Changing Skyline: What happens to Philadelphia's old Family Court building?

Everyone knows that falling in love with real estate is dangerous. So keep your fingers crossed: Gov. Rendell remains committed to acquiring a parking lot at 15th and Arch Streets for a new Family Court, despite the bad smells that continue to waft from the property.

The governor must be pretty confident that the stink, which is of the political and legal kind, will go away. He just advised the city to put the court's current home on Logan Square up for sale.

That elegant neoclassical palace "will become the most exciting, glamorous hotel," Rendell proclaimed in April when he announced the release of $200 million for the Family Court project. He did not say he hoped the massive courthouse would be converted into a hotel, or that hotel suites would fit nicely into its parade of wood-paneled courtrooms. No conditional tense for our Ed. In his view, the only thing left to do is measure the drapes.

Developers, of course, can hardly utter a thought about real estate without liberally salting their sentences with would and could - as in, Family Court could be turned into a hotel if the state would provide a big enough subsidy.

Several dozen real estate people, hotel operators and architects toured the Depression-era courthouse last week at the invitation of the city, which owns the property and is soliciting proposals for the property through the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. (PIDC). They agreed with the governor that the courthouse, whose stately design by John T. Windrim was lifted wholesale from Paris' Hotel de Crillon, is an impressive structure in a fabulous location, and will soon have the Barnes Foundation as its neighbor. But none appeared ready to place furniture orders.

The hardheaded bunch rapped on the masonry walls to determine whether new utilities could be inserted. They rolled their eyes at the low-ceilinged mezzanines, whose rooms resembled the 71/2 floor in the film Being John Malkovich. They complained about the generous, well-lighted corridors - as a waste of space.

These days, American hotels are run by big chains that design their properties according to calibrated formulas. Each "flag," as hotel brands are called, is expected to have a certain number of rooms. Those rooms must be a precise number of square feet. Even their shape is prescribed. Philadelphia's elegant new Le Meridien and Palomar hotels show it's not impossible to convert a historic building into a chain hotel, merely challenging.