Dumpster, Porta Potty & Storage Container Rental in Fishtown & Kensington

Building on the Block the Restaurants Own

Frankford Avenue has a problem most construction corridors would love to have: it's busy at every hour. The restaurants, bars and shops that made Fishtown take deliveries in the morning, fill the curb by lunch and own the sidewalk at night, and a job site on or near the avenue competes with all of it for the same twenty feet of curb. That changes how the rentals work. A dumpster in the parking lane needs the Streets Department's right-of-way permit like anywhere in the city, but here it also needs a plan with the neighbors: the box goes tight to the building line, loaded from the sidewalk side, and gets swapped early in the morning before the beer trucks arrive. A container on the street is out of the question on the avenue; it goes inside the fence or it doesn't come.

The side streets are easier but not easy. Fishtown's rows sit on narrow lots with a mix of rear alleys, some wide enough for a service truck and some not, and the new townhome rows replacing old garages and corner stores often have a curb cut and a rear lane the old block didn't. We check the block before the truck rolls: where the service truck can stop, whether the alley takes it, what's overhead. On a new build with a fenced lot, everything sits inside the fence until the building fills it, and the box moves to the curb under a permit only for the last phase.

What Comes Out of a Fishtown Demolition

The neighborhood's old building stock is a mix the rest of the city doesn't have in one place: two-story brick rows from the 1870s with plaster and lath, corner stores and taprooms with tile floors and tin ceilings, one-story garages and warehouses with concrete slabs and steel, and the occasional fire-damaged shell. A demolition here produces heavy debris first and light debris second, and the box has to be sized for the sequence. A 10 yard heavy-debris box handles the brick, the plaster and the slab, filled to its marked line so it can be lifted; a 20 or 30 takes the lumber, the roofing and the drywall that follows; and on a full teardown a 40 for the framing makes sense only once the heavy material is gone. Mixing the two in one box costs more than two boxes sorted by weight, because the heavy material hits the allowance long before the rail. Our What Size Dumpster Do I Need guide has the arithmetic.

Containers earn their place on the new construction. A townhome row or a small multifamily building takes deliveries of windows, cabinets, fixtures and finish lumber weeks before the floors that need them are ready, and a 20 foot container inside the fence, locked and dry, is the difference between a stockroom and a pile under a tarp. Ask for shelving down one wall and it stays a stockroom for the length of the job.

Festivals, Brewery Weekends and the Waterfront

Fishtown's calendar is one of the city's densest: street festivals that close Frankford Avenue, brewery and distillery events in the old industrial buildings, concerts and festivals on the Delaware Avenue venues and at Penn Treaty Park, and the races and rides that run the river trail. Each puts a crowd somewhere with little or no plumbing, and the unit count is set by the headcount, the hours and whether there's a bar, which there usually is. Plan on units in clusters at both ends of a closed block or at the gates of a venue, an accessible unit in every cluster on a path a wheelchair can use, hand wash stations by the food, and a mid-event service for anything that runs past six hours. The Streets Department's event permit covers the closure; the organizer handles that, and we handle the units and the cleanup box. Our How Many Porta Potties Do I Need guide has the planning table.

Port Richmond and Harrowgate have their own calendar, the parish festivals and block parties along Allegheny and Aramingo, smaller counts delivered the day before and picked up the morning after. The same rules apply at a smaller scale: an accessible unit with the cluster, a sink if there's food, and a path kept clear for the service truck.

Port Richmond and Harrowgate: The Steady Work

North of Lehigh Avenue the boom thins out and the steady work takes over. Port Richmond's rows along Allegheny and Aramingo are owner-occupied and well kept, and the jobs are the ones a long-held house eventually needs: a flat roof tear-off, a kitchen, a basement finish, a rear addition on a lot that has a yard. Many of these blocks have a usable rear alley, which puts the porta potty in the back and occasionally a 10 foot container in the yard, with the box in front for the days the demolition runs. Harrowgate and the blocks around Kensington Avenue are investor flips at lower price points, where the box has to be the right size the first time: a 10 for the plaster and roofing, a 20 for the rest, pulled the day it's full so the lot doesn't sit with a box on a block where every neighbor is watching.

The Aramingo Avenue corridor is the neighborhood's commercial strip, shopping centers and big-box stores with parking lots, and a fit-out there is a lot placement on a property manager's hours, behind the building and off the state road. It's also where the Fishtown jobs get their materials, so a container on a Fishtown site often holds a delivery that came from six blocks away and couldn't wait for the floor to be ready.

Sources

• City of Philadelphia: Get a Dumpster License (Private or Right-of-Way)
• City of Philadelphia: Apply for a Temporary No Parking (TNP) Permit

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Nearby Service Areas

• Northern Liberties, Fairmount & Spring Garden
• North Philadelphia