The weather is getting nicer, which means that walking around town doesn’t just have to be about getting from one place to another anymore. It’s the perfect time of year to explore your neighborhood or some other parts of town that you don’t know so well. And you’ll probably find some cool stuff along the way. Traipse around Brewerytown, for instance, and you’re likely to stumble upon a ton of new construction mixed in with some older commercial or industrial buildings with unique architectural features. Wouldn’t you know it, here’s an example from the 1500 block of N. 25th Street.

Clearly, the building at 1502-08 N. 25th St. was once home to a warehouse for the now defunct Scott Powell Dairies. We don’t know much about this business, but we do know that they were based out of West Philadelphia, and given the size of this building we’d guess that this was a delivery hub and not a place for the cows. The building itself is unremarkable, with the old signage being the most interesting feature. The building has been vacant and blighted for a number of years, though a towing company based around the corner purchased the property and is now working to bring it back to active use or at least keep it from falling down. The stucco facade is relatively new, covering over the old brick front. We liked the old look of the building, but suspect the bricks were degraded after years of neglect.

Next door is another building with a great old sign which we believe was once a laundromat.

While the former dairy is getting renovated, we don’t believe anyone has touched this building in years. It’s owned by the City and has been since 1990, which makes us worry that it will eventually become too blighted to survive. It’s impossible to know without the insight of an engineer, but we wonder, even at a nominal purchase price, whether it will be feasible to salvage this building. Unfortunately, we suspect it will eventually get torn down and replaced with housing.

As for the rest of the block, you can see there’s a mix of vacant land and older homes that have survived the years. As we said about the 2500 block of W. Oxford Street around the corner, we can see a world in which market rate development would eventually make its way to this area. But with PHA already owning most of the vacant lots on this block, it’s perhaps more likely that we’ll see affordable housing here instead. Either would be fine, we just hope that the future for the 1500 block of N. 25th Street includes the former dairy and the Eureka building.