One Meridian Plaza - After The Fire

After The Fire

By February 26 city officials had determined One Meridian Plaza was not in danger of collapse. There was structural damage to horizontal steel beams and floor sections on most of the fire damaged floors. Under extreme fire exposure the beams and girders sagged and twisted and cracks appeared in the concrete floors. However, the overall structure was stable and able to support the weight of the building. Thermal expansion of the steel frame caused some of the granite panels to be dislodged from the building's facade. The streets and buildings around One Meridian Plaza were closed and cordoned off. The 20-story Morris Building and several three-story shops behind One Meridian Plaza on Chestnut Street were damaged by falling debris and sat unused for years until they were demolished in 2000. The neighboring Girard Trust Building, then called Two Mellon Plaza, experienced extensive water damage forcing the closure of the building. A bank in the building reopened a month later but the rest of the tower remained vacant for years. The roads around the building were closed for months after the fire, including a portion of two of Philadelphia's major streets, Broad and Market.

The removal of the uninhabitable One Meridian Plaza off the real estate market and the sudden relocation of the buildings tenants to other offices in Philadelphia removed 1,500,000 square feet (140,000 m2) of real estate off the market. The city's office vacancy rate was 14.3 percent at the end of 1990 and in the two months after the fire the vacancy rate lowered to 10.7 percent. On December 18 Mayor Wilson Goode signed a law requiring every nonresidential building 75 feet (23 m) tall or taller have sprinklers installed by 1997. An estimated three hundred buildings in the city were affected by the law.