More Philly developers are looking to build artist and maker spaces like the Bok building

Lindsey Scannapieco’s Bok building has become a South Philadelphia icon.

The monumental former public school, shuttered in 2013, now hums with activity. It’s filled with 225 tenants — artists, nonprofits, small businesses, and cultural institutions — with 500 more on the waiting list. Its retail options include a James Beard-semifinalist bakery, a bike shop, and a bar with Center City skyline vistas.

On a recent Sunday evening, salsa dancers twirled around the bar’s deck despite inclement weather, a testament to the way Bok has become a focal point of culture, arts, and just plain hanging out in this corner of Philadelphia.

This success has attracted emulators. A number of buildings inspired by Bok are being considered in Philadelphia, including one from Scannapieco’s company, Scout, on South Broad Street, another from Ken Weinstein on Germantown Avenue in Nicetown, and a third in the Navy Yard by Ensemble Investments and Mosaic Development Partners.

But will other developers be able to reproduce the success of a project that isn’t designed to maximize profits?

“I’m working with a lot of really small-scale tenants that most traditional developers wouldn’t work with, and a lot of people who haven’t seen a lease before,” Scannapieco said. “We’re building something together, and I find that really exciting, but it’s a different approach. It’s not for everyone.”

Scannapieco believes there is ample demand for spaces like Bok.

Philadelphia is more affordable than many of its rival cities in the Northeast, and artists have long managed to craft workspace out of the city’s faded industrial heritage.

Some spaces have been acquired and refashioned off-the-books — studios and living quarters carved into hulking structures that escaped the notice of the real estate market or city inspectors. Other buildings like Crane Arts in Callowhill or the Maas building in North Philadelphia’s Ludlow neighborhood are earlier, smaller examples of the professionalized model that Bok continues.

But areas like Northern Liberties and Old City that once attracted artists are now among the priciest neighborhoods in the city. Those seeking super cheap real estate must look farther afield in areas like Kensington.

“You can still get a bunch of people together to buy a building in Philadelphia in a way that is practically impossible in New York,” said Charlotte Cohen, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Association for Public Art.

Building more small-scale office and workshop spaces in the mold of Bok costs more than arts infrastructure established in grotty, but cheap, warehouses. But developers could also offer space at scale and in areas of the city, like Center City, the Navy Yard, and South Philadelphia, that are largely now out of the price range of individual artists or collectives.

“These kind of adaptive reuse buildings offered by developers to artists can be advantageous if they are strategically located and intentionally planned to provide artists with stable rent and use for a long time horizon,” said Cohen.

The most prominent Bok clone comes from Scannapieco herself. Earlier this year, Scout won the bidding for Hamilton and Furness Halls, the keystone of the defunct University of the Arts’ real estate holdings. The colonnaded building on South Broad Street served as an emblem of the institution, which provided work and space to artists throughout the city.

Scout’s pitch during the competitive bidding was preserving the building as a place for culture and offering affordable rentals for artists in the former dorms, as opposed to turning the space into market-rate housing.

That line of argument was echoed during the bidding by her competitor, New York’s Dwight City Group, which also promised “artisan space” in the building.

Scout’s bid was supported by much of the city’s political class and many cultural institutions, and the company won out in late February with a $12.25 million bid. Scannapieco said at the time that she had received an emergency bridge loan from an anonymous source, to be paid back in 60 days, and that the company would launch a crowdfunding campaign to secure the necessary resources.

Scannapieco is still working to pay back the loan, although she has decided against crowdfunding and instead is raising capital from “mission-related investors who really want to support bringing this impactful project to life for the city of Philadelphia.”

The finances of this deal are far more complicated than they were at Bok. In that case, she got the 340,000-square-foot school for $1.75 million.

Hamilton and Furness Halls are a combined 111,360 square feet, obtained for a vastly greater sum.

“The economics are very different from what we had at Bok, just based on the purchase price,” Scannapieco said. But she plans to keep prices accessible to artists.

