Philly’s Hottest New Bar Becomes Gentrification Battleground

Activists take to Yelp to trash Le Bok Fin, a pop-up bar on the roof of a shuttered city school.

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For weeks, there has been a fierce debate on social media about Le Bok Fin. It’s a pop-up restaurant that serves French cuisine, offers a stunning, panoramic view of Philadelphia, and has been called “the hottest bar” in the city. What’s so controversial about that? Well, it’s on the rooftop of what was once Bok Technical High School, a vocational school that was closed in 2013 amid major financial cutbacks.

On one side of the debate are people who argue that the project is tone-deaf, that the school never should have closed, and that it should be repurposed with long-term residents — not craft beer-drinking hipsters — in mind. On the other side are those who say that the revitalization of a blighted building is something to be celebrated, and that the larger issues of poverty, affordable housing and education funding should be addressed by the public sector, not individual developers.

And somewhere in between are people who acknowledge that Le Bok Fin is a good thing, but call for empathy for residents who bristle at seeing scads of young white people eating croissants and $6 “Paris” hot dogs in the same place where children of color learned trades just two years ago.

Much of the discussion about Le Bok Fin, though, has taken place in private Facebook groups. On Thursday, critics of the pop-up restaurant took it much more public when they launched a guerrilla campaign on Yelp, posting highly critical comments about Le Bok Fin right alongside five-star reviews posted by fans. Taken together, they mirror the ever-escalating debate over gentrification that is happening all over the city.