Pa. School for the Deaf wants to raze historic house to improve student safety and campus parking

The Philadelphia Historical Commission is scheduled to vote Friday on a request by the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf to demolish a 19th-century house adjacent to the private school’s Germantown campus.

The school bought the property in 2019. The house previously was used as a residence for troubled teens and had been nominated for the city’s register of historic places.

The Historical Commission’s financial hardship committee concluded last month — after 10 hours of presentations at two meetings — that repurposing the structure at 156 W. School House Lane would not meet the school’s needs.

School officials describe the demolition as part of a plan to improve vehicular and foot traffic safety on the K-12 day school campus, where about 145 students are enrolled. Using part of the one-acre house site for parking would free up ground elsewhere on campus for construction of student dining and meeting space.

“Approval by the Philadelphia Historical Commission is necessary for [PSD] to execute our plan to reorganize our campus and provide vital new facilities that will improve the educational opportunities and safety of our students,” Melissa Draganac-Hawk, head of school, said in a written statement.

“We are asking the commission to prioritize the well-being of PSD’s students, whose educational needs may be different from those [at] traditional, non-deaf schools, but who also deserve a safe school environment in which to learn,” Draganac-Hawk said.

The Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia and the Penn Knox Neighborhood Association, as well as School House Lane residents and other preservation advocates, contend that the school could improve its campus and enhance student safety without destroying a building they see as an important piece of Germantown’s character.

“We want the children who attend the school to have the best of the best,” Penn Knox chairperson Deneene Brockington said. “But even one house being demolished and replaced with a parking lot is really going to be impactful.”

Preservation Alliance executive director Paul Steinke said: “PSD knew 156 School House Lane was nominated for the register when they bought it; they fought the nomination and lost, and still, they want to tear it down.”

“If this building is allowed to be demolished, what purpose does the Historical Commission serve?” he said. “There’s no question [a new buyer] would be willing to redevelop it for residential use. Demolishing it is antithetical to what we should be doing as a city.”

Spokesperson Bruce Bohri said the commission has “considered all suggested alternatives extensively.”

During a presentation at the Nov. 28 meeting of the financial hardship committee, Draganac-Hawk said the campus improvements would provide students much-needed opportunities to learn language they may not have access to anywhere else.

And reconfiguring campus driveways, sidewalks, interior roadways, and parking areas would give students and staff in the Early Childhood Center safer access to the library and art studio on the other side of campus, she said through a sign language interpreter.

About 40% of her students have a disability in addition to deafness, about 80% are students of color, and 71% are city residents, she said. Forty-five school buses serve the campus daily, and the one-way entrance driveway crosses the School House Lane sidewalk.

Professionals the school hired to evaluate 156 School House said it would cost $3.5 million to “just to make it functional, but not usable by us” without additional expense, Draganac-Hawk said.

According to Bohri, “the Historical Commission’s executive director and a historic preservation planner inspected the building ... [and] concluded that the building is in very poor condition. The house would require full rehabilitation to reuse it.”

In addition, he said that all mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems would need to be replaced, “floors show signs of settling, which may point to structural problems. Two ceilings have collapsed. Some rooms show evidence of many years of water infiltration.”

At that financial hardship meeting, Mark D. Apodaca, chairman of the school’s board of trustees, said through an interpreter that the school is running a deficit.

“In fiscal year 2023, it was a little over $600,000, and we will have a deficit of over $900,000 in FY 2024,” he said. “We have to tread carefully financially in hopes [of receiving] state funding, or fundraising, to cover that deficit. We have to be very conservative when it comes to spending right now.”

Irwin Trauss a lawyer, and his wife, Georgette Bartell, a retired lactation consultant, live across School House Lane from the house. They and others insist it could be redeveloped and repurposed for much less than $3.5 million.

The couple moved to the neighborhood from Center City in 1981. Three years later, Trauss helped Pennsylvania School for the Deaf move to what had previously been the Germantown Academy campus.

Later, he and several business partners purchased and renovated the corner apartment building at School House and Wayne Avenue, which was once a center of the crack cocaine trade, he said. At the time, the building was almost entirely vacant, according to Trauss. More recently, he and others in the neighborhood offered to buy 156 School House to save it from demolition.

The school “says this isn’t about parking,” Trauss said. “But for 36 parking spaces, they’re taking down the building and creating a three-lane highway in and out of the campus.”

Tearing down the house would set “a very bad precedent for historic preservation because [it suggests] that a nonprofit can buy a historic building, decide they can’t use it, and get it [approved] for demolition,” he said.

Yvonne Haskins, a lawyer and longtime historic preservation advocate in Northwest Philly, said Germantown and other neighborhoods already had lost too many bits and pieces of themselves. The historical and architectural heritage of this diverse section of the city is an asset not to be squandered, she said.

“We need to be able to rely on the Historical Commission to make it really hard for someone to get the right to demolish a building and to require owners to demonstrate they’ve done everything possible to save it,” Haskins said.

Brockington believes there’s still a way to save 156 School House Lane.

“I believe there is a solution, but we’ve never been able to get to that point because of [PSD’s] unwillingness to sit down with us,” she said. “We have to spend some time together so the school can get what they need and the neighborhood doesn’t have to lose the house.”

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