PlanPhilly: Planning Philadelphia's Future

When the Community Design Collaborative chose to make food access the mission of this year's Infill Philadelphia program, three projects - with different approaches to making good food available to residents in Philadelphia and Chester City - made the cut.

Conjuring up designs that not only work in specific regional situations - and meet the challenges thrown up at those locations - but also set a best practice example for future ventures is a cut above.

Tuesday evening teams representing a satellite storefront market on Ogontz Avenue, a co-op food market in Chester City, and a large scale supermarket and residential complex on Girard Avenue made final presentations and accepted more feedback from a team of judges that included architects, a supermarket chain owner, developers, and a high level Philadelphia city official.   

The project sites and teams are:

STOREFRONT REUSE

Project: Weavers Way, an established co-op and anchor in Mount Airy, has jumped on the opportunity to open a neat and tidy satellite store in a prominent location along the Ogontz Avenue Commercial Corridor. The design team was changed to develop a fresh food market in a very small retail space that is already up and running, while considering options for using the second floor and an adjacent vacant lot.

The Team: Working closely with Weavers Way Community Programs, Agoos/Lovera Architects has developed a design that gives the community a view inside and space outside to shop, buy, and learn about locally grown food.

WAREHOUSE CONVERSION

Project: A new co-op in Chester, PA is considering a four-story, 32,000 square-foot space in Chester’s central business district. The team was tasked with developing a design that will allow the co-op to grow in phases and best utilize the upper floors and two adjacent lots.

The Team: Working with Chester’s Community Charitable Corporation, KSS Architects LLP brings a big building down to scale and repairs Chester’s frayed central business district.

URBAN SUPER MARKET

Project:  A triangular, 2.8-acre vacant parcel located in Philadelphia’s growing Brewerytown neighborhood is ripe for development and the biggest challenge of the three. The team was charged with creating a conceptual design for a new 35,000 square-foot supermarket that will be attractive to a supermarket operator and serve as a gateway to the Girard Avenue Corridor. 

The Team: Collaborating with the Girard Coalition, Inc., together with Westrum Development Company, Interface Studio Architects LLP designed a contemporary urban supermarket that bridges the gap between Girard Avenue and Brewerytown.

Tuesday evening the teams presented their final renderings before a team of judges made up of: Philadelphia deputy commerce director Elinor Haider; architect Alex Vondering; Leigh Rosen of the Penn Center for Clinical Epidemiology; Paul Steinke, Reading Terminal Market; ShopRite president Jeff Brown; Sean O'Rourke of spg3; Preit vice president Andrew Bottaro; and DIE Creative principal Jamie Montgomery.

These judges had already taken a mid-term review of their progress and the final presentations represented adjustments to the plans given the June critiques.  

While two of these projects are just design concepts at this point, it is possible that all will be buttressed with grants from the Fresh Food Financing Initiative. The project teams' immediate next steps are fine tuning the design concepts and working on attracting partners and stakeholders to their initiatives.  

The Fresh Food Financing Initiative is a program of the state's Department of Community and Economic Development, and several people who play key roles in the Initiative spoke enthusiastically at the project launch earlier this year, including Rep. Dwight Evans, creator of the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative, Don Hinkle-Brown, who manages the Financing Initiative and is also president of one of the organizations that manages it, The Reinvestment Fund. The Food Trust and the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition are the other managing organizations.

Stay tuned to PlanPhilly as we continue to cover the Food Access endeavor.
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posted by Matt Golas. Contact him at mgolas@design.upenn.edu