Showdown on Locust Street

In his elegant conference room, mulling this most grievous offense, Daniel Berger raises a question. “I ask you,” he says mournfully, “does this look like it’s appropriate?”

Berger is sitting at the head of a conference table inside the offices of Berger & Montague, the Locust Street law firm where he is a managing shareholder. A chandelier hangs from the room’s high ceiling. The wan midwinter light seeps in the giant bay window overlooking the street.

In the 35 years since Daniel Berger’s father, David, founded Berger & Montague, it has become one of the most prominent plaintiffs’ firms in the nation, litigating complex, massive class-action and antitrust suits. Berger & Montague was part of a team that won a $5 billion verdict against Exxon for the Valdez oil spill. It helped secure compensation for thousands of Holocaust survivors against Swiss banks. And it obtained millions in settlements for investors hurt by accounting scandals involving Rite Aid, Waste Management Inc. and Sunbeam. Such success has been a boon to the firm’s reputation and its bottom line. In October, American Lawyer reported that Berger & Montague was one of the 16 ­highest-­grossing plaintiffs’ firms in the country, estimated to have pulled in more than $50 million in 2003.

But on this February morning, Daniel Berger is not doing well. Still ailing from a bout with the flu, he looks pale and sounds awful — as if his nasal cavity has been stuffed with a drawer’s worth of wet socks. His physical condition seems to be but part of the problem. More obviously irritating is the square hunk of beige stone, the size of a dinner plate, sitting on the table in front of him. It’s a sample of the material that’s supposed to grace the facade of an eight-story condo complex proposed for the site of the old Locust Club, just down the block. Berger points a finger at the hunk of rock and asks again: “Does that look like it’s appropriate for this street?” He answers before there’s a chance to consider the many merits of beige rock. “I don’t think so.”

There have always been disagreements over development, of course. Such disputes are as American as apple pie, Chevrolets and post-game rioting. But in the past nine months, the battle over the Locust Club condos has become one of Philly’s more bizarre pissing matches. It’s neither the most expensive nor the most dramatic project in town. It won’t alter the skyline or affect city planning policy. It will not destroy a civic monument or raze a historic building. Yet the skirmish now involves an unlikely array of the city’s most powerful players. There’s Berger. There’s prominent ­personal-injury attorney Mark Mendel. There’s majordomo attorney Richard Sprague. And there are the city’s two most well-connected law firms: Klehr, Harrison, Harvey, Branzburg & Ellers, and Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll. Even God — via St. Mark’s Church — is in on the action. The involvement of such high-priced hitters usually signals a battle over power, status, or epic piles of cash. But that’s not the case with the Locust Club project. This fight is over something far more consequential: shadows.