Eric Blumenfeld now has all the money he needs to revive
the Divine Lorraine, the iconic former hotel that has towered over North Broad
Street for years, vacant since 1999, collecting dust and graffiti.
On Wednesday, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority
approved a loan for the project worth $2.5 million as well as a $1 million
grant from the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative left over from the John
Street administration. That money, combined with a $3.5 million state grant
awarded last week, federal historic tax credits worth the same amount, and a
$30 million investment from New Jersey real estate lender Billy Procida, will
allow Blumenfeld to start work on the redevelopment next month.
“It will get us across the finish line,” Blumenfeld said
on Wednesday.
Blumenfeld plans to remake the building, which he bought
for the second time in 2012, with 109 apartments and retail spaces on the first
two floors.
“The city has been incredibly helpful, as has the state,”
Blumenfeld said. “It’s been a group effort and I’m hopeful that this approval
this afternoon kind of insures that the Divine Lorraine will be rehabilitated
starting next month.”
The financing of the project is a win for the Nutter
administration as well. Alan Greenberger, the deputy mayor for economic
development, has been banging the drum about the project for years and making
personal promises that its revival will be underway before Nutter leaves office
in January.
It’s been a week of wins for development on North Broad
Street, too. On Tuesday, the Planning Commission approved a plan from New
York-based RAL Companies to build nearly 500 apartments and an
80,000-square-foot supermarket on the vacant lot behind the Divine Lorraine.
Earlier in the day, a City Council committee voted to approve zoning tweaks and
a street striking for that project as well.
Greenberger said on Tuesday that the timing isn’t exactly
coincidental.
“Both projects really feed off of each other,”
Greenberger told PlanPhilly. “The Divine Lorraine has to get done. I mean,
nobody’s going to make an investment like you saw without the Divine Lorraine
getting done. That’s sort of a given. So we have to finish that off. I’ve been
working on this for a lot of years, and I want it done.”
Blumenfeld said on Wednesday that he’d sold off his stake
in a large waterfront parcel recently so that he could focus on rehabbing the
Divine Lorraine. He said he welcomes the proposal from RAL.
“I’m thrilled about it,” said Blumenfeld. “Very excited.
It’s nice to have comrades developing on North Broad Street.”
The Divine Lorraine was built in the 1890s and designed
by the architect Willis Hale. Patrick Grossi, director of advocacy at the
Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, said the building is an emblem
of the era when North Broad Street was the place where some of the wealthiest
Philadelphians, many of whom were new-money industrialists, chose to live.
Starting in the 1940s, the hotel was operated by Father
Divine of the Universal Peace Mission Movement. Divine renamed the hotel and
ran it according to a strict behavioral code. Men and women were housed on
separate floors, but the hotel was among the first in the country to be
racially integrated.
Grossi said that finding an adaptive reuse for a historic
building as old and as large as the Divine Lorraine should also be regarded as
a preservation win.
“It’s a difficult building to work with, so the fact that
the developers are taking a risk by opting to work with it is something that
the Alliance would hope to see a lot more of.” Grossi said. “... I do think
that this is a strategy that developers in Philadelphia would be wise to be
thinking about more carefully, and I think a lot of folks don’t realize the
options they have. There are alternatives to demolition, and in many cases
there are economic incentives for those alternatives.”
Source: PlanPhilly
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