There Used to Be Nowhere to Eat in This Town: restaurant-led development in postindustrial Philadelphia

Abstract

There Used To Be Nowhere To Eat In This Town: Restaurant-led Development In Postindustrial Philadelphia This project examines the roles that restaurants have played in the revitalization and reconceptualization of postindustrial Philadelphia. While many studies of Philadelphia after 1945 focus heavily on race relations, politics, deindustrialization, large-scale renewal, or historic tourism, analyses of restaurants as spaces of consumption and experience have been conspicuously absent in the historiography. This project elevates the history of restaurants to determine how they allowed Philadelphia to cope with the many challenges of deindustrialization, the flight of human and monetary capital, and the rise of competing suburban centers of gravity. The research procedures for this project included readings and analyses of secondary works centered on urban history, foodways, and histories of consumption; readings of food magazines, trade journals, menu collections, cookbooks, guidebooks, restaurant reviews, and restaurant design works; the conducting of oral interviews with many participants and employees of the restaurant, real estate, and public relations industries; archival research in Philadelphia, New York, and Wilmington, DE; market analyses of the restaurant industry both locally and nationally; and many hours of personal observation in Philadelphia's restaurants. Situating restaurant-led development within the postindustrial city required considerable personal debate. The basic premise was that after factories closed and suburban malls drained Philadelphia of its retailing strength, restaurants became new factories in the experience economy. Deciding on which restaurants to focus and how neighborhoods were altered by them proved challenging. Ultimately, a combination of specific restaurant genres and selected neighborhoods seemed the most feasible strategy. "The New Urban Dining Room" considers how sidewalk cafes, one of the most popular phenomena in Philadelphia, regenerated public space and reflected changing tastes for urban experiences. Stemming from European traditions and influenced by the postwar romance of La Dolce Vita, Philadelphia had in 2010 more than two hundred sidewalk cafes. Many people equated dining al fresco on a busy street or plaza with the good life. American cities, namely New York and Los Angeles, contained sidewalk cafes as early as the 1950s. But Philadelphia and its residents preferred the intimacy of homes or the elite seclusion of hotel dining and supper clubs. Coupled with those traditions, the development of sidewalk cafes produced years of legal battles and cultural divisions. Once those battles subsided and the political divisions mended, sidewalk cafes grew exponentially in Philadelphia, clearly indicating a new appreciation for public urban experiences. "Brokering Beef" examines the many high-end steakhouses on the South Broad Street corridor, once the nerve center of Philadelphia's business district. From the 1890s to the 1940s, the area thrived as Philadelphia's literal and figurative center, containing important banks, stock exchanges, brokerages, government offices, hotels, and department stores. After WWII, South Broad languished as other areas of Center City were renovated and redeveloped. By the late 1980s, after retail decentralization and the erasure of the local banking industry, the grand frontages and interior spaces of South Broad lay vacant. Finding suitable tenants proved difficult, for few businesses could afford the rents along South Broad or utilize its massive interior spaces. Corporate steakhouses such as The Capital Grille, Morton's of Chicago, Del Frisco's, and Ruth's Chris were ideal matches for grand architecture once indicative of power. As the consumption of steak long was associated with strength, virility, and power, replacing the banks and brokerages with beef allowed a new centrality to take root in the spatial lacunae of the South Broad corridor. "At Disney's Altar" described how the entrepreneur Stephen Starr almost singularly redefined the restaurantscape of Philadelphia. Beyond food, Starr's restaurants embodied a broader maturation of urban space, from rotting industrial landscapes to areas of hip consumerism. In certain neighborhoods, they remediated crumbling portions of the human-built infrastructure placed atop the nonhuman landscape. Starr's restaurants redefined the city as a site of the experience economy, a place not from which to escape but a place in which to partake. Within these transitions, new flows customers, suburbanites, and tourists entered the deindustrial ecology of Philadelphia. Through the recycling of the Continental diner, the creation of University City's Pod, and the opening of Talula's Garden on Washington Square Park, Starr, by providing patrons with multi-sensory ways to reimagine the city, used experience dining to rebrand Philadelphia. "The Hipsters at the Cantina" examined how new restaurants and cafes sprouted in one of Philadelphia's most ethnically guarded neighborhoods. Instead of treating the restaurant experience as purely theatrical, the restaurantscape in East Passyunk after 2000 resembled an organic, authentic alternative to Starr's dining theme parks. Upon closer inspection, this change resulted from a concerted grassroots effort to rebrand a neighborhood suffering from neglect and disinvestment. East Passyunk's transformation was engineered by the Citizens Alliance for Better Neighborhoods (CABN), a non-profit redevelopment agency