The building at the northeast corner of Broad & Pine rises three stories, with the ground floor space that was used for years as a Starbucks and the a small parking garage on the upper floors. While parking garages are certainly a need for Center City, this still qualifies as a rather significant underuse for this 10K sqft parcel. We don’t imagine this was the case a hundred years ago, though.

Back in 2015, Dranoff Properties put this property under agreement and announced plans to demolish the existing building and construct a 22-story building with a small Hyde Hotel presence in addition to apartments. In 2017, the plans had evolved, eliminating the hotel element and increasing the size of the building. The new plan called for 56 condo units and 92 parking spots over 28-stories. The project was dubbed Broad + Pine and even went to Civic Design Review, showing a glass and metal clad building from Cecil Baker.

Four years later though, the building looks the same as it did before, aside from the missing Starbucks.

That being said, it looks like something could be happening here at last, as the developers are planning a return visit to Washington Square West Civic Association next week. The e-mail announcing the meeting indicates that the plans have changed again, with the new plans calling for a 14-story building with 91 apartments, 18 parking spots, and 3,000 sqft of retail. And… that’s pretty much all we know, at this point. Maybe the units will be condos, maybe they’ll be rentals. Perhaps the new building will look like the previous iteration, but we don’t know that for sure. We also don’t know what motivated the pivot here.

What we do know is that the project will be coming before WSWCA on October 26th at 7pm, at which point the community will have a chance to weigh in on the project in advance of a return visit to CDR. We should get our mitts on renderings around from the meeting itself, or perhaps we’ll see them before the meeting, if the project is on the CDR agenda for next month. No matter what the community or the CDR committee says, the project is permitted as a matter of right and should proceed as planned, assuming the developer is satisfied with this newest iteration of the plan.

And with Arthaus well on its way up the block, Dranoff will have all the motivation in the world to settle on a concept for Broad & Pine asap. We wouldn’t be surprised to see this project break ground sometime next year, and we’ll look forward to seeing exactly what’s in store for this site.