The new DiNic's stand at Reading Terminal Market is one of many changes afoot as the Market celebrates its 120th year in operation.

Today is Reading Terminal Market’s 120^th anniversary and, far from ossifying into old age, the market has a major renovation project underway. I caught up with Paul Steinke, the market’s general manager, last week to discuss how Philadelphia’s food city is getting the equivalent of an urban renewal project on its eastern edge.

If you frequent Reading Terminal Market, you’ve probably noticed that there’s been a lot of construction happening over the past few months and that several vendors have moved. Soon the market will have more stalls, new vendors, and improved public amenities.

The current project was driven by the market’s explosive visitor growth over the last decade, Steinke explained, increasing from 4.8 million visitors in 2003 to about 6.3 million in 2011. On average 115,000-120,000 people pass through the market each week. That’s remarkably successful for a market that was largely vacant and hanging by a thread in the 1970s. Today the market’s success comes, to some extent, at the building’s expense. Some areas of the market are well worn. Of course, that’s part of the market’s charm and authenticity, but it was time to rethink things.

Over time the market’s eastern edge had become its backside, as valuable floor space was devoted to refrigerators, prep space, and service areas. So despite the growth and popularity of the market, its eastern end lacked the liveliness seen in other areas. It also wasn’t the best use of the space, as visitorship and interest from possible vendors grew.

The market's eastern edge, along Avenue D, before renovation (left) and after (right). | courtesy of Reading Terminal Market

Guided by a recent master plan, developed by Friday Architects and Planners, the eastern edge of Reading Terminal Market is being revitalized. “Avenue D,” the market’s easterly north-south corridor, is being straightened out (see above); refrigerator and storage areas were moved from the main market floor to the basement; more vendor stalls are being added; and there is new space for office, operations, and maintenance. And mercifully, the new bathrooms are bigger and vastly nicer.

A sneak peek into the new men's room, which should be open this weekend.

As these physical changes were taking shape, two vendors left the market, which opened up opportunities for several stalls to shuffle spots. Here are some of the vendor shifts:

• In May 2011 long-time vendor Harry Ochs, a butcher stall at the market since 1906, closed up shop. That closure, however, allowed DiNic’s to gain space by moving into the former Ochs stand. (The Ochs name is honored on the new DiNic’s sign.) DiNic’s moved into its new, bigger digs on January 9, Spataro’s opened where DiNic’s used to be on February 17, and Flying Monkey expects to move to the former Spataro’s stand in March.
• Meanwhile, Spice Terminal declined a lease renewal. But fret not; Steinke said that the market has a lease out to a similar bulk purveyor to sell herbs, spices, tea, coffee, and nuts by the pound. Where Spice Terminal used to be, a new German food stand called Wursthaus Schmitz (an outpost of South Street’s Brauhaus Schmitz) will open around Memorial Day.
• Molly Malloy’s, a gastropub created by Iovine Brothers, replaced the old Beer Garden back in October. And it’s a good illustration of how the market’s eastern edge is spiffing up without becoming so shiny and new that the market’s patina disappears.
• Rounding out the renovations is a new home for the market’s demonstration kitchen, La Cucina, just off of Center Court. Via a clear garage door, La Cucina will connect to the new Rick Nichols Room, named for the Inquirer writer who Steinke credits as a “fierce advocate” for the market. That room will be a multi-use space which will also have a market history display, developed in partnership with the Philadelphia History Museum (via a William Penn Foundation grant).

“It’s definitely the biggest project since the market was completely renovated by the convention center in the early 90s,” Steinke said. “That was a 30 million dollar job, this is a 3.5 million dollar job 20 years later.” Most of the project financing comes from a combination of loans from Beneficial Bank and PIDC.

Flying Monkey will move to Spataro's former stall along Center Court.

Elizabeth Halen, owner of Flying Monkey, says they’re excited to move the bakery a few stalls down to the former Spataro’s spot. Halen notes that Center Court is “very savory…so it’s nice to throw in some sweet stuff.” Halen is one of few women-owned stalls, one of the youngest, and she’s clearly proud to represent a new breed at Reading Terminal Market.

Lunchtime in Reading Terminal Market's Center Court.

So today, as Reading Terminal Market celebrates its anniversary, the place is very much thriving thanks to willingness to carefully adapt. Despite the changes afoot, it’ll still be the market Philadelphians know and love. Part of that security comes from the market’s commitment to being a true market that is home to local vendors, not just a food court.

Paul Steinke has not brought his lunch to work in his 10 years at Reading Terminal Market, and I can’t blame him. (When we met on Friday, he celebrated Spataro’s new stand by eating one of their classic cream cheese and olive sandwiches on rye.) The market captured my heart (by way of my stomach) because I feel like it is a beautiful expression of our city through food.

