On Whitewashing The Gallery
While waiting 24 whole minutes for crab fries and a cheesesteak at the Aramark-run, not-at-all original Chickie’s & Pete’s concession stand in the new food court at The Fashion District of Philadelphia, I had an ample amount of time to think about what changed over the course of three years at my weekly high school hangout spot. I struck up a conversation with woman joining in my wait time, mostly because we were both pouting about the ridiculous-but-expected wait for the second day of operation for a busy food stand. This woman, African-American and older than me, shook her head repeatedly when talking about the wait, both because time was wasting away and also because she came back after a delayed construction to find that what was a convenient fast food spot in the city was now 20-minute wait three times as expensive as her old go-to.
She, like me, misses the old Gallery.
The Gallery at Market East was the predecessor to the new Fashion District. It could charitably be called a mall or uncharitably called a dump. Covering the same land-space as the new District, it was a staple of the East Market corridor, a run-down, neglected area between City Hall and the business district and Independence Mall and the historical district. The woman in line was devastated when the shut-down and remodel was announced, so much so that she captured pictures of the Gallery in all it’s, uh, Gallery-ness before it shut down for construction to remind her of what it had been.
Now, I would never go to that extreme — I can simply google and find plenty of pictures to remind me of the FYE across from the food court or the unreasonably tall ceilings in the old Five Below — but the space meant different things to different people, and more importantly it meant a lot to the types of people the city, and the mall’s owners, are abandoning.
Most of the people reading this I expect know little about the original Gallery or even much about the current Fashion District. I can speak to the Gallery, due to the many Fridays in high school where my friends and I traversed to 10th and Market to sit in the food court, eat what can only be described as pure trash, and play Battleship on loose-leaf paper for hours on end, straining friendships due to our uncomfortably powerful competitive natures. We also went to the stores when we had the money and need to visit them, listening to random CDs in FYE or picking up games in GameStop or KB Toys. Most importantly, the Gallery had space where anywhere from four to eight teenagers could hang out for a few hours, eat, and not get bored.
It, along with its anointed successor, sat along the north side of Market St between 8th and 11th, and if you didn’t know it was there while walking by before the mall’s owner (PREIT, a Real Estate Investment Trust) and the city of Philadelphia pumped at least a combined four hundred million dollars into it, I would not have faulted you. The Gallery was first constructed in the 1970s and expanded in the 1980s, and then no one updated basically anything about it until it closed three years ago. The original construction was a retrofit of space within already-existing buildings along Market, thus the outside looks like old office buildings. The Gallery featured brick colored tiling on its poorly lit walkways throughout the complex, except for the old food court, where square white tiles showed every chip and stain from 30 years of messes and grout aged from approximately the Mesozoic era. The frequency of broken escalators rivaled Liberty Place’s. It sometimes smelled bad, and security was lax enough to where you can walk in wherever and not be bothered unless you actively solicited people.
The Gallery also had virtually anything you would need to shop for within a three block area. Sometimes the stores would surprise you. Every storefront was somehow twice the size of the same retailers in suburban malls. The stores valued price-friendliness and convenience. Until it closed it was, legitimately, one of my favorite places to shop. Even up until a few years ago before its closing, I would stop by during the holiday season.
During the Gallery’s hey-day, there were bans on electronic and other outward-facing advertising which prevented the stores within the complex from advertising to a wider audience. You could drive down Market without having much of a clue that a full mall was there, the outward signs for Burlington Coat Factory, Old Navy, and K-Mart being obvious but not being obviously connected, and everything else tucked away, out of sight, hidden by the appearance of office buildings that weren’t really there.
Most crucially to the mall’s previous existence, despite the hidden views from cars in the street, the Gallery was accessible. The mall was and continues to be book-ended by public transit hubs. Jefferson Station, formerly known as Market East and the second part of the old Gallery name, sits underground at 11th and Market and was (and still is) connected to the mall via a walkway on the basement floor. Notably, with the mall re-opened you can now again walk from City Hall to 7th and Market entirely underground, which is a fun and sometimes useful fact. The PATCO-connection at 8th and Chestnut and can be accessed underground from the mall. Finally, and frankly most importantly when discussing the history of the Gallery, the Market-Frankford Line has stops at both 8th and 11th on Market, and the Broad-Ridge Spur wraps up its trip near the 8th Street station as well. If you were in Center City, or could get to Center City from one of SEPTA’s various lines, you could go to the Gallery.
