The Frankford Chocolate Factory

May is Preservation Month. How are you celebrating? Well to kick it off, developer and failed City Council candidate Ori Feibush began demolition on one of the last remaining Civil War era factories in Philadelphia, the Frankford Chocolate Factory, not six months after it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. A little over a year ago he demolished the Royal Theater, one of the oldest black theaters in the nation, also on the Register. The latter was allowed by a technical loophole in the Register that often only requires salvaging a facade. The former, pure greed and spite.

When Feibush ran for City Council back in 2015 he ran on a platform of unapologetic gentrification. He lost because the only yuppies who would have voted for him in his Point Breeze district are transplants out-priced from somewhere else, still registered to vote in already pillaged neighborhoods like Brooklyn's Park Slope. Cozying up to six decade City Council veteran and resident crone Anna Verna probably didn't help his bid. As a developer who is pro-construction to a fault, it's odd that he aligned himself with the woman proudly responsible for the Stadium District's longtime lack of anything but stadiums and parking lots. 

Of course this isn't completely Feibush's fault. Developers are cold and calculated, money is money, business is business. They're why we have organizations like the National Register, the Historical Commission, and City Hall's recently established done-nothing Preservation Task Force. But where developers fail to recognize the long-term value of history, bureaucratic government agencies are staffed by flunkies waiting in line for a pension job at the DMV. They push paper around for months while developers open up historic properties to nature's elements and let them rot just in time for some sycophant from L&I to slap a red and white "condemned" sticker on the door.

Last year Mayor Kenney, who himself ran on a promise to end historic demolition, created the Preservation Task Force which immediately presided over some of the city's biggest losses. He solicited advise from the National Register which has grown so frustrated with the city's unwillingness to heed anything they have to offer that they don't bother returning our phone calls. He declared a "Preservation Crisis," seemingly for the sake of declaring something.

All of this right after UNESCO named Philadelphia North America's first World Heritage City.

Every public organization charged with protecting the city's portfolio of historic properties has turned into demolition's loudest advocate, and the private ones are stuck with a backlog of unprotected buildings while they try to save the protected ones crumbing under the city-enabled wrecking ball. That is when they're not being sued by developers, stuck in court, defending the right to do their jobs. 

Feibush attributed the abandoned Frankford Chocolate Factory to all of the ills in Point Breeze and Graduate Hospital over the last two decades. As if one block sealed so tight it's never been tagged by graffiti artists was solely responsible, or had anything to do with, the neighborhood's blighted past. Washington Avenue is industrial, so industrial the factory he's demolishing hasn't even yet been rezoned for his proposed project. Big rigs roar past spewing diesel fumes, it's lined with gravel warehouses, suburban-style shops, parking lots, and truncated by a crumbling concrete viaduct. Certainly these contribute to the neighborhood's lack of residential appeal, not to mention neo-Jim Crow-ism that manages to keep the area as poor and poorly educated as possible. 

Apparently he thinks one block of "luxury" apartments and townhomes will remedy fifty years of housing inequality, but what he builds and his firm OCF Realty manages, is the flip-side of urban blight, or just a more insidious kind. Low quality, cheaply constructed McTownhomes crammed with superfluous amenities like granite and stainless steel at $700K a pop, each outfitted with ample parking so residents never have to mingle with neighbors who've lived there longer than Feibush's personal prejudices can stand. 

Let's not pretend race isn't a factor. Developers like Feibush are just too two dimensionally minded to see where race and class intersect. He's systematically removing everyone who can't afford one of his properties, and in Point Breeze those people are black. The Frankford Chocolate Factory could have been converted into art studios or, dare I say, affordable housing. Feibush could have gotten a handsome kick back from the state for either, not to mention points for a future run for office. But he knows as well as his yuppie posse that people who need a garage for their weekly excursions to Target, Target, Target, or Whole Foods dread living near anything subsidized, even if the tenants are war veterans or retirees. Ironic considering how many of them have "Namaste" slapped to the bumper of their SUVs.

No architects have stepped to the plate with a rendering for what's to replace the Frankford Chocolate Factory, but be sure to expect more of the same. Post-post-"modern" townhomes with concrete causeways and garages where yards would logically be, an apartment building reminiscent of the new beast at Broad and Washington, all clad in randomly colored plastic panels that mask exactly how uninspired the buildings actually are.

They'll be pitched as "luxury," demand a price that makes rational people scratch their heads and wonder why anyone wouldn't rather spend less money on house in Society Hill, and constructed to last exactly ten years. The purchase prices will be justified with ten year tax abatements ensuring residents will contribute absolute zero to the community before their mashed potato board palaces need to be demolished and replaced. Funny how these human kale chips hate subsidized housing, except when it comes with a private swimming pool and in-house Starbucks, and is only available to those making well over six figures. 

What truly sucks is that in fifty years - if our country hasn't suffocated under the waste of our excess - is that cities will be riddled with the pockmarks of demolished 21st Century construction. It's bad enough we don't keep our bloated cars and gigantic flat screen televisions for more than a few years. Who knew money grubbing development firms like Toll Brothers, and those Feibush so wishes he could play golf with, would find a way to make cheap construction the vogue? A lifetime's single biggest investment is now every bit as disposable as an iPhone. Thank HGTV and Bravo's Million Dollar Listing (remember when Bravo showed operas?) for convincing latte sucking Netflix zombies that a house is nothing more than a short-term sensory deprivation chamber designed to be flipped the second the mortgage goes through. Anyone else miss when houses were homes and lived in long enough to watch your kids grow up with marks on the door frame? 

The Frankford Chocolate Factory could have been this, and even more. Over a century ago when it was constructed, buildings were built under the assumption that they would never be demolished. Feibush could have profited off its conversion into lofts and shops, even lined its north face with modern townhomes. Eric Blumenfeld did it with the Divine Lorraine and he's doing it with the Metropolitan Opera House, to meticulous detail. Feibush is just a small-fry, a Donald Trump wannabe, a mini-mogul with an ego big enough to run for City Council, and too deluded to realize he lost because long-time Point Breeze residents are wise enough to spot a villain. 

Unfortunately for those of us who get Philadelphia, history, and cities in general, City Hall has rolled out the red carpet for urban newbies and late-generation Millennials who see it as nothing but a bedroom community and "cheap" real estate, the "Sixth Borough," a suburb that might as well be Newark, NJ. Feibush is no doubt an unequivocal dirt bag, but he's doing his job within the confines of the law and marketplace. Those who refuse to recognize that dense neighborhoods require individual scarifies for the collective betterment of the city, they're the ones who bring down buildings like the Frankford Chocolate Factory. They'd rather have the cold isolation of large townhomes and Soviet style apartment blocks than anything integrated into the unfamiliar and unexpected world outside their sterile cubicles. 

We like to think future generations will look back and marvel at all of the technological advances we've made, but they'll probably just wonder how people so wealthy and privileged managed to built and live in such soul-sucking shit-cans. Or maybe developers will find a way to make construction even cheaper and more profitable, and the future will look at the soggy remains of Feibush's garbage-architecture the way we revere the lost works of Frank Furness and Willis G. Hale. Maybe, but I would like to think the well of American standards has a bottom, and I hope with whatever replaces the Frankford Chocolate Factory we've finally scraped it.