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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

A short visit to Philadelphia's roof

The maple-veneer planks are still in place, and the sample-unit kitchen, and most of the bathroom, and the podium where the Trump Tower Philadelphia model used to be.

But the 57th floor of One Liberty Place is now vacant -- the Trump organization suspended its proposed Delaware River condo tower last fall -- and it's for rent, the highest 10,000-square-foot space now available in Philadelphia. So are the 18,000-square-foot 54th and the 24,000-square-foot 33rd floors. The rest of the building is leased, like most of Philadelphia's trophy office space, for now.

The view's spectacular -- you can see from the Atlantic City casinos to the hills below Reading on a clear day -- though not when it's foggy and you have clouds on three sides of you, as I remember from when this used to be Cigna Inc.'s corporate office, back when Cigna was still a financial conglomerate and Philadelphia's biggest company, not a healthcare insurer struggling to adopt to wherever President Obama is taking medical care payments.

Bill Hirschman, senior managing director at office broker Cushman & Wakefield, showed me around. We looked over the condo towers of Rittenhouse Square, South Broad and Market West, and dusted the rumors about which were mostly leased, which were mostly empty, and which were facing foreclosure.

Condos are boom and bust, rumor and claim; office rents are practically public, and the business, in Philadelphia, is so stable as to approach stagnation. One Liberty has been owned for the past decade by Metropolis Investment Holdings, the Chicago arm of Germany's Mann family, former furniture moguls who own some of the biggest U.S. buildings outside New York. They are long-term investors, which is probably a good thing: Philadelphia office rents haven't moved much in that decade.
Posted by Joseph N. DiStefano @ 4:14 PM  Permalink | Post a comment
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About Joseph N. DiStefano
Joseph N. DiStefano writes this blog to feed his PhillyDeals column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Joe has been a member of Bloomberg LP’s New York Finance Team, wrote the book “Comcasted,” taught writing at St. Joseph’s University, and studied economics and history at Penn. Reach Joe at 215-854-5194 and JoeD@phillynews.com
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