For many Philadelphians, it was hard, back in 2014, to envision the promise of the Bok Building. At least, it was hard to envision the promise of Bok as Lindsey Scannapieco saw it.
And here was Scannapieco, 28-year-old founder of Scout—a small, female-run development firm specializing in unused and empty spaces—gliding into the headlines with a winning bid for the place that sounded almost too cool to be true.
She and her team would buy the place for $1.75 million, and transform the 340,000-square-foot Art Deco school—a block-long behemoth built under FDR’s Public Works Administration—into an affordable workspace for creative types, nonprofits, and small businesses. It would buck the trends—something like 80 percent of school conversions are market-rate condo projects— and instead be a haven for artists and artisans, a boon for entrepreneurs.
They’d use what Scout’s director of leasing and marketing Liz Maillie calls “a light touch” in the renovation and development plans, so that the cost of renovation didn’t drive up prospective rents. Which means it would remain very clearly a former vocational school, with lockers and sinks and concrete floors. Or as one neighbor puts it, approvingly, “It certainly doesn’t have a sleek, shiny new-construction vibe.”
There were, back in 2014, other cool reuse and renovation projects happening in the city; there were other maker spaces popping up. But there was nothing of this scale and scope. And so it was difficult to imagine how it might play out once it moved from proposals to brick-and-mortar reality.
But now? Six years, thousands of events, dozens upon dozens of tenants, a handful of awards, 400 new jobs, and, yes, a pandemic later? Now, Bok both is and is not the product that was promised.
But now? Six years, thousands of events, dozens upon dozens of tenants, a handful of awards, 400 new jobs, and, yes, a pandemic later? Now, Bok both is and is not the product that was promised.
“I actually think it’s better than what we could have ever imagined,” Maillie says.
For one thing, there’s the range of businesses that have, one-by-one, moved in—a diverse assemblage of 150-plus tenants Scout couldn’t have possibly masterminded.
There’s a hair salon, a day care, a glass blower, tattoo artists, visual artists, sound artists, musicians. There are photographers, clothing designers and manufacturers, manufacturers of hard seltzer, makers of hair scrunchies, restorers of pianos, repairers of guitars. There’s a kids’ gym, a chiropractor, family therapist, a coffee shop, and a Mediterranean restaurant. For starters.
Another thing? “I’m always blown away by the collaboration between tenants,” Scannapieco says. This is something you hear a lot about from the tenants, too—a certain symbiosis that exists in Bok.
“When we do photoshoots, our photographer is in the building,” says Nicole Haddad, co-owner of clothing designer and manufacturer Lobo Mau—Bok’s first-ever tenant. “The backdrops come from inside the building, too. I get my haircut at Fringe Salon right across the hall. We also have a lot of customers in the building. The synergy is incredible.”
That aspect is one of the many “that we never could have foreseen,” Scannapieco says, “and one of the most beautiful parts of the puzzle.” It’s true that they work hard to make their spaces fit the tenants, to the flexibility businesses need to grow (this is something you hear a lot from Bok business owners), “but the openness of the space has allowed it to self-evolve, which I think has been so important.”
It’s this factor, actually—a sense of mutability, open-ended evolution—that’s made Bok such a compelling project to watch. This is what’s turned it from an empty emblem of Philly’s problems to a business hub to a community gathering space; this is what has allowed the place to pivot during Covid; this is what’s keeping it rolling into its next iteration, with little sign of slowing down.
A neighborhood force
In the beginning, there was Bok Bar. Nestled on the 8th floor roof deck of the building, the sprawling beer garden was the first project Scout took on in the building. It had jaw-dropping views, a chill vibe, loads of young(ish) fans. (This is still true.) But it wasn’t a slam dunk for everyone: The bar garnered loud critiques about new noise in the neighborhood and new hipsters and how, exactly, this project was going to affect the people around it.
“If you had asked me five years ago how the neighborhood felt about Bok, well, I was hearing from a lot of neighbors and peers that it was just another ultimate gentrification of a neighborhood that was once colorful and is now white-washed,” says Katie Gould, who lives in South Philly and has run her fitness studio, KG Strong, from a second floor space in Bok since 2017.
Mike Persico, a Bok neighbor, is a photographer who’s lived in South Philly since 2005. He owns a place at Ninth and Mifflin, an address that gave him slight pause six years ago when he was buying his house. “It was a different corner then,” he says.
