Life Sciences : Development News

According to a campaign from Pew Charitable Trusts, U.S. coastlines are in serious trouble: The expanding use of concrete bulkheads and seawalls is "threatening the borders of our oceans, lakes and rivers," damaging and destroying wetlands that people, plants and animals rely on. Fortunately, Philadelphia is host to one of the only sites in the region working on a real solution.

In 2012, at Lardner's Point Park in Tacony, the Delaware River City Corporation (DRCC) constructed what’s known as a "living shoreline" on the Delaware River (check out our recent look at the upcoming K&T trail on the same site). In lieu of a concrete structure between water and land, a permanent installation of rocks and native plants preserves the natural habitat and helps prevent erosion and flooding.

Now Pew is helping to spread the word as the Army Corps of Engineers is opening a public comment period on its proposal to create a unified, nationwide permitting process for the creation of living shorelines. Currently, obtaining permits to develop these coastal structures can be a lengthy and onerous process without consistent standards from state to state -- meanwhile, it’s quick and cost-effective to obtain a permit for a traditional bulkhead or seawall.

According to Laura Lightbody, project director of Pew's Flood-Prepared Communities Initiative, advancing this nature-based infrastructure solution -- which helps mitigate disasters like storms and floods -- is about "protecting people and property, and reducing the cost to the federal government," as well as preserving and restoring natural habitats.

"Part of our effort is to do education for the American public about the benefit and value of living shorelines as a way to demonstrate to the Corps a need for the nationwide permit," she says. Lightbody calls Philadelphia a "unique area to highlight, where living shorelines are in a diverse geographic region."

Lardner’s Point Park was a great site for that effort, she continues: formerly not accessible to the public, the shoreline is now something "to be incorporated with other outside recreational activities for the community."

DRCC and Pew will hold a tour of the Lardner’s living shoreline in mid-July -- the timing is perfect to see the full potential of what was built in 2012 since it can take a few years for the vegetation to mature. Unlike a concrete shoreline structure which deteriorates, a living shoreline is an excellent infrastructure investment. They "tend to become more durable and more substantial over time," as the natural vegetation takes hold, explains Lightbody.

To find out more and comment on the Army Corps of Engineers proposal to streamline the permitting of living shorelines, click here. 

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Laura Lightbody, Pew Charitable Trusts

The nonprofit Chester Charter School for the Arts (CCSA) has been renting space in Aston, PA, since its inception in 2012. But in June, the school broke ground on a brand-new $25 million, 11-acre campus; it should be open by fall 2017.

"There isn’t much in the way of this kind of development happening in Chester," says Keren White, executive director of the Chester Fund for Education and the Arts, CCSA’s precursor and now its development and marketing arm. "A new school hasn’t been built in Chester for several decades."

When CCSA opened, it offered kindergarten through sixth grade, and the school has expanded by one grade each year. Currently, this non-selective public school serving the Chester Upland School District has almost 500 K-9 students. For the 2017-18 school year, they will welcome 11th graders, and then 12th graders in fall 2018. At that point, the school will maintain an enrollment of about 650 students, with a maximum of 25 students per class.

"Arts Integration" is key at the school, combining rigorous core academics with dance, music, theater and visual arts classes. The model works, according to CCSA: In 2014, the school achieved the third-highest year to year improvement among 800 Philly-area public schools; it currently boasts a 96 percent attendance rate.

CCSA isn’t Chester's only charter school: there’s also the K-8 Chester Community Charter School, which currently serves around half the kids in the district (about 3,500 students). CCSA will ultimately have the capacity to serve about 10 percent of the district’s kids.

"If we can really educate 10 percent of the kids to a high standard, then potentially we’ll have a huge impact on this population," says White.

The new CCSA campus at 1200 Highland Avenue -- a three-story, 90,000-square-foot building -- will feature a gymnasium, a multi-purpose cafeteria/auditorium, music space, art studios and a kiln, science and media labs, and dance studios. Outside, there will be athletic fields, a new playground, and ample parking alongside new landscaping and trees. In a later phase of construction, which could be as early as 2018, the campus will add a 350-seat performing arts center with its own costume and set design workshops.

