The Ghost Corridors: How Six Pop-Up Stores Are Trying to Save Philadelphia’s Market East

In the middle of a city, a long-empty storefront can create a certain kind of silence. You would have noticed taped paper in the windows, dust on the thresholds, and a section of sidewalk where people moved through rather than toward if you had strolled down Philadelphia’s 900 block of East Market Street any afternoon during the previous seven years. Before stealthily leaving last year and returning to South Philadelphia, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment had planned to construct a $1.3 billion Sixers arena on this block. The arena dream came to an end. The openings did not.

What took the place of the plan—at least for this summer—is modest in a way that seems almost unyielding. Supported by a $1.8 million city grant and the nonprofit organization Meantime, six pop-up tenants—Almost Famous, Art Philly, Clubfriends Radio & Records, Rarify, Siddiq’s Water Ice, and Two Persons Coffee—opened on May 6 in storefronts donated by HBSE and Comcast. Until July 31, they will remain. Presumably, the question marks then come back.

Brian Phillips, who designed it, is an unlikely ER physician for retail. A few years ago, he noticed the same unsettling pattern: the storefronts below remained dark for years, sometimes longer than anyone wanted to admit, while the apartments above filled up quickly. His company, ISA Building Lab, typically designs housing. In certain Philadelphia neighborhoods, commercial rents had fallen to such an extent that landlords no longer bothered to pursue tenants. In order to fill those gaps with manufacturers, vintage dealers, and small businesses who genuinely desired the space, Phillips spun off Meantime in 2022. The name says it all.

Another question is whether or not this scales. Market East’s pop-ups aren’t making rent payments. On someone else’s money, the block was painted, the bus shelters were redesigned, and new icons were added to the windows. You believe Melasia Pinder, the owner of Almost Famous, when she tells a local TV crew that this is “the opportunity I’ve always dreamed of,” but you also notice that the model only works because the property owners agreed to bear the carrying cost and the city wrote a check. This experiment seems more like a controlled trial—the kind you run to see if anything sticks—than a solution.

Even so, the block now appears different when you walk by it. A window on Market Street bears the name of Two Persons Coffee, a tiny business that is typically located inside the Bok Building in South Philadelphia. For the first time, Siddiq’s Water Ice, a West Philadelphia mainstay, is coming to Center City. In honor of Pennsylvania’s 250th birthday, Rarify is hosting an exhibition on the state’s design heritage. It’s difficult to ignore how uniquely local everything is—no national chains, no Sephoras, no aspirational brands attempting to appear genuine. Just operators who had a window into the market and already had followers in Philadelphia.

Even though he doesn’t state it explicitly, Phillips seems to be raising the larger question of whether American downtowns have simply developed more retail than the internet era can support. For the past twenty years, commercial corridors have been hollowed out by online shopping. A story taking place in dozens of cities is dramatized in Market East.

If this summer’s experiment is successful—that is, if foot traffic appears, the city gathers sufficient data, and landlords voluntarily adopt the pop-up logic—then perhaps what’s happening on this particular block will be incorporated into what city planners actually try elsewhere. The storefronts become silent once more on August 1st if it doesn’t. Which way it lands is still unknown. But the ghost corridor is alive, at least for the next few weeks.