When the National Bank of North Philadelphia building went up at 3701 N. Broad Street in 1926, the impressive 14-story, Art Deco structure made a clear statement: North Philly had arrived. “Now Open! North Philadelphia’s First Skyscraper!” declared an ad placed by builder Wark Co. in the Philadelphia Inquirer in June of that year. “A commanding structure, a beautiful structure, and need we add, a well-built one.”

Nearly 100 years later, the building has become greatly diminished, decades of dereliction and decay having left it a literal shell of what it once was. Today, the building is best known to many–especially the millennial crowd–as the “BONER 4EVER” building on account of eponymous graffiti tags spanning half its height. Those dialed in to local history and architecture call it the Beury Building. Whatever its name, the building’s strong bones indeed still stand, and the surrounding blocks, also diminished since a Roaring Twenties heyday, hope a potential revitalization can once again elevate the neighborhood.

News broke this month that those dreams are presently deferred, with a bevy of local outlets reporting that financing for a complete transformation of the building had fallen through for owner Shift Capital, leaving a decade-old promise adrift as the developer searches for another lender. Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, says those in his circle have known for months that the project had hit serious turbulence.

“It’s obviously disappointing, as many of us were eagerly anticipating the rehabilitation of this prominent landmark,” Steinke said. “It harkens back to the Divine Lorraine, which also sat vacant and decaying for many years before its celebrated rehabilitation in 2018.”

Shift Capital did not respond to requests for comment, but in interviews with other media outlets, representatives for the firm said that $23 million in financing for an overall $70 million price tag to convert the building into a Marriott Hotel had been rescinded by unnamed parties at the 11th hour. In an interview with the Inquirer, Shift Capital principal Nancy Gephart said investors had grown queasy about “providing a loan in an area untested for hospitality,” while real estate trade publication Bisnow, which broke the news earlier this month, tied the issue to problematic national economic trends related to high interest rates and construction costs.

Whatever the exact causes, the news is unwelcome in North Philadelphia, where a community-led push to revitalize the Broad, Germantown, and Erie Avenues area is on. In 2017, Mayor Jim Kenney launched a task force for the busy North Philadelphia hub, identifying many areas for improvement. The corridor was among the 12 percent of city streets where 50 percent of traffic deaths and injuries happen. The City determined there was also a need for more public spaces and business revitalization.

Over the past seven years, according to a City-provided timeline, municipal government has worked with local community groups like Called to Serve CDC to improve the corridor, from actions as small as helping businesses install new awnings and more attractive signage to obtaining millions of dollars in funding for new plazas and streetscapes. Jobs have also become a priority: Called to Serve launched a workforce development program, while WHYY reported that Shift Capital “signed a community benefits agreement that would have employed local residents and ensured contracting with minority-owned businesses.”

Community leaders are also working to provide spiritual revitalization in the neighborhood. The Philadelphia Historical Commission has worked with residents and community organizations to pilot Treasure Philly!, a program exploring ways to capture the cultural value of a neighborhood beyond the usual paradigm of building designation and historical placards.

In a 2023 interview, Amelia Price, corridor manager for Called to Serve and longtime resident, said many neighbors have living memories of a very different North Philadelphia in the mid-20th century, recalling a shopping district and family-oriented community, not the one where many live in fear of gun violence today.

She and other advocates likened their efforts to the sankofa bird, a Ghanian symbol conveying the importance of remembering the past in order to progress. “His head is pointed toward his tail, which means you can’t look forward unless you reach back and grab your roots,” Price explained.

Party on North Broad

In 1985, the Beury Building was successfully added to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. 60 years earlier, architects and decorative artists of all types gathered in Paris for the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) in Paris. Americans in attendance took home a new architectural vision and a shorthand to match: Art Deco.

While use of the architectural style exploded in cities like New York, “relatively few examples of pure Art Deco” exist in Philadelphia, the Beury Building’s nomination notes. “Rather, the city’s Deco style is generally identified by its marriage of ‘modernism’ with classically derived details,” it adds, referencing the Liberty Title & Trust Building at Broad and Arch Streets and Market Street National Bank building just east of City Hall.

In this context, the construction of the National Bank of North Philadelphia at 3701 N. Broad Street in 1926 was game changing: “In an area characterized by elegant rowhouses, the Beury Building stands as an important North Philadelphia landmark unusual in its scale and character,” the nomination concludes.

