Chestnut St. was Philly's premiere shopping street, full of classy stores. The problem was all those stores were threatened by the surge of suburban malls.
So around 1975 Philly wanted to make Chestnut a mall-like pedestrian-only street, but it didn't have the funds. Federal transit agencies wanted to do a bus road and had the funds, so the 'transitway' was born from a compromise: busses down the middle and pedestrians on the sides. Further the whole thing needed to be rushed in time for Philly's 200th anniversary.
Over the next 5 years a few things happened:
- Market West and East were redeveloping into dense office buildings, pushing out food, convenience stores, and theaters. This also brought in a huge flood of non-resident office workers.
- Fast food and convenience stores were on the rise.
- "Classy" boutique stores, Chestnut Street's staples, were on the decline due to pressure from suburban malls.
Chestnut had an influx of businesses catering to office workers: fastfood and hoagies for lunch, pharmacies for quick essentials, theaters and pinball arcades for fun.
Around this time the street was bustling: real estate prices were up, occupancy was high, and the streets were packed. Musicians and performers of all sorts flooded the streets to make money off the crowds.
But with success comes new problems:
- The rushed and shoddy construction started to break down under the load and neither the city or business owners seemed to take responsibility for maintaining up the street. Planters were full of trash instead of plants, bricks were loose on the sidewalks, lamps were broken and dim.
- Traditional business owners and nearby residents weren't happy with the erosion of Chestnut street's classy aesthetic.
- And the problem with businesses that catered to office workers was there was little to pull in pedestrians outside of work hours. At night it was desolate so the city decided to reopen to car traffic after 6pm.
What appealed to office workers also appealed to the city's teenagers, and towards the tail-end of the 70s pinball arcades converted to video arcades and proliferated, stereo stores moved in, and teens frequenting the movie theaters.
Street vendors started packing the street making it difficult to walk in places. Notably bicyclists were the only thing reliably regulated: the Bicycle Coalition was pissed at how many bicyclists were getting $60 tickets for using the street.
Chestnut street businesses fully embraced profitable early 80s trends: fastfood was sold to pedestrians through windows, video arcades were packed, movie theaters played 'violent' martial arts movies, and stereo shops blasted music to entice buyers.
At the same time the street was chaotic: trash all over, infrastructure crumbling, most of the trees are dying, shops had distracting signage, posters were everywhere, giant metal traffic lights were sitting unused, and busses roaring down the middle.
And people were actually getting hit by the busses: a shoplifter running from cops got hit by a bus and it took an hour and a crane to lift the bus off him (he lived). Another person tripped into the street and SEPTA ran over his arm (also lived).
The city halfheartedly tried to address some of problems by removing a bunch of benches, banning food sales from windows, regulating audio shop noise, and regulating store facades. But they rarely enforced the regulations they added.
Despite all of that at this time 54.1% of the city thought the transitway was "good" and the rest thought it was neutral or bad.
In 1985 public perception of the street completely reversed in one day. On Easter thousands of well-dressed teenagers poured into the streets after attending church downtown and many thousands of them went to Chestnut to play in the arcades or to see the new martial arts movie "The Last Dragon".
After the movie let out a fight broke out between a few kids and a few others joined in. During the chaos someone threw a trashcan through the window and teens ran in and started looting. During the commotion a few other nearby stores were broken into as well with minor looting.
A small minority of the teens were part of the looting and chaos, most were onlookers, and police managed to break it up pretty quickly, but national and local media cast it as a full-on riot. The Inquirer's headline: "Shops are vandalized and looted in rampage along Chestnut Street".
The old-school Chestnut Street businesses and clientele were horrified. The city put together a group to assess the failure of the street and see what could be done. From here on out the general public, as reflected in the tone of the Inquirer, shifts to viewing the street as a failure.
Critics begin to describe the street as "overwhelmingly criticized by both merchants and pedestrians alike in recent studies".
In 1987 the mayor concluded "We don't like the way Chestnut street is at the present time". In spite of that the street still had high-occupancy, high rents, and some of the busiest sidewalks in the city.
From here things got bad for the street: traditional businesses were fleeing due to perceived crime and the trendy businesses of the '80s that took their place weren't as trendy anymore. Arcades started to wane after their peak in '83, VHS cut into the small-time theater market, and stereo stores were losing popularity.
A few historic office buildings on key Chestnut blocks caught fire and were left in a state of disrepair for many years further exasperating the 'empty' feeling of key parts of the street. With plunging demand cheap discount stores took over many of the vacant properties, further accelerating the transition to a 'seedy' feel.
With businesses leaving the street went from bustling, in spite of its state of disrepair, to a sketchy street in severe need of repair.
By 1991 the street is described as a 'failure' and a few years later 25% of Chestnut East of Broad was vacant and 10.1% West of broad.
Public opinion sunk so low that people forgot the transitway was ever popular at all. Reporting began to describe the transitway as a failure that had never succeeded from the start.
By 1996 the mayor and the Center City District were fully onboard with the large cost of reopening it to traffic. Large hotels and businesses used the plunging real estate values to buy enough property to construct new towers on.
And finally by 2000 the 'transitway' was undone: sidewalks were narrowed and cars were allowed back. Vacancies still persist and a walk down the street makes it hard to believe it was the premiere shopping street in Philly.
Source: Summarized from Inquirer and Philadelphia Tribune back articles. If I write this up properly I may put together correct attribution.