Cracking The Nut

Daniel Brook

It has to be one of the great letdowns of the holiday season in Philadelphia: leaving the still-grand Wanamaker building (a.k.a. Lord & Taylor) and walking out onto the straggly stretch of retail that is Chestnut Street -- the low point of which is a store window for Society Hill Furniture that tells shoppers to head six blocks east to find the actual store.

But things are looking up for the 1300 block of Chestnut. First, the venerable army/navy store, I. Goldberg, opened a few weeks back, having been forced out of its address on the 700 block. In February, Borders Book Shop will relocate here, and a new Olive Garden restaurant is set to open.

While you might wonder how an Olive Garden could do a decent business just a few blocks from the red gravy meccas of South Philly (or more to the point, why Philly needs such a place), one has to concede it's better than an empty storefront. And the relocation of Borders from its prime location on Walnut Street near Rittenhouse Square is even more notable.

[This stretch of Walnut was a] neglected area when we moved in here 12 years ago, says store manager Chris Adams, who wants to be a part of the revitalization of Chestnut. Adams said it would have been nice to move before Christmas, but he couldn't give up a week or two of business at this time of year.

Chestnut has always been, as this paper once labeled it, a tough nut to crack, wedged as it is between two more successful streets. One of its main problems has been its proximity to two indoor malls, the Gallery and the Shops at Liberty Place, which sucked the life off the street and gave national chain stores low-risk locations in controlled suburban-style environments. After failing as a transitway -- filled with high-speed buses and barred to private automobiles -- the street has just started to pick up in the last few years. The stretch west of Broad and a block north of Rittenhouse Row began to attract major retailers like H&M, who opted for its more reasonable rents.

Now the boomlet looks ready to jump over Broad. With the Stephen Starr restaurant mini-renaissance in the 700 block (Morimoto, Jones, Blue Angel) and the Tony Goldman-generated hopes for 13th near Chestnut, the whole street could come alive. It's yet one more reason the planned Jefferson garage on the 900 block seems so ill-conceived -- it could not only have a negative effect on the streetscape that exists now, it could stand in the way of any progress that is yet to come.