For many Philadelphians, it was hard, back in 2014, to envision the promise of the Bok Building. At least, it was hard to envision the promise of Bok as Lindsey Scannapieco saw it.
There it was, this sad, shuttered vocational school sitting empty in the heart of South Philly. And there we were, a city that often struggles to reconcile its past with its future, as evidenced in the many scattered, forgotten old buildings, as evidenced in so much soulless new construction.
And here was Scannapieco, 28-year-old founder of Scout—a small, female-run development firm specializing in unused and empty spaces—gliding into the headlines with a winning bid for the place that sounded almost too cool to be true.
She and her team would buy the place for $1.75 million, and transform the 340,000-square-foot Art Deco school—a block-long behemoth built under FDR’s Public Works…
