95 Years Later, Binswanger Is Still Writing Philadelphia Commercial Real Estate's Playbook

Binswanger, the Philadelphia-founded commercial real estate firm, turns 95 this year. Frank G. Binswanger Sr. started the company in 1931, and two years later saw an opportunity in a coincidence: Prohibition had just ended and Pennsylvania needed locations for state liquor stores, while the Depression had left bank buildings vacant across the region. He converted failed banks, vaults and all, into the state store network. In the 1950s, he helped submerge the elevated rail tracks that ran through what's now Penn Center, opening six blocks of high-rise office development west of Broad Street that eventually grew into the Comcast headquarters district.

By 1960, Binswanger was solving a different problem: textile manufacturers leaving multistory North Philadelphia mills for single-story production. The firm helped build the Philadelphia Industrial Park in the Far Northeast, then the country's largest inner-city industrial park, keeping manufacturing jobs inside city limits instead of losing them to the suburbs. More recently, the firm worked a former DuPont chemical campus in Wilmington into a modern Merck manufacturing site, the same pattern of turning a complicated, contaminated, or outdated property into the exact asset a specific tenant needs.

The throughline across 95 years is the method: treat a building's obstacles, a failed bank vault, elevated tracks, an obsolete mill, an environmentally challenged industrial site, as the very thing that makes it valuable to the right tenant. That's still the job today. A vacant, awkward, or contaminated property is a property nobody has matched to the right use yet.