A new use for industrial sites: Industry

Philadelphia's old industrial buildings, like those in many cities in recent decades, have enjoyed a renaissance, as anything but industrial buildings.

What were breweries, clothing mills, tire plants, and electronics factories have been turned into hip apartments and condominiums, airy office buildings, and upscale restaurants.

That's if they weren't bulldozed entirely.

Now comes a movement to reverse that trend, as Philadelphia economic-development advocates hope to revive the city's manufacturing muscle, in part through the national push for more energy independence and the jobs to make that a reality.

The Community Design Collaborative, a volunteer group that promotes revitalization of older, urban neighborhoods, is joining the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. (PIDC) on an 18-month initiative to improve job opportunities and restore underused industrial buildings and land to what they call "a competitive market standing."

Put more simply: "Let's focus on industrial for industrial for a little bit," said Elizabeth K. Miller, executive director of the collaborative.

Acknowledging that the task is complicated - including the need to secure financing for renovation, bring very old buildings up to code, and clean up environmental offenses - Miller said the time could not be more opportune.

"It just feels like a perfect storm," she said. "Jobs and the green economy: It's the perfect nexus."

Add to that, Miller said, local, state, and national support for "the idea that urban areas are good," and that roughly 20 percent of the city is zoned industrial.

"I think Philadelphia has the best chance of any city" to pull off an industrial renewal, she said. "Philadelphia has it in its bones."

With most open tracts of industrial-zoned land on the city's periphery already spoken for, largely for use as industrial parks, the Infill Philadelphia initiative will focus much of its work, as its name implies, on neighborhoods dotted with factories or vacant sites where plants once stood.

Soon, gauging how many sites there are, and where, will be more than guesswork.

PIDC, with the city Planning Commission and Commerce Department, has spent the last year taking inventory of Philadelphia's industrial sites as part of a comprehensive study on how to improve employment and development opportunities at them.

The resulting Industrial Market and Land Use Strategy will be released in the fall, said Thomas J. Dalfo, vice president of real estate services at PIDC.

The report will include recommendations for which properties should keep their industrial zoning and which would make more sense as something else. Factored into those recommendations will be national forecasts on industrial needs and which properties are best positioned to meet them.

Among the various challenges in building community support for the reawakening of industrial places, Dalfo said, is educating the public about what is meant by industrial in current terms.

"It's not this horrible factory that's going to have your house covered in soot and grime," he said. "A modern industrial use has some issues that come outside the box of the building, but they're not odors [or] sound as much anymore. It's probably traffic and managing it."

Overall, Dalfo said, modern industrial facilities tend to be clean, quiet, and increasingly green, with each needing far less space than its industrial predecessors. These businesses are more likely to be low-volume, high-margin, customized.

Infill Philadelphia expects to reimage existing industrial facilities to accommodate multiple tenants, which might even share equipment, break rooms, and locker rooms, Miller said.

The Globe Dye Works plant in Frankford is an example of the kind of industrial revitalization Infill Philadelphia hopes to inspire throughout the city.

The plant is a collection of 12 interconnected brick structures built from the late 1800s to the 1930s, that operated as a dye factory until 2005, albeit in a limited capacity toward the end as work went overseas. In all, there is 160,000 square feet of floor space, said Peter Kelly, one of six partners who bought the vacant property in December 2007.

So far, about 20,000 square feet has been leased to 12 tenants, including steelworkers, cabinetmakers, picture-frame manufacturers, even a company that makes salsa and guacamole.

"All these properties represent an incredible opportunity for the city to reinvent itself," Kelly said. "We like to think we're kind of right at the cutting edge of what the city needs right now."

The officials behind Infill Philadelphia sure think so.

The program officially begins Oct. 30 with a daylong design charrette - a brainstorming session to come up with temporary proposals for four industrial sites.

What is meant by temporary is an event or use that can last as little as a day, but no longer than six weeks, and that is preferably cost-neutral. The purpose is to draw attention to industrial buildings.

After that, three two-team groups will be formed, likely to include architects, planners, site owners, industrial users, developers, and community-based nonprofit organizations. Each group will spend six months creating a design plan for a separate industrial property. Their work will be made public in May.

"If we're lucky," Miller said, "they'll get built eventually."