Step out of the art deco cathedral that is Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station and you see a neighborhood-wide construction site. Stand beneath the station’s West Portico, and its columns frame images of cranes, steel beams, and glass towers, amid a park of redwood trees and century-old limestone and terra cotta. A new skyline is rising in America’s sixth-largest city, where, until the mid-1980s, a gentleman’s agreement dictated that buildings couldn’t surpass the height of William Penn’s statue atop City Hall.
University City—more than 2.4 square miles, with boundaries from 52nd Street through the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University campuses, then eastward to the Schuylkill River banks adjoining Center City, the heart of Philadelphia’s downtown—is becoming the vital economic core of the metropolitan region. In addition to universities, this West Philadelphia neighborhood, with a population of more than 55,000, is home to health-care systems and laboratories fueling the city’s life sciences industry. University City has become a “global life sciences hub,” says Bruce Katz, director of Drexel’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab. “Cell and gene therapy [CGT] is the special sauce.”
In the 1990s, pioneering work by University of Pennsylvania scientists made University City the birthplace of CGT, which, thanks to groundbreaking research, has led to life-changing treatments, and even cures for genetic defects. Now, the industry is transforming West Philadelphia’s blocks into a dense area that’s competing with Center City, where an era of remote work has led to a 20 percent office vacancy rate. “It might be time to stop talking about recovery,” Center City District CEO Prema Katari Gupta told WHYY in May.
The contrast in urban vibrancy is apparent when comparing University City with some blocks around City Hall, where the neighboring landmark Wanamaker Building entered receivership last fall, or Rittenhouse Square, Center City’s upscale residential district. For every law firm downsizing its skyscraper footprint in Center City, there’s a new office occupant in University City, from start-ups to laboratories, often tied to the life sciences. Work involving biotech and bio manufacturing can’t be accomplished over Zoom calls, so, unlike their white-collar peers in accounting or consulting, scientists and researchers are commuting to University City’s offices and labs.
All this was unthinkable even a decade ago, when a westward stroll from Amtrak’s third-busiest station involved passing little but parking lots and a Firestone auto shop on Market Street; the area was barren and unsafe. “It has been a really amazing evolution of . . . a previous dead zone,” said Jerry Sweeney, president and chief executive officer of Brandywine, a real-estate investment trust playing a part in University City’s growth. As Alan Greenberger, a Drexel University vice president, told Philadelphia Business Journal, “I don’t think Philadelphia has ever seen this type of explosive development in such a tight geography before.”
The increasing density and foot traffic of University City owes to the neighborhood’s ambitious private-sector leaders. They make up a partnership of higher-education institutions, the life sciences industry, and real-estate developers that has invested massive capital into the area’s three innovation districts, all forming within the past decade. Through wide-spread construction projects involving existing and prospective employers, these districts are attracting talent and translating “research into commercial discovery,” says John Grady, a senior vice president at Wexford Science + Technology, another real-estate partner involved in University City’s expansion.
The life sciences sector ignited the boom. In 2023, more than $710 million of development was added to the neighborhood’s inventory—and nearly $2 billion in investments in research and development. Last year, 46 construction projects were either finished or underway, accounting for 2.23 million square feet of offices, laboratories, and apartments, among other mixed-use purposes. Meantime, in 2023, construction began on a 12-story building, rising near 30th Street Station, which will be the city’s largest life sciences lab when completed later this year. And Spark Therapeutics, the biggest player in Philadelphia’s gene therapeutics realm, broke ground on its $575 million innovation center, doubling its city footprint. Earlier this year, 30th Street Station commenced $550 million in multiyear renovations. More mixed-use development is planned or underway.
Drexel has been the civic force behind the real-estate development. “This just wasn’t a random series of real-estate development acts,” says John Fry, whose 14-year presidency of the university will end this November, when he becomes president of Temple University in North Philadelphia. “This was a carefully thought through strategy . . . about being basically the nation’s preeminent, transportation hub-based innovation district campus in the country.”
