How One Store Became Ground Zero for West Philly’s Gentrification War

Baltimore Avenue / Photograph by Nazir Wayman

The song of the summer on Baltimore Avenue this year was a lament, a Greek chorus that started as a whisper and just kept getting louder.

Why, people cried, does it seem like so many businesses have closed recently? Why have their storefronts stayed vacant longer? Where did all these vape shops come from? And will someone, anyone, open a decent cocktail bar?

It could all be summed up in a somewhat guilty refrain: Why can’t Baltimore Avenue have nice things?

Bemoaning the neighborhood’s commercial offerings, and listing the businesses we wish would open, is something of a parlor game in West Philadelphia. A butcher, a baker, a hardware store, a craft supply shop, a kids’ retailer, a music venue, a few more sit-down restaurants, a grocery store that isn’t Mariposa, somewhere to hang out after 3 p.m. that’s not a bar: I’ve heard this same wish list since moving to the neighborhood in 2019.

“People in West Philly just socialize at home,” I was told. This was framed as quirky, endearing, a preference for a more intimate type of community building. That’s probably true, but it’s also, I suspect, a structural response to the material conditions, which lately seem to be getting worse.

This was the second summer Baltimore Avenue went without the Bar(n), the dive bar at the corner of 49th that experienced a catastrophic fire in September 2023 and has not reopened or been replaced. It was the fifth summer without an ice cream shop on the avenue, since Little Baby’s closed in 2019 and its replacement, SueSaki’s Treats, opened in 2020 and closed the same year. That storefront is still empty. Shaved ice shop Ice Cave shuttered in 2024. The business that is set to move in, Chai Nashta, put up a “Coming soon!” sign over a year ago but as of early September had not opened.

I could keep going: Asante Sana Art (became a vape shop, which got shut down for violations including selling drug paraphernalia), Greensgrow West (check fraud and financial mismanagement), Spruce Hill Provisions, Ceramic Concept, Aksum, Jinxed. All of these businesses were on Baltimore between 40th and 52nd, and all have closed since 2021. Many of those storefronts are still vacant.

That spate of closures was bad enough, but what turned the steady, years-long drip of lament into a wail was two businesses that did open but seemed to violate something of the sanctity of Baltimore Avenue’s culture, its fiercely protected reputation as a place that values local ownership and a DIY feel. Their arrival topped a growing list of evidence that something was wrong with the trajectory of one of West Philadelphia’s most iconic streets.

The breaking point was Amazing Binz. Back in 2015, the local vintage store chain Jinxed opened a location at 4521 Baltimore Avenue. The old auto tag sign on the corner got a makeover, with a faux old-timey font advertising a “West Philly Variety Store.” Nine years later, in the summer of 2024, Jinxed closed, citing low foot traffic.

Then this spring, after months of vacancy, the storefront got another makeover, this time in red, yellow, and black. Gone was the tasteful hand-painted lettering on the windows, replaced by corporate logos. The twee signage was papered over haphazardly, the J from Jinxed still poking out over the top of a banner that read “Amazing Binz.” (Actually, “Amazing Binz 1,” though I see no evidence of an Amazing Binz 2.)

This was still a variety store, but of an entirely different kind. Instead of selling vintage goods — which, by definition, retain and even increase their value over time — this new store was selling consumer excess and returned products from the likes of Costco, Best Buy, Amazon, and Target — goods that drop in value every day.

For the uninitiated, here’s how it works. On Fridays, everything in the bins, whether a toaster oven or a battery-sized nasal inhalant that declares itself “good for the arteries,” costs $10. Prices fall daily, until by Wednesday everything — again, everything, from an advent calendar puzzle labeled “Advent Caledar” to cans of pet food to off-brand antihistamines to that puffy pink headband all the influencers wear — costs $1. Every Friday the whole cycle starts again.

Amazing Binz had neighbors in a tizzy. “Can’t say I’m super jazzed about that trade,” wrote one commenter in the West Willy Facebook group. “What a bummer,” said another. “How many more junk stores do we need?” One person found a silver lining: “I guess this is better than yet another vape shop on the Ave.” Not everyone was sad to lose Jinxed; it was, after all, not a cheap place to shop. But many people seemed perplexed and dismayed, as if Amazing Binz was a harbinger of worse to come.

