Former view of 924 Beulah Street. Credit: Google.

Permits Issued for Five Townhouses at 924 Beulah Street in Bella Vista, South Philadelphia

7:00 am on August 22, 2021 By Colin LeStourgeon

Permits have been issued for the construction of a townhouse complex at 924 Beulah Street in Bella Vista, South Philadelphia. The complex will include five homes in total, each rising four stories tall. Permits list each home to total just over 3,000 square feet of space, with construction pricing coming in at $250,000 apiece. Rich Villa is listed as the project’s design professional, with KNE II LLC listed as the contractor.

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139 North 23rd Street. Credit: Solomon Cordwell Buenz

Permits Issued for 139 North 23rd Street in Logan Square, Center City

8:00 am on August 21, 2021 By Colin LeStourgeon

Permits have been issued for the construction of a 115-unit multi-family building at 139 North 23rd Street in Logan Square, Center City. Designed by Solomon Cordwell Buenz and developed by the PMC Property Group, the building will rise four stories tall and will feature a roof deck with a green roof. In total, the building will hold 122,576 square feet of space. The developer was permitted to include the higher-than-standard unit count through the utilization of green roof and mixed-income density bonuses. A below-grade garage will hold 42 parking spaces. Construction costs are estimated at $35 million.

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Mural West site looking east. Photo by Thomas Koloski

Murals Rank at Number 29 on Philly YIMBY’s First Anniversary Countdown

7:30 am on August 21, 2021 By Vitali Ogorodnikov

Philadelphia is famous for its astounding collection of outdoor murals, which count in the thousands. Philly YIMBY does intentionally seek them out as subjects of articles (unless, at some point in the future, we hear an announcement of a particularly notable mural planned somewhere in the city). However, given the pervasive presence of outdoor wall art all around the city, especially near sites with vacant lots, it inevitably makes its way into our content in one way or another. Some murals are located near planned development. Of these, some are in danger of being entirely obscured or torn down. Others are planned to be painted on freshly proposed buildings. In either case, when the opportunity arises, we try to track these murals. Over the past, we have made 29 such tags, earning the category the 29th place (the numbering is coincidental) on Philly YIMBY’s First Anniversary Countdown. Today we look at a few standout examples.

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Current view of The Maven. Credit: Khosla Properties.

Philly YIMBY’s First Anniversary Countdown Looks at Entry Number 30: Francisville

8:00 am on August 20, 2021 By Vitali Ogorodnikov

In 1682, William Penn’s surveyor general Thomas Holme laid out a rectangular street plan for the new planned city of Philadelphia. Today, the area covered by the original plan comprises Center City, yet its grid continued to extend in all directions until it either hit a natural boundary, or was shelved in the postwar period when gridded city plans fell out of favor. As such, most of the city’s central neighborhoods follow the rectilinear plan, with a few notable exceptions. One among these is Francisville, a neighborhood situated west of Broad Street in Lower North Philadelphia. Here, a small yet clearly noticeable group of streets run at a roughly 45-degree angle to the main grid, as they follow Ridge Avenue and predate the grid’s extent this far north. The neighborhood fell on hard times in the postwar period, yet today it is awash in new construction as low- and mid-rise buildings are rising in every direction. The construction boom translated to 28 category tags over the course of the past year, landing Francisville at the 30th place on Philly YIMBY’s First Anniversary Countdown, where we track article categories we tagged most frequently over the course of the past year. Today we visit the most notable developments that we have covered in the neighborhood during this period.

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