The school had closed. Mifflin Street was often deserted. And then came Bok’s second life: the coffeeshop hang; young people hanging on the stoop; seniors exercising outside; upwards of a hundred (pre-Covid) events a year, roughly 60 percent of which involved community neighbors like Southwark School or the EPX Civic Association, who get free or discounted space.
“It’s brought a really nice human energy back,” Persico says. “It’s busy now.”
Again, that’s not to say everyone’s enamored all the time. One hears complaints about noise from the bar floating down, about extra traffic in the area, about parking issues. (Note: All roads in South Philly lead to parking issues.)
On a deeper level, there’s also the underlying tension that’s lingered since day one, a complexity that Thoai Nguyen sums up thusly: “The initial imagination of the building was to be a maker space. But who the hell talks about a maker space in a struggling, working-class neighborhood, except for yuppies and hipsters? You ask just about any Black or Latinx or Asian person about a ‘maker space’ and they’ll say ‘I don’t know what the hell that is’ or tell you you’re full of it.”
Nguyen is the CEO of SEAMAAC, the nonprofit that has for almost four decades now served the large and diverse immigrant and refugee population in South Philly; to some extent, part of his work, he says, is to “hold players who are trying to gentrify neighborhoods accountable and responsible.” He also happens to be a friend of Scannapieco’s, and has a few other Bok connections, as well: One of the programs SEAMAAC runs for elders meets regularly in a spare, unpolished room at Bok. As is the case with many of its community partners, Bok doesn’t charge for the space.
Nguyen says that the pressure and expectations directed at Scout from his and other community groups were key in making the free space happen. More pointedly: That the process of Bok “becoming more of a true community hub has not been for lack of effort from the community,” he says.
“I do think the building represents a wide cross-section of business and individuals,” Scannapieco says, “people of different races and ages, from different backgrounds with different perspectives and education levels and goals. I think it’s provided jobs and local employment and the opportunity for people to work close to where they live, and I think that’s a great thing.”
This actually fits with what Scannapieco says about how she thinks about the building. “In my mind, so much of the project isn’t about our ideas, it’s about providing space for people to do their ideas,” she says. “That’s what I think our task is, creating safe space for people to do what they need.”
SEAMAAC is a (paying) Bok tenant, too. In February, the nonprofit and Jefferson Health are opening the Hansjörg Wyss Wellness Center on Bok’s ground level, a groundbreaking facility focused on caring for refugees and immigrants. This will be, by all accounts, a big deal for Bok and an even bigger deal for neighbors who can access the center for primary care, safe gathering spaces and other social services, regardless of citizenship or insurance status.
“We met with more than 10 ethnic groups in the community to hear about their health care experiences, and how they felt about having the health and wellness center in their neighborhood, especially at Bok,” says Mark Altshuler, physician, director of Jefferson’s Center for Refugee Health and the clinical leader of the Wyss Center. He’s worked closely with SEAMAAC to plan the place. “It was a positive response, in part because they’ve done so many great cultural events. It’s been a welcoming space.”
Scannapieco is sensitive to the tension inherent in developing a place— a school, no less, “with emotional and social and community history” — that sits at the center of a diverse community. This has been a major consideration from the outset. She also believes that “we can’t say that we’d prefer vacant or underutilized buildings because we’re afraid of where the improvement leads us.”
“I do think the building represents a wide cross-section of business and individuals,” Scannapieco says, “people of different races and ages, from different backgrounds with different perspectives and education levels and goals. I think it’s provided jobs and local employment and the opportunity for people to work close to where they live, and I think that’s a great thing.”
One of those people is Ricardo Rivera, artist and co-founding creative director of Klip Collective, a well-known video and projection mapping collective based on the third floor of Bok. He’s a South Philly native who moved into Bok not long after the first wave of tenants started trickling in.
As an artist who’s done a series of work in abandoned, empty buildings, it wasn’t just the physical space he liked; it was also Scannapieco’s vision—creating a cultural hub that South Philly lacked, he says. “And it was like, she’s not developing luxury condos, thank God,” he says. (As it happens, Scannapieco’s father is Tom Scannapieco, the well-known and successful developer of … luxury condos.)
Five years in, he’ll tell you, he loves the “cross-pollination” in the building; he’s worked with a number of other tenants over the years. He’s created public art for the place. And he’s one of the key players helping plan the transformation of the building’s 11,000-square-foot auditorium, aiming to create a more finished space—a “media lounge”—that will host a wider variety of events for the community and beyond.
