The contentious demolition of the Painted Bride Art Center Building — one of artist Isaiah Zagar’s most famous mosaic city murals — is finally underway. Demolition equipment is currently clearing out the building’s interior.
For years, the fate of the building at 230 Vine Street was in question. In 2018, the Painted Bride arts group announced that it could no longer maintain the building, setting off a six-year-long legal battle to determine its fate.
The building was wrapped in Zagar’s 7,000-square-foot mosaic titled “Skin of the Bride” — one of his largest in the city. The artist spent years constructing the work in the 1990s.
Advocates, community members and preservationists have argued the mural holds important cultural and historical significance for Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens has made repeated attempts to try and save the artwork, including an unsuccessful effort to give the mural a historic designation.
The developer Shimi Zakin of Atrium Design Group bought the building for $3.85 million in 2022. Initially, the plan was to construct a seven-story residential building on top of the old structure and, in turn, preserve the artwork.
“I saw Shimi Zakin’s design as a wonderment; a brightness and excitement that he envisioned something new that was responding to my work,” Zagar told the New York Times in 2023. “It would be a new place that people would go to be stimulated by art and architecture. Now the buildings are going up in Philadelphia at a rapid rate and they are ordinary glass boxes.”
However, even after approval from the Philadelphia Zoning Board, the plan fell through. Neighbors of the building appealed the decision, citing concerns the new space would be too tall. With just 17 votes, the compromise was shut down.
After that, Zakin changed course and received approval to raze the building.
“It’s been a really difficult couple of weeks,” Emily Smith, the Magic Gardens executive director, told the Inquirer in 2023, after the decision, “and this week in particular has been painful for neighbors and community members who have been following this story. It feels really difficult and upsetting to be destroying something that we love so much, and it’s been really difficult for our preservation team.”
Since then, the Magic Gardens has worked to save and reuse as much of the mosaic as possible — designating a preservation team to hand-chisel tiles from the building.
The new building is intended to be an apartment complex that is six stories — 65 feet — tall, with commercial space as well. Zakin also announced separate plans to use parts of the mural in the new complex, per the Inquirer.
“This was avoidable and we have lost a masterpiece of public art,” the Magic Gardens said in September on Instagram. “Unfortunately, it was the voices of only a few neighbors that ultimately decided the fate of the artwork. We can only hope that this loss will help spur change and prevent a similar outcome for other culturally significant places in the future.”
For more information about the Painted Bride building and the fight to save the mural, visit the PMG’s dedicated webpage.
The post Demolition of the historic Painted Bride building kicks off appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY.
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