The Heartbeat of the City, With a River Running Through It

It’s being referred to as a gift that this generation is passing on to the next.

In March, Drexel President John A. Fry welcomed a crowd of more than 500 to the official kickoff of the 20-year, $3.5 billion project aptly named “Schuylkill Yards,” a development that will transform a 14-acre swath of land between Amtrak’s 30th Street Station and Drexel’s University City Campus into an innovation community — an exciting and welcoming front door to Drexel and University City.

It’s a project that’s been 20 years — and maybe even a century — in the making, says Fry.

“The genesis of Schuylkill Yards involves two critical decisions made a century apart,” Fry said at the March kickoff event. “In 1891, Anthony Drexel decided on Chestnut and 32nd streets as the location for his new institute, driven by the fact that this neighborhood was a transportation hub, which is still true today. A hundred years later, in 1993, our trustees began acquiring the land that now makes up Schuylkill Yards, despite an economy bad enough to have Philadelphia fighting to avoid bankruptcy, and Drexel fighting to survive. That decision was a vote of confidence in the future of both Drexel and Philadelphia.”

In 2014, Drexel began a national search for a master developer for the site, resulting in the selection of Philadelphia’s Brandywine Realty Trust. Together they’ve envisioned a 14-acre integrated urban environment that features a collaborative and connected community where educational and medical institutions, businesses, residents and visitors are bound together by the pursuit of innovation.

In its role as master developer, Brandywine will oversee and fund the master planning and approval process, and will be responsible for the construction and buildings and public spaces, as well as the ongoing marketing, leasing and management of the project. The agreement is similar to Drexel’s other third-party development relationships, which don’t reach into the University’s pocketbook; Drexel maintains ownership of the underlying land while granting a long-term ground lease to the developer.

“This is not just about creating another corporate campus or building another high rise or apartment building, it’s about creating a neighborhood,” says Jerry Sweeney, Brandywine’s president and CEO. “Our objective is to create something truly special that will be an additional catalyst for the continued ascendancy of Philadelphia.”

Schuylkill-Yards

[box type=”shadow”]Looking southwest from Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station up JFK Boulevard and Market Street, this rendering depicts the soon-to-be-constructed Drexel Square and the new facade of One Drexel Plaza. JFK Boulevard will be made into a tree-lined promenade where pedestrians, bicycles and slow-moving vehicular traffic mingle. Drexel Square will be a public green space that serves as the gateway to Schuylkill Yards. “Our aspiration is that this park becomes, in Philadelphia’s lexicon, our sixth square,” says President John A. Fry. “You know how you feel when you are walking across Rittenhouse Square on a Saturday afternoon — it feels great. We want to aspire to that level of design and community.”[/box]

Schuylkill Yards is indeed a long-term project but construction on its first phase — Drexel Square, a 1.3-acre park just across from 30th Street Station’s west portico — will begin later this year.

Next, work will begin on the “reimagining” of the historic former Bulletin Building, known today as One Drexel Plaza, in early 2017. Brandywine is expected to break ground on a new building in early 2018, delivering sometime in 2019.

Before
Before
After: Schuylkill Yards will transform the area around Amtrak’s 30th Street Station.
After: Schuylkill Yards will transform the area around Amtrak’s 30th Street Station.

The initial phases of the project will bring about 5 million gross square feet of mixed-use real estate on 10 acres owned by Drexel featuring entrepreneurial spaces, educational facilities and research laboratories (Drexel will have priority use of a portion of this space), corporate offices, residential and retail spaces, hospitality and cultural venues and public open spaces. An additional 3 million square feet of mixed-use space over four additional acres south of Market Street will come in later years.

Economic impact studies estimate that Schuylkill Yards will bring 10,000 construction jobs and 15,000 permanent jobs to the area. And, adds Fry, there will be a strong focus on inclusion.

“We are in a federal Promise Zone, so we are going to be thinking about inclusion and diversity when hiring and try to include as many people as possible,” Fry says. “There will be lots of opportunity for the people who live in this region.”

The development is in a prime location, what Fry says is like “oceanfront property.”

“But unlike most oceanfront property, the 14 acres of Schuylkill Yards won’t be developed for an exclusive few,” he says. “They will be developed for all Philadelphians.”

And what about the name? It was an easy choice, Sweeney says.

“As we look at Drexel’s and Brandywine’s long engagement with the Schuylkill River, and how important the river was in the historical planning of the city, we felt it was very important to maintain the connection to the river,” Sweeney says. “We view what we’re doing here as a real acceleration of joining the central business district in University City and making it the heartbeat of the city, with the river running through it.”

Introducing Schuylkill Yards, a new “innovation community” containing mixed-use high-rises and a network of public green spaces, retail and promenades that will be built on the land between Drexel’s campus and Amtrak’s 30th Street Station thanks to a landmark development partnership between the University and Brandywine Realty Trust.