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PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: 120-140 S. 24th St.
It's pretty pitiful when a lot was more occupied in 1855 than it is now. This 33,600-square-foot example is one such lot.
PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: 120-140 S. 24th St.
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
Its pretty pitiful when a lot was more occupied in 1855 than it is now. This 33,600 square foot piece of shit at 120-140 S. 24th St. is one such lot. For 49 years, this crappy surface lot has graced the Schuylkill River with a sunken empty void that should have been filled a long-ass time ago. Can we get a building here already?!?!
The development life of this lot started way back in the early 1800s when it was at the corner of George (Sansom) and Beach (24th) Streets and wasn't even on solid ground -- it was a series of piers and wharves. The City Glass Works was located here for the majority of the mid-19th century. In the 1860s and 70s, the neighborhood just to the east of this location started to become filled in with the stately mansions of wealthy families. This meant that contractors needed easy access to the high-quality marble needed to build the fancy-shmancy facades of those awesome homes. As a result, the site of the current lot became home to Sam F. Prince's Marble and Soap Stone Wharf, one of many along this part of the river. The northern half of the lot became the Sansom Street Wharf.
From 1886-1888, everything changed. The land along that part of the river was filled and construction began on the best thing to ever be in this spot, the 24th Street Station of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad designed by none other than the dick-swinging designer of Philly's greatest buildings, Frank Furness. The site of the lot was home to the headhouse of the station. One of three major train stations in the city, this one faced the Chestnut Street Bridge on stilts and had its tracks run along the river at grade, 30 feet lower. Passengers visiting Philadelphia would arrive here, then take the Subway-Surface trolley into town via a long-lost wooden trolley station built just north of 24th and Market accessed by a concourse that ran under the Chestnut and Market Street bridges.
On Feb. 28, 1902, a massive rainstorm following a large snow event flooded the Schuylkill River to twice its normal width, inundating the station (and current empty lot) with stinky river water. It took three days for the water to subside and ended up costing millions of dollars in damage and months of clean-up.
The station was threatened with demolition in about 1930, when the B & O had a Dead-Ass Proposal to replace it with a more modern Art Deco station with a skyscraper on top, a la Suburban Station. Needless to say, it never happened. The Furness-designed station stayed open for a total of 70 years, ending service on April 28, 1958. It was torn down in 1963, not only creating one of the city's greatest architectural losses, but also giving birth to the shitty surface lot that's still there today.
The lot got slightly smaller in 1979 when 2400 Chestnut was built, but otherwise, it hasn't changed since. In 2003, the Los Angeles-based Bedrock Group, LLC, purchased the surface lot. The Rosenbluth building, owned by the family of the general manager of Bedrock Group, is just south. In 2005, Bedrock proposed an outstanding new skyscraper to be built on the lot, Mandeville Place. This Dead-Ass Proposal was one of the most horrifying losses from the housing bubble burst. Fully approved and set for a March 2008 construction start-date, the market downturn stabbed it in the back.
Bedrock ended up converting the Rosenbluth Building into West Coast-style "green offices" and left the surface lot to keep parking cars. So now that so much new construction is going on in the city, where's the new proposal for this spot?
Maybe its just a massive coincidence, but in my Empty Lot of the Week article from Oct. 2, I urged the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to sell the huge lot they've been sitting on for 40+ years. Guess what? That lot just went up for sale last week. So in the same vein, I urge Bedrock LLC to get off their fucking asses and build something awesome here, or sell it to someone who will.
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