Maybe it’s the planner in me, but I see Reading Terminal Market as our city unto itself: Its “avenue” grid is packed with the wonderful diversity of urban life, marked by ethnic enclaves, where old school establishments stand next to newcomers, and all sorts of people gather to eat and shop. Reading Terminal Market is one place where people from all over the city share a sense of ownership and belonging. So as generations of shoppers and eaters come elbow-to-elbow and belly-to-counter – at the market, we are sustaining a proud tradition that supports a vibrant food community that also bonds us together as Philadelphians.

architectural detail at Juniper and Chestnut | Flickr user Rob Lybeck, Eyes on the Street Flickr group

Yesterday’s Planning Commission meeting kept PlanPhilly busy. Kellie Patrick Gates reports that commissioners weren’t pleased with the materials proposed for the redevelopment of the old YWCA Annex property at 2017-23 Chestnut Street. Despite concerns that the materials will look cheap, the commission voted to support the 12-story project. Commissioners had a bit more enthusiasm for Mosaic Development Partners’ plans to redevelop Blue Horizon as Hotel Blue on Broad. Among their concerns at Blue Horizon: parking, legislative variances requested through City Council, and building materials. The hotel project, which includes space for a supper club and venue, will be on next month’s agenda for a vote.

Jared Brey reports the Planning Commission also heard about the draft sign regulations that will round out the new zoning code, which prompted a lengthy discussion. How many signs can a single business have? What kinds of signs are okay where? Where can signs advertise things not related to the property? The new draft regulations aim to answer these questions and more. You can read the draft sign controls here.

Why did the proposed transit-oriented development once called Umbria Village get renamed “The Station at Manayunk”? It’s at the Ivy Ridge SEPTA station in Roxborough, not Manayunk, and a NewsWorks reader thinks the name is a bit deceptive. Amy Z. Quinn looked into the renaming and learned that developer Petrucci Residential is trying to draw a connection to its similar development “The Station at Bucks County.”

Real estate brokerage Grubb & Ellis has filed for bankruptcy and will be taken over by BCG Partners, the Business Journal reports. Grubb & Ellis has 41 local brokers and 130 employees.

While Philadelphia area home sales are up from this time last year, the median price for those homes is a bit down, reports the Business Journal, citing the Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors HomExpert Market Report.

The Buzz is Eyes on the Street’s morning news digest. Have a tip? Send it along.

Chestnut Square, Drexel's huge new mixed-use development on Chestnut Street between 32nd and 33rd streets.

This evening Drexel University will break ground on Chestnut Square, a major mixed-use development along Chestnut Street between 32^nd and 33^rd streets.

The project, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, will add on-campus student housing to answer growing demand and will create a more urbane presence for the University by adding ground-floor commercial spaces along Chestnut Street. The project will cost an estimated $97.6 million, and should be completed in September 2013.

Chestnut Square will add 361,200 square feet of residential and commercial space on Chestnut Street, through the addition of two eight-story buildings framing the passage to the Creese Student Center, a 19-story residential tower at 32^nd Street, and glassy street level spaces for retail and restaurant use. All told the development will have space to house 869 students and 11 retail tenants.

Drexel is developing Chestnut Square in partnership with American Campus Communities, which will also manage the project. The official ground breaking ceremony will take place at 6pm tonight (2/21) in front of Creese Café, in the courtyard between the Creese Student Center and MacAlister Hall.

Aerial of Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant | phillywatersheds.org

The Philadelphia Water Department has awarded a $47.5 million contract to a Massachusetts renewable energy firm to build a biogas-to-energy facility at the Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant.

The Business Journal reports that Ameresco got a 16-year contract to design, construct and maintain a new biogas facility at the Bridesburg plant, which will generate heat and electricity from methane captured in the plant’s digesters. The project is expected to save the Water Department $12 million in energy costs through the contract term.

The biogas project is a priority outlined in the city’s Greenworks plan, as part of the energy targets geared at sourcing renewable energy for the city’s electricity demand. The new biogas facility could produce 50% of the treatment plant’s electricity use.

The project is financed by Bank of America’s Energy Services unit and qualifies for an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant funding.

Do you know a beautiful street when you see it?

Is a beautiful street something you feel? Is it context specific? Does beautiful equate to urbane, narrow, architecturally interesting, uniform, well kept, or busy? Is streetscape beauty like pornography? That is, do you know it when you see it? If beautiful streets are in the eye of the beholder, how can urbanists analyze these aesthetic judgments in a uniform way?

Two of Philly’s former Code for America fellows hope to help answer those questions through Beautiful Streets, an experiment with OpenPlans, to research what streetscapes people find more attractive. The Beautiful Streets website explains:

With your help, we’ll compare 200 randomly selected streets in Philadelphia and ask which one in each pair is more beautiful. We expect this experiment will produce some neat data, which you’ll be able to download here soon.

