A bill to turn part of the Philadelphia Civic Center property over to the University and to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was approved last month by Philadelphia City Council. Penn and CHOP plan to construct a cancer-research and -treatment center on the property, which covers 10.7 acres of the 19.2-acre Civic Center site.
According to Lori Doyle, chief public-affairs officer
for the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Penn would first build
a freestanding outpatient cancer center, and later a facility devoted
solely to cancer research. CHOP would also build a clinical-research facility
on the property. The project would include an 1,800-car parking garage
and two 900-car parking areas, as well as unspecified “commercial
ventures.”
In return for shouldering the cost of “environmentally
remediating” and demolishing Exhibition Hall and Center Hall — an
8.5-acre lot that would be divided into two parcels — Penn would receive
the larger (six-acre) parcel. CHOP would pay $3 million for the smaller
(2.5-acre) parcel. The total cost of developing the property, which also
includes a 2.2-acre surface parking lot, is estimated at $450 million,
of which some $320 million would be put up by the University and virtually
all of the rest by CHOP. None of the money for this project, incidentally,
will come from the recent $100-million gift from the Abramson Family Foundation.
“Everybody looking at the deal feels that it’s
a winner for all the parties involved,” said John Fry, Penn’s executive
vice president. “We’re proposing to take an outdated convention facility
and turn it into a leading-edge health-care and medical- research center
that will eventually produce thousands of jobs for the city without any
substantial public subsidy. Unlike prior efforts in this area, all the
key players — institutional, governmental, and political — have been
at the table, and are all working from the same program.” Noting
that Exhibition Hall has only been used for one two-month period over
the last five years, Fry called the project a “well-thought-out,
incremental approach to the Civic Center’s future development” that
will further enhance Philadelphia’s status as a world-renowned healthcare-services
center.
“This would be a patient- and research-driven project,”
said Steven M. Wiesenthal, associate vice president for architecture and
facilities-management at the School of Medicine. “It would be focusing
on cancer, something we haven’t been able to do from the campus-planning
perspective. There are not too many places that have the opportunity to
bring it all together, centered around a particular disease, the way we
will here.
“From an urban-planning perspective,” he added,
“what this allows us to do is to create a complex that will come
in line with 30th Street Station, the Post Office, and Franklin Field
as one of the great architectural developments on the west side of the
Schuylkill.”
Earlier in the decade, Penn was exploring the possibility
of building a whole new hospital and ambulatory-care center on the site
— a project that would have cost in the neighborhood of $900 million
and added more beds to an already saturated market. That the project never
went through is something of a relief to the University.
“Times have changed,” said Lori Doyle, “and
the trend now is to keep people out of the hospital. The last thing we
need is more hospital beds. What we really need is more space for outpatient
care.”
The Civic Center — which hosted the Beatles, the Pope,
five national Presidential nominating conventions, and the Philadelphia
Flower Show, not to mention numerous Penn Commencement exercises — became
obsolete when the Pennsylvania Convention Center opened in Center City
in 1993. The project is supported by Philadelphia Mayor Edward G. Rendell,
C’65, City Council President John F. Street, and the Philadelphia
Industrial Development Corporation, which is handling the transaction.
“I’ve always believed health, medical research,
and technology is one of the growth areas of our economy,” said Rendell.
“This is a huge jump-start for us in that area.”
