This article appears in the August 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
It’s lunchtime on a hot, sunny late-June day. The students are long gone from the schoolyard at the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Summer vacation has started, and save for a few cars cruising by, this corner is quiet. Twenty-four years ago, the city imagined a very different vibe, with cheering crowds at a new Philadelphia Phillies baseball stadium. During a neighborhood walk, Debbie Wei, a founder and a former principal of the school that focuses on the needs of Asian American and immigrant children, told me that FACTS would have been a stadium parking lot.
Philadelphia has been coming for Chinatown for decades. An indoor shopping mall hems in the neighborhood to the south, and the massive Pennsylvania Convention Center does the same to the west. The Vine Street Expressway, a six-lane connector between two interstate highways, splits the heart of the neighborhood off from homes and community gathering places to the north. If not for the 1970s protests that resulted in a scaled-back roadway, the Chinatown that exists today would have been obliterated.
When federal infrastructure dollars arrived in March for the Chinatown Stitch, a cap for the expressway that will hide the division with parks, play spaces, and other community amenities, it was a significant victory against what residents have viewed as an attempt at erasure. At a news conference announcing the grant, John Chin, the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation’s (PCDC) executive director, pronounced the $160 million grant “transformative unlike any that Chinatown has experienced.”
“We will finally be repairing a historic wrong, an injustice that was done to a community,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA).
Chinatown’s several thousand residents have fought for generations to build up and keep what they’ve got—homes for low- and moderate-income families, new shops and small businesses, and a cornucopia of restaurants and small eateries. They’ve beaten back plans for the Phillies stadium, a federal prison, and two casinos.
Community members are more sophisticated and skeptical about mega-projects’ costs and benefits.
But the sports world has intruded again, this time with a new Philadelphia 76ers basketball arena proposed by a troika of private equity and real estate executives. Their pitch boasts of new jobs and revenues, economic revitalization, and above all street cred for a team aspiring to join other NBA cities with downtown arenas. But there’s nothing more inconsistent with repairing historic wrongs than the existential threat posed by the hoop dreams of billionaires, which could spell the end-times for this working-class neighborhood of color.
“We truly believe that if this gets built Chinatown will die,” says Wei, who co-founded Asian Americans United, a neighborhood advocacy group. “This has become, to me, at least, much bigger than Chinatown because this is a fight against that kind of private equity development that’s destroying communities around the world.”
Throughout the country, professional sports teams dangle arenas and stadiums as civic dreams come true. But for the communities and the taxpayers subsidizing them in one way or another, they are often more like cynical exercises in urban grift. Dollars that could have been spent on housing, schools, parks, or recreational facilities flow into the bulging portfolios of wealthy team owners. It’s all slam dunks and three-pointers for Philly until the real costs materialize: epic traffic jams, ambulances caught in game-time traffic, top-chef restaurants elbowing out modest local favorites, and more of the gentrification that is already noshing on the northern end of Chinatown.
WITH LEASES EXPIRING ACROSS THE COUNTRY after the last major period of sports facility construction in the 1990s and 2000s, teams are casting about for new deals. The difference today is that community members are more sophisticated and skeptical about mega-projects’ costs and benefits and more vocal in their demands for transparency and accountability from the dealmakers about these proposals.
“Simple price escalation in the costs for building these things has been so great that politicians can’t get away with pushing a bill through the city council or state legislature nearly as easily as they could have in the past,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College professor emeritus of economics. “One of the ways that politicians and team owners have tried to get around the cost is by lowering the apparent public contribution.”
Dozens of academic studies show that arenas and stadiums are not only not economic catalysts, but that cities end up spending additional millions more in transportation infrastructure enhancements, among other things, to keep them purring. The data hasn’t made a dent: Teams sell their dreams not only to fans but to local and state politicians who want to keep those fans happy. Politicians fear the threat of teams pulling up stakes, and either don’t reckon with the long-term impacts of their decisions, or resort to subterfuge to hide them.
“The Buffalo Bills are ingrained in the heart and soul of every Western New Yorker,” Erie County, New York, executive Mark Poloncarz gushed in a statement after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul shocked angry but compliant lawmakers with a nearly billion-dollar state commitment for a new stadium at the end of the 2022 legislative session.
Politicians like cutting the ribbons on legacy-building sports investments, and don’t want to be the one who “lost” the team. “You get the credit for saving whatever team it is, but the costs don’t come until later, by which time, hopefully, from your point of view, you’re governor,” says Michael Leeds, a Temple University professor of economics. “The bill gets paid on someone else’s watch.”
