Welcome to Rittenhousenews, a new newsletter for the Rittenhouse (and Logan Circle) neighborhoods, brought to you by The Condo Shop. At The Condo Shop, we help people buy and sell houses and condos for home and investment, and we have an office at the Riverwest Condos at 21st and Chestnut Streets in Rittenhouse Square, Center City, Philadelphia. We would like to share with you great happenings, neighborhood improvements and unique features of the Rittenhouse and Logan Circle neighborhoods, near our Riverwest office.
Philadelphia Film Festival Main Box Office at The Condo Shop Riverwest office
The 20th anniversary Philadelphia Film Festival has just begun on October 20 and will last until November 3, 2011. The Condo Shop is a sponsor and we are happy to have the main box office for the festival at our Riverwest office at 21st and Chestnut. With over 120 films, the Philadelphia Film Festival allows viewers to see independent and artistic films that are not found at your typical movie multiplex. The films will include several special gala screenings, which include discussions with the film makers and/or actors, including Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, a film about controversy surrounding William Shakespeare, Simon Curtis’s My Week with Marilyn, about the relationship between Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, and Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, a black-and-white film that was all the rage at the Cannes Film Festival. The festival opened with the screening of Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy, a film about an international love affair starring Felicity Jones and will close on October 29, with the screening of the tragicomedy, The Descendants, starring George Clooney (although films can be seen through November 3).
The main box office, at Riverwest Condos, will be open through the end of the festival on Monday thru Friday, from 12PM to 8PM, and Saturdays, from 12PM to 5PM. You can get your tickets, and a badge, from Sara Jewett, ticketing manager. Tickets are mostly $12, but are $6 for weekday matinees and $15 for gala premiers. For more info, you check out the film festival’s website, www.filmadelphia.org.
New apartment tower, across from Riverwest, will add to the neighborhood
Working at The Condo Shop office at 21st & Chestnut Streets, I am often looking out at the Sidney Hillman Medical Center, a senior medical center for former apparel manufacturing workers, on the corner of Chestnut and Van Pelt Streets. The building was built in the 1950’s by one of the garment worker unions that eventually became part of UNITE. The exterior has an unusual granite facade and a diagonal shape. Now, Chicago developer John Buck Company and UNITE have teamed up to demolish this building, across from my office at the Riverwest Condos in the 2100 block of Chestnut, and replace it with a gleaming, 34-storey, glass apartment tower. The new tower would have a new space for the Hillman Center and retail spaces along Chestnut Street.
The construction of this tower will start very soon, as it has received approval from the city, and the developers just completed the purchase of the Hillman Center last week. As many may know, it would be the first residential highrise to start construction in Center City in more than two years, since the super upscale 1706 Rittenhouse broke ground at 17th & Rittenhouse Square Streets. This new building would be among the first of several proposed buildings which will be built in the coming years as the nation recovers from the recession. This building will be rentals, which are popular now in Center City, due to the difficulty of obtaining financing for condominiums and the fact that the vacancy rate for rentals in Center City is less than 2%. The vacancy rate for rentals went as high as 4.5% in 2009, which is almost unheard of in Center City. But as the economy recovers, rental vacancy in Center City clearly is getting back to normal.
The new tower, designed by Chicago firm Hartshorne & Plunkard Architects, will have 307 upscale apartments in 34 storeys. It will have retail, with likely a restaurant or two on Chestnut, that will enliven that end of the 2100 block. The total cost is about $100 million to build (including $10 million from the state – another sign it is likely to be built soon), and rents will likely be in the thousands per month, as is normal in Rittenhouse Square for new luxury rentals (at Riverwest, condos rent for $1050 per month for studios to $2000 per month for two-bedrooms). It has been modified a bit from its original design. There was concern among the Unitarian Church across the street about losing sunlight through their stained glass windows, so the developers set the building back above the second floor to preserve sunlight. They, also, are providing a courtyard for use by the residents of the small historic buildings next door on 22nd Street.
The new tower will be a shiny new addition to the west Rittenhouse neighborhood and will be the start of the next round of highrise construction here, and will add more luxury housing and new retail to this end of the Rittenhouse neighborhood, which will undoubtedly increase property values in the western end of the Rittenhouse neighborhood. If you are interested in purchasing or selling a home or investment property in Rittenhouse, then feel free to contact me at gabriel@thecondoshops.com or check out our website, www.thecondoshops.com, or our Condo Shop facebook page here.
Current Sidney Hillman Center
Rendering of the new tower @ 2116 Chestnut Street, across from the Riverwest Condos
Our Condo Shop office, across the street, @ the Riverwest Condos...feel free to stop by
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