Pushing preservation of Philly neighborhoods by tearing down a 19th-century house

A "funeral" for a Mantua row home draws a crowd of 300. Shortly thereafter, the tumbledown structure was demolished.

FAREWELL: A gospel choir, flowers and speeches are part of the funeral ceremony for the row home.
Mark Stehle

Who would think that the best way to make a point about preservation was to tear down a dilapidated row home?

The ceremonial demolition of the derelict Mantua house on Saturday was designed to encourage Philadelphia’s neighborhoods to work harder to save their history rather than being so quick to tear down the buildings that contain centuries worth of memories, hopes and dreams.

Patrick Grossi, project manager of the event, titled Funeral for a Home, said he wanted to highlight the value of one unremarkable building as a rich repository of social history, in the hope the event would lead others to think twice before replacing their old homes with new ones.

“We are focusing on just this one little house on this quiet block in a neighborhood in West Philadelphia to offer a moment of pause, and a reminder that these houses come down far too often,” Grossi said in an interview. “The core idea is that we are taking this one house down so that we can keep many of the others that remain standing up.”

He spoke after a excavator tore the cornice off of 3711 Melon St., beginning the process of demolition, after an hour-long ceremony attended by about 300 people to celebrate the life of the house which had stood near the corner of 37th Street since about 1872.

Speakers and neighbors recalled Leona Richardson, who bought the house in 1946, and lived there with her son, Roger, until the 1990s when she moved into a nearby house. Vacant and neglected, 3711 then became a magnet for drug dealers, according to 91-year-old Audrey Davis, who has lived across the street since 1948, and had a grandstand view of Saturday’s ceremony from a chair on her front porch.

“It was an eyesore, and it was causing a lot of problems, with a lot of people going in and out,” Davis said.

She welcomed the demolition, and said the ceremony united the community, as well as attracted people from around the city and the country, including two nieces of Richardson who came from Ohio and California.

Davis said she wasn’t sure why the ceremony was taking place or what improvements it would bring to her neighborhood, but she hoped it would be a force for good.

“I’m surprised and excited and I wonder why they are having it because this is the first time I ever heard of a house having a funeral,” she said. “I think it’s a good thing, it’s a new thing, and, to me, I want to see how it’s going to work out.”

She welcomed the prospect of new homes going up across the street. “I would love to see new houses, not just empty lots,” she said.

Like many neighboring properties, 3711 was built as a rental unit for Irish-American manufacturing workers. After Richardson’s 2002 death, it was bought by West Philadelphia Real Estate, a developer that plans to build affordable-housing rental units on the lot and adjoining parcels, Grossi said.

The ceremony was billed as a “Homegoing Celebration,” but the organizers sought to create a funereal atmosphere, wearing black suits and dresses and handing out black-bordered order-of-service cards. Even the excavator had a black sash tied around its steel arm. 

The event was produced by Temple Contemporary, the exhibitions and public programming department at Temple’s Tyler School of Art, and won a grant of $160,000 from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Grossi said. It was designed by brothers Billy and Steven Dufala, local multimedia artists.

Speakers reminisced about the Mantua they had grown up in, drawing murmurs of acknowledgement from the crowd. Ardie Stuart Brown, 67, an educator who has lived in the neighborhood since 1951, recalled a drug store, a butcher shop and a fire station that had been familiar features in earlier years.

“Let us never forget 3711 and the other attached houses that were here,” Brown told the audience. “So long, 3711, your presence will last in our memories.”

Pastor Harry Moore Sr. of the Mount Olive Bap-tist Church around the corner on 37th Street rebutted questions about the value of the ceremony by telling “mourners” that the demolition represented an opportunity for renewal in a predominantly African-American community that has been hurt by high levels of crime, poverty and unemployment.

“This funeral ceremony is a symbol of a resurrection,” said Moore, speaking at a lectern built with sections of 3711’s front door, complete with a real estate agent’s combination lock. 

After fond reminiscences and promises of renewal, the mood briefly turned dark when the excavator’s menacing black claw began its work, plucking a thick wreath of flowers from the full width of the house’s cornice. After gently dropping the flowers in a black dumpster, the machine tore at the cornice, sending down a shower of broken lumber and mortar, the first debris of the full demolition that would take place later in the day.

The demolition of one row house may be the latest step in a process of renewal that got a boost earlier this year with President Obama’s selection of Mantua as one of five national Promise Zones, offer-ing extra federal help for economic development.

De’Wayne Drummond, president of the Mantua Civic Association, said many residents were unclear about how the Promise Zone status is going to help the neigh-bor-hood, but he expressed hope that the community will be ener-gized by the row-house fun-eral combined with the federal program.

“I think this is a wake-up call, that the community is going to realize that we are on a national stage and there are resources there for us so that we can come out of this poverty-stained mindset,” Drummond said.

Grossi argued that the strength of community shown on Saturday was a sign that the Promise Zone process, though currently amorphous, will reflect the wishes of Mantua’s residents, and not those of outside agencies, or the market forces that could lead to gentrification.

“Whatever is going to happen here is going to happen on our terms,” he said.

With 3711 gone, one side of that block has only two homes standing, a reminder of the “gap-tooth” pattern of many older blocks where empty lots and abandoned buildings — together totaling an estimated 40,000 properties citywide — surround the homes of occupants who struggle to hold back urban blight. That battle might be easier to win if people adopt the lessons of Funeral for a Home, and work harder to preserve the buildings that are an essential part of Philadelphia’s identity, Grossi argued.

“In many ways, Philadelphia’s built environment is defined by the row home,” he said. “It is really the most important piece of Philly’s architectural iconography, and we’re losing it.”