In the 1960s, John Gallery was just a whippersnapper fresh out of Harvard’s architectural program when he went to work for the Philadelphia Planning Commission under influential executive director Ed Bacon. That would launch an accomplished career that saw Gallery help create and lead the City’s Office of Housing and Community Development before leaving public service to head up private and nonprofit enterprises focused on historic preservation.

Gallery, now 85, retired about a decade ago. Yet, from his 8th-floor apartment overlooking the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, he still keeps an eagle’s watch over Philadelphia’s land use. A thick stack of papers on his dining room table constitute his unpublished memoir, and tabs mark the places Gallery sees history repeating itself. Particularly, that is, along Market East.

Gallery’s first assignment after arriving in Philadelphia in 1964 was to try and effectuate redevelopment plans along the corridor, stretching along Market Street from City Hall to 9th Street. Power players in the city–the executives of then-dominant department stores such as Strawbridge’s and Gimbels, as well as some politicos–had been trying for the better part of a decade to successfully adapt to changing demographics and consumer preferences. Ideas about better transportation planning, open streets for pedestrians, major new construction, and even the possibility of a sports stadium were being cast about. Yet, little, it seemed, was getting done. Sound familiar?

I recently sat down with Gallery to discuss his tenure working on Market East for the City, what he makes of recent developments along the corridor, and what lessons from the past he thinks might be valuable for the present day. This resulting interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Kyle Bagenstose (KB): Tell us about what challenges Market East faced when you first got started.

John Gallery (JG): In the 1950s there was a median in the middle of Market Street with buses running down lanes on either side: NJ Transit, Trailways, Greyhound, city buses, lots of cars. So, the concern of the merchants was not making it a better retail area, but that there was a lot of congestion on the street. The first plans were to remove the buses and do something to help get rid of the cars. In 1957, Wilhelm von Moltke develops a plan to put in a parking garage and a bus terminal and four office buildings with little courtyards in-between. The idea was that the parking garage and bus terminal would be linked to the Vine Street Expressway by ramps running though Chinatown–the Planning Commission didn’t recognize the existence of Chinatown at the time. The plan had a lot of detractors. There were reports the bus terminal was not economically feasible, and there was no market for office development.

There was also a proposal to build a commuter rail tunnel and demolish all the buildings along that route including Reading Terminal, which remained sort of the primary plan up until 1963. Edmund Bacon was severely criticized for not hiring Louis Kahn to be consultant, so he hired him in a token gesture kind of way. They didn’t get along.

The property owners on Market Street were not happy with these plans, so they formed their own committee under the old Philadelphia Development Corporation, consisting of the presidents of Strawbridge’s, Lits, Gimbels, Wanamaker’s, and PSFS bank. They hired Victor Gruen, who was the most famous shopping center architect in the country. He proposed closing Market Street, making it a pedestrian mall, and having the north-south streets bridge over Market, which, of course, was ridiculous. The clients rejected that plan immediately in early 1963, but Bacon felt very threatened by this idea of them going off and doing their own plan.

KB: It’s interesting they bring in Gruen, who is sort of the father of the American shopping mall, which by that point is already starting to gut urban department stores. They really weren’t worried about their competitiveness in a changing market?

JG: At that point, I would say the interest starts to shift. All of these plans continue to have parking and bus terminal facilities, but increasingly the focus becomes the retail shopping complex and what that was going to be. If you think about a regional shopping center, usually there is a department store at both ends and a lot of little stores in between. So here you have Wanamaker’s on one end and Strawbridge’s, Lits, and Gimbels at the other. Market Street worked very well that way.

KB: On your dining room table here you have a timeline printed out counting nine total plans for Market East between Von Moltke’s in 1957 and the Fashion District in 2019. There are other big names who take a stab at it like Romaldo Guirgola. The fourth plan that you made, in 1964, gets modified, but ultimately approved, and basically becomes The Gallery of the 1970s through 2010s. Tell us about that legacy and whether you view it as successful.

JG: What seemed fairly obvious to me was, if you want a continuous pedestrian shopping mall, you put it one level below the street and connect it to this new train station (now Jefferson Station). The department stores approved this. The Planning Commission approved this. It was the first plan that everyone agreed to.

At the time of the first phase (1977), it was the most economically successful urban shopping complex in the United States. So, there was pressure to do a second phase. I had moved to Texas in-between, but for the second phase I returned. Mayor Frank Rizzo asked me to come back. People do not like to give Frank Rizzo credit for anything. He may have been a controversial police commissioner, but without Rizzo Market East would never have been accomplished. He got behind the plan and convinced Nixon to give federal funds necessary for the first phase. There was a signing of agreements in 1979 for the second phase.

The problem is that (next Mayor) Bill Green sat on it and started questioning it. Eventually it got built, but a second courtyard was eliminated and there was no major entrance on the west end. The commuter tunnel opened in 1984 and, in a certain way, that was the end until the Fashion District.

