If developers’ vision comes to fruition, Queen Village will soon be home to a new upscale boutique hotel. Last summer, we wondered what was in store at the northwest corner of 5th & Bainbridge when we noticed the John C Paul and Sons paper company that operated out of a ground-floor location for decades had closed.

Former store

Last we heard, the ownership group had taken the property, which stretches from 501-11 Bainbridge Street and north along 5th Street to Kater, off the market after its $3.1M asking price found no takers. But last October, Zaken Realty Trust acquired the property for $2.2M. We’re fairly confident that the Zaken in question is Shimi Zaken of Atrium Developments, an architect we’ve written about numerous times in the past.

A huge footprint

The owners…

Last August, we told you about some interesting construction activity on the 1300 block of S. Howard St., as a warehouse picked up an additional two stories and the warehouse next door got torn down. You can see, the change on the block has been fairly dramatic.

In the past

Current view

In the photo above, you may notice the presence of zoning signs which relate to a zoning hearing that took place last week. At the hearing, developers were given approval for the construction of six new homes on this lot, which stretches from Howard to Hancock Street. From the looks of it, three homes will front each street. Each home will have a roof deck and garage parking.

Looking through to Hancock

The other sign on the property indicates the possibility…

Visit the Ralph Brooks Tot Lot at 20th & Tasker today and the first thing you notice is a chilling mural containing dozens of names of neighborhood victims of violence. It’s perhaps appropriate that such a mural would exist next door to this twenty-five year old park, which was established in response to an incident involving a six-year-old, to attempt to provide a safe haven for kids in the neighborhood.

The mural

After you get past the mural, you quickly realize that the park itself has seen better days, with cracked pavement, no nets on the basketball hoops, and surrounded by vacant land. But if

In 2011, the Philadelphia Housing Authority took the important, necessary, and long-overdue step of admitting that they were in way over their heads. No, we’re not referring to their former Executive Director who just put his Naval Square home up for rent, we’re talking about their auctioning off of hundreds of surplus scattered-site properties. As we told you back then, PHA owns about 14,000 properties in Philadelphia. At that time, that number included just over 2,000 blighted and vacant properties that PHA simply didn’t have the funds to bring back into active use. After two auctions, they still have about 1,500 such properties, just sitting around rotting.

Auctioned off last time

Which brings us to the news of the day- another PHA auction is coming soon, once again organized by the Max Spann Auction…

Last week, we told you about a couple of grants that recently came through for projects along the Delaware River. Today, we have news about the completion of the first quarter-mile of the Delaware River Trail, a path along the river that will ultimately extend over a five-mile stretch of waterfront from Oregon to Allegheny Avenue. Running both on-road, as this first section does, and off-road along the river, the Delaware River Trail will, once complete, connect with other regional trails at its northern and southern end.

The whole trail

The first section

The Delaware River Trail, designed by the RBA Group, is the brainchild of the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, and a critical element of the Master Plan for the Central Delaware. And the opening of…

For the last few years, Arcadia Boutique has held down the retail space at 265 S. 20th St., right on the corner of 20th & Manning, right in the middle of one of our favorite commercial corridors in town. This store, along with their other location in Northern Liberties, offered shoppers clothing, accessories, and gifts with a focus on featuring sustainable designers and “eco-fashion.” But in the middle of last month, Arcadia’s Rittenhouse location closed its doors for good.

The closed store

According to a sign in the window, the space is currently available for sale or lease, though it’s not presently listed anywhere we were able to find online. And as we carelessly neglected to take down the phone number on the sign, we couldn’t even tell you asking prices at this time. Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop us…