The long-blighted Beury Building at Broad Street and Erie
Avenue could be reborn as an apartment house with downstairs shops and offices,
under a revitalization plan now gathering steam.
Artist´s rendering of rehabbed Beury Building at Boad
Street and Erie Avenue, with new annex under consideration for adjacent lot.
Philadelphia-based Shift Capital is readying crews to rid
the building of asbestos and other environmental hazards as it closes in on a
package of redevelopment aid and low-income-housing tax credits to help pay for
most of the $33 million project.
Planned for the 14-story building are 80 apartment units
— 50 of them for low-income renters — atop 25,000 square feet of commercial
space, including offices and ground-floor retail, said Shift Capital's chief executive, Brian
Murray.
The firm, which focuses on projects that can improve
economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, hopes the Beury’s overhaul will
jump-start development along the commercial sections of Erie and Germantown
Avenues and Broad Street that converge near the site, Murray said.
“It’s been this incredible shadow that prevented other
developers and other interested parties from doing more for this community,” he
said. “Our hope is that this is an actual catalyst.”
The Beury — best known by some for the (how to put it
... indelicate) graffiti message on its
north and south facades — was built in the 1920s as the National Bank of North
Philadelphia but has been vacant for decades.
The windowless Art Deco ruin is often referred to as a
northern counterpart to the Divine Lorraine at Broad Street and Fairmount
Avenue, which stood derelict for years until its recent redevelopment.
Both are architecturally significant structures built in
an era of prosperity and population growth along North Broad Street, but their
condition has tracked the deindustrialization and disinvestment that
impoverished the areas around them.
“I always referred to this as ‘Divine North,’ ” said
former Philadelphia development director Alan Greenberger, now a fellow at
Drexel University’s Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation. “Once we got 'the
Divine' under control, this is the next thing that had to happen.”
But the Divine Lorraine’s neighborhood, aided by its
proximity to Center City’s business districts and the increasingly wealthy
Fairmount area, has seen a recent uptick in affluence. Not so the Beury's.
The average household income in the neighborhood around
the Beury Building — within a triangular
area bounded by Germantown and Hunting Park Avenues and Old York Road — was
$31,900 a year in 2015, up just 6 percent from $30,136 (in 2015
inflation-adjusted dollars) in 2010, according to calculations based on U.S.
Census data.
Around the Divine Lorraine — in the area bounded by Broad and 10th
Streets, between Poplar and Green —
income jumped 37 percent to $34,512 in 2015. The citywide average in 2015 was
$56,418, according to the census data.
Greenberger said a rehabbed Beury – helped by the throngs
of commuters who board the subway and buses daily at Erie Avenue – could bring
new life to the neighborhood's shopping strips, now dominated by check-cashing
spots, take-out restaurants, and cellphone shops, as well as the stalwart Black
& Nobel bookstore, which advertises that it ships to prisons.
A retail upgrade also could encourage more pedestrian
activity between the Beury and Temple Univerity's medical campus a block to the
south, Greenberger said.
Diane Brown, 47, who was changing buses near the Beury on
the way from her home in Nicetown to her job as a medical assistant, said the
building’s overhaul would make a big difference.
“It’s an eyesore right now,” she said. “Either they fix
it up, or they need to tear it down.”
Shift Capital’s Murray said the first concrete step
toward the Beury’s rebirth will be its environmental cleanup, to be funded with
a grant from the state Department of Community and Economic Development that
covers up to $1 million of remediation costs. Work on the cleanup should begin
in the coming weeks, he said.
For the redevelopment project itself, Shift hopes to tap
private investment through the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program,
bond financing, and a publicly administered loan. It also is seeking a grant
from the city's Division of Housing and Community Development to round out its
financing needs, Murray said.
If the funding materializes, work could begin late this
year and finish in mid-2019, he said, adding that a later stage of development
could include new construction on an adjacent empty lot.
Greenberger said that change would come gradually to the
area, but that Shift's project may nudge it forward.
“It's a long journey," he said. "But you have
to take the first step."
Source: Philly.com
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