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27 February 09: 2400 things to see
HI, EVERYBODY!
Don't think about this building much, do ya?
2400 Chestnut is, as the Philly Skyline goes, among the forgotten. It's not without good reason -- it's not tall like Comcast Center, it's not iconic like City Hall or Liberty Place,
it's not standout architecture like PSFS, and it doesn't have a scrolling sign like its neighbor PECO did until it turned it off at midnight on New Year's to be replaced by a more
dynamic LED sign. But it's there, in every classic South Street Bridge skyline view, watching over the Schuylkill River, River Park and Expressway, a white box against PECO's black
box.
The 34 story 2400 Chestnut -- 33 stories from Chestnut and one lower level along 24th Street -- is 44th tallest in the city, 339' above ground to the roof. (I hereby acknowledge that
this web site's 50 Tallest Buildings is in need of an update, and is being handled accordingly as part of What's Next.) Then
again, it may be 342' or so after a recent addition to the tower.
Following my most recent Delaware diversion, in which I stumbled across several bald eagles (26 January 09: Winter of the
Delaware, fly eagles fly), I got an email from architect Josh Otto, who works in 2400 Chestnut at Brett Webber Architects (BWA),
about some other big birds in the area. If you're among the lucky few, you may have seen one of the incredibly agile yet somehow stealthy peregrine falcons that roost in Center City.
There's a pair atop the PNB Building which one architecture critic tells me she watched swoop down, kill and drop a pigeon in the middle of an unsuspecting crowd on their way to work
at 16th & Market. Another pair was rumored to be nesting at South Street Bridge, which as we know is being demolished just downriver from 2400.
That demolition led the owner of 2400 Chestnut, whose son is an amateur ornithologist and fan of falcons, to invite them to the top of his building. David Chou, a Blue Bell based
structural engineer who worked on the original construction of the building in the late 70s, was given the task of designing a dedicated falcon box atop the building's rooftop
mechanical room. If you're standing near the new post office at 30th & Chestnut, look just above the '00' on the '2400' sign and you'll see it. Whether or not you see any falcons . . .
well, that might depend on the weather.
"I'm not really a bird watcher," Chou laughs, "but I love this project . . . and this building." Chou was also involved with BWA in their current makeover of the building's vestibule
from utilitarian, HUD-era plain to a more dramatic amber glass and polished interior with bright orange accents to the lobby's lighting. Though you may catch a glimpse of this
improvement heading east across the Chestnut Street Bridge, you probably wouldn't notice it unless you were turning into the building's parking lot; likewise unless you were on 24th
Street driving south or walking north, you might not catch the makeover they've made to the lower level's streetscape along the otherwise weird street that feels like the basement
of a city whose action is above.
The action used to be, for a brief window of the city's history, both above and below when this property was the site of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's main Philadelphia station.
There is surprisingly little written about this -- it didn't make Thomas Keels' Forgotten Philadelphia, and there isn't even so much as a summary at PAB, for example -- but it was one of Frank Furness' hardest attempts at a landmark. The
design, commissioned in 1886, was also an attempt to supersede the Wilson Brothers' Broad Street Station (central terminal to B&O's hated rival Pennsylvania Railroad), whose enormous
expansion Furness dedicated himself to less than a decade later.
In Frank Furness, Architecture and the Violent Mind, Michael Lewis
writes:
"What we are trying to do," [Furness] announced dramatically, "is to beat Broad Street Station." What he unveiled was a vivid commercial work that would proclaim the
presence of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad within Philadelphia and defy the stranglehold of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Furness modeled a Flemish Gothic daydream, less a single building
than a jumble of gabes and turrets, a midieval Rathaus run amok and then hoisted on iron stilts.
Frank Furness, Architecture and the Violent Mind, p 168.
Much like the utilitarian 2400 Chestnut stands over the utilitarian Chestnut Street Bridge, Furness' Flemish Gothic daydream B&O Depot stood over Strickland Kneass' cast iron
Chestnut Street arch bridge of graceful
proportions. That bridge was demolished in 1957, and the B&O depot followed suit five years later. The bridge's replacement we know today opened as soon as it could be built.
B&O's railroad lines were bought out and are now infamously used by CSX. The bilevel property at 2400 Chestnut stood empty for over a decade, though, taking an assist from the US
Department of Housing and Urban Development to be redeveloped.
Less a housing project than a typical apartment building (albeit a very big one), the new apartment building was commissioned around the Bicentennial and the peak of the Rizzo years,
in 1976. The developer received HUD's Section 221(d)(4) mortgage insurance, which assists builders of multi-family, market-rate projects, as opposed to the luxury towers we've seen go
up in the last few years (and as opposed to HUD's more famous Section 8 subsidization of housing). According to the building managers, it's now 96% occupied with very little
advertising, largely by recent college graduates transitioning into their careers.
Thomas J Mangan of Fort Washington was selected as the architect of the building. I'm not sure whatever became of Mangan or his firm, but a little Googling shows that he also designed
the St Philip Neri Church in Lafayette Hill and made a donation to Jimmy Carter in his failed re-election bid in 1980, a year after 2400 Chestnut opened
its doors -- in the main entrance off of Chestnut Street and its lower level entrance on 24th Street.
It's an interesting little nook of the city that has the potential to be more interesting, if economic realities ever allow Mandeville Place to be built next door. In the interim, 2401
Walnut -- the former Rosenbluth Building -- next door is getting a makeover to reopen with new office space and a green roof. The building across the street, the loading dock back end
of 2300 Chestnut, has a mural by Richard Haas of William Penn (the statue atop City Hall) standing in the waiting room of the old B&O station. A smaller Ben Franklin (the sculpture in
the rotunda at the Franklin Institute) sits off to the right.
* * *
I meet Josh Otto on the lower level of 2400 Chestnut, in the spacious BWA offices with posters of recent works, including the Puma store on Walnut Street and a modish rowhouse on
Girard Avenue whose back deck looks out over Girard College. We meet Neil Sowersby, the building's maintenance manager with 21 years under his belt at 2400, and head out to the roof
to inspect the falcon box. No falcons today, drat.
Sowersby shows me his point & shoot digital camera, where he's got the display on a photo of a falcon sitting on the ledge of the PECO Building. "That's the best photo I've gotten of
it," he says before uttering the old familiar photographer dilemma, "but I've seen it a lot closer without my camera." He motions to the ledge of the roof we're standing on, 20-30'
away, and intensely describes: "it was perched right there, its body facing right at me, but its head was turned completely around, watching below. It fell straight backwards and
spread its wings and just glided back up into the air." There were to be no such displays on our visit, only the remnants of a falcon's recent lunch (see photo at left). We did,
though, see a flock of seagulls swarming between us and Cira Centre, the late day sunlight lighting their underbellies.
What late day sunlight it was. The day was one of the clearest and purest I can remember, the visibility as clear as I've ever seen. The twin Delaware Memorial Bridges (32 miles), the
twin cooling towers at Limerick (40 miles), all as plain as day. The triple Towers at Wyncote on Route 309 north of the city. The water tower at Burholme Park glaring down at Fox
Chase Cancer Center up in the Northeast. Chestnut Hill Tower up in the corner of the city. The flashing cell phone tower by Sowersby's house in Glenolden. The big shiny skyline right
in our face.
The views on such a clear day are without a doubt a fair trade for not seeing any falcons in a roost they haven't embraced -- yet. In the event that they do, there's already a
falcon cam set up, ready to go live the minute they start building a nest. Until that day, enjoy this new set of photos from up top over on 2400 Chestnut.
GO TO PHOTOS.
Very special thanks to Josh Otto and Neil Sowersby at 2400 Chestnut and Maria Bynum at HUD's Philadelphia office.
–B Love
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