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Thank you. That's the thing that drives me nuts. Yes, there should be some upscale shopping. No, it shouldn't be at the expense of shopping for the 99%.
My favorite ad from the Inquirer, for years, from an amusement standpoint was Madame Wellington's, at the Bellevue, that is after the Troc closed down.
Robinson Luggage had a 2nd location in Cherry Hill, just off the Route 38 circle. They had good, utilitarian luggage.
That's what TWO main shopping streets downtown should be for? One more the Upscale with Boutique shops on side streets if no on the main one? Then the other more moderate Mall type stores and even like a Target and the Five-Below. Not two trying for the same things and best out by the MALL?
NYC has its 5th Ave and 42nd Street. Chicago has its Michigan Ave (Magnificent Mile) and State St. The original shopping street.
Philly has Chestnut an Walnut St. Shopping and a Broad St that could have should have been more in retail?
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Originally Posted by UScityUrbanCores
That's what TWO main shopping streets downtown should be for? One more the Upscale with Boutique shops on side streets if no on the main one? Then the other more moderate Mall type stores and even like a Target and the Five-Below. Not two trying for the same things and best out by the MALL?
NYC has its 5th Ave and 42nd Street. Chicago has its Michigan Ave (Magnificent Mile) and State St. The original shopping street.
Philly has Chestnut an Walnut St. Shopping and a Broad St that could have should have been more in retail?
Shopping on Broad has always been spotty. Lets see. . .the Union League takes up a lot of space & it's going nowhere. There's the University of the Arts. Then there's the Bellevue, & those are just 3 institutions on one side.
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Originally Posted by cpomp
I've looked up Country Club Plaza many times (great setup) and one of the better attempts at trying to emulate an urban environment.
I am not trying to insult Kansas City at all, and But Philadelphia and Kansas City are not and should not be in the same playing field. Philadelphia should be compared and emulate (while keeping some features unique to Philadelphia) Boston, DC, San Fran, NYC and Chicago. I know a lot of people on here fear rising rents and affordability beginning to diminish in the city, but that is just a result of the growth and progress.
So you have to pick your poison: stagnant, lets settle for average, OR dynamic and striving for the best
Plus Philadelphia is still no where near as expensive as NYC and Boston, and still fairly far behind DC, we are just beginning to surpass Baltimore.
And believe it or not (not addressing you specifically) but retail is a huge tourism draw, and should not be ignored just because you may not be interested/cannot afford to shop there.
King of Prussia Mall for example is one of the most visited and profitable malls in the country. That mall alone in a year gets more visitors than Atlantic City. Image the benefits that would have if that were emulated in Philadelphia (not that its really possible right now, but I am just making a point that retail/high end retail is very important, and a city of Philadelphias size needs more than just mom n pop shops if it wants to continue to break out of its shell).
The biggest tourist draw in NC is Concord Mills. Outlet malls are very popular tourist stops. There's a reason that state welcome centers usually have advertising leaflets for every outlet mall in the state.
I've looked up Country Club Plaza many times (great setup) and one of the better attempts at trying to emulate an urban environment.
I am not trying to insult Kansas City at all, and But Philadelphia and Kansas City are not and should not be in the same playing field. Philadelphia should be compared and emulate (while keeping some features unique to Philadelphia) Boston, DC, San Fran, NYC and Chicago. I know a lot of people on here fear rising rents and affordability beginning to diminish in the city, but that is just a result of the growth and progress.
So you have to pick your poison: stagnant, lets settle for average, OR dynamic and striving for the best
Plus Philadelphia is still no where near as expensive as NYC and Boston, and still fairly far behind DC, we are just beginning to surpass Baltimore.
And believe it or not (not addressing you specifically) but retail is a huge tourism draw, and should not be ignored just because you may not be interested/cannot afford to shop there.
King of Prussia Mall for example is one of the most visited and profitable malls in the country. That mall alone in a year gets more visitors than Atlantic City. Image the benefits that would have if that were emulated in Philadelphia (not that its really possible right now, but I am just making a point that retail/high end retail is very important, and a city of Philadelphias size needs more than just mom n pop shops if it wants to continue to break out of its shell).
