For whatever reason, we tend to take 27th Street to get to Brewerytown. Our landmark for entering the neighborhood is the enormous vacant lot that stretches almost from Polar Street to Girard Avenue, and also a somewhat unusual looking home on the west side of the street. We wrote about 924 N. 27th St. way back in 2011, shortly after it was built, but somewhere along the line the owners swapped out paneling for stucco and now it looks a little more conventional than it did previously. Still, a stucco box on a brick pad isn’t a terribly common design choice these days.

In the photo above, you probably noticed that there’s some construction activity near this home. That construction is taking place at 2710 W. Harper St., a parcel we never would have expected to see get developed. A closer look at the property will quickly reveal why it seemed like such an unlikely candidate for redevelopment.

Well that is a little house indeed. The property is teeny tiny, measuring only 12.75’x29′, which doesn’t accommodate a whole lot of space for a new home. Further, the developers are seemingly building this home by right, not that going to the ZBA would afford them a whole lot more space. But we have to assume that the developers know what they’re doing, as it’s Callahan Ward that’s behind this project. We’ve covered multiple Callahan Ward developments over the years, most recently telling you about some infill projects on Master Street in Brewerytown. So they’re not only experienced developers, but they have a sense of the neighborhood as well. It’s also worth noting that they own the property immediately next door, so it’s likely that we’ll see at least one more home pop up on this block in the near future.

We didn’t even think that development was possible on this part of Harper Street, as we believed that all the properties on Cambridge Street went street to street. Instead, you can clearly see in the map above that there’s over a dozen tiny properties on the south side of Harper Street, and interestingly enough if we look at historic maps we see they were never connected to the homes on Cambridge. Some of the Cambridge Street residents own the Harper Street lot behind their home and use it as outdoor space or for parking, but that’s not the case for most of the lots. This is a long way of saying that if Callahan Ward has success building and selling two homes on this block, it’s quite possible we’ll see other developers get in on the act on Harper Street somewhere down the line.