After 15 years, one developer's journey to get a project done is over

Armed with a $45 million construction loan from Citizens Bank, Brown Hill Development is scheduled to break ground Wednesday on the Bridge, a 17-story apartment tower in the Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia.

The project has been a longtime coming and that’s not lost on Jeffrey Brown, president of the Huntingdon Valley, Pa., development company.

“It’s been a long haul,” Brown said. “A long haul is an understatement, but it’s happening.”

Brown Hill bought the property at 205 Race St. 15 years ago. “We thought Old City was a cool place,” he said.

It ended up that Old City was a cool place but not the way Brown had perceived it. It was cool to the point of putting a cold chill on his plans to develop the parcel until now.

A year after the company bought the site, the Old City Civic Association passed a 65-foot overlay that limited the height of buildings that could be constructed in certain areas of the neighborhood.

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In some ways, that ordinance was used as a weapon to prevent certain development from happening. In the case of Brown's project, it meant reworking his plans.

By 2005, Brown Hill proposed a project called Old City 205, which was a 10-story, 130,000-square-foot complex that would have 53 duplex condominiums.

“It was way ahead of its time,” Brown said, noting it won an award for its design and the support from Old City Civic. Brown was able to sell eight units just off of the blueprints, a feat in itself.

Brown Hill had expected to break ground on Old City 205 in September 2005, but it got delayed after proposing a couple of other iterations which were taller that failed to get support from the civic association. The recession and financial crisis took hold and the project was shelved until 2011.

That’s when Brown started to entertain the idea of reviving Old City 205 so he called Alan Greenberger, deputy mayor who heads up the Philadelphia Planning Commission.

With Greenberger’s help, Brown Hill was able to get things rolling again. In the interim, Old City Civic imploded, eliminating that obstacle. A new design was presented and, after some time, it successfully went through the city's approval process that was completed this year.

The project is now called the Bridge and will have 146 apartments and 13,480 square feet of retail space. It is scheduled to be completed by early 2017. At that time, Brown will figure out final rents, but they are expected to be around $1,900 for a studio, $2,300 for a one-bedroom and $2,500 for a two-bedroom.

The design, done by Gluck+, is daring and makes a statement in a neighborhood filled with low-rise brick buildings. It’s basically two, shiny boutique buildings broken up by a 7,500-square-foot outdoor, green space on the fifth floor roof.

“A lot of people thought we would dumb it down,” Brown said. “After all of this time, I would not be able to do that. It has to be special and something that people can enjoy for those who live there and who live around there. In our minds, we think it’s going to be transformative.”

That’s not necessarily something Brown could have done 15 or even 10 years ago.

Construction costs were high, rents were too low and the city’s population was still on a decline or just starting to stabilize.

Now, even though construction costs remain high, the city’s population is on the upswing, rents are on the rise and more people are looking for unique living spaces, which are not prevalent in Center City.

“It’s been a long, long time but we’re glad to have the perseverance to be doing this today and doing it the way we are doing it,” Brown said.

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal