“John Kromer has done it again! His community development experience shines through in this second edition of Fixing Broken Cities. John reminds us that the process for revitalizing our core communities continues and that, now more than ever, partnerships are needed to strengthen neighborhoods.”
John Brenner, Executive Director, Pennsylvania Municipal League, USA
“In Fixing Broken Cities, John Kromer brings the wily experience of a practitioner and the creative understanding of an intellectual to some of urban America’s seemingly intractable problems. Through detailed case studies in Philadelphia, Allentown, and Camden, NJ, he carefully analyzes how proposed solutions have been devised, debated, and carried out, evaluating the consequences and suggesting paths for the future. For anyone working in urban policy and for all students of American cities, this is an essential read.”
Nikil Saval, Pennsylvania State Senator, District 1, USA
Praise for the 1st edition:
“This book is a tour de force about planning efforts and their impact in postindustrial urban downtowns and residential communities. . . . I recommend this book highly to anyone looking for a way to navigate our older, struggling cities into a brighter urban future.”
L. Nicolas Ronderos, NY Regional Plan Association, USA
“Kromer’s illuminating case studies and advice garnered from years of experience working in some of the nation’s neediest areas are a welcome addition to the literature.”
Richard LeGates, San Francisco State University, USA
“Reinvestment in our central cities is critical to the health and prosperity of our metropolitan areas and our country. Drawing from the author’s own experience, Fixing Broken Cities provides inspiration and practical guidance to community leaders as they struggle to meet the challenges of urban redevelopment . . . this book is a must read.”
Parris N. Glendening, President, Smart Growth Leadership Institute and former Governor of Maryland, USA (1995–2003)
“John Kromer shows that after decades of decline cities can come back with the right combination of reinvention and reinvestment.”
Paul S. Grogan, President & CEO, The Boston Foundation, USA
“John Kromer’s medley of memoir, practical tips, case studies, and honest reflections will be of value to anyone striving to transform older American cities.”
Paul C. Brophy, Principal, Brophy & Reilly, USA
“Kromer’s work in cities has shaped this exciting blueprint for action in the post-industrial city. The book is a must-read for both urban policy-makers and students of the city.”
John Pelissero, Loyola University Chicago, USA
“Kromer draws from decades of in-the-trenches experience implementing development strategies in cities in this readable book . . . I recommend this book for experienced developers to broaden their horizons and provoke thought as well as for students and scholars who are looking for a lucid, realistic primer on the arcane tools of development.”
Beth Walter Honadle
, University of Cincinnati, USA
Fixing Broken Cities
Fixing Broken Cities explores the planning, execution, and impact of urban repopulation and investment strategies that were launched in the wake of two crises: late twentieth-century economic disinvestment and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Because past practices could no longer serve as a reliable guide to future outcomes in this uncertain environment, any new initiatives had to involve a significant level of risk-taking. Based on the author’s experience as a policymaker and practitioner, this book provides detailed insights into the origins and outcomes of these high-risk strategies, along with an explanation of why they succeeded or failed. This new edition examines policy initiatives from a fresh perspective, based on an awareness that (1) real estate ventures are best evaluated over the long term, rather than shortly after the completion of construction activity; (2) policies that had guided the allocation of public-sector resources during past decades of urban disinvestment need to be reconsidered in light of the economic resurgence that many American cities are now experiencing; and (3) the places described in this book are representative of other municipalities, of all kinds, where the pandemic has led to a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between home and workplace.
A key theme of the book is equitable development, the question of who should benefit from the allocation of scarce public capital, and what investment policies are most likely to support this principle over the long term. The author provides realistic guidance about pursuing the best opportunities for improvement in highly disadvantaged, resource-starved urban areas, with reference to several key issues that are pressing concerns for members of urban communities: enlivening downtown and neighborhood commercial areas, stabilizing and strengthening residential communities, eliminating industrial-age blight, and providing quality public education options.
This new edition will be of great use to planning, housing and community development professionals, both regionally and nationally, as well as to students on Urban Politics and Planning courses.
