401 North Broad Street is an 11-story, 1.3 million square feet building that occupies an entire city block in downtown Philadelphia. Also known as the Reading Terminal Commerce Building, the iconic structure was built by William Steele & Sons. At the time of completion in 1931, it was the largest commercial warehouse building in the nation with construction costing approximately $4 million at the time. 401 North Broad was constructed of structural steel and fireproofed with concrete; materials selected with intention for their durability.

401 North Broad Street is an 11-story, 1.3 million square feet building that occupies an entire city block in downtown Philadelphia.

The infrastructure of 401 North Broad was designed to accommodate a freight station beneath the building, in the basement, which replaced the rail yard previously on site. During World War II, the building was used to assemble and transport United States military vehicles. At that time, the building was home to its own post office and its own dedicated zip code. Over the decades following the end of the war, as commercial rail traffic decreased, the building was used as offices for federal agencies and for storing government and insurance company records. The structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.

Frost Engineering & Consulting was enlisted by the building’s current owner, Netrality Data Centers, to provide structural engineering services in support of this large-scale adaptive reuse project transforming this historic structure into a data center. Frost’s scope included structural capacity assessment and analysis as part of the process of retrofitting the building. The Frost engineering team assessed existing slab conditions for moving loads, developed and implemented repairs of the fire escape, basement and sub-basement. Frost also performed structural analysis and design work in support of the condenser water loop installation and crane installation.