Warehouse

Some Conshohocken residents probably thought these four city slickers were looney - fiddling with that dilapidated red brick warehouse. One project partner's secretary, Barbara Berkle, even admitted: "I walked in here and thought, Oh, my God! We are moving here?" But love is blind. In this case, love, along with more than a million dollars, and six months- plus of hard work transformed the boarded-up warehouse at 10 E. Sixth Ave. into a stylish office building for aesthetically inclined professionals.

A four-alarm fire last night destroyed a two-story chemical storage warehouse and briefly threatened to spread to adjacent buildings in the Sun Chemical Co. plant in the city's Hunting Park section, fire officials said. The blaze broke out in the warehouse - in the 3300 block of Hunting Park Avenue - shortly after 9 p.m. and quickly engulfed the 175-by-100-foot structure. Fire officials considered evacuating thousands of people from rowhouses around the plant and from a concert at the Dell East.

A large portion of the frozen food consumed in the Northeast spends time in a cold-storage warehouse in Fogelsville, near Allentown, operated by Americold of Portland, Ore. Yesterday, the company dedicated a $6 million expansion of the warehouse that will increase its size by 3 million square feet, to 10.7 million from 7.7 million. Employment is 100, and will eventually grow by 45 workers. Capacity will grow to one billion pounds from 720 million pounds a year of foods being shipped.

Since January, the South Jersey Port Corp. has had to turn away 21 ships loaded with a total 47,000 tons of wood. It simply had no space. Yesterday, the port broke ground for the first warehouse built at its Beckett Street terminal in Camden since 1954. The burgeoning wood cargo will now have a place to be stored. The 100,000-square-foot warehouse, with a construction cost of about $1.5 million, is to have the capacity to store up to 10,000 tons of wood, which would increase the port's storing capacity for wood in transit by 40 percent.

James W. Kennedy's zoning variance request for construction of a warehouse for pipe storage and fabrication was tabled Wednesday. "In order to ask the board for a variance, you must be specific" about front and side-yard setbacks, solicitor Bruce Hasbrouck told Kennedy at the Mantua Township Zoning Board meeting Wednesday. Kennedy wants to build a 4,000-square-foot warehouse to store and fabricate steel pipe for use with his Firetec Automatic Sprinkler Systems Co. of Sewell.

It's business as usual for tenants in a former West Ambler asbestos warehouse after a Montgomery County Court judge's decision to have a new hearing on the safety of the site. Judge Marjorie C. Lawrence made the decision Tuesday, after a meeting in Norristown with attorneys for the property owner and two tenants. The new hearing will be Sept. 22 in Norristown before Lawrence. On Aug. 4, the judge ordered the tenants to vacate the 55,500-square-foot warehouse until containers of asbestos were removed from the site and fire safety equipment installed.

The Philadelphia Regional Port Authority celebrated the eagerly-awaited sound of pile drivers finally sinking the foundation of a new "forest products" warehouse near Pier 78 at Delaware and Snyder avenues yesterday with a ceremony at the site. The state Legislature appropriated the money to build the warehouse six years ago, but it got stalled in lawsuits. The Legislature passed a special act last year to get the project moving. Forest products means paper, pulp and plywood - some 700,000 tons that was imported from Finland, Sweden and Great Britain last year through PRPA-owned terminals leased to Penn Trucking and Warehousing Co., according to John Brown Jr., Penn Trucking's vice president.

George F. Thornton Jr. has asked for permission to build a warehouse and single-family apartment at Font Road and Route 100. Thornton sought permission Wednesday from the Upper Uwchlan Zoning Hearing Board to build on the 1.7-acre lot, near the northwest corner of the intersection, because only one use is permitted per lot. The site is zoned for commercial use. Thornton plans to build a one-story, 6,000-square-foot warehouse with four...

The Middletown Township Zoning Hearing Board addressed a zoning variance to sandwich a 6,000-square-foot warehouse at 2308 Big Oak Rd. between Cherry Steel Co. and D&R Machine Shop. The warehouse would store building materials for a residential and commercial contractor. Daniel Marrazzo of Langhorne plans to use the warehouse to centralize his construction company, which has warehouses in Princeton, N.J., and Morrisville. "I want to put it all under one roof," said Marrazzo.

Local maritime officials yesterday ceremonially drove the first foundation pile for a 208,000-square-foot, $10.5 million high-tech warehouse for the waterfront's growing imported-paper business. The new facility, at Piers 78/80 off Columbus Avenue in South Philadelphia, is the first dockside operation on the North Atlantic built expressly for imported paper, said Jack Brown, owner of Penn Trucking & Warehousing Co. and JH Stevedoring Co. Brown's companies will lease the facility, when it is finished next September, from the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority.