skip to main |
skip to sidebar
It looks like Mom's Organic Market will be moving into the 11th Street component of the massive East Market project currently under development on the Girard Trust Block. While it's great that Philadelphia will finally have a supermarket on par with Whole Foods, or even SuperFresh, closer to the core of its residents, what's even more exciting is the facelift the former Family Court Building will receive.
Once a warehouse for Snellenberg's Department Store, the old Family Court Building is faded and its facade is cracked and worn. Rather than restore the building's exterior, developers will be refacing it to include modern elements and large windows.
The new skin could have been as dramatic as that at Goldtex Apartments, but given the sum of the parts of the overall project, it doesn't have to be. The high-rise that will be anchoring 11th and Market looks sexy enough to carry the entire block. By slicing the block bound by Market and Ludlow in half for a pedestrian promenade, East Market isn't afraid of sacrificing land for a quality experience.
They're carrying that theme over to the old Family Court building by opening up a good amount of the building's square footage to the outdoors. Center City's most exciting project (sorry, CITC) keeps getting more exciting.
The new Family Court building at 15th and Arch is nearly complete. With its glass in place it's time to
announce, this building is as bad as it could be.
Okay, maybe not that bad. It could be surrounded by a parking lot. But remember when government's built the best stuff?
There is a vast difference between an ugly building and one that doesn't make sense, and the new FCB is the latter. Philadelphia is home to hundreds of ugly buildings: Robinson's Department Store, the Roundhouse, even the PSFS Building and City Hall in a certain light could be considered "ugly." But they're examples of well executed architecture and designs that made a statement and have found their way back to a positive light.
The FCB will never be so ugly it's great. Its greenish blue panels echo the color of bins found in government warehouses and postal bathrooms. It's a color that no one has ever used outside of a government facility. And for some reason, government facilities still use it, apparently even as a design element.
It's thin metallic lines separating the windows would have been a good choice for a relatively short building amongst skyscrapers. They could carry the eye upward creating the illusion that it's much taller than it is. But they're broken up by thick horizontal lines every at every other floor, interrupting the building's upward flow.
And then there's the entrance, which looks like a suburban office building tucked into the corner of its only slightly more interesting entirety. The whole thing looks like an 80s era fax machine. I assume that's why it's got a handle on the top of it.
Caught up in the exciting skyscraping proposals along Vine Street, the Schuylkill River, and other nonsense, I completely missed Kimpton's plan to renovate Philadelphia's Family Court building as a boutique hotel, solidifying an iconic corner of our landmark Logan Square.
With plans for a highrise apartment at 1601 Vine and Chinatown's Eastern Tower nearing reality, and the LDS's Mormon Temple and Goldtext Apartments under construction, dreams of capping the Vine Street Expressway as a means to entice investors seem to be stepping aside for developers who don't see the canyon as an obstacle.
Truthfully it isn't. From Portland to New York, many cities have highway crevasses cutting through dense neighborhoods that have succeeded without a Big Dig. If skyscrapers flanked the banks of the VSE, crossing it would be akin to walking across an inner city boulevard. It's no wider than the Ben Franklin Parkway.
While Vine Street seems to be organically evolving into such a grand boulevard, one headache still stands in front of Kimpton's Hotel Family Court, right in front of it. For years, Food Not Bombs has provided free food for the homeless atop one of the VSE's caps, a should-be handsome park facing Logan Square and the Basilica of Saint Peter and Paul.
Things are about to change.
Food Not Bombs has to apply for a daily permit from the city to provide the picnics. If they've been going rogue and evading the city, Kimpton will make a case of it. If the picnics are on the up and up, permits in place, Kimpton can apply for the same permit. If they beat Food Not Bombs to the punch for a month or two they'll frustrate them into relocating.
Of course that may not even be necessary. If Kimpton invests in renovating the park, and being the hotel's "front yard" they'd be eagerly willing, the city may give them preferential treatment. That route isn't entirely ethical, but neither is Food Not Bombs' admission of using the hungry homeless to advance causes that have nothing to do with hunger or homelessness in Philadelphia.
