Permits Issued for 3929 North Park Avenue in Hunting Park, North Philadelphia

Permits have been issued for the construction of a three-story, four-unit multi-family building at 3929 North Park Avenue in Hunting Park, North Philadelphia. The new structure will rise from a vacant lot on the eastern corner of the intersection of North Park Avenue and McFerran Street. The building will span 3,441 square feet and feature a basement. Permits list Intensified Builders LLC as the contractor and indicate a construction cost of $125,000.

The structure will rise from an irregular, trapezoidal plot, zoned RM-1, where Park Avenue, running along the conventional north-south grid alignment, meets with angled McFerran Street. The building’s footprint will span 904 square feet, taking up around 59 percent of the 1,521-square-foot lot, and will be offset from Park Avenue to match its neighbors. A nine-foot-wide, 397-square-foot side yard will separate the building from its rowhouse neighbor on McFerran Street.

3929 North Park Avenue prior to redevelopment. Looking east. June 2019. Credit: Google Street View

The structure will rise 35 feet to the main roof and will feature ten-foot floor-to-floor spans. The design utilizes red brick on the main street-facing elevations and paneling on the cantilevered sections. Though such a facade system is very common in new construction throughout Philadelphia, it makes for a particularly good fit for the location as it matches the brick facade and obliquely angled bay windows of the adjacent prewar rowhouses.

The new building will replace a quirky yet highly charming garden populated with small plants, shrubbery, and statuary. While the garden’s loss is admittedly unfortunate, the new building will reinforce the street wall at the corner while adding new housing stock to a neighborhood that sees comparatively little new construction.

3929 North Park Avenue sits a block east of North Broad Street, North Philly’s primary thoroughfare, serviced by the route 16 bus and the Broad Street subway line (the Erie and Hunting Park stations sit roughly equidistant within a five-minute walk to the south and to the north, respectively). Hunting Park, the primary green space in upper North Philadelphia, is situated within an eight-minute walk to the northeast.

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