If there’s one thing to avoid in urban retail — restaurants are retailers — in real estate markets other than New York City, it’s turnover. The owner of this place had one tenant for 22 years, and that kind of consistency is money in the bank.

Now comes some prolonged period of tenants in a revolving door — clothing boutique that fails, sundry store that fails, Dunkin’ Donuts that fails — that gives the owner nothing but headaches, until one day we find newspaper covering the windows and no one moving in. This is what most of Philadelphia looked like in the 70s and 80s.