The 100 block of W. Wildey Street in Northern Liberties is a bit of a mixed bag. Start at Front Street, and you’ll see a recently renovated building that once housed a refridgeration company and now contains office space and a fried chicken place. Take a few more steps and veer to the left to follow the street, and you’ll see another conversion, the former Boone School, which turned into an apartment building several years ago. Across the street, you’ll see some homes. Moving along the block, there’s a large vacant patch on the south side until you reach a new home next to a small dog park, and a relatively new parking garage on the north side. It’s that large patch of vacant land that’s of interest to us today.

138-46 W. Wildey St. has been sitting empty for years, a vacancy that pedates the dog park, the parking garage, and the residential conversion of the former school. Earlier this year, developers came to the community with a plan to build eight homes on this property, with five homes on Wildey Street and three homes on Allen Street. Each home was to rise four stories and include garage parking. But the community didn’t like the front loading garages, so the developers went back a forth a couple times before reappearing last night at another community meeting. According to a reader that attended the meeting, there was still some disagreement on some small details of the project, but it seems there’s path forward for the proposal to move forward in the process. This is good news as far as we can tell, as there’s no good reason for this patch to remain vacant, and new homes seems like the appropriate use for this location.

If the people who eventually move here need parking, we wonder whether the parking garage across the street will be available to them. This garage, we should note, is part of the same parcel as the Shops at Schmidt’s and the proposed but never built Residences at Schmidt’s. You may recall, Tower sold off a controlling interest in the Piazza and Liberties Walk a few years back to some guy with a famous father in law, but we’re pretty sure that sale didn’t include this parcel. We have to wonder when Tower (or whoever owns the property) will look to develop the large empty space between the supermarket at 2nd & Girard and this parking garage.

Let’s agree that the massive dirt surface parking lot isn’t exactly the highest and best use for this property.