Amazon says its Southwest Philly warehouse will open in October. It’s one of two projects pushing development in the area.

Industrial redevelopment is picking up in Southwest Philly:

Amazon has told officials it will at last open its two-year-old, three-blocks-long complex adjoining Bartram High School by October, hiring the first of at least 200 workers. It will be the largest Amazon distribution center in Philadelphia and is expected to initially handle 20,000 to 25,000 packages per day.

And Hilco Redevelopment Partners says it has cleared oil refinery equipment and most of the pipes and storage tanks from the two-square-mile former Philadelphia Energy Solutions complex in South and Southwest Philly on both sides of the Schuylkill, and is preparing a massive regrading of the site to attract business tenants, a year ahead of schedule.

“Hilco and Amazon are two flagship companies that together give that part of our city key opportunities to expand,” said state Sen. Anthony Williams (D., Phila.), who says he heard Amazon’s good news from company officials earlier this month.

Williams’ district includes the Amazon site, once home to a General Electric generator equipment factory that employed thousands, and part of the refinery site, which was once one of the largest gasoline producers in North America. However, declining profits, reduced investment following payment of a reported $600 million to private-equity owner Carlyle Group, and a 2019 explosion led to its shutdown and sale to developer Hilco Global.

Williams pointed to neighborhood transportation upgrades that should help attract others to new construction in an area once prominent as an industrial center. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spent $10 million over the past three years repaving sections of streets used by trucks and local residents, and contractors are scheduled to complete $15 million in pier repairs to the Grays Ferry Avenue bridge that links the neighborhood to I-76 by the end of this year.

The neighborhood includes some of Philadelphia’s poorest communities, and recent immigrants from Africa, East Asia, and the Caribbean. Census data shows many commute outside the neighborhood, to jobs in University City or the area around Philadelphia International Airport.

Williams advocated Amazon’s purchase of the rubble-strewn GE site in 2019, securing city support for the shipping company over SEPTA’s rival proposal to use the site for a new trolley maintenance center. But after building the black-fenced, white-walled, 140,000-square-foot complex, with 300 commuter parking places and 600 trailer-parking spaces, Amazon put off the opening, along with a similar facility at 53 Germantown Pike in East Norriton, and in many other communities across the U.S.

“Given the unexpected surge in demand during the pandemic, we had doubled the size of our fulfillment center footprint,” in just “a couple of years,” but by 2022 the company was finding “inefficiencies” from that expansion that cut into profits and forced changes, chief executive Andy Jassy told investors in an April 27 conference call.

Recent local news reports have noted new Amazon warehouse openings in Iowa, Rhode Island, and upstate New York, among other states, suggesting the company is growing its local warehouse network again. Besides its well-known online retail shipping services, Amazon is also a major provider of business web services and consumer advertising.

“They are finally opening,” Williams said of the Southwest Philly site. He said he urged Amazon to build close ties with community groups and neighborhood schools as it recruits staff. “I am pushing on not only providing jobs, but also being a good neighbor, doing everything a major corporation would do,” he said.

In a statement Wednesday, Hilco said it has received permission from the state Department of Environmental Protection to remove two wastewater plants, the last demolition work it needs to do on the 1,300-acre riverside site.

It has also received permits from the city to move more than two million cubic yards of soil, to be redistributed onto flood-prone areas, especially those where it plans to build structures.

Hilco is marketing the site as the Bellwether District (a bellwether is the lead sheep on a farm, which wears a bell to attract others). The company says it plans to spend $4 billion building 16.5 million square feet of warehouses, labs, and other structures, starting with new roads and other improvements along 26th Street near the Grays Ferry Bridge, for as-yet unsigned tenants.