The Rebirth of North Broad

YOU CAN ALWAYS see gentrification happening. The new, freshly pointed brick facades fill in the once-empty gaps in a block. Soon, rowhouses are being called townhouses, and they suddenly sport wrought-iron balconies and window boxes.

A cute coffee shop opens on a previously desolate corner, stocks the pastry case with arugula macadamia scones, and is quickly filled with expensively dressed-down people who seem to be paid to do nothing all day.

Hearing gentrification is another matter. Tonight, in a pleasantly bustling new Italian restaurant with tart wisps of smoke from the wood-burning oven in the air, Jason Lehman is the sound of gentrification. Lehman is a good-looking 31-year-old, fit and friendly, a former football player at Carnegie Mellon, where he studied information technology. He’s just moved to Philly from Harrisburg, taken a good job at an insurance company. He’s lived in other big cities for short spells while working on consulting projects, but now he’s ready to settle into Philadelphia.

“I looked around at different neighborhoods,” he tells me, after a sip of a rich red gravello, “and this seemed like a good deal for all you got. I didn’t think much about what it meant to be on North Broad Street.”

I met Jason Lehman by chance when he sat down by himself next to me at the bar of Osteria, a sleek new Marc Vetri restaurant that recently opened in the Broad Street storefront of a former clothing factory that’s been converted to 265 loft-style apartments. We started talking, and Lehman told me he lived in one of the apartments upstairs. I lived upstairs, too — for that week, at least.

Full disclosure: Real estate developer Eric Blumenfeld agreed to open a model apartment in the Lofts 640 to me and my fiancée, the silver-haired little firecracker named Dixie DeHart. For seven days we would use the place as base camp as we explored whether the message Blumenfeld was promoting, in the exuberant way developers tend to, could be true: that North Broad Street and environs are primed to become the next hot Center City neighborhood. More than that, that the two-mile stretch of the city’s once-grand thoroughfare will be transformed from a pockmarked mess of muffler shops into a gorgeous “gateway” from City Hall to Temple University.

Just getting people to live on North Broad would seem challenge enough, but asking for something like Center City rents, Blumenfeld knows, requires special salesmanship. The promotional brochure for Lofts 640 — where rents range from $1,180 to $2,500 — makes much of the gated indoor parking, fancy rooftop pool and health club, and cyber lounge. But it also promises SoHo-style living and “escaping from the orthodox conventionality of bourgeois space into an alternative world of creativity, aesthetic choice and purposeful self-definition.”

As I peruse that brochure, it seems to me that the developer is selling what may be an outworn image of urban pioneering. Yes, Manhattan’s SoHo district served as a model for one kind of neighborhood transformation that has been duplicated in cities all over America: A first wave of hardscrabble but industrious artists invades cheap loft spaces, makes the area livable, and opens the portal for less adventurous bankers and dentists, who drive up prices and drive out the original artists.