In the May issue of Philadelphia Magazine–still on newsstands! Print products are great!–Ashley Primis takes readers garden-hopping. ’Tis the season, after all. She chooses five area public gardens that are a must-visit, and it’s hard to disagree with her list. Want to suggest more? Please add them in the comments! 1. THE NEW KID. Chanticleer [...]
Here’s a rara avis: a foreclosed trinity in Queen Village, on Sixth Street between Catherine and Queen. It has two bedrooms and one bathroom, and is trinity-tiny at 624 square feet. Because it’s a Fannie Mae Homepath Property, the three-story home can be purchased with just 3 percent down with special renovation financing. Which is to say it’s being sold As Is.
The first floor has the living room with a fireplace and a rear patio (there’s also a shared courtyard in this gated community). The kitchen is in the basement level. The upstairs has the two bedrooms and the bathroom. Hardwood floors compete for aesthetic dominance with carpeted stairs.
Photo: Dock Street Brewery by Jeff Fusco for GPTMC
An estimated 38 million people visit the Philadelphia area each year. Impressive number, yes. Even more so when compared to San Diego at 32 million, Chicago at 40 million and Toronto at 21 million. But how many of them only visit the Liberty Bell or get a cheesesteak at Pat’s or Geno’s?
The city wants folks to see more than a cracked bells and Cheez Whiz, so a new Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp campaign focuses on promoting 14 specific neighborhoods–though that number is just a start. The featured ’hoods lay near Center City. Short walks or rides of 15 minutes or less for tourists were the max considered for this stage of the promotion, but that won’t be the limit longterm.
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This Merion Station estate for sale once belonged to famed art collector Albert Barnes.
SPOTLIGHT LISTING: Merion Station Estate for Sale Albert Barnes gave many things to the Philadelphia region, most notably his world-class art collection that is at the heart of the Barnes Foundation Museum in Center City. Barnes, a physician and chemist by trade, also had several homes in the area, including this 1914 Merion Station estate [...]
Detail of photo in SuitSupply book, all of whose photos are taken by Carli Hermès.
The European men’s store SuitSupply opened this week in the long-vacant ground floor of the Lanesborough at 16th and Locust. The extremely stylish men’s fashion house from Amsterdam chose Philly after noticing that many of its website orders came from here as well as the fact that Philadelphia men would go to New York just to hit the Manhattan location.
For the 4,300-square-foot store’s grand opening, SuitSupply handed out enormous coffee table books with exquisite images from its advertising campaigns taken by photographer Carli Hermès. Being European, the images feature plenty of nudity and representation of (to put it in Puritanical American terms) sexual congress and lewd behavior. One woman, for instance, can’t seem to keep her hand off her breast. Go for it, honey!
Trout Hall. Photo via VisitPA on Flickr.
Trulia’s Jed Kolko, writing for Quartz, analyzed the age of homes for sale in the U.S. and found that the majority of homes built before 1900 are in New England and upstate New York. But there’s also a dark horse–Allentown, Pa.
A new study by the Center for Housing Policy shows that the Philly Metro area–which includes Camden, NJ, which hardly seems fair–experienced an increased housing cost burden on working households between 2008 and 2011. The good news is that the difference is not enormous, and the difference between 2010 and 2011 was a decrease, though not a statistically significant one. But hey, we’ll take whatever decrease we can get, right?
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Remodeling Inspiration: Cool Front Doors It’s easy to give guests (or potential buyers) a fabulous first impression of your home with a cool front door. The door, after all, can color a person’s opinion of your property before they’ve even stepped inside. A front door has a critical function in a house—it protects homeowners from [...]
The listing says this very sweet house has “an exciting floor plan” that packs in “a variety of surprises.” And that’s no lie: There’s an unexpected length of uneven, exposed brick next to the dining table; pressed concrete floors; a vintage stove; and a “tree-house room.”
But who needs surprises when the rest of the house is so lovely? The period details are knockouts from the first step inside the vestibule, with turquoise and white wall tiles. The hardwood floors are random-width and the wooden stairs, doorframes, indoor window, fireplace and built-ins have a distinctly Mission feel.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the most recognizable symbol of Philadelphia labor protest, the big, inflatable rat, would eventually be modernized. All these years? The animal airbed must have been a bitch to carry and inflate at one protest and another. Now Local 98 brings Philly the Rat-mobile, a minivan whose conversion cost $14,000.
It’s not hard to guess where the Rat-Mobile is headed: to Post Bros. properties. That’s the company that, for the first time in city history, undertook a huge residential project without exclusive use of building trades labor. The ensuing mess is now the stuff of legend, but after an intervention by Philly’s Dr. Drew (aka Bob Brady), relations are better. At least, with everyone except Local 98, whose Rat-Mobile will be hitting the next Post Bros. site hard.
