After years of delay, the Orens Brothers are back with a new apartment building for Blue Horizon site

North Philadelphia’s famed Blue Horizon boxing arena at 1314 N. Broad St. has seen four major development proposals since its closure in 2010.

The Orens Brothers, a locally based development company, owns the building and recently pulled new zoning permits for a 108-unit apartment building — almost half the size of the previous residential project planned for the site.

But that doesn’t mean development will start any time soon, the developer says. A more solid plan is expected to emerge in the next 12 months.

“I don’t know that 108 units are going to be built there right now,” said Scott Orens, a principal with the Orens Brothers company. “I’m still experimenting with some other options that might be better. But in the meantime, I had to secure something rather than nothing.”

The Blue Horizon building is fronted by three brownstone townhouses of the kind that lined North Broad Street when it was one of the city’s ritzier addresses in the 19th century.

Behind their facade is the redbrick boxing arena, which extends all the way back to Carlisle Street.

The three brownstones were combined and converted into a grand event space for the Loyal Order of the Moose in the early 20th century. Then in the 1960s, it was redeveloped as a boxing arena dubbed the Blue Horizon, which was considered one of the finest in the world.

The 1,200-seat venue shuttered in 2010 amid financial difficulties, and soon afterward the Orens Brothers began seeking to redevelop it. In 2019, they secured zoning and building permits for a 13-story, 140-room hotel.

“It was all supposed to settle in March of 2020. Instead, COVID hit and blew everything up,” Orens said.

In 2021 during the subsequent apartment boom, they planned a 13-story, 208-unit apartment tower — which would preserve the brownstones on North Broad — with 14,000 square feet of retail space.

But that plan ran afoul of then-City Council President Darrell L. Clarke, a frequent critic of apartment development.

“He didn’t want another apartment building on Broad Street,” Orens said. “I don’t know why, but that was his opinion, and it took the wind out of our sails for two years, during which time we could have gotten financing more easily.”

Now Orens says he is watching the changes at Temple University, just to the north, under president John Fry.

The company has hoped Temple could become involved in the redevelopment of Blue Horizon, especially if the university sees the need for hotel capacity adjacent to the campus.

But recent headlines about Temple have shown enrollment and student retention down. A foreclosure crisis is haunting the surrounding real estate market with less demand for student housing.

Blue Horizon’s neighbor to the immediate south, a 21-unit building at 1310 N. Broad St. was seized by its lender and is under court appointed receivership.

Still, Orens said, Temple is “very much interested in developing the North Broad Street corridor, and this is a big eyesore.”

“We’d love to get something underway, but up to this point Temple hasn’t been terribly receptive to working with us,” Orens said. “Look, they don’t have to, but it would be nice.”