Daily News | A new cafe at Kimmel is the first step to a better arts center
The Kimmel Center was trumpeted as Philadelphia’s fifth public square — an 18-hour-per-day, seven-day-a-week arts center where you could show up anytime and find a concert or see a film.mixed signals about just how welcoming it really wants to be. Some of this has to do with the architecture — fortresslike from the outside, visually chilly on the inside — but also with the way the Kimmel has policed its spaces, which has sometimes been heavy-handed.
That visual blockage has been cleared up, at least somewhat. The new cafe, called Garces Trading Company at Kimmel, does nothing to open up the Broad Street side of the arts center, and the awful black cube at the corner remains. But now, when you pass by on Spruce, you look through glass to see a warm social tableau inside — people eating, drinking, and talking. This legibility of activity within has never been possible in this prime spot.
“When you come in here at night, it’s vibrant, it’s electric, it’s filled with people. Some are going to the concert, some are going to the bar, some are going to watch it [on the digital wall],” says New York Philharmonic president and CEO Deborah Borda. “And to me, if you want to call it high culture or classical music — these are horrible names for it — it has been moved so far to the side of our social discourse that it’s almost disappearing.
The symbolic value of the cafe as a space of access to all is important, especially now. The arts are still perceived by some as elitist, and arts attendance took a hit during the pandemic — as did the city’s image. On a recent morning, a man sat cradling his baby in one of the rocking chairs the Kimmel has set out near the cafe while soft recorded music played and the sun streamed in.
The open-air garden atop the Perelman Theater once offered anyone who wanted it a great city view, an escape from the busy city. But the Kimmel, strapped for income, took down the trees and renovated the rooftop perch years ago so it could reap revenue from weddings and other events.The Kimmel needs to evolve further to become the social hub the arts community urgently needs to reintroduce pandemic-weary patrons to the value of live, in-person performances.
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