Dumpster, Porta Potty & Storage Container Rental in Northern Liberties, Fairmount & Spring Garden

Loft Conversions: Freight Elevators and Dock Doors

The Callowhill factories and the Northern Liberties warehouses being turned into apartments and offices are a different job from a rowhome. The buildings are big, the floors are open, the debris is industrial, and the one advantage they have is that they were built to move freight: a loading dock, a freight elevator, a yard or an alley where trucks once backed in. On a conversion the dumpster goes at the dock, and the demolition comes down the freight elevator in carts instead of through a window into a box on the street. That lets a 30 or 40 yard box sit inside the property line for the whole demolition phase, swapped from the yard, with no Streets Department permit and no neighbor losing a parking space.

The debris is heavy in a specific way. Old mill floors are maple over thick subfloor, the partitions are often plaster on hollow tile or block, and there's steel, duct and pipe in quantities a house never has. Sort it: a 10 yard heavy-debris box for the masonry and tile, a 30 or 40 for the wood and the drywall, and a scrap plan for the steel, which is worth more sorted than it costs to haul. A container in the yard holds the new material, the fixtures and the long runs of conduit that arrive ahead of the rooms. Our What Size Dumpster Do I Need guide covers the weight limits.

Fairmount's Rows and the Museum Blocks

West of Broad, Fairmount and Spring Garden are three-story rowhome and twin streets, some of the handsomest in the city, with the museums and the Parkway a few blocks south. The renovation work is the Victorian version of South Philly's: plaster, slate, old framing and brick party walls coming out of a tall, narrow house with no driveway, through the front door into a box in a parking space under the Streets Department's right-of-way permit. The difference is the lot. Many Fairmount rows have a rear yard with a usable alley, and some of the Spring Garden Street houses have a side drive or a rear lot off Brandywine or Mount Vernon, which puts the porta potty and sometimes a 10 foot container in the back instead of on the sidewalk. We check the alley before the truck rolls.

The blocks nearest the Parkway have their own calendar: the museums, the Barnes and the library bring visitors, buses and tour groups past the job site every day, and the Parkway's event season closes streets and fills the neighborhood's parking for days at a time. A box in a parking lane on an event weekend is a box that can't be swapped until the barricades come down. We check the city's event calendar against the delivery date and schedule swaps around the closures.

Second Street, the Piazza and the Neighborhood Calendar

Northern Liberties' commercial blocks around 2nd Street, Girard Avenue and the Piazza have the Fishtown problem a few blocks south of it: a busy restaurant and bar strip that owns the curb from lunch through last call, and fit-outs that need a box for days and a container never. The box goes in the rear alley where there is one or in a space under a Streets permit for the demolition days, loaded from the sidewalk side and swapped before the delivery trucks arrive. On the townhome and apartment construction filling the last lots north of Girard, everything sits inside the fence until the building takes the lot, and the box moves to the curb only for the last phase.

The neighborhood's events are the Piazza's concerts and markets, the 2nd Street festival, the Spring Garden Street fair and the block parties that run all summer, each a closed block or a plaza with a crowd and no plumbing. Those need units in a cluster at one end of the block, an accessible unit with them on a path a wheelchair can use, a hand wash station by the food, and a pickup the morning after; the bigger festivals add a mid-day service. The Parkway events to the south are the large-count work, planned months ahead with the Office of Special Events; our How Many Porta Potties Do I Need guide has the planning table that those site plans start from.

Spring Garden Street's Big Houses

Spring Garden Street between Broad and the river has some of the largest rowhouses in the city, four-story Victorian piles with twelve-foot ceilings, and the blocks behind it on Green, Mount Vernon and Wallace are nearly as grand. Many were carved into apartments decades ago and are now being put back together as single homes or rebuilt as condos, and a renovation on one of them is a long job with a lot of weight in it: plaster on every wall of a 5,000 square foot house, slate on a mansard, marble mantels and cast-iron radiators the owners want saved, old-growth framing in the opened walls. The dumpster is a swap schedule, a heavy-debris box for the plaster and slate and a 30 for the rest, and the material that's being saved needs a dry, locked place to sit; a 20 foot container in the rear lot or a leased space nearby is where the mantels and the doors wait for the finish carpenter.

The porta potty on one of these jobs goes in the rear yard where the house has one, reachable by the service truck through the alley, or inside the shell once the first floor is open. The street placement for the box is the Temporary No Parking permit for the demolition days, on a block where parking is scarce and the neighbors are close, so the box is sized for the phase and pulled when it's full. Our What Size Dumpster Do I Need guide has the weight math for plaster and slate.

Sources

• City of Philadelphia: Apply for a Temporary No Parking (TNP) Permit
• U.S. Access Board: Guide to the ADA Standards, Toilet Rooms (Portable Units, §213.2)

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Nearby Service Areas

• Fishtown & Kensington
• Center City
• North Philadelphia