Is Philly’s Next Hot Neighborhood … the Navy Yard?

Longform

On a cold and windy day in March, a horde of real estate agents descended on deep South Philly, seeking to catch a glimpse of what might be Philadelphia’s next buzzy neighborhood. For the moment, the building they’d come to see — the AVE Normandy, a 267-unit luxury development and part of the first residential project to be built at the Navy Yard since the military vacated the land 30 years ago — still looked slightly unfinished. Rows of glass windows on the ground floor offered a view into eventual retail space that for the moment remained littered with boxes, ladders, and construction equipment. The seven-story building’s slate-colored bricks blended into a dismal gray sky, and there was little indication of the grand-opening festivities from the outside of the apartments, other than a small bouquet of black and white balloons tied to a metal bollard.

Inside the main entrance, though, the party was underway. Agents wandered past unobtrusive mid-century-inspired furniture arranged throughout the lobby. They stopped to pick up glasses of sparkling wine from the makeshift bar set up in front of glass-walled conference rooms, an amenity for the work-from-home crowd. They posed for photos and meandered toward the various charcuterie boards scattered throughout the space, which mixed the fresh-construction scent of Home Depot with the slightly antiseptic visual aesthetic of a WeWork. Other amenities for residents included a podcast studio for content creators, a 7,000-square-foot gym, a golf simulator, a rooftop pool, and common spaces with free coffee. A group of agents walked up the stairs to tour a sample one-bedroom unit, which had wood floors, track lighting, a carpeted bedroom with a walk-in closet, white quartz countertops, and a window looking out at a life sciences lab building next door. Starting price: $2,900 a month. (Rents run as high as $7,600 for an unfurnished three-bedroom. A hundred of the units come furnished for short-term stays and are even more pricey.)

If you haven’t paid much attention to the recent goings-on at the Navy Yard, you aren’t alone. Originally home to the country’s first shipyard (officially established in 1801 and located ever since 1876 on League Island, at the southernmost tip of Philadelphia, where the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers converge), the Navy Yard has for most of its history been an industrial center set off from the rest of the city — a literal island unto itself. When the Navy first announced its plans to close the base, in 1991, it intended to leave the giant tract of land — 1,200 acres, the size of present-day Center City — completely abandoned. The city stepped in to take control five years later, and over the next 30 years the Navy Yard has, somewhat quietly and surprisingly, transformed into one of the city’s largest centers of employment. It might also be its most interesting.

Today more than 16,000 people work at the Navy Yard. Gigantic industrial shipbuilding companies like Korean conglomerate Hanwha and Philadelphia’s Rhoads Industries have taken over the Navy’s old shipbuilding docks, while just a few blocks away cutting-edge life sciences companies like Iovance Biotherapeutics manufacture cell and gene therapy treatments. On the other side of the Navy Yard is a sector of modern glass office buildings that feels a bit like the downtown of a small to midsize Midwestern city — only with very few people walking around, since almost everyone drives to work. In between the offices and the shipbuilding is the headquarters of Urban Outfitters, indisputably Philadelphia’s coolest homegrown corporation, which was one of the first to bet on the Navy Yard all the way back in the mid-2000s, taking over a group of beautiful early-20th-century brick shipbuilding facilities. Altogether, according to one study, the Navy Yard added $2.6 billion to the city’s economy from 2004 to 2020.

What the Navy Yard has never been, however, is a genuine neighborhood — a place with shops, restaurants, convenience stores, and people walking around after 5 p.m. (Currently, the predominant after-dark residents are deer.) For years, a Navy deed restriction forbade residential development on the site, owing to its industrial past. But in 2023, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, the city’s public–private partnership with the Chamber of Commerce, which controls all of the Navy Yard’s land, secured permission to build apartments. In so doing, the city created something very rare for a place as old and as dense as Philadelphia: an expansive piece of land, right on the waterfront, essentially with carte blanche to build a brand-new neighborhood.

That may sound like a very appealing proposition, but to entice people to live in a part of the city as isolated as today’s Navy Yard presents a sequencing problem: How do you get people to live somewhere where there’s not much of anything beyond office space? Today’s Navy Yard has almost no dining options, aside from a DiNic’s sandwich shack and the Urban Outfitters cafeteria, both of which close after lunch; a small cafe/juice bar combo; the hotel restaurant at the Courtyard by Marriott; and just one bar serving a mediocre burger.

And yet, if there were ever a time to try to stretch the city’s residential limits southward, it’s now. A mini economic boom is happening in deep South Philly: Hanwha has already pledged to invest $5 billion in the shipyard; the nearby Port of Philadelphia is in the midst of its own $2 billion expansion; and the Bellwether District, the redevelopment of the now-shuttered PES Refinery into a logistics and life sciences hub, has secured its first two major tenants. Urban Outfitters also recently announced plans to hire another 1,000 employees, 450 of whom will work at the Navy Yard. All that investment should bring a lot of jobs and people down to lower South Philly on a daily basis — and some of those people might even want to live at the Navy Yard.

Back at the AVE Normandy, the real estate agents could barely contain their excitement. “It doesn’t give hotel vibes,” one of them said about the building. “I can’t believe all the common space — it’s gorgeous,” another one cooed. “So cool — and it smells so new,” said another. A woman with a silk scarf tied neatly around her neck wondered aloud, “Is all that sushi for us?”

I had been wandering around aimlessly, hoping to meet an actual person living at the Navy Yard to get a sense of who the intrepid frontiersmen moving to this area really were. It was not going well until I finally chanced upon Blessing Awogbamila next to one of the many tables of food. Twenty-four years old and dressed in a white crocheted shirt and wearing a diamond-encrusted cross, Awogbamila looked young, upwardly mobile, stylish — the ideal AVE Navy Yard tenant. (For a moment, I wondered if he might be a developer plant.) A 2024 Rutgers–Camden grad, Awogbamila told me he currently lives in Northeast Philly and works at the life sciences company US WorldMeds. He saw an advertisement for the new development while driving around and was intrigued. The concept sold itself. “An apartment complex next to my job — I don’t have to drive to work? Perfect,” he said.

After two tours of the development, Awogbamila signed a lease starting in August in the AVE Constitution, the slightly cheaper building next door that was also just completed and has another 347 units. “I see potential, so I wanted to tap in,” he said of the Navy Yard. He wasn’t concerned about the lack of retail, restaurants, and public transit for now — he mostly meal preps, and anyway, Center City is only an Uber ride away. The bigger concern to Awogbamila, as he sipped a cocktail, was the crowd of people currently in the building. He was worried that there weren’t many young people like him — were these really his future neighbors? When I told him almost everyone there was a real estate agent, he seemed genuinely relieved.

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The day before that grand opening, I met the Navy Yard’s two main developers, Mark Seltzer and ­Brian Cohen. They work for Ensemble, the firm PIDC selected in 2020 to develop the next 109 acres of the Navy Yard. We were at the Ensemble Navy Yard ­offices, and Cohen and Seltzer stood over a scale model of the entire Navy Yard that looked like a Lego project completed by the world’s most overachieving fifth-grader. With our bird’s-eye perspective, we could see all of the existing buildings, the not-yet-built buildings, a couple of Navy ships parked in the basin, green spaces, rows of neat little trees, even miniature cars driving and stationed in the many parking lots. (There were no people walking around anywhere in the model.)

“None of this was here,” Seltzer said as he stood towering over the model. “None of the roads, none of the infrastructure. This was just open space that PIDC spent a lot of money on security to keep people out of.”

Seltzer and Cohen have been thinking about how to go about transforming the Navy Yard for the better part of two decades. Seltzer worked at PIDC back in the mid-2000s, and Cohen spent the majority of his career working at Liberty Property Trust, the firm PIDC selected to develop the office-space component of the Navy Yard back in 2003. They’ve given this spiel countless times over the years, pitching the Navy Yard to interested parties. “Mayor Parker sat right there,” Seltzer said, gesturing to a chair. “Governor Shapiro sat right here.”

These days, the presentation is getting to be an easier sell. Liberty Property Trust has already built some 17 buildings across the Navy Yard; Ensemble has added to that a life ­sciences lab building, a parking garage, and the $285 million AVE Normandy and Constitution buildings, all since 2020. More than 150 companies now have office space at the Navy Yard, and it has already been designated as a LEED-certified neighborhood for sustainability, the largest of its kind in the entire country.

