The planned move of Borders' Center City books and music store to Broad and Chestnut Streets was hailed by city officials yesterday as just the boost that Chestnut needs to become the next hot downtown retailing zone.

Borders Group Inc. said it would move its store at 1727 Walnut St. to One South Broad Street, the old Philadelphia National Bank Building, where it would spread out over two floors and a mezzanine, with windows facing both Broad and Chestnut. The move is scheduled for November, said Chris Adams, store manager.

"Stop looking in your rearview mirror about Chestnut Street," Paul R. Levy, executive director of the Center City District, said at a news conference announcing the move, held in the vacant former bank lobby.

Levy predicted that within two years, national-chain retailers would be revealing plans to open outlets on what are now the bedraggled 1200 and 1300 blocks of Chestnut. The blocks are spotted with vacant storefronts and have no national retailers except the Chestnut entrances to the Lord & Taylor department store.

The national retailers will say, "If Borders is there, we need to be there, too," Levy said.

Last fall, the Center City District introduced a restoration movement started by a coalition of property owners who control 75 percent of the storefronts in the two blocks. They put up $40,000 to restore deteriorating building facades. The Center City District matched the funds. Since then, the district has given an additional $45,000 to two property owners to improve facades.

City Councilman Frank DiCicco gave Borders credit for helping revitalize Walnut Street as a shopping district when it opened that store, its first in the Philadelphia area, in 1990.

"I think we're going to see that happen on the east side of Broad Street," he said.

The Walnut Street store is one of 15 in the region and 370 nationwide operated by Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Borders. The Walnut property is owned by AIG Baker, a Birmingham, Ala., developer, which city officials said was looking for another retail tenant for the 22,000-square-foot space.

In Ann Arbor, Borders spokeswoman Emily Swan said the company wanted to move to have more room to sell music and to expand its cafe. The Walnut Street store was the first Borders in the country with a cafe, she said.

The store keeps 150,000 book titles in stock, but has little room for CDs. Adams said the new store would carry more than 200,000 book, music, movie and periodical titles.

From a brief tour of the new space yesterday, the store looks as if it will be brighter and more inviting than the old one.

The new store's second floor, housing the fiction section and an expanded selection of music, will be in a cavernous area with 25-foot ceilings and chandeliers. New escalators will carry customers between the floors.

The One South Broad Street building was erected in 1932 by John Wanamaker to house the store's menswear department. It was sold to Philadelphia National Bank in 1952.