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PHILAPHILIA: Empty Lot of the Week - Pitiful Pine Lot
A perfectly good piece of prime Rittenhouse Square-area real estate is just sitting there, parking cars.
PHILAPHILIA: Empty Lot of the Week — Pitiful Pine Lot
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.
Aaaaaarggh!!!!!!!!!
Northeast Corner of 17th and Pine Streets -- How the hell did this happen? A perfectly good piece of prime Rittenhouse Square-area real estate just sitting there, parking cars? A corner property? What in the fuck!?!?! That's 19,045 square feet of asphalt cockfucks sitting on some expensive-ass land.
Well, I guess it's not that expensive. The lot was purchased in August of 2009 for $10. It seems that a lot of the empty lots and parking garages I've written about have changed hands for $1 or $10. I guess this allows those greezy motherfucker slumlords that own these places to get away with paying little to no land transfer tax. Crooks.
Anyway, the Pitiful Pine Lot is the site of the Southwestern School, the third Philadelphia public school to bear the name. It was built in 1869 to serve the rapidly expanding population of the 7th Ward, back when that ward was bounded by Seventh Street, the Schuylkill River, South and Spruce Streets. It was a big deal at the time, costing $42,100 ($663,000 today). When the first Southwestern School opened in 1826 at what is now 18th and Spruce, the school stood at the southwestern point of the city's development. The name stuck for successive school buildings as sort of a tradition.
By 1885, the third Southwestern School's name seemed ridiculous. The southwestern extent of development at this point was already up to 50th and Woodland Ave. The school was renamed the Ulysses S. Grant Combined Grammar and Secondary School to seem a little less crazy.
The Southwestern School as the U.S. Grant School in 1897. Image from the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project.
The school building stood on the site of the Pitiful Pine Lot for at least seven decades. It served 550 students and held the distinction of being the birthplace of the first branch of the Civic Club's Children's League of Good Citizenship. The school survived past a fire in 1884 and later became part of the Philadelphia Trades School. In 1916, it was altered to become some School District offices. Coincidentally, its brother, the Northwest School was located on another Empty Lot I've written about, the Hahnemann Mural Lot. Once the school was demolished, the Pitiful Pine Lot was born.
That's pretty much it ... the lot has been parking cars now for at least 70 years. It's been a parking lot for roughly the same amount of time that the school building stood.
The lot in 1964. Image from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Public Records.
How could this have happened? How could a parking lot last so long in such a neighborhood? Anything could be built here: homes, retail, a nutsack shaving resource center. Shit... I'd be satisfied if a crappy parking garage was built here. If the school building was still there, it could have been converted to condos or apartments by now. It would probably be in good condition, since the Kearny School at Sixth and Fairmount was built at the same time using the same plan and still functions as a school.
Right now, the lot is zoned R10, which means multi-family buildings 35 feet tall can inhabit the lot. Well? What the hell are you waiting for? Quit parking cars and build build build!!
The Kearny School. It's like a zombie of the Southwestern School! Image from Google.
A fire destroyed the original structure in 1920 and the current Kearny School dates from the following year. The school was either rebuilt or replaced with a new building. --from Northern Liberties: A Brief History (expected in 2013 from the History Press)— cchali- Wow! I had no idea it wasn't the same building... though I thought it was weird that the windows didn't match... I just figured they were altered at some point. Thanks for the info!! — GroJLart
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