There’s 30K sqft triangular lot that’s bounded by Ridge Avenue, Buttonwood Street, and 12th Street, but the address is 1126 Spring Garden St. because it’s got a little bit of frontage on Spring Garden Street as well. It’s been sitting vacant for as long as we remember, but back in the day it was home to a lumber yard and before that, a brass works. We wondered about the property back in 2013, noting that it had been owned by the same developers since 2007 and that it was listed for sale in 2011 for $2.8M. That price was way too high back then, but would seem like a steal today.

You can see in the photos, there are some zoning notices posted to the fence surrounding the property. Either the longtime owners have finally gotten motivated to build something here, or new developers have the property under agreement with a (zoning contingent) eye toward redevelopment. The project that’s proposed here would certainly be a game-changer and stand as one of the more exciting additions to the neighborhood in recent memory.

The developers are looking to build a sixteen-story building with 172 apartments, 62 parking spaces, and a pair of commercial spaces. This would by far be the tallest building on Spring Garden Street east of Broad, with a height that far exceeds the spires of the Church of the Assumption across the street and would approach the top of Tower Place, a couple blocks to the west. Aside from this information, we don’t know much about any other project details, like the sizes of the retail spaces, or the site plan in general. And honestly, as long as the building looks decent, we don’t much care about the details.

Over the last several years, we’ve showed you example after example of improvements in the West Poplar neighborhood, just north of here. At the same time, Callowhill has seen multiple reuse projects move forward and most excitingly, the first phase of the Rail Park is set to open this month. With news that a single developer has purchased over a dozen buildings in the general area, this part of town is set to take off to another level. It stands to reason, we’d say, that a sizable project would make all kinds of sense on the 1100 block of Spring Garden. Let’s hope the neighborhood group and the ZBA agree with that assertion.