The customer base for the Gallery in large part was defined by its accessibility to people within the city who worked in the city or relied on public transit to access its retailers. This meant a poorer consumer compared to the average citizen was the most common consumer, and the stores that dropped anchor at the Gallery responded to that customer base. The mall attracted working-class citizens, who were more likely to be minorities, and teenagers without money. The mall did not attract high-end retailers because high-end consumers by-and-large did not walk the corridors. And the corridors weren’t updated because the aesthetics of the Gallery, while outdated, would not drive the customer base away.
From a profit standpoint, the space worked. The Gallery, as was told to me by a PREIT finance executive during a class visit during my senior year at Temple U, was actually among PREIT’s more profitable malls. This was after PREIT announced its intention to renovate the mall but before renovations had been approved, funded in part by the city, or initiated. At the time, while the company wanted to upgrade the space and was working toward that goal, it had more pressing needs such as how to draw people out to its struggling suburban malls, places like Plymouth Meeting which were abandoned by typical mall consumers during the Great Recession as Amazon crept in and consumer spending dropped and mostly did not recover. However, in its other relationships with retailers, the Gallery was looked down upon mostly because its public image was that of a dirty mall, regardless of the accessibility that it provided to working class citizens.
The inner city, “dirty” image also was something the city of Philadelphia wanted to do away with. The city has consciously tried to restore and “upscale” spaces since the Rendell administration, starting with the parkway and City Hall and expanding to frankly most public locations in Center City, and the Gallery was thought to be the last place along East Market, after the convention center expansion and the construction of new towers on the south side of the street, that needed restoration to help lift the whole neighborhood out of its previously rough edges. So Philadelphia contributed over $100M to help PREIT change the mall into an airspace paradise.
I went with a couple friends to the new Fashion District last Friday, but as I got there about 30 minutes early, I took some time to traverse up and down the three blocks along the three completed levels. The layout isn’t different. There are four levels — including a basement unbothered by breaks caused by the numerical cross streets at 9th and 10th above that despite the white tile so ubiquitous that even Joanna Gaines couldn’t help but blush still feels insulated and dark — but the retailers and target audience couldn’t have been more of a 180 from the old mall.
Old Navy isn’t welcome anymore. God forbid K-Mart or something like it take up space. Lidz frankly isn’t white enough. Instead, you can get an Aeropostale, a Nike outlet, a Lane Bryant, a winery, and two stores with the number 21 in them. Instead of the traditional mall kiosks with dollar pretzels or jewelry out of a plastic bag, you can try an overpriced adult beverage or an $8 cup of Haagen-Daas.
The message being sent might be via overtones, but you can hear it loud and clear: this is not a place for light wallets. The Gallery’s old customers don’t belong here. And the cause for the change should make us uncomfortable. It wasn’t profit-driven for PREIT, as I mentioned above — it was image-driven. Poor people, for them, reflect poorly on their business even if they profit off of them. If the city was willing to pitch in, they’ll give up the three years of rents for the change in image and potential upside from having higher rents if the space succeeds. For the city, it was spending money to increase property values and “upscale” the image of the neighborhood at the expense of shopping opportunities for the city’s most needy citizens.
The most notable change to the substance of the mall, and where the lack of welcome for the old customer is most evident, is in the mall’s food selection. The old food court, smack dab in the middle of the mall’s basement floor, shaped like a traditional three-sides mall cafeteria that never aspired to rise above a level of cleanliness which had a consistent grease coating on the floors and tables, is now the site of an underground winery for some reason (which is an awful location for a winery, but I digress). The food court area was moved to the basement area between the easternmost entrance to Jefferson Station and the 11th Street El stop. In the food court are retailers that are customary for most modern, hipster-y malls: a BurgerFi, the aforementioned Chickie’s & Pete’s, another ice cream place to come, and a Blaze Pizza knockoff, among other tenants. No more Taco Bells, KFCs, McDonald’s-es, and Burger Kings are welcome.
The seating arrangement setting is your standard industrial chic look that every modern restaurant settles for, with tables that have faux concrete tops, single-support table stands, and customary metallic, hard-backed chairs intended to make customers uncomfortable (to prevent loitering) combined with high-tops that somehow feel out of place in the environment, mostly because you are sitting in the basement of the Gallery and, again, there is no natural light to speak of.
Most notably in the new food court, there’s a Chick-Fil-A. The old mall had one too, though that was nestled in the food court and was less popular among the crowds than the KFC with the bright signage at the edge of the food court’s ring.
Now you may or may not think to ask: what was at the site before where the Chick-Fil-A currently stands?
Popeye’s. The woman I ran into’s old go-to. Which makes CFA the perfect representation for what the new Gallery seemingly represents — “whitewashing” without creating an actual improvement in product offerings, just adapting to the tastes of the people that PREIT and the city want to show up to the new mall. An image to be projected, one that distances itself from the Gallery and its old shoppers.