Up Close: Jerry Sweeney

by JoAnn Greco 

A while back, Jerry Sweeney bought a small business — he had a nostalgic yearning to revive something that was no longer living up to its potential. The product was Bonomo Turkish Taffy, that stick-to-your-teeth glob that many of us remember gnawing away at in all of its garish pink and yellow glory. He still co-owns the Coney Island-bred legacy company, but it’s his day job as CEO of Brandywine Realty Trust, fresh off its third decade, that consumes him. Whenever he looks out the windows of his offices at Cira Centre, Sweeney gets the same feeling that the sugary acquisition gave him, one of “making a great contribution by realizing a vision for something that goes back a century,” he says.  

He’s talking, of course, about Schuylkill Yards. Developed in partnership with Drexel University, the project is a top priority over at Brandywine Realty Trust. Every once in a while, they move a bit closer — opening a building here, dropping a park there, gradually filling in a 14-acre parcel over the Amtrak rail yards — to fleshing out the master-planned $3.5 billion community that is primed to reenergize University City. Beyond this part of town, the company’s footprint includes another twenty million square feet of commercial, residential and office space, mainly across the Philadelphia and Austin markets, with smaller presences in Maryland, New Jersey and Richmond, Virginia.  

University City, though, is the focus of the company’s action. They began with the 2005 opening of the Cira Centre. Since then, Brandywine Realty Trust has introduced the new-build Cira Centre South (composed of the mixed-use FMC Tower and the Evo apartment building) and adaptive reuses of the city’s main post office and the defunct Philadelphia Bulletin headquarters. The company also owns a smattering of buildings on the eastern side of the Schuylkill, including 1900 Market Street and the towers of Commerce Square at 2001-2005 Market Street.  

“The [west] side of the river is becoming a great corridor that’s perfect for walk-to-work,” says Sweeney. “We’re really starting to see this vision — and our ultimate goal of creating a whole new center of gravity for the city — come to life.” 

A sense of romance in the real estate business, an aspirational what-if, drives Sweeney forward. “A lot of it, for me, has been about challenging assumptions,” he explains. “When I started the company in 1994, there was a lot of skepticism, and ever since then the idea that we couldn’t be successful has been a major motivator.” He persisted, and within six years, Brandywine Realty Trust grew into a large suburban office development manager. “We kind of had our own niche, so much so that when, in 2000, Amtrak started looking for a developer for around 30th Street Station, my people said, ‘Nah, nothing there,’” he recalls. “I went down to see for myself, and said, ‘Oh, my god, this is amazing!’”  

He still remembers the frisson of excitement when he first got a hold of a set of architectural plans for the site from the late 1920s. “I’m sitting in this dark cavernous conference room in the train station, by myself, and I’ll be a son of a gun, but on the cover page is a sketch of this nexus of transportation surrounded by all of these buildings,” he says. “Cira is that first building, even if it took us 75 years to get there.” 

The Delaware County native and West Chester University alum says he always liked real estate, though as an economics major, he first fell prey to the preponderance of available accounting jobs. He spent a number of years in the field, but in his heart he wanted to make things. “As a young man, I wound up at a mill in Maine for Scott Paper, as part of the construction group,” he says. “One of my earliest experiences was walking through the manufacturing plant and watching as logs went in one end and came out as finished paper on the other. I loved the technology involved in that transformation and so I sashayed into [the role of] construction controller, and from there I got the development bug.”  

Sweeney eventually returned to Philadelphia to work as a controller for a private developer, where he rose to become a partner. “It was an extraordinary training ground,” he remembers. “I learned every aspect of the business from financing to operations to marketing to leasing.”   

When he left to form Brandywine Realty Trust, it was just him, an assistant, and a portfolio of four small buildings. Fast forward to today and the company employs around 300 people. “I learned early on that the team you work with is very important in the quality of your outcomes,” he says. “I look for people who are creative, who have the courage of their convictions and aren’t afraid of trying new things, who are strong in their opinions but not strident in their beliefs.”  

Now, as his dream of shifting the center of the city westward — making the river a nexus and not a divider — begins to take tangible shape, he remains “delighted” by the investments his company has made, as risky as they were. “I love creating public centers and open spaces,” he says. “People need, and require, places to gather and find refuge. It’s good for employers looking to bring in today’s employees, and it’s good for residents and visitors, too. Density is not the cure-all for everything.” 

It’s no surprise then that nearly half of Schuylkill Yards’ master plan is devoted to green space. Brandywine’s earlier lob in this direction, the one-acre Cira Green (built on top of the FMC parking garage), earned locally-based Erdy McHenry Architecture an AIA Honor Award in 2015 and is a good indicator of the sort of projects pegged for the Yards. The similarly-sized Drexel Square, opened in mid-2019, actually counts as the very first completed project within the development. Designed by West 8 and SHoP Architects, the park sits across from the western entrance of the train station, on the former site of a surface parking lot, and is ringed by 23 mature redwood trees. And last winter, Brandywine Realty Trust completed Highline Park, with landscape design by SWA/Balsey, at 3001 JFK Boulevard. It will serve as a connector between the refashioned Bulletin building and a new tower still to be erected.  

Public amenities — hotels, restaurants, retail and other attractions — remain a priority. For example, Brandywine will soon unveil a food hall, with offerings from a half dozen or so local vendors, on the ground floor of the re-done Bulletin building.  

“How exciting is it for this region to see a whole new city emerge at the center of mass transportation and academic achievement?” Sweeney asks. “There’s the promise of an almost unimaginable scope of possibilities.”  

He thinks back to how hard he worked to acquire the candy maker he’d loved since he was a kid. “It’s a great example of the value of dogged persistence,” he says. “If you get an idea in your head that you can’t shake off — well, then, don’t. Just keep at it.”    

JoAnn Greco is a Philadelphia-based journalist who frequently writes about the built environment. 

CAPTIONS 
Jerry Sweeney  

PHOTO: COURTESY OF BRANDYWINE REALTY TRUST 

THINK BIG Cira Centre South (composed of the mixed-use FMC Tower and the Evo apartment building) sits adjacent to 30th Street Station  

PHOTO: COURTESY OF BRANDYWINE REALTY TRUST