Pennsylvania Horticultural Society is moving its office to West Market Street
The move comes as PHS prepares to mark its 200th anniversary next year and requires employees to work at the office more regularly.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society is moving to West Market Street after 30 years at 20th and Arch, as the nonprofit behind the Philadelphia Flower Show requires employees to work at the office more regularly.
The move comes as PHS prepares to mark its 200th anniversary next year.
PHS’s roughly 100 office-based employees have worked on a hybrid schedule since 2022, president Matt Rader said. The in-person cadence ranges from a couple days a week to a couple times a month, he said.
That will change starting in the spring at PHS’s new office at 1900 Market St., where the organization signed a 16-year lease. Rader said employees would be required to come into the office three days a week.
In its current building at 100 N. 20th St., PHS leases 31,000 square feet, subleasing two-thirds of that space to another tenant, Big Brothers Big Sisters. Its workforce is split into two suites on different floors. The new location, at the site of the former Philadelphia Stock Exchange building, is a single space spanning 18,000 square feet.
“Our current office space that we’re occupying is quite small because we’ve been on this largely hybrid model, and we wanted to move into a situation where we could have the team comfortably in-office three days a week and have everybody in one space,” Rader said.
“PHS, despite being two centuries old, has the nimbleness of a startup,” he said. “We’ve been in a significant chapter of growth, particularly in our neighborhood work. We do a lot of work around tree planting, community gardening, vacant land greening, small business development, and job training across the city and region, and that work has grown significantly since 2019.”
Staying in Center City was an easy decision, Rader said.
“We believe very much in Center City,” he said. “We work in more than 230 city and suburban neighborhoods. So our PHS community of supporters, volunteers, staff is kind of everywhere.”
That means easy access to public transit is important, Rader said.
1900 Market is owned by Brandywine Realty Trust, Philadelphia’s biggest office landlord. PHS’s move was first reported by the Philadelphia Business Journal.
As for its 200th anniversary, PHS plans to double down on its neighborhood greening work, invest more in the annual Flower Show, and launch a new vision, Rader said: “Every person, every place, gardening for the greater good.”
“Our job is to scale up the places and people involved in using gardening to improve the health and well-being of the region, and we see this new headquarters office space as a great first step on that journey,” he said.
