1351-59 Frankford AveDelivered

A 61-unit mixed-use building has wrapped construction at 1351–59 Frankford Avenue, adding four stories of apartments above ground-floor commercial shell space to a 16,439-square-foot site in Fishtown. The project, which has cleared to build since late 2022, uses a split construction strategy—Type IA for the basement and first floor, Type VB for the upper three residential floors—and includes a common roof deck. Approvals show the building went through a couple of rounds of plan amendments in 2023 and 2024, adjusting materials, layouts, and mechanical details as construction moved forward.

The site sits in CMX2 zoning, which allows the density by right and reflects the city's intent to concentrate residential around Frankford Avenue's transit spine. Owner of record Thirteen Fifty-Nine has controlled the parcel since 2015, riding out the early years of Fishtown's intensifying development cycle before moving to construction. The commercial component remains shell space, requiring future fit-out work before any retail or office tenant can move in—a common hedging strategy in neighborhoods where ground-floor demand remains uneven despite residential appetite.

This delivery slots into a particularly active stretch of the neighborhood, with nearly 900 units either built or planned within a half-mile radius. Immediate neighbors include a 114-unit building at 1440 N Front Street, a 55-unit project at 1713 N Front, and a 40-unit building at 1716 Frankford Avenue, among others. The cluster underscores how decisively this section of Fishtown has tipped toward multifamily, with mid-rise wood-frame or hybrid construction now the default assumption for any sizable parcel along the avenue.

What's notable is how thoroughly the corridor has absorbed this volume without stalling. The pace suggests that remaining underbuilt lots—particularly those assembled before the last zoning remapping—will continue to pencil as residential, likely with similar unit counts and mixed-use ground floors. Commercial activation may lag, but the residential pipeline shows no sign of hesitation, and projects like 1351–59 Frankford reinforce the template for what comes next on any comparable site nearby.