He’s something of a Bok evangelist.
“I brag about it all the time,” he says. “My space is sick.” He says Scout helped him bring his studio to life exactly as he’d envisioned it, down to the light fixtures and paint colors. Moving in represented a new life for his studio and his business, he says. “And I love it here. I never want to move out.”
“How can we get through this together?”
To Rivera, flow is a big deal. Like blood pumping through a body, he says, “all things need a flow in order for them to survive,” and in his view, Bok had it — the life, the vibe. And then Covid shut the world down, and everything got much, much harder.
He was not, of course, the only one unnerved by the sudden quiet in the building, by the sudden lack of events, by the drastically slowed trickle of foot traffic.
“Last spring, we were really, really nervous and concerned,” Scannapieco says. “We know that these are fragile businesses, and the building is a fragile ecosystem. We weren’t sure how it was going to go.” The question for them was—and is—this: “How can we get through this together?”
The answer began by circulating an application for rent relief, and helping tenants search out grants and relief programs that might be available to small business owners.
“We’re happy to say that we’ve been able to offer support of one kind or another to every tenant who has applied so far for it, and we’ll keep doing that as long as we can,” Maillie says. It’s worked both ways: Some tenants offered to pay rent upfront for the year, she says. “I have to say, it’s been inspiring. And heartening.”
Of course, the pandemic isn’t yet over, and nothing is certain. Almost everyone has been hit hard. And yet to date, there’s been no real Covid-related departures to speak of. In fact? There’s been an uptick in interest, Scannapieco says. Something to do with people needing to get out of their home offices, she guesses.
Another Covid pivot happened outside, at Bok Bar, where they hosted 82 different pop-ups over the summer and into fall, from chef-led dinners to yoga classes to panels to workshops with makers from the building.
“We’re happy to say that we’ve been able to offer support of one kind or another to every tenant who has applied so far for it, and we’ll keep doing that as long as we can,” Maillie says.
“This season called for a different approach,” explains Bok events manager Jackie Rush. And so they transformed the place into a space for their partners, neighbors and small businesses who could use a sprawling outdoor “safe” zone to do their programming.
Bok offered stipends for panels and classes and chefs to come in, paying attention to representation and diversity in the lineup: Half of the programming partners were BIPOC-owned, and half were women-owned. (Part of what the Inky reported as this “social-minded” approach included a generous sick-leave policy for staff, and guaranteeing a living wage, plus tips.)
In a year when so much felt beyond reach, Scannapeico says—it’s not like she could change the situation for businesses, or even, sigh, tell tenants they could skip paying rent for a year—the question of keeping whatever pieces of the puzzle in place they can has been coming back to one question: “What can we do with what we have?”
They have the roof, obviously. And they also have electricity, which allowed them to become a site for a Philadelphia Community Fridge—a helpful location given the nearby schools, says PCL co-organizer Syona Arora, and because several of Bok’s tenants regularly contribute food. (One artist with a homebase in the building also wheat-pasted the once-drab shelter around it.)
Another thing they have is a massive building, still full of promise. And so Bok is rolling on, transforming. They’re building out more space for retail shops. A massive former cafeteria space on the 6th floor is under construction, making way for some future tenant. And there’s the auditorium project, which is actually overseen by Friends of Bok, the nonprofit Bok formed in order to be eligible for the state grant that they won for the project.
The beautiful but tattered old event space, which has hosted everything from the Barrymore Awards to Southwark graduation ceremonies, is, in the short term, getting updated sound, lighting and HVAC equipment that will make it a more affordable, flexible, accessible event space, ideally by next summer. (Baked into the plan is a commitment to neighborhood partners that 15 percent of future event space will be offered at below-market or subsidized fees.)
The long-term master plan will transform the place still more, but given that it’s such a tough time for cultural and performance venues, the timeline for funding and building will likely be delayed, Scannapieco says.
No matter. Bok has always been a work in progress. (Literally, the construction is never done.) The place—and likely its role in the lives of the people in and around it—will continue evolving for the foreseeable future. You know, says Scannapieco, like a city.
“You wouldn’t ever say, ‘Well, we finished Philadelphia now,’” She laughs. “For better or worse, I think this will be a never-ending project.”