Even casual Naked Philly readers know how much we love when new buildings replace surface parking lots. To say the least, we were pretty jazzed to see how much progress has been made on the seven story apartment building on the former parking lot at 1314-32 Spring Garden St. when we passed by a few evenings ago. With move-in dates available for next month, it’s clear that the Astir Callowhill is nearing the finish line. A reminder, this project will include 149 apartments and a small retail space on the first floor.
A parking lot occupied this property for decades before closing in 2017. Historically though, there were houses and small multi-family buildings here, so the new building is something of a return to form for this site. You may recall, we previously told you about plans for a self-storage building at this location, which thankfully never moved forward. And as we suggested previously, a mixed-use project should do a much better job activating the sidewalk along this transforming corridor.
But the project won’t be perfect in this regard. Despite having a subway station entrance only a few hundred feet away, the building includes an underground parking garage with spots for 28 cars. As we can see from the plans from Bohler Engineers, the design of the garage requires two separate curb cuts, one for ingress and the other for egress. With the City planning on spending millions of dollars over the next few years building protected bike lanes along Spring Garden Street, these curb cuts will unfortunately undermine the goal of making cycling here less stressful. We are speculating here, but we would think that there would be no parking for this project if it weren’t required by the Zoning Code.
It’s been a pleasure watching this building go up, especially considering the awful alternative that we were considering just a few years ago. We wonder, if not for the parking minimum imposed by the code, if the developers might have been able to include a few more units in this building. Certainly, if not for the parking requirement, the streetscape wouldn’t be impacted by a pair of curb cuts. If Mayor Parker wants to induce more housing production in Philadelphia, we’d advocate for eliminating parking minimums across Center City. At the very least, we’d propose rolling back those requirements for properties within a couple blocks of every subway stop in town.