John Kromer is a housing and development consultant who specializes in the design and execution of reinvestment strategies for distressed urban communities. As Philadelphia’s Director of Housing from 1992 to 2001, he supervised the expenditure of more than a billion dollars in public investment to implement housing preservation and development strategies that improved living conditions for thousands of Philadelphia families. Since then, he has completed strategic planning and capacity building projects for municipal government agencies and nonprofit development organizations. He teaches a course in “The Politics of Housing and Urban Development” at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where he previously served as a program administrator and consultant at the Fels Institute of Government. His most recent book, Philadelphia Battlefields: Disruptive Campaigns and Upset Elections in a Changing City (2021) draws on his extensive participation in local political campaigns and elections.
The right of John Kromer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kromer, John, 1948– author.
Title: Fixing broken cities : new investment policies for a changed world / John Kromer. Description: 2nd edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022045754 (print) | LCCN 2022045755 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032410180 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032404530 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003355854 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: City planning—Pennsylvania—Case studies. | Urbanization—Pennsylvania—Case studies. | City planning—New Jersey—Case studies. | Urbanization—New Jersey—Case studies.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045754
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045755
ISBN: 978-1-032-41018-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-40453-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-35585-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003355854
Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Apex CoVantage, LLC
6.1
6.2
Acknowledgments
I very much appreciate the help that I received in connection with the completion of this edition, from people who needed to take time away from busy schedules in order to provide information or answer questions. Thank you to Jane Allen, Ashley Anyu, Mason Austin, Jessica Bloomfield, Thomas Burke, Bill Coleman, Dennis Culhane, Anne Cummins, Anne Fadullon, Maxine Griffith, Matthew Grande, Barry Grossbach, Gregory Heller, Elizabeth Hersh, Lindsay Johnston, Lucy Kerman, Carol Kuniholm, David La Fontaine, Paul Levy, Brian Murray, Jeremey Newberg, Karen Beck Pooley, Rebecca Poyourow, Vicky Tam, Matthew Tuerk, Eric Weiss, Jane Whitehouse, Douglas Wiebe, and Earnestine Young.
Briana Cervantes produced some of the new maps that appear in this edition and helped me decide how best to resolve some related graphic arts issues. Thanks to Michael Fichman, who referred Briana to me at the end of a particularly busy semester.
Special thanks to Elizabeth Estrada and PlanPhilly for allowing me to publish an excerpt from an article that I wrote for PlanPhilly in Chapter 4 (“The Legacy of Vernon Marks”).
And I’m very grateful for the patient oversight that Emily Ross and Hannah Rich of Taylor & Francis provided in connection with this unusually demanding project.
Acknowledgments from the First Edition
Fixing Broken Cities could not have been written without the support of my friend Joanne Barnes Jackson, who patiently taught me some basic rules of organization and structure and helped me find the best ways to present my views systematically and coherently. In addition to reading, correcting, and commenting on the entire manuscript, Joanne contributed many valuable insights that improved every chapter.
I am grateful to Kathleen and Andrew for their love and support during the challenging period in which this book was conceived and written.
Several chapters draw on experience that I gained over the course of nearly a decade at the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government. The experience of teaching, conducting research, and participating in consulting projects while at the Fels Institute has been exciting and inspiring. Thanks are due to the current executive director of the Fels Institute, David Thornburgh, as well as to his predecessors, Donald Kettl and Lawrence Sherman, for supporting my work. In addition, much of the activity described in Fixing Broken Cities was supported directly or indirectly by members of the Fels Institute staff, including Christopher Patusky, Danielle Costo, Anthony Banks, Leigh Botwinik, Allison Brummel, Michelle Garcia-Navarro, Karen Kille, Catherine Lamb, Jillian Marcussen, Rebecca Perry, and Alyson Ricketts.
I am grateful for comments and advice provided by a number of people who read portions of the manuscript, including Amanda Frazier, Rose Gray, Maxine Griffith, Michael Groman, Lucy Kerman, Daniel Kildee, Catherine Lamb, Paul Levy, Monica Lesmerises, Victoria Mason-Ailey, Hallie Mittleman, Karen Beck Pooley, and Eric Weiss. Thanks also to Marlie Wasserman and her reviewers for a constructive and helpful early critique.
