In Hawthorne

December is going to be a huge month for Civic Design Review, as numerous developers rush to get building permits before the scheduled change to the 10-year tax abatement at the end of the year. Perhaps this race to the finish line will be for naught, with the continued possibility of a delay

It was almost exactly a year ago (though it feels like at least a decade ago) that we brought 701 S. Broad St. to your attention. Back then, we told you that the property had been home to a KFC which closed in 2005 and was unused since then except

The intersection where Broad Street meets Washington Avenue should be a trophy intersection in Philadelphia, a proverbial corner of Main and Main. It took a step in the right direction a couple years back when Lincoln Square opened at the northwest corner, adding hundreds of apartments, a supermarket, a Target, a liquor store,

It's been a long road for the townhome development on the 1300 block of Bainbridge, which we first brought to your attention way back in 2012. At that time, the sizable lot at 1319-51 Bainbridge St. was operating as a surface parking lot, which seemed like a bit of an

The first mile of North Broad Street beyond City Hall is currently in the middle of a staggering transformation. Perhaps the lynchpin of this progress is the redevelopment of the Divine Lorraine, the wonderful building at Broad & Fairmount that sat vacant and blighted for years until it finally reopened as

We always wondered about the parking garage at 725 S. Broad St. because of a curious sign posted to its front. The sign read 'Peace Mission Democratic Cooperative Garage,' basically begging for some additional context. For example, what makes a garage democratic and cooperative? Had we bothered to perform a simple

With apologies to the people that live there, Carpenter Street between 11th and 12th Streets is a fairly unremarkable Hawthorne block. Almost every home on the block goes up three stories, with a mix of original facades and "newer" facades that still date back a few decades. One property, 1116 Carpenter St.,

You don't have to have an amazing memory to remember when the stretch of 13th Street just below South was an embarrassing mix of blight and vacancy. The building on the southwest corner of 13th & South had amazing bones, but looked like garbage, with a boarded up first floor

When we saw on the zoning calendar that 1343 Fitzwater St. was seeking a variance, we immediately suspected that the empty lot on the northwest corner of Watts & Fitzwater was getting redeveloped. But this wasn't an accurate suspicion.1343 Fitzwater St. is actually the northeast corner of this intersection, a

Way back in the summer of 2012, we told you about plans for twenty-two homes on the 1300 blocks of Bainbridge and Kater Streets, on a parcel that had been used as a surface parking lot for quite some time. The project caught us off guard at the time, as we openly