The Rebirth of North Broad

Jason Lehman grew up on a dairy farm near Carlisle, however, and he is no bohemian. As we talk, he mentions a few other neighbors who rent in the same building, like Moses Malone, the former Sixers star. In my week of living at Lofts 640, I find out how difficult it is to meet your neighbors in a big apartment building. But I certainly don’t see anybody who looks even vaguely like an artist, and one prospective tenant I meet (who did later rent an apartment) is actually — a dentist!

Nothing wrong with dentists, of course. In fact, one big aesthetic and very purposeful choice Blumenfeld made was luring much-lauded chef Marc Vetri — whose eponymous Spruce Street restaurant has been hailed as one of the best Italian eateries in America — to open a second upscale restaurant, Osteria, in an area where anything upscale disappeared decades ago. It’s the kind of place that’s appealing to dentists and information-tech guys.

A good restaurant can be a kind of Fort Apache in a tough, transforming neighborhood. We saw this with the funky French bistro Florent in Manhattan, which opened in the Meatpacking District in 1985 and made possible the later explosion of trendiness ignited by another restaurant, Pastis, that has in turn led to an invasion of scenesters.

But, c’mon, Broad Street — above City Hall?

A few days before meeting Jason Lehman, this friendly,unpretentious de facto new urban pioneer, Dixie and I took a slow drive up and down Broad Street between our temporary home and the Temple campus. My idea was that I would find a way to live exclusively in this corridor. But a survey of the street made that seem nearly impossible. There were no markets, no restaurants beyond fast food, no bars. Virtually none of the amenities of day-to-day life seemed available, and some of the necessities were missing. We were both a little depressed by the whole idea of the experiment when we went to dinner at Osteria that first night with a friend who teaches at Temple.

By the end of the evening, we were sanguine again about our week-long experiment, soothed by a smooth barbera and some tangy rigatoni. The restaurant is a comfortable and relaxing place, with a nice mix of patrons. The professor sipped the last of his wine, dug into the little cannoli on his plate, and peered out the big windows to the deserted street. “I cannot believe I’m doing this on North Broad Street,” he said.



BELIEVING ANYTHING VERY good about North Broad Street went out of style long ago. We needed to look no further than a few blocks above Osteria to see the great decaying symbol of this — the Divine Lorraine Hotel. Hulking in stoop-shouldered neglect at the complicated intersection of Broad Street and Ridge Avenue, the Lorraine was built as a grand palace in 1894, transformed into a center for eccentric Father Divine’s ministry in the 1940s, and left to steadily decline, like the street where it sat and the neighborhood around it, in the ’60s and ’70s.

What does it say about a city that it allows such an important part of town so close to its core to get so rotten?

“Race played a big factor,” says Kesha Moore, an assistant professor of sociology at Drew University (and Philly native and Penn graduate). “In the racial politics that came into play when people were looking at what neighborhoods could be turned around, North Philadelphia got characterized as a no-man’s land and came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the black ghetto. In comparison, other areas just seemed a little blighted.”

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