(The following article by Joseph A. Slobodzian was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on May 22.)
PHILADELPHIA — SEPTA’s Suburban Station is a daily rite of passage for 100,000 commuters – one to get through as quickly as possible.
Dark and dirty, freezing in winter and tropical in summer, the Center City hub of SEPTA’s rail system is a shadow of the showpiece opened in 1929 by the powerful Pennsylvania Railroad.
These days, conditions seem even worse as commuters thread their way among plywood construction barriers amid a din of hammering and power tools, part of the $63 million makeover that began in 1997.
Commuters may be skeptical, but the end is near. By summer of 2006, SEPTA says, the station and concourse will have had their first major renovation in 76 years. Retail space will double to 30 stores, leased to high-quality tenants. The terminal’s west end will be ready to open in 2007 into the grand atrium of the 57-story Comcast tower at 17th Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard.
“At the end of the day, I think people are going to be impressed,” said Gerald M. Maier, SEPTA’s director of real estate. “The problem some days is remembering that there will be an end of the day.”
Maier’s frustration is understandable. SEPTA owns Suburban Station and the concourse that was extended in the 1950s to connect the station with the stand of Penn Center office towers above and to the Market-Frankford subway’s 15th Street station. But renovating the long-neglected facility has meant coming to terms with Penn Center’s various owners, who also control parts of the concourse, shops, and common walls; the city, which controls the north-south numbered streets above and below ground; and a thicket of 76-year-old easements and deed restrictions.
And all work must be done while the 100,000 commuters and pedestrians use the facility every weekday, and without disrupting rail service.
“There have been a lot of surprises,” said Terry Heiser, SEPTA’s project manager on the Suburban Station job. “One surprise after another.”
Take the concourse floor, which runs from 18th to 15th Street. After removing walls, Heiser said, workers discovered an 11-inch deviation in the elevation from one end to the other.
When other walls were removed, Heiser said, workers discovered the original marble-clad station wall. There turned out to be no space between the plaster ceilings and the floors above, Heiser said, which meant tearing out the original ceilings to install new ventilation ducts and replastering the ceiling to meet historic restoration rules.
“You don’t have any wiggle room here,” Heiser added. “You’ve got to work in the space you have.”
There were also surprises left behind by some former tenants, such as furniture and trash, a locker of old meat in an abandoned grocery and an eight-inch-deep trench excavated in the concrete floor.
With some former tenants, Heiser said, “the attitude was ‘Forget about it, Joe will take care of it,’ and we’re Joe.”
That attitude had a long pedigree at Suburban Station, which became a bricks-and-mortar chronicle of the decline and fall of the Pennsylvania and Penn Central Railroads.
“As money ran out, they let one thing go after another,” said Maier.
Maier’s personal favorite horror story is the concourse restrooms. The railroad maintained them until the 1950s, when Penn Center was developed and a Sheraton Hotel built above. But after the hotel was built, Maier said, the Pennsy never made sure someone else continued cleaning the restrooms.
Maier said that by the time SEPTA inherited the property after the 1970 Penn Central bankruptcy, “the conditions in the restrooms were unbelievable. It was like a casting call for deviants.”
Though it may not seem that way to the public, Heiser said work is 80 percent complete. It began in 1997 with installation of water chillers needed to air-condition the station and concourse for the first time (since 1929, fresh air has been sucked in from fourth-story vents in the Suburban Station building and pumped to the concourse, train platforms and the two levels of service tunnels below tracks).
That was followed in 1998 by removal of asbestos and pollutants, installation of new ventilation ducts in 2001, and the beginning of work in passenger areas in 2002.
Throughout, Heiser said, SEPTA is restoring the original 1929 color scheme and cleaning and reusing marble wall panels, art deco bronze ceiling light fixtures, and the decorative bronze access doors to utility lines.
But the need to keep the station open for rail passengers and to accommodate construction planning for the Comcast tower “has meant we’ve had to do a lot of the work in a checkerboard fashion.”
For passengers, said architect Roderick Wolfson, the principal at Bower Lewis Thrower Architects who is managing the design, the current work is most important: disassembling the original ticket windows, rotating them 180 degrees and stripping away retail space tacked on over time to create a real waiting area.
By reusing original bronze and marble fittings, Wolfson said, the station “will have a waiting area that looks very traditional but which was never there.”
Other improvements are apparent, such as the striking, new glass “headhouses” – entryways – going from sidewalk at 15th and 16th Streets; new stores and a new concourse way to 18th Street.
SEPTA has contracted management of retail space to MetroMarket, a joint venture of U.S. Equities and the Rubin Organization involved in renovating 30th Street Station.
Ultimately, MetroMarket’s general manager Tony DeAngelo said, Suburban Station’s retail stores could generate significant income for SEPTA. Even during construction, DeAngelo added, MetroMarket has collected $3.82 million in rents in the last eight years, and its tenants have made $3.9 million in improvements to SEPTA property.