It was a little over a year ago that we gave you the lowdown on a proposed parking garage from CHOP at 3000 Grays Ferry Ave., lamenting the by-right project for a host of reasons. We complained about the anti-urbanist nature of the garage, promoting car transit for hospital employees over the use of public transportation, bikes, etc. Along those lines, the ingress and egress from the proposed garage was going to present problems for cyclists on Grays Ferry Avenue. The monolithic structure was also going to be a rough sight for the adjacent residential blocks and anyone passing by on this mixed-use corridor. Alas, the project was permitted by right, so no amount of kvetching on our part was going to get in the way of this thing.

Anyways, construction started a few months ago and if you pass by the property today, you’ll notice that it’s starting to go vertical.

The core of our critique was that the parking garage felt like a very backward looking project, cleaving to the corridor’s industrial-leaning history rather than looking forward to a possible transition, akin to what we’re seeing on nearby Washington Avenue. We’ve wondered for years whether a remapping of Grays Ferry Avenue might result in the construction of new mixed-use projects, given that it provides easy access to both Center City, University City, and I-76. Even with the presence of a newish storage facility at 3114 Grays Ferry Ave. and plans for another storage facility at 3145 Grays Ferry Ave. which haven’t come to pass, we’ve still held out hope for a better future for this corridor.

As the zoning has not changed here, we’ve only seen a handful of residential projects on the Grays Ferry corridor. But we could be in for some projects of a different variety in the near future that could dramatically change the scene on this stretch.

Apparently, business is quite good at the Secure Space and other developers are eyeing multiple properties nearby to expand the self storage footprint in this area. On one side of the street, developers have plans for a self storage facility at 2900 Grays Ferry Ave., a 58K sqft property that was once home to the local post office and is today home to a breakfast spot and a Paws clinic. Down the block at 3111 Grays Ferry Ave., right across from the Secure Space, we are hearing buzz about another storage facility for a property that was most recently used for car repair and parking.

The big kahuna, as it were, is the plan for yet another storage facility at 2815 Grays Ferry Ave., which is home to the Grays Ferry Shopping Center. While the plans for the previous properties would entail a vertical facility, the plans for the shopping center call for a mix of a vertical building and drive-up units as well. This parcel is huge, measuring over 400K sqft, so there’s plenty of room for plenty of storage. This will be bad news indeed for the Fresh Grocer, the post office, and the liquor store in this shopping center. Who knows, perhaps the plans will maintain some commercial presence that will at least allow a few businesses to remain here.

Whether it’s one or two or three more storage facilities that end up coming to fruition, change is in the air for Grays Ferry Avenue, and it’s not the kind of change we were hoping we’d see. A year ago, we were worried that the CHOP garage would stick out like a sore thumb among low-rise industrial buildings, a shopping center, and the homes in the neighborhood to the south. With several new storage facilities on the horizon, it could stick out for a different kind of reason – a place to store cars instead of South Philly’s detritus.