In West Philly

Earlier this month, we told you about a plan from Campus Apartments to demolish an attractive building at 123 S. 41st St. and build a 98 bed student housing building in its place. And we lamented that the new building wouldn't possibly hold a candle, architecturally, to the Italiante mansion that's been here for over

When you consider that the trolley portal at 40th & Baltimore is the busiest at-grade rail station in town, its awful condition in recent memory becomes especially egregious. But the fact that it's historically been a concrete wasteland will make its transformation into the 40th Street Trolley Portal Gardens all the more

We've been keeping tabs on the building at 4100 Chestnut St. over the years, first bringing it to your attention back in 2011. At that time, we noted that student housing player Campus Apartments had purchased the building, with longtime occupant Graphic Arts Inc. moving their operations to Port Richmond. The

We've probably walked past the corner of 40th & Ludlow dozens of times over the years, and at no point did it occur to us that the building on the northwest corner of the intersection might have a notable history. We were way off base, but if you look at

As far as greater Center City goes, we've got a really good handle on neighborhood names, boundaries, and the different challenges of dealing with various community zoning committees. But when we head into West Philadelphia, we admit that our neighborhood geography gets a little shaky. And the farther west we

A reader reached out to us recently, wondering about some demolition activity on the 600 block of Union Street, which is just north of the 3900 block of Haverford Avenue. We figured we'd investigate, as development would sense on this block given the amount of new construction we've seen nearby

A recent thread on the UrbanPHL Facebook page drew our attention to an upcoming demolition on 41st Street in West Philadelphia, and as you can guess from the name of the group, the response was rather negative. The property in question is 123 S. 41st St., a nice looking building on the edge

The handsome building at the northeast corner of 41st & Baltimore was built in 1927, according to the University City Historical Society, designed and constructed by Samuel Silverman and originally known as Calvert Hall. The Historical Society goes on to describe the structure as an example of Renaissance Revival architecture, with "distinguishing features

Thanks to a reader tip, we visited 52nd Street earlier this week to investigate a potential student housing project in a building with some wonderful bones. It turns out the renovation wasn't aimed at creating residential units, but will instead result in a very large clothing store in a greatly improved building

There's been a staggering amount of new construction in West Philadelphia over the last several years, as developers have gobbled up vacant land or underused properties and built new student housing. Near Baltimore Avenue, we've started to see this development move past 50th Street. Farther north though, we can't think