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PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Gateway Center South
Broad and Washington -- this pitiful corner is the subject of more Dead-Ass Proposals than any other. This one came the closest to happening: a gigantic super-out-of-scale monster of a project that's probably better off dead.
PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Gateway Center South
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.
1001 S. Broad St.
Broad and Washington -- what a shitty corner. The largest set of empty lots near the city core, this pitiful corner is the subject of more Dead-Ass Proposals than any other. Here, we're gonna talk about the one that came the closest to happening -- a gigantic super-out-of-scale monster of a project that's probably better off dead.
The origin of this thing indirectly goes all the way back to former Mayor/Governor Ed Rendell. In the early 1990s, this guy spearheaded, among other huge plans, the conversion of the then-shitty South Broad Street corridor into the Avenue of the Arts. Though highly successful along its northern portion, the southern quarter of the district is just as shitty as it was 20 years ago (except for CAPA).
This part of Broad Street was supposed to be the gateway to the Avenue and a new southern border for Center City. Blighted buildings were removed, sidewalks were redone with a fancy pattern, and a (horrible) public art project was planned to welcome people into the district. This was all done with the assumption that massive amounts of development would then hit the Broad/Washington corner like a bag of hammers.
In late 2006, over a decade after these improvements were made, six proposals for the Broad and Washington corner had come and gone. The empty lot had become a shameful joke to most Philadelphians. However, there was hope on the horizon. The locally-based developer Rimas Properties declared themselves the savior of this shitty segment of Broad, hoping to bring its development and density to the level originally envisioned.
Their first idea was completely insane. On Jan. 17, 2007, Rimas presented a 53-story, 2.3 million-square-foot project based on NYC's then-new Time Warner Center. It would hold 1,100 residential units, a large indoor shopping mall (Gallery South?), commercial office space, a public park six to 12 stories in the air, and TWO parking garages designed to store a total of 2,600 cars. The whole thing would be in two towers 657 feet tall, the tallest buildings east of Broad and the sixth-tallest buildings in the city.
Needless to say, neighbors went FUCKING APESHIT over it. The height, the traffic, the lack of affordable units -- pretty much everything about the proposal chapped their asses. The Hawthorne Empowerment Coalition dedicated an entire newsletter to opposition of the proposal, showing pictures of the Time Warner Center as an example of how humongous this thing would be. Rimas attempted to assuage their fears by re-massing the building toward Broad Street, but to no avail.
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| Early rendering showing 53-story towers moved toward Broad. |
Eventually, the HEC calmed the fuck down and started working with Rimas (despite still sort of being against it), probably realizing that this would be the last time something would get proposed here. They imposed a 395-foot height limit on the lot to get this thing to be a little more reasonable. Rimas complied, reducing the project down to double 31-story towers on a six-story base. The parking was brought down to 1,100 spaces.
By the end of that summer, Rimas acquired the lot through a $16 million-dollar deal with Natixis Real Estate Capital, and Councilman Frank DiCicco was ready to propose a zoning switch in City Council to help get this thing built. On Sept. 27, 2007, the zoning change was approved, despite the presence of protesters who demanded the project not exceed seven stories. That rendering at the top of the article was released about the same time, showing the level of luxury and detail the $500 million project was meant to have.
Then ... nothing. After that initial approval, no further progress seemed to be made: no site prep, no construction permits, no posted notices ... not a damn thing. After all that trouble, not a whimper of this project would be heard again until Dec. 30, 2008, when the property was foreclosed upon and Natixis Real Estate Capital took full control of the space. Rimas Properties itself has fallen off the face of the Earth, its only legacy being the 1352 Lofts on South Street (which is doing fine now but got Rimas embroiled in a bad publicity storm) and 2400 Weccacoe Ave. (which was quite successful and created hundreds of jobs).
In the end, the death of this proposal is probably a good thing. Had it been built, the housing crisis would have hit about the same time the thing was topped out. It would have ended up being 800 empty condos with 500,000 square feet of empty storefronts ... that is, if construction finished. There's a good chance this beast would have become Philly's own Ryugyong Hotel.
Nowadays, this part of the Avenue of the Arts is embarrassing as fuck. The streetscape improvements from the 1990s didn't age well: the medians everywhere along the Avenue are overgrown with weeds, and the Broad/Washington lots look like shit. Nonetheless, the string of dead proposals for this location did not end with the Gateway Center South. A shopping center was proposed for like three seconds and an urban-style Walmart was proposed at one point, causing ire amongst the city's snobbery contingent. About a year ago, rumors swirled that Dranoff Properties, bringers of Symphony House, 777 South Broad, and the soon-to-be-built Southstar Lofts, were in "deep negotiations" for the site. Nothing has been of heard since.
Hopefully, the recent change in the city's zoning code will bring something to this barren space. Under the new code, the lot is zoned CMX-5, the only one zoned as such for blocks and blocks around. Though neighbors would probably oppose it to death, something of incredible height can now be built here without a damn hitch. Hopefully, a reasonable project of appropriate size can come to this corner and save it from damnation forever.
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