The Academy of Music balconies were falling apart. Here’s how they’re being fixed.

To many, the Academy of Music rises above Broad and Locust “perfectly plain and simple like a market-house,” as one of its architects is said to have described it.

In reality, the exterior of the 1857 theater — still the city’s formal parlor for everything from Broadway shows and The Nutcracker to college graduations — is a more subtle mix of materials and textures. The eye doesn’t have to follow stretches of utilitarian brick for long before meeting nodes of great detail.

Detail often means brownstone. It wraps around parts of the building, and over the years the soft, porous substance has crumbled. Today, little of what appears to be original brownstone actually is, as it has been patched, reinforced, and recoated with various materials.

The condition of the exterior has taken on greater urgency in recent years. A 2015 inspection of the two exterior brownstone balconies found substantial deterioration, and in 2019 the balconies — which hover above patrons as they enter the building on both the Broad and Locust Street sides — were fitted with netting to catch falling debris.

Now the Academy’s stewards are aiming to stabilize and preserve the balconies for what they hope is a good long time. This summer, workers have been taking the damaged brownstone balconies down to the core and replacing old materials with composite materials carefully matched in color and texture.

The classic architectural preservationist’s refrain — that the successful project is one in which no one knows the preservationist has been there — may not apply here.

“What we’re excited about is we are restoring these balconies to a really high level of architectural detail, and one we haven’t seen for decades,” said Caroline “Cackie” B. Rogers, chair of the Academy’s board of trustees. “We’ve worked really hard looking at historical photos and records to make sure that we are staying true to 1857, but with materials that should hold up a lot better.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra and its volunteer Academy board have raised and spent about $80 million since 1994 on improvements — including reversing previous historically insensitive renovations.

The brackets beneath the balconies, for instance, had been given a coating thick enough that they largely lost their detail, and this layer had to be peeled back to understand what was underneath.

“We started removing some coating and then realized we needed to remove more coating, and more coating. And then we were like, ‘What are we looking at?’ There’s cracking all over this, it’s not acting like brownstone,” said Ari Seraphin, a project manager for the structural engineering firm Keast & Hood, in a presentation last year to the local chapter of the Association for Preservation Technology. “We were really trying to figure out what people had done to this thing over the years, because everywhere we went there were multiple repairs.”

With so many generations of repairs using so many different materials, the project’s consultants began referring to the accidental composite as “fruitcake,” said Kathryn Brown, a preservation and materials consultant on the project from the Philadelphia office of Building Conservation Associates.

Natural brownstone was considered as a replacement, but the quarry in Connecticut that was the original source of the stone is closed. The idea of re-creating brackets, balustrades, and ornaments in brownstone from other quarries in China and Canada were considered.

“We got samples and they were not a good match,” said architect Sam Olshin of Philadelphia’s Atkin Olshin Schade Architects.

And so new pieces fashioned from cast stone and glass fiber reinforced concrete were made. Olshin re-created the details from looking at remaining ornamental work as well as historic photographs.

The new brackets will fit over the old shaved-down brownstone like enormous dental crowns.

“It will look just the way the old ones did, including all the shadows and scrolls and detail work,” says Olshin, “and hidden inside the brownstone bracket is the original cast-iron beam which is doing the structural work.”

At the same time as this summer’s balcony restoration, a new exterior lighting scheme is being installed. That project, funded by former Academy chair Joanna McNeil Lewis, will light building details from the balcony up to the cornice that lines the edge of the roof.

The $1.6 million in renovations of the Academy is being paid for by private donations, a continuation of restoration efforts launched nearly three decades ago. Old stage rigging was updated. The ballroom was restored, a new chandelier was designed for the main auditorium, and all the seats were replaced.

Much of the current work stems from a 2015 assessment Keast & Hood conducted in compliance with the city’s façade inspection ordinance.

That survey turned up a list of repairs, including typical masonry problems such as brick movement and erosion, relaxing arches and cracking. The deteriorating brownstone keystone at the top that says 1857 American Academy of Music was restored. The cupola atop the building was repaired and painted, completed in 2021.

The building has long been owned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and, more recently, managed by the Kimmel Center. With the 2021 merger of the two organizations, handling the ongoing restoration has become “much easier,” says Matías Tarnopolsky, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center Inc.

“We can make decisions so much more quickly, we can get work done much more efficiently, and we can speak in one voice to the many generous donors that help in the restoration project,” he said.

The Academy’s restoration needs are substantial. Its roof is in need of attention. A project to replace about 200 poorly matched bricks on the exterior and all of the mortar is on the drawing boards. The stone floor in the lobby and ambulatory (the horseshoe-shaped area between the lobby and main auditorium) will be replaced at some point. And the quoins — the large horizontal bands where the exterior walls meet at the corner of Broad and Locust Street — are being repaired or replaced as part of a pilot project to test which materials might work there and on the building’s other quoins.

Both the balcony and the quoin pilot projects are slated to be completed by early 2023.

The restoration of the damaged gilded mural on the Academy ceiling of the hall is still unaddressed.

Being able to woo donors with all aspects of the Academy of Music — the building as well as its increasingly diverse programming from opera to comedians — is an advantage made possible by the merger, Tarnopolsky says.

“Donors are inspired by a vision of a restored Academy of Music, and they have been part of the decision-making process in terms of the priorities for the restoration of the Academy.”

The Academy provides a healthy stream of revenue through its Broadway series, so its condition and historic allure are tied to the combined organization’s overall success.

Says Tarnopolsky: “All of these significant projects and improvements are part of a long-term strategy to ensure that Philadelphia’s beloved Academy of Music will be forever well-appointed and looked after.”