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1,500-Foot Philly Tower Inches Toward Reality

PHILADELPHIA-Walnut Street Capital gets 'positive' response from municipal and community audiences for its planned 1,500-foot, mixed-use tower in Center City.

By Paul Bubny | Updated on April 30, 2008

PHILADELPHIA-The 975-foot Comcast Center at 1701 John F. Kennedy Blvd. in Center City could soon be dwarfed by a nearby tower half again as tall. An informational presentation before the Philadelphia City Planning Commission Tuesday was another step toward eventually getting approvals for Walnut Street Capital’s proposed 1,500-foot, mixed-use American Commerce Center at 1800 Arch St. If completed, it would be one of the 10 tallest buildings in the world.

“We are actively engaged in working with potential tenants” for the ACC project, Peter Kelsen, a land use attorney representing the developer, tells GlobeSt.com. “We have a joint venture partner on board and we don’t see any issue with financing once we get the entitlements and the tenants signed up. These two aspects are moving forward and have been for quite some time, and look pretty positive. We have not concluded the entitlement stage yet and that’s what we’re beginning to do in terms of the formal city process. Tuesday’s meeting was one prerequisite for that.”

Walnut Street in mid-March revealed plans for the project, which is being designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. It would include a 63-story office tower with 1.3 million sf, a 26-story hotel and more than 300,000 sf of retail space above and below street level. The announcement came five months after Verizon’s sale of the 1.5-acre parcel at 1800 Arch to Walnut Street, reportedly in partnership with a Washington State pension fund. The site is across the street from the Comcast Center, and last October Joseph Grasso, head of Walnut Street, told GlobeSt.com that the Comcast tower was “deserving of a better neighbor” than the parking lot that had occupied the parcel since 1992.

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