White says the Fund is raising $7 million of the total $25 construction budget ($3.825 million is already in place) and will finance the rest.

"We just really believe in Chester," says White. "The people in Chester are great people…and they haven’t had the opportunities that other people have had. We’ve really invested for the long term."

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Keren White, The Chester Fund for Education and the Arts 

How do you top distributing 250,000 seedlings every year to gardeners and urban farmers throughout the city? The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) is working on it.

Recently, we checked out the installation of a new solar power array in Strawberry Mansion, our current On the Ground neighborhood. PHS has been building two new Green Resource Centers (GRC) over the past eighteen months (it already has four others throughout the city): one on the Strawberry Mansion site and another in South Philadelphia on a formerly vacant lot at 2500 Reed Street. (GRCs are a part of PHS's City Harvest program.)

The South Philly site is a partnership between the lot owner (the nearby Church of the Redeemer Baptist), PHS and the Nationalities Service Center (NSC), which works with refugees resettling in Philadelphia. NSC leases about two-and-a-half acres (of the three-and-a-half acre lot) from the church, and worked with PHS to develop a large community garden there.

"It’s an entire city block and it’s right by the old rail line, so it’s really a wonderful place to have a community garden," says Nancy Kohn, Director of Garden Programs at PHS. Before NSC and PHS arrived, the long-unused site was full of debris, rubble and stones. Volunteers from Villanova University and various corporate partners pitched in to clear the land and build hundreds of raised garden beds. Now the site has its own water line, a shed and 400 beds.

Half of those are "entrepreneurial beds," according to Kohn, for people who grow and sell vegetables to nearby businesses and restaurants. The rest are community garden beds open to the public.

The opportunity to garden is important to many NSC clients.

"A lot of refugees that are coming through this program have an agricultural background," explains Kohn. "The community garden has been a wonderful place to get them more connected to their background, as well as connected to their neighbors, who are South Philly natives."

Meanwhile, the impact of the GRCs extends citywide: Through the network, volunteers and PHS staff propagate a total of 250,000 seedlings each year, to be distributed to gardens and farms all over town (with the two new GRCs completed soon, that number will grow significantly). Participating volunteers give ten hours of work to the PHS site over the season and receive the seedlings in return. Earlier this month, PHS had a mass distribution of nine different varieties of veggies, including peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes and okra.

"The gardeners come to pick them up," says Kohn. "They take them back to their gardens, and they grow them for their communities."

Because of the landowner's evolving plan to eventually build a new church on the site, the community gardens will stay and continue to partner with PHS, but the permanent GRC will be built in another South Philly location (to be announced soon). The site will include a new greenhouse, demonstration and community garden beds for educational workshops, solar paneling for electric power, a wash station and a shade structure.

Kohn hopes the build-out on the new site will begin later this summer; the GRC should be up and running by next spring.

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Nancy Kohn, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
 

Late last month, Governor Tom Wolf confirmed a massive local green roof project that’s been five years in the making. Thanks to a partnership between Temple University and the Philadelphia Water Department, the stunning design be a reality when the school's new library opens for the fall semester in 2018.

"Temple has worked closely with the Water Department over the last five years to identify meaningful stormwater solutions that address North Philadelphia’s critical challenges with this issue," says Dozie Ibeh, associate vice president of Temple’s Project Delivery Group.

According to Temple, the new library will have one of the state’s largest green roofs (the only comparable one in the region is the PECO green roof at 23rd and Market Streets). 
 
The project will be made possible thanks to a $6,747,933 loan from the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority (PENNVEST). With a low interest rate of approximately one percent and a 20-year term, the university projects that the PENNVEST loan will save them $4 million. Those dollars will help Temple install the green roof, permeable paving, cisterns for rainwater and stormwater piping. The space will also include a 46,000-square-foot roof garden, planting beds, and a terrace and seating area outside the new library’s fourth-floor reading room.

The international design firm Snøhetta is behind the 225,000-square-foot new library, in partnership with the local office of Stantec. Philadelphia’s Roofmeadow consulted with Temple throughout the design process, and will help maintain the completed system, alongside Temple’s grounds superintendent, and faculty from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture.
 
