Retail

Center City Philadelphia is the largest employment node in the nation’s eighth most populous metro area. While the pandemic seriously affected retail sales nationally in 2020, this sector has proved resilient in Philadelphia. Retailers have gradually reopened, relying on new safety protocols to sustain recovery. Many restaurants are providing protected and heated outdoor seating and relying on take-out through the cold winter months.

Despite extraordinary challenges, Center City restaurants and retail are showing remarkable resilience. Seventy percent of restaurants in Midtown Village and Rittenhouse Row are serving outdoors, under weather-protected cover. Boarded up storefronts downtown have dramatically declined from almost 300 in the summer to just 27, only 1.6% of all premises in the District. New businesses are opening, behind plywood barriers some remain open for customers, while in others work is underway for new store openings.

The steady, incremental lifting of pandemic-related restrictions has enabled retail, restaurant and service businesses gradually to reopen, drawing an increasing number of pedestrians back to Center City’s sidewalks and helping to restore thousands of jobs. This new report from CCD/CPDC tracks the rebound over the last three months.

State of Center City 2020 is a comprehensive overview of market conditions downtown at the end of 2019, before the impact of the current crisis. It provides detailed profiles of the diverse sectors that drove ten straight years of employment growth, highlighting strengths and challenges as we entered 2020.

This summer, CCD staff surveyed the number of restaurants currently providing outdoor seating, including new streeteries, within the district boundaries. Outdoor dining has been an indicator of Center City’s vibrancy since sidewalk cafés were first authorized. As the current number of restaurants providing take out or serving outdoors continues to expand, Center City is slowly and cautiously beginning to recover.

CCD distributed via email a survey to determine respondents’ purchasing patterns during the shutdown and the factors that will make them most likely to return to restaurants and shops as the reopening gains momentum.

The 2019 Developments Report includes a map and full-color photos or renderings and project descriptions of all 62 major developments in Center City, categorized by type. New for 2019, an interactive map that features all of the information found within the publication.

With the installation of 14 cameras that measure pedestrian volumes 24 hours a day, the CCD now provides retailers, brokers, and developers with detailed counts and analyses of hourly trends.

A brief look at the current state of Center City Philadelphia's retail market in Fall of 2017.