It’s been more than 30 years since SEPTA decided to “temporarily suspend” trolley service between Chestnut Hill and Center City. But between the tracks in the street, the wires in the air, and traffic signs alerting drivers to wide-turning trolleys, the visual reminders of the decades of trolley service along the Germantown Avenue corridor abound.
For Philadelphians too young to actually remember the streetcars operating in Northwest Philly, at least there was the Trolley Car Diner, with its accompanying restored PCC trolley, to serve as a reminder of the not-so-olden days.
Today, even the trolley car diner is just a memory. Ken Weinstein sold the diner in 2019 (and tried to ship the trolley car to Fishtown), with the new owners proposing a mixed-use development at 7619 Germantown Ave. along the Mount Airy / Chestnut Hill border. The development team was able to avoid any NIMBY complaints about parking and traffic by proposing a by-right project.
It’s understandable that folks sometimes get upset about changes in their neighborhood, but it’s worth remembering that this site was a stone quarry just a few decades back. Change is normal in Philadelphia, even if it sometimes seems to occur over a geological time scale. And while construction got off to a bit of a “rocky” start, we saw pretty good progress at the site when we visited the other day.
We already see the outline of a project that will include 114 apartments (36 one bedrooms and 78 two bedrooms), with a roughly 7K sqft commercial space and 38 parking spots underground. The project went to Civic Design Review back in 2021, but the internet never forgets, so we can share renderings of the project from Morrissey Design. As is always the case, we are hopeful that the executed project captures the architectural details represented in the renderings. We’re especially fond of all the masonry on the building’s more visible facades, as well as the curved elements of the balconies and some of the windows on the fifth floor.
Though the streetcars are gone, this location is still pretty well served by mass transit. Buses run up and down Germantown Avenue, and the Mount Airy Regional Rail station is just a ten minute walk away. That being said, we can understand why the developers included 38 underground parking spots, even though it wasn’t required by the zoning code. Fortunately, the parking will be accessed via a driveway off Woodbrook Ave on the edge of the property, squeezed in between the adjacent railroad viaduct, so the curb cut will be relatively unobtrusive.
Many of the surrounding blocks of Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill are zoned primarily for single family homes, so the fact that the developers were able to pursue this project by right makes it a bit of an outlier. The adjacent single story commercial building at 7601 Germantown Ave., has similar zoning and was just put on the market. Though it has a much smaller footprint, we could certainly see a world in which this property changes hands and we see a little more scale here as well. It also makes us wonder whether the developers at 7619 Germantown Ave. might have consolidated their project with the adjacent property, if the timing had been a little different.
It can be a bummer when neighborhood favorite like the Trolley Car Diner closes down, but we’re going to stay hopeful that whatever business opens in the new building goes on to become a local institutions of its own. It certainly won’t have the charm of the old diner, but it will have the benefit of a couple hundred people living upstairs, which can only bode well for its longterm prospects.