The space will also provide important research opportunities for students and faculty.
 
Temple hopes to receive LEED gold certification when the new library is completed in 2018 as part of a wider sustainability plan on campus; LEED gold status is already on the books for the new Science Education and Research Center, which opened in 2014.
 
Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Dozie Ibeh, Temple University 

"We’ve been taking from nature for 200-plus years at a rate that’s not sustainable," says Christopher Zelov, Philadelphia eco-activist, filmmaker and author. The founder of the Philadelphia EcoDistrict (the local chapter of a nationwide urban sustainable living movement based in Portland, Oregon), Zelov has spent the last six months teaming with University of the Arts Associate Professor Tony Guido and a group of seven undergrads on The Philadelphia EcoDistrict Oasis.

According to Zelov, the ultimate goal is "building a regenerative culture." That means not just "technologies that give back more than they take" (green roofs, cisterns, aquaponic gardens and solar arrays), but also building a social culture that supports these technologies.

For the past semester, UArts industrial design students have been collaborating with the Spring Garden Community Development Corporation to fashion portable working prototypes of their EcoDistrict Oasis concepts as a case study for future development here in Philadelphia.

On May 5, after an extensive research and engagement process, students presented their prototypes at a community barbecue at The Spring Gardens Community Garden. Their concepts included a small-scale aquaponic garden for the kitchen wall, modular ramps that easily make buildings accessible to all, sustainable composting pails, super-insulation, modular green surfaces, and more.

Green surfaces aid stormwater management while also mitigating a cycle of urban heat that leads to more pollution. Aquaponics offer an accessible closed-loop water-saving system for growing veggies. Composting pails made for city kitchens reduce waste and nourish gardens. Super-insulation uses a variety of techniques to vastly reduce a building’s energy usage, effectively sealing everything from electrical outlets to windows, and using specially fabricated walls filled with cellulose -- rather than fiberglass -- to keep temperatures comfortable without extra heating or cooling.

"What we’re trying to do is bring it into the community" and make it a regular practice, explains Zelov. He’s one of the filmmakers behind Ecological Design: Inventing the Future and City21: Multiple Perspectives on Urban Futures, and their companion books. He’s working on another film, this one about the UArts EcoDistrict project titled EcoDistricts Emerging.

Guido, who’s been teaching in UArts’ Industrial Design department for 21 years, says the program takes pride in "doing great work and doing it with conscience." He hopes the prototypes will get future public showcases, perhaps during 2016's PARK(ing) Day.

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Sources: Christopher Zelov, Philadelphia EcoDistrict; Tony Guido and Guiseppe Sciumbata, University of the Arts

Earlier this month, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s (PHS) Strawberry Mansion Green Resource Center became the first PHS Resource Center to operate on solar power thanks to a $40,000 gift from the Green Mountain Energy Sun Club. The Center is across the road from Strawberry Mansion High School in Flying Kite’s current On the Ground neighborhood.

Originally founded through Green Mountain Energy Company in 2002, the Sun Club is now a separate nonprofit.  

"We have been a partner of PHS for a number of years," says Jason Sears, an executive for the organization. "They introduced us to the opportunity out at Strawberry Mansion High School, and we’ve been working with them on that for about a year now."

The new 10-kilowatt solar array will include over 30 panels on top of a shade structure in the site’s community garden. (The greenhouse is still under construction.) The electricity from the panels will power all kinds of appliances for the site’s plant-growing and vegetable-washing stations.

The Sun Club takes a broad view of sustainability -- it doesn’t just mean renewable power or energy efficiency. It includes community-wide factors: access to food, transportation and job-training, all of which the nonprofit wants to support.
Sears appreciates projects like the Strawberry Mansion installation because it’s putting green energy in the hands of local residents. Solar panels are durable, and with little more than a rinse every year or two, they can last for up to 30 years.

"When people understand that renewable energy isn’t this mythical ephemeral idea, it’s very real and very powerful," he says.

PHS Director of Garden Projects Nancy Kohn says power from the new panels will affect up to forty different gardening sites city-wide. PHS currently has four Green Resource Centers besides the one under construction in Strawberry Mansion which propagate seedlings for participating gardeners across Philadelphia (a sixth center is planned for South Philly). About 50,000 seedlings from the newly solar-powered facility in Strawberry Mansion will grow throughout the city each year.