But without a thriving residential component, Seltzer and Cohen believe, the Navy Yard won’t ever reach its maximum potential. Ensemble’s master plan, released in 2022, ultimately envisions at least 40 new buildings, from offices to retail to residential (a total of 4,000 new units), 13 additional parking garages, an entirely new waterfront district along the Delaware River, an open-air shopping plaza that would be created by cutting a passageway through an existing building, rapid bus service along Broad Street that would operate in a dedicated lane, protected bike lanes for cyclists, and plenty of new green space. All told the plan calls for $6 billion of spending over the next 20 years and projects 12,000 new jobs, along with a $14.3 billion economic impact for Pennsylvania. Fifteen percent of the 4,000 residential units are mandated to be “affordable” — reserved for residents earning up to 120 percent of the Area Median Income. (In practice, that means the cheapest studio at the new AVE buildings is about $1,250 per month.)

“We have over six miles of waterfront,” Cohen explained, beginning to rattle off what he likes to think of as the Navy Yard’s “value proposition.” “We have 150-year-old trees. We have architecture that spans from beautiful brick buildings that the Navy developed 100-plus years ago to an industrial architecture that is really unique and kind of edgy.” Cohen and Seltzer see the Navy Yard as taking the best parts from a host of Philly neighborhoods: Chestnut Hill’s access to green space, Fishtown’s liveliness, and University City’s proximity to major employers.

When it comes to filling the AVE Constitution and Normandy project — which was built with Korman Communities, another Philly developer that owns a number of luxury rental properties around town, including in Washington Square West and Rittenhouse — Cohen and Seltzer envisage a few different tenants. First and most obviously: people who already work at the Navy Yard. Farther afield, Cohen suggests, a suburbanite who wants to be closer to the city but isn’t “ready for the urban environment, the density, the noise, you know, some of the crime.” Call it city living with training wheels. Young people from Fishtown and Northern Liberties — presumably ones not attached to a vibrant food and bar scene — are also being targeted. The Navy Yard, he believes, with its public space and its car-friendly location near I-95 and I-76, offers something that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the city.

That still doesn’t solve the problem of retail, though. It’s one thing to “invent” a new neighborhood out of a place that already existed and is proximate to all sorts of city amenities (see the attempt to rechristen Point Breeze “Newbold”); it’s quite another to entice people to live in a development that is in its infancy and is for all intents and purposes cut off from the rest of the city. (Until as recently as 2022, the Navy Yard’s main entrance gate on Broad Street was watched over by security guards.) The area’s closest neighbor is the Sports Complex, where no one lives either. Transit connections to the inhabited city are lacking. The Broad Street Line ends at the Sports Complex — the closest Navy Yard office is nearly three-quarters of a mile from NRG station — and while the Navy Yard operates a shuttle to Center City, it doesn’t run on weekends.

Seltzer and Cohen say they’re well aware of these challenges, which is precisely why they built a total of 614 units as part of the first residential project — enough so its residents could quickly support retail. “If we just built 200 units, the first residents that moved in here would feel like they were a little bit on an island,” Cohen said. “We needed to do something substantial.”

Cohen also contends that the Navy Yard’s order of operations might even be construed as an advantage. “In a lot of neighborhoods, it’s actually the residential that comes first, and then you try to get the jobs to that neighborhood,” he said. “It has happened in reverse at the Navy Yard, and that has been, in many instances, a benefit. In other areas, your biggest opposition is actually the community for development. Here, we don’t really have that.”

Even without a vibrant retail scene — or a community, for that matter — Seltzer and Cohen project long-term appeal for the Navy Yard, one that’s grounded in a kind of psychological analysis. Cohen believes tomorrow’s successful neighborhoods are the ones that can achieve work–life integration. “We’re creating an environment where work–life integration exists geographically, not just from a technology standpoint,” he said.

That may be music to the ears of the 150 employers currently based at the Navy Yard, and at least based on my unscientific survey taken while reporting this story, many of the early Navy Yard residents, like Awogbamila, are indeed people who work nearby. A few Urban Outfitters employees and staff from the various sports franchises are among the early adopters to have taken up residence at the AVE buildings.

