{"id":3211,"date":"2012-10-02T09:10:30","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T13:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=3211"},"modified":"2014-05-14T10:23:36","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T14:23:36","slug":"a-building-that-should-be-treated-tenderly-and-remain-undisturbed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2012\/10\/a-building-that-should-be-treated-tenderly-and-remain-undisturbed\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cA building that should be treated tenderly and remain undisturbed\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
521 Spruce Street, just before restoration in 1964.
Photo from PhillyHistory.org.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cImmediately south of Independence National Historical Park,\u201d wrote historian Louis Mumford<\/a>\u00a0 in 1956, \u201cdown as far as Lombard Street\u2026is a district that should not be left to time, change and the conflicting aims of real-estate operators. This district has become nondescript\u2014a mixture of seedy residences, lunchrooms, factories, lofts, tombstone-makers\u2019 sheds, old burial grounds and historic churches\u2026 This part of Philadelphia is still known as Society Hill, and it still contains many houses that justify the name\u2026 rows of elegant dwellings of impeccable craftsmanship, which only need a little loving care to be nursed back to life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mumford imagined more of what was already underway\u2014a sweeping and positive transformation of an inner city when the very term was synonymous with decay.\u00a0 Philadelphia had discovered its lightning-in-a-bottle solution, the key to Center City\u2019s turnaround and Society Hill\u2019s success. It wasn’t so much about historic landmarks or landmark developments, although these would be part of the mix, but hundreds (and thousands, city wide) of residential properties with age and character where Philadelphians could \u00a0make history theirs.<\/p>\n

The city planner behind Philadelphia\u2019s array of projects, including this calculus, knew he was onto something. And by November 1964, Edmund Bacon had parlayed success into fame with a TIME magazine cover story<\/a> featuring his own fa\u00e7ade framed by old and new icons of Society Hill. \u201cRenewers of the city want not only to bring people back from the suburbs to shop, but back to town to live,\u201d wrote TIME. \u201cSociety Hill is studded with 18th<\/sup>-century houses and historic landmarks, and Bacon opened up vistas around them by chopping out the factories and dingy warehouses, threading greenery through them and building new houses in harmony with the 18th-century beauties.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the fall of 1964, Ford and Mary Jennings had snagged their diamond-in-the-rough at 521 Spruce Street and were well on their way to a state-of-the-art renovation and restoration. As Bacon held forth for TIME, the Jennings\u2019 held hopes that their plans would be approved by the Philadelphia Historical Commission. Construction began shortly after, and soon 521 Spruce was awarded the city\u2019s 289th<\/sup> historic plaque. The Jennings installed it with pride beside their brand new front door.<\/p>\n

If the door wasn\u2019t historic, the doorway was. Five-twenty-one Spruce seemed liked any many other houses in Society Hill\u2014but this one carried an extra-added association with its first resident, John Vallance. In 1792, the year the house was built, Vallance, Philadelphia\u2019s leading artist\/engraver was at work on illustrations for America\u2019s first encyclopedia<\/a>\u00a0and the famous L’Enfant plan<\/a>\u00a0of the soon-to-be-new national capital in Washington D.C.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Renovated and ready for its historic plaque.
Photo from PhillyHistory.org.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Twentieth-century Philadelphians had come to expect as much of their past. Everywhere you turned in Society Hill stood something<\/em> remarkable, but just as remarkable was the success of the neighborhood\u2019s revival. The sheer scale of this turnaround was one of the main reasons why Society Hill earned a place on the National Register as \u201cthe first large-scale urban renewal project to plan for historic preservation.\u201d\u00a0 No single project, or even collection of developments, could have surpassed the crowd-sourced community building achieved in Society Hill in the third quarter of the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

But in all this renewal, something special about these gems was getting lost. It had tugged at Mumford in the 1950s when he wrote of the nearby Headhouse<\/a> at 2nd<\/sup> and Pine Streets: Here was \u201ca building that should be treated tenderly and remain undisturbed.\u201d An appreciation of the nuances of patina and accrued features \u00a0had fallen by the wayside. Now something harsh and hard had replaced it. In the rush to restore, preservationists purged all but the distant past, or a facsimile of it, anyway. Evidence of intervening time, and, by default, the building\u2019s sense of itself\u2014its very authenticity, was compromised. That\u2019s<\/em> the irony of Society Hill: buildings that had survived in spite of preservation<\/em> were suddenly being \u201csaved\u201d at the hands of it.<\/p>\n

Nuance\u00a0didn’t\u00a0have much of a chance as this dynamic played out. At the Headhouse, which underwent restoration<\/a> as well, a feel for the complex past gave way to a simpler, cleaner, and ultimately less interesting interpretation. At 521 Spruce, and at hundreds of other properties, the elusive patina and the authenticity of acquired age wouldn’t\u2013and didn’t\u2014stand up to the untender restoration aesthetic that came to define Society Hill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cImmediately south of Independence National Historical Park,\u201d wrote historian Louis Mumford\u00a0 in 1956, \u201cdown as far as Lombard Street\u2026is a district that should not be left to time, change and the conflicting aims of real-estate operators. This district has become nondescript\u2014a mixture of seedy residences, lunchrooms, factories, lofts, tombstone-makers\u2019 sheds, old burial grounds and historic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}