How Many Smoke Shops Does One Street Need?

South Street has reinvented itself before. Are its seemingly endless smoke shops just the latest chapter?

Walk a few blocks down South Street these days and a question eventually occurs to you:

How many smoke shops can one street possibly support?

Apparently, quite a few.

A 2025 survey counted 17 smoke shops between Front and Broad Streets. They come in various flavors, but the ingredients are familiar: vapes, tobacco, hookahs, glassware, snacks, colorful displays and enough flashing LED lights to make you wonder whether you've stumbled onto a tiny Atlantic City casino.

But the smoke shops may tell us more about South Street than they do about smoking.

This is, after all, a street that has made a career out of reinvention.

In the 1950s and '60s, Philadelphia planned an eight-lane Crosstown Expressway through the South Street corridor. Businesses left, property values plunged and buildings sat vacant. The highway was eventually defeated, but something unexpected happened while everyone was waiting for the bulldozers: cheap storefronts attracted artists, musicians, entrepreneurs and assorted Philadelphia characters.

Out of that mess came the South Street many Philadelphians still remember—music clubs, galleries, record stores, funky shops, restaurants and nightlife. By the '80s and '90s, South Street had become so successful that national retailers arrived. Eventually, some of the eccentricity that made the street famous disappeared along with many of its independent businesses.

Today the economics have changed again.

South Street's commercial vacancy rate has reached roughly 30 percent, according to recent reporting, while smoke shops have multiplied. They make a certain economic sense: small spaces, relatively simple build-outs, long hours and products that don't require a kitchen full of employees.

But don't assume they're all printing money. The market may already have overshot. Several Philadelphia-area smoke-shop owners recently described intense competition and declining business; one longtime South Street operator said his sales had fallen dramatically from their peak.

So perhaps the smoke shops aren't killing South Street.

Maybe they're simply occupying the space left behind while South Street figures out what it wants to become next.

And strangely enough, we've been here before.

The last time South Street had cheap space, vacancies and an uncertain future, a bunch of unconventional people moved in and created one of Philadelphia's most memorable streets.

Maybe what South Street needs isn't fewer weird businesses.

It just needs a new generation of weird ones.