Massive Office/Residential Tower to Rise at 2400 Market St

The Marketplace Design Center building at 2400 Market Street is undergoing a massive overhaul that will become a mixed-use development with a 15-story residential tower added on top of the existing building. There will also be retail and creative office space below, a grocery store, restaurant, and coffee shop.

PMC Property Group plans to redevelop the block-wide building into a 19-story office and residential complex, the latest sign that Philadelphia's most aggressive development is shifting west.

Plans include 450,000 square feet of offices and 350 apartments in a building that uses the former interior design showroom center as its base.

The project comes amid rapid development directly across the Schuylkill around 30th Street Station, where the 47-story FMC Tower is rising.

"The Schuylkill is going to become the new center of Philadelphia."

PMC hopes to capture current high office and apartment rents with the project, which is expected to cost more than $250 million. Asking rents for Class A office space in the west Market Street business district exceeded an average of $30 per square foot during the last three months of 2015, up 3.3 percent from the year-ago period.

Residential rents in Center City's highest-end apartment towers, meanwhile, averaged $2,191 a month last year, and a 3.1 percent rise over 2014.

PMC's plans 2400 Market St. call for six floors of offices, filling the existing structure - which will be re-skinned - and a glass-walled addition to be built on top. The building's residential portion would be built over the offices.

The company is in talks with several office users, some of which may be interested in leasing entire floors of the building, each of which is about 60,000 square feet. One such tenant would also have access to an attached outdoor deck.

The building's ground floor, meanwhile, would accommodate retail services such as restaurants, coffee shops, or fitness centers.

As part of the project, PMC would build an elevated passage along the building's river-facing wall to connect Market and Chestnut Streets, from which the reconfigured building's main entrance would be reached, he said.

Crews have started construction at the site and are aiming for occupancy in mid-2018.

The project will target financial-service companies, law firms, and other big groups that have long occupied the high-rise district closer to City Hall.

Market Street is the last high-quality developable swatch of land in the office market.

The current high rents and rising demand for Center City offices make it likely that more big projects will rise on the underdeveloped blocks of Market Street between those high rises and the Schuylkill River.