Take Walnut Street: "We have more retailers looking for space in Center City than we can provide. From Broad Street to Rittenhouse Square we have three vacancies in 80 spaces. I would own that mall any day."
It's different, I noted, in the old Market Street East district. And why no Kohl's, no Sports Authority, no Target?
"A lot of the chains want big expanses of contemporary space with suburban-style loading and even parking," Gartner sighed. "The Center City customer, these 250,000 people who now live downtown and in the surrounding neighborhoods, has to go to South Philly or Cherry Hill" or Northeast Philadelphia.
People are trying. SSH Management L.L.C.'s Peter Soens says he's talking to potential tenants for the city-run Girard Trust's 1200 block of Market Street. Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust's plans to light up the Gallery and find new uses for the 1970s-era mall are on the drawing board.
"Street retail in the neighborhoods is suffering," Gartner admits. "Germantown Avenue. Jenkintown. The dress shop, the video store, the bookstore, it's going away."
It's the times, Gartner says: "The middle of this economy, the guy who lived in a rowhome and worked in a factory and kept clean, we need that guy to continually buy stuff. And he's not there anymore."
And not just shopkeepers are suffering: "You can't buy season pro sports tickets or spend $2,000 a year on cable" anymore, Gartner says, unless you're paid way more than most people, these days.
Past renewed
In the old street-level dining room, where women guests ate until they were admitted as members in 1986, Philadelphia's Union League club on South Broad Street has opened an exhibit space to show off its Civil War-era treasures.
