Up Close: Prema Katari Gupta

by JoAnn Greco 

Walking with Prema Katari Gupta towards her office at 7th and Chestnut Streets, I mention that we might just be passing the city’s filthiest alley. The newly-appointed president and CEO of the Center City District (CCD) appears to bristle.  

“I don’t agree with you,” says Gupta.  

Ahh, here it comes: the standard operating boosterism. 

“I think there are several other strong contenders,” she quips. 

Boom!  

It’s a surprising answer — though it shouldn’t be because Gupta is a self-confessed student of trash. On a recent visit to Copenhagen with her husband, they were sitting at a restaurant in Nyhavn.  

“I couldn’t stop watching someone putting a clown car’s worth of garbage in a bin along the canal,” she recalls. “Later, I Googled to see what happened from there. It turns out there are pneumatic shoots underwater that transport the trash to a central spot to be compacted. 

“That’s a tremendous investment,” she continues. “Here, we have an addiction crisis, we have a gun problem. Trash has become normalized. It not seen as anyone’s responsibility.” 

Lest we go down a rabbit hole of complaints, Gupta shifts gears. The sun is definitely rising in Philadelphia — and indeed in most American cities — she points out. The organization’s recent “Downtowns Rebound” report rebuts the notion that the pandemic has turned the nation’s largest urban cores into empty, gutted, dangerous, dirty wastelands. By mid-2023, for example, the city centers of all 26 cities analyzed had recovered at least two-thirds of their 2019 daily pedestrian traffic. In Philadelphia, the number was 83 percent, parsed out to residents at 126 percent of 2019 levels, visitors at 82 percent and non-resident workers at 68 percent. Weekday evening volumes rebounded to 87 percent while weekend foot traffic is at 95 percent of 2019 levels. 

“I have to think that we’re all at the point in our lives where we’re craving to be outside, among people,” says Gupta on the upwardly trending numbers. She mentions our much-discussed loneliness epidemic, which has been blamed on smart phones, the pandemic, social media, online shopping, etc.  

“I’m not even sure about the so-called ‘15-minute city,’” she says, referencing the urban planning paradigm in which most daily necessities and services can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any location. “Do we really need more self-sorting so that we can achieve everything we need to do by staying close to home? We need public transit. We need random encounters and interactions with strangers. We need to create places that are for everyone. Look at Dilworth Park — according to cellphone data, it’s become a citywide park. That’s awesome.”  

Obtaining a basic “clean and safe” level is the mantra that drives CCD, but, according to Gupta, it’s the “defensive” weaponry to erase the negativity that surrounds our cities.  

“What I really want to emphasize is the ‘offense’ — the parks, the walkability, the culture, the restaurants,” she says. “The stuff that feels good.” 

Those positives weren’t always so obvious to her. Gupta grew up in small-town Connecticut with their brother and Indian immigrant parents. Her father commuted to Hartford for a job in the insurance industry and the family trotted to the capital once or twice a year “to check out the Wadsworth Atheneum or the Mark Twain house,” she says. “But otherwise I didn’t spend much time in cities. When we visited my grandparents in India, I felt completely overwhelmed.”  

That all changed at Bowdoin College where her studies in art history and government led to a semester abroad in Florence.  

“I had a Eurail pass and all of a sudden, I could be in Prague or Paris or Amsterdam,” she recalls. “I fell completely in love with cities, and how livable and humane and joyful they could be.”  

After college, she moved to New Haven for a development job at Yale University. There, her first day-to-day experiences of la vida urban nudged her into thinking that making a career out of caring for and creating better cities might be for her.  

On to Philadelphia and to the University of Pennsylvania, specifically, to pursue a master’s degree in historic preservation.  

“What attracted me to preservation — and it’s a thread that’s run through a lot of my work — is that older buildings are for the most part superior to what we build now,” she says. “And city planning is just a layer on top of that, leveraging those old buildings and neighborhoods and making them more livable. I’m not at all a strict preservationist.” 

Armed with her preservation chops, she served stints as a scholar in residence for Urban Land Institute (where she was lead author of its book, Creating Great Town Centers and Urban Villages), real estate manager for the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, director of planning and economic development for the University City District, and senior vice president at the Navy Yard. 

In 2020, she joined CCD as a vice president of parks, where her purview included oversight of Dilworth, Sister Cities, Cret and John F. Collins Parks, as well as the District’s streetscape assets. In 2022, she was appointed executive director of the Central Philadelphia Development Corp., which was founded in 1956 and supports a number of initiatives including CCD, created in 1991. 

It was never a foregone conclusion that Gupta would move behind the desk that Paul Levy, CCD’s founding president, occupied for 33 years but “it was always obvious that there’d be an opportunity for me,” she says. “Look, I’ve known Paul for 20 years, ever since I was a graduate student. We’re from different generations and we don’t always agree, but what he did is magical.”  

The 45-year-old mother of two remembers sending Levy photos of her daughter playing with the boats in Sister Cities Park. 

As Gupta looks toward her own future at the helm, she’s aware of the challenges she faces. For one, there’s the sense that downtown retail is struggling. It’s not, she says, citing CCD research that puts today’s storefront occupancy at 85 percent, just four percentage points shy of pre-pandemic levels. While some legacy brands like Ann Taylor and Banana Republic have closed their west Walnut Street stores, digital native brands like Faherty and Joybird are establishing brick-and-mortar presences.  And while the eastern ends of South and Chestnut Streets are in bad shape, it’s important to acknowledge their declines started years before the pandemic.  

The other stumbling block is a resistance to the rise of remote and hybrid work. 

“Return to office hasn’t been as strong as we’d like, but it’s been lazily framed as a power struggle between employer and employee,” says Gupta. “As someone who runs an organization, I think it’s incumbent on employers to create a value proposition for employees. Personally, I understand the value: I’ve met some of my greatest friends through my jobs. And, professionally, I would not have the career I’ve had if I hadn’t built the relationships I did. I just think people are better off getting together in person.” 

Gupta ticks off all the exciting things happening in the city, particularly in areas like West Market, the Navy Yard, the riverfronts and along Spring Garden Street. 

“[I see] not gloom and doom, but more pedestrians and more vitality,” she says. “I know there are people who still feel uneasy about coming downtown, and I certainly respect that perspective, but I think they’re missing out. The data shows that there’s a disconnect between the perception and the reality — so the vibes are off. And our job is to fact-check the vibes.”  

And don’t forget about the trash. 

“I’m trying to retrain myself to see the graffiti and the trash, the cues that give people those bad vibes,” she adds. “We can’t get used to it.” 

JoAnn Greco is a Philadelphia-based journalist who frequently writes about the built environment.