The Peirce School, located at 2400 Christian St. and closed since 2007, sits on a 35K sqft. lot and the building itself is more than 50K sqft. According to the Notebook, the district voted last April to sell the building that once housed Peirce. To this point, the building has not gone on the open market to our knowledge, but its safe to assume that the cash-strapped PSD will put her on the market in the near future. Which gets us thinking- could this be the best privately owned parcel left in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood? The other day, we looked at the Catharine St. YWCA which recently went on the market for a crazy $2.2 million, and sits on a lot one-third the size. Looking at a comparable property, the building that houses the Independence Charter School sold in 2007 for $6 million. That said, it’s impossible to guess the asking price for Peirce. While we don’t believe that 16th and Lombard can be talked about in the same breath as 24th and Christian with regard to real estate prices, the School District’s behavior simply cannot be predicted.

So let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that the building goes on the market for a somewhat reasonable price. Seems like a no-brainer condo conversion, right? Or think of the number of $600K homes that could be built on such a huge lot. While those would seem to be appropriate real estate uses, we could also get behind a local charter school opening in that building, especially with the specter of E.M. Stanton School at 16th and Christian Sts. possibly closing in the near future. With Charter School management being well outside our area of knowledge, we don’t know what that would entail, but it sure sounds like a nice idea in a vacuum. Hey, it worked at 16th and Lombard, right?

And while we’re talking about the School District, check this out. Seems like our goodly Superintendent was supposed to get some new perks but then didn’t. Well, at least not yet.

Lot next to the school