North Broad Street Builds Itself One Room at a Time

Broad Street north of City Hall does something particular on a weeknight once the offices empty out. The buses keep running past the storefronts. A few blocks up, the marquee of a hundred year old opera house throws light across the sidewalk. I was inside a room full of people the other night, and I recognized the specific charge in that room the moment I walked in. Business owners were talking to developers. A chef I know was catching up with somebody who runs a nonprofit. A man who spends his days building union apprenticeships stood near a man who books touring acts into a hall that used to be a movie theater. It was the North Broad Renaissance Business Advisory Council’s Welcome Back networking night, and I did not get to stay as long as I wanted. We had a retirement party to get to for a colleague named Jane, and we left earlier than I would have liked. But I got enough of that room to remember, again, why North Broad Street is the corridor in Philadelphia where I think this particular argument matters most right now.

What the Business Advisory Council Actually Does

The North Broad Renaissance is the nonprofit that manages the North Broad Business Improvement District and the older special service district layered underneath it, and its Business Advisory Council is one of the rooms where that work gets argued out loud. The council is made up of people who actually run businesses on the corridor, and its executive committee includes Rachel Branson of Ship Shop PHL, Daryl Debrest of Progress Trust, Gina Rubinic of Temple University and Cybille St. Aude-Tate of Honeysuckle. It meets the first Wednesday of every month, and I sit on it because I think the people who are exposed to what happens on North Broad Street, financially and otherwise, deserve a seat at the table where that future gets decided, not a survey sent to them after the decision is already made. That is the whole argument I keep making about this corridor. It is not that North Broad needs more attention from people who like the idea of it. It is that the people already doing the work there need a structured way to talk to each other, on a schedule, in a room, with the follow through that requires.

From City Hall to Butler Street, and the Narrower District That Pays for It

North Broad Renaissance describes its own footprint as running four miles, from City Hall north to Butler Street, touching eight neighborhoods and more than fifty thousand residents, a scope it laid out in its own five year plan. The assessed Business Improvement District that actually funds the cleaning crews, the security cameras and the tree planting is narrower. It runs from Spring Garden Street to Indiana Avenue, and it only started collecting money from commercial property owners in January of 2024, after a proposal that had been stalled since a public hearing got derailed by the pandemic back in 2020. In its first year the district was projected to collect about $718,000, climbing toward roughly $873,000 within five years. Executive Director Shalimar Thomas, who came up through the African American Chamber of Commerce before she took this job, has said the goal is to make the corridor’s growth as inclusive as possible rather than growth that simply moves through a neighborhood and leaves it behind. The organization’s board reads like a cross section of who actually has something at stake here: Eric Blumenfeld, the developer who put the money into restoring the old opera house up the block; Temple University’s president, John Fry; and Brian Murray of Shift Capital, still working through the financing to turn a long vacant tower into a hotel further north. Board chairman Kenneth Scott runs Beech Interplex. These are not people who need an introduction to North Broad Street. They live inside its economics every day.

The Buildings That Prove the Point

I do not think anyone who saw North Broad Street a generation ago would recognize what I passed to get to that networking night. The Divine Lorraine, built in the 1890s as one of the city’s first grand apartment houses and later run for decades as a residence by Father Divine’s Peace Mission, sat gutted and empty for years before it reopened as apartments, its neon sign relit above Broad Street like a promise somebody finally kept. A little further south, the old Metropolitan Opera House that Oscar Hammerstein built in 1908 spent stretches of the twentieth century as a movie house, a boxing venue and a church before a $56 million restoration reopened it in 2018 as the Met, where I have watched a room full of strangers turn into an audience more than once. And up past Girard Avenue, the Beury Building, an Art Deco bank tower with graffiti across its top floor that has outlived several attempts to remove it, is still becoming the hotel Shift Capital has been trying to finish for years, one financing setback at a time. None of these buildings got fixed because somebody decided from a distance that North Broad deserved it. They got fixed because people with money, people with permits and people with patience sat in rooms together long enough to make it happen.

Omar Tate, New to the Neighborhood

It was especially good to see my friend Omar Tate at the networking night. He and his wife and fellow chef, Cybille St. Aude-Tate, are still new to North Broad Street in the way that matters, the way where you are still learning which corner gets the morning sun and which neighbor waves first. They ran Honeysuckle Provisions out of a West Philadelphia storefront that measured under a thousand square feet before they moved the concept to 631 North Broad Street in the spring of 2025, into a room three times the size, with a full bar and a menu built around telling the truth about Black foodways rather than performing it. Omar told the Inquirer that North Broad felt like “the main artery of the city” to him, tied to a family history that runs back to his uncles organizing at Temple in the 1970s. This past August, Honeysuckle in Poplar landed on Bon Appetit’s list of the best new restaurants in the country, one of nineteen nationally and one of only two from Philadelphia. Cybille sits on the same Business Advisory Council I do, representing Honeysuckle at the table. That is not a coincidence. It is exactly the mechanism I am describing. A restaurant moves in, the people who run it show up in the room where the corridor plans its next move, and the corridor gets a little more capable of planning it well.

Networking as Infrastructure, Not Small Talk

I know networking can sound like a euphemism for standing around with a drink, trading business cards and talking about nothing in particular. Done right, on a corridor like this one, it is the opposite of that. It is how somebody with an idea for a storefront meets somebody who owns the storefront. It is how a nonprofit that needs a caterer meets a restaurant that is looking for institutional clients. It is how a construction trades council learns which building is about to break ground and which contractors on the corridor are ready for the work. None of that happens by accident, and none of it happens on a spreadsheet somewhere. It happens because North Broad Renaissance keeps convening the same set of people, on a schedule, in a room, until the connections between them stop being coincidental and start being structural. That is the difference between a neighborhood that occupies the same zip code and a neighborhood that functions as an actual economy. I have sat in enough of these rooms now, on this council and off it, to trust that the difference is real, and that it eventually shows up in which storefronts stay open.

Where This Goes Next

We left before the room emptied out, walking back onto Broad Street with the Met’s marquee still lit up the block and the Divine Lorraine’s sign glowing further north past buildings still waiting their turn. Jane’s retirement party was waiting on the other side of the city, and I spent most of the drive thinking less about what I had just left than about who else was probably still in that room, still talking, still trading the kind of information that turns into a lease signed or a hire made three months from now. The Business Advisory Council meets again the first Wednesday of next month, same as it always does, at five o clock, over Zoom this time instead of in a hotel bar. I will be there. So, I expect, will Omar and Cybille, and Rachel from Ship Shop PHL, and whoever from Temple shows up that month, and a dozen people whose names I do not know yet but will, because that is what happens when you keep putting the same corridor in the same room long enough. North Broad Street is not finished. It is not close to finished. But it is moving, one Wednesday, one networking night, one new restaurant at a time, and I intend to keep showing up to watch it happen from inside the room instead of reading about it after the fact.