Is Comcast Tower II - Philadelphia in the works?

Chatter has picked up in recent weeks and now in recent days that Comcast Corp. is up to something when it comes to NBC, it’s headquarters and its real estate.

John Demming, spokesman at Comcast, assured me that Comcast is not moving NBC’s headquarters to Philadelphia.

“We just bought 30 Rock...the floors that NBC occupies,” he said, noting that the company also bought the real estate that housed CNBC in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and moved NBC Sports to Stamford, Conn.

“We are not moving NBC’s headquarters from New York to Philadelphia,” he said.

As for having any new buildings constructed in Philadelphia for the cable giant, Demming was a little more reticent.

“There’s a lot of speculation that I can’t comment on,” he said.

That hasn’t stopped real estate sources from reporting several different things to me such as recently seeing what looked like drilling equipment at the surface parking lot at 18th and Arch streets in Center City. Liberty Property Trust, which constructed Comcast Center, bought that 1.5-acre property in 2011, and it sits across from Comcast Center. At one point, another developer had proposed a 2.2-million-square-foot mixed-use development on that property and its zoning can handle something of that scale.

While Comcast might not want to move NBC’s headquarters to Philadelphia, maybe it would just move some back-office employees instead and would need new construction to accommodate that? There’s no more room in Comcast Center and the cable company has leased space in other Center City buildings.

Liberty also has space on the existing Comcast Center site to build a smaller structure and some have speculated that perhaps Comcast would like a pretty glass box that would serve as some sort of studio for the company. It would be highly visible and be a nice compliment to its shiny headquarters.

Last fall, Liberty began hawking a new office tower in Center City that would stand 27 stories and total around 400,000 square feet. The building would be constructed on a narrow parking lot on the northwest corner of 19th and Arch streets that is now being used as a small surface parking lot and maybe that building is getting primed for development.

For now, it’s just rumors and speculation but wouldn’t it be nice if Comcast’s growth did kick off another new building in Center City?

Real Estate, Economic Development

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal