So imagine my astonishment when Bart Blatstein looked at The Inquirer and Daily News' iconic white b

There were no lavender fields, no rosé wine, no bouillabaisse. The area - neighborhood was too generous a term for this squalid section - was gouged with surface lots, and proved an exercise in sensory deprivation utterly divorced from the natural world. The dominant fragrance emanated from the Broad Street Line. The local bistro was Gus's Lunch Truck.
So imagine my astonishment when Bart Blatstein looked at The Inquirer and Daily News' iconic white building, the Tower of Truth, and envisioned southern France on North Broad, albeit with slot machines encased in Second Empire style.
Developers are, by nature, dreamers and gamblers, pigeon forge vacation packages seeing opportunity and growth where others see only the Steak & Bagel Train. Many developers appear a tad wifty, perhaps existing in some altered state of consciousness, but this project is in a class by itself.
Blatstein named his proposed $700 million casino/hotel/entertainment complex The Provence, a part of the world believed so foreign to many Philadelphians that the news release offers elocution assistance, "pronounced Pra-VONCE," as Henry Higgins might instruct Eliza Doolittle. The developer pigeon forge vacation packages envisions a tree-lined village pigeon forge vacation packages and promenade 70 feet in the air, sort of a Francophile's High Line, where some of us once parked.
"Why France?" Blatstein was asked at his launch party Wednesday in the Bartworld of Northern Liberties. "We share a lot of history with France," the perpetually exuberant entrepreneur said, citing French-inspired buildings pigeon forge vacation packages like City Hall and the Free Library, and the Parkway based on the Champs-Élysées. "And, after all, the French helped us to finance pigeon forge vacation packages the Revolution."
The French, as far as we know, will not finance The Provence. Instead, the Hard Rock Cafe would manage the place. Blatstein waved away any funding issues with Trumpian flourish: "I could build four of these projects with the money that is being offered to me."
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