A Little Help From Their Friends

by Daniel Brook

Philadelphia is a big city -- so big that even a top-notch organization like the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia can’t keep tabs on the whole thing. That’s why the alliance is soliciting nominations of endangered properties from neighborhood groups and individuals.

"I am hoping that people will suggest things that I or four or five preservationists wouldn't come up with on our own," says John Gallery, executive director for the group, which promotes the appreciation, protection and revitalization of the region's historic buildings, communities and landscapes. "I'm hoping for a list that's not just the Boyd Theatre [and] the Naval Home," two well-known endangered structures that have received loads of public attention during the past year.

Architect Henry Magaziner is nominating the Uptown Theater on the 2200 block of North Broad Street. The Uptown, designed by Magaziner's late father, Louis, was an early screening room for "talkies." Henry Magaziner says he hopes that generating attention for the unused building will spur nearby Temple University to rehab the venue for use in its music program.

Joanne Jackson, who heads the Advocate Community Development Corporation in North Philadelphia near Temple University, is planning to nominate entire neighborhood blocks that contain buildings from the 1890s, such as Diamond Street from Carlisle Street (between Broad and 15th) to 20th.

"Because there are so few buildings in North Philadelphia -- other than Girard College -- that are mentioned in any of the standard architectural guides to the city, they have been lost to the general consciousness," Jackson says. "We have very few opportunities to educate people who are new to the city or are interested in architecture that these buildings exist."

Focusing its attention more sharply, the Germantown Historical Society is nominating Germantown Town Hall, which was built in 1923. The classical revival-style structure, which boasts a marble rotunda, is owned by the city and has sat vacant for years. According to the Germantown Historical Society's nominating petition, the Germantown Avenue building is in danger of demolition by neglect.

Gallery says the nomination program is based on one pioneered by Historic Boston, a Massachusetts historic preservation group. Gallery says that the goal of the Historic Boston program, and of his own, is ultimately to identify policy changes that could help preserve these threatened structures. "On the one hand the goal is to identify key buildings that need some help, but it's also to see whether there are some fundamental policies that would be helpful to a class of building."