Huge new warehouse is planned in Holmesburg next to the former prison

A new 191,000-square-foot speculative warehouse is planned for 8301 Torresdale Ave., right next to the infamous former Holmesburg Prison.

This is the second such project in Philadelphia by the New York-based Rockefeller Group, which is no longer associated with its namesake family. The first, announced at the end of last year, is coming to the site of the former Philadelphia State Hospital — better known as Byberry.

Both of Rockefeller’s Philadelphia projects are being built on spec, which means they are not being developed with a specific end user in mind.

“We try to design these buildings for 90-to-95% of the market,” said Heath Abramsohn, the Rockefeller Group’s director for New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “We don’t know who’s going to be in this building, but we designed it so that they could accommodate a broad spectrum of different types of uses and occupier operations.”

Rockefeller acquired the site, previously occupied by a patchwork of old auto repair facilities, at the end of last year. They’ve spent the intervening months demolishing a couple dozen derelict structures on the property and remediating the aftereffects of decades of auto-oriented uses.

“If you look at an old aerial view of the site, you’ll see a ton of cars on the site and tires all over the place,” Abramsohn said. “So we cleaned all that and the buildings that were there, the majority of which have been torn down.”

Although the Rockefeller Group’s project does not need permission from the Zoning Board of Adjustment to move forward, it is large enough to be subject to Civic Design Review, an advisory panel of planners and architects that seek to help large developments fit in the city.

It’s in that context that the developer has been communicating with the Upper Holmesburg Civic Association, the local community group.

For near neighbors, the warehouse project has swept away a longtime blight on the area.

“It was a real mess back there, so getting those folks moved out and cleaned up is definitely a good thing,” said Stanley Cywinski, president of the Upper Holmesburg Civic Association. “They invited us for a walk-through before they got heavily involved, and it was eye-opening. I didn’t realize that it was so bad back there.”

For the Rockefeller Group, the site at 8301 Torresdale Ave. offers excellent I-95 highway access, and a future occupant can tap into Philadelphia’s large labor market. The company’s activity comes amid a burst in warehouse construction in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Since 2020, roughly 55 million square feet of warehouse space has been built or is under construction in the nine-county Philly region.

Abramsohn said the company is looking for more locations to acquire both inside and outside the city, with an emphasis on infill former industrial locations that can be cleaned up and returned to productive use.

“We are very bullish on this market,” Abramsohn said, “and we plan to continue pursuing this strategy.”