In the 1990s, team owners recalibrated their expectations. Rather than multipurpose stadiums, they wanted sport-specific, centrally located facilities, which they preferably wouldn’t have to share. Those costs were largely borne by the taxpayers, who were wooed by the idea that a sports facility would revitalize an economically depressed area.
Camden Yards, the home of Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles, was one of the first purpose-built baseball stadiums. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, in the more than 30 years since the stadium opened in 1992, it has cost Maryland taxpayers more than a billion dollars to support the needs of the team, currently run by David Rubenstein, a private equity billionaire.
Stadiums and arenas now come with minimum price tags of $1 billion, even before the infrastructure wish lists appear. Where voters can weigh in, they’ve often said, “No thanks.” In Tempe, Arizona, three separate measures failed by nearly 60 percent of the vote in 2023 for a $2.1 billion entertainment district that included an arena for the Arizona Coyotes National Hockey League team. A tech billionaire acquired the Coyotes and moved the team to Salt Lake City.
Gabrielle Gurley
Left, a poster opposing the 76ers arena; right, Debbie Wei, a leader in the community opposition movement.
The MLB’s Oakland Athletics could not pull together an agreement with the city (which refused to put a stadium question on the ballot) and declined to renew their expiring lease. The A’s will take their bats and balls to a Sacramento minor league park before moving to Las Vegas when their new stadium opens there. But the proposed move prompted protests from Nevadans over the legislature’s approval last year of $400 million in public funding, through tax credits and bonds, for a $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat stadium on the former Tropicana casino site. The furor has fueled two lawsuits and a “Schools Over Stadiums” ballot referendum drive led by teachers unions. The state supreme court disallowed the referendum over ballot language, and that battle continues.
Tussles over teams can unleash economic warfare between states. Jackson County, Missouri, voters decided not to extend a 3/8-cent sales tax for 40 years to generate $2 billion for a new stadium for the MLB Kansas City Royals, and renovations for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs’ home field. It failed 58 percent to 42 percent. Kansas and Missouri once had a decades-old understanding that they would not get into the business of poaching projects and jobs from one another. But Kansas state lawmakers, seeing a long-standing dream taking shape, have jumped to lure the teams. They recently passed a financing plan for two stadiums. That move led to a counteroffensive by Missouri lawmakers, who announced that they’d do what it takes to keep the teams. Taxpayers will soon find out how much this battle will cost them—and it’s not over yet; there may be another Jackson County vote.
The clearest signal that the unconditional acceptance of wealthy owners pushing lopsided deals on pliable pols and taxpayers is coming to an end unfolded at the end of 2023. Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Ted Leonsis, the billionaire owner of Washington’s NBA Wizards and NHL Capitals, suddenly announced a plan to construct a $2.2 billion arena in an unsuspecting neighborhood in Alexandria, a wealthy suburb of Washington. Leonsis had been angling for a half-billion-dollar renovation package from Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser for the Capital One Arena, the team’s home base (located, like the proposed Sixers arena, in the heart of Chinatown), and had decided to play Maryland and Virginia against the District. By the time Bowser came around, it was no deal.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority had just opened a new metro station near the proposed site, which only had one exit. Residents of Alexandria’s Potomac Yard neighborhood were apoplectic about traffic and parking and new highway modifications. Maryland fans, who preferred the convenience of the Chinatown arena with its access to multiple Metro lines, weren’t eager for either a long drive or much longer Metro ride to the other side of the Potomac River.
But the final blow to Youngkin and Leonsis’s dream came from the state capitol in Richmond. In a breathtaking failure to read the room, the two white men ignored the key decider: an 80-year-old African American woman who’d been in the Virginia legislature for more than three decades. They failed to run their plan—resting on bonding through a stadium entity that didn’t yet exist—by Democratic state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, the chair of the Virginia Senate’s finance and appropriations committee. She had to sign off on the deal though the state budget process and steer it through a General Assembly that had swung over to unified Democratic control in 2023.
On X, formerly Twitter, Lucas was unequivocal about her role: “Anyone who thinks I am going to approve an arena in Northern Virginia using state tax dollars before we deliver on toll relief and for public schools in Hampton Roads must think I have dumbass written on my forehead.” By the end of March, Leonsis worked out a $515 million investment toward the total $800 million cost of renovations—with Bowser.
