August 21-27, 2003

cityspace

Fringe Vacancies

by Daniel Brook

Another year, another vacant Old City property transformed from eyesore to eye-catching Fringe Festival box office. This year, itís the Corinthian-columned Seamenís Church on the corner of Third and Arch. In 2002, the Fringe took over an abandoned warehouse on Race Street. The year before, the festival camped out in the bright-orange, modernist-style National Building on North Second Street.

Box office manager Lori Aghazarian admits the main reason for the floating Fringe headquarters is cost, not dedication to adaptive reuse of historic buildings. "Honestly, every building so far, the owner of the building has generously let us use it for free. It's always been a building that's in a transitional period between developments," she says.

Still Aghazarian acknowledges, "it's absolutely Fringe" to breathe life into a different vacant building each year. "By squatting in all these fantastic empty buildings around Old City, we get to show them to everybody," she says, hoping someone will take an interest in the spaces.

But so far the hopes have not come to anything; since their Fringe-headquarter incarnations, neither the National Building nor the Race Street warehouse has been occupied.

After months of wrangling between developer Jeffrey M. Brown Associates of Huntington Valley and the Old City Civic Association (OCCA), the two parties have agreed on a series of compromises that will allow construction to begin on a controversial high-rise apartment building at 108 Arch St. The 160-foot building will dwarf other buildings in the neighborhood where new construction is now limited to a 65-foot height limit. (For perspective, the nearby Society Hill Towers are 292 feet tall.)

Under the agreement reached last week, OCCA will drop its appeal of the developer's building permit. (The 108 Arch St. site was zoned before the height limit went into effect.) Many Old City residents wanted to stop the project altogether, but realizing that that was unlikely, the group decided to compromise. Their agreement lays out a slew of requirements for the developer -- everything from what building materials can be used to which hours noisy construction can take place. As for the controversial height, the agreement mandates that the "height of the building is 160 feet to the highest mechanical equipment," so no extra water towers or cable antennae can be tacked on.

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