Fishtown, Philadelphia Is Still America’s Hottest New Neighborhood

Roland Kassis is sitting in the his restaurant, Suraya, under the shade of a gnarled, arcing ironwood tree when I first spot him again.

He’s leaning in over a black metal four top, hands clasped in front of him, listening intently. Sitting across from Kassis is Philadelphia’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, a long-time civil rights lawyer and one of the first DAs in America to run as a self-professed prosecutor for change. Whatever Kassis and Krasner are talking about, it’s clearly important.

It’s late Tuesday spring afternoon and Kassis’s Lebanese-inspired restaurant wedged into the triangle between Frankford Avenue and Front Street in Philadelphia’s historic Fishtown neighborhood is already packed. The white-washed, walled-in courtyard — designed to evoke an airy, waterfront café in Beirut where Kassis grew up — is filled with a buzzy mix of hipsters, Millennials, Gen Zers, empty nesters, and DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids) lunching on stuffed grape leaves and lahm bi-ajeen, a traditional Lebanese pizza made with beef, tomato, onion, and arugula tossed with Middle Eastern spices.

As Kassis gets up to greet me, “The El­” — one of America’s oldest elevated trains linking Fishtown to Center City Philadelphia in just under ten minutes — thunders by the back of Suraya in a blur of glass and gunmetal suspended in midair.

“Welcome back”, he says.

It’s been more than half a decade since I’ve seen Roland Kassis, which in Fishtown real estate time is more like a quarter century anywhere else.

A lot has happened in the intervening years, including COVID-19, the home delivery takeover, the partial collapse of the commercial office sector, the continued exsanguination of brick-and-mortar retail, and a fundamental reordering of America’s housing market. If someone had told me back in 2018 that the real estate industry would look like this in 2025, I would have questioned their fundamental sanity.

For the most part, Kassis — the founder of Kassis & Co. spanning real estate, construction, restaurants, film production, and non-profits — hasn’t changed much at all. Widely credited with re-developing Fishtown’s commercial corridor from a “bombed-out Beirut” into one of America’s trendiest neighborhoods, he’s still the wiry, fiery, kinetic, garrulous mass of human motion and emotion who first started investing here almost two decades ago. That’s when he began buying up dozens of vacant storefronts and lots along a seven-block stretch of Frankford Avenue and Front Street, many of which had been abandoned since the 1980s.

His demeanor, though, is more relaxed than I remember, which seems paradoxical. Many real estate developers got hammered by COVID, especially those heavily invested in commercial retail and hospitality. Yet, Kassis got even more bullish on Fishtown when the pandemic hit, fast-tracking design on several multi-story apartment complexes as well as adding over a dozen new businesses to the buildings he’d recently completed, including new restaurants (LNMO, Two Robbers, and Kalaya) a furnished apartment hotel (The Archway), an upscale Danish cabinetmaker (Reform), a wellness market (Reap), noodle bar (Mecha), a hardware store (Fishtown Hardware), a high-end med spa (SEV), along with national fast-casual chains Sweetgreen and Shake Shack.

It’s also been almost five years since I’ve been back to my old neighborhood.

I first moved to Fishtown in December 2017 when the local real estate market was still entering peak transformation. Newly renovated, half million-dollar rowhouses were hitting Zillow almost daily, young families were moving in from as far away as San Francisco, and Frankford Avenue’s boutiques and restaurants were already being fawned over by national media like Vogue, Conde Nast Traveler, Bon Appétit, and TIME. Yet, despite the feverish pace of re-development, Fishtown was somehow managing to re-imagine itself without tearing the human and architectural foundations of the existing community apart.

Eventually, I decided that I wanted to figure out what Fishtown’s secret was and write about what I learned (How Fishtown, Philadelphia Became America’s Hottest New Neighborhood, Forbes, May 2, 2018), with the idea that other historic neighborhoods similarly struggling to re-invent themselves could learn from its example. For the next few months, I talked to dozens of local business owners, community members, and real estate developers, as well as new transplants and long-time “Old Fish”. Almost everyone I spoke with about the changes happening in the neighborhood ultimately pointed back to Kassis. So, I tracked him down and, despite his long-standing aversion to the media, he agreed to meet with me.

What I learned from Kassis over several lengthy interviews is that Fishtown did several things right as it re-evolved. Locals were largely given a voice, which was rare. Change happened incrementally, which was purposeful. And, along Frankford Avenue and Front Street, independently owned businesses were favored over national brands to create the scaffolding for a self-supporting micro-economy. Kassis also bet heavily on wellness and “F&B” (food and beverage) as the neighborhood’s new engine, starting with Frankford Hall and Fette Sau which he launched with celebrity restauranteur Stephen Starr back in 2011 and 2012, respectively. A few years later, he opened the flagship café and headquarters for La Colombe, a then local, now national coffee roaster recently acquired by Chobani for $650 million.

Lastly, Fishtown had mostly re-populated with an eclectic mix of artists, architects, entrepreneurs, tech start-ups, and other ‘maker’ types with a sharp eye for design and strong opinions about neighborhood re-development. For builders who wanted to get in on the action here, that meant finding common ground not only with the Old Fish, but with the New Fish as well.

I’ve come back now to interview Kassis again and find out how Fishtown is doing seven years later. During COVID, America’s downtowns were shock tested by forces no one could have imagined. If Fishtown ever had something to teach other cities about neighborhood resilience and re-development before the pandemic, it might have even more to teach now.

Visually, plenty of things have changed already.

The streets are no longer choked off with bright, orange construction barriers. The sidewalks are cleaner, thanks to a recently formed Business Improvement District. And shiny, new apartment buildings now tower over The El. If anything, Fishtown’s internal combustion has actually spilled over since I left, fueling new residential and commercial revitalization into adjacent East Kensington and Port Richmond in a kind of “hive” effect with Frankford Avenue and Front Street at its core.

Fishtown has also stealthily emerged as a culinary vortex for some of America’s hottest chefs and restauranteurs. The most recent addition is Kassis’s new Thai restaurant, Kalaya, helmed by Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon who won the James Beard Award for Best Mid-Atlantic Chef in 2023 and just made the TIME100 List of the World’s Most Influential People (Kalaya also just appeared on Netflix’s Chef’s Table and is currently a 2025 James Beard Award semifinalist in the Outstanding Restaurant category overall). As a numerical matter, that’s given Fishtown the distinction of having one of the densest concentrations of restaurants opened by James Beard Foundation Award-winners in America (seven inside of seven blocks), including three restaurants from Stephen Starr, two restaurants and an event hall by Israeli chef Michael Solomonov, and now, Kalaya.

Meanwhile, Fishtown’s original critical mass is as dynamic as ever: Johnny Brenda’s remains one of America’s coolest­­­ indie rock venues; Pizzaria Beddia, which took home Bon Appetit’s Best Pizza in 2015, now has a new space ten times its original size; and Frankford Avenue’s beer gardens and wine bars are still packed every night.

“You won’t believe what’s happened here in the past five years,” Kassis tells me as we walk briskly from Suraya back to his office. “The pandemic hurt a lot of neighborhoods and developers across the country. But except for the lock downs, Fishtown never skipped a beat.”

If there’s a textbook caricature for a successful real estate mogul, Roland Kassis isn’t it.

He grew up in the 1970s and 80s splitting his time between Beirut, Lebanon and Monrovia, Liberia, trading one bloody conflict for another. His dad, Abraham, was a celebrity hair stylist. His mother, Maude, owned the most popular restaurant between all of the government ministries in downtown Monrovia and was the “Godmother” of the country’s political and business elite. His uncle, Tony, owned a casino and a construction company and took Kassis with him everywhere to teach him about the “family business”.

“My mother and Tony had this undeniable style and charisma,” Kassis recalls. “They had a deep love for the local people and a kind of fierce generosity. I remember being eight years old standing behind them as they played poker with Liberia’s most powerful tycoons. I watched them engage effortlessly with everyone — from street artisans to ministers, presidents, ambassadors, and rebels. Through them, I learned how to connect with both the wealthy and the struggling, and how to navigate life’s highs and lows. They introduced me to every facet of life and taught me everything I know — about God, family, business, politics, and above all, the importance of always doing the right thing and helping others.”

In 1975, Lebanon descended into a brutal sectarian war. When Kassis decided it was time to pick up arms with the Christian militia, his mother intervened and sent him to boarding school in France for 8th and 9th grade. It was there that he first encountered the worlds of high-end fashion, architecture, and design. But France also taught him a harsher lesson: that, as a Lebanese kid, he’d always have something to prove. Labeled a “terrorist” and an “Arab,” and bullied over his skin color, Kassis always fought back — literally — until the fights got him expelled. His mother then gave him a choice: move in with relatives in the U.S. or return to war-torn Beirut for good.

“I was a hot-headed kid with a short fuse back then,” he says, reflecting on his move to America. “If I’d gone back to Lebanon, I’d already be dead.”

Kassis arrived in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1985 where he moved in with his aunt and uncle to finish high school. Their house was in a poor neighborhood of Syrians and other Lebanese immigrants who’d already fled the war. During the day, Kassis went to a Catholic school that was attended almost entirely by white kids from the suburbs. After class, he hung out with the Syrians and Puerto Ricans from the rougher neighborhoods next door.

“That was one of the hardest periods of my life,” Kassis recalls. “Drugs and gangs were everywhere. In the summer and on the weekends, I worked two jobs as a waiter at night and doing construction during the day. But I was also learning how to survive and get things done on my own.”

After studying at Penn State University, Kassis moved briefly back to Liberia. But, he quickly realized that there was nowhere he’d rather make a life for himself than America. So, in 1995, he returned to Philadelphia to work tables again before starting a building services company called KassCon with his brother and business partner Christian; together, they built a team that cleaned the city’s upscale condo and apartment buildings during the real estate boom before 2008.

As it turned out, that business would change everything. Commercial cleaning not only exposed Kassis to the biggest players in Philadelphia real estate, but also banked him enough money to buy his first condo. A year later, he built five townhouses on two empty lots that incorporated loft-like layouts and floating glass staircases inspired by the Dior and Prada stores he’d visited in Paris. The clean, modern aesthetic was a new look for Philly’s historic neighborhoods, and all five properties quickly sold for above market value. He built a larger, 16-unit development next in 2008, which also immediately sold out.

It was a far cry from what he owns today — and a long way from Monrovia and Beirut — but by the time the Great Recession hit, Kassis had established himself as a legitimate Philadelphia real estate developer with keen eye for detail and design.

Ever since it opened in 2016, Suraya has been Kassis’s principal center of gravity. Not surprisingly, it’s hard to get very far into a conversation about Fishtown’s re-development with him without coming back to the transformative power of food.

“Growing up in Monrovia my life revolved around my mother’s restaurant,” he tells me as we walk into the beautifully restored Presbyterian church where Kassis & Co. is based. “The whole fundamental concept of hospitality is about making people feel welcome through food and creating warm, thoughtfully designed spaces to bring them together. Hospitality is in my blood because of her.”

On the way inside, Kassis waves up the staircase to the second floor which he rents to a fast-growing hospitality company called Method Co. Founded by David Grasso and Randall Cook, Method opened the award-winning hotel and restaurant, Wm. Mulherin’s Sons, a block down from Suraya in 2016 and also operates several other bespoke restaurants and hotels in Charleston, Atlanta, Tampa, and Baltimore.

“We’ve got a lot of amazing companies in Fishtown doing a lot of things nationally that no one knows about,” says Kassis. “They’re all part of the ecosystem that’s fueling this place.”

Kassis’s office is more low key than I imagine. We sit down in a modest, yet tastefully designed room with a sofa, two chairs, and a small coffee table covered with zoning plans and fashion magazines. Leaning up along one wall are several framed photos of Beirut in the late 1970s taken not too far from his family’s home at the height of the war. There are also a few pictures of Frankford Hall, roofless and raw, shortly after Kassis bought the building in 2008.

“It’s hard to tell the difference between the two,” he says, glancing past me at the photos. “Maybe that’s why I was willing to take the risk here in the first place.”

In hindsight, Kassis’s journey from immigrant to developer to hospitality entrepreneur has a clear inevitability to it. He’d always wanted to open a restaurant that served the food his mother and grandmother cooked. And what better way for an aspiring real estate mogul to control their own destiny than by curating the commercial and culinary foundations of their own neighborhood.

So, in 2010, Kassis, his sister Nathalie, and best friend since high school (and now brother-in-law), Gabi Richan, opened Cafe La Maude, an upscale French-Lebanese bistro in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood that’s consistently rated the city’s best brunch spot by travel and gourmet sites. Next, he launched Frankford Hall and Fette Sau with Stephen Starr, which quickly forged Fishtown onto the city’s epicurean map. Kassis’s culinary tipping point, however, occurred in 2014 when he was approached by an aspiring restauranteur named Greg Root, a Starr alumnus. Root envisioned opening a restaurant of his own, but needed the financial backing to do so. Around the same time, Kassis was introduced to Chef Nick Kennedy, a Scarpetta and Jean Georges protégé from Manhattan who also was looking to strike out on his own.