I became entranced and a little enamored with the bin store, and wrote about it for the sports and culture website Defector. I’d never seen anything like it, and it felt so out of place on Baltimore Avenue. Amazing Binz was like a portal into this massive part of the global economy that I could ordinarily glimpse only obliquely through targeted Instagram ads, but was now here, in the plasticky flesh, in my own neighborhood. And then an interesting thing happened. Independently, a bunch of people started to send me photos of another storefront a few blocks west, and its own garish transformation. The restaurant Aksum, which opened at 47th and Baltimore in 2017, had also closed in 2024 and had also sat empty for nearly a year. And in May, its facade also got a facelift, with freshly painted red and yellow trim. There was a brief hopeful moment, when it could have been anything.

West Willy was not optimistic. “I swear if it’s another hot chicken place …” wrote one commenter. “I hope it’s a smoke shop,” said another sarcastically. “Hot chicken and vapes,” someone predicted.

Sure enough, a few days later, down came the paper on the windows, revealing that the sit-down restaurant had been converted to a bulletproof-glass, counter-service joint. Up went the awning: Halal Food Crown & Pizza, selling the classic kitchen-sink combo of “fried chicken, wings, bur­gers, pizza, cheesesteak, fries, gyro, chicken over rice.”

“I can’t believe I was right,” a commenter lamented.

Why did these businesses provoke such ire? It’s not as though before this summer, Baltimore Avenue was a chichi promenade. The avenue already had its fair share of convenience stores, dollar stores, smoke shops, and the like. But it also had a solid mixture of locally owned businesses selling a range of goods, from accessible necessities to little luxuries: the secondhand kids clothing store, the pricey ice cream shop, the African art gallery. From the 2010s onward it felt like more were opening every year.

“I feel like before the pandemic, West Philly and Baltimore Avenue were on this, like, boom, this increase,” says Franchon Pryor, owner of the Hair Vyce Studio salon at 4828 Baltimore. “There were businesses that were thriving and opening on the corridor.”

Not that this wasn’t controversial in its own way. When some of the recently closed businesses opened in the early 2000s and 2010s, they were plot points in an easy narrative: Here was the consumer handmaiden to gentrification, with all its attendant controversy, opportunity, and anxiety. Some became community fixtures. Others were shunned. Locals boycotted the opening of a Loco Pez location on Baltimore Ave in 2018, citing the use of homophobic slurs on its Fishtown menu and employee allegations of sexual harassment. The staff of Clarkville Pizza walked out en masse in 2019, accusing the owners of racist staffing decisions and fostering gentrification. The restaurant continues to get hit with the occasional graffiti or smashed window. The Linden, the only large new apartment building on the avenue, whose “luxury residences” start at $1,850 a month, has consistently been hit with graffiti — e.g., “Fuck This Shit” — and broken windows.

This phenomenon of businesses deemed too bougie, exploitative, or exclusionary being greeted with a rock through the window? Call it the West Philly welcome. It’s perceived by some as a warning sign to anyone who might want to open a business unacceptable to neighborhood standards. (There’s also nonideological window smashing, like some in a string of thefts from local businesses this summer.) Whatever the connection, West Philadelphians have fought against displacement, whitewashing, and a rising tide of unaffordability for decades. We’re not going to stand for racism or anti-queerness or bad labor practices, as consumers or workers. Nor, frankly, should we. But the reaction to Amazing Binz and Halal Food Crown & Pizza showed there’s a limit at the other end of the spectrum too.

I don’t know what it is people want here. It is hard to characterize what makes your window not get smashed in, but you can also survive.” — resident William Inglis

In 2023, the Spruce Hill Neighborhood Association surveyed 524 residents about what they did and didn’t want from new neighborhood businesses, then made word clouds of the responses, with the biggest words meaning more responses. It was a small sample size, sure, but enlightening nonetheless.

In the positive cloud, the biggest words are groceries, garden, and community. As they get smaller, the words become more hyper-specific and, depending on your perspective, more endearing or more eye-rolling. There are the concrete asks: gym, Italian, vegan, spa, hardware. And the aspirational: witchy, upscale, destination, black-owned, green, healthy. The top businesses residents didn’t want: chains, smoke shops, fast food, and bars.