formed in 1991. For decades, many in East Passyunk watched their neighborhood decline due to suburban growth and the popularity of shopping malls. By the 1980s, its commercial vigor had weakened with remaining businesses keeping irregular hours and residents angered by the city's failure to deliver basic services. With political acumen and a specific vision, the CABN leadership imagined a café society to attract new residents and businesses. CABN assumed control of neighborhood services and acquired properties along East Passyunk Avenue, and through their backing of restaurants, coffeehouses, and bars, seeded new growth in East Passyunk that appealed to a young, hip demographic. "Zones of Certain Taste" considers one of Philadelphia's most unique forms of restaurant development, "bring your own bottle" (BYOB) establishments. Given the prohibitive costs of liquor licensing in Pennsylvania for restaurants, a tangential phenomenon emerged to skirt those costs. These restaurants first gained popular appeal in the 1970s in neighborhoods such as Chinatown and East Passyunk. As Philadelphia's restaurantscape matured in the 1990s, the number of BYOBs grew. Many chefs who'd trained in upscale eateries left to seed new projects in off-center neighborhoods with minimal capital. Without alcohol sales, their focus fell on food. Without corporate rigidity and theatrical presentations, restaurants such as Bibou, Radicchio, Audrey Claire, Tre Scalini, and Cochon Fish formed a substrata of the city's restaurantscape. For patrons, knowledge of food and wine could be conspicuously displayed, making BYOB restaurants stages for a small-bore, niche consumer experience. After decades with Starr's experience dining and the continual arrival of corporate chains, taste-savvy Philadelphians sought antidotal places in which to display their food refinement. Starr, who relied upon suburbanites as his primary customer base, offered one version of urban authenticity; he provided Philadelphia unique stages upon which multiple sensations were layered. Over time, audiences that patronized Continental, Pod, or Talula's Garden looked elsewhere for badges of urban sophistication. It was in BYOBs that sophistication lay. On the surface, the benefit of patronizing BYOBs was less expensive beer, wine, or spirits, greatly reducing the total costs of a meal. But digging deeper, the small spaces, casual waitstaffs, minimal theatrics, and out-of-the-way locations seemed the real payoff for customers seeking restaurant authenticity. The epilogue, "Vetri's Gamble," considers the limitations of restaurant-led development in Philadelphia. Marc Vetri, whose eponymous restaurant Vetri and casual offshoot Amis were among the most celebrated eateries in Philadelphia, transferred his talents out of the rarefied precincts of Center City and into the developmental void of North Broad Street. Vacancies and neglect proliferated. Panhandlers were many. Post offices were shuttered. "For Lease" signs adorned many of the car showrooms and theaters while the once-gilded mansions of the city's elite saw second lives as plasma clinics and storefront churches. In the middle of this landscape was the Mulford Building, once the home of a sewing machine factory. Renamed "640 Lofts," the upper floors were converted into luxury apartments offering "SoHo style living." In shorthand, the apartments were to be populated by young people with disposable income, a demographic foreign to the nearby weeded lots and pockmarked buildings. On the first floor, Vetri opened a casual eatery named Osteria. What made this gamble unique was not the fact that North Broad Street lay off traditional foodie radar, but that Vetri's reputation was thought to have the cultural magnetism to attract similar restaurants and amenity-style development. Five years after Osteria opened, the restaurant-led development that proved successful elsewhere in Philadelphia failed to take root. The majority of Osteria's patrons were upper-middle class whites who drove to the restaurant, never venturing beyond the storefront. Areas residents were mainly black families that did not have the taste for octopus-topped pizzas or braised rabbit with polenta. Restaurant-led development, as successful as it was in certain areas, did not fully remedy Philadelphia's problems. Beset by limitations, Poverty, crime, failing schools, pollution, and budgetary woes were concerns that Marc Vetri, tapas bars, or expensive steakhouses would not erase. Dining out in restaurants has always been more the province of those with disposable or leisure income. In this regard, many contemporary Philadelphians lacked the means to patronize one of Starr's dining theme parks or fall short in the cultural capital needed to appreciate basmati rice ice cream or charred venison. When assessing the areas of Philadelphia where restaurant-led development had been most visible and profitable, there was a firm sense that the dynamic represented a culinary colonization of certain streets and neighborhoods, at times to the consternation of those who felt trendy restaurants were signs of impending gentrification. Yet unlike expressways, stadiums, parks, malls, convention centers, and other "big-ticket" urban development, restaurants seldom required massive demolition or residential displacement. If gentrification was ever linked with a restaurant opening, hostility from those displaced was minimal. The following chapters will explore how restaurant-led development affected various parts of Philadelphia and the roles that restaurants played in the renewal of and rekindling interest in the postindustrial city.