Sensing the opportunity, Kassis convinced Root and Kennedy to form Defined Hospitality with another Starr alumnus, Al Lucas, and David Reuter, a private equity principal at LLR Partners who’s also Kassis’s real estate partner. The restaurant group opened Suraya to widespread acclaim the next year, followed Pizzeria Beddia’s new location, the debut of Kalaya, and a new restaurant called Picnic housed in a 1890 historic brewery that was meticulously re-imagined to highlight Kennedy’s globally-inspired dishes conceived while traveling with his wife Virgi, who runs the concierge travel company, Lux Voyage.

“Suraya was the restaurant that started the whole elevated food scene here,” Kassis recalls. “Fishtown was in the middle of three neighborhoods that didn’t have a commercial corridor, and we knew that we could make food and hospitality the new centrifugal force at the center of it all.”

If Kassis lacked a real estate pedigree growing up, what he was blessed to inherit in abundance were keen instincts for what’s now often called “urban ecology”.

Almost every developer specializes in something. Some build affordable housing. Others develop luxury resorts or logistics centers. Kassis always saw the fact of owning real estate differently as a fundamental matter of design and scale. What captivated him more than just developing individual properties was how buildings and businesses worked together to form a neighborhood: the way a tree becomes a forest which turns into an ecosystem.

“I love building stuff,” Kassis explains. “But building community has always been more important to me. You can open an amazing restaurant in a lot of great places. But not in a vacuum. You also need retail, wellness, and creative businesses surrounded by residential buildings and homes for a neighborhood to thrive.”

Consequently, when Kassis first started re-developing Fishtown, he asked himself a few simple questions: What if you could handpick exactly which businesses were the tenants in your buildings? And what if you could situate them precisely where it made the most sense for them to go? Could you — through the careful configuration of human commercial geography — create the perfect urban village?

As we talk about Fishtown’s re-birth, Kassis frequently comes back to this idea of “curation”.

In most industries, the concept is simple enough: namely, assembling the best possible collection of any given thing, such as works of art for an exhibit or handbags in a pop-up store. More recently, though, the word has worked its way into real estate development circles, particularly when it comes to designing neighborhoods for Millennials and Gen Z who are summarily rejecting suburban, big box dogma in favor of maker culture and independent, craft retailers.

The original brilliance of Fishtown, explains Kassis, is that it was purposefully, locally curated from the outset — even if no one knew at the time exactly what the long-term benefits of that would be in the unlikely event of a global pandemic. For many other towns and neighborhoods across America during COVID that weren’t as commercially diversified, the world stopped and would never be the same again. Fishtown just paused and waited the worst of it out until everything returned to normal, which is exactly the way everyone here liked it to begin with.

“When I first shared my vision for Fishtown,” Kassis recalls, “People thought I was crazy. But I’d done my research. I studied the neighborhoods in New York and Paris, and reflected on the rise and fall of Gemmayzeh, the once-thriving commercial strip in Beirut where I grew up; it collapsed because it focused too heavily on nightlife. I thought about Zahle, my birthplace in Lebanon, where a mix of shops, makers, and restaurants created a vibe that reminded me of Aspen without all the glossy fashion brands. I also remembered how local merchants in Monrovia drove the economy. All of that shaped how I envisioned Fishtown — as a modern urban village, powered by a thoughtful blend of independent businesses.”

Crucially, Kassis had also come to understand by this point that curating vibrancy and resiliency into a neighborhood was as much about geography as selectivity. A dozen award-winning restaurants packed into a food court, for example, doesn’t benefit a commercial core holistically over time. Similarly, those same restaurants stretched too far apart can’t form a strong enough chain reaction to create a ‘hot spot’. Instead, businesses sharing a commercial corridor should work commensally together; meaning each supports the other without being dependent on it, the way Fishtown’s businesses all feed off one another to create a more durable, sustainable whole.

Fishtown’s emerging gallery scene is a similar example of Kassis’s theory of curation. Artists have long been considered the neighborhood’s pioneers. Yet, historically, their workshops were located too far off Frankford Avenue to have any gravitational pull. That all changed last year when Lewis Wexler and his wife Sherri, both Christie’s veterans from Manhattan legendary for their talent spotting, were lured by Kassis’s vision to relocate their eponymous modern art gallery from Old City, Philadelphia into a historic storefront two blocks from Suraya.