Philadelphia was once known as the Workshop of the World, the city’s working-class residents producing everything from textiles and locomotives to ships and chemicals. Today, it’s a city deploying mRNA technology for sickle cell and heart disease, producing innovative cancer therapeutics, and even developing antibody therapies for pets. With their homegrown research base, strategic investments, and real-estate development, University City’s partnerships are turning Philadelphia into a global laboratory.
University City’s expanse of glass towers began as a meatpacking district. In the early 1900s, along the Schuylkill River, the Pennsylvania Railroad ran a 21-acre slaughterhouse complex. Not far from the abattoir, at 30th and Market Streets, stood D. B. Martin Company, a state-of-the-art meatpacking plant with a rooftop pen for 500 cows. A block away, at 31st and Chestnut Streets, stood the Italian Renaissance-style Main Building of the Drexel Institute, founded in 1891 by financier Anthony Drexel as a practical school for the city’s working class.
By the early 1930s, the Pennsylvania Railroad had cleared the stockyards to construct 30th Street Station, its rail transporting passengers but also mail from the neighboring U.S. Post Office building, completed in 1935. For decades, though, the blocks around the station were “a no man’s land between the river and the start of Drexel and Penn. There was really nothing going on for a long time,” said Inga Saffron, a Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic.
Broadening its educational scope after World War II, Drexel renamed itself the Drexel Institute of Technology. The University of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, started its Great Expansion, which set off “a fierce, unprecedented competition for wealth, power, and prestige among the nation’s research universities,” wrote John Puckett and Mark Frazier Lloyd in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Penn targeted the blocks, many residential, of what was coined “University City,” which the Inquirer in 1960 editorialized would transform from “dilapidated commercial structures and substandard housing, into a park-like panorama of college campuses, educational and medical buildings, [a] research center.” It was the age of urban renewal, and “no university achieved a larger expansion or made a greater use of urban renewal tools than Penn,” wrote Puckett and Lloyd.
University City and its displaced residents bore the brunt of this then-fashionable approach to urban planning. The stretch of Walnut Street along Penn’s campus became an expanse of ugly brutalist architecture and desolate parking lots. By the early 1990s, both Penn and Drexel faced institutional crises in a now crime-ridden neighborhood, plagued by shootings and murders. “Faculty and students took notice. While 60 percent of [Penn] graduate students lived in University City in the 1988-1989 school year, the number dropped to 25 percent by the spring of 1996,” noted the Daily Pennsylvanian.
In response, Judith Rodin, the president of Penn, spearheaded a university-led initiative seeking to improve University City. During this period, Rodin hired Fry, who was then consulting Penn on the neighborhood’s improvement, as the university’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. As Fry recounted, he focused on initiatives “to restore safety and cleanliness to the public environment.” This involved the formation in 1997 of University City District, a business-improvement district organization, with Fry as founding chair. As the organization worked on the neighborhood, and the university hired more cops, Penn also reviewed the undeveloped real estate east of campus. This led to the acquisition of an 18-acre area that included the Philadelphia Civic Center, built in 1931. By the early 2000s, Civic Center Boulevard became a campus for Penn’s massive expansion of its health-care system and the site of facilities for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). At the same time, Drexel, where enrollment had plummeted in the early nineties, was embarking on its own turnaround, which involved purchasing institutions and concentrating on its foundational co-operative education program.
By the mid-2000s, University City had dramatically improved, but it still lacked activity and density. It was then that Brandywine, at the time headquartered on the Main Line and mostly involved with suburban real estate, launched a project that began to transform West Philadelphia’s uninspiring skyline.
The story of today’s University City dates to this period. In 2002, Amtrak had selected Brandywine as the developer of a large parcel next to 30th Street Station. That became Cira Centre, a curving, 29-story modern tower—the first skyscraper west of the Schuylkill River. Sweeney, Brandywine’s CEO since its 1994 founding, recounted how he saw the 1920s-era renderings for the train station, which was surrounded by buildings. He asked himself, “If the planners in . . . the twenties were thinking about creating a new center for the city, why can’t we do that today?” Sweeney wondered: could developers like Brandywine and other city stakeholders shift “the center of gravity of Philadelphia from City Hall to 30th Street Station?”
