Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
Brandywine Realty Trust and Drexel University unveiled their ambitious plan for the 14-acre Schuylkill Yards development when Barack Obama was president. The proposal sought to remake the dead zone around 30th Street Station into a neighborhood. It added office and life science capacity to the eastern edge of University City, where a second skyline had begun to emerge, also largely courtesy of Brandywine, the biggest office developer and owner in the city. Almost 10 years later the plan, which has been hampered by the pandemic and a struggling office market, is still unfolding. The Gather Food Hall opened last week in the old Bulletin newspaper building at 3025 Market St., boasting a bar and local Cambodian, Mexican, and Peruvian offerings. Now two new restaurant tenants are coming to the two completed buildings of the five that Brandywine eventually hopes to bring to the site. KNEAD Hospitality + Design will be opening a Mi Casa, the company’s Tex-Mex concept, in the life sciences and office building at 3151 Market St. The residential and office building at 3025 John F. Kennedy Blvd. will host Tous Les Jours, a French-Korean fusion bakery chain. “It’s all part of what we’ve been doing to create a neighborhood with a good retail base in University City,” said Jerry Sweeney, CEO of Brandywine. “We think [all this] will add to the neighborhood’s attraction and to pedestrian traffic.” KNEAD will also soon have a Mi Vida location, its high-end Mexican concept, opening on East Market Street. And Tous Les Jours has a new location coming to 814 N. Second St. in Northern Liberties as well. Amenity expansion, not more trophy towers The recent additions to Schuylkill Yards come as the larger expansions of its commercial real estate offerings remain unrealized. In addition to the new restaurant and food hall leases, the blitz of activity over the last few months saw the opening of a pedestrian path behind 3151 Market, lined with murals The next steps for Schuylkill Yards include reimagining an unwelcoming stretch of JFK Boulevard, where Megabus riders wait without shelter. “Our objective is to make JFK Boulevard from the west portico of the train station through the bend to Market Street, much more pedestrian-friendly,” Sweeney said. “Put in a lot of additional landscaping, widen the sidewalks, reduce the lanes of traffic. That will dovetail very nicely with our objective of creating a neighborhood.” Sweeney did not have a timeline for that transformation but said Brandywine has finalized a plan, working with the city and the state transportation department. It just needs to be funded and sequenced with other infrastructure work. Plans for the largest — and most architecturally striking — of Schuylkill Yards’ buildings at 3001 JFK Boulevard are still on hold. In 2019, Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron called the proposal a “big red office tower [that] looks like a precarious stack of children’s blocks” and praised its design for breaking from the trend toward glassy office towers. Then the pandemic struck, and the office market was thrown into chaos. In 2023, Sweeney announced that the almost 800,000-square-foot building was on hold until it was 50% pre-leased. Over two years later, the status of the office and life sciences building remains the same, although Sweeney says talks are continuing with “a number” of prospective tenants. “Both the office market and life science are in a bit of a lull right now, but the prospects we have presented that building to have been very favorably impressed with its art, with its efficiency, its prominence on the skyline, and its architecture,” said Sweeney, whose company owns large office buildings in Center City, University City, and in suburbs like Radnor. No definitive date for next phase Back in 2016, two more buildings were planned for Schuylkill Yards, but they will have to wait on Big Red’s fortunes as well. “We’re not announcing a definitive start date, but we’re monitoring capital market and local real estate conditions very diligently to determine when the next phase can start,” said Sweeney, who founded Brandywine in 1994. And in this era of relatively high inflation, the 2016 price tag of $3.5 billion for the entire project should also be revised upward, Sweeney said, although he does not have an exact new price tag. It is true, as Sweeney argues, that even as the office market is struggling, companies like Brandywine that offer the highest-end space often are winners. Older buildings, in less advantageous positions, and with fewer contemporary amenities are struggling to maintain occupancy. Many have gone into foreclosure or sold at huge discounts. Brandywine’s occupancy has remained strong amid what office brokers call the “flight-to-quality.” In the era of hybrid work, employers have often wanted nicer space, if less of it. He says that puts his company in a strong position to continue its dramatic remaking of this corner of University City, especially as interest rates trend lower. “We are moving forward with the planning and design of the next phase of Schuylkill Yards, which will be residential and retail with some commercial components,” Sweeney said. “Those plans are underway.”