The Country Club Plaza is generally considered the oldest planned shopping center in the United States. There are one or two smaller ones (Roland Park in Baltimore, J.C. Nichols' own Colonial Shops in Kansas City) that predate it, but it's the first that was planned on the scale of what we would now call a "regional mall"; it was begun in 1921. Garreau counted it as an edge city in his 1991 taxonomy, and although it's entirely within the city limits of Kansas City, it does qualify save for predating 1960.
I maintain that we knew a lot of things about creating urban environments that could also accommodate cars in the early years of the Auto Age that we promptly forgot to the detriment of our suburban cityscapes (they're certainly not "rural" landscapes) after World War II. Efforts to retrofit walkability onto places like King of Prussia are a tacit acknowledgement of this.
His racial prejudice notwithstanding, Jesse Clyde Nichols was indeed an urban visionary. The city he called home is much the better for his having developed a good chunk of its suburbs (and he also had a "Levittown" of his own: Prairie Village, Kan., which Thrillist dubbed the coolest suburb in metropolitan Kansas City this year. It too has a shopping center where you can drive there and park your car but is thoroughly integrated with the street network).
Despite my frequently comparing and contrasting the two, I agree that Kansas City and Philadelphia actually occupy two different planes in the hierarchy of U.S. and world cities. KC's in the middle tier while Philadelphia is, or ought to be, in the top tier (acknowledging that New York occupies a tier all to itself above that). Metro Philly is three times the size of Metro KC, for starters.
Your point about retail as a tourist draw is well taken. I imagine there are a lot of gawkers walking up and down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills who would never dream of actually buying something from one of those stores. This is the rough equivalent of the posts I write on "Property" that I call "house porn": stupendously fabulous homes whose price tags put them out of reach of most of the people surfing Phillymag.com, but boy, do we love to ogle them!
If "growth and progress" mean that folks in the middle inevitably find life increasingly difficult, then maybe we need to rethink that "growth and progress" mean. If the rising tide doesn't lift all boats, then I doubt the problem is with the boats, especially if so many of them are sinking where they had been floating. That said, there's probably still room for more here, but I wouldn't dismiss those worries out of hand (which I fear you might be doing).
As for the "mom and pop shops": wasn't Warby Parker started by a couple of Wharton grads? I understand your point, but don't undersell the potential of homegrown creative talent to contribute to the future of high(er)-end retail. The Big Names may be the visitor draws, but that might then lead the visitors to check out the real originals operating locally. (Some of this is personal: the habit my ex had of heading straight for the Ralph Lauren store in every city we visited drove me nuts. I preferred finding some local shop that offered merchandise I probably couldn't find in every city I visited. It was at one of those latter places that I got the "I lived in Kansas City BEFORE it was cool" T-shirt I now occasionally wear.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by southbound_295
Shopping on Broad has always been spotty. Lets see. . .the Union League takes up a lot of space & it's going nowhere. There's the University of the Arts. Then there's the Bellevue, & those are just 3 institutions on one side.
Broad Street was the city's historic office canyon, replaced by Market Street West after Broad Street Station and the "Chinese Wall" came down and Penn Center took their place. It's never had any shopping to speak of.
The Philadelphia analogue to Chicago's State Street or New York's Herald Square and 14th Street has historically been Market Street (East). We may see its revival as the shopping street for the broad middle with recent developments, with Chestnut, the former ne plus ultra shopping street, serving as a mixing ground between tiers. And speaking of mixing grounds, there may also be some mixing on Market too: Design Within Reach, after all, is no Ikea.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 12-11-2016 at 04:30 AM..
Location: The place where the road & the sky collide
23,813 posts, read 34,657,307 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl
The Country Club Plaza is generally considered the oldest planned shopping center in the United States. There are one or two smaller ones (Roland Park in Baltimore, J.C. Nichols' own Colonial Shops in Kansas City) that predate it, but it's the first that was planned on the scale of what we would now call a "regional mall"; it was begun in 1921. Garreau counted it as an edge city in his 1991 taxonomy, and although it's entirely within the city limits of Kansas City, it does qualify save for predating 1960.
I maintain that we knew a lot of things about creating urban environments that could also accommodate cars in the early years of the Auto Age that we promptly forgot to the detriment of our suburban cityscapes (they're certainly not "rural" landscapes) after World War II. Efforts to retrofit walkability onto places like King of Prussia are a tacit acknowledgement of this.
His racial prejudice notwithstanding, Jesse Clyde Nichols was indeed an urban visionary. The city he called home is much the better for his having developed a good chunk of its suburbs (and he also had a "Levittown" of his own: Prairie Village, Kan., which Thrillist dubbed the coolest suburb in metropolitan Kansas City this year. It too has a shopping center where you can drive there and park your car but is thoroughly integrated with the street network).
Despite my frequently comparing and contrasting the two, I agree that Kansas City and Philadelphia actually occupy two different planes in the hierarchy of U.S. and world cities. KC's in the middle tier while Philadelphia is, or ought to be, in the top tier (acknowledging that New York occupies a tier all to itself above that). Metro Philly is three times the size of Metro KC, for starters.
Your point about retail as a tourist draw is well taken. I imagine there are a lot of gawkers walking up and down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills who would never dream of actually buying something from one of those stores. This is the rough equivalent of the posts I write on "Property" that I call "house porn": stupendously fabulous homes whose price tags put them out of reach of most of the people surfing Phillymag.com, but boy, do we love to ogle them!
If "growth and progress" mean that folks in the middle inevitably find life increasingly difficult, then maybe we need to rethink that "growth and progress" mean. If the rising tide doesn't lift all boats, then I doubt the problem is with the boats, especially if so many of them are sinking where they had been floating. That said, there's probably still room for more here, but I wouldn't dismiss those worries out of hand (which I fear you might be doing).
As for the "mom and pop shops": wasn't Warby Parker started by a couple of Wharton grads? I understand your point, but don't undersell the potential of homegrown creative talent to contribute to the future of high(er)-end retail. The Big Names may be the visitor draws, but that might then lead the visitors to check out the real originals operating locally. (Some of this is personal: the habit my ex had of heading straight for the Ralph Lauren store in every city we visited drove me nuts. I preferred finding some local shop that offered merchandise I probably couldn't find in every city I visited. It was at one of those latter places that I got the "I lived in Kansas City BEFORE it was cool" T-shirt I now occasionally wear.)
Broad Street was the city's historic office canyon, replaced by Market Street West after Broad Street Station and the "Chinese Wall" came down and Penn Center took their place. It's never had any shopping to speak of.
The Philadelphia analogue to Chicago's State Street or New York's Herald Square and 14th Street has historically been Market Street (East). We may see its revival as the shopping street for the broad middle with recent developments, with Chestnut, the former ne plus ultra shopping street, serving as a mixing ground between tiers. And speaking of mixing grounds, there may also be some mixing on Market too: Design Within Reach, after all, is no Ikea.
Totally agree on the mom & pops. I knew several students from PCA who came from wealthy families who opened shops in center city upon graduation. One was a woman who had been a jewelry major. It was a high end custom jewelry shop. Yet I believe that that poster would have turned his nose up at it. A couple who had married during college found a place in the city to live & have a pottery studio & opened a shop in Center City. Those were two examples of very nice mom & pop stores.
While I've thought that the Gallery was out of place since it was in the planning stages, & would rather see it torn down & start from scratch, turning it into an outlet mall might work. European tourists love to shop for clothes when they come to the US. That way they avoid heavy taxes. That may become a very big destination for tourists.
Totally agree on the mom & pops. I knew several students from PCA who came from wealthy families who opened shops in center city upon graduation. One was a woman who had been a jewelry major. It was a high end custom jewelry shop. Yet I believe that that poster would have turned his nose up at it. A couple who had married during college found a place in the city to live & have a pottery studio & opened a shop in Center City. Those were two examples of very nice mom & pop stores.
While I've thought that the Gallery was out of place since it was in the planning stages, & would rather see it torn down & start from scratch, turning it into an outlet mall might work. European tourists love to shop for clothes when they come to the US. That way they avoid heavy taxes. That may become a very big destination for tourists.
