The Big Chill

Can a 15-acre refrigerator save Southwest Philly — and revolutionize the way we eat?

by A.D. Amorosi

Jonathan Bartlett

I can say this because I grew up there: Southwest Philly is a mess.

When Philadelphians think of the area west of the Schuylkill and south of Grays Ferry — if they think of it at all — it's because they're cutting through it on the way to the airport.

SWP is the home of the auto mall and junk yards. It's where you can hit any number of sleazy strip clubs and never, ever be found out. Businesses are shuttered along shopping corridors like Woodland Avenue, and the ones left open aren't particularly welcoming. Police blotters are filled with petty crimes. With less than 1 percent of the area covered by trees, you get no shade from the heat that blasts the tiny rowhomes lining most blocks. In the summer, the lack of oxygen is palpable.

The expanse of land owned and operated by oil refineries here is long, desolate and gray. It doesn't help that those refineries sit across from a bolt of property known as Jerry's Corner, where The Pleasure Garden swingers club, Charlie's Dream 24-hour porn shop and the C-level stripper haven Purple Orchid reside on a devil's triangle of lust and disgust. When you look up and see the there-forever Boys & Girls Club billboard with a young Denzel Washington that reads "Be Inspired," all you can think to yourself is, "How?"

This might be the last place you'd expect to find a revolution in fresh green anything. But for developer and prodigal son Brian O'Neill, a graduate of Our Lady of Lourdes school at 63rd and Lancaster, and Sonny DiCrecchio, executive director of the Philadelphia Regional Produce Market — the long-outgrown South Philly distribution center where large-scale operations like grocery stores and restaurant suppliers get their goods — Southwest is perfect. "There's no place left within city limits with this sort of land mass," says O'Neill.

In just a few weeks, many in the region will see the fruit of their labors: the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market (PWPM), a years-in-construction, decade-in-the-works, state-of-the-art wholesale produce distribution center that will be, depending on how you measure it, the biggest or second biggest in the country (along with New York's Hunts Point).

"I'm very familiar with this area," says O'Neill with a Cheshire Cat grin as his glasses slip to the tip of his nose. Though his real estate investment and development company is headquartered in King of Prussia, O'Neill Properties buys, recycles and renovates lots of abandoned lots: surplus brownfield, industrial and military real estate all over the country. Ask him how his home area has changed for the worse, and he demurs. "It doesn't disturb me. I see a change for the better. And it's going to get better what with the proximity to I-95 and the airport. For what Sonny wants, this is perfect."

"All the best. All right here," reads a sign at 6700 Essington Ave. It's cold but not yet wintry when I first hit the still-in-construction PWPM. On opening day, the $200 million facility — DiCrecchio calls it the "world's largest refrigerator" — will be 700,000 square feet on nearly 48 acres with another 15-plus-acre staging lot at 61st Street.

Now, all you can see from the highway are rows of blank gray garage doors and the trucks of building suppliers. It's been more or less like this since October 2008 when O'Neill Properties broke ground on the new facility, after its former occupants — five junk and scrap yards — got cleaned up by the Essington Avenue Partners II (an O'Neill Properties affiliate) and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection removed scrap metal and a reported 400,000 tires.

In a trailer near the emerging superstructure hangs a photo rendering of the facility done in 2008. One worker, observing me scribbling, looks at it. "Very accurate, isn't it?" he smirks. "Look how blue the sky is and how appealing the workers all look." That's when Nick Peetros, senior project manager, grabs me for a tour. The Delaware County native shuffles between pallet jacks to point out ramps and covered shelters that run the length of the market for smaller trade customers and restaurants whose trucks can't actually reach the docking station.

"Basically the entire periphery of the building is for loading and unloading," he says before leading me inside to the center concourse where buyers will walk and look at product from 26 vendors, purchase it and have it delivered to their trucks.

Getting it all done in one place is important. PWPM (pwpm.net), with its enclosed 224 loading docks and 127 spaces at its nearby staging lot, will be nearly twice the size of that 350,000-square-foot, 150-dock facility near the sports complex on South Galloway Street. And it makes possible PWPM's treasured first: It will be a 100 percent refrigerated facility — the entire building — designed to prevent breaking the cold chain from truck to loading docks to cold storage at the distribution center. The building is constructed of steel, concrete and insulated metal panels 5 inches thick for energy efficiency and refrigeration.

The Galloway Street facility had become too small to accommodate all that loading and unloading, sometimes leaving produce to sit on loading docks in wait. That's the problem with open-air terminal markets, the industry standard at locations such as Baltimore's Jessup Market and Hunts Point: You break the cold chain as soon as you pull up to the dock. "We had to get up to the times. Food safety was becoming an issue as we found out that rising temperatures were causing food-borne illnesses — to say nothing of the shrinkage. You cut days off the shelf life of most produce just by leaving it in a box on the side in 80- to 99-degree heat."

Here, 26 vendors will utilize 33 units. One unit, they say, will be used as a test kitchen; another is intended for use in a cooking show. (Unlike the Galloway site, the public will be very much welcome here.) Three large vessels hold refrigerant in different stages of the liquid-to-vapor cycle and several compressors circulate throughout the building, with all content areas kept at 50 degrees — all controlled via the Internet.

"I've worked on difficult projects, but this is the only property I've ever had with a brain, a personality and changeable limbs," says O'Neill.

This massive project — currently employing more than 1,500 people, and expected to create a multitude of new jobs and employers, including some from Southwest Philly — had the most clichéd of beginnings.

"One day I just started drawing out plans on a napkin," says Sonny DiCrecchio.

After running his own refrigeration business for 25 years, DiCrecchio took over as the Galloway Street market's executive director in 2000. A year later, he started dreaming up plans for a more modern facility. After realizing that retrofitting Galloway could cost upward of $90 million — and leave its existing merchants and vendors high and dry during the process — it became obvious that a new facility was the answer.

Easier said than done.

There had long been talk of getting aid from the city and the state. In the 1990s, even as recently as 2004, New Jersey cities such as Camden and Gloucester just across the river had been offered as alternative sites, but loyalty to Pennsylvania was key to the market's stockholders.

DiCrecchio recalls the back-and-forth of locations and money worries as an equal mix of comedy and drama. There was the Navy Yard, where Gov. Ed Rendell announced some 70 acres would be made available in 2005, and again in 2007. In between, Pier 98 at Oregon Avenue and Columbus Boulevard was proposed, too.

"We had a ground-breaking [at the Navy Yard] and everything, but suddenly it got too expensive, according to the governor," says DiCrecchio, recalling the day he heard the news. He'd gone sailing with his daughter in Florida — "my only day off in years" — only to be interrupted by a call informing him that Rendell was on television calling off the deal. "I was so pissed off, I threw my laptop, a blue one, in the lagoon. Two days later, I'm on one of those little boats in the lagoon — BOOM. The boat stopped. I got knocked out when my boat hit ... my blue laptop. I couldn't win for losing."

Starting over seemed unlikely until O'Neill — who had heard about the project from one friend and the Essington Avenue land mass from another — entered the picture. In 2004, an associate of O'Neill's had a parcel of land that he wanted to unload. "He didn't know what to do with it," smiles O'Neill, who did what he does: He bought that property as well as most of the rest of the block for "tens of millions of dollars, a great deal." While he won't comment on what else in the area he's buying, all O'Neill can say is that he is buying.

He'd bought 40 acres, close to the amount DiCrecchio was looking for when the Navy Yard fell through for the second time.

O'Neill went to Rendell and then-state Sen. Vince Fumo and said he could build the new market for less than it had been value engineered at — $218 million instead of $260 million. A deal was struck.

The Port Authority of Philadelphia purchased O'Neill's 40 acres and 23 nearby acres that the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. owned at the start of the project in 2008.

The deal became a mix of private and public financing, which includes $152.5 million from the state of Pennsylvania that Rendell and Fumo pulled together, a $50 million loan from American International Group Inc. (AIG), an $11 million low-interest loan from the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority (PENNVEST), a $3 million grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and $1 million per year for 10 years from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development.

The Philadelphia Regional Port Authority is the landlord on the property, with the market vendors repaying 100 percent of the grants and loans over the life of the 40-year lease.

After 40 years, the market can buy the property. "For $1," says O'Neill.

Not that anything gets done quite that easily.

The Eastwick Project Area Committee (EPAC) had issues with possible traffic jam-ups. But the combination of a food distribution center grossing $1.5 billion annually, the removal of all that refuse and the possibility of jobs won out. (EPAC's longtime president, Elvira Rosalinda Stewart, passed in June 2010, and the committee's phones have since been disconnected.) As a result, PWPM is shooting to be fully operational by the end of January rather than the recent Dec. 15 target.

"The neighborhood committee may have been wary at first, but once we added traffic lights and turning lanes designed to ease the flow coming in and out of 67th and Essington, they saw the benefits," says Peetros. "It's a rough neighborhood. Between the junk yards and the strip clubs, it ain't the Main Line. But it's not the worst neighborhood I've built in. Any place where it's not just for locals dumping trash is a good thing."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)