One Franklin Town Apartments
1 Franklin Town Boulevard
Philadelphia's Franklin Town Boulevard, with only two buildings, is a pretty exclusive address. The Fountain View at 2 Franklin Town Boulevard was discussed here. This article deals with the 335-unit apartment building called One Franklin Town at, of course, 1 Franklin Town Boulevard.
East side of One Franklin Town (lower right) seen from the roof of the 34-story Alexander Apartments. Its parking garage is across Callowhill Street to the apartment building's north, seen in lower right. Diagonal Franklin Town Boulevard, the "pedestrian-friendly byway" first proposed in 1971, separates the Fountain View at Logan Square from One Franklin Town. Baldwin Park is at the right.
This photo was taken in 2021 when the Fountain View was called the Watermark.
Every building in this view is discussed separately on our history pages and can be found on the map, with links, on the main history page here.
One Franklin Town offers 335 luxury apartments with a parking garage across Callowhill Street with 374 spaces. Most of the units are one-bedroom with 805 to 840 square feet, with a number of two-bedroom (roughly 1100 square feet), and studios (315 square feet for roughly $1600). There is one three-bedroom unit. Like most apartment towers, monthly rent increases by about $10 dollars for each higher floor occupied. Most units here have balconies. On the commercial One Franklin Town website, the units have codes which mark the time of the last renovation: R2 for 2002, R2 and R3 for 2012, R4 for 2019, and R1 or no designation for the original 1987 look. The building has a 24-hour concierge, a gym, community room, a work lounge with reservable conference room, pool table, pool, in-unit washer and dryers, and outdoor courtyards with propane grills. A 7-11 store occupies one corner of the first floor and Tops Cleaners another. There is a 1,500-square-foot commercial space on 17th Street available for lease.
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The building was constructed in 1987 as part of the Franklin Town Development. The development group at the time, Forest City, was purchased by Brookfield Asset Management in 2018.
Why are there 63 televisions at my door? That's art! In fact, it's Percent for Art.
Video Arbor, 1990, by Nam June Paik at the Franklin Town Boulevard entrance to One Franklin Town Apartments. Paik has been called the founder of video art, incorporating televisions into his projects. Unfortunately the televisions at One Franklin Town are just blank screens now, hardly noticeable to passersby.
Let's look at the history of the site preceding the announcement of the Franklin Town project in 1971. Like most of the neighborhood, the site went from being occupied by the Lenni Lenape, then being part of the Bush Hill estate, then industrialized and filled in with worker housing, then deindustrialization, suburban flight, and attempted urban renewal. This last change was the most dramatic and intended to be the most efficient, but still has lingering effects. Before eminent domain could be used to evict families and businesses, the government has to certify that an area is blighted. That process was done in the 1960s in this neighborhood. While this was going on, properties were being bought up by the five corporate partners in the Franklin Town Development Corporation. Some of these properties needed work, but remediation was not performed because the owners did not want to remedy the potential blight and hurt their cause, and knew that demolition was coming anyway. The residents found out about the planned urban renewal in June of 1971, when media announced the Franklin Town development, a new "city-within-a-city" to be built over just ten years on fifty acres scrapped bare using eminent domain.
Portion of an 1810 map showing the current location of One Franklin Town as the blue house. The Bush Hill Estate to its north lent its name to the neighborhood, and the mansion there had been used as a house for the Vice-President and as a hospital during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, as discussed here.
Portion of 1875 Philadelphia City Atlas showing the block on which One Franklin Town is currently situated. Callowhill Street is the uppermost street running left to right; Wood Street runs horizontally on the bottom. The neighborhood factories required workers, 20,000 at Baldwin Locomotive Works alone, and housing was tight between the factories. The 100 houses between Callowhill and Wood and 17th and 18th might have provided rooms for 1,000 people. The replacement buildings, the Watermark and One Franklin Town, house about the same number.
The blue arrow points to 1704 Callowhill Street, as seen in the next photo.
1894 photo of the Rosner family at 1704 Callowhill Street. Many of the houses had first floor retail or services, with boarding rooms for the local working men above, looking much like the south side of the 1800 block of Callowhill Street today. Restaurants were more common since many lodgers were room-only without board. Saloons also were much more common than today, since workers needed to escape the crowded boarding houses whenever they could, at least until Prohibition. The Parkway Central Library was welcome relief when it opened in 1927, providing electric lighting, bathrooms, and reading material.
Photo looking east on the lowest level of the One Franklin Town parking garage. This wall had been built as part of the Callowhill Cut freight yard to place it below street grade between 17th and 18th Streets in 1898.
Deindustrialization and disinvestment hit this neighborhood particularly hard.
