Massive apartment complex proposed for former Phila. World Trade Center site

A property along the Delaware River waterfront that had many bold ambitions that never came to fruition is back at trying to make progress.

It’s not Penn’s Landing.

Carl Marks & Co. is looking to revive a version of plans it created in 2002 to develop a massive residential project called Renaissance Plaza on 5.3 acres that front the Delaware River at Columbus Boulevard and Callowhill Street and had been known for the last 15 years as the future address of the Greater Philadelphia World Trade Center.

The dense project would include 1,342 apartments in four buildings that range in height from 21 to 31 stories. Plans also include 16 townhouses, nearly 70,000 square feet of retail space, 653 parking spaces along with more than an acre of landscaped public plazas.

The project is “designed for development as two stand-alone but integrated projects,” according to Carl Marks’ marketing materials.

HFF of New York has been retained to assist Carl Marks with all forms of developing financing for the project, said Jeffrey Julien, managing director of HFF.

Waterfront Renaissance Associates, the owner of the Renaissance Plaza site, along with its affiliate Carl Marks & Co., have had a relationship with HFF’s debt-placement group for more than 20 years. They also retained HFF’s real estate investment banking group for assistance with Renaissance Plaza because of the size and complexity of the project. Financing for the development of the project will require patient institutional equity and additional development expertise, Julien said.

“We are experts in locating both,” he said.

Carl Marks is a New York investment firm that pieced together four tracts that make up the plot about three decades ago. The company received its World Trade Center license in 1988 and in the mid-1990s began the work of devising an architectural concept that entailed developing more than 3 million square feet of space consisting of a residential tower and three office buildings, parking for more than 2,000 vehicles and 118,000 square feet of retail space.

That never happened.

Then in 2002, Carl Marks ditched the idea to construct the office space and decided to move forward with a 42-story apartment tower that at the time would have cost $100 million and had 396 units. At the time, the firm anticipated it would break ground in 2003 and completing the project two years later.

That also never happened.

While Carl Marks is considered the lead investor of the project, Philadelphia-based Silver & Harting and Co. Real Estate has a minor interest in it.

Last fall, an affiliate of Carl Marks called Waterfront Renaissance Associates made a leap across the river into New Jersey and decided it would focus bringing the Greater Philadelphia World Trade Center concept to Camden.

Waterfront Renaissance Associates said at the time it would look at developing a 2.3-million-square-foot campus on 16 acres at the former Riverfront State Prison in Camden, N.J. That project would have four phases and would be built by Waterfront Renaissance Associates, which indicates it had already spent several years studying the site and the city, and has brought in a design and development team to create a concept.

It proposed the first phase would entail a pedestrian-only promenade linking Camden neighborhoods to the Delaware River as well as other waterfront amenities. The New Jersey Economic Development Authority controls the prison site. Plans also call for office and retail uses.

No update was available on that project.

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal