You’ve probably never paid any mind to the 1400 block of Clymer Street, a little street that dead-ends before it even gets to Broad Street. And you can be forgiven for not paying much attention to this block, as it has been historically home to a row of half a dozen two-story homes, the back of the Slater Funeral Home, and a parking lot for Tindley Temple. Aside from the people living in those homes, we don’t know that too many people have had a reason to set foot on this block of Clymer.

A little over a year ago though, we told you that change was afoot on this little block. The row of homes were all owned by the same family and offered as rentals for many years, which made it very straightforward for a developer to step forward with an offer to buy all of them at once. And that’s just what happened, as developer Noah Ostroff bought the homes with a plan to tear them down and build something new. At the time, we didn’t quite know what to expect. Ostroff has a track record of building high end homes like Lombard Estates, but he’s also built multi-family, like the Garden Square Condos project on 12th Street. Turns out, he went with a project modeled after the latter development, which ended up being a by-right build. And it’s now approaching the finish line.

The project has been dubbed the Ravello, perhaps after the town on the Amalfi coast. You wouldn’t necessarily guess just from looking at the buildings, but the project includes a total of fifteen units. Ten of the units are of the 3 bedroom/3 bathroom variety, with about 1,750 sqft of living space. The other five units are smaller, one-bedroom apartments. The difference between this project and its cousin on 12th Street though, is that these units won’t be listed for sale. Instead, the developer is going with rentals, offering the larger units for $3,250/month and the smaller units for $1,800/month.

Some might say that fifteen apartments is too much for this little block, but we’d posit that additional density is great at this location. It’s just a half a block away from Broad Street and a block and a half from the South Street West corridor. These buildings are, in our estimation, a much higher and better use for the land than half a dozen little homes, especially when you consider the demand for housing in this neighborhood. With that in mind, we wonder whether there might come a time that Tindley Temple would consider selling their parking lot, or perhaps more likely, partnering with a developer to have an apartment building constructed above the parking lot. We’d think that the additional density would only be a positive for this area.