Changing Skyline: Betting on Strawbridge

Foxwoods has become the oldest established permanent floating slots game in Philadelphia. Last fall, it ditched plans for a big-box casino on the Delaware waterfront and announced it would instead set up shop in the Gallery at Market East. Now comes word that the slots operator is eyeing the historic Strawbridge & Clothier building at Eighth and Market Streets.

Quick, someone! Calculate the odds on that.

They're not as bad as you might assume.

This latest switch, though, creates a strange predicament for the Nutter administration. How does Philadelphia prepare itself to become the largest U.S. city with casinos when it can't get a fix on the coordinates of its phantom slots parlor? Five months after signaling an interest in a Market Street location, Foxwoods has yet to show city officials a single architectural drawing of what its gaming hall might look like. Officials aren't even certain which architecture firm the company is using.

That hasn't stopped the city from moving full steam ahead on a $250,000 master plan for the ragged area around Market East, or lobbying for stimulus money to upgrade the transit infrastructure. The city's new casino consultant, Stan Eckstut of EE&K Architects, even presented his preliminary findings at a public forum last week. All his maps showed a little dot at 11th and Market Streets to identify Foxwoods, and it was clearly a starting point for his ideas.

But a day later, city officials inadvertently learned that Foxwoods was negotiating with the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT) to install its slots parlor three blocks east, in Strawbridge's four empty retail floors. Couldn't Foxwoods have mentioned that detail before?

Apart from Foxwoods' secrecy (its officials didn't return my calls, either), the Strawbridge location offers a new set of possibilities for the city.

Of course, there are pitfalls, too. It's not clear that Foxwoods, which has been struggling financially, can be trusted to treat Strawbridge's soaring, columned interior with the respect it deserves. But because the 1928 art deco exterior by Simon & Simon is a protected landmark, the city would have the final word on signage, lighting, and the treatment of Strawbridge's brass-trimmed shop windows. The last thing Market Street needs is a casino version of the papered-over windows pioneered by the drugstore chains.