There’s also Sumit Verma, a 48-year-old cell therapy entrepreneur who lives full time in St. Louis but has been coming to the Navy Yard for years — first to work at the life sciences company Iovance, and now to run a start-up he’s headquartered there. On previous trips to Philly, Verma stayed at the Courtyard by Marriott — the Navy Yard’s one hotel — for days at a time. Now, he’s decided to rent a two-bedroom at the AVE Normandy.

“I’m just not seeing something as convenient,” Verma told me, noting that he can arrive at the Philadelphia airport on a Monday morning, get to the Navy Yard within 10 minutes, and have his first meeting scheduled by 9:30.

I also met Bill Kaemmer, a former military chaplain who serves as director of a nonprofit that occupies the old Navy chapel right across the street from the AVE buildings. Kaemmer lives in Washington, D.C., but he comes up to Philly occasionally to run events and do things like oversee repairs to the janky HVAC system in the historic chapel; he signed lease number seven at the AVE Constitution and got a unit looking out on the chapel.

“I haven’t seen a soul since I moved in here,” Kaemmer told me in March. Considering how infrequently he’s here, and how new the buildings are, he didn’t really mind. Still, he went on, “It feels like I’m in a sci-fi movie — everyone’s gone and I’m the only one left.”

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Technically speaking, there has been a community at the Navy Yard before: all of the sailors and shipbuilders and their families who lived on the base. Little buds of civic life sprouted up around them. There was a commissary, a swimming pool, a newspaper — even a jail. Tucked away in the eastern corner of the Navy Yard today are a couple of blocks of rowhomes, almost completely overgrown by trees, visions from a future — or is it past? — South Philly apocalypse.

When the Navy gave up its claim to the shipyard in late 1996, the city and PIDC acquired the land for $2 million. “We were getting a site that could have environmental issues, including everything up to armament shells that hadn’t exploded,” said Bill Hankowsky, the former CEO of Liberty Property Trust, which played a major role in developing the first phase of the Navy Yard into office space. (He also served as president of PIDC until 2000.) The land was also completely separate from the city’s infrastructure. The Navy had its own electrical grid, and there were no city streets. (Even today, the roads aren’t controlled by the Streets Department, which may explain why there’s decent bike infrastructure. And: no PPA!)

If the adaptive reuse of an abandoned postindustrial shipbuilding facility sounds like the sort of thing a developer today would happily sacrifice a limb for, it was not a universally popular idea at the time. This was the Philadelphia of the late ’90s, a city coming back from the financial brink. The population was declining. To some, taking ownership of a giant, complex piece of land was the last thing the city needed to focus on.

A Penn economist named Peter Linneman wrote an article summing up the Negadelphia crisis of confidence permeating the city at the time: “What I have to say about the future of the city of Philadelphia in general, and the Navy Yard site in particular, is not especially cheerful. In fact, I don’t think we can find a way to turn the Navy Yard site into an exciting, dynamic enterprise that will create jobs and plow tax revenues into city coffers.” His strikes against the city included its “God-forsaken” airport, its “prolonged fiscal mess,” its “complacency” and “corruption” — you get the idea.

The Navy Yard PIDC inherited seemed at first to be an indecipherable assortment of structures: modern shipbuilding infrastructure and dry docks, historic brick warehouses, single-family homes where Navy officers used to live, even a seaplane hangar. Early tenants included the military contractor Wes­tinghouse, which operated an engine facility, and a packaging company that took over some warehouse space. (At one point, M. Night Shyamalan’s production company rented out the seaplane hangar for filming.)

By the time Liberty Property Trust submitted a response to PIDC’s request for proposals in 2003, a more cohesive vision was coming into focus. Liberty had landed on the idea of turning the Navy Yard into an office zone that was somewhere between a central business district and an isolated suburban office park. “We weren’t going to create a new Center City,” Hankowsky said.

Instead of building vertically as was done in Center City, the Navy Yard presented a chance to build more horizontally — and to create a different kind of space for tenants. “What Philadelphia didn’t have was something less dense, with a lot of parking for free. But we didn’t want to build suburbia,” Hankowsky said. “We wanted a street grid with sidewalks, and we wanted it to have an urban fabric.”

