The Sixers’ ambitions for Market Street go well beyond building a sports arena

Ever since the Sixers revealed that they’re planning to move their home court to the flagging Fashion District shopping mall on Market Street, people have been referring to the new venue as an arena. But, these days, sports franchises don’t want to waste their time just building large rooms where fans can watch athletes perform. Owners now see themselves as big-time real estate developers.

The Sixers’ arena is really the starting point for a major urban redevelopment project.

The Sixers’ development group — Josh Harris, David Blitzer, David J. Adelman and HB Sports & Entertainment — has been stingy with details about this massive undertaking. But after an hour of talking with Adelman last week, the outlines of their real estate ambitions finally began to emerge. The 18,500-seat arena at 11th and Market would serve as the anchor for a new entertainment district studded with restaurants, bars, shops and, eventually, apartment towers.

The Sixers expect to partner with the owners of the Fashion District to improve the mall and develop the south side of Market Street, Adelman said. Filbert Street would be turned into a covered arcade lined with amenities. And Philadelphia’s main bus station would be relocated to make room for it all.

Obviously, the Sixers are playing a long game. Demolition of the western portion of the mall wouldn’t start for four more years, Adelman told me, and the arena wouldn’t open until 2031.

But what the Sixers have in mind is so big, it’s likely to transform that entire quadrant of Center City beyond recognition. It would also enable the owners to earn a whole lot more money than they now pull in from ticket sales at the Wells Fargo Center.

In the past, such massive redevelopment projects were typically initiated by government planners or their nonprofit surrogates. But because the Sixers’ development group, 76 Devcorp, would control the site and the partners say they would not seek public subsidies, they would have a relatively free hand to arrange the pieces as they see fit.

While they’ve already started reaching out to city transportation officials and various Chinatown groups to get their buy-in, they have yet to provide detailed architectural plans showing how the buildings would occupy the main, four-acre site. They essentially want us to Trust the Process.

The sports version of that approach has had mixed results, so city officials would need to be especially vigilant in looking after the public interest in this real estate variant. It’s not too early to start pursuing strategies to protect Chinatown, which could be both a beneficiary and a casualty of the new entertainment district — or asking how the Sixers could help.

The city, which has tolerated the shameful, bunker-like conditions at the Filbert Street bus station for far too long, also would need to get serious about creating the multimodal transportation center Philadelphia deserves. City planners would also have to monitor the Sixers to make sure they didn’t turn Filbert Street into another dark tunnel.

Yet, for all the possible pitfalls, this project could also be Market Street’s salvation. Despite spending $420 million to de-suburbanize the former Gallery shopping mall, its owners, Macerich and PREIT, never succeeded in bringing back shoppers to what had once been Philadelphia’s main retail corridor. The pandemic and the retail apocalypse didn’t make things easy, and now the cavernous mall feels eerily depopulated.

But once the Sixers lopped off a third of the building for the arena, the mall’s operators could concentrate the existing stores, movie theater and bowling alley into a more compact space. That could finally energize the mall.

What’s more, the regional transit hub below Market Street makes it a perfect location for a modern sports venue. Over the last two decades, several other NBA franchises have migrated downtown and built similar entertainment districts near transit. By leaving Philadelphia’s dull, autocentric Sports Complex for Market Street, the Sixers would be embracing a more sustainable urban future. That can only help SEPTA and PATCO, something that is good for the whole city.

If only we knew a little more about the Sixers’ design. Adelman offered up several new images when we spoke. They give us a general idea of how the development — now called 76 Place at Market East — might look. But these sketches, produced by the Gensler architecture firm in Washington, should not be confused with real renderings. They are merely atmospherics.

Still, they do tell us that the Sixers are smart enough not to replace one blank-walled leviathan (the Fashion District) with another. In their sketches, Market Street is lined with retail, both at the ground level and on the second floor. Right now, the arena entrance would be midway between 10th and 11th.

“We really want to activate the front of Market Street,” Adelman assured me. That’s a relief, given the fortress compound that the team constructed in Camden to use as a practice facility — a project, incidentally, that was aided by an $82 million subsidy from New Jersey taxpayers.

