Butt-Fugly Building: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius Building

1701 Market

Snore

                 Why the hell does our Central Business District have this shitty fucking box of a building? This antiquated piece of shit with its old timey ribbon windows that aren't even that old! Knock this fucker down and put a real building in its place. This pile of shit had its time in the sun, now it needs its time in Hell. 
                This 248-foot-tall piece of Lego-looking asstrash was once considered quite the important building. At the time construction was about to begin, the future of the infant Penn Center was looking pretty bleak. The Center was already on its second developer, the first one having said "Fuck this shit!" immediately before. Plans for an underground concourse to connect the whole thing (which was planned to have 1000 retail spaces lol) were looking bleak. The plans for 6 Penn Center were going to put the concourse in even more danger, since they called for an underground delivery area that would have blocked any future concourse. Edmund Bacon and his gigantic Kevin Bacon-making cock actually had to get the city's Law Department involved to help make the concourse happen.
              Anyway, 6 Penn Center's ugly ass was complete by the end of 1957. It was to be part of a transportation Super-Block. The Pennsylvania Railroad would have its offices here while the rest of the block would be filled with the world's ugliest bus station. The design came from the Great Satan Vincent Kling, and was basically a box with box-shaped windows. Like he was doing the first drawings on graph paper, got stoned, then just outlined every other square on the paper and drew a box around it out of laziness.

The building in 1958. It was less than a year old in this picture and already looks like crap. The crappy watermark indicating where the picture comes from actually makes the building look better!

               As you can see in the picture above, the original version of the facade was even shittier than it is now. It was built a full block away from the rest of Penn Center, the 1600 block of Market being a big-ass surface parking lot for 8 years afterward.
              While it was known as the Transportation Building, 1701 Market held the Pennsylvania Railroad's offices through their two mergers, becoming Penn Central in 1968 and finally Conrail in 1976. At some point, some of the office floors were made into a 194-car parking garage... I guess they figured with those shit windows no one would know the difference. By the time the 1990s rolled around, Philly had a shitload of office buildings in this area that were about 1000 times better looking and 75000 times more technologically advanced. Conrail ditched the building in 1993 and it stayed empty for years thereafter.
             Finally, in 1997, people started to get sick of having this antiquated butt-fugly building sitting around doing nothing. The conglomeration of owners commissioned Kohn Pedersen Fox to re-design the building to make it look like it might actually be able to get a real company to move in. They ripped the facade out between the windows to create a ribbon window effect, making the building look like it was built in 1958 instead of 1957. The ramp up to the internal parking garage was covered in stainless steel panels. The entire interior was upgraded. It didn't help. The building still manages to look dated as fuck.
            The Morgan, Lewis & Bockius law firm took occupancy of the building in 1998 and was doing well enough by 2001 to eliminate the internal parking garage and add 44,000 square feet of office space to the place. The building is now named after them. It went up for sale in 2004 but no one took the bait.
             This little piece of rhinoceros shit takes up space in a location that should have a much taller, more modern building. It also has a corner retail space on its Market Street side that is chronically unfilled, but I'll be telling y'all about that some other time. Once Morgan, Lewis, & Bockius's lease is up, put this ugly bastard out of its misery.

You can see the covered former parking garage ramp from this angle. You can find two other Butt-Fugly Buildings I've written about before in the background, 1601 and 1635 Market.

99 Years Ago in Philadelphia-- First Week of May, 1915

A Gigantic Women's Suffrage Parade Takes Over the City 

          On May 1st, 1915, a planned Women's Suffrage parade was set to take place, with participants called to meet beforehand on Washington Square. About 1,000 women were expected but about 10,000 showed up, some of which waited there since early in the morning. At 3pm, the parade's grand marshal mobilized the throngs of ladies into military precision, marching them up 7th Street. With banners and signs in hand, some women ran out of their workplaces and followed along.
           For the older ladies, a group of cars and buses were volunteered to bring them along the parade route for a fee of $2. The gigantic parade attracted large groups of both men and women as it turned onto Market Street, then to North Broad, finally descending onto the Metropolitan Opera House at 4:30pm, when a bunch of Suffrage-related lectures/events were to take place. Along the route, there were six designated stands where famous leaders of the Women's Suffrage cause would publicly proselytize.
           A good time was had by all. Nowadays, Women's Suffrage is so taken for granted that its a funny youtube prank to get women to sign a petition to end it.

