Philadelphia Ballet's New $50 Million Home Is Pulling the Avenue of the Arts North Toward Temple

Philadelphia Ballet finished its new home on North Broad Street this month, a five story building that takes the company from 15,000 square feet to roughly 60,000, on a $50 million capital campaign with $35 million spent on the building itself. The old building was a former garage on Wood Street, set back from Broad and easy to miss. The new one has a stainless steel facade etched with 26 life sized dancing figures, designed by Stephen Varnhorst, and it isn't set back from anything.

The address puts the ballet directly between The Met and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in the stretch of North Broad branded the Avenue of the Arts. Two blocks north, Temple University is opening its own 200,000 square foot Caroline Kimmel Pavilion. Two institutional builds landing on the same corridor in the same year signals where the foot traffic is about to concentrate.

Arts anchors don't lease retail space themselves, but they pull the businesses that do: coffee before a rehearsal, dinner before a show, parking and pickup traffic on a schedule you can set a watch to. The Avenue of the Arts corridor has historically stopped short of Temple. This is the year two institutions built the case for stretching it further north, and the retail that follows an anchor always arrives after it.