The 11th place on Philly YIMBY’s December 2021 Development Countdown goes to the 364-foot-tall, 31-story One Dock Street in the Society Hill section of Old City, Center City. Designed by BLT Architects and developed by LCOR Incorporated, the skyscraper will rise next to architect I.M. Pei‘s similarly-scaled Society Hill Towers, offering the most significant contribution to the local skyline in half a century. The structure will span over 300,000 square feet of interior space and feature 272 rental units. Permits list Hunter Roberts Holdings LLC as the contractor and a construction cost of $66.55 million.
The development will feature a commercial component spanning around 15,000 square feet, as well as underground parking. Amenities will include a roof deck and a rooftop pool. The building will be fully sprinkled.
One Dock Street site. Original image from Google Earth, edit by Thomas Koloski
One Dock Street (1 Dock Street). Credit: BLT Architects
One Dock Street. Credit: Google
One Dock Street looking northeast. December 2020. Photo by Thomas Koloski
The building will rise at the narrow south tip of an irregularly-shaped block, on a site bordered by Dock Street to the south and west and South Front Street to the east. The structure will replace a landscaped outdoor space to the south of the adjacent four-story Marriott hotel. The loss of the trees and thickly growing vegetation at the site is somewhat regrettable; however, the space was inaccessible to the general public, available only to the hotel patrons when it was in operation, and the new building will offer arguably more effective engagement with the pedestrian realm.
The development was able to reach its current scale by utilizing unused air rights from the low-slung hotel next door. Construction permits were issued in June, and the site was cleared over the course of the following month. Our recent site visit shows that excavation is currently underway, with south-facing apertures at the hotel’s ground level boarded up.
1 Dock Street. Photo by Jamie Meller. December 2021
1 Dock Street. Photo by Jamie Meller. December 2021
1 Dock Street. Photo by Jamie Meller. December 2021
1 Dock Street. Photo by Jamie Meller. December 2021
1 Dock Street. Photo by Jamie Meller. December 2021
When the Society Hill Towers rose at 200 Locust Street in 1964, the Brutalist trio was hailed for reviving Society Hill, one of America’s oldest and most venerable neighborhoods which by that time degraded to the status of a veritable slum. Although the high-rises were clearly wildly out of scale with their Colonial-era context, at the time they were (and still are, even in retrospect) praised for breathing new life into a dying urban district. Today, of course, Old City is one of Philadelphia’s most well-maintained and prestigious neighborhoods, a far cry from its postwar doldrums.
Because of an increased focus on historic preservation, at all levels ranging from national to the hyper-local, the under-construction tower has caused considerable controversy. Since we can hardly replicate a neighborhood as rarefied as Old City, YIMBY, of course, fully understands the need to preserve its general historic integrity. However, the proposal will affect the area’s historic fabric in a surprisingly minimal manner, or at least will not introduce any intrusion either at the skyline or the street level that would eclipse what Society Hill Towers have already wrought in their time.
As seen in the image below, the site sits nearly five hundred feet away from the nearest prewar structure of any kind, and considerably more so in several directions. When viewed from the west, the high-rise will be mostly obscured from view by the similarly scaled Society Hill Towers. To the south, the site overlooks the Philadelphia Korean War Memorial Park, built in the postwar period, and a sprawling postwar residential complex further south, with historic buildings far removed from the immediate vicinity. The sprawling, Postmodern Marriott hotel spans the rest of the block to the north, which is also flanked by several postwar buildings. To the east, the site faces the underpass of the broad Interstate 95 (which will hopefully be capped with a park in the near future), with Penn’s Landing along the Delaware River beyond, a district that already boasts several high-rises and is slated to receive many more in the near future.
One Dock Street (1 Dock Street). Credit: Google Maps
In other words, the developers effectively found the ideal sweet spot in Old City where, due to the peculiarities of its siting, even a towering glass slab will have a minimal effect on the neighborhood’s historic fabric.
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