Generally when we cover development in East Kensington, it's on Coral Street or Amber Street, or perhaps on some of the upper blocks of Frankford Avenue. Today though, we look at the easy-to-miss 2600 block of Martha Street, a block which has seen significant changes in the last few years. Check out this image from 2011 to get a sense of what we're talking about:
Holy crap, this is terrible. At the corner of Albert Street there's an apparently occupied home, but next door all we see is vacant land and blight. One of the buildings on the block literally looks like Swamp Thing. We visited this block last week and it's a radically different experience.
The home on the corner is all that remains from the previous photo. Next door, at 2615 Martha St., a single family home is under construction. Next to that is another home that was recently built and sold. Moving further down the block are three homes that we think are rentals, owned by the Fishtown Redevelopment Authority. Guessing they're not affiliated with the PRA?
It's amazing to see the transformation this block has experienced in just a few short years. It's actually pretty consistent with what we've seen in other parts of the neighborhood, where the vacant land wilderness is slowly being beaten back by the tide of redevelopment. And with the purchases of some warehouses on Martha Street in the last year, we'd wager this block isn't done changing by a long shot.