Liberty spent millions of dollars on parks before there were any office buildings constructed. And unlike in the suburbs, where parking lots usually front the street, they sited buildings on the street. They also hired starchitects: Field Operations, the firm that did Manhattan’s High Line, designed the Navy Yard’s Central Green park; A.M. Stern and Bjarke Ingalls designed architecturally ambitious buildings with energy-efficient LEED certification. Blue-chip tenants soon followed. (It helped that much of the land was — and remains — designated as a Keystone Opportunity Zone, which can eliminate a number of state and local taxes for up to 10 years.)

No tenant was more important than Urban Outfitters, which moved its headquarters to the Navy Yard in 2006. At the time, Urban’s offices had been located in the old Barnes and Noble building on Rittenhouse Square. They’d been planning a move to an industrial building near Washington Square, but the deal fell through when Urban discovered that the landlord had a no-pet policy — a dealbreaker for the company, which was very much ahead of its time in the workplace-benefits arms race.

Shortly thereafter, John Grady, who succeeded Hankowsky as president of PIDC in 2000, found himself with Urban CEO Dick Hayne, touring one of the Navy Yard’s more industrial buildings. The space in question was a former pipe shop, and PIDC had been looking for a modern industrial tenant to take over and keep doing the logical thing: bending giant metal pipes. “It had big equipment pits everywhere,” Grady recalled. “It was dark and dingy, had huge ceilings.” During their walkthrough, Hayne proclaimed, “This is going to be the center of our campus. This is going to be like our college union building.”

Grady hadn’t considered such a possibility. “It was a level of vision that we had not expressed in our master plan,” he said.

Today that building is, without question, one of the coolest in Philadelphia. Open to the public for lunch every day, it has giant glass windows looking out at the waterfront, and rows of plants give it the feel of an industrial greenhouse. (It’s a shame it has to function as office space, because it would make a great bar for the hypothetical new Navy Yard resident.)

Urban’s arrival marked a turning point for the Navy Yard. “It definitely changed people’s perceptions about the property and opportunities associated with it,” Grady said. In 2013, pharmaceutical company GSK moved to the Navy Yard, to a purpose-built office. Investment manager Future Standard moved into a shiny new building in 2015. (Both companies have since left the Navy Yard for University City, a sign of today’s cutthroat competition for office tenants.)

As the Navy Yard expanded, so did its ambition. PIDC began discussing with SEPTA the possibility of extending the Broad Street Line. Grady and PIDC also started to think more seriously about residential development. At the time, Grady didn’t conceive of creating a full-fledged neighborhood; he thought of residential as a way to bolster the office-park transition that was already well underway. A small number of residents, he thought, would help support retail, which would ultimately make the Navy Yard a more appealing place to work. And the Navy Yard as a workplace was still the fundamental vision.

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If you were to compile a list of cities that have transformed their urban footprints with ambitious development projects, Philadelphia would not be one of them — at least not recently. Despite some wins — the Comcast towers, Schuylkill Yards — if anything, we’ve probably been more notable for what we haven’t gotten done: Market East, where development of the Disney Hole has failed so many times that we’ve actually named the parking lot wasting space there, and Penn’s Landing, where over the past 60 years the plans for what is arguably the city’s most desirable land have changed more times than you can count, and which only just recently is finally getting its well-deserved makeover with the I-95 cap. Unlike those places, the Navy Yard has actually been successful in transforming itself — maybe in part because it’s so off the radar, and also because it’s benefited from a genuine master planning effort overseen by PIDC.

The biggest shift for the Navy Yard since the arrival of Ensemble as the developer has been a reimagining away from Grady’s vision of a limited residential development meant to support the office development. The goal now, according to Seltzer, is much more ambitious. “I think it truly has evolved into a holistic thinking about the creation of a new neighborhood,” he said.

But the transformation from abandoned postindustrial zone to office space is very different from the transition from office space to a genuine neighborhood. An office park is a place you have to go. A neighborhood, at least in theory, is a place you choose to go.

So what do some of the current people who work at the Navy Yard think about the prospect of living there? I spoke to a couple of Urban Outfitters employees who were quick to tell me they had absolutely no desire to live at the Navy Yard. “Everyone I know wants to live in the city center,” one twentysomething woman said. Another similarly aged Urban woman felt the same, though she did note that one of her co-workers, who likes walking her dog, moved into one of the new buildings. She has been only mildly judged by her peers. “I think it’s so boring,” the woman said. “There’s just nothing around. I’m a city girl.”

