Web-design company joins greening of Fishtown

In the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web was relatively new and just beginning to be appreciated by businesses for its e-commerce potential.

To many, the Internet was still a great unknown and a source of anxiety. Thus, the name that Mia and Tracy Levesque chose at the time for their Web-design company: Yikes.

It's a five-letter word the couple are uttering with regularity these days over their own anxiety.

"This is the riskiest thing we've ever done," Tracy Levesque said, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of a $1.1 million construction project in full sawdust-laden progress.

Effective Aug. 1, it becomes the new offices for Yikes - and a likely popular attraction among green-building enthusiasts. The property, actually two of them - 204 and 206 E. Girard Ave. in Fishtown - is being renovated to qualify for the highest ranking under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification: platinum.

Whether renovations or newly built, buildings achieving LEED platinum status are rare. There are seven in Philadelphia, one of them in Fishtown - Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts - according to local green-building groups.

Upon completion, the Yikes project will include two storefronts (one of them to be occupied by Yikes), along with a two-bedroom apartment and three one-bedroom apartments arranged over three stories on a block of Girard Avenue just east of Frankford Avenue that includes a seafood restaurant, a bar, a combination tattoo parlor and art gallery, a lawyer's office, and a flower shop.

With New Kensington Community Development Corp.'s Sustainable 19125 initiative - an education program aimed at making the zip code that encompasses 1.4 square miles north of Northern Liberties and a population of 24,000 the greenest in the city - and a growing stock of environmentally sensitive, energy-efficient buildings in the neighborhood, proof is abundant that "Fishtown has reached critical mass . . . it has to be the easiest place to build green in Philadelphia," said Janet Milkman, executive director of the Delaware Valley Green Building Council.

Of course, that depends on your definition of easy. The Yikes project is about as close as possible to building from scratch without actually doing so.