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PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: Abbott's Drexel Hole
An immense asphalt desert that sinks under the old post office building has stayed empty and decrepit for over a decade.
PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: Abbott's Drexel Hole
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.
Bounded by 30th, 31st, Chestnut, and Ludlow Streets. This lot is ridiculous. An immense asphalt desert that sinks under the IRS/old Post Office building. Even as new buildings and other developments have occurred all around, this Sunken Ocean of Assholes has managed to stay completely empty and decrepit for over a decade. Will this lot soon be dead? Good fuckin' luck.
You know an empty lot is bad when you're not the first person to name it. Some folks on Philadelphia Speaks call this the Drexel Hole (a play on the name Disney Hole), and the university itself has a name for it: Lot F. That is to say, Lot Fuck. This block has spent most of its dull life as industrial buildings that would later get replaced by other industrial buildings. Most notable and long-lasting among these was the famous Abbott's Dairies company.
Abbott's on Lot Fuck in 1931. This is actually one of their newer buildings. They rocked some early-19th Century industrial buildings before altering them and building new ones in the late '20s and early '30s.
Abbott's Dairies began on a farm in Salem, N.J., in 1876. The Abbott family would sell their bottled milk to locals and then tourists at the Jersey Shore. Eventually, they opened locations in Philadelphia and became a massive dairy company under the name Abbott's Alderney Dairies. They changed the name to Abbotts Dairies, Inc. in 1908. At their Lot Fuck location, they needed a place to park all their employees and delivery trucks, so they cleared the eastern half of the spot and gave birth to the Drexel Hole.
Thirtieth and Chestnut looking north in 1930. The lot is on the left. Before the Post Office was built, the lot was at ground level. Image from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Department of Public Records.
The Hole as it appeared in 1950. Image from PhillHistory.org, a project of the Department of Public Records.
Abbott's Dairies went strong at this spot all the way up to 1964, when they consolidated all their locations into one massive building at Seventh Street and Packer Avenue, which still stands today as the Turf Club of South Philadelphia. Drexel University purchased the entire property in December of that year for $92,500 and has owned it ever since. You'd think Drexel was going to build something here one of the many times they expanded between 1964 and now, but NO. They didn't even touch the space until the turn of the 21st Century, when they demolished the old Abbott buildings and created the fully formed Abbott's Drexel Hole as we know it today. However, the fate of this lot is not exactly sealed.
Drexel's new and somewhat ridiculous decades-long master plan has big ideas for the Hole. For the 2012-2017 segment of the plan, they envision a skyscraper that would be a new home for the university's Hess Labs that would take up the entire western end of the lot.
This rendering turns the Conrail train causeway into a park. So the mile-long freight trains will just fly overhead?
For the 2017-2026 segment of the plan, they assume some private developer will want to build another skyscraper, this time a mixed-use one for the Eastern part of the lot.
Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week, Dec. 21, 2027.
The Hess Labs building has a so-so chance of happening... some of the goofier stuff from the 2007 master plan happened, and stuff from the new plan is starting construction right now. Like most master plans for large areas of the city, the probability of the projects actually being built become more and more unlikely as time passes, so the building planned for the eastern part of the lot is somewhat unlikely.
I'm excited to see that there are plans for this horrendous lot, but they need to get cracking on them if there'll ever be hope for the ability to have a seamless string of development that connects Center City and University City. Currently, the Abbott's Drexel Hole a.k.a. Lot Fuck is one of those gaps that makes the transition pathetic. Build NOW, you bastards!!!
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