One thing that I think contributes to its failure [The Fashion District redesign] is that they changed it so that you don’t go down into anything. You come in at street level, you walk down the mall, and when you get to the end, instead of being able to exit back onto Market Street, you exit onto Filbert Street. Why would anyone want to do that? The fact that there’s no real entrance to the mall part, it’s always made it a strange plan to me.

KB: So, overall, success or failure? Did Market East accomplish the redevelopment vision of 60 years ago?

JG: Even when they closed The Gallery, it was economically profitable. It wasn’t like it was losing money. It was like, “We want something different. We want something like Plymouth Meeting Mall.” So, planning what could happen on Market East, I think you really have to think, “Where are the important customers?” It’s not just bringing people from Chestnut Hill. What would make East Market Street meaningful to the communities that are closest to it?

[At this point in the interview, Gallery sketches a map showing the connectivity of public transit between Market East and West Philadelphia via the Market Street subway line, and North Philadelphia via the Broad-Ridge subway spur, which lets out at 8th and Market].

The clientele for Market East was principally the Black community. Some people might say it was a failure, but it was relevant to a large group of people and still made money for the owners.

KB: Let’s talk about power players and how big land use and planning decisions like these get made. Who called the shots in your day, and how does that compare to now?

JG: One thing that’s changed is that almost all of these plans were done during a period where there was a substantial amount of federal funding for rebuilding cities. An important piece of the funding was a program called Urban Development Action Grants, which were federal grants leveraged by private investment. The City was obviously in a strong role since it was the only one that could get access to those funds, but it needed to have partnerships with the private sector. This no longer exists, so it’s not like the mayor can come in and say, “Well we’ll apply to HUD for $20 million to do XYZ, if you’ll do ABC.” There’s a different financial climate than existed during the era of all those other plans up to the Fashion District.

And you have many more actors now. Center City District has its own ideas about some things. A 60-member task force is a large number to be a real decision-making body. When we created the Market East Development Corporation, I think it was like 10 members on the board. Something you could fit everyone around a table and make decisions.

KB: Help us understand the motivations for Market East property owners to tear down buildings when there’s no plan for what comes next? It seems that is what happened with the Disney Hole and now we risk repeating history.

JG: People always refer to the Disney Hole, and that somehow gives the impression that it was because of something related to Disney that the parking lot is there, which is not true. As soon as Gimbels got a new building built, they demolished their old building [on the site]. Yes, it’s unfortunate that there wasn’t something over all these many years that came along to be developed there, and I don’t know what the real explanation for that is, but it wasn’t that the Disney idea failed and then we got this vacant lot. It was that Gimbels moved.

But private property owners can demolish anything they want anytime they want. They don’t have to have future plans for it. If you don’t have property on the land, you don’t have a real estate property tax on it. If they demolish it, ongoing expenses are probably less, right? They don’t have to worry about maintenance and vandalism. It’s hard to say you should wait until there’s a plan from their economic point of view.

What I would say, and get myself in trouble, is that it’s been many years since the City Planning Commission did any planning. Many years. And that’s a handicap. It’s not that they could have anticipated the whole issue with the Sixers. But because the Planning Commission doesn’t think in planning terms–I mean, it’s a reactive agency–then I think you are in a more difficult situation dealing with private property owners. If you had an effective Planning Commission, and someone there did go to a [landowner] and told them to wait a year to demo, if you were Frank Rizzo you could probably convince them to do that. Mayor Parker?

KB: At the end of the day, this is all still a question of figuring out how to use Market East, which is something you’ve been thinking about for 60 years. Is there a way to revitalize it?

JG: I don’t know the answer to that.

Two things. One, take a walk on Walnut Street from 16th to 19th Street. Crowded with people. Are they all people living in Center City? I doubt it. So, obviously people will come to Center City if things are attractive.

Streetscaping and walkability is a very important ingredient that I don’t think is discussed a whole lot. Frankly, I think you go back to 1957. Get the buses off the street, transform the street, make it an exciting environment, then, I think, many of these buildings along the way may adapt. For example, Market Street between 10th and 11th Streets–it’s all these glass walls that you can’t see anything through. The stores are big stores, it’s like three stores on the whole block. If you were on Walnut Street, there’d be 20 stores on the whole block and everyone would have a display window. And right now, the Marriott, I mean it’s a great facility, but walking down Market Street it’s like a blank wall. With Reading Terminal Headhouse, you’ve got Hard Rock Cafe on the corner and nothing else.

But there is another side to it, which is maybe the east side of Market Street can’t be that again. Maybe the only thing you can do is build an apartment building with a couple of stores on the ground floor and not expect it to be a big, vital shopping district the way it was before. You look at photographs from the 1950s and the streets were packed with people,but there were no regional shopping centers.

Again, the clientele for Market East was principally the Black community, so it may be that you can’t go back to the past. And maybe it doesn’t regain that functionality, but maybe it has a different function. You could change the composition of stores in the Fashion District that might make it more meaningful, but thinking we’re going to make it back into an equivalent of West Walnut Street–maybe that is the wrong direction.

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