That opening, in turn, helped pull Frankford Avenue’s core further north, along with the opening of several vintage stores and other independent businesses, like Thunderbird Salvage, H&H Books, Estilo Dance Studio, an eco-friendly baby boutique called Minnow Lane, and high-end clothiers Vestige and Franklin & Poe. The Wexler Gallery’s new location also jumpstarted the first visible swing in Fishtown’s identity away from principally restaurants and wellness to a more balanced mix of galleries and museums. In addition to the Wexlers’ gallery, Frankford Avenue is now home to an exotic auto club called Cannonball housed in the original 1850s Otis Elevator Building. And next year, the internationally acclaimed West Collection will open in an historic warehouse Kassis purposefully sold to the family’s foundation featuring over 4,000 rotating works of contemporary art assembled by local billionaire Alfred West.

To the untrained eye, all of this subtle nudging and curating might seem haphazard. In Kassis’s case, however, every move he’s made on Frankford Avenue’s Monopoly board has had a purpose — even if that master plan hasn’t always been evident from the outside in.

“I first went after Stephen Starr because I knew that without his vision and execution, Philadelphia’s F&B and nightlife scene wouldn’t be anywhere close to what it is today,” says Kassis, who continues to collaborate with Starr on new restaurant concepts. “I knew that having him here would change the whole perception of Fishtown to a place that’s vibrant and on trend. But I also knew that to sustain long-term growth, we needed more than just restaurants— we needed galleries, museums, and cultural spaces in addition to wellness. These kinds of businesses build walkability and foster connection. And connection is what builds community. Community, in turn, creates lasting stability.”

Another word Kassis keeps returning to during our conversation is “lifestyle.”

Back in the early 1900s, the lower Delaware River was the epicenter of the East Coast’s shad-fishing industry, and Fishtown was a thriving, working-class neighborhood made up of mostly German, Irish Catholic, and other Eastern European immigrants. The El was its crown jewel and Frankford Avenue bustled with storefronts, workshops, warehouses, and the hum and buzz of dozens of locally-owned manufacturing businesses. As a result, the original architectural foundations for a vibrant community and commercial core were already in place when Kassis arrived. The key was deciding how to bring it back to life again.

“The vision for Fishtown was never just about real estate,” Kassis recalls, referencing his goal to revive the neighborhood’s historic buildings. “It was about more than development. It was about creating a place where local businesses, preserved architecture, and the people who live and work here all come together to shape a new kind of urban lifestyle.”

On what this new “lifestyle” would look like, Kassis’s clarity never wavered: if Fishtown’s past was based on iconic American retail brands that made things you could touch and feel, like Otis’s elevators, Penn’s fishing reels, A.J. Reach’s baseball bats, and Stetson’s hats (yes, that Stetson), Fishtown 2.0 would traffic in unforgettable experiences and emotions that stimulated the other senses, like speakeasies, yoga studios, and a best-in-class food scene.

Fortunately, Kassis’s vision also coincided with several foundational shifts in what Americans wanted from the places they live. It’s long been an accepted truth in real estate that coffee shops and restaurants are good omens for neighborhood re-development. Over the past decade, however, fitness, health, and wellness have started to run neck and neck with F&B at the top of every up-and-coming neighborhood’s must-have list.

“Health and wellness are no longer just an amenity or a luxury,” says Ken Davies, founder of Philly-based City Fitness which launched its Fishtown location in 2017 in a historic warehouse that Kassis purpose-renovated to accommodate 26,000 square feet of state-of-the-art training studios, steam saunas, and a new ‘recovery space’ called Revive.

“When we opened our first Philadelphia location back in 2007, gyms still weren’t considered an important part of a community,” Davies continues. “Now, they’re where people gather as much for their mental, emotional, and social well-being as for their physical health. A vibrant health and fitness scene doesn’t just bring commercial diversity to a neighborhood. It also brings an energy and lifestyle that has real meaning for the people who live there.”

Furthermore, not all cities are like San Francisco, Denver, and Miami, adds Kassis, where backdoor access to trails, parks, beaches, and open space is often taken for granted. That makes building a commercial core around fitness, health, and wellness in neighborhoods like Fishtown more important than ever for the residents who live and raise their families there.

