After surviving its latest near-death experience, the Bellevue offers lessons for today’s Philadelphia

Few Philadelphia buildings track the city’s shifting fortunes as neatly as the the Bellevue hotel.

Philadelphia was one of America’s richest cities when George C. Boldt opened the Park Hyatt at the Bellevue-Stratford, the city’s first Parisian-style grand hotel, in 1904.

But as the city’s economy declined in the ’70s, so did the the Bellevue. The “Grande Dame of Broad Street” was finally forced to close after it was struck by a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease during the Bicentennial in 1976. Twenty-nine guests died.

Remarkably, the Bellevue survived that notorious incident, but its comeback, like the city’s, didn’t really begin until the 1990s. To make the huge building profitable, a new owner scaled back the hotel, converted several floors to offices, and installed a sprawling food court in the basement.

Then COVID emptied out the building again.

Now the Bellevue has bounced back from another near-death experience, with an ambitious renovation aimed at adapting the storied building for our changing times.

In the midst of so much national and local uncertainty, it’s a pleasure to see the French Renaissance palace, designed by G.W. and W.D. Hewitt, looking as radiant as a debutante. And its renewal could help Philadelphia navigate the difficult economic days ahead.

The Bellevue’s latest reinvention is the work of Lubert-Adler, the same developer that transformed a derelict Delaware River power plant into a mixed-used hive called The Battery. Undaunted by the pandemic, the company purchased the Bellevue in 2021, when it was far from clear what the future would bring, and immediately started construction.

Assisted by a team of expert craftspeople, Lubert-Adler has spent the last three years carefully repairing the Bellevue’s sculpted plaster ceilings, marbleized columns and mosaic floors, which now look much as they did when the Queen of Romania came to stay in the 1920s.

After a deep cleaning by the company’s contractor, Fastrack Construction, the facade’s rippled stone bays glow in the sun. The team also repaired the mountain range of rooftop domes and turrets that hover over Broad Street, a signature feature of the Bellevue’s Second Empire design. All the grand ballrooms and event spaces have been restored to their Gilded Age splendor by Tantillo Architecture and Tony Machado, who specializes in hotel design at LUCID.

The first thing you notice when you walk into the soaring lobby is that it has been thoroughly de-malled. The Bellevue’s first savior was Ronald Rubin, who ran the company that owned the former Gallery on Market Street. Although he deserves enormous credit for rescuing the Park Hyatt at the Bellevue after the Legionnaires’ disaster — especially after Mayor Frank Rizzo threatened to demolish the building — he also brought “a mall guy’s” sensibility to the project, Lubert-Adler’s Leonard Klehr told me during a tour of the recent improvements.

Not only did Rubin insist on building a parking garage next to the Bellevue and a food court in the basement, he cut up the lobby’s distinctive, flower-patterned mosaic floors to install an escalator.

The lobby’s incongruous, mall-style intrusions have been banished, and the ground floor feels like an elegant respite again, furnished with living-room-style seating, potted palms and velvet drapes. An elaborate, five-dial clock, which is practically a work of sculpture, has been given pride of place over the check-in desk, where the electronic keys are secured with fat, green tassels. And once again, there is a “presidential suite,” which is fitting for a hotel that has hosted three American presidents.

But this is no by-the-numbers restoration. Both the lobby and the hotel rooms feel like modern, streamlined versions of their original, overstuffed Edwardian selves. As part of the restoration, the architects rediscovered a magnificent green-and-white mosaic floor in the conservatory that had been buried under a layer of concrete. (The soaring space is so inspiring it’s a shame that its awkward location makes it accessible only to hotel guests.)

Although Lubert-Adler was intent on reviving the Bellevue’s former grandeur, it is still a very different place today than it was when Boldt conceived it as Philadelphia’ answer to New York’s Waldorf Astoria. In its heyday, the enormous, E-shaped building was crammed with over a thousand hotel rooms. Today, there are less than 200. Seven of its 19 floors have been converted to apartments and just four floors of offices remain.

