Market East has been on my mind for more than 15 years. As a young-ish project manager at Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, I assisted the Nutter administration with the 2009 Market East plan, which aimed to reestablish the eight city blocks between Independence Mall and City Hall as Philadelphia’s Main Street. Today, as the child with whom I was heavily pregnant during that planning process learns to drive, I’m struck by how little has materially changed along Market East.

The most notable transformation has been National Real Estate Development’s East Market project, a decade-long effort that has fully transformed an entire city block with a dense mix of diverse uses thoughtfully oriented around a human scale public realm, a blueprint worth emulating. The Fashion District

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