A Journey through the Philadelphia Navy Yard

I know I haven’t finished my other bike ride yet, there are more blog posts coming about it.  However, last Friday my friend Zack and I decided to take a trip to the Philadelphia Navy Yard and honestly I’m more interested in writing about it right now. We had tried this trip a few months back but it was during a weekend and the Navy Yard is apparently closed to visitors on weekends.

On this sunny, yet very windy day, Zack and I set off through Point Breeze down 24^th St. and then followed 20^th St. to FDR Park, practically to the entrance of the Navy Yard on South Broad.  

All in all the stats and route for this ride is below:

http://www.dailymile.com/people/Jerome9883/entries/6537849

Miles	Minutes	Speed	Calories Burned
14.3	85	10.1	1,023

The Philadelphia Navy Yard is not actually owned by the U.S. Navy anymore; it was decommissioned in 1991. Even though Philadelphia is the where the U.S. Navy began, the Navy Yard’s current location is only 140 years old. The yard moved from Southwark (Columbus and Reed) to what is/was known as League Island, over time the island was enlarged and isn’t really an island anymore. In the height of World War II, the U.S. Navy employed more than 50,000 people at the navy yard.  These workers helped to build 53 ships, including the famed New Jersey (docked in Camden, NJ as a museum) and the Wisconsin (docked in Norfolk, VA as a museum).  By the 1980s the yard employed less than 10,000 people and was recommended for closure by George H.W. Bush in 1991.  Although it was delayed the yard was closed in 1996 and sold to the City of Philadelphia in 2000. 

In 2004, Robert A.M. Stern Architects prepared and presented a master plan for the Philadelphia Industrial Corporation (PIDC) who manages the yard’s redevelopment.  The crux of the plan calls for a transformation of the 1,200 acre site into a business development center, with a focus on research and development, corporate and industrial offices. The plan additionally calls for some residential, commercial spaces. In total, an additional 12 million square feet will be built, home to potentially 20,000 new jobs.

The Navy Yard currently consists of several companies.  Aker’s shipbuilding yard and Tasty Baking Co.’s main bakery is located to the far east of the site, along with several NAVSEA operations (the Navy still has several offices in the yard even though it’s not owned by it anymore). Located in the historic core is the corporate headquarters for Urban Outfitters, several other Navy offices and various Jefferson health clinics. To the north, near the entrance is a PNC corporate office and headquarters for Tasty Baking Co.  Recently, PIDC has been successful in attracting several other future tenants, most notably the corporate headquarters of Glaxo Smith Kline and a $130 million innovation hub developed and managed by Penn State University. 

Even though the Navy Yard is brimming with new development the site is filled with abandoned and underutilized buildings and surrounded by several large ships.  Additionally PIDC has spent millions in infrastructure upgrades, including streets and sidewalks, along large dirt and grass filled development sites. It is by far one of the more interesting places I’ve been in Philly.

Zack and I began our tour of the Navy Yard with a stop at the Urban Outfitter’s restaurant, Café 543.  It is a delicious place in the heart of the Urban Outfitters corporate campus that is a great excuse to spend $14 on lunch.  Urban Outfitters was the first corporate office to move to the Navy Yard in 2006.  It began by readapting a few of the old industrial buildings along the Delaware into trendy loft office spaces. It is currently 5 buildings, 264,000 sq. ft, and employs more than 1,300 people. A few months ago, the company announced that it’s going to expand again, adding 1,000 new employees and an extra 100,000 square feet over the next 5 years.

Most recently the company has taken an old dry dock and created a floating garden and park in the center of its campus.  Although the plants in the floating garden were nowhere near blooming, the park is absolutely gorgeous, set in amongst the hub-bub of urban outfitters employees and large abandoned aircraft carriers. 

There are several peculiar elements, strewn throughout the landscape of the campus, fitting for a company based on quirky and eccentric fashions.  Bright chairs and reclaimed wood tables surround the floating gardens and café. A forest of trees is alongside the main building, growing through the broken up concrete of the old industrial site. Even the trash cans and bollards contain elements of the industrial past. 

Their bicycle racks were so unconventional that I made Zack go to other ones because I couldn’t figure out how to lock my bike.  Apparently the company has a bike-share policy where employees can take a bike to ride around and then just return it when finished and then they lock them up at night.   

After biking trough the Urban Outfitters’ campus we biked down a road along the Delaware where the wind was so strong it felt like we could get off and walk our bikes faster. We eventually got to a large abandoned airplane hanger, which at one point was converted into a commissary. Currently it functions as a movie set from time to time.

We also found this goose that was not enjoying the wind either.

From there we ventured into an abandoned residential development that was used as barracks at one point. At the beginning it didn’t seem that creepy but the further we biked into this 1970s housing development and the more broken out and collapsing apartments we saw, the creepiness set in.  Zack was adamant that some crack head was going to jump out. However I’m not sure what a crack head would be doing in this area.  It’d be a pretty isolating place seeing that we were a good mile from the main part of the yard and the Navy Yard is a good mile from anything else.

We did eventually came across a place where someone had set a car on fire and it had exploded, taken out the entire car and sending shrapnel into the surrounding buildings. 

We eventually ended up at the far end of the abandoned airstrip, along with two people making out (heavily) in a car. Awkward.  After biking up the windy airstrip we ended the ride by the corporate offices of Tasty Baking Co. and PNC, two of the city’s first LEED Gold certified buildings. 

Tuckered and overwhelmed by everything I just saw we headed back up through Point Breeze, back to civilization.