Thursday, August 28, 2014

Chestnut Beast!

899 to 1399 Chestnut Street



             Goddammit, I love Chestnut East. All at once the most depressing and exciting part of Center City. This little stretch has been on a downward spiral for many years, but is just now starting to bounce back into its former glory. I always knew this day would come and now it has.. but there's still plenty of work to do.
             This corridor spent well over 100 years as one of the most important, busiest, and bustling parts of the city-- retailers, businesses, schools, warehouses, libraries, and even parking structures used to step on each others' nutsacks just to get one small little bit of this short part of a long street. The middle piece, the 1100 and 1200 blocks, changed so quickly over the decades that its hard to quantify it all. Over 150 years, those two blocks went from stately country villas to residential rowmansions to rowmansions-turned-businesses to warehouse-factories-on-storefronts to the Piano-selling district/business offices to retail clothing nexus to shithole to its current state of rebirth.
             Though some are out of date, I'd like to list and revisit all the Chestnut East-related writings I've done over the last few years:


 After that, I trashed the perpetually ass-kissed Mercantile Library in all its Mid-Century Modern glory. Its up for sale again, by the way, and supposedly Brickstone Realty, the latest heroes of Chestnut East, are interested.


Oh my Gooooooooooood



                  I then managed not to write about anything on Chestnut East for nearly two whole years. However, when it came time to bring out the new Philaphilia subject Fill This Front, four of them ended up being on this stretch (including the second Jefferson garage one listed above):




                Had enough? Well... I'm not done. Despite writing all that shit about Chestnut East over the years, there's even more shit I know about the buildings/lots/properties along this street... including a whole lot of content about Chestnut Beast's past, present, and future. Instead of writing it all down (laced in profanity, of course), I will be giving a tour in collaboration with Hidden City, just like I did for Broad Street. Therefore, if you want to know even more about my favorite part of the city, come on down to the Forgotten Chestnut Street Tour on September 13th. Space is limited so sign up now!!

              Oh... if you missed the Forgotten Broad Street Tour, I'm doing another one on September 20th!

1 comment:

  1. The Broad Street tour was great! I really want to do the Chestnut Street one but I'll be out of town. Hopefully you'll do a second date!!

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