Who the fuck stole the Liberty Bell's clapper?

            This week in May, 1915, visitors to Independence Hall started to notice that the clapper of the Liberty Bell, which was on display at the bottom of the main staircase, was missing. The guards that normally patrolled the area didn't seem too bothered. The curator of the bell, Wilifred Jordan, gave a bunch of shady answers when reporters asked him about it. When prompted, he said "I don't want to talk about it" and "Ask Chief Ball (of the Bureau of City Property)".
           This led reporters to start spreading the lie that the clapper was stolen by a crazy souvenir hunter. The bell was in a glass case at the time so this would be an exceedingly difficult theft. It wasn't until half a week later that Chief William H. Ball finally admitted that the clapper had been removed to make room for the steel support that would be employed to keep the bell safe on its long train ride across the West for the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Fransisco. The same steel support, known as the "spider", is still in the bell today.

The inside of the bell from 2003 when it was getting stress-tested by the NSF. Photo from nfs.gov

Flash Mob of Housewives Fucks Up the 1000 Block of Arch

                  Back in the day, some stores offered something called "Trading Stamps". These were the predecessors to modern day store club cards and memberships. You would collect these little coupons that were worth points that were worth a fraction of a cent each. After you collected enough points, you could go to other stores and redeem them for certain products.
                 On this week in May, 1915, the Acme Tea Company announced that their trading stamp subsidiary, the Crown Stamp Company, would be going out of business and to redeem your stamps as soon as possible. This, of course, was irresponsible as crap. The very next day, 3000 women descended onto the Crown Trading Stamp Premium Store at 1007-09 Arch Street, panicked as shit. The weather that day was terrible, a huge rainstorm falling while everyone waited outside. As the doors opened, people were trampled, their pocketbooks and stampbooks stolen, and the front display window of the store got shattered.
               In the aftermath, several of the women were hurt and robbed. A six-year-old boy was abandoned. News spread of the melee and somehow caused an EVEN BIGGER crowd the next day. Other trading stamp-redeeming stores also experienced huge crowds, the customers assuming that they would go out of business soon as well. The crowds were reported to be mostly foreigners, with all sections of the city and surrounding suburbs represented. The Camden branch of the Crown Trading Stamp Premium Store got overrun as well.
              The Acme Tea Company (predecessor to the Acme supermarket of today) was forced to put ads out promising that customers will be able to redeem their stamps until August 1st, 1915.

oh, and The Lusitania is torpedoed by a German Submarine, killing 17 Philadelphians

              This is an insignificant event of little importance, proven by this small blurb in Wikipedia about it.

Fill This Front: Champions

1201 Market Street

Putting up big photos is NOT the alternative to an empty storefront!!!

                 Ok, 6 fucking years? How does a space like this stay empty for 6 years? While the previous tenant wasn't exactly a superstar, it did manage to stay open for 13 years. This corner is one of the more highly visible and heavily trafficked in Center City, yet this space manages to stay so empty that they don't even bother to put "For Lease" signs up.
                The previous tenant was, of course, Champions, the "Great American Sports Bar". It opened in the Summer of 1995 as THE place where Philadelphians and Out-of-Towners would come together to watch sporting events, get wasted, and eat shitty food that you wouldn't know is shitty because you're wasted. When it opened, the place offered free popcorn and ready-made pizzas in addition to the usual crap you get at a bar like this. In reality, Champions was less "Great American Sports Bar" and more "Shitbird Hotel Bar for Tourists". After all, the chain itself seems to be exclusive to or created by Marriott, since every other location is found in a Marriott-controlled property. Nonetheless, it did just fine. After all, restaurants are considered highly successful if they last 5 years, right? Double-and-a-half-and-some-change isn't that bad.