But where it gets really interesting is in the contradictions. Unaffordable, unaccessible, overpriced, and fancy are all on the list of do-not-wants, but so are dive, dollar arcade, variety, check cashing, and cheap. And there’s some pretty pointed feedback about who exactly might be bringing in the unwanted businesses: out-of-town, white-owned, corporate, exploiters.

It all paints a picture of a needle to thread. The perfect Baltimore Avenue business is affordable but not cheap, nicer than what we’ve got but not too nice. Neighborhood opinion seems equally poised between fears that the neighborhood could be getting even more gentrified and fears that it might be in decline.

“I don’t know what it is people want here,” resident William Inglis tells me. “It is hard to characterize what makes your window not get smashed in, but you can also survive.”

“I have loved how Baltimore Ave always prioritizes small, locally, and often POC-owned businesses over chains,” says another resident of two decades. “But lately the new businesses don’t feel as welcoming to me — huge, loud advertising all over, covered windows, neon signs.”

Gigi McGraw, a performance artist and tour guide who at 51 has been around the neighborhood most of her life, tells me Baltimore Ave at its best had a homey feel, with each business like a room in one big house. It was easy to spend the better part of a day dipping in and out of businesses, running into friends and neighbors: grabbing a coffee at Satellite, watching the Birds on Gojjo’s backyard projector, and eventually winding up at the Bar(n), where one night some summers ago, McGraw saw a big crowd line-dancing in the street.

It was so beautiful,” she says. “Amazing. It was like the definition of what that part of Baltimore Avenue, that community, was supposed to be.

“So when you start seeing stores that are set up to cater to large masses of people or just people in general, like a bin store where you can get old Amazon packages or a franchise chicken store, it starts to shift this community feel. Like outsiders are now inside the house, and they don’t understand the rules.”

The vape shops, the hot chicken place, they aren’t chains. Despite the sign, Amazing Binz 1 is a one-off, not part of a franchise. Nor is Halal Food Crown & Pizza, though it borrows its name from similar chicken shops around the Northeast. Many are in fact small, immigrant- and family-owned businesses, doing their best to get by. But they feel like chains, in their impersonality, their business-in-a-box repeatability. They don’t feel like they arise out of community need, and in the case of the vape shops (some of which are almost certainly, let’s be real, also selling unregulated weed) there’s a sense they might be doing harm.

“Problem with vape stores are there are a million of them already, they’re all the same, every bodega and CBD shop has vape products anyway, and they don’t bring anything of value to the neighborhood,” said one West Willy comment. “Imagine if it was that many stores selling nothing but cigarettes.”

Amazing Binz, I suspect, also taps into some deeper anxieties about the changing economy. It’s stocked with the stuff that spills out of the very online shopping economy that has made it so risky for local businesses to open physical stores. Pryor, of Hair Vyce, says customers at her salon are constantly taking photos of the hair products she sells and then going to buy them from Amazon, even when Pryor tells them it’s the same price. “Jeff doesn’t need your money,” she says.

It all raises questions about the arc of West Philly’s gentrification narrative. The gentry are here. They’re having kids and worrying about school catchments. And yet few local businesses are catering to their tastes or purchasing power. Regardless of how you feel about that, it’s weird, right? Sometimes it seems like an unspoken thought bubble hovers over these Baltimore Avenue conversations: Not that anyone is rooting for gentrification, but what happened to the gentrification?

I wanted to know: Is this a real economic pattern? Or just a vibe, a perception, a panic? I read out a list of recently closed businesses to Andrew Goodman, director of equitable development for the office of City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier. He says there’s no question: It’s a trend.

“Certainly there’s been, I’d say, a consistent kind of alarm bell ringing” ever since Gauthier took office in January 2020, Goodman says. “The first real trend that we saw and heard about from constituents was this cross between part-convenience and part-nuisance businesses popping up on different commercial corridors in West Philadelphia.”

Vape shops and smoke shops, many fudging their permit applications, are popping up everywhere. Local businesses that are trying to fill real gaps in demand are having a hard time competing.