Well my version of a mom n pop shop is different than what you described. What you are describing of course I think its essential to have a mix of local offerings and national brands You seem to take everything I say in absolute terms. You pick one sentence from my entire post and base your argument off that.
I always pictured mom n pop shops to be old school small town main street, something I'm sure you would love Philadelphia to turn into. Joan Shepp for example to me is a fashion offering unique to Philadelphia not a mom n pop.
Warby Parker I never considered a mom n pop, I considered it a startup that turned into a sole boutique in Manhattan and now its becoming a national brand.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cpomp
Well my version of a mom n pop shop is different than what you described. What you are describing of course I think its essential to have a mix of local offerings and national brands You seem to take everything I say in absolute terms. You pick one sentence from my entire post and base your argument off that.
I always pictured mom n pop shops to be old school small town main street, something I'm sure you would love Philadelphia to turn into. Joan Shepp for example to me is a fashion offering unique to Philadelphia not a mom n pop.
Warby Parker I never considered a mom n pop, I considered it a startup that turned into a sole boutique in Manhattan and now its becoming a national brand.
A mom & pop can be high end or low end, or anything in between. It's not the class of the store, it's the fact that it's a small, independent, generally family-owned business. That's probably why you don't care about Jewelers Row & l do. I knew someone who was third generation in a shop on Jewelers Row & he referred to the family store as a mom & pop.
You've made it abundantly clear what you think of me. You're not right. But you've played your hand as to who you are.
Totally agree on the mom & pops. I knew several students from PCA who came from wealthy families who opened shops in center city upon graduation. One was a woman who had been a jewelry major. It was a high end custom jewelry shop. Yet I believe that that poster would have turned his nose up at it. A couple who had married during college found a place in the city to live & have a pottery studio & opened a shop in Center City. Those were two examples of very nice mom & pop stores.
While I've thought that the Gallery was out of place since it was in the planning stages, & would rather see it torn down & start from scratch, turning it into an outlet mall might work. European tourists love to shop for clothes when they come to the US. That way they avoid heavy taxes. That may become a very big destination for tourists.
Do you you realize very few posting/reading here know what the PCA was?
Remains to be seen how well the "new" Gallery pans out.
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Originally Posted by kyb01
Do you you realize very few posting/reading here know what the PCA was?
Remains to be seen how well the "new" Gallery pans out.
I've stated, repeatedly that I graduated from Philadelphia College of Art which was one of the components that formed the University of the Arts. I figured that if someone didn't remember, they would be free to ask.
I do know that outlet malls are big tourist draws. Whether that holds true for the Gallery remains to be seen. If it doesn't pan out, I hope that they tear it down & start from scratch.
Well my version of a mom n pop shop is different than what you described. What you are describing of course I think its essential to have a mix of local offerings and national brands You seem to take everything I say in absolute terms. You pick one sentence from my entire post and base your argument off that.
I always pictured mom n pop shops to be old school small town main street, something I'm sure you would love Philadelphia to turn into. Joan Shepp for example to me is a fashion offering unique to Philadelphia not a mom n pop.
Warby Parker I never considered a mom n pop, I considered it a startup that turned into a sole boutique in Manhattan and now its becoming a national brand.
Forgive my misinterpretation, then, but if you read that parenthetical in my post above about my ex, you may understand where I got the wrong impression from.
I know you understand homegrown luxury retail. I wasn't sure that you had room for small local boutiques in that mix. The corner grocer and similar "mom and pop shops" are neighborhood retail anyway and don't belong in a big-city downtown business district (a big-city neighborhood one is another story; what's good for 20th and Spruce isn't necessarily good for 20th and Walnut). I sure hope no one was saying we needed to preserve that type of store on our main citywide shopping streets.
Edited to add: Then I read southbound_295's definition of the term and realized he (and I) weren't that restrictive in our understanding of the term; this other definition allows for "mom and pop" jewelers like Lagos. I would agree, however, that that particular small, highly regarded custom jeweler isn't what most people think of when they hear those three words.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 12-11-2016 at 08:32 PM..
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