Most of the photos and maps in Fixing Broken Cities were produced by Jane Whitehouse, Tiger Productions, who worked tirelessly to respond to my requests and deliver spectacular results. Jessica Bloomfield contributed excellent photographs and completed a variety of support tasks over the course of several months. The Cartographic Modeling Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania (Vicky Tam), and Karen Beck Pooley completed maps that help provide a frame of reference for the issues discussed in several chapters.
The research conducted by the Fels Institute on the City of Philadelphia’s ten-year tax abatement, described in Chapter 1, was funded by a grant from the William Penn Foundation.
The Central Philadelphia Development Corporation/Center City District made available three photographic images for inclusion in Chapter 2. Paul Levy provided a wealth of information about the creation of the Center City District and reviewed and commented extensively on draft text.
The Philadelphia City Planning Commission provided the base for the Eastern North Philadelphia map that appears in Chapter 3 (Figure 3.1), and the source for Figure 4.1 is City of Philadelphia, Office of the Mayor, Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, 2001.
Information, comments, and advice were also provided by Joanne Aitken, John Claypool, Michael Dean, Councilmember Frank DiCicco, Robert Fina, Carl Greene, Barry Grossbach, William Hankowsky, Jim Hartling, Liz Hersh, David Hornbeck, Feather Houstoun, Lindsay Johnston, Jerry Jordan, Debra
Kahn, Barbara Kaplan, Michael Koonce, Melani Lamond, Mark Frazier Lloyd, Alan Mallach, Jeremey Newberg, Liza Nolan, Richard Redding, Emilymarie Romin, Lance Rothstein, Ronald Rubin, Patricia Smith, and Fred Tarlino.
I very much appreciate the help of Stan Wakefield in finding the right publisher for Fixing Broken Cities. The interest, assistance, and support of Michael Kerns and Felisa Salvago-Keyes at Taylor & Francis to date have been invaluable, and I look forward to continuing an enjoyable and fruitful working relationship with them.
Photo and Map Credits
Cartographic Modeling Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania (Vicky Tam): Figures 1.1, 1.4.
The source for the base of Figure 3.1 is the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. The map was adapted for this book by Jane Whitehouse, Tiger Productions.
The source for Figure 4.1 is City of Philadelphia, Office of the Mayor, Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, 2001. The map was adapted for this book by Jane Whitehouse, Tiger Productions.
Introduction
No one knew what might happen. The crisis was unprecedented. This time, lessons learned from past experience were no longer relevant. This time, past trends were not a reliable indicator of future prospects.
For these reasons, responses to the crisis involved a degree of risk-taking, with little certainty about whether something different might work or not. In this untested environment, new initiatives could lead to positive results but might produce new setbacks instead.
Two major crises that older American cities experienced during the past half-century had these unsettling characteristics. One was the prolonged period of economic disinvestment that followed World War II, when many businesses, jobs, and people moved away from cities that had thrived during the industrial age. The other was the pandemic period, which began with the outbreak of COVID-19 and, as of 2022, has not yet ended.
Although every city experienced both crises at the same time, they responded to them in different ways, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Fixing Broken Cities is about the planning, execution, and impact of investment strategies that were designed to lead to transformative change in three cities that were severely challenged by these crises. The central focus of this book is how to implement and operationalize. Many good ideas for remaking and redefining older urban areas have been proposed over the years. However, even the best of these ideas will not make a difference without an awareness of where to begin and what to do.
I do not have a degree in city planning, economics, or public administration; I have no political credentials to speak of, and I have little name recognition outside of a relatively small number of researchers and practitioners specializing in urban policymaking. However, unlike many writers on urban affairs who possess more of these credentials, I have devoted most of my career to implementing downtown and neighborhood reinvestment strategies in cities that are disinvested, depopulated, and cash-starved. Based on what I have learned through my own successes and failures, I have gained firsthand knowledge of how some of the complex problems confronting these places can be addressed effectively.
Most of Fixing Broken Cities derives from my personal experience: in Philadelphia (where I served as housing director for ten years); Camden, New Jersey (where I helped plan and coordinate housing agency plans for several years, during one of which I headed the Camden Redevelopment Agency); and in Reading, Allentown, and numerous other Pennsylvania cities where I worked with government agencies and nonprofit organizations on plans to address vacant and neglected properties.
Through these experiences, I gained knowledge and insights into how to fix broken capital assets—the deteriorated, underused, or abandoned real estate of the industrial age—in postindustrial cities. Individual chapters of Fixing Broken Cities describe the most important elements of this learning, as it relates to reinvestment activities in Philadelphia, Camden, New Jersey, and Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Each of the first eight chapters consists of two sections. The first section (“2010 Perspective”) describes the origin and execution of a particular reinvestment strategy undertaken during the years leading up to and immediately following the turn of the twenty-first century. The second section (“2022 Outlook”) provides an update and analysis of the consequences of the strategy from a post-implementation vantage point, along with a discussion of related, newly relevant issues.
The first six chapters focus on Philadelphia issues: the city’s ten-year tax abatement; the formation of a business-led downtown management organization; the build-out of largely abandoned sections of Eastern North Philadelphia; Mayor John F. Street’s citywide neighborhood revitalization policy, the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative; the creation of a high-quality new public school as part of a University of Pennsylvania neighborhood reinvestment program; and an attempt to convert a vacated fire station into a neighborhood retail center.1 Chapter 7 describes my participation in a state-mandated municipal reform and economic recovery plan for the city of Camden, focusing on a controversy over the city’s anticipated use of eminent domain powers to acquire real estate in support of an ambitious development plan; and Chapter 8 describes how the city of Allentown addressed problems associated with a proliferation of deteriorated, unsafe rental housing on blocks where owner-occupancy had previously been predominant. A final chapter describes three new initiatives that represent significant disruptions of the status quo and encouraging prospects for the future: a plan to expand the “Housing First” approach to homelessness, consumer-oriented approaches to addressing pandemic-period housing needs, and a successful statewide anti-gerrymandering campaign. Each of the three can serve as a model that can be replicated to produce new value in other places.
Although Fixing Broken Cities is not an autobiography or memoir, many of my own biases, predispositions, and prejudices become evident in the chapters that follow. I have tried to balance these personal perspectives with detailed descriptions of other points of view, particularly those in opposition to my own.
In addition, the descriptive passages in each chapter draw on or refer to other published works that readers may consult in order to consider views other than mine.
The activities described in the chapters that follow are not best practices that can be replicated as is in other settings, because they were strongly influenced by geography, economics, politics, and the personalities of the individuals who managed them. However, all of these interventions are relevant to other urban areas because they address key issues that are major concerns everywhere: enlivening downtowns, stabilizing and strengthening neighborhoods, eliminating industrialage blight, and providing quality public education options.
Fixing Broken Cities is intended to interest and inform readers who support the revitalization of older cities, especially those who are or will be pursuing economic development and human capital development in urban downtowns and neighborhoods. With knowledge gained through an awareness of the successes and shortcomings of the strategies described in this book, I hope that others will be inspired and challenged to think and act creatively in addressing the problems and opportunities that pervade these places.
Note
1. I was not personally involved in the formation of the downtown management organization or the development of the new public school. However, both of these activities took shape in places where I was working at the time, giving me an opportunity to witness their impact on the environment and to recognize their relationship to my work in or near these areas.
Chapter 1 The Ten-Year Tax Abatement
An Equitable Development Controversy and a Political Compromise
2010 Perspective
The City of Philadelphia’s ten-year property tax abatement was one of the most important of several contributors to the revival of downtown Philadelphia during the 1990s. Without this generous financial incentive, the downtown area’s turnof-the-century success would have been severely limited.