The site includes community garden plots as well as educational beds for Strawberry Mansion High School students -- they grow food there and incorporate the produce into cooking and nutrition classes.

Kohn estimates that construction on the Strawberry Mansion Green Resource Center, a member site of PHS’s City Harvest, will wrap up by August.

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Sources: Jason Sears, Green Mountain Energy Sun Club; Nancy Kohn, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society

Follow all our work #OnTheGroundPhilly via twitter (@flyingkitemedia) and Instagram (@flyingkite_ontheground).

On the Ground is made possible by the Knight Foundation, an organization that supports transformational ideas, promotes quality journalism, advances media innovation, engages communities and fosters the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit knightfoundation.org.

While Bartram’s Garden has been gearing up for new visibility and an influx of visitors thanks to construction of the Bartram’s Mile segment of Schuylkill Banks, its historic house has been closed for renovations.

On April 1, it will be reopen with a compelling mix of old, new and new-to-us environments and programming. (This spring, our On the Ground program will land nearby in Kingsessing.)

"We’ve been fundraising since 2010," explains Bartram’s Garden Assistant Director Stephanie Phillips. With help from a $1 million state Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program grant -- which Bartram was required to match -- the budget for the revamp grew to $2.7 million. The design phase commenced in 2014, and construction took place throughout 2015. The improvements range from a new roof and interior renovations to a cutting-edge geothermal heating and cooling system – the latter quite a feature for a house dating back to 1731.

"It was a great opportunity for us," says Phillips of bringing in the geothermal system. It’s not the first area historic site to install one, but probably the largest, with four main buildings and all the site’s historic outbuildings now on green climate control.

It was a special challenge, geologically speaking, because if you go back several hundred thousand years, the area wasn’t dry land at all: It was under an ocean.

"What we didn’t know was that Bartram’s Garden was on the site of a large sand dune," explains Phillips. If you need to dig 12 wells to a depth of 500 feet each, you have quite a job on your hands once you hit that ancient sand. Ultimately, they had to line the wells with steel casing and import a specialized Canadian drill.

New programming includes a Women of Bartram’s Garden tour -- as Phillips says, "broadening how we tell our story" -- which up until now has focused mostly on farm founder John Bartram, a famous botanist and co-founder of the American Philosophical Society with Benjamin Franklin. When Bartram was traveling in search of his prized plants, his second wife Ann Mendenhall, with whom he had nine children, managed their 200-acre farm. Their son William Bartram took over the site, and after 1810, his niece and John Bartram’s granddaughter Ann Bartram Carr continued the family legacy. She added ten greenhouses to the site.

A recreation of Ann Bartram Carr’s original portico and garden, which graced the western entrance of the house in the 1800s, is still under development at the site. Carr was an extraordinary figure in the art and horticulture world. New outdoor spaces and programming will introduce the public to her story.

"[The improvements] really coincide with the arrival of the Bartram’s Mile trail," adds Phillips. They will create "a much more welcoming experience" for visitors who arrive via the new amenity. For a long time, the west side of the house has been "treated more like a public park, and now it’s going to be treated more like a botanical garden."

Watch Flying Kite for more news at Bartram’s and developments on the Bartram’s Mile trail.

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Stephanie Phillips, Bartram’s Garden

Follow all our work #OnTheGroundPhilly via twitter (@flyingkitemedia) and Instagram (@flyingkite_ontheground).

On the Ground is made possible by the Knight Foundation, an organization that supports transformational ideas, promotes quality journalism, advances media innovation, engages communities and fosters the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit knightfoundation.org.

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) is gearing up for its second round of Neighborhood Placemaker Grants. PHS Associate Director of Civic Landscapes Tammy Leigh DeMent says the organizations expects them to be even more popular than last year’s awards, which drew about 150 entrants.

The call for proposals (released on December 22) asks applicants how they plan to make their "neighborhood uniquely beautiful through horticulture."

