CHOP to go before planning committee on new tower project

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s bold plan to construct a 21-story tower at South Street and Schuylkill Avenue is scheduled to go before the Philadelphia Planning Commission’s civic design review committee Tuesday afternoon.

The project would be the first of a four-phase master plan that would create a four-building research campus along the Schuylkill River. The first phase would entail constructing the 21-story building, which would total 488,671 square feet and house research and administrative programs. It would have a 256-space garage and a surface lot that would accommodate another 256 vehicles. It also features a rain garden called Schuylkill Green.

This is the culmination of a lengthy evaluation that CHOP initiated four years ago when it began to assess its real estate needs in Philadelphia and in the suburbs. The process included considering buying properties, constructing anew, relocating operations or finding space to add to existing locations. As a result of that evaluation, CHOP’s decisions are significantly impacting Philadelphia and the King of Prussia area.

In King of Prussia, the hospital outgrew 70,000 square feet it leases between two buildings for its specialty-care operations. The two buildings — one on Mall Boulevard and the other on Pulaski Drive — are limited in their ability to expand. As a result, CHOP decided to buy 10 acres on North Gulph Road in King of Prussia and last year broke ground on a new roughly 100,000-square-foot specialty care center.

In January 2010, CHOP bought the former John F. Kennedy Center on Schuylkill Avenue and a couple of months later asked developers to offer proposals to construct a 400,000-square-foot office building on the site.

Four years later, a master plan created and the first phase going through the approval process.

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal