Adler, Caplan pay $42M for Design Center, plan apartment tower

Dean Adler of Lubert-Adler Partners says he and Ron Caplan of PMC Property Group have agreed to pay $42 million to New York-based Loeb Partners for the Marketplace Design Center, 2400 Market St., the building with the whales painted on the side, visible from the Schuylkill Expressway. "It's right in the middle of the Market Street Corridor, Rittenhouse Square and University City," Adler told me.

He says the partners hope to keep the Design Center businesses in place, in a consolidated area, along with the telecom server farms that use part of the building; add "creative office space" for tech companies in some of the vacant areas; and top the building with a "mid-rise" apartment tower, as Caplan and Adler have done at the former AAA building, three blocks away at 2040 Market St.

"It's a former car factory, and the roof is 80 feet up, where you get magnificent views of the river," Adler added. "You can take the first floor and have an exciting coffee shop, and perhaps a grocer, there." Giant, or Trader Joe's? "Yeah. And people who live here can walk to work. We have a parking garage behind the building. We can build on the roof. So we didn't have to pay for parking or for land. Our costs right there are 35 percent less" than new construction. Didn't Loeb take that into account? "They've wanted to sell," Adler concluded.