The Rebirth of North Broad
“I think it’s wonderful,” Savin says, “because it’s bringing people back into the neighborhood and building it up. It costs a lot of money to live in this neighborhood now.”
Flight doesn’t always require a pale modifier. Savin watched for decades as anyone who could flee this neighborhood did. “Luckily,” he says, “they come back when it’s time to bury their people. Some of them started saying that it’d be nice to see everyone when it wasn’t a funeral, so I started throwing a block party here once a year. We get 300 people.”
We talk a little more, get a tour of the warren of rowhomes that have been combined for his business, then end up on the street outside. It’s late in the afternoon now, and Savin keeps asking if we’d like someone to drive us the few blocks back to our apartment, and we keep saying no.
The fact is, there are no other pedestrians in sight.
“Once the work time is over, there’s nobody walking around here,” Savin says. “That’s different, because there used to be people going to Linton’s. Going up to the jazz club. It was busy. There’s not that many jobs around here now. After four-thirty, five, it’s pretty clean on the street.”
"NOW THIS IS a great study in gentrification,” says Eric Blumenfeld, turning a corner in his Porsche Carrera from a shabby 16th Street onto a block of North Street that’s been entirely transformed with new townhouses into something out of Society Hill, Philadelphia’s first great gentrified enclave.
Blumenfeld somehow manages to seem gentle and pugnacious at the same time. He was a boxer when he was young, and he readily admits that when he plays basketball at the Sporting Club at the Bellevue, he tends to foul a lot. The son of well-known developer Jack Blumenfeld, Eric studied English and philosophy in college and managed to pull the family business out of bankruptcy in the ’80s. He meets me in the lobby of Lofts 640 on a morning with sleet turning the streets into a skating rink, and insists on going for this ride.
I’d been on this block a few days before with Councilman Clarke, who seemed to view gentrification as a double-edged sword. He spoke with great eagerness of empty lots that looked on the verge of sprouting something new. But he also talked of the bill he’d introduced into Council to create a “homestead exemption” to freeze property taxes for longtime residents of this soon-to-change neighborhood.
To a developer like Blumenfeld, gentrification is the primary goal.
“Fairmount was pushing toward Broad,” he says, “and now with the Lofts, Broad Street is pushing back. When this becomes a 24-hour community, with people living here, that really bridges the gap.” Some of those new townhouses on North Street, he says proudly, sold for over $1 million.
For the next few hours we drive and park, drive and park, going as far afield as an abandoned factory at 20th and Allegheny, where Blumenfeld introduces me to his main theory of development: “It looks so bad, it’s perfect!”
We take a tour of the unused balconies of the Metropolitan Opera House, which sit like Roman ruins above a huge blue tarp that protects a church occupying the renovated ground floor. We visit a day care center and charter school in the old Traffic Court building, run by People for People, a neighborhood organization affiliated with the Greater Exodus Baptist Church. Blumenfeld doesn’t want to develop every building north of Spring Garden, but he has plenty in his sights.
We’re finally getting back to 640 North Broad when he says, “The area in front of us” — south toward City Hall — “that’s just a slam dunk. It’s just going to evolve.
“I suspect,” he adds, “that the Inquirer building will be converted in our lifetime to residential use. My God! Can you imagine that building as all retail and restaurants on Broad, and people living upstairs? Nobody believed in this corridor for residential living, but when the Inquirer building gets converted at the end, people will see it.”
Even to the confident developer, the growth from his Lofts 640 building north is less a slam-dunk and more of a tough three-point shot from the corner. “It’s nine-tenths of a mile to Temple,” he tells me. “Historically, Temple has taken the stance that they live life as a fortress — that’s how they could handle their policing power. But there’s a whole new cast of characters there, and they really see this gateway from Center City to the university.”
Flight doesn’t always require a pale modifier. Savin watched for decades as anyone who could flee this neighborhood did. “Luckily,” he says, “they come back when it’s time to bury their people. Some of them started saying that it’d be nice to see everyone when it wasn’t a funeral, so I started throwing a block party here once a year. We get 300 people.”
We talk a little more, get a tour of the warren of rowhomes that have been combined for his business, then end up on the street outside. It’s late in the afternoon now, and Savin keeps asking if we’d like someone to drive us the few blocks back to our apartment, and we keep saying no.
The fact is, there are no other pedestrians in sight.
“Once the work time is over, there’s nobody walking around here,” Savin says. “That’s different, because there used to be people going to Linton’s. Going up to the jazz club. It was busy. There’s not that many jobs around here now. After four-thirty, five, it’s pretty clean on the street.”
"NOW THIS IS a great study in gentrification,” says Eric Blumenfeld, turning a corner in his Porsche Carrera from a shabby 16th Street onto a block of North Street that’s been entirely transformed with new townhouses into something out of Society Hill, Philadelphia’s first great gentrified enclave.
Blumenfeld somehow manages to seem gentle and pugnacious at the same time. He was a boxer when he was young, and he readily admits that when he plays basketball at the Sporting Club at the Bellevue, he tends to foul a lot. The son of well-known developer Jack Blumenfeld, Eric studied English and philosophy in college and managed to pull the family business out of bankruptcy in the ’80s. He meets me in the lobby of Lofts 640 on a morning with sleet turning the streets into a skating rink, and insists on going for this ride.
I’d been on this block a few days before with Councilman Clarke, who seemed to view gentrification as a double-edged sword. He spoke with great eagerness of empty lots that looked on the verge of sprouting something new. But he also talked of the bill he’d introduced into Council to create a “homestead exemption” to freeze property taxes for longtime residents of this soon-to-change neighborhood.
To a developer like Blumenfeld, gentrification is the primary goal.
“Fairmount was pushing toward Broad,” he says, “and now with the Lofts, Broad Street is pushing back. When this becomes a 24-hour community, with people living here, that really bridges the gap.” Some of those new townhouses on North Street, he says proudly, sold for over $1 million.
For the next few hours we drive and park, drive and park, going as far afield as an abandoned factory at 20th and Allegheny, where Blumenfeld introduces me to his main theory of development: “It looks so bad, it’s perfect!”
We take a tour of the unused balconies of the Metropolitan Opera House, which sit like Roman ruins above a huge blue tarp that protects a church occupying the renovated ground floor. We visit a day care center and charter school in the old Traffic Court building, run by People for People, a neighborhood organization affiliated with the Greater Exodus Baptist Church. Blumenfeld doesn’t want to develop every building north of Spring Garden, but he has plenty in his sights.
We’re finally getting back to 640 North Broad when he says, “The area in front of us” — south toward City Hall — “that’s just a slam dunk. It’s just going to evolve.
“I suspect,” he adds, “that the Inquirer building will be converted in our lifetime to residential use. My God! Can you imagine that building as all retail and restaurants on Broad, and people living upstairs? Nobody believed in this corridor for residential living, but when the Inquirer building gets converted at the end, people will see it.”
Even to the confident developer, the growth from his Lofts 640 building north is less a slam-dunk and more of a tough three-point shot from the corner. “It’s nine-tenths of a mile to Temple,” he tells me. “Historically, Temple has taken the stance that they live life as a fortress — that’s how they could handle their policing power. But there’s a whole new cast of characters there, and they really see this gateway from Center City to the university.”
Posted by Anonymous | Nov. 6, 2007 at 2:12 PM