Dumpster, Porta Potty & Storage Container Rental in North Philadelphia

Vacant Lots Are the Easy Part

North Philadelphia's building boom runs on lots that have been empty for forty years, and that gives a builder here something the rest of the city rarely has: room. On a vacant lot the box, the unit and the container all sit inside the lot line until the foundation goes in, with no Streets Department permit and no sidewalk to keep clear. The planning problem is what happens next. Once the footprint is poured the lot disappears, and the box has to move to the curb under a right-of-way permit or onto the next vacant lot over, which may belong to someone else. The builders who run clean sites here plan the move before the foundation pour: the container to the rear of the lot or a neighboring parcel they control, the unit inside the shell once the first floor is framed, and the roll-off on the curb only for the phases that need it, with the permit in hand before the slab cures.

The infill blocks also come with the leftovers of demolition that happened decades ago: buried foundations, slabs, brick rubble under a foot of fill, and the occasional oil tank. Excavation for a new footing turns that up, and it goes out heavy. A 10 yard heavy-debris box for the masonry and the slab, filled to its marked line, and a 20 for everything else keeps the loads legal. Our What Size Dumpster Do I Need guide has the weight math.

Temple's Calendar and the Rental Turnover

The blocks around Temple run on the semester. Student housing turns over in August, the new apartment buildings along Broad and Cecil B. Moore open on a schedule tied to move-in, and the conversions of old rowhomes into rentals have to be done before the leases start. That puts the August rush on this part of the city the same as West Philly: cleanouts of departing tenants' belongings, kitchens and baths done between leases, a box per building scheduled by address, and the Temporary No Parking permits applied for a week ahead on blocks where every space is spoken for. Book in June.

The university's own projects, and the hospital campus to the north, run on the institutions' rules: a designated gate, a delivery window, a site logistics plan and a facilities contact who expects the truck on the list. Those jobs take a 30 or 40 inside the fence on swaps, a 40 foot container as the stockroom, and units that move with the crew. Tell us the gate and the window and the trucks land in it.

Brewerytown, the Avenue and the Park

Brewerytown is the finished version of what Sharswood and Strawberry Mansion are becoming: a neighborhood where the infill is done, the Girard Avenue storefronts are full, and the work has shifted to renovations of the houses built ten years ago and fit-outs of the restaurants and shops along the avenue. A Girard Avenue fit-out has the same curb problem as Fishtown's Frankford Avenue, a trolley line and a busy commercial strip that owns the parking lane, so the box goes behind the building where there's an alley or in a space under a Streets permit for the days the demolition runs, loaded from the sidewalk side and swapped early. The container goes in a rear lot or it doesn't come.

Fairmount Park's east side is the neighborhood's event ground: the runs and rides on Kelly Drive and the river trail, the festivals and concerts at the Mann and on the park lawns, the regattas on the Schuylkill, Strawberry Mansion's own community days. Those put crowds on grass and asphalt with no plumbing near, which means units in clusters at the gates and the stages, 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 park's own permits cover the use of the grounds; the organizer handles those, and we handle the units and the cleanup box. Our How Many Porta Potties Do I Need guide has the planning table.

Fairhill, Lehigh Avenue and the Second Wave

The Lehigh Avenue corridor through Fairhill and the blocks east toward Kensington is where the next wave of infill is landing, with some of the highest new-construction counts in the city on lots that sat empty for a generation. The sites are the same as Sharswood's, a vacant lot that takes the box, the unit and the container inside the line until the foundation goes in, and the planning problem is the same: where everything goes once the building takes the lot. What's different is the block. Fairhill's streets are narrower and busier, the El runs over Kensington Avenue with low clearance for a truck raising its bed, and the neighbors have lived through more demolition than most. A box set without the Streets permit, or left full over a weekend, is the kind of thing that gets photographed.

The practical answers are the ones that work everywhere north of Girard: get the right-of-way permit before the slab cures, size the box so one fill covers the phase, keep the unit inside the shell once there's a floor, and plan the swap for early morning before the avenue fills. Where several builders are on one block, which is common here, one service stop for the units and a swap schedule that keeps two trucks off the block at once makes the difference between a job the neighbors tolerate and one they call 311 about.

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

• Fishtown & Kensington
• Northern Liberties, Fairmount & Spring Garden
• Germantown, Mt. Airy & Chestnut Hill