Among the professional developer class, however, the feeling is more optimistic. Bart Blatstein, who in the ’90s developed the Piazza in Northern Liberties, described NoLibs at that time as a “netherworld,” crime-ridden and barren — everything the Navy Yard is not. “The Navy Yard is a whole different story; it’s beautiful now,” he said. Matt Pestronk, whose firm, Post Brothers, recently built the giant 630-unit luxury project at Broad and Washington, believes the neighborhood has “tremendous potential.” Charlie Houder, the founder of Haverford Development Partners, which recently built 470 units in another sort of netherworld where Spring Garden Street meets Columbus Boulevard, emphasized the Navy Yard’s waterfront connections, not to mention the cool factor that comes from being near the Urban Outfitters offices. “The exciting part of the opportunity is you have this blank canvas to start from,” he said, “but the downside is it’s a blank canvas.”

One thing the Navy Yard indisputably has going for it is the fact that it’s slowly but surely becoming less of an island. Just two and a half miles away is the Bellwether District, which over the past eight months announced its first two tenants. DrinkPAK, a canned beverage manufacturer (tagline: “Any Drink. Any Can. Any Time. Anywhere.”), is investing $195 million in a manufacturing and distribution facility. TerraPower Isotopes, a life sciences company that manufactures cancer treatments and counts Bill Gates as an investor, is spending $450 million on a facility of its own.

Combine these two new arrivals with the $250 million redevelopment of FDR Park, the Comcast and Sixers partnership to build a new $1.5 billion arena at the Sports Complex, and the expansion of the Port of Philadelphia, and suddenly Ensemble’s residential development starts to look a lot less isolated. “I think the way to really frame this is that the center of gravity of the city is moving south,” Seltzer said.

Seltzer is not a dispassionate observer, but it’s hard to argue with the numbers. And if having life sciences facilities right next door to each other in the Bellwether District and the Navy Yard might seem to raise the chances of one cannibalizing the other, both parties say that’s not the case. Amelia Chassé Alcivar, an executive vice president at Bellwether District developer HRP Group, says the Bellwether is intentionally designed to fill a specific niche that doesn’t yet exist in Philadelphia: large tracts of land suitable for manufacturing. She sees the life sciences development in University City as more about proximity to the higher ed research institutions, while the Navy Yard is the place where a firm might want to put its corporate headquarters in a fancy building. “We see every successful life sciences cluster in the country generally has those three different product types,” Chassé Alcivar said.

Seltzer and Cohen, for their part, are betting that more activity can only help the Navy Yard. After all, where might all those new Bellwether employees want to live? “It really accelerates our residential growth,” Seltzer said. (In fact, when TerraPower executives came to Philly for their project’s groundbreaking, they stayed at the AVE Normandy.)

It helps that the Navy Yard and the Bellwether District, along with all of the other stakeholders in what’s increasingly starting to become known as “Lower South,” are actually collaborating on ways to stitch these new developments into the rest of the city. A few years ago, Governor Shapiro and Mayor Parker established a working group that meets monthly to discuss that exact question and promote more cohesive growth in the area, and in April the city rolled out a program to fast-track permits for large employers in Lower South. SEPTA’s recent announcement that it would be extending Route 45 bus service to the Navy Yard was at least in part a result of that effort, and Cohen says a potential new bus route that would connect the Navy Yard to the Bellwether District, the airport, and 30th Street Station is also under discussion.

One infrastructure improvement Cohen doesn’t expect is an extension of the Broad Street Line. “Especially with all of the development that’s occurred, trying to really weave a subway through the Navy Yard, I think you would be challenged to prove a cost–benefit analysis there,” he said. That’s not such a terrible thing, at least in his estimation. “There’s also some negative externalities, as far as people that linger around subway stops can kind of increase crime,” he said. “There’s positives, but there’s some negatives as well.”

For now it’s something of a moot point, considering SEPTA’s ongoing budgetary crisis and the fact that, as of the most recent estimate from 2019, the cost of extending the Broad Street Line has ballooned to at least $870 million. (A potential extension isn’t mentioned anywhere in SEPTA’s latest proposed budget, either.)

