Hillel will relocate to Superblock

The Hamilton Village area will be home to the new Hillel building, a project still undergoing negotiations months after construction was to begin. Jamie Wyper of Jacobs/Wyper Architects -- the firm handling the design of the new facility -- confirmed that the building would be located in the vicinity, although they did not specify where. "At the moment, it's going to be built between Walnut and Locust Walk near 39th Street," said Wyper, who is one of the firm's architects. Rabbi Howard Alpert, the executive director of Hillel of Greater Philadelphia, would neither confirm nor deny the Superblock spot as the prospective location. The $10 to $12 million facility was first announced in the summer of 1999, but officials did not specify where the new facility would be. The current Hillel building is located at 202 S. 36th Street. But according to a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, who wished to remain anonymous, the facility will likely be built in what are now the parking lots of the ATO and Sigma Chi fraternities. Another member of ATO said that the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs had contacted the fraternity about locating Hillel in their parking lot. One member said that the fraternity was angered that they would be losing their lot and that they were trying to have a discussion with the involved parties . However, the member added that he did not know if anything could be done to stop construction there. Officials had originally hoped to begin demolition of the old Hillel building last summer, but delays prevented the start of the project. Alpert would not specify exactly what has taken so long in finalizing plans, instead citing many factors as causes. "Projects like this move according to their own time table," said Alpert. "There are a lot of complex issues dealing with funding, building and programming." Alpert also said that Hillel had underestimated the complexity of the project when it was announced in the summer of 1999. But Wyper said that most of the delays that he was familiar with arose because of conflicts over the aesthetics of the building. "There have been some delays, mostly pertaining to what the building is going to look like," Wyper said. Leaders of Hillel's student Executive Council would not comment on the Superblock location, deferring all questions to Alpert. Uriel Cohen, a student leader in Hillel's Conservative Jewish Community, expressed some regret that the new facility will not be in the middle of campus, as is the current one. "It's not as central as the Hillel building is now," Cohen said. But Cohen agreed that the prospective site follows the trend of recent campus construction. "On the other hand, things seem to be expanding westward," he said. Current plans for the facility contain between 30,000 and 35,000 square feet of space, more than double the current facility's space. The building -- which is to have three stories as well as a basement level -- will house kosher dining, which moved out of Hillel about five years ago because of a lack of space. Irv's Place at 4040 Locust Street has housed kosher dining for over a year. According to Cohen, one of the main attractions of the new building will be the larger space. "It's going to have the capacity for two very large rooms, which will help bring the various communities together," he said. Cohen also noted that the facility will be "state-of-the-art." This unification of the different Jewish communities was one of the key goals of the new building that Alpert and others named when the project was first announced. In December, Alpert said that at least 80 percent of the funding for the new structure would come from donations. Donors are currently being sought for the project.