Well, well, well. Another developer thinks he's Willard Rouse. Newsflash: there is no substitute. And Liberty Place is already built.

Chalk it up to another bad plan idea for Philadelphia...

Changing Skyline: East Market By Inga Saffron
Inquirer Architecture Critic

Imagine two new skyscrapers as big and swaggering as Liberty Place. Then imagine those towers sprouting from a full-size urban shopping mall - and not some miniaturized retail sampler. Try to visualize Marriott's convention hotel hoisted onto the mall's broad shoulders. And picture all of it on dreary East Market Street, where sneaker stores now rule and Strawbridge & Clothier's grand flagship has been reduced to a retail wallflower.

It may be hard to envision any new skyscrapers rising in Philadelphia at the moment, just when it feels as if the banks will never lend another dime to a developer. But those towers are pretty much all Kevin M. Doyle can think about these days.

Doyle is the president of Trinity Capital Advisors, a real estate and investment company that, until now, has specialized in collecting choice suburban office parks. In 2006, he paid $90 million to lease a full block at 12th and Market Streets, considered Center City's last big redevelopment site. Since then, he's been investigating how to occupy its 4.4 acres.

Doyle started by hiring Blackney Hayes Architects to figure out how much stuff could be physically piled onto the block. The answer is 3.5 million square feet. That would make the project a third bigger than Doyle's favorite model of mixed-use development: the Time Warner complex, a pair of knife-edged glass towers on Manhattan's Columbus Circle.

It's too early to call the results of Blackney Hayes' explorations a plan, but it's sure not too soon for Philadelphia to fret about the details....But Doyle's ambitions go way beyond this one block, which he has on lease for 75 years from the city-controlled Girard Estate....

The Next Liberty Place?

Philly's developer-dreamers just don't quit. Trinity Capital Management, which took a 75-year lease on the Girard Estate block (Market, btwn 11th and 12th) in 2006 for $90 million, has come up with the outlines of a massive development scheme that would dwarf Liberty Place.....Unfortunately, the developer is too eager to level the site, which includes some wonderful early, 19th century skyscrapers like the Stephen Girard building

(Well, we're just golad Kevin Doyle isn't interested in Ardmore as we have enough height mongers already, don't we?)