There are some obvious redevelopment sites that we’ve been speculating about for years, so you’d think we’d be very excited to learn about a proposal for one of the biggest and best located. Instead, the news that CHOP is planning a massive garage at 3000 Grays Ferry Ave. leaves us feeling dejected. The concrete structure will include 1005 spots and serve as park-and-ride collection point for hospital staff, who will ride an employee shuttle to the CHOP campus in University City.

The size of the project triggers the Civic Design Review process, with the development team scheduled to appear at the May meeting of the CDR committee. As we’ve communicated in the past, the CDR committee lacks any authority to compel adjustments, let alone veto a proposal. Incidentally, L&I is in a similar situation in this case.

We’ve been screaming from the mountaintops for years, begging the powers that be to remap Washington and Grays Ferry Avenues. Historically, both of these corridors have been home to heavy industry. As Center City and University City have grown over the last couple decades, these avenues have become increasingly desirable, providing easy access to Center City and West Philadelphia while providing larger underused parcels, ripe for large-scale development. Regrettably, most properties on these corridors remain zoned for industrial use, which opens the door to intense community and political involvement in each project, injecting groupthink over city planning principals, and NIMBYism over progress.

Hilariously (or maybe tragically), 3000 Grays Ferry Ave. is zoned CMX-3, which is extremely well suited to by-right mixed-use development. This is the case, despite the fact that just about every other parcel from here to Kimball Street is zoned for industrial use, prohibiting apartments. If there was ever going to be a property that went mixed-use in this area, this was going to be the one. A speculative rendering of a possible multi-family building on the site was included in the marketing from before CHOP bought the site.

In what we can only describe as a flaw in the Zoning Code, the CMX-3 zoning designation ALSO allows parking garages to be built by-right. It’s one of the only commercial designations that are this permissive for parking garages, with most requiring a zoning variance or a special exemption. Thanks to this situation, instead of providing Grays Ferry Avenue with a plug and play property that would add residents and commerce to a growing neighborhood, the zoning of the property will result in a massive parking garage across the street from homes and a recreation center. At a time when the city and state are improving the D Finnegan Playground as part of the Rebuild initiative, we’d suggest that a new parking garage next door is rather counterintuitive.

Most of the cars will enter and exit the garage via Grays Ferry Avenue, which will create a challenge for cyclists using the recently improved bike lane on Grays Ferry. As we can see in the plans from Pennoni Associates and THA, the garage will also include an entrance and exit off 30th Street, right next to the aforementioned playground. This is also where the shuttle bus will pick up the employees parked in the garage for the brief drive over to CHOP.

With one of the adjacent blocks a park and large surface parking lots for the suburban style supermaket across the street, the new structure will be extremely visually prominent. This is probably the one thing that we don’t mind, as a seven-story apartment building would have been a-ok with us.

Fresh off the news that Jefferson Hospital is considering moving their headquarters out of Philadelphia, we appreciate that CHOP is willing to spend tens of millions of dollars investing in a future in the city. But with their campus already in one of the more transit accessible pockets of the city, it’s extremely disappointing that the hospital is going in this direction at this location. With local urbanist group 5th Square organizing a petition against the project, we’re expecting a spirited CDR meeting on May 6th. Lively though it may be, we don’t expect it will result in any meaningful changes to the plan. Short of a massive negative response from the surrounding community combined with efforts from the district councilmember’s office, we would wager that this project will be moving forward soon, whether we like it or not.