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PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Philadelphia Federal Center
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PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Philadelphia Federal Center
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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| No surviving rendering, so here's a conjectural one transposed onto an aerial photo from its time. Original image form Google. |
2901 Walnut St. -- During the late 1980s/early 1990s building boom in Philadelphia, scores of office building proposals were getting built with little to no effort. West Market grew like a motherfucker and there was no end in sight. Nonetheless, the wall on development had to come down sometime, and, like 1777 JFK and the Corestates Financial Center, some proposals got their asses kicked out of existence. Unlike those two, this one, if built, would have been a massive disappointment and would have probably looked like shit. Not only that. Philadelphians were against this one the day it was proposed.
It all started in 1989. At that point, it seemed like Philadelphia's new melange of big-ass buildings was never going to stop. The U.S. Postal Service wanted to jump on the bandwagon and develop the 14 acres of land along the Schuylkill it had been using as a parking lot since the 1950s (though the lot didn't expand to full size until 1973). The USPS intended to turn the huge area of land into a complex of at least 5 mid-rise buildings over the course of the next decade. They called out to developers for proposals and got numerous responses. Nonetheless, two years went by without progress and the real estate crash happened during that time. They ditched the idea of starting the complex with a Phase One of two small buildings and decided that it would be better to build one extremely wide 12-story box meant to house all of the city's Federal offices. It was named the Philadelphia Federal Center.
This building was meant to be as exciting as a 12-story building could get. One million square feet (equal to 40-story buildings elsewhere in the city) of flexible office space, 90,000 square feet of retail, three stories of underground parking, an employee fitness center, an 800-seat auditorium, and advanced (for 1992) telecommunications equipment.
When the idea was first proposed, it seemed like a pretty good idea. At the time, the Federal Government was leasing space in 20 buildings throughout Philadelphia, spending $390 million a year in rent. This new building would be able to keep them all in one government-owned space, and, more importantly, keep these offices from moving to other cities. In July of 1992, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service and Administration threw $37 million into the following fiscal year's budget in order to get the party started. By this point, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor and Education, as well as the Interstate Commerce Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, Internal Revenue Service, and General Accounting Office were getting ready for a move into the space as soon as 1994. The budget of the Federal Center went from $150 million to $200 million, and Linpro of Berwyn was chosen as the developer.
Though this was going to be great for the Fed, local unions, and local politicians, the prospect of another one million square feet of office space coming on line during this period of economic slump scared the fuck out of local real estate developers. Tons of space in the new skyscrapers built during the recent boom was empty and the idea of even more space being vacated in favor of this new Federal Center was a horrifying idea. A study by Temple University was commissioned, and the findings, release in March 1993, made the Postal Service and General Services Administration look like a bunch of assholes. They found that the new building would cost the government more than it would save, and that all those government agencies could move into vacant space in two adjacent existing buildings for way less cost.
The GSA and local politicians publicly announced that the Temple study was a bunch of bullshit. Another study from the University of Pennsylvania made no bones about dissing the project, stating, "It's blatantly stupid to build in this market." Though the Postal Service and the GSA insisted that the project would still move forward, the final nail in the coffin came in May of 1992, when U.S. Postmaster General Marvin T. Runyon Jr. basically admitted that they couldn't afford to build the fucker regardless of anything else involved. The bill in Congress that allowed for the construction of the Philadelphia Federal Center also insisted that the Postal Service pay for the project on its own.
Even after the project was declared dead, some politicians argued that the Postmaster General didn't have the authority to declare the project over and that the building could still be construction if the restriction on private funding was lifted. In the end, it still didn't happen, and rightly so. Had it been built, the city's office space recovery would have taken much longer, plus we'd all be stuck with a shitty 12-story triple-wide box along the Schuylkill.
Seven years and two Dead-Ass Proposals for the same site later, the University of Pennsylvania ended up with the 14-acre area after fighting with the USPS for it over the course of 50 years. Today, Penn Park and its parking lot take up the site that was intended for the Philadelphia Federal Center and the city is much better for it. Some proposals deserve to be dead.
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