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I was really grateful and I feel like I’m preaching to the choir here so, forgive me
if I am, but I was really pleased to be asked to assemble this talk because it forced me
to think about what the term “preservation” has meant to me over so many years and how
dramatically that meaning has expanded and changed since I began working in the field
in the 1960’s, early 1960’s. As a result of my training in the Philadelphia
office of the National Park Service, with the Historic American Building Survey and
with the Branch of Restorations, I very quickly learned that the first step in preservation
is documentation. At that time the office was directed by Charles Peterson and Lee Nelson
and Penny Batchler and others. So it could not have been a better place for me to start
in the preservation field because they were at the top of the game. Without understanding
and documentation which is so important in any preservation project, because without
understanding and knowing everything possible about a historic building or site or object,
it’s really impossible to develop a sound rational and effective plan for preserving
it. There are lots of questions that one has to address when talking about documentation.
First of all, what is it? Is it a building, is it a site, is it a landscape, is it a bridge,
is it a water tower, an archeological site, what is it that we’re hoping to preserve?
What is its significance? Was it a venue for an important historical event? Is it just
a great piece of architecture or is it a representative piece of architecture, one of many that represents
a certain kind of building type or function? Does it represent an important advance in
technology like the Gruber Wagon Works and that was a great project but you give me way
too much credit, way, way, too much credit. Keystone Hood was so great and your firm was
so great that I think if I remember correctly, one of the reasons that you were successful
in the bidding process is that you checked the weather and you knew when the ground froze
and when you could move it without a lot of equipment because it had to go quite a distance
and that was a really important part of that. How does this resource, building or whatever,
relate to other similar resources? Is it unique? Is it rare or is it just a representative
example of a type of resource? What did it look like originally and how has it changed
over time and if it has, are the changes significant or do the changes compromise the integrity
of the original object?
How should it be treated? Should it be restored, conserved, adapted, rehabilitated or all of
the above? What function will it serve? How should it be interpreteted because if we are
going to preserve an object or a building, we need to think about what people can learn
from the process of preservation. The answers to all of these questions and many other questions
will provide a basis for developing a treatment philosophy. What should we do with this building?
I’m going to use since I’ve been involved in this preservation business since the early
1960’s with Charlie Peterson, I’m going to use some of my own personal projects as
examples, because I’ve traveled a route that pretty much parallels the evolution of
the term preservation. One of my first projects, and I never get tired of talking about this
because this was an amazing project, is the restoration of a little building on Chester
Creek and Delaware County called the Caleb Pusey House. I’m going to apply some of
the questions that I just posed a minute ago. This is a very well documented late 17th century
residence of the business partner of William Penn in establishing a milling operation in
southeastern Pennsylvania. It’s a relatively rare, not a relatively, it is a very rare
surviving example of a building erected by an immigrant from England employing design
and construction practices that he had learned in England. I don’t know whether the light
compromises this but, I had never worked on a 17th century house anywhere and never worked
on an English 17th century house, so I needed to go to England and find out what the people
who built this house lived in and what their houses looked like. So I went to the village
of Upper Lambourn in Berkshire, and I found the village that Caleb Pusey came from and
the house that he may have lived in, but certainly in the village that he came from, looks an
awful lot like what he built on Chester Creek. It has the same material, stone. Brick is
mixed in with the stone to give it some character and color. The roof form is very similar and
it was a real eye opener for me because I realized where the tradition came from because
I saw the village that it came from. So this building was acquired by a very dedicated
group of residents in Delaware County in the late 1950’s. They planned and funded the
restoration, planned and funded extensive archeological investigation, and they continue
to manage the site today. It’s wonderful because I call them up and I make an appointment
and I take my students from Penn down there to see it. Thinking about this issue of treatment
philosophy, we know what this is, but what does restore mean when you apply it to this
building. Does it mean returning it to its original 1682 configuration which is half
of the size of the one that’s there now? The one that’s there now has a gambar roof
but the original one had a gable roof. In 1696 it was expanded to the left with a small
utilitarian addition. In 1750 the gambar roof was added and the building was raised a bit.
So do we pick a historic period and restore it to that. If we go to the original period,
we tear half the building down. If we go to the second period, 1696, we take the gambar
roof off but the gambar roof was a very important part of its documentation. It appears in ledgers
and descriptions of the property of being raised to this wonderful gambar roof. So,
I think you need to consider all of those alternative treatment options before landing
on the right one and they landed on the right one there, which was to preserve the building
to its 1750’s appearance, thereby retaining a great deal, most of the original and 18th
century historic fabric. I’m sure many of you know the Woodlands
or know of the Woodlands. This is a marvelous house in the Woodlands Cemetery in west Philadelphia.
Documentation was the critical first step in deciding the most appropriate treatment
for the Woodlands. The mansion was constructed and expanded under the direction of William
Hamilton over a period of forty years beginning in 1770 and extending into the early 19th
century. The current project is administered by the Woodlands Trust for Historic Preservation
and the first step was to do an incremental historic structure report. The reason that
it was incremental is that there were very serious issues with the façade which needed
to be addressed before an HSR was done for the entire building. So the incremental report
dealt primarily with the façade. What the architectural investigations and the archival
research indicated was that this building probably looked something like the upper left
hand corner in the images in 1770. Then in 1774, those little angular bays were added,
symmetrically added, one on each side. Then in 1789, Hamilton had just come back from
the grand tour of England, where he had seen the great architecture being created there.
He was really inspired, so he expanded his smaller Woodlands with symmetrical wings in
a very high style of design. Then by 1813, you see the little yellow figure on the back,
those were pavilions that were added on top of a fantastic cryptoporticus and stairs we
think were added around the portico that shows in yellow.
After Hamilton died, the building became under the ownership of the cemetery company and
they made some changes. So I guess the obvious question is well where do we land on a treatment
philosophy? We certainly don’t land on 1770 because we’d take down so much of the important
architecture but where do we land in-between and the decision was really made that William
Hamilton was certainly the most important person to ever occupy it and had such a profound
impact on its architecture and the style of its architecture, that the restoration or
the treatment approach should be to respect the building as it evolved through his lifetime
about 1813. It can’t be as cut and dried as that because
if we go to 1813, as a practical matter we don’t know enough about those stairs that
wrapped around the portico to put them back, so it would be totally conjectural. From a
very practical standpoint, there are vandalism problems in the cemetery and what you don’t
want is an easily accessible wonderful flight of stairs that comes up into the main parlor.
So the decision was made not to put them back even though we’re pretty sure that they
were there. So the lesson learned here is that it’s
hard to say okay 1813 and everything goes back to that because you probably can’t
achieve that without some conjecture or doing something that you really don’t want to
do. The next project I’d like to talk about
just for a minute is Franklin Court, which you all know and I think there’s a visit
there tomorrow. It’s very close to here and it evolved from the early 18th century
through the 20th century. In the earlier part of the 18th century, there was a range of
very small two and a half story colonial buildings on this site. Over time, they were enlarged.
Franklin in 1785, I think that’s the right date, built the two large center sections
right there with an arch through it and that’s the carriage way which accessed his personal
residence in the court. He began building that house in 1763 and the Market Street houses,
as they were called, were very important feature to screen his private courtyard and garden
and house from very busy Market Street. After Franklin died, the property was sold.
These Market Street houses were significantly altered. The front and back facades were torn
off. They were raised in height. Floor levels were changed. Most of the interior features
were taken out. Fireplaces, woodwork and they became commercial buildings, loft buildings.
So the park acquired the property and knew that this was the site of Franklin’s house
and decided to undertake a project for the Bicentennial to preserve and interpret this
site. There are many options here. What should they do? The Market Street houses were so
totally renovated that was it worth keeping them. The only thing that really survived
in the Market Street houses were the party walls that separated the five houses. On those
party walls was an incredible amount of physical evidence showing or explaining what the original
houses had looked like, how tall they were, where the woodwork was, where the floor levels,
the stairs, the doors, all kinds of things. Franklin’s house was torn down. There just
wasn’t enough architectural or archival evidence to reconstruct it but there was enough
to reconstruct the front and back facades of the Market Street houses and adapt them
to new uses. So this project is a really good example of
the combination of conservation in terms of the archeological ruins, conservation of evidence
of the original houses, rehabilitation, reconstruction, and adaptation and interpretation. So this
is a marvelous project and I know you’re going to see that tomorrow. I think this is
one of the most refreshing and peaceful spaces in Philadelphia. It’s just a wonderful court
and Venturi and Rauch and Scott Brown’s Ghost Structure is certainly an iconic image
of Franklin Court. The next building I’d like to show you and
this is totally different from anything we’ve seen. This is Fonthill, as you know. It was
built by a remarkable man named Henry Chapman Mercer in the early part of the 20th century
and it was part of a collection of three buildings, actually four that he built in Doylestown.