WASHINGTON CHINATOWN’S RECENT HISTORY reverberates with warnings for Philadelphia. The construction of the Washington arena in the 1990s destroyed the last vestiges of a recognizable Chinatown. The 1968 riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination spurred families and business to leave for the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. The construction of the Metro in the middle of the neighborhood in the 1970s accelerated the exodus. The siting of the city’s convention center on the northern edge of the neighborhood in the 2000s also affected the community.
Ted Gong, the executive director of the 1882 Foundation, which works to raise awareness of the historical impacts of the Chinese Exclusion Acts that prohibited Chinese immigration in the late 19th century, wasn’t among the Washingtonians agonizing over the teams’ possible departure. “We were saying, ‘You know, if that thing falls into the ground and becomes a parking lot, that’s fine with me,’” he says.
The longtime residents’ exodus to the suburbs precipitated a decline; the arena finished Chinatown off. “One of the major causes of demise of Chinese Chinatown is the loss of restaurants that can do banquet business,” says Gong. “I’m not talking about the little noodle shops—something everybody talks about, how to protect the mom-and-pop shops. It’s the weddings, the birthdays, the wakes, all these rites of passages, things that bring the family together. That process of coming and sharing maintains the community. If you don’t have that banquet facility for these rites of passages, you’re finding someplace else.”
Gong is already reimagining Chinatown. He points to Georgetown University’s new multimillion-dollar undergraduate and graduate campus near Capitol Hill, a development he believes will have a positive impact on Chinatown over the next decade. City planning has to focus not just on sports fans attending games a few days a year, but the wider implications of students and workers from the city and federal courts and Capitol Hill who will seek experiences that a sports arena does not provide, like the area’s theaters, libraries, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery.
“The sports arena is either going to be a hub for all these places, or it’s going to be a roadblock,” he says. “Right now, it’s a roadblock.”
Dozens of academic studies show that arenas and stadiums are not economic catalysts.
Another District neighborhood wants a football team to stay far away. Resistance is heating up over the possible return of the Washington Commanders from suburban Landover, Maryland, to a new NFL stadium constructed on the site of the soon-to-be-demolished Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. Ebony Payne, a member of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, an elected citywide body that handles local affairs, opposes the stadium. “There’s a lot of nostalgia around the team,” says Payne, who grew up in the Kingman Park neighborhood around RFK. “Being in D.C., when they were playing at RFK, they won the Super Bowl.”
What her constituents want is more affordable housing in a city where it’s scarce, and a new neighborhood supermarket that would also be an option for people living in the food desert across the river from the stadium. They want a popular skate park, a farmers market, and especially the multi-use playing fields preserved. But The Fields, as the space is known, have been viewed as temporary by other mayors and by Bowser herself. She is leading the drive to get the team back. “I think she sees it as part of her legacy,” Payne says.
Bowser has said that the Wizards-Capitals deal should show the Commanders ownership, led by Josh Harris, the co-founder of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, that the city is serious and is committed to new investments in sports and infrastructure. Harris is a busy man. He’s also behind the Philadelphia arena deal.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2022, Josh Harris and his Philadelphia 76er co-owner David Blitzer, along with local businessman David Adelman, announced a plan to move downtown. Blitzer is a senior executive with the Blackstone private equity firm. Adelman is a Philadelphia entrepreneur best known in the city for Campus Apartments, a large on- and off-campus student housing firm.
Currently, the team is a tenant of the Wells Fargo Center, about four miles away in the Sports Complex in South Philadelphia, which also houses the stadiums for the MLB’s Phillies and the NFL’s Eagles. Comcast Spectacor owns the Wells Fargo Center and its co-tenant, the NHL’s Flyers. With their lease expiring in 2031, the Sixers’ owners want to control their own scheduling in a state-of-the-art arena with luxury boxes, the newest Jumbotron scoreboards, and premium food offerings.
Comcast Spectacor put another offer on the table, a 50/50 partnership to build the Sixers their own arena in the Sports Complex “at the right time,” CEO Dan Hilferty told the Philadelphia sports blog Crossing Broad in June. The offer comes on the heels of the corporation’s multibillion-dollar upgrades to the Sports Complex, including $400 million in Wells Fargo Center renovations with restaurant “experiences,” bars (with the privilege of standing-room tickets at $25), stores with high-end merchandise, and more exclusive club seating. According to Hilferty, the Sixers owners have not responded.