From Cira Centre to the subsequent early-to-mid 2010s development of Cira Centre South—two skyscrapers, including the current headquarters of Brandywine, south of the station—Sweeney noted that the company was making a “simple bet . . . that at some point those anchor institutions [Penn and Drexel] would need to…start moving eastward as opposed to continue to move westward.” Along with leasing Penn-owned land for this project, Brandywine had bought, redeveloped, and then sold the Penn-owned old post office.
By the early 2010s, Fry had concluded an eight-year tenure as president of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, in south-central Pennsylvania, and became Drexel’s president. There, as Fry recounted, “I had the same set of opportunities on the other side of Market Street,” noting approximately 14 acres of mostly “parking lots, underutilized facilities.” Drexel proceeded to assemble properties, and its leadership thought “carefully about the kind of gateway we want to have for our campus,” said Fry. He was inspired by the transformation of Kendall Square, a rundown part of Cambridge, Massachusetts—home to Harvard and MIT—that had transformed into a thriving medical and biotech innovation hub. Fry wanted Drexel “to sort of do our version of what they did in Kendall Square.” Fry also factored in Drexel’s educational mission as a co-op university. “All of our students work,” he said, “and I thought, wouldn’t it be great over time if we developed a density of businesses and tech and life sciences so that my students . . . have the opportunity literally to stay on campus and work for employers who are nearby?”
Thanks to Drexel’s partnerships, Fry’s vision came into fruition with life sciences investments near or on campus, including the university’s collaboration with Gattuso Development Partners on a Cuthbert Street site that will be Philadelphia’s largest research and lab space. Overall, three innovation districts have emerged around the campus. Much of the development proceeded during the pandemic, especially in University City, where Penn scientists pioneered the mRNA research that led to Covid-19 vaccines. When University City-based employees were still working remotely, it gave “all the contractors the opportunity to get these buildings up and running quickly,” noted Fry, who continued to work in person and “just watched everything . . . explode in terms of development.”
The first innovation district, announced in 2016, was Brandywine’s $3.5 billion Schuylkill Yards development around the 14 acres surrounding the region’s transportation center—previously, Sweeney’s “dead zone.” The inaugural Schuylkill Yards project, completed in 2019, was Drexel Square, a public green space in front of the Bulletin Building, Brandywine’s subsequent project. Last year, on JFK Boulevard, Brandywine finished the 28-story West Tower, which includes life science space but also rental apartments, and later this year, its 12-story life science building will open on Market Street. Meantime, at Cira Centre, office space has been converted to accommodate life sciences growth, including the incubator B+labs. Asked if he ever anticipated life sciences’ role in the neighborhood upon Cira Centre’s 2005 completion, Sweeney responded: “I don’t think anyone in the city understood the magnitude of what its impact would be.”
Schuylkill Yards’ projects have overlapped with the ongoing second innovation district, centered around Spark Therapeutics, a gene therapy company. Created by CHOP scientists with a $33 million investment from the institution in 2013, the firm works to accelerate the market entry of gene therapies; in 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved its treatment of an inherited form of retinal blindness. In 2019, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche bought the firm for $4.8 billion, the largest venture capital-backed exit in Philadelphia’s history.
At one point, Fry recalled, Spark contemplated locating its manufacturing outside the city, but Drexel worked with it to keep this component together with its research. Today, Spark is the anchored tenant at the Drexel-owned Bulletin Building, redeveloped by Brandywine, which also redeveloped 3000 Market Street, the old industrial building once home to D. B. Martin’s slaughterhouse. Nearby, a Drexel lot is being transformed into Spark’s 500,000-square-foot cell and gene therapy center. By staying in University City, Spark has effectively become part of the Drexel campus, says Fry.
