Hungry students and faculty who once flocked to the plaza beside Gimbel Gym to find overflowing crepes and crispy chicken can do so no more, as whirring equipment and hard-hat wielding construction workers have claimed the area as their own.
And that has some of the food truck vendors and their customers feeling a little steamed.
"It's too noisy, too dusty, too dangerous, and too far away from the people," Le Petite Creperie owner Andreas Andoniadis said of their new location on the 3700 block of Sansom Street. "Basically, it sucks."
The vendors were relocated at the end of June to allow for the construction of the $24 million gym expansion. Although the new location is not physically far from the old, the trucks are not visible from the main Walnut Street thoroughfare, making their existence something of an urban legend.
"I just found out -- I thought they were on 40th Street," Iris Hill, an administrator in the Franklin Building, said, adding that a friend had tipped her off.
Management department staff member Robin Woods was also in the same predicament.
"We were actually on our way to someplace else, and I just happened to look over and see [the carts]," Woods said. "I didn't know that they were here."
Yet some, like Tyesh Grundy of Wharton Computing, got the inside scoop: being a longtime customer of George's Lunch Truck, the employees told her of their impending move.
To help wayward customers satisfy their culinary cravings, Penn has installed two signs along Walnut Street at 37th and 38th streets. However, several of the vendors considered the signs to be too small and too confusing to read.
"They put a little sign on the corner, but the arrow points the other way," Andoniadis said. "What does that mean?"
Penn Vice President of Facilities and Real Estate Services Omar Blaik said that the matter was being looked into, and mentioned the possibility of additional signage at 37th and Sansom streets.
Regardless of whether the customers find the food trucks' new location through signage, trial and error, or word of mouth, it will still not change the location of the trucks -- at least not for the next two years.
Blaik said although permanent relocation was originally intended for the trucks, "creative thinking" among the Penn facilities staff will allow them to return to their old haunts when the Gimbel construction is done.
According to Roman Petyk, associate general counsel to the University, such shifts in vendor location are part of the five-year contract that vendors around the Penn campus agreed to in 1998.
"We expressed to [the vendors] that there would be situations like this that would arise: construction projects would be going on and we would need to be able to relocate them eventually to another location," Petyk said. "That's what happened here."
Under the contract, the vendors pay the University a basic rent of one dollar per month, plus a $50 per month trash removal fee that is spread collectively among the six-odd vendors on Sansom Street.
But besides electricity, the vendors are getting something else for free -- dust -- which has some customers and venders concerned that it may get into the food. However, Blaik said that the demolition phase of the project, which creates the most dust, will be over in a few weeks.
"Who else on campus is actually saved from the impact of construction?" Blaik said. "There is construction everywhere, so it's not just them."
Among the vendors, it's a mixed bag as to how all of this has impacted their bottom line. While some, like Andoniadis, say that their business has not been affected by the relocation, others, such as Curry on the Run owner Surjit Singh, say that their business this summer is down from previous summers.
But when the 20 to 30 construction workers give way to about 100 workers when full-fledged work on the building begins, Blaik predicts that all the vendors will be very happy.
"All of the construction workers get two coffee breaks as well as lunch, so I think [the vendors] will be very happy." he said.
However the issues are resolved, Visiting Management Scholar Piers Davenport thinks that the two sides should come to amends.
"These guys are as much part of the community as we are," he said. "We have to respect that."
