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.