Joe Colleluori stood in a corner of a recently built, 325,000-square-foot warehouse, next to a set of posterboards propped up on easels. His voice lightly echoed off the shiny concrete floor before being swallowed up by the vast, high-ceilinged space behind him.
“It’s 40-foot clear height inside, and then, I guess, 42 to 43 foot on the outside,” he told a group of visitors. He gestured at an artist’s rendering of the warehouse and several other buildings on a sprawling industrial campus, interlaced with busy streets and green spaces with thousands of trees. “You made a U-turn here, and then you came in this way to the building,” he told the group, pointing to one of the roads.
About 15 people listened attentively as two photographers darted around them, taking pictures. Colleluori, a senior project manager for HRP Group, described road and signal improvements the company is making along neighboring 26th Street down to Pennrose Avenue, including new traffic and turning lanes near the warehouse.
“From the industrial campus perspective, keep in mind the intersection is designed to, like, a full build-out that assumes 10½ million square feet occupied and rented,” he said. “So we were required to perform off-site improvements at the intersection of 26th and Hartranft.”
The visitors had arrived at the warehouse after taking a short, bumpy ride in a shuttle van from the marketing center for the Bellwether District, a 1,300-acre expanse of mostly open land in South Philadelphia.
The property served as an oil storage and refinery site for about 150 years, until a fire and series of explosions permanently shut it down in 2019. Since then, HRP Group, a division of Illinois-based Hilco Global, has cleared the site of 950 miles of industrial piping, 300 tanks, more than 100 buildings, some 18 million gallons of oil and other hydrocarbons, and thousands of tons of asbestos.
The company is now in the early stages of building an industrial development that a decade from now will consist of perhaps 14 large structures, along with a planned, separate life sciences campus on the property’s northern end.
HRP offered three hourlong tours last Friday to “demystify” the site, which has historically been off-limits to the public, and to explain the company’s development plan, environmental remediation work and community engagement efforts, said Amelia Chassé Alcivar, executive vice president for corporate affairs.
The visits took place as HRP finishes up construction on a second, 727,000-square-foot warehouse, and works to ink deals with prospective tenants to occupy the properties and order up new buildings.
The proposed life sciences campus “is just kind of dirt, but we’re hoping to start construction on our first building early next year,” said Amanda Mazie, HRP’s director of mixed use development. “It really depends on what kind of interest we get. We need a tenant to kind of come and tell us what they want, and then that’ll dictate the start of construction for us.”
The company started marketing the two campuses earlier this year. It says it has seen significant interest from prospective tenants and expects to have news to share on deals in the near future.
Moving mountains of dirt
On the way to the warehouse, the van had taken the tour group past the verdant banks of the Schuylkill River, a stormwater retention pond, various pieces of construction equipment, and a cluster of mini-pyramids of crushed concrete, one of the few noticeable features rising from Bellwether’s flat-graded, 1,300-acre landscape.
“There were a lot of building foundations, tank foundations and other encumbrances that existed on the property during the former use,” Stephanie Eggert, senior vice president of operations, explained over the racket of the van bumping its way along a makeshift dirt road. “We were able to sort of accumulate that material and then crush it so that it can be reused in building foundations under roads and in different slabs.”
HRP has also recovered “a tremendous amount of steel” above and below ground that gets recycled, she said.
The van eventually reached a smooth, newly created stretch of Hartranft Street that led to the long beige warehouse at the property’s eastern border. The visitors trooped into the empty building for short question-and-answer sessions with Colleluori and other HRP execs.
Julianna Connolly, executive vice president for environmental remediation, explained that cleanup duties are shared by former site owner Sunoco, which is on the hook for the century-plus of contamination through 2012, and HRP Group, which is responsible for remediating more recent spills. The developer is working “very aggressively” to clean up 12 spots where contaminants were released in the oil refinery’s last several years of operation and during demolition, she said.
A map on display in the warehouse showed locations labeled with green stars if the state Department of Environmental Protection agrees they’re sufficiently clean, and purple stars where work is still under way. Another focus is managing the relocation of potentially contaminated soil, which has been a major component of the overall redevelopment project.
“We had to move dirt primarily because this area down in the south was vulnerable to flood hazard. It was too low. The river was coming right on the property,” Connolly said, pointing to a spot on another map. “Fortunately for us, there was enough soil on other parts of the property that we could move it. If we had to source that soil from off the property and import it, it would have been prohibitively expensive. Like, this would have been a no-go.”
The map showed areas color-coded green, blue or orange, according to their contamination level. “That allows us to think about, OK, green, we want to make sure we keep that [soil] closer to the river, orange away from the river, things like that,” she said.
HRP continuously monitors 10 areas for dust and volatile organic compounds in the air, so when levels rise, the spots can be wetted down to prevent materials from blowing off the property. It also has a ventilation setup that keeps evaporating substances from accumulating inside the warehouses, and another system that essentially vacuums pools of subsurface gasoline out of the soil, Connolly said.
The company has said it is raising the entire site above the 100-year floodplain — the level where there’s a 1% chance of flooding each year — and the buildings even higher, above the 500-year floodplain.
Unanswered questions remain
The old refinery was the city’s biggest source of particulate air pollution, and neighbors and environmentalists cheered its closure. But some remain concerned about continued environmental issues related to the site, including HRP’s decision to cap contaminated soil instead of removing it and the prospect of future pollution from a continual stream of diesel trucks serving the warehouses.
After the tour ended and the van dropped the group off at a parking lot on West Passyunk Avenue, visitor David Steinberg said he’s among those concerned about the elevating of parts of the property that used to absorb water during storms.
Steinberg, an environmental activist from Runnemede, N.J., said he wonders if that will lead to flooding in surrounding neighborhoods, and beyond.
“If that’s low land and marshland, then where’s that water going to go? Is it going to go to the airport? Is it going to go to Eastwick? Is it going to go to South Philadelphia? Is it going to be New Jersey, or all the above?” he asked. “That is a big concern, because they’re moving a lot of dirt. A lot of dirt. So I don’t yet have the answers.”
He said he’s also trying to find out more about the long-term effects of the soil pollution on the aquifer, the underground layer of rock and sediment that water moves through. “What happens after all this has been, quote, ‘remediated,’ and five, 10 years afterwards, that the pollution that is in the aquifer right now migrates over to the water companies in New Jersey? Who’s responsible for that? Is that HRP? Is it Sunoco? Or is it the taxpayers?”
Other visitors were interested in Bellwether’s economic impact. HRP Group projects that it will generate more than 20,000 temporary construction jobs over the years of its development, and 10,000 to 19,000 permanent jobs once built out.
“It’s the very early stages of a very long-term project, but in terms of the overall growth for our city, for economic mobility — which we know is one of the mayor’s top priorities — I’m very hopeful,” said Victoria Fear, who lives in South Jersey and works for Year Up, a Boston-based nonprofit that runs job training programs for young adults. “That’s all you can be, I guess, at this stage, until you see what type of tenants move in, what type of jobs are created, all that.”
HRP expects tenants in the industrial campus to be “high-throughput facilities” that move merchandise on a daily basis, including logistics and e-commerce companies, although there could also be cold storage, large-scale manufacturing, stores, fitness centers, restaurants and other non-residential uses, Alcivar said. The life sciences or “innovation” campus is meant to have smaller-format buildings for uses like research, manufacturing and training.
Visitor Michael Clemmons, who lives in Queen Village, said he knew someone who worked at the refinery decades ago, when part of the property was owned by Gulf Oil, and he was impressed by the transformation of the site over the last five years.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen to this space, and HRP came in, and they’ve really done a lot to remediate what was here. This place has been there since 1880, so that’s a lot of junk in the ground,” he said. “I think they did a real good job of trying to turn it into something.”
“It still remains to be seen, you know, the end product,” he added. “But I think they’ve got a vision, and it seems to be progressing.”
The post Developer offers tours of warehouse district rising at former South Philly refinery site appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY.
Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.
