From an elevated section of Interstate 95 in South Philadelphia, drivers can look down on several mothballed war ships moored at the edge of the Delaware River. They recall a time when Philadelphia’s Navy Yard hummed with naval shipbuilding and repair, but for the last quarter-century the area has been a growing campus for businesses ranging from cake making and clothing manufacture to molecular diagnostics and gene therapy.
Now, it’s evolving further to become a pioneer for sustainable development with energy-efficient buildings, innovative storm-water management, construction that’s designed to withstand future sea-level rise and green spaces that provide an inviting environment for the campus’s approximately 15,000 employees.
The Navy Yard’s sustainability transformation began with its previous developer, Liberty Property Trust, and is being continued by Liberty’s successors, Ensemble Investments, LLC and Mosaic Development Partners JV. They have been jointly developing the site in partnership with Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., a public-private economic development agency, since winning the development rights in 2020.
Those efforts have just been recognized by the U.S. Green Building Council which gave a portion of the Navy Yard a gold certification in its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program for Neighborhood Development, known as LEED-ND. The certification, which covers 39 existing and 38 planned buildings over 295 of the site’s 1,200 acres, makes the project the biggest of its kind in the United States and the first in Philadelphia. The new certification also follows earlier LEED awards to individual buildings at the site, according to Peter Templeton, chief executive at the council.