I think that the general concept of the project is workable, but the design (to judge from the renderings and photos of the model) could benefit by a few modifications.

1) The towers are fat and blocky. Essentially, they appear to be one wide wrap-around building in two sections. Moreover, the northern tower overwhelms the historic Stocker house on Front St. I am all for the blending of old and new in architecture, but a sheer 15-story wall smack next to an 18th-century townhouse is too much of a clash.

Solutions seem easy enough. For example, instead of having the northern tower protrude over the ground stories (which are in scale with the lower buildings on the block), let it rise from behind the facade of the ground stories, or even provide it with a series of graduated setbacks (balconies?).

2) It is not clear from the renderings what kind of use is intended for the entrance buildings on 2nd St. They appear to contain a glass lobby of some sort, perhaps for the hotel. As other bloggers have suggested, it might be best to give this over to retail sales or a restaurant/cafe with outdoor tables. This would help give some public use to the space, and perhaps induce people to venture further down the Stamper St. passage into the "sculpture garden."

As it is, the only reason for people to walk into the alleged "greenway" from 2nd St. would appear to be to enter the hotel or the 5-star restaurant. That might be fine for residents or hotel guests, but for the public, the passage and garden might not be the "treasure" that some make it out to be.

this project is horribly out of scale with neighboring 95. They should be proposing to leave it as a big ditch in a nod to the architectural significance of the fabled highway.

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the 2nd street side is the entrance to the hotel and lobby. The lobby is along that glass wall adjacent to the courtyard/walkway. The reception desk faces the courtyard. The restaurant is actually at the 2nd st end of the ground floor and includes a small patio for dining on the courtyard.

I actually was thoughtfully designed with Society Hill's scale in mind. It doesn't rise the 15 story height until it gets to Front Street.

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My God...

Inga writes: "Developers wouldn't be talking about more tall buildings unless they felt confident that Philadelphia could weather the coming economic storm."


Let me get this straight. Her point is pretty much this: If a developer wants to build, it must be a good idea -- because, you know, developers are always right.

Kool-aid for all!

Without Society Hill Towers there is NO Society Hill.

Before the towers were built the area looked truely "bombed out". Forget shells, the land was just rubble everywhere. The Towers helped develop the area again and brought people back that then joined in with the restoration of the area.

I wish someone could find the photo from PhillyHistory of what Society Hill looked like before Interstate-95 was proposed to go through it.

It really did look like Beruit. At the same time people were fleeing en masse for the suburbs as the new Walt Whitman bridge provided a quick exit and Society Hill had only started to heal.

Back in the early 1970s, the homes in the area were still dirt cheap to get--unlike now where it is fashionable to live there, and that's about the same time when the new housing started to look attractive to buyers, square boxy brick homes with mustard-colored interiors and all.

But the big reason why Society Hill came back from extinction was Society Hill Towers. The apartments (at the time they were apartments) provided a big density increase to the neighborhood, which brought back retail into the area which dissipated and closed since the area was bleeding residents like no tomorrow. The increase in retail and proximity to jobs---at the time most of the jobs were in Philadelphia and not the suburbs---provided a lure to repopulate the area and now it's a neighborhood for rich lawyers.

On top of that, before the rebuild happened, you had major structural problems with most of the houses that were standing... indoor plumbing was a luxury in that neighborhood... and most of the residents were the poor and the elderly who couldn't afford to maintain their property--only accentuating the decay. The people who managed to tough it out through the rebuild were given special loans and grants to gut their houses and fix their interiors, and the vacant spaces in Society Hill were in-filled with the present-day faux colonial brick houses and the "brick-moderne" that you see now. Cobblestone was repaired, streetscapes and new lighting was installed, and Washington Square Park got a makeover out of the deal.

You could even argue that the redevelopment project that created the present-day Society Hill, with I.M. Pei's Society Hill Towers as the focal point... stopped what would have become a severe urban blight from taking over all of Center City and leaving it all in ruin.

The affected area stretched all the way north to Walnut and Chestnut, and as far down as Catherine east of 9th Street, but the area that looked completely devastated was specifically between Walnut and Lombard, from 7th Street down to the river.

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Buh-bye.

Society Hill Towers are under construction in this photo taken, I think, from one of the Southwark Plaza high-rises now demolished. This came from the personal collection of the now deceased former pastor of Emanuel Lutheran Church, 1001 South Fourth Street. I may have a higher resolution tif on disk somewhere. I'll look.

EDIT: Found it and converted to jpg. See http://www.southphillyblocks.org/ima...ill_aerial.jpg

What looks like a pile of rubble in the photo above appears in the enlargement to be a ragtag assortment of very small houses.

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east-how do you know how bad it was?
are you saying negro removal is the solution to neighborhood problems?

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Nah... about about the old black and white photo that was taken from the vantage point of Pier 34?

It was taken about halfway through the demolishion process of Society Hill, looking north along present-day Delaware Avenue.

The picture was taken back in the 50s. I remember seeing it posted here 2-3 years ago.

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Buh-bye.