September 20–27, 2001

cover story

Bart and the Deal

Developer Bart Blatstein says his proposed upscale artists community is just what Northern Liberties needs. Many residents think he’s naïve and possibly a threat.

by Daniel Brook

photographs by Kass Mencher

part 1 | part 2

The artists of Northern Liberties form a close-knit community, and not just because they all show up on summer nights for the "lawn-chair drive-in" movie in Liberty Lands park. Their community is close-knit because the people who live in the neighborhood actually own the neighborhood. Many of the homes are owner-occupied. Monthly rent checks often stay within the 19123 ZIP code.

The main exception in this locally owned neighborhood is multimillion-dollar real estate developer Bart Blatstein. The developer, who lives in the suburbs, owns a huge swath of Northern Liberties, where he plans to build an "artists community." In the eyes of many community members, he is the consummate outsider. That he thinks his urban-style development plans, his Northeast Philly roots or his professed "love" for the neighborhood make him an insider only underscores the point for most people in Northern Liberties. As Blatstein finalizes his plans for an "artists community," many wonder whether Bart knows art.

On the windowsill in Bart Blatstein’s Delaware Avenue office sits a copy of the book Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. It’s an odd choice for a man who has built his American Dream by building sprawl. The volume is generally considered the bible of the New Urbanism movement in city planning, which encourages pedestrian-friendly downtown development, as opposed to car-oriented suburban sprawl. The authors of the book have nothing but scorn for the strip malls that developers like Blatstein have constructed across America.

But Blatstein claims to have taken the book’s lessons to heart with his recently proposed Northern Liberties development. Blatstein got off on the wrong foot with the community; his original plans called for a massive strip mall on the site of the former Schmidt’s brewery. Now plans for the shopping center are on hold as the developer focuses on building Liberties Walk, a mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented retail and residential development across the street from the Schmidt’s site that Blatstein believes will fit in with the neighborhood’s indigenous architecture.

Blatstein says that he changed his plans after "falling in love" with the neighborhood. Others have speculated that the real estate speculator changed his tune only after finding that the area was too blighted to attract his usual strip-mall tenants. By building new upscale housing, they suggest, Blatstein is building the market that will attract his true loves: national retail chains.

Having his original plans panned by community members and by Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron in her "Changing Skyline" column may have pushed Blatstein to reconsider. Local architects brought their own sketches to the developer, urging him to build a less car-oriented project. Soon after, Saffron wrote a Jan. 26 column headlined "Let’s not strip-maul a promising loft district," attacking Blatstein’s proposed retail complex as too suburban for the downtown neighborhood.

Saffron says Blatstein was "a little un-nerved by the column." The developer invited the critic to his office to look over his plans. "He tried to win me over, but he did not," says Saffron. As much as she would like to believe in the power of her pen, however, Saffron thinks Blatstein changed his plans because of economic considerations, not her architectural critique.

In her column she asked the rhetorical question, "What about combining a small-scaled retail complex with new loft-style apartments?" Regardless of why the plans were changed, the current sketches, which Blatstein recently presented at a press conference and a Northern Liberties zoning committee meeting, call for just that — an "artists community" of 65 loft apartments, 22 townhouses and 35 gallery spaces.

Blatstein’s $25 million mixed-use Liberties Walk will encompass nearly four acres extending from Second to Third streets. His vision of an "artists community" calls for two rows of three-story red brick buildings which will frame a pedestrian walkway extending the length of the development. An arts center housed in the now-abandoned St. John’s Church will anchor one end of the pedestrian strip. At street level, there will be spaces for galleries, shops, cafes and restaurants. The floors above street level will hold the loft apartments.

To put the four-acre site together, Blatstein bought up a dozen individual properties using straw buyers. The process took more than a year to complete and cost about $2 million dollars. The developer plans to break ground in January.

Northern Liberties was born in colonial days, when the City of Philadelphia, hoping to attract new residents, promised Old City home buyers a free plot to the north. As the city grew, Northern Liberties, which extends from the Delaware River to Sixth Street and from Spring Garden to Girard Avenue, blossomed into a charming neighborhood of summer cottages. A sign on the corner of Spring Garden and Third Street commemorates this history, calling Northern Liberties "Philadelphia’s First Suburb."