“People are more health-conscious now than ever before,” says Kassis. “They care about what they eat, how they feel, how they look, and how long they live. When COVID hit, it became almost like a religion. I always believed that wellness could be a central pillar of Fishtown’s re-develoment. We just had to get the banks on board.”

That wasn’t easy at first. Lenders are hesitant to invest in transitioning neighborhoods; ventures in wellness and food are often seen as even riskier. Yet, Kassis was able to forge relationships with local banks, like Hyperion and Meridian, that could see his vision for Fishtown firsthand, knew his track record of following through, and were willing to take the chance.

“Traditionally, banks know that in a recession gym memberships are the first to go,” Kassis recalls of the hurdles of securing funding for City Fitness. “But I managed to persuade Richard Green, the owner of First Trust Bank, that the idea of wellness is changing. People now see living well as essential — not expendable.”

After the banks, Kassis’s next validation that a wellness-based lifestyle could be a keystone of Fishtown’s re-development came when he was introduced to Jonathan Neman, founder of Sweetgreen, a now publicly traded restaurant brand that arguably invented healthy fast casual in America.

At the time the two first ran into each other in Miami during the pandemic, the last thing Kassis was looking to bring into Fishtown was a national “chain”. Starbucks had already been trying to elbow its way into the neighborhood for years, but fought fierce resistance. Neman’s community-based, ‘intimacy at scale’ approach, on the other hand, aligned squarely with Kassis’s vision of Fishtown as a health-conscious urban village.

“Sweetgreen was the perfect restaurant brand for Fishtown because we knew it would bring day-time traffic to the neighborhood, and a local feel with national roots,” recalls Kassis. “They focus on approachable, fresh food, in buildings that are designed to fit into the neighborhood, and don’t just talk about the importance of community; they practice it.”

As no small side benefit, Sweetgreen’s arrival also brought the gravitas of a Silicon Valley-backed unicorn into Fishtown’s commercial ecosystem. That, in turn, has caught the eye of larger, national real estate developers who are perpetually scouring America’s cities for the next hottest neighborhood to invest in. Fishtown what? Where?

“I’d always heard about Fishtown because Philly was our second market after Washington D.C.,” recalls Neman, who’s also Sweetgreen’s CEO. “But when I first went there, I immediately saw what Roland was doing. As a brand, we’re always looking for ‘moments’ and creative communities that are driven by tastemakers. We also like to be a part of building urban ecosystems that are authentic and influential. Fishtown is safe and clean and re-developing at the right density for us. But it also has this sense of place to it that’s ideal for the lifestyle brand Sweetgreen is all about.”

Not surprisingly, the third word Kassis repeatedly uses when he talks about Fishtown is “partners”, who, he insists, are as foundational to what the neighborhood has become as the physical real estate he’s re-developed.

“None of this would be possible without my siblings and business partners,” Kassis says, reflecting on the collaborators he’s worked with over the past two decades. Key figures like Al Lucas, Greg Root, Nick Kennedy, Joe Beddia, Aaron Deary, and Nok Suntaranon oversee the daily operations of the restaurants, along with wellness ventures like Amrita Yoga, which he co-owns with Heather Rice. Others focus on design and construction: Katherine Lundberg leads Briquette, Kassis & Co.’s in-house interior design firm; Denise Mayer, Ashley Burrows, and Jules Tulio manage the real estate portfolio and Peroni Construction; and Rene Ermilio oversees the company’s condo and homes sales division.

“I learned early on in business that growth comes from surrounding myself with people who are not only smarter than me, but brilliant in their own areas,” Kassis says in typically humble fashion. “I need partners who complement my strengths, offset my weaknesses, and most importantly share my values. People who are just as driven, just as focused, and maybe even a little crazy, in the best way. My partners are my second family.”

(NB to aspiring real estate developers and entrepreneurs on the value of long-term strategic partnerships: Kassis’s original cleaning company that started it all, KassCon, eventually merged with several building management companies to form a conglomerate called Continuum, founded by Marcus Mayo and Chris Moss, which, at Kassis’s urging, expanded into building services as well. Continuum is now one of the largest HOA management companies in the U.S., servicing over 200,000 condos along the East Coast.)

There was no formal end to the pandemic in Fishtown, mostly because there was no real need to reckon with its aftermath. No one who lived here when COVID hit ever had any intention of leaving in the first place.

“The pandemic was evidence that everything we’ve been doing here for years is working,” says Mo Rushdy, a residential developer who’s been called one of the most powerful people in Philly politics and whose company, Riverwards Group, has been working in the trenches of Fishtown’s re-development alongside Kassis since 2009.

