The new owner of 401 North Broad Street in Center City is moving forward with a $70 million renovation to the telecom building. Amerimar Enterprises and its partners bought the property in March and are hopeful the multi-phased, multifaceted improvements planned for the building will help entice new tenants to fill up its empty space.
The first phase of work will entail overhauling many of the building’s mechanical systems and its security and creating new shaftways from decommissioned elevators.
The shaftways will be used to house cabling. Work will also be done to the facade.
In addition, a 20,000-square-foot “meet-me” room will be constructed. This is space within a telecom hotel where different networks can connect with each other. It will be carrier neutral and owned by partners.
Work will also entail preparing the vacant space with the necessary equipment and other gear that telecom tenants need. The types of tenants that might be interested this data center space is vast.
About 300,000 square feet of the 11-story, 1.3-million-square-foot building is empty. The vacancy came about when some of its non-data related tenants vacated.
Tenants can come from a range of industries including financial, cloud and information technology services, manufacturing, health care, universities and other institutions.
Aside from housing Internet data and data communications, data centers are used for disaster recovery purposes, processing transactions and even housing corporate IT operations.
