Living close to downtown Philadelphia presents a variety of tradeoffs. Sure, you can easily walk into Center City for the purposes of work or play. Then again, demand is higher for housing in the neighborhoods closest to downtown, which usually means higher costs and less space. And since land is at such a

Fitler Square doesn't see a whole lot of construction, given its relatively stable ownership base and the fact that so many of the homes in the neighborhood are already in pretty good shape. When homes do get fixed up in this neighborhood, the work generally takes place inside, with developers

The blandly named Pennsylvania State Office Building appeared on the southwest corner of Broad & Spring Garden in the late 1950s, and still stands as a classic example of Modernist architecture. Back in 2013, Tower Properties undertook a $70M project to renovate the building into 200+ apartments, naming the finished

It was nearly seven years ago that we first brought the W.G. Schweiker building at 2621 W. Jefferson St. to your attention, noting at the time that it was listed for sale for $80K (too high a price, at the time!). The building caught our eye because it had spectacular

Lanier Park is a massive patch of green space in the Grays Ferry neighborhood at 2900 Tasker St., taking up an entire city block on the edge of the Greater Grays Ferry Estates PHA development. The park is a wonderful resource for the neighborhood in theory, but like many public green spaces

With the weather warming up and Memorial Day quickly approaching, summery thoughts are starting to creep into our consciousness. That's probably got something to do with how we found ourselves wandering down the 2000 block of Lombard Street the other day. The Lombard Swim Club makes its home on the

If you can believe it, Grays Ferry Avenue was once a pretty junky corridor in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood. The streetscape was dominated by vacancy, with the former Naval Asylum property prominently and aggressively blighting the blocks between Bainbridge and Christian. Eventually, Toll Bros. started working on transforming that property

We've been fairly consistent over the years, complaining about surface parking lots as an undesirable land use in our dense urban environment. Whether a surface lot is tiny or huge, it's almost never the highest or best use for a property. One notable exception might be the sea of surface parking

It was roughly two and a half years ago that we pointed a finger at the warehouse on the northwest corner of 17th & Annin, noting that it was not long for this world. We explained that the ZBA gave their blessing to a plan to demolish the building and

The origin of Paul's Draperies tracks all the way back to a pushcart in 1950. During that era, the demand for fabric was such that pushcarts in the street provided options beyond the offerings of the brick and mortar establishments. Within a few years, the Paul family established a storefront at