Definitely a play on words. It probably specializes in sea food and the 'C' also stands for the Comcast Center.

Part of the concourse system is closed and been for some time.

The North Broad Concourse which runs between City Hall and Race Street has been shut since the late 1960s. There is some hope that one day it will be reopened now that the PCC is expanding all the way to Broad Street.

There are some cross unders which are also shut... such as the crossunder at 13th Street which allows you to dart from the 69th-facing part of the concourse outside fare control to the Frankford side of the concourse. Those stairs have been closed for a long time.

There's a tunnel between 30th Street Station (Amtrak) and the subway (MFL/Subway-Surface) at 30th Street, which was bricked off due to vagrants and fairly nasty people hanging around there. I believe Amtrak insisted that it be bricked off--and indeed, the entrance inside the 30th Street Station side is sealed and a pub now sits in front of where that tunnel used to open up into the Amtrak station.

In a 1916(?) plan for Philadelphia's street system, a pedestrian tube was designed to run the full length of Chestnut Street from river to river, because at the time Chestnut Street was the primary banking, insurance and retail corridor for the city. The "Chestnut Street Walkway" proposal included "walkolators", similar to the ones you see at most airports, and most buildings along Chestnut would have redesigned their basements to open into the walkway to provide a warm and cozy way of coming and going, with stairs leading up to the sidewalks at every mid-block. I think this was proposed as a way to alleviate congestion on the Market-Frankford line and many of the E/W streetcars of that era.

Part of that original Chestnut Street Walkway materialized anyway when the Broad Street Station was demolished and it became Penn Center, which now provides a warm and dry alternative to getting to Center City from suburbia, provided your office building is connected to the Penn Center concourse. Some notable buildings like the Mellon Bank tower and the new Comcast Center have direct connections to the Penn Center Concourse, which sits above the Suburban Station platforms. Once you loop around the Ritz-Carlton in the tunnel, into Dilworth Plaza, there are outdoor/indoor entrances to City Hall and also the MSB (Municipal Services Building).

There is also another looping tunnel which you can see on the north side of 13th Street Station (walk towards the Broad Street Line). This takes you to the "Rizzo" plaza at the Municipal Services Building and wraps around City Hall. As you walk through here, you'll notice that there are TONS of former entrances to City Hall and the City Hall Annex [now a hotel] which have since been bricked off. I guess at once time this area used to be fairly well-traveled, but today it's mostly empty. If I happen to be going to the gym before this part of the tunnel closes and it's raining or snowing outside, I'll actually use the tunnel to avoid getting rained on or dodging traffic around City Hall.

There is an incomplete tunnel under Arch Street (or is it Race?) that had construction start, but was abruptly ended... that is in Chinatown. Some vent covers are still visible on the street.

Spring Garden Station on the Broad-Ridge Spur is a closed subway stop... you can see it when you get on the Broad-Ridge line at 8th and Market or you board the Broad-Ridge Spur going the other direction.

Also on the Broad-Ridge Spur, part of the station at Fairmount Station is closed, as the Broad-Ridge spur typically only runs with one or two cars. The platforms are designed for a full-length train but long subway trains are never run on this line. So, a barrier was erected on the Fairmount platform many years ago to close it off, as well as one half of the Fairmount Station itself has been closed and cordoned off since this station is fairly light in traffic and the area around it had deteriorated (it's very slowly coming back, though.... slooooooowly).

On the PATCO line, the Franklin Square station has been closed in fits and starts due to light usage. The entrance staircases have concrete caps blocking entrance to the station. The last time it was open was for the 1976 Bicentennial, and not long afterwards it was abruptly shut due to light traffic. The station is kept fairly well-lit so you can get a really good glimpse of it as you whiz on by. The subway maps and turnstyles are all there, intact, and surprisingly enough there is very little graffiti and all the tiles are intact. DRPA is interested in re-opening this station because Franklin Square has been refurbished into a childrens' tourist attraction with a new carousel and mini-golf and the homeless which used to camp out here for decades have been driven out of the park.


In the South Broad Concourse, the most visible and blank area of the whole network of tunnels, there used to be entrances to many of the buildings that line Broad Street. If you look carefully at the walls you can still see the signs to the old banks and insurance companies which used to have entrances to their basement lobbies down here. You can also spot where there used to be an entrance to a cafeteria, a barber shop, and a shoe-shiner near the Chestnut Street exits.

Today, the only buildings left with direct entrances to the South Broad Concourse remain The Wanamaker Building, whose underground entrance is still used, and the Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia, which is now using its entrance to the tunnel as a service staff employee entrance.


For the longest time, my suggestion for the SBC has been to clean the concrete with acid, seal the walls and retile them, and turn the entire South Broad Concourse into a Wal-Mart and move the station entrances to be flush with the walls and let the whole area become retail space [ventilation for the train tunnel below can be rerouted from the floor grates to air vent hoods on the sidewalks].

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Buh-bye.

I took some pics(Video later) of the underground(Under Broad) during the rainstorm last week, it gets busy down there at rush hour:

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I Rather Talk About HurricanesThen Pregnant Teens