Well it's nice to see that development plans continue despite a bad economy and such. Though I would love CHOP to build a skyscraper, a tall building is not very convenient as a hospital.

It's good to know that the little CHOP/HUP mini-skyline is going to continue to get better, though the newest building is about as ugly as it gets. The only part about it that sucks is the year of traffic problems we'll have in that spot as a result of the demo/construction. It just recently cleared up around there.

The land they want on the east side of the schuylkill is totally dead.. breathing life into that spot is nothing short of a miracle IMO. They have enough dough to improve the schuylkill waterfront in that spot in the far future as well.

http://nakedphilly.com/fishtown/ekna-green-spaces/
It's nice to see residents of neighborhoods fixing up and making use out of vacant/blighted lots

GSK groundbreaking
 

I know that it sucks that GSK is not staying downtown, but it still is a development, not to mention that the sooner that the navy yard is filled up, hopefully companies will be forced to locate their offices downtown

does anyone have a picture of the existing location that CHOP wants to develop on?

PhillyShark just posted this image.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oR0tYTJWVn.../Picture+3.png
Since I haven't seen any construction above the first level, and this complex is due to open 10/11, does anyone have any idea what this render's for?

^ What in the world is that?

Good grief.Looks like the love child of The Preserve at Chadds Ford and The Old City Lofts.:yuck:

Not a Philly project per se, but still great nonetheless! :tup:


Temple med school to open Pittsburgh campus

By Stacey Burling
Inquirer Staff Writer

Temple University's School of Medicine announced Friday that it is expanding once again - in Pittsburgh.

It is collaborating with West Penn Allegheny Health System to establish a four-year medical campus.

Temple currently has a training program in Pittsburgh for third- and fourth-year medical students at West Penn Allegheny. Thirty students will be accepted into the new program, which is scheduled to start in 2013.

Temple's first class of 30 students at its other satellite medical school campus, in Bethlehem, will begin studies in August.

Larry Kaiser, dean of Temple's medical school, said doctors are more likely to begin practicing in the places where they train, so the outlying campuses will help attract doctors to Pittsburgh and the Lehigh Valley.

"This is to allow us to attract some students from Western Pennsylvania and to educate them, ideally in a place where they will stay and practice," he said.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20...gh_campus.html

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Changing Skyline: A small-scale vision of Philadelphia's future

By Inga Saffron
Inquirer Architecture Critic

In 1960, Philadelphia peered into a crystal ball and tried to divine how the city would look 25 years in the future. The exercise in clairvoyance produced the city's first Comprehensive Plan, an amazing, 375-page document that showed the rough outlines of what would become Penn Center, Market East Station, and the revitalized Society Hill neighborhood.

City planners also misread some key signs. They were way off in their prediction that the city's population would balloon to 2.5 million by 1986. And when they designated land for a new waterfront neighborhood called Penn's Landing, they neglected to recognize that a certain planned interstate highway would fatally wall off the site. Still, if planners had not pursued a few transformative ideas, such as the tunnel projects that paved the way for a single, unified transit system called SEPTA, Philadelphia probably would not count itself today among the nation's survivor cities.

We are once again living in a time of pulse-quickening civic visions, thanks both to Mayor Nutter, who has made good on his campaign pledge to untie the hands of city planners, and the William Penn Foundation, which has picked up the tab for many of the studies. The planning frenzy is a huge turnaround from the Rendell and Street years. It now feels as if a new report comes out every month.

Tuesday, it was the "Philadelphia 2035" vision plan. Modeled on the 1960 Comprehensive Plan, it marks the first time in half a century that Philadelphia's Planning Commission has taken time to sort out its long-range priorities and identify projects key to its future. The 2035 plan will inform every major decision the city makes in the next 25 years, whatever the inclinations of the mayor who succeeds Nutter.

Thinner in bulk than the original - 227 pages - the new comp plan also is pared down in ambition. City planners seem to have taken the opposite tack from that advocated by the great Chicago planner Daniel Burnham, who exhorted his city to "make no little plans. They have no power to stir men's blood."

The 2035 report is a collection of little plans, many of them terrific, but small-scale nonetheless. The future Philadelphia that appears in the planners' crystal ball is a place where people bike to work, shop at neighborhood farmer's markets, dine at the corner brewpub, tap at laptops in the park at the end of the block, and regularly compost their food waste. It sounds like a shinier version of today's Philadelphia, one without the poverty and blight.

http://www.philly.com/philly/columni..._s_future.html

Looks like this is the view from google earth
http://tinyurl.com/3u24gu9

I crossed the old south street bridge daily to go from SWCC to Penn and wondered what the heck the gutted lost building was. The Penn building department has a nice mock-up of the Penn connects / Penn Park complex in the office at 31st & Walnut/Chestnut and last time I stopped in there was no mention of this CHOP project. Nor of the HUP plan also mentioned above. I can check again next week.