Today the heart of Northern Liberties, centered around the growing business district on Second Street, is a hipster suburbia. Spruced-up vacant lots complete with gardens, lawns and patio furniture take the place of backyards; rehabilitated warehouses spring up in place of McMansions. With many artist couples remaining in the neighborhood to raise families, there is even a mothers club, that most suburban of all social organizations, which has spearheaded efforts to turn a massive vacant lot into a park with a playground for toddlers. Like true suburbanites, Northern Liberties residents guard their little piece of the American Dream against outsiders who they fear may alter their community.

The entry of a major real estate developer into Northern Liberties may be unprecedented, but it is the natural conclusion of processes that changed the area over the past three decades. As Ray King, an artist and resident since 1984, puts it, the neighborhood has been remade in the aftermath of "an economic war with all the breweries and factories closing." As industry moved out, the once vibrant working-class neighborhood, now cut off from Center City by a tangled mess of highway interchanges, deteriorated into a no man’s land of abandoned buildings.

Starting in the 1970s, artists seeking low rents in a big East Coast city began to move in. One such urban pioneer was Ira Upin. In 1977, he had just graduated from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore. Lured by cheap live-work space, the Chicago native moved to Philadelphia, eventually buying a run-down building in Northern Liberties with a leaky roof. Upin was attracted to the idiosyncratic neighborhood with its narrow alleyways going off at odd angles, where a local stable meant that horses shared the streets with cars and pedestrians.

In the height of the ’80s boom, real estate speculation swept the neighborhood, inflating rents and selling prices. By the time the boom went bust, many buildings had changed hands, but little development had taken place. Now at the end of a similar ’90s boom, Blatstein hopes to put his permanent mark on the neighborhood — and finish his project while demand for downtown rentals is still high.

Despite its reputation as an artists haven, Northern Liberties is by no means monolithic. The neighborhood still holds a mix of people. While the artist and professional contingents are growing, there remains a sizable working-class population, particularly around the edges of the community. An elderly remnant of the Eastern European community remains, and an Eastern Orthodox church is still in use. The neighborhood’s Catholic church, whose congregation was once solidly Polish, is now heavily Hispanic. While the arts community and Blatstein discuss the future of the neighborhood, these groups are largely out of the loop. But if property values continue to spike, they are the ones who would be least able to pay reassessed property taxes.

Working-class residents are already being squeezed out, and if current trends continue — as they should, considering Blatstein’s plans — the neighborhood will only get more upscale. Ira Upin, who now rents out a few apartments he bought and rehabilitated near his home, has seen his tenants go from starving artists to rich kids. His tenants used to drive beat-up Datsuns, said Upin. Now one of his renters tools around the neighborhood in a BMW, courtesy of dad. With the influx of the affluent, rents have gone through the roof. Enter Bart Blatstein, a developer hoping to capitalize on the residential real estate boom and the neighborhood’s artist chic.

Though local residents see him as an outsider, Bart Blatstein does not consider himself a stranger to Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. He grew up in Northeast Philly where, like other Jewish boys, his parents always told him he’d grow up to be a doctor. Blatstein was pre-med at Temple and applied to medical school, only to get rejected by every one. It wasn’t that Blatstein was dumb. Indeed, anyone who’s met him will attest to his mental quickness. He just didn’t have the kind of intelligence needed to ace the MCATs.

Always good with his hands, the recent Temple grad started fixing up old Queen Village townhouses and selling them at a profit. As Blatstein attests, it was the kind of transition only a blue-collar kid could make. When the children of more established families don’t get into medical school, they end up as dentists or accountants — they don’t start fixing up run-down South Philly apartments. But for Blatstein, one house led to another which led to another, and the profits grew.

With a reasonable stash of cash, Blatstein went into commercial real estate, building strip malls between I-95 and the Delaware River. His sprawling Riverview Plaza development now boasts parking lot after parking lot of chain stores. Athlete’s Foot, Pep Boys, Staples. When customers need a break from shopping, they can take in a movie at the United Artists multiplex, play a videogame at the massive GameWorks Studio arcade or grab a quick bite at a number of different delis, restaurants and bars.

Looking back, putting strip malls on vacant land next to America’s busiest highway looks like a no-brainer, but at the time, most developers thought Blatstein was nuts.

Now Blatstein has the cash on hand to do something big, new and different. Departing from his early plans to build yet another strip mall, he’s developed his New Urbanist plan for an artists community. But Northern Liberties artists doubt the strip-mall developer has the ability to understand them, their lifestyle or their neighborhood — especially judging him from his previous work. As Marita Fitzpatrick, a local artist and art teacher, said, "Bart’s a blue-collar guy who made it big. I doubt he’s ever taken an architecture class."

part 1 | part 2