Once you get past Washington Ave., Grays Ferry Avenue serves a few purposes, like access to Southwest Philly, the location for the neighborhood supermarket, and the site of the “central” post office in 19146. Otherwise, it’s nothing to write home about, with fast moving cars and various industrial businesses making the streetscape generally unfriendly for all. It’s somewhat analogous to the situation, historically, on Washington Avenue, but we believe that things will continue to change on Washington as the neighborhoods on either side continue to gentrify. It’s probably not realistic to expect those kinds of changes to ever occur on Grays Ferry Avenue, though.

A flyer ended up in our possession recently, which indicates that something significant could be in the works on Federal Street, just a couple doors down from Grays Ferry Avenue. Currently, there are a few one-story garages at 2728-34 Federal St., like several other properties on the block. According to public record, the current owner has held the property for about a decade, though it seems likely that another party has the property under agreement or has already bought it. Whoever owns the property is currently floating a plan to tear down the existing buildings on the property and build a new five-story commercial building. And we’ve got some renderings, with design work done by OW3 Architects.

The flyer provides to pretty detailed info about the project, which has been dubbed The Point on Federal. The 36K sqft project calls for a beer hall on the 1st floor, an event space on the 2nd floor, office space on the 3rd floor, a kitchen on the 4th floor, a restaurant on the 5th floor, and a roof deck. Obviously, there’s nothing like this project anywhere nearby, let alone on Grays Ferry Avenue.

We don’t see any permitting for this project as of yet, but the fact that the renderings exist would seem to suggest that it’s got some legs. That being said, we find ourselves with some questions. Will a beer garden want to open on Grays Ferry Avenue? Can a restaurant succeed on the 5th floor of a building at this location? Will a business want to rent office space here? Our gut says no, but we sure would love to be proved wrong here.