Seems to me that the portion in the back, not the newly constructed part, but the rehabbed part will be ready by 10/11.

CHOP is not part of Penn so they would not really have CHOP mock-ups laying around.

As far as the HUP tear down of Penn Tower and garage, that is definite enough. The executives hate that building and many departments have been moving out of it and into Perelman for a couple years now. Penn Tower was built as a short-term solution and has outlived its maintainability.

It was a Senior VP that told me about the hospital build, though it is far enough off that finances could certainly change. A hospital as big as 1200 beds would have to be done in many phases anyway though I would kill for a design - even a napkin sketch though I do not know if they even have one yet. I'm sure folks here can correct me, I would think that we would have to plan all of our needs for hospital prior to engaging an architectural firm. Unless they plan on a space-maximizing box with some dress ups on it and I doubt that will happen. Much of it may depend on how fast we can get everyone out of Penn Tower and that is likely dependent on other projects finishing.

This render is for the Wilke Car dealership site.
Which incidentally will have a Davita Dialysis affiliated with Hanneman on the ground floor.

This may be the ugliest thing I've ever seen. It looks like a design from a third tier Chinese city in 1995. That blue prism is grotesque.

^ That is simply awful. The more I look at it, the more I laugh about how fucking ridiculous it is... or maybe I'm still a bit high.

I just threw up in my mouth.

Inga's gonna have a field day with that abomination.

Come on guys, it's not that bad if you only look at the top half and pretend that it is a 1990's townhouse complex:shrug:

Hey the top houses have good views?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oR0tYTJWVn.../Picture+3.png

I was shown this rendering in late 2006 when I briefly lived at Lofts 640. I forgot all about it until I saw it on here just now. I remember them saying it would have a supermarket on the first floor. I'm sure it's nothing to worry about... the plan has hopefully changed since then.

This is a big problem in my immediate area as well and only a few have been redeveloped, and most are still a terrible eyesore:


Vacant gas stations a challenge for Philly-area developers

By Harold Brubaker
Inquirer Staff Writer

Every town seems to have one: The shell of an old gas station, sometimes recognizable as a former Exxon, Sunoco, Mobil, or Texaco.

From Glen Mills to Mullica Hill, they often sit empty for years, patches of gravel showing where aging underground tanks came out, a succession of "available" or "for sale" signs on display.

That was the case at Ridge Avenue and Hermit Street in Philadelphia's Roxborough neighborhood after a Mobil station on that corner closed in the early 2000s.

The usual assumption is that the cost of environmental cleanup delays redevelopment of these properties, but that's not generally the case, developers said.

"When you see the closed gas stations, they can be on a great corner, but they are just too small to do anything," said Jerry Holtz, vice president of the Provco Group, a Villanova real estate firm that bought the Roxborough Mobil location four years ago.

Provco has signed up a TD Bank branch with drive-through lanes to go in there. Construction is set to begin this month.

To make the Ridge Avenue site big enough for the bank, Provco bought two adjacent houses last year for an additional $850,000. Some neighbors are not thrilled to lose the circa-1885 houses for another bank, but they figure that's better than a vacant service station.

Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/busines...#ixzz1P4VZ4700

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Revising strategies on Delaware waterfront

Philadelphia's waterfront has shifted identity many times since William Penn first stuck his toe in the Delaware, evolving from a pioneer settlement to a bustling port, from an industrial wasteland to a big-box entertainment and retail district.

Now, as Philadelphia wraps up a five-year planning effort, the river is being prepped to take on a new role. A detailed master plan, which will be presented to the public Monday evening, shapes the empty acres along the central Delaware waterfront into the flagship of a 21st-century lifestyle city, with dense neighborhoods of middle-class housing, street-level retail, gracious parks, restored wetlands, and a riverside recreation trail.

The place imagined in the plan bears little resemblance to the celebrated waterfront neighborhoods of Vancouver, British Columbia, and New York's Battery Park City, where a stockade of skyscrapers lines the shore. Philadelphia planners, led by the firms Cooper Robertson and KieranTimberlake, envision something that looks more like a typical Center City block, with a mix of low- and mid-rise buildings, punctuated by the occasional 20-story high-rise.

As the first serious development blueprint for the area since the early '80s, the plan abandons many of the cherished assumptions that have guided Philadelphia's waterfront policies for the last half-century. The plan's shorter skyline is an up-front acknowledgment that the low housing demand in Philadelphia cannot support a continuous wall of urban high-rises.

Penn's Landing, which for so long was the focus of the city's attentions, is also no longer seen as a viable site for a jam-packed mega-development, for much the same reason.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20...cmpid=41144277

Some of those renderings are very neat. I especially like the third one! Also, this link is attached to a propaganda-ish video about the 2035 plan.
http://www.philly.com/philly/home/123554919.html