Philadelphia 2035 (Norristown, Washington, Progress: nicest, supermarket, cat)

[gwillyfromphilly]

Gov. Wolf hopes development of Navy Yard's Southport section starts in 2017

[Pine to Vine]

Pearl Properties is buying Latham Hotel, plans 144 apartments there

[cpomp]

Originally Posted by Pine to Vine

Pearl Properties is buying Latham Hotel, plans 144 apartments there

What does "financial services" mean, I would love to see some ground floor retail, upscale clothier perhaps.

Also, this is great news, but does anyone feel that the market will become too saturated with apartments. There are at least a dozen large projects that will hit the market between 2015-2017.

[RightonWalnut]

Originally Posted by cpomp

What does "financial services" mean, I would love to see some ground floor retail, upscale clothier perhaps.

Also, this is great news, but does anyone feel that the market will become too saturated with apartments. There are at least a dozen large projects that will hit the market between 2015-2017.

Depends. We'll see how the market absorbs it. The last round of apartments were absorbed pretty quickly. As long as we have a few a year coming online, and not 10+ all at one time, I think we'll be good.

[Pine to Vine]

Catalyst for gentrification in Germantown?

Changing Skyline: Germantown bets its future on revitalized Vernon Park

[cpomp]

Philadelphia Becomes First World Heritage City in US - ABC News

Surprised no one posted this. Another huge spotlight moment!

[FamousBlueRaincoat]

Originally Posted by Pine to Vine

Catalyst for gentrification in Germantown?

Changing Skyline: Germantown bets its future on revitalized Vernon Park

Hopefully not - most of Germantown doesn't need gentrification per se. It's fairly economically diverse, especially in that area. The main streets are big enough to appeal to everyone in the neighborhood, the middle class folks in the area should be more open to doing stuff in the neighborhood. And Maplewood Mall should be nicer. So this is a positive development in that regard.

[Pine to Vine]

Originally Posted by FamousBlueRaincoat

Hopefully not - most of Germantown doesn't need gentrification per se. It's fairly economically diverse, especially in that area. The main streets are big enough to appeal to everyone in the neighborhood, the middle class folks in the area should be more open to doing stuff in the neighborhood. And Maplewood Mall should be nicer. So this is a positive development in that regard.

We all have our views.

[rotodome]

Originally Posted by FamousBlueRaincoat

Hopefully not - most of Germantown doesn't need gentrification per se. It's fairly economically diverse, especially in that area. The main streets are big enough to appeal to everyone in the neighborhood, the middle class folks in the area should be more open to doing stuff in the neighborhood. And Maplewood Mall should be nicer. So this is a positive development in that regard.

I don't know. I think some gentrification to offset the damage done by Settlement and Donna Reed Miller et al might actually be just what Germantown needs. That economic diversity has been chipped away over the years, and it's a shadow of what it was even in the 90's after all of the big retail closed. Germantown is out of balance. All this misdirected energy went into the top-down replacing of businesses with social service agencies, which has a dreadful effect on a commercial area. Vernon park is bookended by what were two core neighborhood institutions: an historic former YMCA (now with a men's housing component of course) that was saved from the brink by members of the community, and on the other end by the old YWCA that burned, and now looks to be on the path to being redeveloped as senior housing. The supermarket at Wayne and Chelten is now closing after the other one a block away was downgraded to a small discount supermarket, and Chelten Ave is looking like hell lately. Even the McDonalds on Germantown ave called it quits.
There are people in Germantown at the grassroots level who have been working hard to bring some life back, such as the folks at the imperfect gallery on greene street, and those who saved the YMCA (now "Germantown Life Enrichment Center" I think) who I know for a fact would be thrilled if the renovated park brought some private investment and acted a magnet for middle class people, and local businesses. Mount Airy has nothing like Vernon Park, and the closest thing Chestnut Hill has is Pastorius, which is off the main drag.