The tax abatement was a purely economic development remedy—the use of a property tax exemption to leverage bricks-and-mortar real estate development. At the time when the abatement was launched in 1997, there was no substantive debate over the appropriateness of this financial incentive, and no significant controversy over the question of who would benefit most from it. When eligibility for the abatement was expanded in 2000, however, the policy generated increasing opposition on the part of many taxpayers, based on the fact that the abatement provided the greatest direct benefit to the wealthiest investors, developers, and property owners—those with the most capital to spend in the city’s hottest real estate markets.
Source: Cartographic Modeling Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania
An important issue underlying this controversy is the question of how a distressed city can attract new investment without creating disadvantages for longterm residents, as well as the question of whether unfairness to these community members is an unfortunate but unavoidable by-product of a successful economic development initiative.
Figure 1.1 Conversion Abatement Sites
Time Travel
On the sidewalk outside City Hall, they were preparing a scene for Twelve Monkeys, a production by the British filmmaker Terry Gilliam that would later achieve cultfilm renown. They sprayed the granite walls to make them look deteriorated and frost-blasted. They wreathed the arched portal with desiccated vines that spread down to the sidewalk. They dusted the area with fake snow that clung to the walls and accumulated in little piles where the building and sidewalk met. They parked wrecked, scorched cars across the street. In the movie, a time-traveling Bruce Willis, entering a deserted, devastated city, wanders toward the portal and encounters a snarling bear.
Although the site could be viewed clearly from my corner office a half-block away, I never saw the work in progress. My job as Philadelphia’s Director of Housing kept me elsewhere, in windowless conference rooms by day and in churches and community centers on many nights. One day I glanced out my office window, and there it was: frost-scarred walls, snow-dusted sidewalks, tangled vines and all.
Back then, in mid-1990s Philadelphia, you could imagine that scene of abandonment and devastation as a not-too-distant reality. A pandemic of the type portrayed in Twelve Monkeys would not be needed to set the stage; the stage was already set. You could find torched cars and weed-choked buildings within a five-minute drive of City Hall in three directions, in neighborhoods like Francisville to the north, Point Breeze to the south, and Mantua to the west. To the east, across the Delaware River, lay an even more wrecked Camden, New Jersey. Many blocks in Lower North Philadelphia, where residences for newly wealthy families had been developed a century earlier, were now haunted places. Along a section of Diamond Street once designated a National Register Historic District (thanks to the initiative of Christine Washington and the Advocate Community Development Corporation), you could see Rittenhouse Square-quality cornices, lintels, brickwork, and stonework in houses that were deteriorating, emptying out, and falling apart.1
The signs of Philadelphia’s disintegration could be found much closer than North Philadelphia, however; they could be found right across from City Hall. The John Wanamaker department store building, once a major regional shopping attraction, had closed and reopened several times, with an inventory that became smaller and less interesting with each reopening. The office building at One East Penn Square: empty. City Hall Annex: empty. The park at JFK Plaza: a way station for homeless people. Meridian Plaza, where three firefighters had lost their lives in a dreadful 1991 blaze: an empty shell. The white marble Girard Trust Company Building, occupied for decades by Girard Bank, then by Mellon Bank: empty. The ground-floor banking center and upstairs offices of CoreStates Bank: empty. City Hall was encircled by many thousands of square feet of vacant space.
Late twentieth-century Philadelphia no longer seemed to make sense. So when had it made sense? Philadelphia had made sense a hundred years earlier, when factories in or near row-house neighborhoods produced all kinds of goods—textiles, chemicals, clothing, hand tools, motor cars, electrical products, and more—that were transported worldwide from a busy port. Philadelphia had made sense when a network of railroads had been the quickest and most cost-effective way to move raw materials, finished goods, mail, and people up and down the Atlantic Seaboard and into the Midwest. And Philadelphia had made sense when, as the state’s biggest population center, the city had more legislators in the General Assembly than any other region of Pennsylvania, more representatives in Congress than most other cities, and a correspondingly greater degree of political clout. The combination of manufacturing strength, accessibility via water and rail, and political muscle had worked well in the industrial-age economy of a century ago. In that economy, the houses on Diamond Street, the John Wanamaker store, and the white marble Girard Bank Building were valued assets. In the economy of the mid-1990s, they were worn-out museum pieces.
