Developer to add ground-floor retail at One Water Street project
PMC Property Group plans to add ground-floor retail to its One Water Street residential project near the Benjamin Franklin Bridge amid increasing pedestrian traffic along the Delaware River waterfront, the company said.
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PMC Property Group plans to add ground-floor retail to its One Water Street residential project near the Benjamin Franklin Bridge amid increasing pedestrian traffic along the Delaware River waterfront, the company said.
"The sense is that there is considerable activity there, and we are going to try to accommodate some retail," PMC executive vice president Jonathan Stavin said in an interview.
The 250-unit project - consisting of separate 13- and 16-story sections - is being constructed at 230 N. Columbus Blvd., near the recently landscaped Race Street Pier and the historic building that now houses the FringeArts theater and restaurant complex.
One Water Street also is close to the Race Street Connector, an underpass beneath I-95 that is in line for $1.3 million in new lighting, walkways, and other upgrades starting next year.
The connector links the waterfront to Old City, which has been seeing a spate of new development proposals, including a 10-story apartment building planned by PMC beside a historic cobblestone lane known as Little Boys Court.
The Philadelphia Historical Commission's architecture committee voted Tuesday to endorse that development at 218 Arch St., setting the project up for consideration by the full commission at a later meeting.
PMC, among Center City's biggest residential landlords, began work on the $50 million One Water Street project in November 2014 and plans to have it completed in April 2016.
New renderings of the project released this week showed an updated color scheme, with its metal facade set into a grid of silver and bronze panels with randomly placed rust-colored highlights.
The complex's lowest stories, originally designed just for parking, are already under construction, so PMC needs to figure out how to reconfigure the space to allow for retail, Stavin said.
"It's one of the things people have criticized, that there is no retail," he said. "So we are looking at the first floor again."
215-854-2615 @jacobadelman