The lower one is the pottery and tile works, the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works but the
upper one is Mercer’s own house. This is a different kind of preservation project because
the building survived into the 21st century pretty much in the form that Mercer originally
envisioned it. The building was not subjected to the kinds of physical change often experienced
by other historic buildings like Franklin Court. It wasn’t added too, it wasn’t
altered, it wasn’t upgraded stylistically. It just plain survived and one of the reasons
it did is because Mercer built it of concrete, reinforced concrete and although he wasn’t
an engineer, he had a basic understanding of how concrete and reinforcement worked together.
He developed a method for building these incredible vaults, ceiling vaults, by building a scaffolding
platform up to the spring point of the vault, putting sand and dirt and covered with canvas
or burlap on top of the mound and then building the vault over it. When the masonry cured,
he pulled the scaffolding out and he had a vault but what was really amazing to imagine
that he cast the tile into the concrete because he placed it on top of this mound of sand
and soil. So I never go in that building and not totally blown away by what he accomplished
there, and I kept saying that I had the feeling that I could work for another hundred years
and I would never be as talented and do so much as Henry Chapman Mercer did.
So we think that his building was built not only as a residence but also to display his
tile work. So here we have the option or the challenge, what do we do with this? Well,
this is a conservation project. The only real problems were water and infiltration, which
was a result of imperfections, originally cast imperfections in the concrete and the
roofs and the window frames and things like that that could deteriorate. But structurally,
it was perfectly fine; there was no structural intervention necessary. So really it was a
matter of cleaning off the biological growth, repairing the concrete spalls where the concrete
had popped out and was exposing reinforcing material. Bye the way the reinforcing material
was anything that happened to be lying around the farm. It could be fence posts, turkey
wire, real reinforcing bars, he built this himself and he knew where to put this stuff
to make it work, so it’s really a marvel. So it was repairing spalls, it was making
sure that the balconies didn’t leak and the roofs didn’t leak and it was really
basically to keep the water out. So that’s a conservation project, not a restoration
project. Another very different kind of project is
the Majestic Theater in Gettysburg. This was opened in 1925 as a vaudeville theater and
movie house. In the 1950’s, President Eisenhower and Mamie Eisenhower regularly attended performances
at the Gettysburg Theater, often in the company of world leaders.
There was a ballroom adjacent to the theater that Eisenhower used as his press conference
location whenever he was in Gettysburg and particularly during his recovery from his
heart attack. In the 1980’s the auditorium and the stage were converted into three little
movie theaters and there was a tremendous amount of damage as you can see in the upper
slide there. The decision was made and the Gettysburg College
was involved in this and they had initiated a project to restore the theater and the auditorium
to the way it looked in 1925 but to adapt the ballroom, because you didn’t need a
ballroom in Gettysburg anymore, to serve a variety of purposes including a changing art
gallery for the College and for other organizations. The 1950’s marquee was restored. A new café
was built in part of the ballroom space and called Mamie’s, and a large new addition
was built on the back to accommodate modern theater requirements. It now has full back
of the house capabilities as a performing arts theater. So here’s a project that you
don’t establish a cutoff date and say okay, I’m going to restore it to 1950, you say
I’m going to restore the auditorium to 1925, the ballroom is going to become something
else, we’re going to put a café in and we have a little extra space so let’s put
in two small movie theaters, which Gettysburg very much needed.
So this was a pretty fascinating sort of combination of preservation, conservation, rehabilitation,
and new construction. The last one I want to show you is the Church
of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr. This was designed in 1880 by Charles Burns, a noted Episcopal
Church architect, in the English gothic revival style. The church and the rectory sit on a
beautiful eleven acre wooded site. The exteriors of the building are stone with brick and limestone
detailing, slate roof, the interior of the church incorporates very finely detailed polychrome
brickwork and tile and beautiful stain glass windows. This was really a restoration project
and with the addition of a very small wing on the right you see comes out perpendicularly
to provide space for accessible rest rooms and a secondary means of egress.
The chancel was reconfigured to satisfy current day liturgical requirements. The tile floor
was restored really or replaced based on fragments that were found and all of the interior finishes
were cleaned and redone and repainted in their original colors and new lighting was installed.
This is pretty much of a restoration project. Not all congregations have the resources obviously
for such an undertaking. Partners for Sacred Places, a national organization based in Philadelphia
is working, and I just talked to Bob Yeager about this, on an innovative program to introduce
small performing arts organizations without homes to churches which have ready-made and
underutilized spaces that could accommodate the programs of these smaller organizations.
So I think it’s a wonderful program and Partners is a great organization and they
should be supported. Thanks very much and Cindy McCloud follows
me with discussion of tax incentive projects.