About a month ago, roughly 1,300 GlaxoSmithKline workers vacated the building at 16th & Vine that was specifically built for their company fourteen years ago. With their move to a new (and really nice) facility at The Navy Yard, they left behind 225K sqft of office space on the edge of Philadelphia’s central business district that owners Liberty Property Trust had to somehow find a way to lease. Instead of attempting to find new tenants in a lousy market for office space, it seems they’re opting to sell the building.

Glaxo building

According to the Inquirer, Liberty has an agreement in place to sell the building to non-profit DeMedici II for a measly $29M. After the sale is completed, DeMedici II will perform a $10-12M renovation to the building, and lease…

As you’ve surely noticed over the last decade, Wawa has been making a steady trek away from the corner store model that we’ve come to know and love over the years, and toward a suburban concept, including the sale of reasonably priced gasoline. While that’s well and good for our parents and lame friends in the suburbs, it’s made for a disappointing situation in Center City, where we’ve seen Wawa locations disappear from 17th and Walnut, 20th and Chestnut, and 20th and Locust just to name the locations in the Rittenhouse neighborhood. And when we saw the Wawa at 1701 Arch St., in the under-construction Robert Morris Building close down a few months ago, you can imagine we were skeptical of the announced plans that the store was simply experiencing “renovations.”

But as a…

Guess not

According to a report today on Philly.com, the American Commerce Center, planned to be the tallest building in Philadelphia, ain’t gonna happen. The 60K sqft lot on which it was to have been built, 1800 Arch St., was purchased earlier this month by Liberty Property Trust. Liberty, who developed the Comcast Center and the Navy Yard locally, paid about $40M for the lot, a sizeable premium over the $32M that seller MEPT paid in 2007.

Could be something better

The article went on to speculate that the site might be a good location for a second office building for Comcast, who currently resides across the street in what is currently tallest building in town. It’s tough to see how the numbers would work for Comcast to…

Yesterday, we noticed that fences have gone up around the nearly one-hundred year old Bob Morris building at 17th and Arch Sts. Purchased for $6.5M in 2004 by 1701 Partners LP, the building’s interior was demoed in 2007 in anticipation of a new Kimpton Hotel leasing the building. In the meantime, 2008 happened, and the hotel ain’t coming.

According to a press release from Federal Capital Partners, a DC based company providing some financing for this project, the fourteen story building will contain 111 luxury apartments along with a media center and a small gym. There will be retail space on the first floor, but no word on tenants just yet. With the Comcast Building across the street, and additional development possibly coming to the surrounding blocks of Arch St., these apartments are in a very desirable location. Whether the apartments themselves or the facade restoration…