Wyeth development and the downtown
As plans for the Wyeth property continue to be discussed, it will be interesting to see if more business owners raise concerns about the development's impact on the downtown. Representatives from the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT) presented some rough concepts of the development Tuesday. Retail is a major part of their plan. Realtor Stan Zukin and Larry Malcolm, owner of Kaptain K's Ice Cream on East Gay Street, raised questions about the development's impact on the downtown and said they want to ensure any future development of the 32-acre property does not negatively impact the town center. No one else raised that concern during Tuesday's meeting, but Douglas Grayson, a representative from PREIT, said the company does not want to hurt the downtown and something may be worked out in terms of transportation to ensure people still visit shops downtown.
1 Comments:
Once I was a big fan of downtown West Chester, owning Holland Art House from 2002-2005, but that turned around by the traffic mess, unfriendly & costly parking facilities, greedy landlords and the poor handling of the Borough of upgrades like side walks. Now, at The Arts Scene, the 6000 sq feet Arts Center featuring the largest Art gallery outside Philly, a Film house and Music theater, Cafe Menta and FrameTech, a creative custom frame shop, I have proven that there is future for businesses within the Borough but outside downtown. Of course it also helps that we have a large free of charge parking lot only one mile from the Westtown rd exit from 202. Instead of maybe up to 50 visitors per week on W. Market Street we receive most weeks hundreds of visitors and sell more art and art realted products than ever in downtown. BID and the Borough have made to many mistakes in downtown to be able to reverse soon the degeneration into a alcohol "outlet" instead of a good mix of retail, entertainment, restaurants and offices. The future of downtown is a "lunch facility" for all courthouse related, chester county, borough administration and other offices and at night it will just be a noisy "bar scene". And unless the ten thousands of cars, that are now just thru traffic, are not routed around the Borough and some streets, like Gay and Church, are not turned into cosy walk- only promenades, downtown WC will stay an ugly, dangerous and noisy,"parking" lot of never ending lines of stinking metal on rubber tires. I'm proud to be the future neighbor of a new more public and business friendly extention of downtown West Chester, that I suggest to be named "Wyeth Village". This as an ode to The Wyeth family of artists maybe we also should devote all street names to important cultural people that are related to West Chester like the world famous WC son & composer Samuel Barber and the mentor of contemporary art in WC, Tom Bostelle.
And we don't need more sport facilities. Including WCU we have enough of that. We need more culture, which brings people more togehter, decreases stress and creates more happiness than any sport will ever do.
We should be happy that PREIT selected the Wyeth property for a very large investment and with their fantastic track record of developing and running large projects like this one. Inspite of all the efforts and private & tax money that has been spend on downtown WC, this beautiful little town reached the place on the map it deserves "the pearl of the Philadelphia area". No unfortuneatly, it even got a pretty negative image.
The Weyth Village will help to tone down the short term thinking, greedy downtown landlords, so that not only liquor licenses are needed to be able to afford the leases. No, it will save downtown WC out of a negative spiral that started in 2004/2005.
Ben Gall
Founder & owner of
The Arts Scene,
530 Union Street
tel 610-644-6555
The Arts Scene
Art, Film Music &More
The Largest, most Fun & Trendy place in town
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