Transfer Station Pilot Closes, Developer Says Manayunk Still Ready for a Coworking Space

The Transfer Station’s coworking space in Manayunk is no more. | Photo via the Transfer Station

What would have been Manayunk’s first coworking space, the Transfer Station, will not make it out of the pilot stage, at least for now.

Developer Shift Capital and brothers Adam and Simon Rogers had set up a temporary space on Main Street in Manayunk to gauge interest and build support for a coworking location, retail outlet for local craftsmen and business incubator. The developers also planned to connect the Transfer Station with another one of their coworking spaces, MakeSh/ft, located in Kensington.

For now, the Transfer Station is closed, but Brian Murray, principal at Shift Capital, said that Manayunk is still primed for a coworking space. The demographics, transit access and prospective residential growth are still there, he said.

“Our goal with setting up a temporary location was to test our assumptions about the marketplace in Manayunk for the Transfer Station concept before embarking on permanent development at 114 Green Lane,” Murray said.

“Unfortunately, we were unable to continue to test some assumptions because we couldn’t fully invest into a temporary location that was far from ideal,” he added.

What made the space not “ideal,” Murray said, was its distance from public transportation and its month-to-month lease, which discouraged long-term partnerships as well as major investments in the space.

Whether Shift Capital and the Rodgers brothers will right these problems by securing a permanent space with better transit access remains to be seen.

“We are taking a deep breath to analyze our options ahead of us with this space and our other projects,” Murray said.