Although Scannapieco declined to reveal the current costs of a rental at Bok, the building’s website lists two spaces available, one of which is $2,500 a month for a 1,427-square-foot corner suite, pitched as a possible ceramics studio. The other available space is slightly larger and pricier. Most of the spaces are less than half that size. The smallest are semiprivate studios sized 100 to 200 square feet.

Most of Bok’s users come from South Philadelphia and a great majority arrive by foot, bike, or transit. Hamilton and Furness Halls are even more accessible, and Scannapieco says she is getting a lot of inquiries from West Philadelphia residents, who could access the building by trolley or the Market-Frankford Line.

“Transit helps a lot,” Scannapieco said. “We’re not directly on the Broad Street Line [at Bok], but we do have really good bus connectivity, and South Philly is very bikeable. It’s very dense and very walkable. Those are things that help.”

At 3939 Germantown Ave., near the border of North Philadelphia and Germantown, longtime local developer Ken Weinstein is looking at Bok as inspiration.

His target is the seven-story building known as the Olympian, which he hopes will host 115 “flex spaces” for artist studios, nonprofits, or start-ups. He also plans to build a seven-story addition adjoining the existing structure, topped with a roof deck. The total project cost is $12 million for 91,000 square feet.

“Lindsey has created something very special down there that can be replicated elsewhere,” Weinstein said.

The Olympian is far enough away from Scout’s existing and prospective buildings that Weinstein believes it will appeal to a different regional market. It will have 115 spaces to rent.

“It’ll nicely space them out and give a lot of small businesses and nonprofits and artists a choice on where they want to locate,” he said.

The project isn’t wholly inspired by Scout’s South Philadelphia effort. Weinstein hosts flex spaces in four of his office projects, each one having between 11 and 23 apiece. All are occupied, all have waiting lists. They rent from $12 to $38 a square foot.

Weinstein hopes many of these spaces will be taken by small businesses and nonprofits, as opposed to predominantly arts and culture-related tenants. He sees a large demand for smaller-format office space given the shrunken post-COVID market for large-scale offices in Center City.

Even in the current development environment, with high interest rates and tariff-related uncertainty, Weinstein says the Olympian is a bet he is able to make. It’s eligible for federal New Market Tax Credits, as it will bring investment and jobs to a struggling part of the city. He expects to get the credits in the fall and close on his construction loan in the first quarter of 2026.

“Unlike some of our other projects, this one is definitely moving ahead,” Weinstein said. “The narrative on this couldn’t be any better in terms of producing jobs in Nicetown, removing blight, just adding economic activity to a previously disinvested area.”

At the most southern edge of Philadelphia, the Navy Yard is preparing to welcome new, nonmilitary residents for the first time in its history.

As the current construction project nears its end, the master developers for the Navy Yard, Ensemble Investments, and Mosaic Development Partners, have announced that their next project will be transforming the massive former warehouse known as Building 83 into a Bok-like entity.

“We’re really envisioning [Building 83] for the creative community, a combination of creative office, maker space, retail and maybe some event space,” Brian Cohen, managing director of Ensemble development, said in an April interview. “It’s a unique opportunity to create a type of space that currently doesn’t exist at the Navy Yard.”

The 440,000-square-foot industrial building is the largest project proposed — slightly bigger than the Bok. It even has a 55,000-square-foot roof deck that sports “unencumbered views looking toward the city and the stadium complex,” Cohen said.

It is also the closest to Scout’s original site, but not as accessible by foot or transit. Instead of competing with Bok, it could draw users from South Jersey or more auto-oriented parts of South Philadelphia.

In June, Ensemble declined to answer further questions about their plans for Building 83 because it’s still early in the planning.

“We don’t have renderings yet; we’ve just started thinking,” Cohen said in April.

Scannapieco declined to comment on the specific plans of other developers but said she broadly supports the idea of more Bok-like spaces.

“Our city is better when we support working artists, small businesses, and nonprofits and give them spaces to thrive,” Scannapieco said. “So I would love to see more of that.”