Flashback Friday: That Time the Bellevue-Stratford on Broad Almost Got an Airstrip

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Today’s blast from the past comes from Philaphilia, where GroJLart reminds as of that time building contractor Theodore Starrett proposed an airstrip at the top of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel on Broad Street so that, as GroJ elegantly puts it, “rich-ass visitors could fly directly to the roof of a building and be served with the highest of luxury.”

The idea, which he’d been kicking around for a few years, seemed to have an inkling of potential when hotelier Georges Boldt commissioned an architecture firm to design the proposed 90′ x 300′ air strip on the roof of the Bellevue-Stratford.

Suffice it to say, they never managed to get it off the ground:

George Boldt died later that year and the roof-to-roof airline went kaput shortly after it was formed. Everyone knows that the Empire State Building was supposed to have a Zeppelin dock on top, but that was mostly just an excuse to add an extra 200 feet to the building. 

99 Years Ago in Philadelphia: Start of February, 1916 [Philaphilia]