[FamousBlueRaincoat]

Originally Posted by rotodome

I don't know. I think some gentrification to offset the damage done by Settlement and Donna Reed Miller et al might actually be just what Germantown needs. That economic diversity has been chipped away over the years, and it's a shadow of what it was even in the 90's after all of the big retail closed. Germantown is out of balance. All this misdirected energy went into the top-down replacing of businesses with social service agencies, which has a dreadful effect on a commercial area. Vernon park is bookended by what were two core neighborhood institutions: an historic former YMCA (now with a men's housing component of course) that was saved from the brink by members of the community, and on the other end by the old YWCA that burned, and now looks to be on the path to being redeveloped as senior housing. The supermarket at Wayne and Chelten is now closing after the other one a block away was downgraded to a small discount supermarket, and Chelten Ave is looking like hell lately. Even the McDonalds on Germantown ave called it quits.
There are people in Germantown at the grassroots level who have been working hard to bring some life back, such as the folks at the imperfect gallery on greene street, and those who saved the YMCA (now "Germantown Life Enrichment Center" I think) who I know for a fact would be thrilled if the renovated park brought some private investment and acted a magnet for middle class people, and local businesses. Mount Airy has nothing like Vernon Park, and the closest thing Chestnut Hill has is Pastorius, which is off the main drag.

I agree with just about everything you said, by the way, and I think we're usually on the same page about this stuff, I think we're just coming at this one from a different angle on this one. Some of the most surreal moments of my Philadelphia time have come in the early morning and later night hours on or around Chelten Avenue - especially with some of the local boarding house characters out and about, and not much of anyone else. I used to walk through Vernon Park on a nearly daily basis from my apartment in West Germantown to Germantown Station on East Chelten - it was beautiful then, even in its dreariness (there's someone who owns a rooster right next to the Park, always looked forward to the months I'd be walking to the train station around sunrise and starting my day with a ****-a-doodle-doo) and it's better now. I've been by it on the bus a few times and I keep on wanting to go down and walk through it.

Some of the changes aren't bad - nobody will miss McDonalds. Pathmark was quite bad, and believe it or not the Save a Lot at Pulaski is a much better environment, with better produce and meat, and is open 24/7 (part of the reason I'd hang out on Chelten Avenue at such weird hours - I'm an early riser and hate busy grocery stores). The closing of Pathmark leave a vacant hole on Chelten, but a vacant hole that shouldn't have existed - a good opportunity to wash our hands of the idea of strip malls at a community's center. Perhaps some smaller scale grocers could even fill the void on Chelten Avenue - kind of in the way a functional big city neighborhood would do things under normal emergent conditions.

Emaleigh Doley seems really with it by the way. A lot of what she wants to do is point people to things that already exist and help business owners that are already there. I mean there's a hardware store, some decent discount stores, several food-stuff stores (even a health food store, btw), one of the better thrift stores I've been to in this city, a fabric store, a flipping piano factory (!).

The people mentioned in the article who claim there are no vegan options - there's the nile cafe (vegetarian soul food), all the way live (raw food), and a relatively new indian restaurant on Chelten Avenue. So perhaps they are among the people who just need a nudge to explore the neighborhood.

Ms. Doley also points out that there are already a lot of middle class people in Germantown. And there are several census tracts right along West Chelten Avenue that have median incomes that are rough the same as the city's median income (36k/year). The tracts just above Chelten - east and west - and just below to the west specifically. Having the main streets be more geared towards the middle class wouldn't be a particularly bad thing - because they're already nearby for the most part. It was a weird thing about living on Germantown - the kind of people I saw on Walnut Lane, Harvey, Haines, Rittenhouse, rarely seemed to come down to Chelten - a place I realied on because I didn't drive. That's a lot of the problem. In addition to the insitutions that left versus those that moved in (a more widespread, probably almost national problem).

But I do think that the common gentrification model would be pretty sad for Germantown. It's a unique place, and I think they can build a lot off of that while not changing the makeup of the neighborhood too much. Plus, there's already two Rite Aids and a Walgreens, we don't need even more attention from the national drug stores.