Kensington's maker district, and it isn't hypothetical

D Street Studios sits at 3437 D Street, in the Harrowgate section of Kensington — a few blocks off the Kensington Avenue corridor, on the lettered-street grid that ran Philadelphia's textile industry for a century.

Most of those mills sat empty for decades. Over the last several years they've been coming back, and not one at a time. Within a five-minute walk of our front door:

That's more than half a million square feet of working creative and light-industrial space inside a few blocks. If you are looking for a studio in Philadelphia, this is one of the few places in the city where the neighborhood itself is the amenity — where your neighbors are also fabricators, ceramicists, photographers, and small manufacturers.

Getting here

The Market–Frankford Line is the strong point. Two stations serve the immediate area:

• Tioga Station (Kensington Ave & Tioga St) — the closest stop
• Kensington–Allegheny "K&A" — about a 13-minute walk

Bus routes 3, 60, and 89 all run within a couple of blocks. The 89 stops roughly 500 feet from the building.

For drivers, the building has two truck loading docks and a private cobblestone courtyard — the practical reason a lot of our tenants chose us over a space closer to Center City.

Coffee and a beer

Càphê Roasters — 3400 J Street, inside J-centrel. Philadelphia's first Vietnamese specialty coffee roaster, a James Beard Awards semifinalist for Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program. Bánh mì, Vietnamese coffee, and the closest thing the block has to a living room. Wednesday through Monday, 8am–4pm. It's a short walk.

Kensington Pub — 2116 E Tioga Street. A neighborhood bar, a few minutes on foot.

We'll be honest with you: this is not a restaurant district, and we would rather you hear that from us than discover it on your tour. What's here is a very good coffee roaster, a neighborhood bar, and corner stores. Fishtown and Port Richmond — full of restaurants and taprooms — are a short drive south. And a café is opening on the Tioga campus in early 2027, which will put good coffee inside the building.

A neighborhood in the middle of changing

We're not going to tell you Harrowgate is finished. It isn't, and anyone who has spent time on Kensington Avenue knows it. What we will tell you is that serious money is going into these blocks, and it's going into the same kind of buildings we're in.

• 2024Collins Lofts opens in the former Tioga Mills: 86 apartments in a building that sat vacant for more than fifty years.
• 2025Construction starts on Sepviva Lofts at 2201 E. Tioga Street: a $20 million, 51-unit building on a lot that had been empty for roughly two decades. Completion expected by the end of 2026.
• OngoingAcross Harrowgate, Odin Properties has now delivered or is delivering 182 housing units across three adaptive-reuse projects — Collins Lofts, East Tioga Lofts, and Westmoreland Lofts.
• Since 2019The Kensington Corridor Trust — a community-owned land trust, not a developer — has assembled 31 properties and deployed nearly $20 million along the four blocks of Kensington Avenue just north of Allegheny, holding commercial rents at or below 75% of market so that local businesses can stay.
• NextHarrowgate Park, five acres at 3455 Kensington Avenue, is in the City's Rebuild program for redesign.

Three dead mills became 182 apartments in two years, four blocks from here. That's the neighborhood we're betting on, and it's the same bet our 130+ tenants made.

Come see for yourself

The honest way to evaluate this building is to stand in it. Come walk a studio, see the light, check the freight access, and look out the window at the block. We'll tell you what we know.

Schedule a Tour