“When COVID first happened, there was this feeling in the beginning that maybe we should just hit the pause button on everything,” Rushdy recalls. “If all the restaurants, bars, and retail stayed closed, what would that mean for the housing market? But as soon as we saw how Frankford Avenue responded, we kept right on building. Fishtown has always attracted a specific kind of person who wants a particular type of lifestyle: urban, trendy, walkable, artsy, eclectic. And those people weren’t going anywhere.”

Looking forward, Fishtown’s real estate zeitgeist shows no sign of slowing down.

To the south across Girard Avenue, Fishtown’s entertainment district — home to the Fillmore, comedy club Punchline, dinner theater Fabrika, and Rivers Casino — is currently experiencing its own mini-boom, fueled in part by Doron Gelfand of GY Properties who’s in the process of completing a multi-building complex called Five On Canal that will add over 1,000 apartments on Delaware Avenue. On the other side of Penn Treaty Park, entrepreneur Dean Adler recently finished converting a long-shuttered power plant into an mixed-use waterfront complex called The Battery, which features upscale apartments, offices, event space, and a furnished apartment hotel. Closer to Girard on Frankford, a third project led by John Farina and Dustin Salzano of U.S. Development, LLC in collaboration with Kassis and his long-time partner, Jason Nusbaum, recently added more than one hundred new high-end rentals along with 15,000 SF of commercial space that will be home to a bakery called Manna, legendary for its lines out the door, and a new Mediterranean restaurant.

Kassis and Nusbaum have also formed another company called the Fishtown Collective with Tom Hallinan from City Living Philly, Roy Alpert, and Jeremy Selman, formerly from the Sidell Group, who built the Nomad and Ace hotels in Manhattan and The Ned in London. Focusing on vertical, residential development, their new partnership just completed The Bend down the street from Suraya and is also moving forward on several other multi-family apartment projects with 300 units and a furnished apartment component, 35,000 square feet of retail, and a multi-story parking garage, Fishtown’s first.

“In a few years”, says Kassis, with a rare hint of satisfaction, “There won’t be anything in Fishtown’s commercial corridor left to build. Our work will be complete.”

Nothing says more about how far Fishtown has come in two decades, however, than the imminent opening of Fishtown Urby.

Founded by David Barry, the force behind dozens of iconic hospitality projects like Manhattan’s Standard East Village and the Chelsea Hotel, Urby is now one of the country’s fastest-growing multi-family and extended stay real estate companies. The brand’s Fishtown debut will not only bring new energy to one of Front Street’s last empty, full-city blocks, but it’s also one of the most visible manifestations yet of Fishtown’s national prominence.

“Urby is more than just another apartment complex,” says Kassis, who is Barry’s local development partner through the Fishtown Collective. “It’s a well-amenitized, carefully programmed brand supported by one of the country’s largest real estate investors, Brookfield Properties. When David began exploring opportunities in the Philadelphia market, he immediately saw the same potential in Fishtown that I did. We also share a vision for historic redevelopment. He understands how integrating food and beverage, hospitality, and star designers with top-tier amenities such as co-working spaces, speakeasy-style rooms, palatial dog parks with BBQ grills, and a ground-floor café that tenants can access from inside the building can infuse a neighborhood with new energy and a strong sense of community.”

For Barry’s part, Fishtown was one of the quickest real estate decisions he’s ever made.

“Fishtown is a neighborhood that’s always been ahead of the curve — constantly evolving and alive with art, music, and great food,” Barry tells me over Zoom. “With Fishtown Urby, we’re creating an entirely new kind of space where residents can connect with the energy and spirit of this incredible neighborhood that’s fully come into its own.”

In my 2018 article, I wrote this about Fishtown in conclusion:

“Fishtown’s story isn’t about a Renaissance or reinvention. It never needed a makeover in the first place. Fishtown’s story is about a distinctly American kind of demographic change — and how neighborhoods organically and purposefully evolve to retain the best of themselves, yet at the same time become more diverse, prosperous, and economically sustainable over time. For other cities seeking to re-imagine their own historic downtowns, Fishtown is also a political playbook on how to leverage a community’s existing, working fabric without tearing the old-school threads apart.”

