Philadelphia’s wave of revitalization gets front page treatment in the city’s namesake magazine’s March edition.

Interspersed among Philadelphia magazine’s stories of how “pent up demand from the Great Recession; the extraordinary revival of urban living; the economic clout of big institutions like Penn, Drexel and CHOP” are driving a new era of revitalization happening across Philadelphia, are brief snippets profiling “27 People Behind the Boom”.

Bill Hankowsky, CEO of Malvern-based Liberty Property Trust, is the only Chester County leader profiled by the magazine. Calling Hankowsky “The Comcast Darling” for his firm’s pioneering work developing the Comcast towers and the still emerging Navy Yard business park, Philadelphia magazine wrote:

“Hankowsky owns an impressive amount of office space around the world, but it’s the state-of-the-art symbolism (see the Comcast Tower) that defines his tenure as Liberty Property Trust’s CEO. At the Navy Yard, LPT helped pull together the master architectural plan. With Comcast II (and maybe III?) under way, Hankowsky continues to push the city’s rents, tech-innovation scene and sky limits even further.”

To be sure, Hankowsky isn’t changing Philadelphia landscape, skyline and Psyche on his own. Members of LPT’s team, led by Senior Vice President and Regional Director John Gattuso, deserves much of the credit. Together Hankowsky and Gattuso are aggressively moving Liberty’s Philadelphia agenda in what is certainly the region’s most challenging real estate development arena.

What makes the magazine’s citation of Hankowsky and Liberty Property Trust noteworthy, is that among the many Philadelphia-based brokers, developers, planners and visionaries highlighted by the magazine, it is a Chester County firm, as Philadelphia Business Journal said last summer, that is “. . . profoundly changing Philadelphia’s built environment and pushing the city in a direction that is not only altering the skyline but helping it shed some of its inferiority complex one building at a time.”

Read the Philadelphia magazine article here and the February 19, 2014 story about John Gattuso in Philadelphia Buisness Journal here.