It may not be cause for alarm—but it seems that Haverford’s Carl Dranoff, the man tapped to reshape the heart of downtown Ardmore, lives in an alternate reality.

What’s more, it seems that the founder and CEO of Dranoff Properties has been there for quite a while.

Just take a look at his record. When most of us look at Camden, N.J., we see a city that ranks high on lists like poorest and most dangerous in America. Dranoff sees “the next Hoboken;” he not only built a $60 million luxury apartment building there, but did it only on the condition that he could have the rest of the residential development rights on Camden’s waterfront, 10 desolate acres. He envisioned Philly’s bleak Walnut Street Bridge as an up-and-coming neighborhood; now his tony Left Bank apartment building has led the way for University of Pennsylvania’s eastward expansion. When the area just west of the Delaware River was a rough warehouse district, he saw the potential for loft apartments and helped create “the building that started Old City.” He believed that Philly’s Broad Street could out-posh Rittenhouse Square—and is making it so. And he’s pretty certain he can turn downtown Newark, N.J., into a cultural hub that will attract upmarket residents to his forthcoming Two Center Street development.

For Dranoff, reality just depends on how you look at things. Sure, for example, Camden is still transitional at best. But, he counters, “It has something Philadelphia will never have: a view of Philadelphia.” And yes, Broad Street lacks that neighborhood feel. But, he insists, “To me, the Avenue of the Arts is like combining New York’s Broadway, Lincoln Center and the Upper West Side all into one street.”

Now, he’s applying this thinking to Ardmore, re-envisioning the beleaguered downtown as a symbol of transformation that will be “a benchmark” for how to revitalize post-industrial suburbs and an inspiration for communities across the nation.

That sounds like a tall order, but not to Dranoff, who specializes in fixing neighborhoods, altering cityscapes and essentially aligning our reality with the optimistic visions in his head.

From the beginning, he says, “What I wanted to do was large-scale transformative projects that could change neighborhoods. The fact that I was born and raised here, that I know the neighborhood and the streets like the back of my hand—city and suburbs—I think I have a very good feel for where the next great neighborhood may emerge. And my whole playbook is being one step ahead of everyone else, making a big bet and proving all the pundits wrong.”

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The first thing you ought to know about Dranoff is that he thinks like a businessman, and talks like an idealist.

His proposed “Ardmore Station,” as he calls his planned development, is a $150 million mix of transit, housing, retail, parking and open space. In comparison to the $300 million plan offered by Edward Lipkin—the plan that fell to pieces in March after Lipkin’s firm, EBL&S, bowed out in the midst of the nationwide credit crunch—it is downright pragmatic. Yet, Dranoff describes his commitment to Ardmore practically as a calling.

“It’s almost my duty to try and make it a better place to live,” says the 14-year Haverford resident. “I live within walking distance of downtown Ardmore and what I’ve seen is a continual decline. I thought we could change the equation. I just felt that this is my own backyard and I’m not doing anything about it.”

Dranoff uses that phrase a lot, “changing the equation.” It’s a sort of mathematical approach to urban sprawl and blight that anticipates that revitalization, if enacted on a large enough scale to reach critical mass, could set off a near-inevitable chain reaction of development throughout the region. And Dranoff sees himself as a guiding force in changing the equation in Ardmore. “What’s different about us from other developers is that we want to set the agenda,” he says. “We have ideas on how to do this; we want to be leaders not followers.”
Captain of industry may be the old-school term for describing men like Dranoff, who are front and center in both business and philanthropy. (Dranoff has served on the boards of Drexel, University of the Arts, New Jersey Historic Trust and Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, among others; his wife Roberta is also active in philanthropy.)

In total, Dranoff’s accomplishments are many, and he is not modest in detailing them—or defending them. After the Inquirer’s architecture critic, Inga Saffron, panned his crowning Broad Street tower, Symphony House, as “the ugliest new condo building in Philadelphia,” he shot back in a letter that her critique was “one-sided, mean-spirited and malicious.” He concluded: “Saffron misses the fundamental intent of urban design: Buildings are designed for people, not for critics.”

A longtime friend of Dranoff’s, former Lower Merion commissioner Joe Manko, left the Main Line last year for a condo in Dranoff’s Symphony House. His assessment: “I say he’s a little like the architect in The Fountainhead”—that is, Howard Roark, the Ayn Rand protagonist who is a lone force of uncompromising creative vision. “His work becomes his life, so that he puts everything of himself into the buildings he develops,” Manko says—code for workaholic. “He’s taken some difficult sites, sometimes environmentally challenging, sometimes for the age and location, … and he has the foresight to see what they could be.”
Dranoff’s role model, though, isn’t Howard Roark. He prefers to emulate Philadelphia developer Willard Rouse. “His projects also changed the equation. He dared to be different, with Liberty Place for example, breaking the height limit. He had vision,” Dranoff says. He likes to think his projects, like those of the late Rouse, “are part of the public realm. They can survive me and be enjoyed for decades, long after I’m gone.”