In the century preceding the building’s arrival, North Philadelphia transformed from a primarily rural area to modern urban enclave. While similar growth in some sections of the city overtime had led to modestly-designed rowhouses for the working class, the housing stock in North Philadelphia was instead “elegant,” the nomination notes, as the corridor “developed as a hub for Philadelphia’s nouveau riche entrepreneurial class.”

Indeed, current residents such as Price still hold deep appreciation for streets like the 3700 block of North 15th Street, where two and three-story rows with ornate cornices and bay windows led to regular nominations for Most Beautiful Block awards as recently as the 1980s. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, the nomination notes, wealthy North Philadelphians employed famous Philadelphia architects such as Willis Hale, James Windrim, and Frank Furness to design their abodes.

However, the crowning achievement was the bank. By the 1920s, residential buildout of the area was nearly complete, as was the Broad Street subway line, finished in 1924. At the beginning of that decade came the founding of the National Bank of Philadelphia. Its first officers and board of directors were selected amongst their industrious peers. Serving as the bank’s first president was Charles Ezra Beury, whose lifelong accolades include officerships for several prominent banks and companies, diplomatic assignments, philanthropic endeavors, and a role as Temple University’s second-ever president, a post he held from 1926 until 1941.

According to the historic nomination, a bank building originally constructed at the current address stood for only five years, before the bank’s leadership enlisted architect William H. Lee the architect of Temple University’s Conwell and Sullivan Halls, to design the 14-story Art Deco structure that stands today. A May 29, 1927 edition of the Inquirer heralded its scheduled opening the next day, stating the building’s basement, street-level, mezzanine, and second floor would house the banking institution with 10 stories of leasable office space above, crowned by “a recreation room for bank employees” on the top floor, beneath a domed roof. “Uptown’s first skyscraper,” the paper splashed in all caps above an adjacent photo of the building.

Crash and Slow Burn

While the National Bank of Philadelphia “gained immediate popular support” and expanded after its opening, the good times were short lived. With 1929 came the crash of the stock market on Black Tuesday, and the Great Depression that followed claimed the bank as one of its victims. By September 1930, an ad placed by the Bankers Trust Company officially renamed 3701 N. Broad the Beury Building in honor of Dr. Charles E. Beury. Just three months later, Bankers Trust would itself go belly up.

In the ensuing decades, publicly available records suggest the Beury building continued to be used for office space with advertisements for leasing appearing into the late 1970s. Yet, by the following decade it had clearly fallen into disrepair. In 1985, City officials applied for grant money to pay for a planned $5.8 million rehabilitation. By 1992, a North Jersey developer named Mohammad Mizani was illegally employing inexperienced, unhoused people suffering from addiction to remove asbestos from the building, a crime for which he later received an 18-month prison term.

A decade later, the graffiti arrived in vertical lettering: “FOREVER BONER” spanning seven stories from the south approach, and “BONER 4EVER” spanning five stories on the north. While some accounts date the graffiti to 2008, Google Street View images show the tags present by 2007. According to a background post provided by Streets Dept, the prominent graffiti is actually the work of two artists, either feuding or collaborating, whose complimentary tags inspire giggles or sighs depending on the eye of the beholder.

What isn’t amusing is the disinvestment and deep fraying of the social fabric that has also befallen the neighborhoods surrounding the diminished Beury Building. In 2012, the promise of a better day appeared to arrive when Shift Capital acquired the building and set out on initial plans to perform environmental remediation and redevelop the building into apartments and commercial space at a price tag of $33 million. Those plans later shifted to a deal with Marriott to turn the building into a 172-room hotel, with Shift Capital principal Gephart noting to WHYY that the building has 11 hospitals and universities within three miles and nary a hotel in sight.

Gephart added that the firm had assembled an extensive array of support to make the project happen, including historic preservation tax breaks, a $2 million state grant, and another $2.5 million donation from Marriott itself. Gephart told WHYY that Shift Capital remains committed to the plans, as long as it can find a new lender to plunk down $23 million.

Steinke, with the Preservation Alliance, said underlying trends appear to put it all up in the air. “We are seeing a general slowdown in construction due to higher interest rates and the increased cost of borrowing for construction projects. The real estate business is famously cyclical, and, after a long lasting boom period over the past decade, we are finally witnessing a slowdown,” explained Steinke. “There are signs that it will be moving in the other direction soon, but there is usually a lag before the beneficial effects of lower interest rates are seen. Let’s hope Shift Capital remains committed.”

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