With Philadelphia’s real estate boom humming along for longer than anyone might have expected, we’re seeing several examples of long stalled or seemingly abandoned projects reappearing on our radar and actually coming to fruition. For example, there’s the mixed-use development at 18th & Washington, first presented in 2011, which came back to SOSNA just this week. Or the southwest corner of 23rd & South, where a project was denied several years ago at the ZBA, which is now getting rehabbed after years of sitting and waiting. Now it seems we can add 626 N. Delaware Ave. to the list of projects that looked like they wouldn’t happen but are now seemingly moving forward.

The City owned this lot for over a century, and it was home to an old warehouse labeled “Department of Public Works Municipal Asphalt Plant.” It was a little over four years ago that the City decided it was time to divest itself of the property, and considering that the Department of Public Works disappeared in 1951, we’d say it was about time. A Plan Philly story details that the City struck a deal with the owners of Desimone Auto Group to sell the property for $1M and that the new owners had a plan to tear down the warehouse and build an 8-story building with a car dealership on the bottom floors and residential on the upper floors. The warehouse is gone, but if you visit the property today, you’ll notice that the new building never came to fruition.

As we’ve told you many times before, we get email updates from most community groups, and the most recent email from Northern Liberties Neighbors Association calls out next week’s community zoning meeting, at which the owners of this property are coming back to the neighborhood with a revised plan. The project has changed over the years, and would now entail a 15-story building with a car dealership on the lower levels, 96 apartments on the upper levels of the building, and a mechanical parking garage with 31 parking spaces for the dealership and 86 parking spaces for the residential portion of the building. We would have never expected such a project on a little 9,000 sqft lot, but it must make financial sense or else the owners wouldn’t be proposing it.

We see that the project has come back to the community a couple times in the last year, so the neighborhood has had a few opportunities to register their thoughts on the proposal. We wonder whether the fourth time will be a charm, though the fact that the project doesn’t fall within the guidelines of the Central Delaware Overlay gives us the sense that it might run into headwinds no matter what changes are ultimately made. That overlay forbids auto-centric uses on the first floor, but allows for a couple of height bonuses (green design and mixed-income) which the project utilizes to allow for its size. Should be interesting to see how the community comes out on the latest iteration of the project and whether the ZBA approves it in the end. Or maybe it’ll just sit in limbo for a few more years… stay tuned.