This is what the space looked like when Shitpions was still open. Image Courtesy of TripAdvisor

                     Once it closed in 2008, the corny tourist bar niche it left behind was already filled by the Field House in Reading Terminal and the Hard Rock on the other corner of 12th/Market that's been there since 1997 and, because of their sweetheart lease, will still be there after the Convention Center collapses in on itself from lack of use. Bank and Bourbon, a much higher end hotel bar/restaurant, has just opened in the PSFS Building/Lowes Hotel across the street. I should note that a few of the other storefronts in this Marriott are empty as well, but none are as prominently empty as this one at a super-high-trafficked street corner.
                    Ok, so the Champions space has been empty. Of course, it doesn't have to be. Let me sell it to you:

                  This is a 3,800 square foot space at the northwest corner of 12th and Market, located in the Philadelphia Marriott Hotel, the largest hotel in the whole city. It now has a brand new owners. In the heart of the Convention District, this location is heavily trafficked by both Philadelphia's tourists and natives. The space is accessible by countless points of transit, located near a heavily-used subway and trolley stop (13th Street Station). It is also close to a Regional Rail station (Market East Station). Not enough for ya? What are you, made of stone? Ok, well its also located on or near numerous bus lines, one of which is one of the most heavily-used in the city (the 23). Its even accessible to a bunch of New Jersey Transit bus lines!
                 This space offers the opportunity to take advantage of Philadelphia's exciting culinary scene! While most of the other restaurant spaces surrounding this spot are chains found all over the country or tourist-trapalooza's, there is an opportunity here to give and up-and-coming chef his/her chance to prove Philadelphia's food superiority to tourists from around the world!! How can you pass this up? Contact Oak Tree Capital Management or Clearview Hotel Capital (the new owners) and make an offer. The place has been vacant for six years-- what are they gonna do? Turn you down?
               C'mon people-- work with us here. Maybe it doesn't even have to be a restaurant! There's got to be some kind of retailer that caters to tourists/conventioneers that can utilize a 3,800 square foot corner property that sees so much foot traffic.

FILL THIS FRONT!!!!

Another reminder of how it looks with Champions. Source: Loopnet

Old-Ass Building of the Week: Robbins Rocks Building

140-142 South 8th Street
           

Photo by Brad Maule

            The Robbins Rocks Building, as I call it, is now 100 years old! Ends up its really called the Alexander Sheppard & Sons Building. Learn all about it at the Hidden City Daily!

GroJLartitorial: Fix The Unit Block of South 11th Street!

Unit Block of South 11th Street, Ludlow to Chestnut

            So much potential, so little love. This little block on 11th Street between Ludlow and Chestnut looks like horseshit and has no goddamn excuse. For at least the last 100 years, this block was a regular retail street that offered everything from stationary to jazz clubs to car batteries. Nowadays, it looks like shit. Empty storefronts, underutilized architecture, barely any nighttime activity. Even the sidewalk sucks. You take Jefferson's Gibbon Building out of the picture and you'd have a hard time convincing someone that this was Center City.
           I'm going to ignore the also crappy block across the street, the one Inga recently called "near-slum conditions", because it is technically in a transitional period. The Girard Estate has some big plans for that spot once the Family Court Annex moves out so I don't want to shit all over it (until those plans are confirmed). But that east side of the block, it hurts.
            Fuck it, let's go through the whole thing. The block begins with a great looking building that I've written about before designed by William Steele & Sons about a century ago. While it was once known for its beautiful single Horn and Hardart storefront embellished with stained glass that matched the rest of the building's facade, nowadays it holds no less than five storefronts, three of which are long shuttered (but available for lease).
            The building's best current feature is probably the famous Sound of Market store, which fills the 2nd and 3rd floors, only accessible through another store called Mine Fragrances & Variety, that sells every fucking thing you've ever thought of. Need a gallon of shea butter? They've got it. Need a new bong? They've got it. Need a Ganesh statue? Got it. The only other active storefront on this building is a crappy jewelry store, just like all the other crappy jewelry stores you see in small storefronts all over the city. Who goes to these places? How do they make any money? This grossly underutilized building serves as a microcosm of the whole block: sad-looking, beat up, and in desperate need of new blood. It does have an "Available" sign on it, but it doesn't really specify for what. Apartments? Stores? Sex?
         Sound of Market is actually a pretty cool store. No reason for that to have to move off the block. More on that later.

