For many years, Walnut Street has been Center City's ritziest commercial corridor, the place that every high-end retailer wants to sell their wares. Still, a few holdouts have stubbornly remained, resembling a sore thumb more and more as time has passed. Several tenants at the attractive building at 1501 Walnut St. were holdovers from another era, with a small corner store holding down the corner of 15th & Walnut and then a tailor shop and a shoe repair place as you went up 15th Street.
But time she is a cruel mistress, and change is the only constant. Last year, PREIT bought the building, and all of those businesses are now but a memory. If you pass by the building today, you'll see that the first and second floors have been gutted. Looking at the old storefronts and window treatments, you'll agree that this is a good thing.
MSC is on the job of leasing out the building, and they've put together a packet that advertises all of the commercial space that's coming available. They're chopping the first floor space into two retail spaces, with a 1,000-1,200 sqft space at the corner and an 800-1000 sqft space on 15th Street. The very back of the first floor will be used to access the 2nd floor retail space and the office space on floors 3-5. Once the project is finished, the building will have an updated look:
Of course, even with these updates, the building will still look positively quaint when compared with the new glass box building across the street. In the fall, the last time we looked into the future home of the Cheesecake Factory, the building was still getting framed out in steel. Now, even though there's still a great deal of interior work to be done, we have a pretty good idea of what the place is going to look like when it's finished.
We still wish it was ten times taller, but we can't deny that this new building looks pretty cool.