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PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: Wholesale Wool District Shame Lot
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PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: Wholesale Wool District Shame Lot
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.
36-50 S. Front St. -- Empty Lots are supposed to get smaller, not bigger! Here we have a dastardly empty lot on one of the city's oldest blocks. Though it has existed for quite a long time, the lot has managed to get incrementally larger in recent years due to shitty circumstances. Overall, there's no reason for this empty space to exist ... but it does.
This part of Front Street was one of the original blocks surveyed by Thomas motherfucking Holme himself, a month after William Penn arrived. The site of the lot spent plenty of undocumented time as little cottages in Penn's old "Green Country Town," which was the primordial city/village of Philadelphia. Later on, in the early 19th Century, being near the waterfront led to the building of large (for their time) commercial warehouses that served maritime interests.
In the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, this particular block became home to Philadelphia's "Wholesale Wool District." At the time, Philadelphia was one of the great wool distribution points of the world. If you were an astute buyer of wool, you would go to the site of this empty lot to skip the middleman.
At first, the buildings on this corner would hold numerous wool concerns. David S. Brown Co. eventually became the most important. David S. Brown was one of the most badass businessmen to grace the city of Philadelphia. The New Hampshire native came to Philly as a teenager to join up with his older brothers' dry goods company. Ten years later, his brothers retired and the firm became the David S. Brown Co.
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| Don't let that kind smile fool ya... this guy would beat you to death with a giant wool dildo if you got in his way. |
Brown grew the company from a single shitty office in the Wholesale Wool District to dominance of the entire neighborhood. He combined most of the buildings on the site of the empty lot until they became the David S. Brown complex from which he ran his cotton, iron, wool and textile-printing empire. By the time of his death in 1877, he had numerous mills and factories in Camden, Gloucester City and West Philadelphia, all run from his offices on the site of this empty lot. He was a philanthropist as well, integral to the success of the Franklin Institute, Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Moore College of Art.
By the 1920s, the Wholesale Wool District was over, consumed by the nearby grocery distribution district to the north. The Trell A. James food brokerage company took over the old David S. Brown space and knocked down 36 to 46 S. Front St. for use as a private parking lot for the company ... giving birth to this garbage empty lot. The T.A. James company, one of the city's oldest grocery-related companies, would last all the way into the 1980s.
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| The lot in 1953. Image from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Public Records. |
Flash forward to 1998. This is when the Spear Brothers, owners of the EZ-Park parking empire, purchased the empty lot. Still standing nearby were the beaten remains of 48-50 S. Front and 103 Chestnut. These buildings were highly dilapidated and were the site of numerous failed redevelopment projects over the previous two decades.
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| 48-50 Front in 2005. Image from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Deparment of Public Records. |
The Spears Brothers acquired the properties in 2005, had them declared "imminently dangerous," and asked the Historical Commission for permission to demolish the shit out of 'em two years later. The Philadelphia blogosphere went fucking apeshit over it ... people couldn't believe that in this day and age we wouldn't be able to preserve some of the last early 18th-century commercial waterfront buildings that were still standing. Strangely enough, the demolition was actually allowed to happen and the Wholesale Wool District Shame Lot got even more shameful.
The worst thing about this empty lot is that it's pretty much destined to live forever. Any building that gets proposed for this location needs to be able to match the historical framework of the 100 block of Chestnut Street, which is one of the oldest relatively intact commercial corridors in the city. On top of that, the empty lot is across the street from the giant trench that holds Interstate 95. We're probably not going to see a building proposal on this spot until all the other empty lots in Old City are filled. Even then, why would the Spears Brothers give up a highly successful parking lot? David S. Brown is looking down from Valhalla right now, shitting himself over the shame of this lot. Sorry, Dave.
So a couple of Schnooks are making hundreds of dollars per hour in this lot. Are THEY paying their Fair Share of Taxes? Are ALL Permits and papers up to date? Audit - Audit - Audit.— bad joe s
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