Sneak peek: See inside the new Greyhound Terminal on Filbert Street
The redone intercity bus station, almost finished, has 189 chairs, new restrooms and offices, as well as vending machines and a lactation pod for nursing mothers.
At Philadelphia’s outdoor home for intercity bus service, some of the best available seating for passengers is an uneven rock wall near the memorial statue of a World War I doughboy at Second and Spring Garden Streets.
At the renovated Greyhound terminal on Filbert Street, travelers soon will have 189 chairs for waiting out of the cold, rain, and heat.
Philadelphia Parking Authority officials offered a peek inside the building on Wednesday, as workers painted support columns blue, touched up the walls and hooked up toilets and sinks in two new, tiled restrooms.
“It’s like an onion. You start peeling it back and you find more issues,” said Rich Lazer, the PPA’s executive director. “It had that awful dirty white floor, leaky tiles in the ceiling … banged up systems in general.”
Much of the plumbing was shot. Workers even had to remove a collapsed pipe and dig a trench for new connections to water and sewer lines, said Kevin McClain, director of facilities maintenance for the PPA.
The Parking Authority says the Filbert Street building will be ready for a planned May 1 reopening, nearly three years after Greyhound left and shut the doors in a cost-cutting move.
During that time, passengers boarded and arrived at curbside, first on Market Street and then on Spring Garden. It became a municipal embarrassment, forced by Greyhound’s cost-cutting decision to end its lease on the station early, after 35 years.
Then the city partnered with PPA on a $4 million to $5 million renovation of the wreck into a temporary terminal in time to welcome visitors to Philadelphia for FIFA’s World Cup, other sporting events, and the 250th birthday of the United States.
Initially, about 200 buses will use the station daily, Lazer said.
New ticket counters have been built for Greyhound, Peter Pan Lines, and Flixbus. There are offices for the companies and the PPA staff who will be managing the terminal for 16 hours a day, as well as rooms where bus drivers can rest. There is a lactation pod for nursing mothers.
PPA has a 10-year lease agreement with the property’s owner, 1001-1025 West Filbert Street LLC, with an option to extend it.
Once the temporary station opens, bus companies will pay $65 for each stop at the station, billed by PPA, which Lazer said is using cameras and automatic license plate readers — the same technology with which it manages loading zones on city streets.
City officials still are looking for a permanent intercity bus station and say they have chosen three options.
Meanwhile, a nearly three-year accumulation of pigeon droppings on the front steps of the station has been blasted away.
Workers will install wire-mesh netting to keep the birds from roosting on the awning and making a fresh mess of the entrance.
Bring on the world.
“We want to make sure that if the first thing they’re going to see in Philadelphia is the bus terminal, it’s a welcoming sight,” Lazer said.
