Brewerytown is picking up speed. West Girard continues to improve incrementally, with a new place from the Pizza Brain guys coming soon. Developers are building new homes and renovating vacant buildings at an accelerating pace. MM Partners is doing their thing. Ditto Westrum, with over a hundred new apartment units across two projects in the last couple of years. And now, one of the big dogs in the neighborhood, the old Red Bell Brewery at 1500 N. 31st St., has changed hands. This should mean that redevelopment is on the horizon.
Rittenhouse Realty has listed this parcel for quite some time, and earlier this week sent out an email that a buyer has stepped forward. The parcel covers 70K sqft and the building has about 200K sqft of interior space, seemingly ripe for adaptive reuse. The building dates back to the olden days of Brewerytown when it was home to the F.A. Poth Brewery, and in later years it was for furniture and appliance storage. In the 1990s, Red Bell Brewery sprung up as part of a microbrewery boom, but it closed down in the early 2000s as part of a microbrewery bust. The building has sat vacant ever since.
We don't see any permit applications on the property just yet, not do we know what developer has purchased the property. We also don't know whether this mystery developer intends to keep the existing building or tear it down in favor of new construction. So yeah, we pretty much know jack squat at the moment. But it shouldn't be long before word trickles out to the community about what's coming here, and once it does you know we'll pass it along. In the meantime, we'll ask you to share what you'd like to see come to this property. Another brewery? Mixed-use? All residential? And if this gets redeveloped, can we assume that the large lot to the south will soon follow?
Yeah, that'd be just great.