Quick – where’s Bank Street?

Don’t know?

What about Elbow Lane?

Now tell us where the two intersect.

Give up?

As you can see, Bank Street runs north to south for a mere block, between Chestnut and Market Streets, between 2nd and 3rd Streets. We don’t know for sure, but we’d have to think that the street got its name because its southern end lands right in the middle of Banker’s Row, a collection of buildings that were home to some of the most important financial institutions in the country back when the events of Hamilton were (sort of) happening. As for Elbow Lane, which runs perpendicular to Bank Street for half a block and then somehow reappears briefly in Mount Airy, we couldn’t tell you how it got its name. But we can tell you it’s incredibly narrow.

There’s a little surface parking lot at 20-22 Bank St., the address where Elbow Lane hits Bank Street. More accurately, there was a surface lot there- as you can see in the image above, there’s currently some work being done at the property such that parking there would be rather unwise at this moment.

The nature of the work happening at the site is a little unclear to us. Developers got a variance a few years ago to build a six-story building here with 5 condo units and 4 parking spaces on the first floor. This is some odd scale for this property, as it covers only a little more than 2,000 sqft. Nevertheless, they pulled the building permits last year. Ordinarily, we’d reasonably assume that they are now moving forward with the project, albeit with a slight delay. Check out this rendering of the building:

The rendering above was cribbed from a listing for the property… which went live two weeks ago. The developers are willing to sell the property for $1.3M, with permits in hand. But if the property is on the market, what’s with the digging on the site? We honestly have no idea. Does anyone in the neighborhood have any insight?

Whether it’s the current owners or some buyer that comes forward to purchase this newly dug hole, we expect a new building will rise here eventually. As always, we’ll be thrilled to see a new building replace a surface parking lot, even if it is a surface parking lot most people couldn’t easily locate on a map.