PHILADELPHIA | American Commerce Center | 1,510' Pinnacle / 1,210' Roof | 63 FLOORS

[apetrella802]

i've been as critical of inga as anyone, but i will say her assassment of ACC is much more balanced than anything she has written,

[JDRCRASH]

The dimensions of this building on Page#1 look too Freedom Tower-ish, like a combination of the original "twisted" 2003 proposal, and the current one u/c.

[Steely Dan]

* many off-topic posts deleted *

posts about liberals or conservatives or any of that political crap belongs in a different thread, not this one. this thread is about the proposed ACC in philadelphia; stay on topic.

[kazpmk]

Good luck Philly on this proposal. It would certainly be a great addition to the Philly skyline.

[Jonathan from Philly]

Hi Everybody. I have long been a reader of this page as well as phillyskyline and emporis. However, With this new proposal I knew I could no longer keep my passion for cities and skyscrapers to myself. This is my first post! Considering it is the end of the day I'll keep it short. I do a lot of business with SAP and I know for a fact they have no interest in moving from their Newtown Square home. In fact they just built another building there which will be topped out this thursday. (I'll be there!) Of course sprawling suburban complexes are much less appealing then beautiful highrises. That being said the best bet for an anchor tenet for ACC will be to look north, which I believe the developer is actively doing. We can lure a New York based company down to the city of brotherly love with a signature building and cheap rent (comparatively). I can't wait for the day when a supertall graces our skyline. I hope that day is sometime in 2012!

[skyscraper]

Can we all agree that the building bears a more than casual resemblance to the freedom tower, and stop bringing it up please! I don't deny that it is true, but the more people mention it the less valuable the comment becomes.

[relnahe]

Originally Posted by skyscraper

looks like my prophecy is beginning to come true. she is already starting to come out with negative stuff about the building, and she hints at her column this week to be about not skyscraping Philadelphia. she thinks we can't handle it, and I will bet you that somewhere in that column will be some comparison to new york: that we are not new york and that only her beloved new york can handle more than one tower in a small area.

What a grating column she wrote. How clueless can she be?

[apetrella802]

in 1950 Philadelphia was a city of 2,000,000 people. The public transportation network that served that city is the same one we ahve now except now we have the merged RRR and PRR via the Market East Station so there is a unified metropolitan rail system.

So of course CC can handle the density of adding a ACC tower and others. The work force in CC in 1950 was about 150,000 greater than today , most of those people were industrial(light and heavy) workers and had a much greater reliance on public transportation.

As long as the buildings are connected to the concourse and the street scape is pedestrian friendly we have a long way to go before conjestion is a major problem. Conjestion is part od what makes a city exciting!

AS much as I love to hate inga I though she was somewhat more balanced than I've ever seen here on this particular building.

[witchypoo]

Originally Posted by apetrella802

Conjestion is part od what makes a city exciting!

I don't know if exciting is the right word for that.

Hope Philly gets this nice new addition.

[Don098]

I don't understand why the concourse at suburban station needs to be extended. Comcast Center's entrance to the concourse will be right across the street. When I lived in Washington and commuted on the metro it felt like 3-4 times as many people were using it than when I worked in Philly and took regional rail. There were less entrances to the concourse at one of the busiest stations, Farragut North, than at Suburban Station and sure it was crowded, but not congested. If you don't want congestion, don't live in cities! Philly is relatively quiet on the public transport side of the equation compared to our neighbors despite the range of SEPTA's network.

[BuildItUp]

Originally Posted by bucks native

There's profit in beauty. Bold design. Eye-popping wowzaa! And the ACC hotel design speaks to each of these. Would you rather stay at the mid-town Holiday Inn or ACC's hotel?

And the discussion above about no tech jobs in Phila - come on - Comcast uses high technology, so does Unisys, and Penn and Drexel, and SAP is close enough. I've had many friends turn down jobs in Silicon Valley because it's just too damn expensive to live decently there.

If that is your argument then every city in the US has hi-tech jobs. The companies you named are users of tech instead of innovators. SAP's regional headquarters is for sales/consulting (no development), Unisys was once an innovators back in the days when they were Sperry and Burroughs (now they managed data centers and back office work - not exactly leading edge). Penn/Drexel does not translate to Stanford/Berkeley. Don't get me wrong I love Philly but our high technology jobs pale compared to Boston/DC/NYC... Sorry for the off topic, however I do love this building and I hope it attracts a multi-national corporation.

[tranceclubbinphilly]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

* many off-topic posts deleted *

posts about liberals or conservatives or any of that political crap belongs in a different thread, not this one. this thread is about the proposed ACC in philadelphia; stay on topic.

First I would like to say thank you to Steely Dan for doing this. We can all agree this is a very exciting topic and the vast majority of us tune in for updates on the project not forum fights. Now if we can just convince you to delete all posts that compare this building to the freedom tower that clutter up the place we would be getting somewhere.

Originally Posted by Jonathan from Philly

Hi Everybody. ... I do a lot of business with SAP and I know for a fact they have no interest in moving from their Newtown Square home. In fact they just built another building there which will be topped out this thursday. ...

As an SAP Employee I will confirm this quote from John. I will guarantee that SAP will not move into the city, even into a beautiful building such as ACC. After all our current headquarters is nothing to sneeze at and the new building will also be LEED certified. (not sure what level)

As for SAP, we do some Development here but yes it is not on a large scale. The new building will house mostly smaller local tech companies that SAP has bought in the past year along with new offices for the executives.

Lastly, I think this design is great the way it is. I love that lighting bolt drawing someone posted, very Philly! I hope we hear soon of a Anchor Tenant so that this thing will start to rise before we know it!

[tranceclubbinphilly]

Just walked upstairs and saw that the new SAP building will be LEED Platinum if any one cares. At least it shows more and more companies are thinking Green with their new projects.

[kraggman]

Here's an article from "thedailygreen" about ACC.

http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-h...scraper-460317

[Swinefeld]

Kazpmk, you might want to update your sig line. It should look like this,

Chicago Spire 2,000 ft UC Crown Las Vegas 1,888 ft proposed Freedom Tower 1,776 ft UC American Commerce Center 1,500 ft proposed (etc.)

[KillerIman]

Developing situations: A welcome addition in the sky
by solomon d. leach / metro philadelphia

> email this to a friend
MAR 26, 2008

CENTER CITY. When real estate experts were sizing up the impact of the Comcast Center on the office-space market in 2005, some started to sweat and others predicted the colossal skyscraper would seriously dampen occupancy rates in the city’s premiere office district.


But now with very few vacancies, real estate experts say the 1,500-foot tower proposed by Walnut Street Capital, which would include 1.37 million square feet of office space, would be a welcome addition.


What a difference three years makes.


“There’s really a shortage of available quality, contiguous space in the [central business district],” said Robert Walters, executive managing director of CB Richard Ellis' Greater Philadelphia region. “That’s completely the reverse of what was going on when the Comcast tower was announced and under construction.”


Vacancy rates in the first-class office market, or trophy market, are down to about 5 percent due to Comcast taking up most of the space in its building and organic growth in other companies. The Comcast Center’s 1.2 million square feet of office space is 98 percent leased.


Experts say developers would need to lure a big-time company to make the American Commerce Center possible, but that there’s a decent chance considering the building’s proposed scale and hotel and retail components.


“If you’re putting something new and world-class on the table, there are people willing to look at it,” said Joshua Sloan, vice president of real estate firm Jones Lang Lasalle.


Walters said although lease rates in the proposed tower would probably be high for the area, they would still be about half the cost of similar buildings in New York’s Manhattan district.

http://philly.metro.us/metro/local/a...sky/12087.html

[CondoGuru]

Originally Posted by BuildItUp

If that is your argument then every city in the US has hi-tech jobs. The companies you named are users of tech instead of innovators. SAP's regional headquarters is for sales/consulting (no development), Unisys was once an innovators back in the days when they were Sperry and Burroughs (now they managed data centers and back office work - not exactly leading edge). Penn/Drexel does not translate to Stanford/Berkeley. Don't get me wrong I love Philly but our high technology jobs pale compared to Boston/DC/NYC... Sorry for the off topic, however I do love this building and I hope it attracts a multi-national corporation.

I agree. SV attracts the intellectual capital that Philadelphia desperately lacks. You just don't have the quality here that you find at Stanford or Cal. Not to mention the loads of top level candidates from Asia/India lured there for high-paying jobs. Building a skyscraper won't change all of that. But build it anyway!!!!

[Capsule F]

Its not my favoreite thing to poach companies from a great city like NYC, I'm only asking that we get something in the scale of what they've taken from us over the years.

[skyscraper]

Originally Posted by Capsule F

Its not my favoreite thing to poach companies from a great city like NYC, I'm only asking that we get something in the scale of what they've taken from us over the years.

that would be everything. Philadelphia used to be the financial capital of the United States, back when it was also the Capitol and before.

[kraggman]

Yeah, we got shouldered to the side by NYC and DC a couple hundred years ago. Time for revenge !!!!! We steal a big guy from NYC for ACC then we steal convention business from DC.