When we told you yesterday that the Fitzwater Church of God will soon get torn down, last summer's demolition of the nearby New Hope Temple Baptist Church came up, unsurprisingly. When we last checked in on that property at 711 S. 12th St., demolition was just getting underway. As you can imagine, the church is now gone and the site is sitting vacant, with redevelopment on the horizon.

New Hope Temple Baptist Church, pre-demolition

Current view of the site

With many projects, the permitting clearly describes the project that's to come. For this one, all we see so far is a subdivision of the large property into twelve lots. Fortunately, signs on the fence directed us to a website for the upcoming project, which has been dubbed Garden Square Condos. When a church gets demolished these days, we generally expect a collection of large, expensive high-end homes in its place. But this project will be a little different as it will be exclusively condos, as the name suggests.

Project rendering

Plans call for a courtyard in the middle

As we said before, the parcel will be divided into twelve properties. Each building will have four condo units, and the project as a whole will offer a mix of thirty-six 2 bed/2.5 bath units and twelve 3 bed/3bath units. For a change, there won't be any parking included in this project. Instead, as you can see in the image above, the buildings will back up into a really nice looking courtyard area. According to the developer, the smaller units will be probably be priced around $389K for the smaller units and $450K for the larger units. Those prices seem to make sense for this area, as 2 bed/2 bath units have traded recently at the nearby Hawthorne Lofts in the mid-$300K range. 

Putting aside the fact that this project is replacing a great church building, what do you think?
 
And look, we get it, this project doesn't compare architecturally to the church that it's replacing. Ideally, these developers (or someone else) would have been able to pencil out a project that reused the old building and allowed them to pay the same price to the congregation selling the property. But that's hardly ever a realistic scenario. Can anyone out there think of an equitable way to preserve more churches in Philadelphia while still allowing congregations to get as much money as possible when they're looking to move?