              The next building on the block is a goddamn disgrace to any architect living, dead, or about to be born. 23-27 South 11th Street is the remains of three early 19th century extra-large rowhouses, so old that they were built before the Opera House that the Sound of Market building replaced. In the mid 1950s, a fire ripped through the three houses, at that point long having been converted to commercial use. The Girard Estate took control of the three properties on January 31, 1959 and combined them into one garbastic piece of ass-smash, throwing on a mid-20th-centuryesque facade that covered the two old houses on the right. At some point in time decades later, that facade was removed and this shitty building has looked like jizz ever since. It currently boasts a complete set of full storefronts and a dentist's office that's been rocking the upper floors for decades.
           One front is filled with yet another hole-in-the-wall jewelry store that no one cares about, another is filled with one of those whacky-looking electronic stores you see all over the city. Again, who goes to these places and how do they stay open? The storefront in the middle is some of the only new blood on the block, occupied by Rosa's Fresh Pizza. This place is exactly what this block needs. A new take-out spot created by a young boul named Mason Wartman who ran with the idea of a $1-a-slice pizza joint in Center City and put it on this underused block, in a storefront that was previously empty for eons. The place was even featured by Michael Klein's Insider column. Good job. Now get a proper awning.

              The next three properties are again old 19th Century Rowhouses-turned-commercial that have held scores of different kinds of establishments over the years. 29 South 11th, the grey one on the left in the photo above, has been rocking an empty storefront for several years now. The owner of the place, according to OPA, doesn't live that far away. You'd think he'd try a little harder to get the completely vacant building occupied. 21 South 11th is home to Paulie's Pizza and has been for quite awhile. Paulie's is valuable to the block for two reasons: 1) Its the only place on the block that is open late at night (closes 11:45) and 2) It has the most hilariously angry Yelp reviews (enjoy).
              33 South 11th Street is the only one of these three old rowhouses that isn't violating the  Doors and Windows Ordinance, which seems to have gone un-enforced on this entire block. It holds an active hair salon on the first floor and a psychic's place on the second and third floor. The place was recently renovated with some new ultra-green siding and lots of perfectly legal, permitted signage that looks fucking crazy. Remember back in mid-2012, when people came after that convenience store over their ostentatious signage? Where the fuck were you when these folks put their (again, perfectly legal and permitted) signs up?

             And now for the last. I've written about this sexy bitch-bastard of a building before as well, because it kicks ass and everyone should know about it. 1039 Chestnut, a 130+ year old Castle of Killer Cock-Slapping is looking sadder than it ever has, rocking four storefronts... but filled with what? Yet another mysteriously successful hole-in-the-wall jewelry store, a crap variety store, a dirtbag media store in the basement, and the block's newest edition, a nameless DVD/CD store, because people still buy those. The upper floors are completely vacant and boarded up. This building is a holdover from the infamous Daniel Rappaport's portfolio of once-awesome buildings that are underutilized and falling apart.
            So, as you can see, this little segment of 11th Street fucking sucks. Even the sidewalk. Its too damned thin!

The block's newest addition.White Rectangle Video?

 SO WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT!?!?!?!

