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Acclaimed developer Carl Dranoff has transformed Philadelphia with his visionary showpieces for urban renewal. And if you haven’t heard, he has big plans for Ardmore, too.
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Radar magazine has just named Drexel University the “ugliest campus in America,” though news of the lambasting doesn’t faze Carl Dranoff. 
“I certainly don’t agree,” says the founder and president of Dranoff Properties from his Chestnut Street office directly opposite Drexel’s campus. “Look behind me. How many campuses can say they have an original building that symbolizes its founding, one built by the great [financier and philanthropist] Anthony J. Drexel. What richness and character is preserved there.”
Dranoff spent a decade on Drexel’s board of trustees. He remains an active alumnus, and one to whom the university granted an honorary doctorate in 1986. He’s also a past chair and current board member of Drexel’s Academics Properties Inc., its real estate acquisition and development arm.
“When I went here, it was a commuter school,” he says. “Since then, there’s been 100-fold improvement. Many now live [on campus]. For Drexel, the people come because it’s a great school.”
At the moment, Dranoff is stationed in his first-floor office in the Left Bank, a 282-unit luxury loft apartment community he built and the largest residential historic rehabilitation project in Pennsylvania history. Via live webcam, he’s overseeing construction of 777 S. Broad St., Philadelphia’s first large-scale, LEED-certified, multifamily, mixed-use building. Consuming an entire city block, it will open in early 2010 as an assortment of 146 luxury apartments above 18,000 square feet of high-end retail shops on the south end of the Avenue of the Arts. “They’re definitely going like gangbusters,” he says.
This past decade, Dranoff Properties has emerged as a powerful force, locally and nationally, on the basis of its expertise in revitalizing and transforming urban neighborhoods into mixed-use and residential destinations. Its projects are always large in scale, and high in profile and quality.
Here on the Main Line—amid controversy, skepticism and a massive economic slowdown—Dranoff has secured perhaps his most daunting challenge yet: the revitalization of Ardmore’s train station and business district, a project no one else would touch. His goal is a mixed-use, transit-oriented development that will create a vibrant and walkable village with sufficient critical mass to attract new residents, businesses and customers. “People themselves bring prosperity,” he says. “We’re out to do what we’ve done all along—revive a neighborhood.”
Like those who master the stock market, Dranoff prefers counter-cyclical theory. When others give up hope, he’s active. When things overheat, he pulls back. “Some of the best opportunities arrive while others can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he says. “I’ve always built for the future, so you have to investigate untested or underperforming neighborhoods if you’re helping shape the future.”
With Ardmore, Dranoff has a lot at stake. If the project doesn’t work, he’ll be a failure in his own back yard. After all, he lives in Haverford, near the Merion Cricket Club, in a 5,500-square-foot, French Normandy-style home he built 15 years ago. A 150-year-old farmhouse on 3 acres was demolished to create three 1-acre sites; Dranoff took the middle lot. His neighbors hired builders. “I acted as my own,” he says.