While the reallocation of space was obviously a market decision, driven by the post-pandemic office glut, the new arrangement could be just what Philadelphia needs right now.

By adding 155 apartments, the Bellevue will increase the residential population on South Broad Street, helping to stabilize that important boulevard as it recovers from the loss of the University of the Arts. That stretch of Broad has always struggled to live up to its “Avenue of the Arts” brand, but the situation was made worse after UArts abandoned five buildings between Walnut and South Streets.

Even though those properties have all been sold, it will be years before they are fully occupied again. The first to reopen will likely be UArts flagship Hamilton Hall, which is being converted into maker studios by Lindsey Scannapieco’s Scout.

The company, which repopulated the former Bok high school a decade ago with dozens of artists’ studios and small creative firms, typically works fast by making only the most necessary renovations. Scannapieco says she plans to open an outdoor cafe in Hamilton’s courtyard this summer to activate the dormant building. More intense uses will follow.

There should be a strong synergy between Hamilton’s makers and Temple University’s new, arts-focused Center City outpost, which will be in the Terra Building, directly across from the Bellevue — in a high-rise that, incidentally, started life as the Ritz-Carlton hotel.

While the Park Hyatt at the Bellevue won’t serve artists in the same way as those projects, the artistry of its architecture makes it a worthy neighbor.

Another developer, Dwight City Group, expects to turn UArts’ former Anderson Hall into apartments, further increasing the residential population on Broad Street. It’s still unclear what will happen to the two other, former UArts buildings, Gershman Hall and the Arts Bank, but they, too, are likely to end up as apartment buildings.

For decades, the Bellevue served as a Gilded Age clubhouse for Philadelphia’s elites. The city’s old families gathered there for the annual Academy Ball, debutante parties and lavish weddings, while Philadelphia’s plutocrats held their power lunches at the Palm restaurant. Given that the Bellevue will still host plenty of fancy balls and that a three-bedroom apartment will set you back $9,800 a month, the building will largely remain an oasis for the wealthy.

Fortunately, Lubert-Adler is also bringing in several tenants that will be open to the public.

The retail space facing Walnut Street is being outfitted for a large, boisterous restaurant called Mr. Edison, in honor of the early lighting fixtures installed at the hotel by the inventor. The food court will be replaced by an outlet of the popular, and relatively affordable, Brooklyn day spa, Bathhouse. For the price of lunch, you can also admire the building’s immense stone capitals from a window seat at the new Pergola restaurant on the 19th floor.

The Gilded Age was infamous for its unequal distribution of wealth and immense poverty, but it did leave us with a collection of spectacular architecture. These buildings can be used now in more democratic ways that help buttress urban life and sustain cities. Lubert-Adler is currently remaking the 10-story Bourse, another Gilded Age building by the Hewitt brothers that has had multiple lives. It, too, will be a hotel with public amenities and is expected to be open in time for the 2026 events celebrating America’s founding.

Unfortunately, bringing back these vestiges of an earlier age could get harder under the Trump administration. Developers like Lubert-Adler depend on federal historic tax credits to cushion the added expense of renovating white elephants like the Bellevue, the Bourse and the Battery. But Elon Musk’s DOGE has slashed hundreds of employees from the National Park Service, the agency that oversees those tax credits.

Imagine what would have happened if Lubert-Adler was just starting to apply for tax credits for the Bellevue. Older cities like Philadelphia, which still has dozens of underused and empty office towers and factory buildings from the early 20th century, will suffer most if the Park Service is unable to process tax credit applications.

Lubert-Adler’s vice chair, Leonard Klehr, said he believes the company will find a way to carry on its preservation work. “We’ve always been a believer in cities,” he said, no matter what was going on in Washington.

Philadelphia will likely need a lot more believers in the difficult days ahead.