Permits Issued for 2315 North 10th Street in North Philadelphia East

Permits have been issued for the construction of a three-story, three-unit apartment building at 2315 North 10th Street near Temple University in North Philadelphia East. The structure will rise from a vacant lot on the east side of the block between West Dauphin and West Dakota streets. The new development will span 2,494 square feet and feature a cellar and a roof deck. Permits list Meir Badush of Northeast Renovations LLC as the contractor and indicate a construction cost of $400,000.

The rowhouse will rise from a 960-square-foot lot and will measure 16 feet wide and 50 feet long, leaving space for a nine-foot-deep rear yard. The street-facing exterior will be clad in what appears as a rather minimalist brick facade, devoid even of basic adornment such as window sills of lintels. The facade is, unfortunately, much simpler than the exteriors of adjacent rowhouses, which are themselves quite plain by prewar standards; on the positive side, at least the brick is contextual, especially if it will sport a muted red color and will feature at least decent material quality.

Likewise, the building’s 36-foot height to the main roof (39 feet to the top of the parapet and 45 feet to the top of the pilot house) will also be consistent with the surroundings, as will be the raised ground floor, though, at an elevation of nearly six feet above the sidewalk, it may even be said to be too high in comparison to the roughly three-foot-high porches of its neighbors. As an added bonus, this height will increase the amount of natural light that will reach the basement level. Generous ten-foot floor-to-floor heights will elicit lofty, nine-foot-plus ceilings, another favorable feature that will increase the quality of the residences within.

Over the past two decades, the area around Temple University has been steadily transforming from a highly distressed neighborhood into a mixed-income community, with numerous renovations and new construction projects transforming vast tracts of abandoned land and structures. However, though it is certainly taking place, the construction boom is only beginning to trickle into the district to the northeast of the university, particularly the area beyond the elevated regional rail trestle.

Although some construction began to take place locally in the past couple of years, numerous properties surrounding the project at 2315 North 10th Street, including the lot adjacent directly to the north, still linger as vacant lots or abandoned buildings. On the plus side, a local artist initiative has transformed portions of the surrounding no-mans-land into the Village of Arts and Humanities, a phantasmogorically adaptive installation, inspired by historic and folk motifs from around the world, weaving through the surrounding blocks and extant buildings alike. At the northwest corner of 10th and Dakota streets, effectively catty-corner to the proposal at hand, sits a rather sizable children’s playground, clearly made indicative as part of the Village via its use of vaguely Babylonian, sand-castle-like crenellated barriers, mosaics, and murals. We look forward to new development rising on the fringes of the Village of Arts and Humanities without infringing onto its territory itself, creating a positive relationship between the two and merging the artistic and the functional into a single cohesive urbanistic whole.

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