            It wasn't so long ago that 13th Street was a shitty runway of alligator shit just like this block. The heroic Tony Goldman came along and, after some early setbacks, got the shitbag stores out of there in order to bring the right tenants in (though I'm still mad that Chicken King is gone). He also bought out a lot of the old slumlord owners. That's what needs to happen here. We can't force all those private owners to sell per se, but the right developer with testicles of tritanium ore could come along with an offer they couldn't refuse financially (which, unfortunately, is the very thing that many of these owners are probably waiting for). 
           The hardest part, I guess, would be getting the ball rolling. The super-ugly 23-27 South 11th Street is the best bet for a 11th Street Unit Block Revoution, since it is owned by the Girard Estate. They have three options for this space in my view. 1) Knock it the fuck down and rebuild on the same spot with some modern-kickass retail with residential above. 2) Buy the Sound of Market Building, knock 23-27 South 11th the fuck down, and build a modern addition to it, adding residential space and brand new retail space (that could hold a re-vamped Sound of Market!). 3) Sell 23-27 South 11th to a developer who has the ability to get some fucking work done and has a new idea for the space (which will most likely include knocking it the fuck down). The Sound of Market Building is currently for sale for 5.4 mil.
             It only takes one or two things to get it all started. Once the revolution begins, the rest of the block will fall together over the course of a few years, just like 13th Street did after El Vez opened. That, a renovation of 1039 Chestnut and some streetscape improvements (wider sidewalk maybe?) and you'll have gold, Jerry! Gold! Don't get me wrong-- its not like all these cruddy stores have to die-- just move to a place where they would be more apt to find customers. After all, there's three fucking jewelry stores on the same block. Move to different blocks!
             You want to know the best thing about this block? The whole thing is zoned CMX-5. You could build a goddamn crystal skyscraper 900 feet tall here and no NIMBY could say shit about it. You want to know the second best thing about this block? THERE ARE NO NIMBYS. No one lives on the surrounding blocks (at least, not yet), so there ain't no old codgers who will complain if this block changes. I know the Wurlitzer Building nearby was recently permitted for an apartment conversion, but its taking forever to get done. This means that the injection of nightlife onto this block would have very little resistance. Put a big-ass bar in the former Horn & Hardart space in the Sound of Market Building. There would already be a steady stream of auto-customers, since Friere Middle School is nearby (top of 1034 Market)-- any good bar owner knows that teachers like to fucking drink.
         I didn't even mention the transit! This spot is less than one block away from the EL, a couple blocks away from Market East Station, and is passed by more bus lines than I can count (the 23 on 11th Street and the buttload of buses that come through Chestnut and Market, including NJ Transit stuff). Accessible by tens of thousands of people without getting in a car.
         There you go-- now all you rich developers out there have no excuse to gather your shit and take a risk on this block. Your welcome. NOW GET IT DONE!!!

Fill This Front: Sharper Image

1518 Walnut

                Here's yet another chronically empty storefront in an awesome-ass building. This space is fucking gigantic and can be used for pretty much any kind of store. Sharper Image was in there, for fuck's sake, so no one else has any damn excuse! This is probably the third or fourth blog post across the local internets written about this spot, but I don't fucking care.
                This bitch-bastard of a storefront is located at 1518 Walnut, a great property at the corner of Walnut Street and South Sydenham Street, right in the middle of Rittenhouse Row, the city's most badass shopping district. Like many gigantofucking spaces of this type, this empty pile of shit started out as a classy banking floor. It was designed by the architecture firm of Hokansen Heacock in the late 1910s for Middle City Bank. The building has been known as the Merlin Building, Middle City Bank Building, Union Bank Building, and was once hilariously named the Allen Rothenberg Building. Just to prove how badass this building is, let me tell you this: Paul Phillippe Cret, one of the greatest architects to wipe his ass in Philadelphia, didn't choose to put his own offices in one of his own buildings, but placed his offices in this one. That's saying something.
              This big-ass empty fuck of a space has held numerous banks over the years, but was most prominent as a branch of Industrial Valley Bank, which managed to fill this space from 1951 to the late 80s.  From 1995 to 2005, this space was Circa, a fancy-ass restaurant/nightclub that took advantage of the coolness of the banking floor and vault.

The space when it was Circa. Photo by Dave Hong.

                After that, the store held a shitty Sharper Image location where they sold a bunch of useless shit that didn't work. I bought some expensive-ass air purifiers from this particular store that did absolutely fucking nothing. What a waste. You owe me, Sharper Image!!! Somehow, that shitstore managed to stay open for multiple years, closing in 2009. After that, the front was always available for lease but ended up being a series of pop-ups. One was a sales office and model for non-existent condos in the ill-fated Waldorf Astoria Hotel Dead-Ass Proposal, another about this time last year was Indochino, some kind of on-line custom-made suit website that opened a brick-and-mortar pop-up store here because they're too fucking cheap to rent the space out for real.
               The space is managed by the Shenian Company, which seems to be having a hard time getting it filled. Therefore, I will help.

Pic of the place from its Loopnet listing.

