The Concerned Citizens for Market East is my other major project. It is an explicitly pro-development community group seeking to improve conditions on Philadelphia's Market East, a retail strip historically associated with department stores but today home to the world's most crowded dying mall (The Gallery) and seedy stereo stores and cash-for-gold pawn shops.
It has seen its urbanity literally and figuratively blasted away since 1945, and CCME seeks to bring it back with, among other things, a renewed focus on street life on Market East, strengthening of corridor retail leasing, endorsement of mixed-use projects, and endorsement of those large-format signs at home nowhere else in the city.
CCME seeks to scrub SCRUB from Market East...our view is that their positions, contrary to their name (Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight) actually increases urban blight, when it comes to Market East.
We also hold deep reservations about the proposal to run the Northeast HSR under Market East--if Market East Station didn't work, why would another station? And how would a station a hundred feet underground act as a reasonably effective urban centerpiece?
Crossing the Lines: Site, Urban, Environmental, and Transportation Planning