After writing about the Goldenberg Group since the days of the failed DisneyQuest project at 8th and Market streets in Philadelphia, I finally got to meet Ken Goldenberg.
At 57, Goldenberg is an active commercial real estate developer as well as a hands-on philanthropist. Three times a year, he travels to Igoji, a small village in Kenya, where he spends a month at a time involved in a variety of programs under an organization he formed eight years ago called People Helping People. “My heart is often in Kenya more than here,” he told me. People Helping People also does charitable work in Philadelphia.
Goldenberg is seeking the last casino license to be awarded in Philadelphia and is proposing to construct a $500 million, 100,000-square-foot gambling hall with 2,400 slots, 82 table games and a hotel at 8th and Market, which is a surface lot.
How did you get into real estate development?
I graduated Harvard Law and have always been interested in civil rights and the environment. I clerked at the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York and then was the first fellow in the Washington D.C. office of the Center for Law in the Public Interest. It was great but, on the other hand, D.C. is about policy and not being on the ground. Sometimes that distance can be disconcerting. I got disillusioned, and in 1983, traveled for a year. After that, I returned to get my Ph.D. in social anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. I still had my public interest agenda and decided that real estate development would create passive annuities to support that and switched to Wharton.
What was your first project?
Snyder Plaza. It was a 50,000-square-foot strip with a Rite Aid. I remember an article about the ground breaking said it was the first commercial development east of Interstate 95. That was in 1986-87. That type of development fit my model the best. Tenants were there for the long term, they paid the management fees and taxes. The bar was lower for developing that opposed to other development. Then there was a tsunami of activity created by supermarkets and category killers.
Do you have a favorite project?
The retail development that was most exhilarating for me was ParkWest. The RFP was for 90,000 square feet and we ended up developing 350,000 square feet. We did it with the community. We look at a community as an organic whole and see where we can best help. That’s how we think about a project in Philadelphia and where ever we go.
How about 8th and Market?
You can hardly identify a location that’s crying out for development like this. There’s nothing else like it in Philadelphia or the country.
Why hasn’t it been developed?
Some things that seemed like good ideas at first turn out not to be good ideas after all. Philly is not New York and Philly is not Chicago. You can’t create a single or a double there. You have to develop a triple or grand slam there to have an impact on Market Street. We had an opportunity to sell to Target but we felt that wouldn’t have had a transformative effect.
Why would a casino work there?
We’re right in the center of town. We will do better and produce more transformation than any other proposal and we are going to do the absolute, very best project in Philadelphia. It would take East Market and take Market Street and the city to a different level. The transformation up and down Market Street would be incredible. Is a casino all good? No, but it’s very hard to generate the kind of revenues you need in order to sustain the cost of the development we are proposing there.
What happens to 8th and Market if you don’t get the license?
Do I think over time, something will happen there? Yes, but it might be 10, 15 or 20 years from now.
Real Estate, Economic Development
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