“Another trend is just the overall struggle, the mounting struggle, the growing struggle for truly, genuine small businesses, ones that are coming from community-based entrepreneurs to try to fill a need,” Goodman says.

One store that closed this year is Spruce Hill Provisions, a bougie little grocery/treat shop that opened in 2021. The owner, Elizabeth Planet, says the main reason she closed was to focus on her nonprofit work. But she also spells out some of the challenges facing any small business in 2025. Planet, a first-time retail business owner, opened Spruce Hill Provisions at a time when COVID had shrunk the world for many of us. She wanted a place around the corner where she could buy milk, and where her neighbors could buy little edible luxuries in lieu of eating at restaurants or going on trips.

“The first year was amazing,” she says. “It got harder over time. The last year of it was really, really difficult.”

As inflation rose, so did wholesale prices. Spruce Hill Provisions never brought in huge profits — Planet says the store was always a labor of love — but with prices climbing, even paying the rent and employees got hard. Planet watched as some of her local vendors went out of business, unable to withstand shrinking profit margins. In early 2025, she closed the doors.

It’s never been a good time to have a small, little retail business, ever,” says Planet. “But in this era, it’s just really challenging.”

Business displacement is a very real thing, just like it is for residential displacement.” — Andrew Goodman, director of equitable development for City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier

Stefani Threet opened Ceramic Concept on the 5000 block of Baltimore in late 2020 and closed it in early 2025. A ceramics artist born and raised in West Philly, Threet had long dreamed of opening a ceramics store in her own neighborhood, in part to expose young neighbors to new art forms and alternative career paths.

At first, she says, the store was immensely popular. It was 2020, and shopping small, local, and Black felt like a civic and moral imperative. “It started with a bang,” Threet says. “I had customers who would come in every week and just buy a little thing.” But once business returned to usual, around 2024, she saw a sharp drop-off in foot traffic and sales.

Threet attributes the drop to people shifting their habits away from local businesses and back to big-box stores, but also to the red-hot housing market pushing people out. “ I have customers who were shopping with me early on who come back now, and they basically tell me they got priced out of the neighborhood,” she says.

Home prices in the University City District are much higher than the city median, around $450,000 compared to $225,000 citywide. When I tell Goodman that people don’t seem to know what to make of Baltimore Avenue’s trajectory, and how it relates to gentrification, he says that’s easy. This is just the next step in the process.

“Business displacement is a very real thing, just like it is for residential displacement,” he says. “Not only are residential rents going up, but business rents are going up at the same time, and actually probably at a higher rate.”

None of the former business owners I spoke to for this story cited high rents as a reason they closed. But certainly some landlords are asking high prices; Amazing Binz’s rent is $3,900 a month. The Linden building, whose ground-floor retail remains nearly empty, is asking $55 a square foot. That’s lower than the average in “downtown” University City, over by Penn, but much higher than the Center City average (around $34 per square foot).

The University City District, which promotes business in the neighborhood, says there are also physical and capital constraints on Baltimore. The retail spaces tend to be small, and there can be long stretches of housing between businesses. Restaurant kitchens are expensive to build out anywhere; most landlords on Baltimore Ave are small operators, and they might not be willing to shell out to build a commercial kitchen. (These factors have created an opening for businesses like Amazing Binz and the vape shops, which require far less up-front capital to fix up and can fit in a storefront of almost any size.)

By contrast, in South Philly the transformation of East Passyunk Avenue was underwritten by the Passyunk Avenue Revitalization Corporation, which started purchasing buildings up and down the avenue in the early 2000s, fixed them up, and rented them out at competitive rates. To this day, many of East Passyunk’s hottest properties are still owned by PARC, including the buildings that house restaurants Supérette, Mish Mish, Ember & Ash, and River Twice.

It almost goes without saying, but the people of Baltimore Avenue would certainly revolt if a developer or organization tried that type of top-down change.

But there are other models. The Kensing­ton Corridor Trust acquires properties in Kensington and stewards them according to a neighborhood trust model, keeping rents low and giving residents a say in what kinds of businesses open. According to their criteria: “Businesses should have a purpose that does not further denigrate or diminish the neighborhood (such as private developers, alcohol and tobacco sales or smoke shops, check casher businesses, pawn shops, cash for gold shops, smoke/hookah shops, and other extractive businesses that are predatory to the community).”