Urbanists routinely rattle off reflexive shorthand for what makes one street better than another (see: walkable, human-scale, green). But what does everyone else think? What are we missing? Where do we find beauty in otherwise unremarkable places? I’ll be really curious to see how the data from Beautiful Streets shake out.

Go ahead and click around on Beautiful Streets here.

Want more?:

• The Measure of a Beautiful Street [The Atlantic Cities, February 14, 2012]
• Beautiful Streets: two former Code for America fellows launch a ‘Hot or Not’ for Philly blocks [Technically Philly, February 21, 2012]

Lines & Squares | Flickr user phillytrax, Eyes on the Street Flickr group

Sign regulations that will become part of the new zoning code have been drafted by a special working group and shopped around town  to gather constituent input. The draft sign controls will be presented to the Planning Commission today. PlanPhilly’s Jared Brey has been following the civic engagement meetings with different groups around sign controls and sees a pattern in the concerns – from what counts as a sign to limiting visual clutter in the public environment. You can share your “visual preferences” for signage by taking this survey on zoningmatters.org.

A municipal land bank could straighten out the confusion over city-owned vacant land information and disposition. Council members Maria Quiñones-Sánchez and Bill Green have introduced legislation to establish the land bank, and the state appears poised to pass enabling legislation soon. The Inquirer editorializes in favor of a new land bank today, saying it’s “a welcome and long-overdue tool to help neighborhoods by more quickly and smartly turning blighted properties into productive assets.”

The Inquirer reports about the unlikely habitat for Northern rough-winged swallows created by a Northeast Philly sewage treatment plant. Rather than migrating, the swallows have been wintering at the plant living on tiny insects and probably roosting near warm pipes. Maintenance manager Richard Stasiorowski said, “We have a mini-ecosystem.”

Gas prices are climbing again, and the closed or idled refineries nearby could be to blame locally. Fuel could become even more expensive, the Inquirer reports, if the Philadelphia Sunoco refinery shuts down in June as planned. The piece points a potential upside: “the increasing price for refined products – gasoline, diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel – might make the refineries more attractive to buyers.”

The Buzz is Eyes on the Street’s morning news digest. Have a tip? Send it along.

Re-imagine urban highways, like I-95, on Thursday.

Kahn in Rome

Monday, February 20, 6-8pm. University of Pennsylvania, Kroiz Gallery, Architectural Archives, 220 S. 34^th Street. To celebrate Louis I. Kahn’s 111^th birthday the Architectural Archives will host a private reception and viewing of the recently acquired Kahn work, Piazza Campidoglio, Rome, 1950. Free. Register online.

Thaddeus Squire: “Hide and Seek”

Tuesday, February 21, 6-7:30pm. University of the Arts, Hamilton Hall, 320 South Broad Street. Next up in DesignPhiladelphia’s “Visibly Invisible” speaker series comes Thaddeus Squire, founder of Hidden City and president of CultureWorks, who will examine our longing for history through pop cultural expressions. Free, register in advance for tickets.

Scott Gabriel Knowles: “The Disaster Experts, Mastering Risk in Modern America”

Wednesday, February 22, 5:30-6:30, Penn Book Store, 36^th and Walnut streets. Can we do anything to prevent large-scale disasters or mitigate risk? In his book The Disaster Experts, historian Scott Gabriel Knowles explores the emergence of disaster expertise, and how those professionals – from insurance inspectors to civil defense planners – have shaped modern America. Free, register online.

Paula Scher

Thursday, February 23, 5:30-7:30pm. PennDesign, Meyerson Hall, 210 S. 34^th Street. Graphic designer Paula Scher, a principal of Pentagram, has spent decades redefining and energizing American graphic design through her work with cultural institutions, architectural clients, record companies, and classic American brands. Her art has been exhibited worldwide. Scher studied at Tyler School of Art. Free, registration required.

Grid Alive with Marilyn Anthony and Mary Elizabeth Clark

Thursday, February 23, 5:30-8pm. Trinity Memorial Church, 22nd and Spruce streets. Grid launches its new event series, Grid Alive, this month. Marilyn Anthony (Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture) will talk about local farming, Mary Elizabeth Clark (Sisters of Saint Joseph Earth Center and Sustainability Assistant to the President at Chestnut Hill College) will discuss the intersection of religion and sustainability. Rounding out the bill is musical guest, The Great Unknown. $5, register online.

Re-imagining Urban Highways

Thursday, February 23, 6-8:30pm. Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Explore how American cities are redesigning and removing stretches of urban highway, and what cities like Philadelphia have to learn from these efforts. The panel discussion will be moderated by Streetsblog’s Aaron Naparstek, and will feature Diana Linda (Editor, Next American City), Ashwin Balakrishnan (Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance), Thomas Deller (City of Providence), and Peter Park (University of Colorado). Free, register online.

