Making the old new again
Last month, I went to my first little kid birthday party in about 20 years.
It was the kind of party where a whirling bunch of pre-kindergarten kids buzz around a room full of toys, slides and balls and bounce into each other but don’t interact.
Nor do the parents, really, as they chase after their toddlers and try to keep them uninjured and alive.
I was invited in my new role as “Pop” to two little granddaughters — and, I suspect, because a second car was needed to haul gifts, strollers, coolers and decorations back to my daughter and son-in-law’s apartment.
There’s no free lunch, even if it’s pizza and cupcakes at a 3-year-old’s birthday party.
The party was at a place called Beehive at Bok on South Ninth Street in the East Passyunk section of South Philadelphia. The Beehive is an indoor playground and a community play space for babies, toddlers and young children. It’s tucked into a mammoth, 340,000-square-foot former trade school built in 1936 in the heart of rowhome South Philly.
Parallel parking and walking skills are required if you intend to visit.
The beautiful, Art-Deco building, which occupies a full block of Rocky Balboa’s old neighborhood, looks like a horizontal version of the PPL Tower at 9th and Hamilton streets in downtown Allentown.
While making multiple trips — and walking many blocks — as part of the supply chain needed to support the celebration of a kid that doesn’t yet weigh 30 pounds, I became captivated by the majesty of the building — and its multiple reuses.
As my wife will attest, I often drift away for hours in cities looking at buildings, architecture, taking iPhone photos and researching the history of the location. Family members long ago learned to abandon me and to avoid all future iPhoto slide shows.
The first sign something interesting was happening in the Bok Building was when a pack of childless, single 20-somethings came to the Beehive entrance looking for the bar.
The idea of a bar inside this colorful Romper Room piqued my interest.
Turned out, however, the bar — appropriately named Bok Bar — is on the building’s top floors and rooftop parapet facing the downtown Philadelphia skyline.
Between the play space for little kids and that of millennials and Gen Z hipsters, the Bok Building houses 250 businesses, artists, makers and entrepreneurs, including bakeries, coffee shops and hair salons.
I suspect a good night at the Bok Bar could result in a pairing of young people that results in a return to the Beehive in five years.
The building was constructed during The Great Depression with Public Works Administration funds to teach vocational and technical trades to 3,000 public school students from across Philadelphia. Known as the Bok Vocational High School, the classrooms were purpose-built to accommodate specific trades like welding, auto mechanics and culinary arts. With decreased enrollment and growing maintenance costs, the Philadelphia School District shuttered the building in 2013 and put it up for auction.
The development company, Scout, with a background in vacant and underutilized spaces, bought it the next year and started a project that has won many local and national awards for adaptive reuse, preservation and transformation of historic structures. Bok was awarded the 2021 Urban Land Institute Philadelphia Vision Award for Transformative Development.
Making the old new again — and relevant in a new century — is difficult and expensive. It requires creativity, dedication, some good luck, and lots and lots of public funds. Market dynamics and profit margins aren’t usually favorable.
Not every old building can be saved. And not every old building is historic.
There’s a life cycle to buildings just as there is to people.
The Lehigh Valley has many reuse success stories, some even grander than the Bok. Each of them helps to give the region its authenticity, uniqueness and quality of character that is so desirable in a cookie-cutter world where so many towns and cities look alike.
Easton’s repurposing of the striking, red-brick Simon Silk Mill complex off 13th Street into beautiful office, retail and residential space is breathtaking. Bethlehem’s redevelopment of old Bethlehem Steel properties into a public
park and arts and culture complex using the former blast furnace stacks is on par with anything in the country. And the Allentown Economic Development Corp.’s transformation of former Mack Trucks manufacturing buildings on South 10th Street into a manufacturing incubator that grows new companies that make things is a model of economic development success.
The Lehigh Valley has done a good job of making the old new again. More work remains.
The former Dixie Cup building in Wilson Borough off 25th Street, the former Lehigh Valley Dairy on MacArthur in Whitehall Township near the Allentown border, and the former Bethlehem Steel General Office Building on 4th Street, along with another dozen old Bethlehem Steel manufacturing buildings undergoing demolition by neglect, remain worthwhile regional challenges.
And now the iconic PPL Tower Building in downtown Allentown.
Some of them will make it, and some of them won’t.
They are all worthy of an effort. There will be only so many funds and interested developers. The key will be uses that envision the needs of a new era while preserving the past.
It struck me while watching my two little granddaughters and their friends run and tumble around the play space in a former 1930s vocational school that life is repurposing. If we’re lucky enough to have children and grandchildren, we leave a little something behind in a new form for a new age.
I then joined the moms and dads at the party working to keep the kids alive.