“I think that this community likes it to be a little bit smaller, less corporate,” says salon owner Pryor. But as a board member of the Cedar Park Neighbors and former president of the Baltimore Avenue Business Association, she would like to see a more active role for UCD and a revived BABA, which has been quiet in recent years. The biannual Dollar Stroll has been a boon for local businesses, but she thinks more could be done to promote them and to court new businesses to take over the available storefronts, like the nail salon across from Hair Vyce that’s been sitting empty for years.

This is not to discount any of the stalwarts of Baltimore Avenue, like Gojjo, Dahlak, and Renata’s. Or to knock any of the newcomers, like Cleo’s Bagels or the boutique Manzanita or the recent arts offerings at Studio 34. These venues are all important and beloved for good reason. But it’s striking that at a time when Philadelphia is getting national attention for its never-ending parade of new restaurants and cocktail bars, Baltimore Avenue isn’t in on the party.

Nearly everyone I talk to has a different theory about why Baltimore Avenue is struggling, and how to fix it. The pandemic, of course, and its disastrous effects on businesses of all kinds. There are zoning complaints: It’s hard to open a tattoo shop, for example, and virtually illegal to run a live music venue. Labor disputes come up, like the closure of coffee shop Milk & Honey after workers protested over wage and safety issues. A few people point out that Black-owned businesses were particularly hard-hit. Some tell me they think business owners are daunted by the prospect of West Philly community feedback.

“I’ve been very careful and cautious in what I’m saying in this interview because I’m like, I don’t wanna damage my business or have a brick thrown through my window. Like, it’s nerve-racking,” says Pryor.

I can understand the concern. I worried about it, writing this story. Over the summer I braced myself and posted on West Willy, asking for opinions on the Baltimore Avenue trend. I expected a wave of criticism. But I was surprised that nearly every response was from someone concerned with the trajectory. There was just one lone dissenter. “I kind of like the trend …” they wrote. “It feels like baltimore ave is resisting gentrification.”

Sometimes I sense there’s an undercurrent of shame when I talk to people about Baltimore Ave, particularly among younger people who didn’t grow up in the neighborhood. They self-identify as gentrifiers, almost painfully aware that they don’t have a “right” to critique new developments, and yet, they do yearn. For a new restaurant, for a better place to get a drink after work with the girls. They feel guilty for having these preferences, like real neighborhood heads wouldn’t. But who doesn’t want better for Baltimore Ave?

“It hasn’t been thriving. It’s been on a decline for years now,” Pryor says. “We need help.”

In the end, I hope this is just a season; Chai Nashta’s owners say they will open this fall, and there are rumors of a new business opening in the old Spruce Hill Provisions space. Call it a phase, the long tail of pandemic and inflationary forces that have hurt small businesses around the country, though tariffs now threaten to extend and maybe deepen that pain. But still, as many people pointed out, Baltimore Avenue today has far more businesses of all kinds than it did 15 years ago. “What’s worse than a bin store is an empty store,” one supply chain expert told me.

There’s a chance that perception could turn around, that today’s unwelcome guests could be tomorrow’s beloved neighbors. Over the course of writing this article, I slowly heard a change in attitudes about Halal Food Crown & Pizza. Some of the same people who lamented its arrival later told me, We don’t really have any late-night eats, so I’m willing to give it a chance.

Even Amazing Binz got a reconsideration when locals realized the owner was from the West Bank, and rallied to support him. But after all the hubbub, the store appears to have already succumbed to the pattern. Since June, merchandise has still been piled high inside — exercise machines and food dehydrators and perineal massagers — but the doors are closed and the lights are off. The store was on thin ice from the start, paying high rent on a shaky business model. After opening its doors in March, the store was hit with nine L&I citations in May, including fire safety violations and operating without a commercial license. Amazing Binz hasn’t opened its doors since early June.

Now there’s a new question striking fear into the neighborhood: If the bin store does close, what will replace it?

Published as “Stumbling Blocks” in the October 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.