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In my Philadelphia neighborhood a large, an abandoned Rite Aid store continues to deteriorate after its closure two years ago. The homeless often congregate behind the building to shoot up or sleep. Vandals have smashed some of the front windows but the replacement boards make the building look even worse. The parking lot surrounding the building has become a dumping ground for mattresses and mountains of trash that nobody – even the city – seems to want to clean up.
This Rite Aid was trashed during the 2020 George Floyd riots. Windows were broken and then boarded up while shoplifters had a field day. This was when many blue cities were letting thieves go free if they stole goods under a certain dollar amount. A clerk used to keep me abreast about the number of holdups; he eventually left his job in disgust, convinced the neighborhood was beyond repair.
Fifteen years ago when this Rite Aid was built, a WAWA was added next door. At that time this was a different neighborhood. Employees at both stores were from the neighborhood; they were mainly of Italian, German, Irish and Polish descent, people who grew up in the area. There was little crime and shoplifting. A seismic shift occurred when New York-based developers moved in. Suddenly 500k utility-looking warehouse homes were replacing many of the humble 2 and 3-story brick structures built in 1921 or before.
Concurrent with the riots and pandemic lockdown came a crime surge, especially in areas like North Philadelphia and Kensington-areas where the WAWA Corporation, based in Media, Pennsylvania-is reluctant to open new outlets.
A combination of factors – (i.e. the riots and the closure of Mom and Pop stores in poor neighborhoods because of the lockdown) – changed the character of this once relatively peaceful village.
Like a flash of lightning, white employees of Rite Aid and WAWA disappeared, replaced by equity-based affirmative action hiring practices that seemed to come from a sense of collective guilt around the George Floyd incident. The new employees lived in other neighborhoods, some so “unschooled” that when I went to order a BLT at WAWA a newly hired clerk asked me if I wanted my bacon cooked.
Okay, no big deal. This is life in the city. Equality for all and poor people of color need jobs too. But something else happened.
The scene grew dangerously risqué at night when the parking lot of both stores would fill up with idling white cars with tinted windows, headlights on. The parking traffic was related to making the right drug connection. Eventually long time neighborhood residents began avoiding the store after dark.
Shootings and fights followed. The stores responded by hiring multiple security guards but even this was inadequate. Arrangements were made to employ Philadelphia police officers alongside the guards. Customers were greeted by three uniformed officers stationed by the front door, a scene reminiscent of armed guard battalions in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport.
Sadly, nearly all of Philadelphia now has become this kind of an armed camp.
Since 2022, some 73 Rite Aid stores have closed in Philadelphia, including a large store at 17th and Chestnut Streets in Center City. Today, there are no remaining Rite Aid stores in downtown Philadelphia. Fast food restaurants are also rapidly disappearing; in 2020 a pro-George Floyd mob burned down a popular – and the only -downtown McDonald’s near Rittenhouse Square. It has not been rebuilt.
Although some abandoned Rite Aid buildings in the city have been converted into urban dog parks and even car washes, my neighborhood Rite Aid continues to slowly deteriorate as the city of Philadelphia itself deteriorates.
The story of this lone Rite Aid has in fact become a symbol for the city at large.
The problem can be traced to Philadelphia City Hall. Mayor Cherelle Parker, who was elected in 2023, campaigned on a promise to end a sense of lawlessness in the city and to bring back lawfulness.
She also promised to address life issues like ending illegal dumping, litter and graffiti, as well as the plague of abandoned cars.
One of Parker’s first acts as mayor was to shut down the open-air drug markets in Kensington. While her Kensington plan seemed to work for several weeks, the shut down – clearing the sidewalks of tents – merely drove the addicted homeless into other neighborhoods.
The Kensington shutdown was more theater than permanent solution. The city ignored the homeless problem for over a decade; in many ways it encouraged the addicts on the street to sequester themselves in Kensington away from the better parts of the city.
Out of sight, out of mind. This was pretty much former mayor Jim Kenney’s philosophy.
The stark reality is that inner city Philadelphia is turning into Kensington. And that’s because the mayor’s priorities are not cleaning up dumping and litter. They are about building billion dollar-plus projects like the new 76ers sports arena in Center City — a glitzy monolith that will make a large part of downtown unlivable and difficult to navigate through until the year 2031 when the project is slated for completion.
Post construction, the arena will come to define the whole of Center City (considering its smallness). The 18,500 spectator capacity monstrosity will stand as a reminder that the 76ers – unlike Philadelphia’s other sports teams that have stadiums in South Philadelphia where the land mass is greater and the streets wider – represent to some extent a base corruption of diversity, equity and inclusion.
The project speaks to the mayor’s – and City Council’s – preference for black businesses over and above the objections of the majority of Philadelphians, both black and white, who opposed the building of the arena in an already congested area.
I think of Mayor Parker – who is tone deaf to the will of the people – every time I walk past that deteriorating Rite Aid. I think about her campaign promises to the city about cleaning up dumping and litter. I laugh sadly when I see the piles of trash and debris spread all over the parking lot there – each day there’s an addition to the piles. Even the fancy wrought iron fence around the property that looked so swank after the store’s opening has been dismantled by homeless scrappers.
It appears to be not important to Mayor Parker that the demolition of parts of Center City will take six years, disrupting traffic, regional rail and the Market-Frankford El. It will also cause SEPTA to reconfigure its station at 11th and Market while half the roof of Jefferson Station, a regional rail and El hub, will have to be rebuilt.
One third of the city’s once highly-touted Fashion District will also be destroyed to make way for the mayor’s pet project that will employ black-owned contractors and developers to build it. The 76ers have also made a commitment that 40% of concessions at the arena will be reserved for black-owned businesses.
The project was opposed by the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation and multiple civic groups but had the support of nearly every African American organization in the city, including the African American Chamber of Commerce, Philadelphia’s Black Clergy and the NAACP, who commented that having the Sixers stadium in South Philadelphia was a bit like having the stadium in the segregated south. (South Philadelphia, although a racially diverse neighborhood, has traditionally been Italian and white.)
From this story one can see the mindset of Philadelphia City Hall under its current leadership: If it’s allegedly good for blacks, it’s good for the city even if the majority of Philadelphians, both white and black, don’t want the arena anywhere near downtown.
In the end, the green light given to the building of the arena boils down to the triumph of identity politics – a new kind of race card – over fixing the city’s rotting “infrastructure.”
Translated: Let the Rite Aid and buildings like it ‘relax’ into a slow decay.