Palms Away

The forest for the trees: Amin Bitar fears Penn planners are too straight-laced to appreciate his palm. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

There's a Bitar battle brewing in West Philly over a tree.

by Daniel Brook

³I think that in three years, 40th Street will be so different from now that people are not going to laugh at us when we say we’re the ‘cultural piazza’ of the Delaware Valley,” says Esaul Sanchez. Sanchez is in charge of the University of Pennsylvania’s real estate holdings along 40th Street in West Philadelphia. By “cultural piazza,” he means a town square with food, drink and entertainment in a see-and-be-seen atmosphere.

While Sanchez admits the vision sounds far-fetched, it does have its share of true believers. One of them is Amin Bitar, the Lebanese-born owner of the local falafel chain that bears his name. The restaurant entrepreneur has had an outpost of his popular Middle Eastern joint on 40th Street, between Walnut and Locust streets, for three years. Now he says, the real estate honchos at Penn are giving him a hard time about his plan to plant a palm or cedar tree in front of his restaurant in place of the maple that currently stands there.

The block between Walnut and Locust has a green space on one side, at the edge of the Penn campus, and a white stucco shopping center on the other, boasting a number of tenants, including Bitar's and the U.S. Postal Service. Banners and signs attempt to distinguish one business from another, but it's an uphill battle, according to Bitar. "It's a plain vanilla kind of mall," he says. "The stores have no curb appeal whatsoever."

In order to get some "curb appeal," Bitar came up with his Mediterranean tree idea. "I want students to say, ŒI'll meet you at the palm tree.'"

The restaurant owner was assured by a grower in Florida that he can provide a type of palm that is very hardy and stands a fighting chance of making it through a Philadelphia winter.

Penn officials are not so sure. "Tastes clash and that's fine, " says Sanchez. "You can put a palm tree, but if it dies because of the weather, which I think will be the case, then you have a dead tree. And what doesn't match with the street is a dead tree."

But Bitar says he has no intention of leaving a dead palm tree in front of his restaurant. "If I have to replace it every year, it's $300," he says. A small price, considering he has already pumped $35,000 into renovating his 40th Street store and coming up with new fusion recipes.

While his other branches serve up falafel in its traditional style, Bitar says he's experimenting with a falafel pyramid set in the middle of a brightly garnished plate. "Who the fuck says it has to be a ball?" he blurts out with the gusto of a freshman engineering student.

But Bitar's retail neighbors don't all share his enthusiasm for the new and untried. The Bridge Cinema seems tailored to its audience of Penn students, with their uncanny ability to combine upscale and low-brow. The adjoining restaurant looks like Pod, Stephen Starr's über-chic West Philadelphia outpost, but serves up burgers and fries.

To Bitar, this is symptomatic of Penn's leadership. "They're nice, but they're very Ivy League," he says of his landlords, who are very cautious, requiring any changes to be cleared by layers of bureaucracy, up to and including the university's architects.

But Sanchez says the university welcomes input from its retail tenants. "[The cultural piazza] cannot be created by the university on its own," he says. "It requires a lot of stakeholders dreaming and having a vision and contributing their piece to this thing that emerges."

Ultimately Sanchez hopes to create a public space similar to the town square in his birthplace of Vieques, Puerto Rico. His other models are Washington Square Park in New York's Greenwich Village and the streets of Barcelona. "I would love to live in Barcelona but I don't think I'll be able to do it, so why not create Barcelona in Philadelphia," Sanchez says.

Bitar loves the idea of a "cultural piazza" too. He's just not sure Penn's buttoned-down approach is going to make it a reality. "I chose not to open up in a strip mall in New Jersey," Bitar says. Instead, he came to 40th Street, where he's "trying to help Penn achieve its goals" in spite of its institutional inertia.