PHILADELPHIA—A simmering debate over the future of Philadelphia’s Bellwether District has been reenergized by a Planning Commission presentation last month that identified the industrial zone as one of only two sites in the city capable of hosting a large data center.
Neither the commission nor the site’s owner, HRP Group, report any such proposals to date.
HRP acquired the 1,300-acre tract after a catastrophic 2019 fire forced the previous owner of a massive refinery on the site, once the oldest and largest on the East Coast, to stop operations and into bankruptcy. HRP then worked with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to remediate the portion of contamination it inherited responsibility for as it planned to transform the land for the Bellwether District.
The process continued an ongoing clean-up that Sunoco, a previous owner of the refinery, had been required to pursue since 2003, but is only set to remediate the site enough for nonresidential use. Far more remediation would have been necessary to make it suitable for parks or housing, as some advocates hoped. A ban on those environmentally sensitive uses was renewed during the sale to HRP, limiting its long-term versatility.