The 2016 program has a total budget of $75,000, half of which is funded through the Philadelphia Department of Commerce, with the other half coming from PHS. Ultimately, this will be divided into two or three separate awards. PHS is hosting an information session at 5 p.m. on January 6 at its Center City headquarters (100 N. 20th Street), but attendance is not required to apply -- a summary of the Q&A will be posted on the PHS website.

The initial application process is simple in its goals but broad in scope. Because of the competitive nature of the program, PHS is not asking for full applications right out of the gate. Instead, interested groups (which could range from schools and churches to Community Development Corporations, garden clubs, park groups and more) should submit Letters of Intent that answer five short questions. According to DeMent, these include basic info on the concept, how it will impact the neighborhood and how the project aligns with the PHS mission.

"There should be some longevity within the project itself," she adds, explaining that the initiatives should not be temporary in nature, a requirement of the Commerce Department dollars. "It has to have at least a five-year lifespan."

"It’s really focused on any neighborhood in the city that has an idea for creating a new place, a green space for communities to gather,” she adds. It could be a garden, a park, a schoolyard, a neighborhood gateway or even a traffic triangle, like one developed into a new community space honoring U.S. veterans in Feltonville thanks to 2015 grantee Esperanza.

Another of last year’s grantees, the Somerset Neighbors for Better Living, launched a grassroots community planters program to beautify and unify the neighborhood. The planters and materials, offered free to residents, became a trademark of homes there, drawing interested neighbors into more conversations with each other and creating engagement with local happenings.

PHS will be accepting Letters of Intent for its Neighborhood Placemaker Grants through February 12.

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Tammy Leigh DeMent, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
 

On October 1, the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC) and Mayor Michael Nutter formally opened DRWC's third permanent pier park. Pier 68 -- located at the end of Pier 70 Boulevard -- offers an exciting new place for Philly’s fishing enthusiasts to cast a line into the Delaware (just be sure to get your PA fishing license). Designed by Studio Bryan Hanes, the firm behind the Civic Commons plans in Parkside, the half-acre Pennsport pier joins the Race Street Pier (2011) and Washington Avenue Pier (2014). 

Construction on the new park began last winter; the recreational fishing component was very important to the neighborhood.
 
"There is a very big demand for fishing along the river," explains DRWC President Thomas Corcoran. Until recently, people who wanted to drop their hooks "had to walk out on dilapidated piers which were not at all that safe, some of which were privately owned."

Pier 68 remedies that, with a third of the structure dedicated exclusively to fishing.
 
The pier also includes a feature similar to a popular one on the Washington Avenue pier: an "Aquatic Cut" -- a four-and-half-foot deep cut into the pier surface that lets visitors see into the tidal world. A "microcosm of the Delaware River’s pre-industrial ecology," according to DRWC, the cut will let students and visitors view a wide assortment of native aquatic plants be covered and then revealed by the tide every day.
 
Other features include an entrance deck that spotlights repurposed maritime bollards.
 
What’s a bollard?
 
"It’s what the ships tie up to," says Corcoran of the salvaged wood’s origins on piers of the past.
 
The new space also boasts a tree canopy that shields the pier from the parking lot and traffic to the west, and picnic tables on the pier’s southern edge.
 
Pier 68 is another milestone in the regional Circuit trail project, with the Washington Avenue Pier and Pier 68 serving as bookends to the southern part of the developing Delaware River Trail. Ultimately, it’ll be a part of the Spring Garden Greenway and the greater East Coast Greenway.
 
Two years ago, DRWC built a demonstration section of what the finished Delaware River trail would look like at Spring Garden and Columbus -- a 28-foot-wide bi-directional bike path separated from a pedestrian path, with landscaping on both the road and river sides featuring cutting-edge stormwater management.
  
The pier project was the result of a major public/private collaboration between DRWC, several design teams, Bittenbender Construction, Hydro Marine Construction, the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the William Penn Foundation, and a Wells Fargo Environmental Solutions for Communities Grant, administered through the National Fish and Wildlife Service.
 
Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Thomas Corcoran, Delaware River Waterfront Corporation
 

A "dinosaur" of a hospital on the corner of Broad Street and Passyunk Avenue is getting a new life as part of the ongoing revitalization of the area. Purchased three years ago by St. Agnes MOB LLC., a small investment firm, the former St. Agnes Hospital (a 150-year-old building) is now Constitution Health Plaza. According to leasing and marketing director Elizabeth Daly, 18 tenants are already installed in the four-building complex and the site's occupancy is ahead of schedule.

Constitution Plaza is part of a larger trend in healthcare. Over twenty hospitals closed last year in New Jersey alone, but complexes like this one -- that offer a variety of independent practitioners in one rehabbed space -- are beginning to take the floundering hospitals' place.

"The idea is one-stop shopping for the community, for any of your medical needs," explains Daly. "Somebody will be able to come to one building and go to different practitioners."

Constitution Health Plaza takes facilities management, security, utilities, real estate concerns, and other operations off its tenants' plates, with the aim of providing more cost-efficient medical care just in time for the influx of patients newly insured under the Affordable Care Act.

Plaza residents include a location of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Kindred Hospital, and specialists practicing dermatology to nephrology to psychiatry. And the facility is joint-commission certified, notes Daley -- the Kindred location has acute care inpatient capabilities, so a critically ill person can stay longer than 24 hours. While there are a lot of targeted options and the building is currently at about 75 percent occupancy, the complex doesn’t yet offer adult primary-care services. It’s a provider the plaza would definitely like to attract, along with dental care and an orthodontist.

The renovation plans kept some of the building’s original marble, but included modern upgrades such as an atrium with plenty of natural light, a fresh lobby and a security desk. The different floors are color-coded for ease of navigation, especially important for patients who might not speak English; the facility also boasts an attached 425-car parking garage.

A multi-million dollar exterior upgrade added outdoor security cameras, extensive new lighting, and a large high-definition video signage board advertising the health plaza's services as well as other community happenings.

"On the exterior we really want it to be a landmark along Broad Street," says Daly. "South Philadelphia is very unique neighborhood, and it’s pretty exciting for us to be right in the middle of where the revitalization is taking place…it’s complemented each other: [the]] investment in the building and people’s enthusiasm for the East Passyunk corridor."

Writer: Alaina Mabaso
Source: Elizabeth Daly, Constitution Health Plaza

On Wednesday, October 15, University City District (UCD) will present its annual State of University City report to a select group of representatives from neighborhood institutions, real estate development groups, small business owners and residents.

In over 70 pages worth of eye-catching charts, graphs and text, the report tells the story of a vibrant and growing submarket that continues to attract a steady stream of educated individuals, innovative startups, creative entrepreneurs and civic-minded businesses.

Some highlights of this year’s report include an explosion of multi-family residential development, an unprecedented 96 percent office occupancy rate, a growing interest in transportation and transit, investment by the University of Pennsylvania in both research facilities and community placemaking destinations, and significant growth in Drexel’s innovation neighborhood near 30th Street Station.

The report also expands on the development plans for the 40th Street Trolley Portal, including the success of UCD fundraising efforts to create a pedestrian-friendly park there.

To create the document, policy and research manager Seth Budick compiles vast amounts of data from UCD’s institutional and business partners, alongside its own in-depth studies and analysis of pedestrian counts, retail occupancy and public space usage.

"What we’re really seeing is a flocking of people and businesses who recognize the value of being close to the density of innovation that’s going on in University City," he explains.

As in previous years, printed reports will be distributed to institutional partners, real estate professionals, local organizations, government representatives and residents, who, according to UCD's Lori Brennan, "use [it] as a recruitment tool for filling office vacancies, and attracting retailers and restaurateurs to open up spaces [in University City]."

The report will be available online on October 16.

Writer: Dan Eldridge
Sources: Seth Budick and Lori Klein Brennan, University City District
 

On September 12, the 51-year-old University City Science Center celebrated the latest addition to its ever-expanding West Philadelphia campus, now home to more than two million square feet of lab and office space.
 
Known as 3737 Science Center and located at 3737 Market Street, the 13-story glass tower was developed jointly by the Science Center and Wexford Science & Technology. The $115 million building is already at 82 percent capacity.
 
Indeed, interest in the space from potential life-science and healthcare tenants was so consistently strong throughout construction that an extra two floors (over the originally-planned 11) were added to the plan.
 
