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Originally Posted by 1487
RTM is HEAVILY supported by tourists who dont mind being gouged on pricing. I really do not that its a regular stop for many average Philadelphians- this one included. Its mobbed with tourists, its loud and its very expensive.
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You must not go to RTM much. Zillions of everyday Philly people go there everyday to eat and to buy groceries. The clientele is ridiculously diverse in every sense of the word. By comparison, you'd think the gallery existed in some kind of apartheid system. You can eat far better food in RTM than in the subterranean hell hole of a chain food court at the Gallery for barely any more money. I mean, RTM beats Wendy's and Popeye's (
) on quality and price any day.
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As for the store mix in the soon to be closed gallery- most of the stores were chain stores that would be found in other malls or shopping centers.
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Most of the stores are/were schlocky local lowest end discount shops that you typically find in really crappy suburban malls or rundown inner city retail strips like Chelten Avenue, 52nd St, 69th Street, east Chestnut Street, Cottman Ave, K&A, Broad & Snyder, or Germantown & Erie. Things like Easy Pickins, Rainbow Shop, City Blue, NET, Samsun, Olympia Sports, Dots, Villa Sports, Ashley Stewert. Throw in 4 or 5 dollar stores, a Modell's, a drug store, Payless Shoes, the ubiquitous Foot Locker, and there you have the Gallery. It might well have been called Philadelphia's sneaker store district.
Old Navy was high end at the Gallery. That was the mall's luxury brand corner right there.
Sure, many of the stores could be found in low end shopping centers. There are/were no mid- or high-end options. Thus it became mobbed by teens interested in junk food, tacky fashion, and sneakers. So virtually no one hung out other than inner city teens and old folks whiling away their days in the food court, save for a few patrons of the methadone clinic across the way looking for some respite.
All those people obviously deserve places to go too, just like the rest of us. But the Gallery had morphed over the decades into a place where only those people would go, and few others.
It just wasn't really representative of the population of the city and/or region as whole. Is it necessary that it become so? No. But it would become, like, the Reading Terminal, a more pleasant place for all if it seems welcoming to all. It remains to be seen as to whether or not that will be the case, but I suspect that there is a good chance that it will. The stores that they speak of bringing in are by no means exclusive or the type that will shun the poor.
Century 21 is a great example of a store with a formula that appeals to a very wide variety of people, perhaps reflecting its roots in the outer boroughs of NYC where segregation is not the problem that it is here in Philadelphia.
PS - you threw down the gauntlet, as far as I'm concerned, when you dissed the RTM. Reading Terminal, in my world, is a no competition top three quintessential definitive Philadelphia locale, along with the Art Museum/Kelly Drive and Rittenhouse Sq. If you can't recognize what Elijah Anderson refers to as an iconic "cosmopolitan urban canopy", yet go around praising Wendy's and making excuses for an apartheid-like Gallery, you need your head examined.
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