                 This space, once again, is located at 1518 Walnut Street. It has a total of 4653 square feet. Some of the space is the old banking floor, some is the vault, some is the mezzanine above. This location is one of the most strategically profitable in the city, being on Rittenhouse Row, the city's premiere shopping district. This spot has so much fucking foot traffic that you'll have to move into the place at 4 am just to keep from getting run over by the stampede of humans that are constantly passing through. The location is convenient to so many transit lines that literally hundreds of thousands of people can reach this point without getting into a car. Thousands of people with incomes well over six figures live in the immediate area, along with tens of thousands of daily office workers. If you lease this space, you'll have so many customers that you'll have to employ bums to piss on the sidewalk out front to cool it off to defray from the heat generated by all those feet!
             All this and more can be yours for the low low price of $48,281.25 a month. Wait a minute... $48,281.25 a MONTH? No wonder they can't fill this bastard! Is this how much other Rittenhouse Row stores are paying?!?! Holy Crap!! Well... maybe you can talk the price down a bit, since the place has been empty (besides pop-ups) for five fucking years.
             Anyway, FILL THIS FUCKING FRONT!!!

Butt-Fugly Building of the Week: The Pearl

111 North 9th Street

So that's where I left my tissue box!

           Ugh-- that's all I can say about this shitbird building when I see it. Years of anticipation spent waiting for this barren deadzone to get a building on it and this is what we get. A fucking block-long gray and white rectangle that comes equipped with a gigantic surface parking lot in back (the side?). I don't care how successful the project was and how great it has been for the neighborhood... I accept that shit. I'm just pissed off by how fucking boring and mediocre this Lego Longhouse is. I've seen better looking parking garages.
          As implied above, the block that this property sits on was once a decades-strong surface lot that only got re-enforced by the long-ass construction of the Center City Commuter Connection Tunnel in the mid-80s. Even back then, Pan-Am Realty was interested in acquiring the lot and building some new residential and retail to add to the already short-of-available-housing Chinatown and boost development in the gigantic deadzone between there and Franklin Square. The problem was, they couldn't afford to buy the space off of the Re-Development Authority, who controlled it for years (before the CCCC tunnel's construction it was part of Independence Mall's property, which is weird).
        In 2003, they teamed up with Parkway Corp to develop just this one property, forming the ridiculously-named Nine Arch Associates (its at 9th and Arch, get it?). They commissioned the firm of Vollmer Associates to come up with a design for a new condominium, some of the first new construction to his this area since the CCCC tunnel tore through. By 2005 they were ready for an official proposal. The new condominium would have 90 units, 12 retail spaces, 6 floors, and 121 surface parking spaces.
         The design was, shall we say, ABSOLUTE TAINT!

One of the final renderings

          The proposal got rejected by zoning... not for being an ugly shoe-box-looking piece of ass mucus OR for having way more parking spaces that it would ever need, but for the simple fact that it was 76 feet tall, 16 feet higher than the area's idiotic height limit of 60 feet! In November of '05, Nine Arch appealed the refusal and were granted a variance. Construction went throughout 2006 and the project was complete by the end of 2007.
  

Under construction as seen from the sky. They couldn't wait to get the parking lot done. Images from Google.

           The new building was named "The Pearl", which is the name of about a million other residential buildings around the U.S. Even more confusing is that there is a local developer named Pearl Properties that has nothing to do with this (though the Granary Apartment building they developed seems almost like The Pearl's much better-looking sequel). The new condos featured tax abatements and free parking in the gigantic parking lot. The project was marketed to middle-income, first generation Chinese immigrants that were relegated to the burbs due to a lack of middle-class housing in Chinatown. It worked. The units sold like hotcakes and the retail spaces got filled in no time. Despite being ugly as fuck, the new building was incredibly successful.
            You'd think that a condo that sold out so quickly would spur more development in the deadzone to the north and east, but it still hasn't happened. The renovation of the PPA Eighth Street Parking Plaza is now underway and a new quasi-halfway house/old folks home will soon be built on the same block as that garage... but other than that, NIENTE! Maybe Parkway needs to get into another Marvel Team-Up with a local developer to get another project like this going. Please... don't make it so fucking ugly next time.

Cool dragons, shitty surface lot.