Still, for some city observers, subway access remains the single most important variable that will determine whether the Navy Yard can achieve its ambition to become a neighborhood that feels like it’s part of the city. “If you’re going to be wanting to develop it as a neighborhood, you’ve got to have transit,” Harris Steinberg, a former Drexel professor who was the founding director of the school’s Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation, told me. The Navy Yard may have genuine momentum, Steinberg said, but it is still “a gated­ community, and I think it’s always going to be a gated community until someone really bites the bullet and figures out how to connect it back into the city in a meaningful way.”

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Most neighborhoods are defined by the things they share. Chestnut Hill has its beautiful Tudor Revival houses, sprawling lawns , and proximity to the Wissahickon. South Philly has its rowhomes and its walkable, tiny, and often treeless streets. Fishtown has its yuppies and fancy restaurants.

The strange thing about the Navy Yard is that it remains defined by its mishmash of contradictory characteristics bordering on the schizophrenic. It is a still-functioning shipyard, a place where the Navy still builds propellers for nuclear submarines, a cruise ship departure point, a life sciences manufacturing hub, a union training ground (both the carpenters and Local 98 electricians unions are headquartered there), a white-collar office park, and a creative campus for 2,500 Urban Outfitters employees — all at the same time. It is a place that has a waterfront path perfect for walking, running, and biking that terminates at a gargantuan, 155-acre surface parking lot next to the Port of Philadelphia.

If you look at the part of the Navy Yard with two new apartment buildings, a historic Navy chapel, and an old barracks building that’s planned to be developed into a hotel, it’s not so difficult to imagine something vibrant materializing here eventually. If you’re standing on the waterfront trail looking at crumbling, abandoned buildings and cracked, unmaintained parking lots where, according to Ensemble’s master plan, there will one day be a cluster of waterfront homes, the future starts to look a lot farther off.

Will this ever be a place where you can walk and wander from a restaurant, to a bar, then to a park, and bump into five different friends along the way? Maybe not. In that sense, the Navy Yard might never feel like a classic Philadelphia neighborhood. But it’s that very un-Philadelphia­ness — its mix of historic buildings and manufacturing and jobs and new construction all together in the same place — that makes it intriguing. And there are other signs of progress, too, since that March apartment showing. Kaemmer, the chaplain living at the AVE Constitution, said recently that he’s no longer feeling so isolated: His floor is something like 80 percent full, and he’s seeing new faces daily. “I think they are well on their way to building a very vibrant community,” he said.

Seltzer and Cohen are doing their best to paint in the many gaps that remain. A number of retail options are coming soon — a nail salon, a deli, hopefully a restaurant. Their next plans call for another residential building, developing the new hotel, and renovating an eight-story industrial building into a breezy space that might have a coffee roastery or a distillery on the ground floor, office space for creative types like an architectural firm on the upper levels, and a giant rooftop bar or restaurant. “Think of the opportunity to do a Bok-like type of building,” Cohen said, referring to the now-renowned South Philly development project that transformed a shuttered high school into a working-­space hub for creatives. All of these projects, he says, could be starting construction as soon as early next year.

In the meantime, the Navy Yard is doing what it can to lure people to visit. PIDC hosts a weekly running club and sponsors free fitness classes during the summer. The Broad Street Run ends there, which is a great way to get 40,000 people to see your new apartment development. (Representatives from the AVE buildings were at the finish line at this year’s race, handing out fresh-pressed juice.) A new Third Thursday series will bring food trucks, live music, and vendors to Chapel Plaza through October.

On a warm day this spring, one of the first nice days of the season, the Navy Yard finally seemed to come out of hibernation. Phillies fans were having lunch outside at the Gatehouse bar. At the Central Green park, two older women ran laps on the outer track. Someone lounged in a yellow hammock. A group of kids played pickup basketball. It was by far the most alive I’d ever seen the place. Brandon Och, a 43-year-old with pierced ears wearing a band T-shirt, was out with his four-year-old kid, tossing bocce balls in the sand. Och’s wife had been training for the Broad Street Run, coming down to the Navy Yard to run circles on the 0.2-mile track that lines the perimeter of the park. Och and his son had made a little habit of coming down from their place in East Passyunk while she ran. It wasn’t their neighborhood, but you could imagine one day it might be. After a while of milling around in the park, Och grabbed his skateboard, his son took his scooter, and together they wandered off.

Published as “Is This Philly’s Next Hot Neighborhood?” in the August 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.