Portion of 1962 Philadelphia City Atlas (map legend here) with Callowhill Street running horizontally at top (north) showing vacant buildings (V) and surface parking lots. Any lot with the letter S or GS represents a gasoline service pump. The white rectangles represent single-family residences. The north side of Carlton Street Street was made up of residences.
1971 proposed model of Franklin Town as viewed from the northwest, looking down the diagonal canyon of the proposed Franklin Town Boulevard. This pedestrian-friendly tree-lined boulevard would extend from Vine Street to the new Franklin Town Park, which itself would be surrounded by mid- and high-rises. Smaller central court yards are in the middle of each block.
The Franklin Town development was discussed in two articles starting here. The anti-urban renewal perspective on our neighborhood is offered in our article here. Let's put some faces on some condemned buildings.
Inquirer photo from June 11, 1971, of Paschal Libonati in front of his home at 1729 Carlton Street. He and his family moved to the new replacement houses on the 500 block of North 20th Street in 1974. A retired taxi driver, he and his wife raised eight children and sent two of them through medical school. The home in the photo would have occupied what is now the site of the arbor entrance to One Franklin Town.
Photo from the Philadelphia Inquirer of March 21, 1955.
Peggy Libonati still lives in the neighborhood, in replacement housing that was built along 20th Street just above Hamilton Street.
Back of house at 1727 Carlton Street, next to the Libonati family. This house was vacant, open, and neglected, and in 1971 cited as an example of the blight which justified the clearance of the neighborhood by eminent domain. The house had been owned by Franklin Town Corporation since March of 1970. Photo from an August 4, 1971 article in the Bulletin.
Partial public listing of condemned houses published five months after the Franklin Town project was announced. These were the homes of families that were replaced by One Franklin Town apartments.
Readers of these history articles may be used to tangents. This one is religious. There was a priest who became Philadelphia's first Cardinal, who is buried under the altar at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral two blocks south of One Franklin Town, and who was metaphorically immortalized by Philadelphia's most famous artist who lived four blocks north of One Franklin Town. Dennis Dougherty grew up in coal country in northeastern Pennsylvania, starting his working life as a breaker boy. He joined the priesthood and rose through the hierarchy until becoming a Cardinal in 19xx. Thomas Eakins was particularly fond of painting the religious figures associated with St. Charles Borromeo Seminary just outside Philadelphia and painted Dougherty in 1902. When Dougherty died, he, like most of Philadelphia's bishops, was buried in a crypt beneath the altar at the Cathedral. As the head of the Philadelphia diocese his name was on the deeds of all buildings owned by the Catholic church. One such building was a 12-foot-wide house at 1743 Wood Street, which Dougherty sold to a Mary Tolan in 1935. This, like others on Wood Street, would be demolished as part of the Franklin Town project.
What makes for a "luxury" apartment? Cynics will say the phrase "luxury apartments" is applied to any apartments being built today. A quantitative definition, at least for a luxury condominium, is any condo that sells with a price in the highest ten percent. Granite countertops, in-unit washer and dryers, and stainless steel appliances seem to be a must. Then there is a whole list of maybes: 24-hour front desk concierge, a package room, community room, fitness center, hardwood floors, or a business meeting room. How about a pool table, yoga room, screening room, dog run, dog wash station, or a roof deck? Or a pool? On-site EV charger?
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Our neighborhood has an abundance of units marketed as luxury apartments. Besides the 335 units in One Franklin Town we have 1600 Callowhill (95 units), Logan Lofts (108 units), NorthxNorthwest (572 units), Dalian on the Park (293 units), the Baldwin (55 units), the Granary (229 units), the Alexander (264 units) and Fountain View at Logan Square (464 units for seniors). Hamilton Apartments with 576 units is just outside our neighborhood, somewhat arbitrarily defined for these history pages as Brandywine to Vine Street and 16th to 21st Streets. The only tower not marketed as luxury apartments is Spring Garden Towers (208 units) which is subsidized senior living. The Baldwin apartments are pitched as luxury apartments with only a fitness center, in-unit washer and dryers, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, "hardwood vinyl" floors, a community room, and a pool table. That combination seems to be a minimum.
​​When most people spend money, like the seven cents a day ($25 annually) for a Friends membership, they are looking for a return on investment. Your seven cents a day buys items not provided by the City: new plantings in the central beds, new trees, dog waste bags, signage, educational tree tags, website fees, history articles, Movie Nights, the annual Halloween dog parade, the Little Free Library and children's story walks. The labor of all the volunteers who make this happen is free. If you don't think all this is worth it for yourself, then join the Friends group to make the Park a place of beauty and serenity for others in your community. There is quite a bit of subsidized housing in the area (Spring Garden Towers and other scattered sites), and quite a few older folks (the Fountain View), and Baldwin Park provides a free and local outdoor living room for all. So if personal return is not a motivator, do it for social justice and equity.