"Three Cheers for George Washington" | NYPL Digital Collection, Image ID: 1585454

Happy President’s Day, Streeters. Like you, Eyes on the Street is taking it easy today, eating cherry pie to honor Washington and rereading Lincoln’s second inaugural address. PhillyHistory Blog is celebrating President’s Day by looking at the divination of George Washington and all of the swag created to glorify the first president in death, from art to instant coffee.

Should SEPTA or the city own transit infrastructure? NewsWorks reports that the city owns the Broad Street Line, half of the Market-Frankford El, and other transit assets. The Inquirer explains that the ownership itself is debated, since SEPTA’s lease expired in 2005. Councilman Wilson Goode, Jr. will be holding hearings on the issue. Goode sees the opportunity to make money from the city’s ownership, but SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney reminded NewsWorks, “People have to realize the financial realities of operating the El and Broad Street, that it costs almost exactly twice as much to run the lines as the revenue that it generates.”

Just how many hotel rooms does Philly need? After the Convention Center expanded, experts projected that the city needed to add 2,000 more rooms, but that’s been slow-going. With two new hotels under construction, the Business Journal asked industry experts if 2000 more rooms was a realistic target. Most came back with a reduced number. Steph Rosenfeld said Philly should be leery of chasing other convention cities, and instead “be a leader in the second tier.” He added, “After all, an expanded convention center is only as viable as the ability to keep its calendar at peak bookings on an ongoing basis.”

After 18 months of restoration construction, the scaffolding on Independence Hall’s tower is down and on Saturday the Centennial Bell rang again as the clock was restarted. The Inquirer was on hand and reports the tower restoration project cost $4.4 million in federal stimulus money.

Selling off PGW is going to be tricky. Sunday’s Inquirer unpacks the complexities, from the right kind of buyer, profitability expectations, and timing. And today’s Inquirer goes point/counterpoint on the sale, weighing the possible revenue a PGW sale could generate against virtually zero benefit to consumers.

The Buzz is Eyes on the Street’s morning news digest. Have a tip? Send it along.

Inside Frankford Central United Methodist Church | NEast Philly, Photo by Stan Lupo

The last year has not been kind to Frankford’s Central United Methodist Church. Back in August the church’s west wall collapsed leaving a gaping hole in the building, and then thieves made off with stained glass windows. Now the Northeast Times reports that the city has made arrangements for the church’s demolition. The church is owned by Frankford Group Ministry, which will not be able to sell the property until the city is repaid for the cost of demolition.

The Frankford Gazette reports that the low bid for demolition $193,700, and laments the “unfortunate ending to a wonderful building.”

After the contract for demolition is signed demolition work has to be completed within 60 days, so the church’s days are truly numbered.

The Central United Methodist Church was built in the 1890s, and was in active use by the Methodist congregation until 2005. The church is not listed on the National or Philadelphia Registers of Historic Places.

 

Frankford Central United Methodist Church, with a part of its west wall (at left) missing. | NEast Philly, Photo by Stan Lupo

Want more?:

• Central United Methodist Church Flickr set from NEast Philly
• Frankford’s Central United Methodist Church windows stolen [October 19, 2011]

Photosynthesis | Flickr user phillytrax, Eyes on the Street Flickr group

Force of Nature

Opens Friday, February 17. Woodmere Art Museum, 9201 Germantown Avenue. The new show Force of Nature features two exhibitions – Elaine Kurtz: A Retrospective and Elemental – focus on the natural world as a foundational element of artwork by Philadelphia artists. $10, $7 for seniors, children, students, and members free.

Independence Hall Tower Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

Saturday, February 18, 4:30pm. Independence Mall. The Independence Hall tower has undergone an extensive restoration for a year and a half. Come celebrate the restoration of this landmark as the tower is relit, the Centennial bell is rung, and the clock strikes again. Ribbon cutting and bell-ringing will be on Independence Square at 5pm.  Independence Hall will be open until 6pm for free tours after the event.

Freedom Bound: African American Women in 18^th and 19^th Century Philadelphia

Saturday, February 18. Stenton, 4601 N. 18^th Street. Join Erica Armstrong Dunbar, professor at the University of Delaware and director of the Library Company’s program in African American History, for a lecture and discussion about the paths African American women took toward emancipation. Free tours of Stenton, emphasizing service spaces, will follow the talk. Admission is free. Call (215) 329-7312 or email programs@stenton.org to RSVP.

President’s Day Celebration

Saturday, February 18-Monday, February 20, 10am-3pm. National Constitution Center, 525 Arch Street. To celebrate President’s Day, the Constitution Center will offer special family-friendly programming about what it’s like to be President and First Lady, and special tours of the Center’s presidential artifacts and exhibits will start on the hour 10am-2pm. Activities are free with museum admission.