A BELLWETHER MOMENT Will the new owners of the shuttered PES refinery bring blue skies or dreams denied to South Philadelphia? story by kyle bagenstose
The 2019 PES oil refinery explosion in South Philadelphia opened the door for a brighter future after more than a century of fossil fuel pollution. But four years later, many questions remain unanswered by new owner Hilco Redevelopment Partners.
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n september 2019 I plopped into a kayak and pushed off the eastern banks of the Schuylkill River in Center City, ready to see Philadelphia in a brand new way. Part of an annual excursion that launches paddlers from the Schuylkill Banks on Walnut Street, sends them down around the Navy Yard and then back up the Delaware to the Seaport Museum, the trip promised a duck’s eye view of the entire rim of the city’s lower half. What an eye-opener it turned out to be. Lively, scenic views of joggers and pic20 GRID P H I L LY.CO M A P R IL 20 23
nickers set against the city’s skyline quickly gave way to something else as we floated toward South Philadelphia. The green visages of Bartram’s Garden turned into the beige cement and cold steel of heavy industry. The river browned and bubbled with some kind of gas seepage from unseen origins. The passageway became stuffy, stifling, odiferous. Three months earlier a massive explosion at the adjacent Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) oil refinery had hurled a 38,000-pound piece of metal all the way
across the river, somewhere in the vicinity. I tried to picture that and failed: force of that kind is hard to imagine possible. But these days, imagination is exactly what’s called for in South Philadelphia. Approaching four years since the explosion and fires shuttered what was then the largest and oldest petroleum refinery on the East Coast, the dust has yet to settle on what will become of the prominent vestige of the city’s dirty industrial past. Following bankruptcy filings, the roughly 1,300-acre PES site was scooped up by Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a subsidiary of Hilco Global, for $225 million in 2020. It quickly became evident that the new owner’s primary intentions were to convert the site into a logistics hub (picture cavernous, Amazon-style warehouses) and a Life Sciences campus (think medical and pharmaceutical companies doing R&D). But in the absence of any public plan for a full buildout of the parcel, which represents nearly 2% of the city’s land area, community organizations, academics, city planners and neighboring residents were able to dream