We got our first glimpse of the Sixers’ ambitions back in 2020, when they made a bid to redevelop Penn’s Landing. Although the proposal was rejected, it showed that the franchise was already thinking of the team as an asset that could leverage the construction of housing, hotels and shops. At the time, Adelman, who started his career managing student housing near Penn, was not involved. Bringing him in as a partner now shows how much the emphasis on the residential portion of the project has grown.

With 76 Place, the Sixers are following the playbook pioneered by another group of real estate tycoons: Forest City Ratner, which oversaw the massive Atlantic Yards development (recently renamed Pacific Park) in Brooklyn. That project started with the Barclays Center, which hosts the Nets. After numerous lawsuits and bitter fights with the neighborhood, the arena is now ringed by apartment towers.

The Brooklyn redevelopment remains controversial, but it’s easy to understand why the Sixers might want to borrow some of its ideas, explained Mark S. Rosentraub, a professor of sports management, and an urban planner, at the University of Michigan. As a tenant in Wells Fargo, the Sixers are entitled to collect only the revenue from ticket sales to their games. Wells Fargo’s owner, Comcast Spectacor, keeps everything else — money from the naming rights, concert performances, profits from beer and food concessions. By building and controlling their own real estate, the Sixers could capture all that revenue for themselves.

“If they do it right,” Rosentraub told me, “they can get 275 nights at the arena.” He predicted that the Philadelphia Flyers would eventually move downtown as a Sixers tenant. So would Villanova’s basketball team, which had traditionally played five games a season at Wells Fargo.

The Sixers will also want a piece of any residential development around the arena. Although the NBA does not allow towers on top of its arenas for security reasons, the Sixers expect to partner with the Fashion District’s owners to erect apartments above the remaining portion of the mall, which has the structural strength to support a tower. Macerich/PREIT also have amassed large holdings on the south side of Market Street, another likely spot for housing.

Barclays offers other lessons for Philadelphia. Located at the edge of downtown Brooklyn, on the border between the shopping district and residential neighborhoods, Barclays was the first modern sports arena to include storefronts facing the street. Not only is the Sixers’ Market Street site the same overall size as Barclays, it occupies a nearly identical niche in the city’s geography, wedged between residential Chinatown and Philadelphia’s commercial core.

Barclays developers were ultimately obliged to incorporate a sizable number of affordable units into their apartment towers. Philadelphia should demand the same from the Sixers.

Barclays also stands out from other NBA arenas in its architecture. After several by-the-numbers corporate designs tanked, Forest City brought in a real design architect, SHoP, to give the triangular building a distinctive urban look. When you emerge from the subway, you are immediately enveloped in a cozy public square, partially shaded by a distinctive canopy. Even though many Brooklynites still resent the arena, the plaza has evolved into a community asset and was the focal point of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

The Sixers want to include outdoor space in their entertainment district, too. The question is: Where? Because they would need to span Filbert Street to accommodate the arena’s footprint, Adelman suggested they could turn the space into a covered arcade, lined with restaurants.

Given that the East Market area is already the land of tunnels and supersized buildings, such as the three-block-long Pennsylvania Convention Center, that proposal should raise alarms. Too many streets are already shrouded in darkness.

“That could create another unfriendly tunnel,” Anne Fadullon, the city’s director of planning and development, agreed. “If it feels dark, it’s not inviting.”

Adelman acknowledged the problem and said the Sixers would look for ways to bring light into the space. That’s one more reason to hire a talented design architect.

One advantage of closing Filbert, however, is that it could help the Reading Terminal Market realize its dream of creating an open-air dining area under the market headhouse. One of the best ideas in the Fashion District’s master plan was a proposal to line Filbert Street with restaurants and outdoor seating. It’s just too bad the Sixers’ version includes a roof.

The Sixers say they don’t plan to ask the city for any subsidies for their entertainment district. But with any development this big, there are sure to be infrastructure problems — big water mains, old train tunnels — that require public money to fix. Then there’s the bus station. If the city goes forward with a long-planned bus station next to 30th Street Station, it would require help from PennDot, an agency not known for moving quickly.

That’s why the city needs to mount a full-court press now to make sure Philadelphia gets a Sixers development that benefits the whole city.