Zoning change prompts new plan for Destination Maternity site in NoLibs

The owner of the former Destination Maternity warehouse in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia is rethinking an earlier plan to convert the building into a creative workspace.

Alliance Partners HSP of Bryn Mawr, Pa., bought the 220,000-square-foot property at 5th and Spring Garden streets a year ago and decided it would spend $60 million to turn the property into edgy industrial yet chic office space. It was being branded as SoNo.

The idea was to capture tenants who would pass up a sleek office tower in the Central Business District for a non-traditional space in a hip neighborhood that appeals to the city’s creative class and millennials.

That has proven to be a bit tricky.

While tenants have toured the space, they haven’t gone so far as to sign on as a tenant.

Progress on redeveloping the site has also been delayed because Destination Maternity, which relocated its headquarters to New Jersey, just moved out last month, said Rich Previdi, a principal with Alliance Partners HSP. There’s an added challenge when a tenant continues to occupy space while its being shown to prospective tenants.

In the time that Alliance Partners unveiled its plans in June to convert it to creative work space and now, the company has a better idea of what tenants are looking for and adjusted its plans.

“We have explored the market,” he said. “We have a good handle on what the market is. What the office, warehouse, retail and residential markets are. We are now looking at some combination of mixed-use.”

The change in plans has also been helped by new zoning overlay in the works for a portion of the neighborhood that would change what can be constructed in that area. The zoning would go from just industrial use to CMX-3, which allows a mix of uses and increased height limits.

In light of the new zoning, Previdi and his team are studying what the right mix of residential, retail and office uses might work best at the site and how much of the existing building to retain when it begins to refine those plans.

“We have new opportunities to explore,” Previdi said. “It’s actually pretty interesting for us since it’s not what we had planned or what we had thought to do originally.”

A new proposal for the site could be unveiled by spring.

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal