I’m all sorts of late on this one, but what can you do. Inga Safron, architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote a piece about Northwood native Betsy Manning, staff photographer at Temple, who’s on a journey to document the hidden gems of modernist architecture here in Philadelphia. And bam tops on the list is Frankford’s own Holiday Thriftway at Pratt and Frankford. To quote Safron:
The soaring glass vault of the old Penn Fruit store, now a Thriftway, on Frankford Avenue is a perfect example of how midcentury designers’ modernist buildings in the urban environment of Northeast Philadelphia needed to work at two scales, one seen from the road, the other from the sidewalk.
Damn, pretty cool. The building was originally built by the Penn Fruit Co. which was founded in Philadelphia in 1927 and grew to 80 stores in the 70’s before losing price wars to local competitors and filing bankruptcy. We got a cool building out of it though. And when you think about it, we got a large building that fronts Frankford Ave under the Market Frankford El with it’s parking in the back. That sounds like transit oriented developement to me and that sounds awesome.
[link] Changing Skyline: Modernist gems of the Great Northeast
[link] Architectural Wallflowers
