THE NEWSLETTER OF THE CENTER CITY DISTRICT AND CENTRAL PHILADELPHIA DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION
FALL 2024
CENTER CITY DIGEST
Right Up Our Alley One of my favorite things about working at Center City District is receiving pictures from friends, stakeholders, and strangers. You might assume that I’m referring to vacation photos of pedestrianized streets in Northern European cities with attached messages asking, “Why can’t we do this here?” Instead, I am referring to the pictures sent to me of alleys lined with overflowing dumpsters, often covered with graffiti, and the quality of life issues exacerbated by this neglect. The accompanying messages vary in tone and color, but the frustration is consistent. Glamorous? Not quite. But important – and inspiring because it doesn’t have to be that way. Many of Philadelphia’s alleys are among the loveliest places in the city, but far more are the opposite. I’m also struck by the way dirty alleys undermine the work of Center City District’s 100 hardworking cleaners, who manually or mechanically sweep the sidewalks of the District’s streets three times daily. As one emailer wrote, “We can walk the cleaned streets and sidewalks and then BOOM! we cross a really disgusting back alley, with dumpsters, trash, graffiti and filth all over.” With improved coordination and enforcement, as well as light modifications to existing regulations, Center City’s alleys don’t have to be our downtown streets’ backsides; they can be clean, safe, and serve the needs of their many commercial and residential users. More imaginatively and ambitiously, there is also an opportunity to reclaim alleys as pedestrian walkways and gathering places that add to the novelty and delight of Philadelphia’s walkable street grid while increasing access to storefronts as well as increasing real estate values. CENTER CITY DISTRICT & CENTRAL PHILADELPHIA DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION | CENTERCITYPHILA.ORG
To better understand the challenge, this summer a CCD team surveyed all 2.5 miles of Center City’s 45 alleys, most of which are in high-use commercial areas south of Market Street. Among the first things observed by the CCD team was the large number of dumpsters that are not in compliance with City regulations, which state that they must be clean, in good repair, free of graffiti, and “tightly secured” when not in use. Remarkably, of the 441 dumpsters our team located in Center City alleys, 68% were found unlocked or unchained. City regulations further state that the area surrounding each dumpster should be maintained free of litter; 36% of surveyed dumpsters had trash under or adjacent to them. There is a clear opportunity to educate business owners about the importance of compliance. At the same time, we can be grateful that Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration has added more SWEEP officers to assist with enforcement, so we expect that these statistics will improve. There may also be an opportunity to update the regulations from requiring dumpsters be “tightly secured” to “locked” and require them to be set back farther from intersections. Poor maintenance of dumpsters in alleys compounds quality of life challenges. Our team observed homeless activity in more than half of the alleys they surveyed. In those alleys, 88% of dumpsters were not secured and 47% had trash scattered under and around them. The “broken windows” theory suggests that visible signs of disorder in our public environment can lead to increased crime – or perceptions thereof – by signaling a lack of care and enforcement. For example, if an alley awash in trash and vandalism is ignored, it may suggest the presence of undesirable activity and make the area more off-putting to others.
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