|
|
|
PHILAPHILIA: Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Will Smith's Philadelphia Failures
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
PHILAPHILIA: Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Will Smith's Philadelphia Failures
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena around Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
If you don't know who Will Smith is, fuck you. From West Philadelphia (born and raised), Smith, according to legend, spent most of his days on the playground. He later became a rapper/singer, then a TV star. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Smith became a big-time mega-millionaire movie star, he, along with his brother Harry, started a real-estate development company called the Treyball Development Corp. It was named after his spoiled-ass son, Willard "Trey" Smith III.
In the summer of 1999, Treyball proposed two major projects for Smith's home city, Philafuckingdelphia. As with many proposals in this fair city, they failed to come to fruition like a motherfucker.
W Hotel
What's with the old-timey car on the right?
410 S. Front St. -- In 1999, W Hotels was still a very new brand. The NYC one had just opened the previous December. Philadelphia was set for one of the earliest branches of the new chain, targeted to young people with way too much money to throw away. At the same time, Treyball was looking to build a hotel on the infamous Newmarket site in Society Hill. The failed 1975-built retail complex was still there, falling apart from neglect.
The Smiths teamed up with Starwood Hotels, W's parent company, to build the new W Hotel Philadelphia on the cursed location. By March of 2000, the Smith brothers purchased the site for $3.5 million. The new hotel would occupy the entire space end-to-end. It would be 11 stories tall and 250,000 square feet, holding 185 rooms and 20 condominiums. The architect was the Atlanta-based John Portman and Associates.
As with EVERY project EVER proposed for this particular patch of land, the most powerful NIMBYs in the city sunk their teeth into the $63.5 million hotel. They complained about its height. They complained about its lack of easement. They complained about its proximity to its neighbors. One of the NIMBYs was even a big-time Philadelphia real estate mogul — someone who should know better. Legal action ensued at the start of 2001, while bulldozers cleared the remains of the old Newmarket retail complex to make way for the now-approved project.
In the end, none of the NIMBYs' issues mattered. The Philadelphia hotel market had slowed to a crawl: any hotel construction was considered a loser. Despite tax incentives from the city, funding could not be acquired to get the hotel going. The project was officially considered dead at the end of July, 2001.