In the well-established Spring Garden neighborhood, a humungous home at 1538 Green St. that features a theater and a swimming pool in the basement, a roof deck and two terraces, is almost finished. The 8180 sqft mammoth reminds us of the way people might have lived in the old mansions that once lined Spring Garden Street in the early 1800s, like Bush Hill at 19th & Spring Garden. As it were, the 1900 block of Spring Garden is currently in the midst of some positive changes, as we detailed yesterday.

The home

The mansion at 1538 Green St. is being built by MetroImpact, a developer that has greatly expanded their horizons in recent years. For example, they’re also working on the Fitz4 project at Chadwick & Fitzwater, one of the more daring architectural visions in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood. But we digress. We first told you about the plans for this project last June when the lot was empty but for a fence and a tractor. Over a year later, the exterior finally looked finished. To the uninitiated, the home looks like your standard multi-unit rowhome. But as we told you previously, the home includes five bedrooms and a penthouse. The developer purchased the lot in December of 2010 for a whopping $325K.

Looking down the street

The home will close out the corner on a block that combines beautiful rowhomes, a former church that was converted into condos, and a couple of leftover blighted properties. So many of Spring Garden’s mansions have been carved up into apartments over the years, with relatively few remaining as single family homes. It’s a little odd to see a new mansion getting built from the ground up in this day and age though, and we confess we’re not sure whether we’ll see another like it built in this area in our lifetimes.

Hoping we can get a tour when she’s all done.

–Lou Mancinelli