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In a city where developers rank as near-celebrities—where Craig Spencer hangs with Jon Bon Jovi and everyone from Bart Blatstein to John Westrum are as liable to appear in society pages as business pages—it’s important to have a myth of your own.

As for Dranoff, he’s testing out a theory of predestination.

“I guess it’s genetic with me to build,” he surmises. “I always had a passion, even when I was a small child, for building things. I always had erector sets and built trains, and in my sketchbook I never drew figures. I always drew buildings and bridges.”

Still, it’s hard to say if the son of a dry cleaner was fated to turn crumbling factories into luxury apartments. What’s certain is that his ambitions were outsized from early on, and he went about realizing them in deliberate and systematic way.

At Drexel University, he says, “I took civil engineering because that’s the engineering of building. … But I found out that civil engineers tended to be small cogs in big wheels, and I really wanted to run things. I found out that most of the people who were CEOs in big business had MBA degrees.” So he went to Harvard for his MBA—the only time he ever lived away from the Philadelphia area.

Only two years into his post-graduate career, at age 26, he followed his entrepreneurial yearnings and struck out on his own, building townhouses and condominiums in the suburbs. His company essentially failed.

“Being young and undercapitalized, I really didn’t have the staying power,” Dranoff admits. After four years of just breaking even, he had a wife and a child, and “it was time to get a real job.”

Eventually he landed at a small company called Historic Landmarks for Living, rehabbing old buildings into luxury apartments in the early 1980s, starting with the Wireworks at Third and Race streets in Old City Philadelphia. “At the time it wasn’t even called Old City,” Dranoff says. “The population I think was seven; it was a warehouse district. So we started the largest building in Old City—the building that really started Old City. A lot of people thought we were crazy.” But it worked, and they followed with more and bigger buildings, chewing up old factories, warehouses and hospitals and spitting out market-rate loft apartments. In just five years, they became the largest rehabbers of historic buildings in the country.

But when the real estate market fell out in the late ’80s, Dranoff laid low for a while, “biding his time” as he puts it, and taking on various projects like turning the PSFS tower into the Loews Philadelphia Hotel with the Rubin Organization.

But in 1998, he says, “I realized if I didn’t start my own company, then I was going to be too old to go out on my own. I felt that this was my last opportunity to mold a company the way I wanted to run it and to do the things I wanted to do. And basically what I wanted to do were large-scale transformative projects that could change neighborhoods.”

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He launched Dranoff Properties with a massive apartment building called Locust on the Park—eight years before the nominal park was even completed—on 25th and Locust streets in Philadelphia. It was just Dranoff and a part-time secretary when he began overhauling the vacant building, a former printing plant specializing in Bibles of the hotel room variety. “Maybe that was good luck because I started out with a holy building,” Dranoff says. And maybe he’s right, given that his plan for the place was somewhat untested. He created luxury loft apartments with every amenity he could think of—then slapped on what he admits were the highest rents in the city. And, he says, “It was an immediate success.”

“What I’m proud of,” Dranoff says, “is that building was holding down property values in the area, it was decaying and it had been vandalized and here we were in one of the nicer neighborhoods of the city, Fitler Square. And after we completed the building, property values began to skyrocket in Fitler Square and it became maybe the most expensive neighborhood in the city.”

That’s what Dranoff calls changing the equation.

He followed that with the even more massive Left Bank, after winning a University of Pennsylvania design competition to rehab a former freight warehouse by the Walnut Street Bridge. In 1999, he says, “This was just a vast, desolate area, and that’s hard to believe when you look around us today and you see the Cira Center, you see the post office being demolished and you see all kinds of new housing surrounding us. But we were the catalyst. We started it all.”

He did the same with the RCA Victor building in Camden, a four-year project to turn the old factory into luxury waterfront apartments like the city had never seen. “Case studies have been written on this building. Books have been written on this building. It was one of the most challenging revivals in America,” says Dranoff. “That building had become a symbol for Camden’s failure as a city. And now that it has been revived, it’s a symbol for Camden’s comeback.”

Of course, Dranoff has a stake in that comeback, especially given that he has plans to build 1,500 housing units on 10 waterfront acres in Camden over the next 10 years. You may not see it yet, but according to Dranoff that’s “probably the next hot neighborhood in this region.”

