In West Mt. Airy, wrestling over whether to pursue historic designation

Homeowners in the Pelham section of West Mt. Airy are passionate about their neighborhood. 

They love its tight-knit feel, its history of deliberate and thoughtful racial integration, and its distinctive collection of grand, turn-of-the-century homes designed by renowned architects.

Some residents have been researching and writing about the neighborhood’s history for decades, and thinking about how to preserve its special look and feel in the face of development pressures.

“I love this neighborhood. We live in this amazing, historic, old-house neighborhood,” said Colleen Floyd-Carroll, whose family spent 14 years restoring their 123-year-old home on Pelham Road. “We want to keep it and, you know, things are changing. Fabulous homes are being torn down for vinyl-siding-covered boxes that don’t at all fit our neighborhood and won’t last.”

Over the past two years, West Mt. Airy Neighbors (WMAN), a registered community organization, has held a series of meetings on whether to seek official historic designation of Pelham, which would ban demolition of historic buildings within the district’s boundaries as well as significant alterations to their exteriors.

The process has unfolded during a period of increased contention over historic preservation in Philadelphia. A surge in district designations over the past few years is drawing blowback. Three recent designations — including one covering 30 apartment buildings in Mt. Airy and Germantown — are being challenged in court. Councilmember Mark Squilla has proposed amendments to the city’s Historic Preservation law that would eliminate some criteria for designation and could encourage speedy demolition of structures being considered for protection.

In West Mt. Airy, residents are now wrestling with some of the concerns that critics of district designation have raised, such as claims that it results in higher repair and maintenance costs for homeowners, causes gentrification by boosting property values, and harms affordability.

The discussions underscore the lack of robust data on the long-term effects of designation, and the basic fact that historic preservation efforts are necessarily driven by advocates, rather than by a neutral arbiter who presents the pros and cons of designation. In Pelham, that has led to suspicion about the process and concerns that preservation supporters are trying to railroad through the designation.

Leaders of the designation effort “claim that historic preservation is a means of fostering diversity, without providing any sources to support this,” contended Lindsey Adams, who is part of a neighborhood group on West Hortter Street. “Meanwhile, we are concerned it’s another way to force out families who don’t meet a certain social status, which is completely antithetical to Mt. Airy’s history.”

“Truly striking diversity”

Pelham dates to the 1890s, when the 500-acre estate of millionaire drug maker George W. Carpenter was sold to the Drexel Company and developed to take advantage of the new Chestnut Hill West rail line.

Developers Herman Wendell and Willard Smith put talented young architects like Horace Trumbauer and Charles B. Keen to work designing some 300 homes in a variety of revival styles, “including Tudor, Jacobean, Flemish, Italianate, Georgian, Queen Anne, Norman, Classical, and a range of idiosyncratic hybrid styles,” according to a history by the late Burt Froom.

The community was architecturally diverse, with twin homes, small single homes, and huge, impressive mansions that catered to both middle-class and wealthy tastes, according to a 1993 Inquirer article marking Pelham’s centennial. 

“It’s a beautiful and very beloved portion of West Mt. Airy, and it’s home to both gorgeous architecture and a truly striking diversity of income levels and home values,” said Adams, who bought her home in 2019.

The neighborhood was also among the first in the U.S. to be successfully integrated. After World War II, while many other areas were becoming segregated because of blockbusting and redlining, local community and religious leaders discouraged discriminatory housing policies and promoted a unified approach to welcoming people to the neighborhood, regardless of race. 

Maintaining that diversity, in part by avoiding gentrification, is a priority for some of the residents involved in the historic designation discussions. 

“That’s a legacy we want to hold up. We want to keep it going,” said Floyd-Carroll, who is not a member of WMAN’s historic preservation initiative committee but is involved in designation conversations. “I’m spending a lot of my energy and time on this, thinking about, ‘How do we make this work?’ ”

Asking unanswerable questions

The three-year-old committee has successfully nominated a number of buildings around Mt. Airy for designation by the city’s Historical Commission, and last year it received a state Keystone grant to pay for the research needed to write a nomination for Pelham. 

WMAN hasn’t yet officially decided to pursue the designation, and hasn’t commissioned an architectural consultant to start working on the application. But it has held four meetings this year to explain the process to residents, including two attended by Paul Steinke, executive director of the nonprofit Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia. 

Adams said the first two meetings were not well-advertised, and some members of her group only became aware of the initiative in late summer. When she then attended a meeting in September and raised her concerns — for example, that some families would not be able to afford home repairs that satisfy Historical Commission guidelines — she said she was treated dismissively by some committee members.

“The response was, you don’t know that, and you’re making this an ‘us versus them,’” she said. “I was really just trying to get the word out that this might affect people differently, and what’s going to happen if people can’t afford to work on their houses? That was very much disliked.”

She said she’s open to the idea of designation, but has been turned off by the committee’s approach and their inability to answer basic questions.