Is an 18,500-seat arena worth the further encroachments on the Chinatown neighborhood? The arena, with the name “76 Place at Market East,” would replace a section of the Fashion District mall between Philadelphia City Hall and the Independence Mall historic district, where blocks of once-busy stores are now boarded-up, disused spaces. The one-two punch of the convention center and arena bears an eerie similarity to the construction patterns that unraveled Washington’s Chinatown.
An August 2021 study of sports facilities and local businesses by a pair of Columbia University and Northwestern University researchers found that, unlike football and baseball stadiums, basketball and hockey arenas do not generate comparable foot traffic to local businesses. But 76 DevCo, the team’s development arm, points to events at the Convention Center, when the average daily population walking in front of shops and restaurants increased by 74 percent to 35,300.
But window-shopping does not necessarily translate into purchases. The team’s owners will want people to spend their money in the arena’s eateries and not in Chinatown or any other downtown restaurant district. “That’s where a lot of their revenue actually comes from,” says Arthur Acolin, a professor of real estate at the University of Washington-Seattle who studies historical Chinatowns on the East Coast and who completed a study of the arena plan.
MATT ROURKE/AP PHOTO
Philadelphia’s Chinatown Friendship Gate, which is near the site of the proposed 76ers basketball arena
The Sixers would play about 50 games, depending on the playoffs, with up to 100 concerts and other events, team owners claim. But 76 Place would also compete with the Wells Fargo Center for big acts, and one of those two facilities would struggle to stay profitable. It would also compete with two other nearby concert venues: Temple University’s Liacouras Center and the Met Philadelphia. The Sixers plan includes a 250-unit mixed-income residential tower with 20 percent of the units (up to 79) affordable, but that aspect of the project remains in flux. 76DevCo did not respond to requests for comment.
“Real estate is kind of the latest kind of bright and shiny thing teams and leagues are using,” says Leeds, the Temple University professor. “‘It’s not a stadium. It’s a mixed-use entertainment district that is going to have housing and stores.’ First of all, a lot of the time that stuff never happens, and even if it does happen, why do you need this spaceship in the middle of it that is empty most of the year?”
In their 2022 announcement, the Sixers cited Jefferson Station, a Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) downtown hub, as one reason for the move. But with federal COVID funds running out, the system is nursing a $240 million deficit going into its 2025 fiscal year. Where will SEPTA get the ongoing funds for infrastructure improvements to Jefferson Station, or tweak schedules to better accommodate Sixers crowds headed downtown?
What the owners ignore are the lifelong behavioral patterns that are hard to shake, particularly among suburban fans used to driving to the Sports Complex, which sits at the confluence of Interstates 76 and 95. Nor is SEPTA the best ambassador for mass transit. Although the regional commuter rail experience is better than either of the city’s two subway lines, which can slide into Mad Max territory, the system has long had an abysmal reputation for safety. “This is Philly, this is not New York,” says Rev. Michael Caine, of Power Interfaith, a statewide group of congregations opposing the arena. “The way subways and trains are right now, oh my God, they’re going to drive their cars.”
How ambulances would get to Thomas Jefferson Hospital, the main downtown hospital that provides the highest level of trauma care, is a concern that hasn’t been addressed to the satisfaction of medical professionals who work there. How the city would handle traffic when Sixers games conflict with events at the Convention Center like the PHS Philadelphia Flower Show, a ten-day-long March horticultural extravaganza, the country’s largest, is anyone’s guess.
The project promises thousands of temporary construction jobs. But it is unclear how it would create stable, year-round employment that a family can live on. Many Sports Complex concession jobs are part-time, seasonal positions with wages that match. Workers have responded by linking together several of those part-time jobs at the Sports Complex to generate an income that can support a family. Splitting off the Sixers won’t produce a raft of new jobs, but it would move existing ones from the Sports Complex to Center City, placing new commuting demands on already hard-pressed workers.
Several African American organizations, including the NAACP Philadelphia and the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, have come out in favor of the project. The groups have signed a memorandum of understanding with the Sixers that 40 percent of the concession, vending, and food businesses would go to African American owners, with a $2 million fund to prepare people for these opportunities. The team has proposed a $50 million, 30-year community benefits agreement. But $1.6 million annually won’t go far in a major city that has the highest poverty rate in the country.
When the 76ers moved their practice facility to Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, in 2016, out of 275 staff members, they only hired 11 city residents.
Caine sees 76 DevCo’s moves as divisive. “It’s used some of the political and historical divisions between the Black and Asian communities in Philly over and over again, promising things to the Black community over and against the Asian community—and I’m of neither community,” he says. “It’s just been kind of horrifying to me to watch these kinds of clumsy efforts, to be honest, on their parts.”
The owners may be paying for construction and swearing off city subsidies. But 76 DevCo has expressed interest in seeking out monies from “existing federal and state programs”—which means taxpayer dollars. The unstable political situation in the nation’s capital throws doubts on substantial increases in transportation funding for highways or large transit systems like SEPTA. A Jefferson Station reconfiguration would cost multiple millions. And despite a Democratic governor from the city’s northern suburbs trying to shore up support for new statewide public-transit investments, there is no love lost for Philadelphia in the Republican state legislature.
The Sixers have said that they plan on the building lasting 40 to 50 years without major renovations, and that over a 30-year period, it will create over $1.5 billion in new tax revenue for the school district, city, and state. That works out to a paltry $50 million per year across three jurisdictions. The Philadelphia School District’s budget for the 2024-2025 academic year is $4.4 billion.
An independent study by Acolin of the University of Washington-Seattle found that no matter how a potential deal is done, during the five years of construction, the city and the state stand to lose. Acolin’s conservative estimate projects that the arena would cost the city 170 businesses, nearly 5,000 jobs, and about $265 million in tax revenues; on the high end, the city would shed 566 businesses, about 16,000 jobs, and nearly $1 billion in tax revenues.
ARENA OFFICIALS HAVE PRESENTED “broad strokes” solutions to Chinatown’s concerns about a sports facility on their doorstep, which John Chin of the PCDC describes as “security, quality of life, supporting the business environment and preserving the authentic culture that Chinatown has to offer.” Chin arrived to head the PCDC just in time for the Phillies fight, so he’s back on familiar ground.
He characterizes 76 DevCo’s efforts as “good-intentioned” but says that solutions for this unique live-work neighborhood are “very, very complicated.” “I’ve said that to them, you don’t bring organic benefits. I don’t want to accept and hear that you’ve got to mitigate all these negative impacts of the arena,” he says. “That’s not what we want; it doesn’t benefit Chinatown one bit.”
Chinese laborers came to the United States in the 1870s to work in mines and on railroad construction in California and other Western states. Where white job seekers resented immigrants and viewed them as competitors, the Chinese became targets of violence and lynch mobs.
North and west of Independence Hall, Philadelphia Chinatown emerged as a refuge from terrorism. The city’s white power brokers initially had little interest in the red-light district where the Chinese settled. That changed when transportation infrastructure projects began to take shape, beginning with subway work in the 1930s. The construction of the Vine Street Expressway and other projects prompted the earliest protests and galvanized the new community organizations.
Chinatown has successfully beaten back several development proposals, including a Phillies stadium and two casinos.
“We’ve gone beyond that Chinese American identity, and we’re a symbolic place for Asian Americans who are minorities in this country and are reminded of it every single day,” says Chin. “In Chinatown, we feel like we’re the majority—we hear languages other than English spoken, and nobody criticizes that.”
There’s been furious debate over the Sixers plan. In its study of the project, the Market Street East Improvement Association, a pro-arena group, concluded that the arena would help the area become a “place for all.” The independent Design Advocacy Group had a tart critique: “Center City Philadelphia has some problems,” the analysts noted. “The proposed Sixers’ arena is not the solution.” They called for “an influx of 24/7 street-oriented activity, preferably connecting with and amplifying the vibrancy of Chinatown.” Inga Saffron, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic, wrote that the Sixers arena “would import the insular dullness of a typical American sports arena onto Philadelphia’s traditional retail corridor.”
“They seem only interested in this one spot, and that seems a little curious,” says Caine. “So many of us feel that it’s really about a long-term game, and it’s about development of that part of Center City, which is the least developed at this point.”
CHINATOWN HAS SUCCESSFULLY BEATEN BACK several development proposals. In 2000, when Mayor John Street announced that he wanted to put the Phillies stadium downtown, it took the threat of a racial discrimination lawsuit from Chinatown leaders to stop the plan. (Chin says the PCDC has no plans for such a strategy today.)
The Phillies weren’t exactly excited about moving the team. “The Chinatown site poses significant challenges, including parking, accessibility, traffic, timing and cost,” Larry Shenk, the team’s vice president for public relations, told The Washington Post in 2000. The Sixers may be paying for the arena construction, but nothing else has changed.
