990 Spring Garden, from wholesale drug warehouse to a building full of makers

Harry Hayman stopped to read a plaque on Spring Garden Street, which is not a thing most people do, and the plaque turned out to contain a complete argument about how cities keep buildings alive. Ninety nine years, four uses, one address, and a stretch in the middle where the building did nothing at all.

What the plaque on the wall says

The text is short enough to quote in full from the photograph. 990 Spring Garden was designed by Rankin and Kellog and built in 1927 as the warehouse for the Philadelphia Wholesale Drug Company. In the 1950s it became the home of the Packard Press printing company, which stayed until the 1980s and then left, and the building sat vacant. In 2016, after decades of vacancy and underuse, it was reworked into what the plaque calls a collective where art, culture, technology and makers share a building.

Four lives in a century. Two of them industrial, one of them nothing, and the current one full of people who make things.

Harry Hayman keeps returning to buildings like this because they answer a question the city argues about constantly without resolving: what is supposed to happen to industrial stock that no longer has an industry. The default answers are demolition or decades of nothing. Adaptive reuse is the third answer, and it is harder, slower and more expensive than either of the others right up until it works.

Who did the reworking

The plaque credits Arts and Crafts Holdings, the developer led by Aaron Cohen and Craig Grossman that has spent the past decade assembling and reworking the warehouse stock north east of City Hall into what it calls the Spring Arts district. The partners bought the initial portfolio in 2015, and 990 Spring Garden was one of the first three properties in it.

The approach is not new to Craig Grossman, who previously drove the redevelopment of Midtown Village around South 13th Street, roughly 24 properties and more than 400,000 square feet in an area that had been written off. Philadelphia Magazine asked in 2017 whether Spring Arts would become the next Midtown Village, which was the correct question and is still being answered.

Part of the pitch has been space for people who make things rather than only for offices. PIDC has written about the studio space offered to creatives across the portfolio, which is the part of the model that decides whether a district full of the word arts contains any.

The neighbourhood the buildings sit in

Callowhill is the strip between Chinatown and Spring Garden Street, historically industrial, for a long time better known for what had closed than for what was open. It is the same neighbourhood that holds Underground Arts in a basement a few blocks away, and the same one people have been predicting a turnaround for since roughly the 1990s.

What makes the last decade different from the previous three is that somebody bought the buildings and then spent money on them rather than waiting for the market to arrive. That is the unglamorous mechanic underneath every neighbourhood story anyone tells: not vision, capital, applied to specific addresses over a long period.

The part that has to be said honestly

Praise for a developer is worth very little if it skips the record, so here is the record. In December 2018 WHYY reported that residential tenants at 1217 Spring Garden Street, a different building in the same portfolio, had raised complaints about leaks, mold, heating and repairs, and that the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections had recorded violations there. The company’s response at the time, from Aaron Cohen, was that tenant concerns were addressed immediately and that the problems traced to a property manager who had not passed complaints along.

That reporting is nearly eight years old and concerns a residential building rather than the maker studios at 990. It belongs in the story anyway. A developer that markets itself on a gentler approach to a neighbourhood invites the question of how the buildings are actually run, and the answer to that question is the whole difference between a district and a brand.

What the vacant decades actually cost

The line on the plaque that repays the most thought is the shortest one: the printing company left in the 1980s and the building sat vacant.

That is roughly thirty years of a large, structurally sound, well built warehouse in walking distance of the centre of a major American city producing nothing. No jobs, no rent, no tax base beyond the land, no reason for anybody to walk down that block. Multiply it by the number of similar buildings in the same few streets and the scale of what Callowhill was carrying becomes clear.

Vacancy is usually discussed as a symptom, as though buildings empty out because a neighbourhood declined. Often the causation runs the other way. A block with three dead warehouses on it has no foot traffic, which means no shops, which means fewer reasons to live there, which means the next building empties faster. Emptiness is contagious in a way that is difficult to reverse and cheap to ignore, because nobody is billed for it.

The reason the 2016 date on the plaque matters is that somebody decided to stop paying that cost. Not through a plan or a designation or a study, but by buying a specific building and putting money into it. Harry Hayman’s interest in this is not developer admiration. It is that the mechanism is legible: you can point at the address, the year, and the change of use, and nobody has to take anybody’s word for it.

The same legibility is what makes the criticism fair game. If the claim is that a portfolio of buildings was brought back, then how those buildings are maintained is part of the same claim, and it is measurable the same way.

Why the second photograph matters

The other picture from the same walk is a painted mural on a cinder block wall, a wreath of pink and blue flowers around a single word: persevere.

It is a small piece of wall art on an industrial building, the kind of thing that costs almost nothing relative to a construction budget and does more for how a street feels than the construction does. Harry Hayman has argued for years that this is where culture actually lives in a development, not in the renderings and not in the name.

A district called Spring Arts is a marketing decision. A wall with a mural on it, and studios inside the building behind it, and a plaque that bothers to explain what the building used to be, is closer to the real thing.

What a plaque is for

Nobody is required to put a plaque on a renovated warehouse. It costs money, it takes research, and almost nobody reads it.

Putting one up is a statement that the building had a life before this one and will have a life after it. The Philadelphia Wholesale Drug Company is gone. Packard Press is gone. The current tenants will eventually be gone too. The building will still be at 990 Spring Garden, and somebody will decide what happens next.

That is the argument Harry Hayman took away from stopping to read it. Cities are not made of eras. They are made of buildings that get handed along, and the question is only whether the handing along is deliberate or accidental.