“What homes are in the district? That can’t be answered because apparently, until the research begins, they won’t know. How will a vote be taken? They don’t know. Will prices increase? They don’t know,” she recalled. “They did say that you’re not going to be able to do the cheapest repairs or buy the cheapest door at Home Depot, which I mean, of course not. But actual numbers are just not provided.”

WMAN subsequently set up a fourth public meeting, in early November, to give residents another opportunity to air their concerns, and a fifth meeting is planned.

“I strongly supported just having a community conversation so that these questions could come to the table, so everyone had an opportunity to voice their opinion and concerns,” said preservation committee member Lisa Kolakowsky-Smith, who is an architectural historian. “They’re legitimate — every person’s concern is a legitimate concern.”

Adams and her neighbors also met separately with WMAN executive director Josephine Winter and Floyd-Carroll, who pulled together a list of city programs that can help residents affordably maintain their historic homes.

Morrie Zimmerman, an architect who is helping lead WMAN’s preservation initiative, referred questions about the meetings to Winter. 

Stymied by a lack of data

Steinke said one of the challenges with the designation process is that “probably 98% of the population,” including owners of historic homes, don’t know the city’s regulations. Some harbor misconceptions, for example that they’re going to be forced to paint their house a certain color after designation, he said. 

That may be in part because it’s no one’s job to educate the public at large. Historical Commission staff and volunteers like the WMAN committee members are available to answer questions, but they are preservation advocates rather than impartial providers of information. 

Adams described the presentation she saw as being “like a sales pitch.” WMAN invited a preservation supporter from the Powelton Village historic district to speak at a meeting, but Adams said she’d be interested in hearing a counter-perspective from homeowners who have struggled to afford repairs, or had other poor experiences following designation.

“I guess I’ll have to try and get somebody to come out from, I don’t know, the anti-Preservation Alliance,” Steinke quipped. “I forget where their headquarters is, who’s on their board, but somebody from there would be great.”

“I’m not going to fulfill that role,” he said.

Winter said she runs WMAN on behalf of residents and doesn’t take a position on designation. She noted that she’s the organization’s only paid employee.

“Assembling a group of people who have had a wide range of experiences with designation would be great, but also labor-intensive, and probably beyond the scope of what we have capacity for,” she said. “But if somebody wanted to do that, I would absolutely help provide a room and get as many people as I could to attend.”

Another issue is the lack of data on the effects of historic designation. Some studies around the country have shown that homes in historic districts appreciate in value more quickly than other properties, although it’s not clear if that’s due to designation or other factors. Some studies show the opposite effect. Restrictions associated with designated homes could deter buyers and actually suppress home values in some places. 

“I always say what happens to a neighborhood is more influenced by macroeconomic factors — jobs, nearby schools, crime. That will dictate more about neighborhood trajectories than whether or not there’s any kind of historic regulation,” Steinke said.

There doesn’t appear to be any research on how designation affects spending on exterior repairs, like replacing doors and windows. It’s often assumed that short-term costs will be higher because new or replaced building elements have to fit the Historical Commission’s guidelines for quality and historic accuracy.

“Historic designation will not always allow you to do the cheapest and most expedient thing,” Steinke said. “It will recommend more durable materials that will last longer, but may cost more. Not always, but sometimes. Slate roofs come up as an example, or windows, constantly.”

Deciding how to decide

Then there’s the procedural question of how to decide whether to pursue the lengthy and sometimes costly process of researching hundreds of homes, assembling archival materials, writing a report, and going through the Historical Commission review process.

Anybody can nominate a home or district to be designated, including non-residents. For districts, a registered community organization like WMAN will often organize the effort, with the group leaders or a set of members spearheading the work and submitting the nomination. In Powelton Village, members of the local RCO voted to move ahead with the process, but there’s no rule requiring a vote.

WMAN must now decide, essentially, how to decide whether to endorse the idea of nomination and hire a consultant, Winter said.

“We have not yet started the process because we don’t know if that’s what the neighbors really want, and West Mount Airy Neighbors as an organization will not move forward in supporting the designation unless we know for sure that the neighbors support it,” she said. “We have to talk to the neighbors, and they have to help us figure out, what does consensus mean to them?”

Winter said the WMAN committee might have put “the cart before the horse” by applying for the Keystone grant before conducting community engagement. Meanwhile, Steinke, who has observed the development of many nominations over the years, argues the group should just start the process and leave a final decision for later on.

“They’re trying to find an elusive consensus, whereas other RCOs have had strong consensus in their leadership to go out and write a nomination and then sell it to the community. That’s what I suggested that Morrie do, is write the nomination,” he said.

“You know, people want to know what the boundaries are. That hasn’t been decided yet. People want to know why it deserves historic district status, and the nomination covers that,” Steinke said. “So that’s been my suggestion.”

The post In West Mt. Airy, wrestling over whether to pursue historic designation appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY.