Former site of Byberry mental hospital in Northeast Philly will become warehouses

For most of the 20th century, the Philadelphia State Hospital — widely known by the shorthand Byberry — stood as a monument to the inadequacy of the mental health-care system.

Almost from the beginning, the institution was plagued by mismanagement and negligence until it ended in a final spasm of scandal in the late 1980s.

The sprawling site near the Bucks County line sat idle until 2006, when the vandal-scarred buildings were demolished and Westrum Development Co. built a senior community called the Arbours at Eagle Pointe on a slice of the land.

Now the rest of the parcel, facing Roosevelt Boulevard, will be filled with two warehouses totaling 650,000 square feet that are expected to be complete by mid-2025.

“It’s a great location, great access onto Roosevelt Boulevard, and it has a strong labor market,” said Heath Abramsohn, director for New Jersey and Pennsylvania with the Rockefeller Group. “It’s very challenging to find well-located sites within the city limits. Even outside the city, a site like this is rare.”

After Byberry was shuttered, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. (PIDC) — a public-private partnership created to help the city adapt to the post-manufacturing era — acquired the land from the state in 2003. PIDC managed the planning and marketing of the property, which Westrum then cleared for houses for residents 55 and older. The development rights for the other part of the site were acquired by Brandywine Realty Trust, the region’s predominant office owner.

Brandywine got the necessary zoning and other regulatory details ironed out, but without a substantial background in the industrial sector — and little call for high-end office space in suburban Northeast Philly — the company sold development rights to the Rockefeller Group.

“After a period of pursuing commercial development on the property, it became clear that the true market appeal of the site was for modern industrial,” said Tom Dalfo, senior vice president at PIDC. “Brandywine pursued a plan to do that, then Rockefeller purchased the approved and permitted industrial plan.”

The New York-based Rockefeller Group, which is no longer associated with its titular family, hasn’t historically had a presence in the Philadelphia area. Neither have many other national industrial developers because they considered labor costs too high and rents too low in the region. But as warehouse construction boomed during the pandemic, they saw an opportunity.

“For the last many years, Philadelphia wasn’t necessarily a target market for many [industrial development companies],” Abramsohn said. “That started to change from the perspective of how consumers shop, how things are distributed. We started to look at markets that weren’t developed previously.”

The Rockefeller Group won ownership of the land earlier this month and has secured building permits. Financing is expected to be complete by early 2024, and construction will begin soon thereafter, according to Abramsohn.

The warehouse project on the Byberry site is being built speculatively, meaning there is no tenant earmarked for the property. However, it is in a Keystone Opportunity Zone, which means it will offer substantial state and local tax breaks for 10 years to a business located on the site.

“I look forward to redeveloping the site, especially considering the history,” Abramsohn said. “A lot of our sites that we pursue have that type of story. Superfund sites, sites that have been functionally obsolete, or have been more of an eyesore.”

Byberry mental hospital, which opened in 1911, suffered from a lack of funding and from society’s poor understanding of the illnesses it was meant to treat.

Despite its sprawling size, it also suffered from overcrowding. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia notes that in 1934 it housed 4,500 patients in a facility built for 2,500. (The private Friends Hospital, farther down Roosevelt Boulevard, held only 155 patients although it could have housed 190.)

In 1938, the state took over Byberry after the latest headline-grabbing failure by Philadelphia authorities. But the change did little good. Photos from the 1940s show patients shuffling around nude, living in unsanitary conditions, and forced to sleep on the floor. Stories of sexual abuse and violence were common.

In Byberry’s later years, as best practices in mental health care moved away from large institutional settings, the population shrunk. But scandal continued to plague the facility, and Gov. Bob Casey Sr. decided to shutter it in the late 1980s after more tales of patient abuse and exploitation became public.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the site became a popular site for local ghost hunters and vandals.

“Given the history here, it’s not necessarily the best history … it’s just going to be an economic benefit to the city, which they haven’t seen in forever,” said Abramsohn.