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PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: Old City Tri-Cornered Lot
PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: Old City Tri-Cornered 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.
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| Image from Google. |
The northwest, southwest and southeast corners of Fourth and Vine Streets -- This is fucking pathetic. THREE unrelated surface parking lots on the same corner? That's ridiculous!! How did this happen? Why didn't anyone stop it? Old City is infested with NIMBYs that claim to care oh so much about their precious neighborhood. Why have they allowed a confluence of surface lots to exist for over four decades? This place is like a tri-cornered hat, but as an empty lot. A tri-cornered lot. We'll have to look at these three surface lots one-by-one.
The Northwest Corner:
The Northwest Corner of Fourth and Vine is really the southern terminus of the long-lost York Avenue that once crossed diagonally through the (also) long-lost southern section of Northern Liberties. At this corner, there were two commercial buildings, 300 and 302 York Ave., oddly shaped due to their presence on the corner of a diagonal street. They couldn't have been THAT remarkable, because no records seem to exist for either -- though old maps/aerials show that they were combined into one building at some point in the late 19th century, and were demolished in the 1940s, giving birth to the surface lot that exists here now.
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The site of 300-02 York Ave. in 1964. Pic from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Department of Records. |
Also located on the site of this lot was a three-story industrial building; you can see the back of it in the picture above. This little workhouse was used by the Renner Company, producing awnings, sails and tents for the first third of the 20th century. In 1938, the building became home to the Craftsman Printing Co., run by the father-son duo of Rufus and John Spayd.
In late June of 1963, the Kee Corp., aka Camitta Brothers Wholesale Footwear Company, purchased the entire corner along with the old W. G. Ellis & Co. hosiery factory to the west. The old Renner/Craftsman Building still stood along with a few other smaller structures on the lot into the 1970s.
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The old Renner/Craftsman building, standing all boarded up and broken in 1972. The old hosiery factory is on the left. Pic from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Department of Records. |
Camitta Brothers still runs out of the old Ellis factory. Forty-nine years later, they do most of their business on this, the internet. The lot is their parking lot. The factory AND lot were historically certified in 1984. I wonder if that means that the corner is now permanently destined to be a parking lot? Will future NIMBYs try to save it?
The Southeast Corner:
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The building as the Reece Button Hole Machine Co. in 1898. Pic from the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project. |
The rest of the site of the current empty lot consisted of the usual type of smaller buildings one would expect to see in this neighborhood ... except for one little thing. There was an interstitial street, a small dead-end alley with six tiny trinity rowhomes packed into a footprint only as large as one of the buildings on the rest of the block. It was called American Place, and later came to be known as its location between buildings, 245 N. 4th St. There are curb cuts, probably from an old entrance to the lot, that line up perfectly with the site of American Place.
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| American Place. Sort of. That's un-American! |
This lot grew in a piecemeal fashion. First to go were American Place and the buildings just to the south, all the way to the corner of Fourth and New Streets. They were gone by the 1940s. The rest of the buildings on the lot would last a while longer. 249 N. 4th St. outlasted all others and was the last to go down ... it was still standing into the 1970s, while the rest of the site was surface parking.
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253, 251, and the great survivor, 249 North 4th in 1960. Pic from the PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Department of Records. |
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The empty lot already had an entrance on Vine Street by then. Check out the old Reece sewing machine factory on the right, sans mansard roof. Pic from the PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Department of Records. |
Southwest Corner:
This one's a real fuckin' bastard. This lot has been empty waaay longer than all the others -- at least 80 years. EIGHTY FUCKING YEARS. That's just silly. The only empty lots I know that are as old are the Luckless Lots of Locust Row. Not only has been been empty for a long-ass time, the space actually consists of TWO separately owned empty lots. To add even more insult to injury, the history of this particular space is spotty at best.
Eighty years before being an empty lot for 80 years, 262-264 N. 4th St. sported the D.P. Brown beeswax and parrafine factory. After six decades of beeswaxing, the same building later became the Nathan Frick machine tools factory. At the corner of Fourth and Vine, there was a confectionary manufacturer that lasted for most of the 19th century. For the first third of the 20th century, the building held the Philadelphia branch of the National Confectioner's Association.
On Sept. 7, 1939, it all went to shit. St. Augustine's Catholic Church took ownership of the site and had it parking cars by mid 1940. Eighty-two years later, it's doing the same crap. Pitiful. The church must have been hard up for some dough at some point, because some time since then, they sold the northern half of the lot and it became part of 406 Vine's property. This has obviously caused much confusion to parking church-goers, because the northern have of the lot has signs all over it saying "NO CHURCH PARKING!!!"
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The lot was already over 20 years old in this picture. Pic from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Department of Records. |
Well, this corner could be even shittier than it is today. As bad as this confluence of empty lots is, it used to be worse. Much worse. Until 2005, the corner of Fourth and Vine had surface parking on ALL FOUR CORNERS.
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| 2004 aerial view. Image from Google. |
The northeast corner used to sport a pad site gas station/garage-type thing. I'm glad someone had the balls to take that out. Now get tot he other ones! The truth is, the only space on this corner that will ever see a building in any of our lifetimes might be the northern half of the southwest corner, which is deeded to 406 Vine. That fucking sucks. Expect to see this solar system of empty lots for ... well, forever.
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