If you've visited the Ben Franklin Parkway at any point in the last year or so, you've probably noticed the large construction site at 22nd & Hamilton where a crappy Best Western hotel once stood. The hotel got demolished a little over a year ago, and a large mixed-use project called Rodin Square is rising in its place. We first told you about this plan about three years ago and last visited the site this past spring. In March, the project's parking garage had made considerable progress but most of the work on the site was taking place below grade. Only a handful of steel girders were visible at 22nd & Spring Garden.
As you can imagine, things have changed significantly in a little over half a year.
It looks like the building has been completely framed out and you can see window installation has begun. The garage, which was just concrete earlier this year, has been sheathed in some material the distracts the eye from the fact that it'll soon be full of cars.
In case you don't remember, this project will eventually contain 293 apartments and almost 500 parking spots. And oh yeah, the Whole Foods that's currently located on Callowhill Street will move around the block into a new space that exceeds 50K sqft in size. Over 150 of the parking spots will be reserved for the WFM, so maybe parking for the new market will be less of nightmare than parking at the current location. We're hearing that a CVS will take another commercial space here.
The building, designed by MV+A Architects, is gonna look really nice in our opinion.
Considering the speed at which construction has progressed we suspect that the project will wrap up sometime in 2016. If you'd like to track its progress on a daily basis and don't feel like visiting in person, you can watch the Intech construction camera. Ooh, technology is amazing. And so is organic Swiss chard.
(and yes, we did look up whether you're supposed to capitalize the "Swiss" in Swiss chard. It's because we care.)