“Places like FACTS and places like the Asian Arts Initiative, all of which actually do exist in the footprint of what would have been the baseball stadium in 2000, are arguably a lot more beneficial to the community and development than a private corporation,” says Kaia Chau, Wei’s daughter, a 2024 Bryn Mawr College graduate who co-founded the Students for the Preservation of Chinatown, an anti-arena coalition of area college students. (Adelman’s machinations with high-priced student housing near the University of Pennsylvania have helped Chau with recruitment there.)
In 2008, a casino tried to move in, and five years later, a second casino plan emerged. Chinatown activists and residents fought them both off. “As a community, they are knit together in a way that you don’t see with just regular taxpayer coalitions,” says Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross. “This has been a much more organized grassroots fight against a stadium.”
A decision to proceed or pull back hinges on the results of long-delayed city impact reports that have been paid for by the Sixers. Many economists take a dim view of these types of studies. Zimbalist of Smith College says this research is done by consulting firms that cater to their clients’ interests: “Those are called economic impact reports, but really what they are is elaborate press releases based upon inappropriate methodology and unrealistic assumptions.”
Chinatown in Washington has been hobbled by Capital One Arena (left); Mayor Muriel Bowser wants to build a stadium for the NFL’s Commanders on the RFK Stadium site next to the Anacostia River.
The final word on the project lies with the city council and the arcane procedural quirk known as “councilmanic prerogative.” This unwritten rule gives any city councilor the power to advance or block projects in the area they represent. There is an understanding that the rest of the council abides by the decision of that councilmember regarding their own district. “They may be against the arena behind closed doors, but when it comes time to vote, I don’t know if that ‘no’ converts to an opposition vote,” says Chin.
Councilmember Mark Squilla, who represents Chinatown, has that prerogative. He says he’ll eventually hold public hearings once the final economic impact reports are released and studied. I asked him about the suspicion in some circles that the arena is a done deal. “Well, if that was the case,” he says, “there would have been legislation already introduced and it would be resolved.”
A few weeks after the Sixers’ 2022 announcement, a group of Philadelphia Chinatown residents traveled to Washington to get a sense of what their hosts said was a preview of what would happen if Philly greenlights a downtown arena. Beyond its magnificent Friendship Arch, Washington’s Chinatown neighborhood is a mix of a few traditional Chinese restaurants like Tony Cheng’s and cheap-eats favorite China Boy to high-end offerings from chefs like José Andrés. But fast food predominates: Chick-fil-A and Taco Bell—a banner on the storefront says it’s “Coming Soon!” Retail stores like the Da Hsin Trading Co. that sell Chinese herbs, teas, and gifts are scarce. The Gallery Place mall next to the Metro station houses a movie theater, an entertainment equipment store, and not much else of interest.
“It was so obscene, almost like a parody,” recalls Wei over a meal in Philadelphia Chinatown at Cily Chicken Rice, one of many small eateries that quickly filled up at lunchtime. “We saw that most of the businesses that were there have shut down as well as the ones that were supposed to revitalize that area. But also, what’s notable is that these aren’t small family businesses. They’re chains, Bed Bath & Beyond, Starbucks, and Fuddruckers. Even at that level, they can’t survive, so how do they think that we’ll survive?”
Their Washington host told Wei, “Take a lot of pictures, because if they build the arena, that’s all you’re going to have left,” she says. “That was my biggest takeaway from visiting.”
The heat did not seem to have curbed the energy levels of people navigating Philadelphia Chinatown. In many ways, the enclave is more alive on a weekday afternoon than the bruised Market Street East retail district the arena aims to replace. The neighborhood’s greengrocers were full of shoppers. The small restaurants had filled up. Workmen seemed to be everywhere.
The arena proposal has the look and feel of a quick fix—let’s run with the first shiny thing that comes along that someone else will pay for. It is out of scale with both Chinatown’s unique history and Center City’s vibe as a shopping, cultural, and residential area with human-sized aspirations. 76 Place at Market East seems like a throwback to the big box-ification of Center City—with a basketball overlay—that was already apparent at the nearby shopping mall, itself a clumsy attempt to suburbanize a downtown.
What Philadelphia needs more than a new sports arena is a strong dose of long-range vision that allows city residents, urban design professionals, small-businesspeople, students, and others to put their collective brains together. That would be a far better step forward to invigorate and dazzle the city rather than dealing with a circus maximus that will never do justice to the place that it would grace. The residents of Chinatown have mobilized once again, to preserve not only their community but the rest of the city from skilled and determined billionaire opportunists.
