A quarter
mile due east of City Hall, and a quarter mile west of the Liberty Bell lies a
contentious series of blocks known as Market East. As is evident in its name,
Market Street is where commercial activity takes place in Philadelphia. Over
the past two centuries, that has taken the form of the gilded age’s multi-story
department stores, such as Lit Brothers, Gimbel’s, and the Wanamaker building,
and morphed into the 21st century mall, which takes the shape of a
multi-block behemoth called Fashion District. These titanic commercial relics dominate
these blocks but remain underutilized and generally inaccessible to the public leading
to a confused neighborhood identity. Who is Market East for?
As it
stands today, the neighborhood is held mostly as vacant buildings plus parking
lots and garages by developers, hoping that capital would one day return to the
area, and have entertained a wide range of heavy-handed design proposals, such
as in 1961, when Louis Kahn proposed it becoming a slightly Romanesque civic
core, or when Edmund Bacon and Romaldo Guirgola proposed an expansive “Gallery,”
which became the gargantuan Fashion District mall, and lastly when the 76ers
and Sasaki put forth a plan in 2023 that sought to build a basketball arena
between 11th and 10th on Market, which was ultimately
called off by the developer. These plans perceive Market East as fundamentally
empty, a canvas ready to be reshaped in the service of corporate interest and
greed. We aim to challenge this notion and put it into the hands of the people.
Through
extensive site research and observation, we started to understand who uses
Market East on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis, which shaped a conception of
the neighborhood as full, rather than as empty as its vacancy pattern would
suggest. Aside from long-term speculative development holdings, the site is
home to a significant portion of Jefferson Health’s medical campus, which is
utilized mostly by insured patients visiting specialty clinics.
We aim to
connect current occupants with the pre-existing network of healthcare and
support that is present on site, while developing a more holistic program of
care for people who use drugs (PWUD), who already maximize the spatial
affordances of the site but are not typically allowed to access the resources
Jefferson offers. Second; we aim to provide a better, safer, mixed-use neighborhood
that encourages longer-term habitation, blending the subculture that exists on
the site with the culture of care that grows in residential neighborhoods. Both
approaches understand harm reduction as a form of urbanism: creating
affordances for activities that are too often suppressed or underfunded –
skating, education, creative exploration, play, and substance use -- as the
path to more connection, care, and health.
Market East, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Collaboration with Alec Tobin, MLA ‘27
Program drawing.The pre-existing Jefferson health ecosystem becomes accessible to the public.Diverse programming + harm reduction services infiltrate the site’s underutilized parking garages. Site model. Orange = public space. Gold = public institutions.We account for dual, often seen as opposing, coalitions of harm reduction agencies + site locals. The project posits these groups as symbiotic, rather than contradictory.Concrete plaza model demonstrates the rugged, yet approachable, ground-level experience.View of repurposed parking lot and Disney Hole Park.Concete plaza model.Site plan.Public space + operations diagram.