For as long as we can remember, we’ve been banging the drum about Washington Avenue, dreaming of a remapping of this underused corridor. Especially west of Broad Street, Washington Avenue was once such a significant industrial corridor that it was home to coal yards, lumber yards, and a smelting plant. And a train ran down the middle of the street! In recent decades, it’s been more of a light industrial corridor, home to building supply companies and the like. As Graduate Hospital and Point Breeze have gentrified, the light industrial uses have become much less appropriate, and we’ve seen mixed-use start to rise on the corridor. Unfortunately, with most of the corridor still zoned for industrial use, the mixed-use development has moved forward in fits and starts, without any sort of master plan.

Grays Ferry Avenue, which hits Washington Avenue around 26th Street, is another corridor that’s mostly zoned for industrial use and also seems like it’s ripe for a change. Some of the parcels on Grays Ferry are likely locked into a long term industrial use, while others have some exciting redevelopment potential. The most sizable project that we can reasonably expect to see in the coming years will take place across from the Grays Ferry Shopping Center, where CHOP purchased a large vacant lot earlier this year. Otherwise, we’ve seen a few smaller scale multi-family projects rise over the last couple years.

Another smallish multi-family project could soon join the crowd, right at the intersection of Grays Ferry and Washington Avenues. We’ve always appreciated this one-story property at 2617 Grays Ferry Ave., mostly because it was home to a beloved lunch spot called Moe’s Hot Dog House until 2015. More recently, the property has been home to a couple of restaurants that didn’t make it, a dog day care, and a school of some kind. But if developers get their way at the ZBA, we could see something a little more interesting here.

At the end of this month, developers will come to the ZBA with a plan for a new building at this site with a restaurant on the first floor and 24 units upstairs. The zoning variance is necessary because the property is zoned for industrial use, like a number of properties on the Washington and Grays Ferry Avenue corridors. Considering that this is a rather small property on the corner of two wide streets, hemmed in by the CSX tracks, we have to think that the ZBA will sign off on the project and we’ll see this project move forward.

That being said, it’s really a shame that the project even has to go through the zoning process. If Washington Avenue were remapped, not only would the door be open to cleanly redevelop this site, but it would open the door to the redevelopment of numerous other sites on the corridor. Here’s to hoping that this project gets approved and that we’ll see additional projects get approved on Washington and Grays Ferry in the near future. At the very least, let’s start with approval for this one. We’ll take the small wins too, folks.