With the hulking former umbrella factory sitting blighted and vacant for many years at the corner of 5th & Master, the vacant lots at 1431-33 N. 5th St. probably weren't of much interest to developers. And we can appreciate why people would have balked at the idea of investing money

Ah, Snyder Plaza. You love that it's there when you need to make a Target run or you want to take your weepy four year to Chuck E. Cheese's, but deep down you hate it because of the awful traffic flow and the fact that it doesn't even remotely relate

We've visited the blocks around the 40th & Baring intersection perhaps a dozen times over the years, regularly providing updates on this booming part of Mantua. Way back in 2011, some new apartment buildings had recently finished in the north side of the 4000 block of Baring Street, with a

A couple of readers have urged us to revisit the booming 2200 block of Wilder Street in recent weeks, but that pesky early setting sun foiled us a couple times before we could get some decent images of what's happening. You may recall, we first visited this block back in

It was just a couple years ago that the Summit at University City sprouted on the 3400 block of Lancaster Avenue, replacing a couple of low slung institutional buildings with a massive mixed-use building targeting Drexel students. We don't need to tell you that this building was transformative for the

Fleisher Art Memorial is one of Philadelphia's hidden treasures, tucked away in a former church on the 700 block of Catharine Street. For those unfamiliar with this fabulous institution, Fleisher is one of the oldest non-profit community art schools in America and holds free and low cost classes and workshops

It seems like just yesterday that we first called your attention to 538 Federal St., a building that was constructed about a hundred years ago as a substation for the Philadelphia Electric Company (we call it PECO today). For the sake of nostalgia and as evidence of its former use,

When PHA built and sold a collection of low slung affordable housing units on the southern side of Francisville in the early 1980s, they surely didn't anticipate that these homes would become incredibly hot commodities to market rate developers several decades later. Slowly, over the course of the last few

Stormwater management is important in Philadelphia. The more stormwater we're able to trap in the ground before it enters the sewer system, the less likely it becomes for stormwater and diluted sewage to overflow into local rivers and streams. We haven't been so good with this historically, but the Philadelphia

A reader emailed us the other day, wondering about zoning notices they'd spied on the 1700 block of Brandywine Street. We were excited to hear about this, as the north side of this block is dominated by a large surface parking lot and is zoned for multi-family use, so we