The other day, after a visit to Brewerytown, we were taking College Ave. to get across town and noticed some blight at 2221 N. College Ave., a triangular property that's formed by the intersection with W. Thompson Street. Surely, this building was once a very interesting structure, given the unique footprint of the property. But looking at historical Google Street View maps, the thing has been vacant since at least 2009 and it's lacked a roof for the last few years. Developers bought the property back in 2012 and started doing some work (perhaps explaining the lack of a roof) but now there's a bunch of violations that they're ostensibly working to correct. In the meantime, the property looks like crap.
In case you've never seen this part of College Ave. in person, Girard College sits directly to the south, on the other side of a handsome old stone wall.
To the north, the 2200 block of W. Thompson Street features one building that's currently undergoing renovation. And it's got at least four blighted buildings. It shouldn't come as a shock that three of those buildings are owned by PHA and the fourth is owned by the City of Philadelphia. If this feels like déjà vu, it's because we literally told you the same story two days ago when we covered several blighted PHA buildings on 27th Street.
This area hit a really rough patch but definitely has potential to get better in the future. With Brewerytown improving to the west and the areas around Temple seeing a boom in student housing construction, we could easily see increasing interest in this part of town in the coming years. Gee, it sure would help if government agencies holding onto blighted properties would unload them, wouldn't you say?