Last night at the Philadelphia School, representatives from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Cooper Robertson and Partners held a community meeting to discuss plans for CHOP’s significant project coming soon to Schuylkill Avenue. This presentation represented the fourth large community meeting regarding this development, and included some details that came to light for the very first time.

The site

To review from the last time we covered this project almost a year ago, CHOP intends to construct a huge new facility just below the South Street Bridge on nine acres of land currently occupied by Springfield Beer Distributor and the former JFK Vocational High School. Built over four phases, the facility will mostly house clinical research and operations for the hospital, in a gross development area that will exceed two million square feet. Phase one, a…

If you’ve lived in Philadelphia for decades, you may remember the days before the Spectrum, when the Warriors and then the 76ers played their home games in the old Civic Center, and Convention Hall was home to the Flower Show. When the Convention Center was completed in 1993, the handsome collection of old buildings which included the old Commercial Museum became obsolete. By 2007, the entire complex was demolished.

Old Civic Center

From above

In 2008, the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, located on the easternmost end of the site, was completed. Until recently, the Perelman Center has sat next to a vacant lot… but not anymore. We stopped by the site last week and spotted workers at the tail end of the biggest excavation project ever in Philadelphia.…

Last month, representatives from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia presented plans for their Schuylkill Avenue site to an overstuffed room of community members and stakeholders. We tried to get into this meeting, but alas, there were too many bodies inside and we were forced to stand in the hallway, unable to hear much of anything. Thankfully, SOSNA had some representation at this meeting, and was kind enough to summarize the main takeaways on their website.

A little background- you may recall, we brought this site to your attention a little less than a year ago, when several of the buildings surrounding Springfield Beer Distributor were being torn down. At the time, we told you that the 9 acre plot on Schuylkill Ave will include the Springfield Beer site as well as the former JFK Vocational High School. At the time, we…