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…

About this time last year, Mayor Nutter officially announced plans for the Philadelphia Police to relocate their headquarters to the imperial Liberty Mutual Provident Insurance building, located at 4601 Market St. in West Philadelphia. The announcement proved the police still planned to move in to the building, a move that’s been discussed for years, and one that a 2008 Inquirer article reported would cost around $70M, a number seemingly out of reach for the City to pay.

Provident building

The announcement was included in his 2013-2017 FY Budget, revealed last March. In addition to a $20M investment for a redevelopment of Love Park that will improve access to the recently improved Parkway and the redeveloped Dilworth Plaza, it called for $9M for the relocation of police headquarters to 46th and Market. That’s $61M shy of the reported cost of renovation…

Market Street in West Philadelphia is undergoing a facelift. That means both new towers and new tenants realized through development by major institutions. Example A: the Science Center recently announced plans to construct its first residential tower ever at 3601 Market St., and has already broken ground at 3737 Market St. on an 11-story tower with office space, retail, and new beds for Penn Presbyterian. Example B: The City recently demolished a string of mixed-use buildings near 46th & Market, right next to the El Station to make way for an development from the Enterprise Center.

Tower coming to 3601 Market

And there are more examples. The Police are slated to move into the attractive Provident Mutual building at 46th & Market in the near future. And most recently, the Nicholas and Athena Karabots Pediatric Center, a…

A reader gave us the heads up about some weird structure going up next to the South Street Bridge, on the northern edge of the site that will eventually contain a huge CHOP facility. What the heck is going on here?

From afar

Getting closer

Closest yet

We went up to the two gentlemen working on the structure and asked them exactly what they were doing. They explained that they were working on a “mock up of the CHOP thing.” As they were both twenty feet in the air, we didn’t really have a chance to ask them to elaborate.

So… look out Naval Square. There’s a mock up of the CHOP thing coming soon to your backyard. Do not panic. All is well. Probably.

A thread popped up on Philadelphia Speaks the other day, wherein someone posted that they had heard a rumor that a Trader Joe’s could be taking over the Superfresh location at 5th & Spruce. This could certainly be a legit possibility or it could equally end up simply being a rumor that never comes to pass. Whichever it is, it brings about an interesting conversation about whether we have enough access to grocery items in greater Center City.

Superfresh

If you ask us, it seems that 10th & South is where the rubber meets the road in this town for groceries. Convenient for pedestrians and with easy parking, a Superfresh and a Whole Foods provide thousands of area residents access to groceries. Many people even visit both stores in one trip to this…

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.…