The Roundhouse is moving to West Philadelphia, and it’s not going to be round anymore.
Mayor Michael Nutter and other city officials recently broke ground on the new Philadelphia Public Safety Services Campus at 4601 Market St. When complete, the campus will house the new Philadelphia Police Department headquarters, the Medical Examiner’s Office and morgue and the Department of Public Health laboratories. Interior demolition and design work is underway. Construction is expected to begin in December 2015 with the move-in date expected in spring 2018.
In his remarks at the Oct. 20 groundbreaking, Nutter boasted his administration’s prior planning and development of a new Police Training Academy and Regional Tactical Training Facility in the Northeast (which will replace the existing Police Academy, also in the Northeast), as well as a new Juvenile Justice Services Center in West Philly (to replace the former Youth Study Center, which was in Center City on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway). Nutter is a West Philly native who represented that community on City Council before becoming mayor in 2008.
The current Police Headquarters, commonly known as the Roundhouse because of its cylindrical design components, has been centrally located at 750 Race St. for decades, within minutes of the Vine Street Expressway, Interstate 95 and the Schuylkill Expressway.
Nutter described the new public safety campus, which is more than a dozen blocks from the nearest expressway exit and closer to Upper Darby than City Hall, as “a much-needed investment that will bring the City of Philadelphia Police and Health Departments into the 21st century to better serve the needs of all Philadelphians.”
The project is projected to cost $250 million and will occupy the former Provident Mutual Life Insurance Company. It will cover about 15 acres “strategically located adjacent to the 46th and Market Street station of SEPTA’s Market-Frankford Line,” the Nutter administration said in a news release. About 900 city jobs will be relocated to the campus, including 800 uniform and civilian police department employees and 100 health department employees.
The new location could make access a lot tougher for a large portion of those 800 police department employees as the city’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, has reported that 68 percent of the union’s members live in the Northeast area of the city. ••