Likewise, if Dranoff has his way, we’ll all be flocking to über-trendy SoBro—a Manhattanization of South Broad Street. Dranoff touts his Symphony House, at Broad and Pine streets, as “widely considered to be the most successful condominium ever built in this city.” The neoclassical pink tower, completed last year, is “a virtual sellout,” he says—and now he’s breaking ground on a new building, three blocks further south on Broad. The prices at Symphony are high and Broad Street—ahem, Avenue of the Arts—is no Rittenhouse Square. But according to Dranoff, it’s even better. “It ended up that a lot of people moved from Rittenhouse Square to Symphony House,” he insists.

The way Dranoff tells it, the risks he took on Broad Street—and in Fitler Square, University City and Camden—have paid off, not just for his company, but for the respective communities, as development and property values have boomed. ‘Sometimes,” he says, “it just takes an entrepreneur to be that catalyst and take that chance.”

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Dranoff talks a great deal about his playbook, as if he’s trying to coach this region into fulfilling its potential.

He thinks his playbook—which involves mixed-use properties, transit-oriented development, adaptive reuse of post-industrial structures and a thorough sugarcoating of luxury finishes and amenities—will come in plenty handy in Ardmore. Ardmore Station, he says, “is more like a slight differentiation—maybe a 5 percent veering off—than a completely different kind of project,” given its scale and the historic sensitivity and public-private partnerships required. “There are a lot of things from our playbook that relate directly to what we’re about to undertake.”

The plan Dranoff has proposed for Ardmore Station is actually his second attempt—replacing his initial, ultra-modern design with a more historically sympathetic plan that utilizes traditional materials like brick and stone. “We changed our thinking along the way,” he says, “after talking with township officials and local civic groups.”

Still, one thing Dranoff didn’t change has been a major point of discussion: He won’t commit to build across the railroad tracks, to connect Suburban Square on the north with the Lancaster Avenue business district on the south.

Bruce Reed, the president of Lower Merion’s Board of Commissioners, initially voted for EBL&S’ plan for that
reason. After all, he says, the so-called Chinese wall of the R5 line “has been a problem now for 80 years. Until we solve that, I don’t think we’re going to totally get what we want, which is Ardmore as a unified, cohesive business area.” But after Lipkin’s surprise exit, he and other commissioners seem satisfied to have in Dranoff Properties “a group that is capable of executing the project and also has the requisite financing to do so.” Reed says Dranoff told him from the beginning that building across the tracks wouldn’t be practical at this time, (a point that EBL&S’ exit seems to underscore).

Says Dranoff, “We needed a project that had imagination and drama, but we also needed a practical project that could be built.” His plan, to be completed in three phases of construction over five years, beginning by early 2010, includes the train station—using $5.8 million in federal grants—as well as 335 apartments, 60,000 square feet of retail, restaurants and sidewalk cafes, 1,150 parking spaces (including Philly CarShare), as well as offices, green space and an open-air plaza and amphitheater. He says a 95-foot Frank Furness-style clock tower “will be the center of gravity that will define the new downtown Ardmore. Ardmore doesn’t have a center of gravity right now.” He says it will be walkable, “a very pleasant village environment” where people, not automobiles, dominate.

In short, Dranoff says he can do what some feared was lost with EBL&S’ withdrawal: make Ardmore “a destination, not just a place to live.”

Still, some say the type of equation-changing Dranoff hopes to effect in Ardmore may not be in any one developer’s power—especially given the number of different proposed development projects in the area. “Until everything’s looked at as one big community, we’re really just dealing with things piecemeal,” says Sharon Eckstein, president of the local civic group Save Ardmore Coalition. “Because outside of Carl Dranoff there are around four other proposed projects that are on the table for Ardmore. And how do all these projects interact with each other? Because they will impact all Ardmore residents.”

Commissioner Elizabeth Rogan, Lower Merion’s former director of planning and a key negotiator with Dranoff, has heard this before. She says the commissioners are looking at things holistically, even if she can’t point to a document entitled Master Plan. But, she notes, plans will evolve over time, maybe even one day to include building across the train tracks.

And in the mean time, she and others hope that Ardmore Station can reshape the downtown—and perhaps even provide that critical mass to change the equation and trigger revitalization across the community.
Until then, says Dranoff, “We’re not the kind of company that will be lead astray or become unfocused. There are competing ideas, and we know that. But we also know that if we keep going around in circles, we’re never going to get this project built, so we really have to provide focus and leadership. I think now all the stars are aligned to move forward. … There’s been enough adversity; I think people realize now that it’s time.”