To characterize this deterioration and abandonment, wartime adjectives and metaphors abounded: “bombed-out”; “like a war zone”; “like Beirut”; “like Berlin”; “in need of a Marshall Plan.” One city official had another wartime comparison in mind. “Other cities have recovered from bigger crises,” he told a group of city department heads meeting in his conference room one afternoon. “Look at London during World War Two. They were dropping bombs on the place!” No one was dropping bombs on 1990s Philadelphia, but no one was airlifting aid either. Bill Clinton’s proposed economic stimulus program, which would have provided postindustrial cities with needed public investment capital, had been sandbagged in Congress.
The Economic Development Cabinet, consisting of a group of city development agency administrators, met periodically on an upper floor of the old CIGNA Building at 16th and Arch, across the street from JFK Plaza. An early twentieth-century high-rise, the CIGNA Building had been the headquarters of the Insurance Company of North America for decades until INA merged with Connecticut General. Now the place was one of an increasing number of vacant or nearly vacant older office buildings that contributed to an oversupply of office space in the downtown area. Some of the vacant square footage had been leased by the city and was being used as temporary offices by a handful of municipal agencies. A security guard monitored an amber-lit, high-ceilinged lobby where Victorian-era firefighting artifacts sat unnoticed in glass display cases.
After one Economic Development Cabinet meeting, a senior executive at the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation brought up an interesting question: which of our agencies should be responsible for handling a few inquiries he had recently received from real estate developers about financing the construction of unsubsidized, “market-rate” housing in the downtown area? Should
these developers be assisted by his agency, because PIDC provided financing for most for-profit development, downtown and elsewhere? By the Redevelopment Authority, because the RDA was the city’s housing finance agency? Or by the city’s Office of Housing and Community Development (OHCD), because that agency set the standards for public investment in housing development?
The question had not come up previously because the development of market-rate housing (which could be defined as housing priced for middle- and upper-income homebuyers and renters) had been almost nonexistent in Philadelphia during the past two decades. Most new housing produced during those years had been financed with federal subsidies and had been subject to federally imposed restrictions on sales prices and rent levels. Little evidence existed of a demand for higher-priced housing by buyers and renters with incomes at or above the median.
In contrast, housing prices were substantially higher in all four of the adjacent suburban Pennsylvania counties, where the number of people and jobs had grown in each decade while population and employment declined in the city. In Philadelphia, the 1995 median sales price for a single-family house was $42,900, compared with $139,900, $155,000, $117,000, and $140,000 in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties, respectively.2 The quality of public schools was much better and the crime rate was much lower in most suburban neighborhoods. Although the members of the Economic Development Cabinet wanted to do as much as possible to attract private investment, most for-profit developers were working exclusively in the suburbs during the 1980s and the early-to-mid-1990s. Most Philadelphia neighborhood markets were not strong enough to generate the level of sales proceeds or rental income needed to repay development financing from a private lender and turn a profit. So, although comments about the possibility of market-rate housing downtown were noteworthy, the news did not seem to require a major change in policy or practice. The Cabinet members agreed to share information about developer inquiries as they came in, then to decide as a group about the appropriate assignment of responsibility for follow-up. In light of past experience, this activity did not appear to represent a major new opportunity for any of us.
Then everything downtown began to change.
Scenes for another movie—Kevin Smith’s ill-fated Jersey Girl—were filmed in Philadelphia in 2001. A Philadelphia Inquirer columnist reported that two of the stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, were sharing a 16th-floor penthouse suite at The Phoenix in Center City. The Phoenix, a “ritzily renovated” apartment building with “marble-manteled fireplaces, hardwood floors, high ceilings, and doormen with amnesia”3 was the former CIGNA Building, the location where our Economic Development Cabinet meetings had been held less than six years earlier.
Other changes followed. Between 2000 and 2008, City Hall Annex was fully renovated and became a Marriott Courtyard Suites hotel. The Girard Bank