Spark Therapeutics, a gene therapy startup, is occupying the building's top floor. With Penn Medicine as the anchor tenant, other residents include the Penn Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine and, in the tower's ground-floor retail space, the Corner Bakery Cafe, which is expected to open by the end of this year.
 
3737 Science Center is the campus' 16th building. At nearby 3601 Market Street, the Science Center is currently constructing a 20-story, $110 million residential tower, which broke ground last year. That high-rise, according to President and CEO Stephen Tang, is part of the campus' current philosophy "to be a place to live, work and play," he says. "Not just work, which is quite frankly what we've been doing for most of our 51-year history."  
 
"We're trying to become a world-class innovation center across University City and not just across the Science Center's campus," he adds. "We really want to be a vibrant center. And that includes attracting smart, creative and innovative people to our campus to live, as well as to work."

Writer: Dan Eldridge
Source: Stephen Tang, University City Science Center

The University City Science Center has partnered with Flying Kite to showcase innovation in Greater Philadelphia.

If you've ever been brave enough to undertake a shopping excursion at the South Philly Walmart Supercenter on a weekend, there's a decent chance you ended up parking your car way out in the far-eastern hinterlands of the lot, right next to the Delaware River.

Assuming you took a minute to soak up your surroundings, you may have noticed a concrete pier jutting into the Delaware, overgrown with weeds and protected by a fence topped with razor wire and sporting a "No Trespassing" sign. That's Pier 68, and it certainly doesn't look like much today.
 
But come this time next year, following a $1.7 million facelift by Studio Bryan Hanes, not only will it have become the new southern trailhead for the Central Delaware Trail, it will have been transformed into a feature-rich pier park boasting amenities ranging from a tree-shaded picnic grove to an angled lawn designed for sunbathing to a water-side walk suitable for fishing.   
 
On June 26, the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DWRC) publically unveiled the pier park's design at a press conference attended by Mayor Michael Nutter, Councilman Mark Squilla and other local leaders.

"This is about getting to the waterfront," says Deputy Mayor for Commerce and Economic Development Alan Greenberger, who pointed out that Pier 68 will merely be the latest in what is becoming a string of pier parks along the Delaware. "And this pier," he adds, "has got a very special character."
 
Along with an entrance deck, a grove of trees and a selection of native aquatic plants, the park's highlight will be a 4.5-foot cut in the pier's surface that will allow the tidal activity of the Delaware to be viewed up-close. Visitors will cross the cut atop a road-and-cable bridge.
 
For development updates, visit the DRWC's Pier 68 website. 

Writer: Dan Eldridge
Source: Michael Greenlee, Delaware River Waterfront Corporation

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania made public its plans to construct a research park on 23 acres of land formerly owned by DuPont in the Lower Schuylkill section of Grays Ferry. The parcel is now being referred to as "the South Bank."
 
Flying Kite has reported extensively on the long-range development plans for the Lower Schuylkill River, but no announcement has generated as much public chatter and excitement as the recent one from Penn; it is just one small ingredient in a much larger campus development recipe known as Penn Connects 2.0, a so-called master plan "which has added nearly 3 million square feet of space to Penn’s campus since 2006," according to a release.   
 
One of the highlights of the South Bank will be a business incubator and accelerator called the Pennovation Center. (Current tenants will remain onsite after renovations begin.) That complex will feature lab space and a collaborative technology-transfer ecosystem that Penn hopes will eventually infuse the entire South Bank campus.  
 
According to Penn's Executive Director of Real Estate Ed Datz, the campus will be available to a wide range of users, from startups that grow out of university research to those without any previous university affiliation. The master plan, designed by Philadelphia-based firm WRT, creates a framework with initial development focused on light industrial and flex-use buildings. 

"The one consistent is the opportunity to let young, upstart companies have space -- at a reasonable rate -- to gather, to share ideas, and to advance their particular discipline," says Datz.

While an exact construction timeline hadn't been revealed, the multi-phase renovation work at the South Bank site may begin as early as this fall.


Writer: Dan Eldridge
Source: Ed Datz, University of Pennsylvania