Seven years and one global pandemic later, I am happy to report that Fishtown is still America’s hottest neighborhood, though it’s not so much “new” anymore. On the contrary, it’s now a textbook, street-level case study in how to execute successful historic, urban re-development and, more specifically, how to curate the essential commercial architecture for a flourishing urban ecosystem around a series of basic, core principles. At the same time, everyone who lives here also now knows what the neighborhood is capable of enduring — no matter what the outside world throws at it.

When I ask Kassis how Fishtown and Philadelphia survived the pandemic, he characteristically gives the credit to others. “The first key to a strong and resilient commercial corridor is keeping it clean and safe and to do so you need a Business Improvement District (BID),” he tells me. “Fishtown business owners had already created one back in 2019 before COVID led by Mark Collazzo. The Fishtown Neighborhood Association (FNA) and South Kensington Community Partners are also well-organized and engaged. Those organizations have made a huge difference.”

After that, Kassis continues, you need vision.

“During the COVID pandemic, neighborhood associations, BIDs, developers, community members, non-profits, the police department, industry leaders across Philadelphia, and city and state elected officials united to support the city through an incredibly challenging time. Thanks to their collective efforts, Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania are now thriving with more people relocating here from New York and Washington than ever before. Governor Josh Shapiro, known for his intelligence, energy, and bipartisan approach, has brought together top talent from a range of industries to drive innovation and elevate both our cities and our state. Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s dynamic new Mayor, Cherelle Parker, has an ambitious vision to make Philadelphia the cleanest, safest, and greenest major city in the nation. She’s formed advisory committees led by business and industry leaders to help shape and implement that vision through bold, forward-thinking ideas.”

As for Kassis himself, there’s a saying in the Japanese martial art of aikido that when a problem comes to your door, let it in. If you sit with it long enough, you’ll discover the opportunity that accompanies it.

In this way, the pandemic offered Kassis an unexpected opportunity to take stock of what he’s built — both physically and figuratively. Not surprisingly, he’s not as relentless about selling his vision for Fishtown anymore, mostly because he doesn’t have to. Real estate developers from all over America now look to Fishtown for inspiration on how effective, historic neighborhood rebirth should work. That, in turn, has given Kassis the comportment of someone who’s already steered a big ship through a wide turn for a long time.

Like countless other people, the pandemic also inspired Kassis to find time for more personal, meaningful work. Through his non-profit, the M Movement co-founded with Ken Meyer, he’s now dedicating more resources to supporting local community start-ups and non-profits, such as the House of Hope, Lutheran Settlement House, Ligouri Academy, “Coach V’s” ODAAP (Open Door Abuse Awareness and Prevention Foundation), BMEC (Black Men in Education Convening), and the Tyrese Maxey Foundation, led by Maxey’s uncle Brandon McKay. With a producer named Alyssa Schroeter, Kassis has also started a production company called Brevity Films, which produces content that amplifies voices that might otherwise go unheard and already has a film and documentary premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

“I know from how I grew up what it feels like not to have a chance in life,” Kassis tells me as we wrap up our interview. “The more acts of kindness that people do, the more others will follow. Ultimately, it’s not how much money you make in life. It’s how many lives you change.”

Kassis’s other pandemic epiphany was that if Fishtown’s model of re-development did, in fact, have something to teach, now was the time to export it. Accordingly, he’s expanded his brands into New York, South Florida, Colorado, and Los Angeles. He’s also brought on his nephew, Jay Hereba, previously a financial wunderkind at one of the country’s largest real estate development conglomerates, CIM Group, to help with Kassis & Co.’s expansion.

“COVID confirmed for me that neighborhoods can’t exist without human energy,” Kassis says. “Kevin Costner was right in Field of Dreams, ‘If you build it, they will come’. But building something lasting takes more than just bricks and mortar. A vibrant, resilient neighborhood needs to be rooted in something emotional, something personal. That’s always been the vision for Fishtown.”

As I get into my car to leave, Kassis hands me a white paper Suraya bag full of hummus, baba ghanoush, and a sweet Lebanese cookie called a ma’amoul, prepared by James Beard nominated dessert chef James Matty.

“If it takes another five years for you to come back again,” he says to me, “You probably won’t even recognize this place.” As if on cue, The El thunders by overhead, careening towards Girard Street Station, packed with hipsters, Millennials, Gen Zers, empty nesters, and DINKs heading to Kalaya, Pizzeria Beddia, Frankford Hall, and Fette Sau.

“I’m pretty sure I will,” I respond.