Keystone to Add 200 KSF of Labs at Philly Landmark

The Curtis. Image courtesy of Keystone

Keystone continues to transform The Curtis, an approximately 900,000-square-foot mixed-use tower in Philadelphia, into a premier life sciences destination. The company plans to repurpose 200,000 square feet at the 12-story building for laboratory use.

Following the planned reconfiguration of space, The Curtis will soon encompass a total of more than 325,000 square feet of laboratory offerings. The undertaking will also yield a handful of improvements including a new exhaust system, together with expanded hot water loops and steam infrastructure. Keystone intends to commence work on the conversion project in the first quarter of 2023, relying on proceeds from a $265.2 million loan the company obtained from Nuveen Real Estate in August 2022.

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Located at 601 Walnut St. in Philadelphia’s booming Center City, The Curtis first opened its doors in 1910 as the home of Curtis Publishing. In 2014, Keystone and Mack-Cali Realty Corp. acquired the property in a $125 million, all-cash transaction with the goal of repositioning the 12-story tower into a live-work-play destination. The partners maintained the 300-space parking garage, transformed roughly 90,000 square feet of the original office space into luxury residential units, reinvented 30,000 square feet of retail space and converted the former printing press area into more than 100,000 square feet of premier life sciences accommodations.

Calling all lab space

Philadelphia continued to hold its own as a leading life science cluster in the U.S. in 2022. “Despite tenant demand slowing in the latter part of the year, the Philadelphia region had one of its best leasing years with 1.5 million square feet of completed transactions through Q4,” according to a report by CBRE.

The future bodes well for the lab expansion at The Curtis. Conversion projects in Philadelphia outpaced new builds in the fourth quarter, and they also surpassed the pipeline of new construction in pre-leasing activity. As of the close of the fourth quarter, 47 percent of converted lab projects had been pre-leased, compared to just 29.5 percent for new developments.