While Spark’s green-colored branding is ever-present around Drexel’s eastern gateway, the university has worked with another developer, alongside Penn, in the ongoing multibillion-dollar development of a third innovation district that’s also the campus’s western gateway. This district’s origins date back a decade, when Drexel purchased and demolished the closed University City High School and announced a $1 billion mixed-use development plan. Drexel rebranded the University City Science Center, founded in 1963, as uCity Square, as part of a massive redevelopment of the 10-acre targeted area.
Wexford Science + Technology, a real-estate developer, partnered with real-estate investor Ventas, Drexel, and Penn in this neighborhood’s transformation. All told, at uCity Square, Wexford has developed eight properties, accounting for 2.2 million square feet that include 200 companies. Another 3.3 million square feet is in pre-development. In 2022, Drexel opened its new Health Sciences Building, which includes its college of nursing and medicine, in a uCity Square building. Wexford recently completed One uCity Square, where Penn has located multi-disciplinary research labs. Among Penn’s tenants at the property is the research team of Drew Weissman, an immunologist who won a 2023 Nobel prize with fellow Penn professor Katalin Karikó for their mRNA research that led to Covid-19 vaccines.
As Grady, who has long worked in Philadelphia’s economic-development realm and oversees uCity Square at Wexford, noted, the decision by Penn and Drexel to lease in the district’s properties was a tribute to the multi-disciplinary collaboration occurring throughout University City. In Penn’s case, for example, it was putting researchers “in direct contact with start-up companies and venture capital and mature companies,” said Grady. Overall, noting the Philadelphia region’s foundation as a life sciences and pharmaceutical center, Grady observed that University City’s districts include long-time industry leaders who “understand how to take science and turn it into business.”
A doctorate isn’t a prerequisite for employment in University City’s labs. Since 2009, University City District has operated the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative (WPSI), which began as an internship program but has since evolved into a workforce-development organization for residents of West Philadelphia and citywide. Philadelphia remains America’s poorest big city, with a 21.7 percent poverty rate, and West Philadelphia itself is home to an historically poor black population. Matt Bergheiser, University City District’s executive director, says that, as gene therapy firms evolve from research into production and manufacturing, “all of a sudden they’re building these facilities that need folks [and] jobs . . . without a four-year degree.” WPSI has worked to train these future lab workers, who, Bergheiser added, “start often at $25 or $26 an hour with full benefits and have a career path upward.”
Over the past two years, despite ongoing construction, macroeconomic forces have created problems for real-estate development and the life sciences sector. For one, there’s inflation. As the Inquirer reported last year, some Philadelphia “landlords are facing big debt repayments at much higher interest rates as they lose rental income from departing tenants” (a challenge amplified by remote work). This uncertainty led Sweeney to read the “economic tea leaves,” as he put it to the Philadelphia Business Journal last September, and not build Schuylkill Yards’ next skyscraper, known as East Tower, on spec. The life sciences industry has experienced its own slowdown, leading to a higher vacancy rate for this city sector. As Sweeney told me, “You had a drop off in venture capital investment, so life science is not immune to economic realities, either.”
Looking ahead, concerns range from Philadelphia’s heavy life sciences focus to state regulations. According to the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, the city is home to nearly 10 percent of the world’s gene and cellular companies. But at a Bisnow life sciences conference this past spring, panelists worried that this “dominance . . . might be a sign that Philadelphia has set itself up as a one-trick pony,” which, in turn, could impact venture capital investments. Pennsylvania’s antiquated liquor control laws are another problem. “You need a permit through the liquor board in order to order high-proof ethanol for the labs,” said Melina Blees, Philadelphia head of BioLabs, at the conference. “This is the only location we’re in across the world where that’s true.”
But walking around University City, there’s no sense of doom and gloom. Standing atop a Chestnut Street multistory parking garage, looking out toward the cranes and buildings affixed with Drexel and Penn logos, one realizes that University City’s new skyline now surmounts Center City’s. “This is the center of the city,” said Katz.
Top Photo: 30th Street Station’s West Portico looking out to the old Post Office building and the FMC tower (All photos courtesy of the author)