Bryn Mawr's Central Avenue: Victim of revitalization

If for only a moment, Bryn Mawr's desolate Central Avenue came to life again, with brick rowhouses reappearing on empty lots and smiles on long-gone faces.

There was Jane Mowbray, the Irish lass whose muffins, cookies and scones were legend from one end of the block to the other.

And Charles "Chas" McGarvey, whose wild shots in street hockey were immortalized on more than a few parked cars.

And Dolores McNamara, who could keep a party rocking till dawn with husband Joe's accordion hits.

By that evening this past June, the decades-long bond among them and their Central Avenue neighbors was just a reminiscence, a slide show lighting up a screen in the Lower Merion Township Building's public room. Afterward, the township commissioners would push forward with their plan for the continued makeover of this flagging Main Line village, an effort jump-started several years ago by Bryn Mawr Hospital.

But as the photos pressed home, saving the town's economic life already had jeopardized something special about Bryn Mawr - its sense of community.

A single block long, leading from the Lancaster Avenue shopping strip toward Bryn Mawr Hospital, Central used to be a working-class street of 28 rowhouses and twins built in the 1910s and '20s, a nook of what is now called affordable housing in one of the region's priciest suburbs.

Today, 10 houses remain on Central, only two of them occupied. In the last six years, the hospital has spent more than $6.5 million to buy and bulldoze the properties - a small part of a $100 million-plus expansion that administrators say is essential if the institution, and 2,000 jobs, is to stay in the town of its founding in 1893.

This month, ground is to be broken for a four-story, 141,000-square-foot medical office building just around the corner from Central's south end. The hospital's planners have talked of refilling Central itself with more medical offices, as well as restaurants and boutiques topped with high-end condos and served by a parking garage.

"We see ourselves having participated in a planned process . . . to ensure a vibrant community," Andrea Gilbert, president of Bryn Mawr Hospital, said in an interview. "I don't feel the hospital has destroyed a neighborhood."

Revitalization fever has spread to Bryn Mawr's business district. There, zoning passed by the commissioners that June night conjures up a vista of buildings up to five stories tall, and a stylish mix of offices, stores and apartments.

"We need it," said Charlie Waters, owner of a downtown fixture, Suburban Hardware. "We're losing businesses and we're losing shoppers." But with big changes on the horizon, he said, "I definitely see a bright future."

The cloud of dissension in this sunny outlook hangs over lonely Central Avenue.

It is reminiscent of the urban-renewal efforts of the 1960s, when working-class neighborhoods were bulldozed willy-nilly for redevelopment, said State Rep. Robert Freeman, a Democrat from Easton who has championed the revival of old towns.

The razing of Central flies in the face of a new wisdom: To successfully revitalize a business district, be sure to preserve the neighborhoods around it.

Indeed, for the last four years, Pennsylvania's "Elm Street" program has advanced that philosophy across the region with $20 million in grants for neighborhood renewal in older communities, from Kennett Square and West Chester to the Kensington and Mount Airy sections of the city.

"You want to try and preserve as much of your residential base in proximity to your commercial core as you possibly can," said Freeman, chief sponsor of the Elm Street legislation.

Leigh Anne Smith, a paralegal and Bryn Mawr resident, never lived on Central. But for the last couple of years, she has campaigned to have it returned to its original function. She and former Central denizen Janet Giersch compiled the slide show for the commissioners, and implored them to re-create "a beloved neighborhood" where people "really looked upon one another . . . as extended family."

Anything less, Smith told them, would render Bryn Mawr's revival "a failure."

Among the commissioners are those who regret what has happened to Central. The gutting of the block was "a mistake," said V. Scott Zelov, whose district includes Bryn Mawr. "Now we've got to figure out how to fix it."

Central had been home to a mail carrier, a nurse, a grocery clerk, a plumber, a housekeeper, a pharmacy technician, and other self-described "average people" of predominately Irish Catholic persuasion. Together they raised children, celebrated weddings, mourned deaths, and formed the backbone of the Bryn Mawr Fire Company, a sprint from their homes.

Most have moved out of the township, a few out of state.

"Heartbreaking." "Tragic."

Those are the sort of words they use when recounting the end of their neighborhood - an end to which nearly all of them acquiesced.

By 1914, Bryn Mawr was a premier stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad's Main Line, and the gentry, seeing opportunity in the influx of city folk, were selling parcels of their estates.

The result was a "wonderful" village, said Jerry Francis, president of the Lower Merion Historical Society. "Everything you would want was within walking distance" - stores, a school, a hospital.

The wealthy were nestled in the gentle hills north of the tracks. Central Avenue was born on the south side, the laborers' stomping ground. The first house went up the year World War I started. The street was a dead end lit by gas lamps, with an icehouse so residents could keep perishables from spoiling.

It was still a dead end in 1956 when 8-year-old Jim Cairns moved with his family to 1 Central.

Cairns was no stranger to Bryn Mawr, having been born at the hospital and raised in apartments around town.

His first job was stocking shelves at the nearby Gane & Snyder grocery store - penance for breaking a window playing wall ball. He worked there until he graduated from Harriton High School in 1967 and joined the Army.

While he was stationed in West Germany, the other half of his parents' brick twin came on the market. At Cairns' direction, they bought it for $12,500. In 1970, he left the service and moved in, a married man and father.

As Baptists, "we were the odd ones out," Cairns said of himself and his wife, Betty.

But on Halloween, they were the odd ones in. Cairns would turn his parents' side into a haunted house for the neighborhood kids. The more bizarre his costume, the better. His most memorable getup was a hospital patient. Perched on an old toilet set up on the porch, he handed out candy from a bedpan.

Four doors down, Millie and Vincent Murtaugh always had a crowd - of their own making. By 1977, they had four sons and a daughter, jam-packed in a three-bedroom rowhouse. Like most Central homes, it had one bathroom.

Bryn Mawr-born Millie had married Vince, a West Philadelphia guy, in 1968. The asking price then for 11 Central, $11,500, was manageable on what they made - he as a plumber at the Acme and at Lower Merion High School, and she as a conveyancer for Title Insurance Corp. With her office just around the corner, Millie could run home at lunch to do laundry.

Their sons all became volunteer firefighters, joining the mad rush from Central when the whistle sounded.

One of the great things about raising a family there was that parents didn't have to go it alone, Millie recalled. "Anyone could correct your kids. No one would get mad."

No one got away with anything, either.

With porch-sitting the favorite pastime, it was like "20 million eyes on you," said Mary Lou Donohue, who was 9 when she moved to Central in the mid-1950s and 12 when "I got my first kiss" there.

The latter took place in her basement. Which was the only reason Jane Mowbray, on the lookout from her porch at No. 32, didn't see it.

Mowbray emigrated from Ireland after World War II, becoming a housekeeper for such prominent Main Line families as the Annenbergs.

In 1962, she and husband George, a bartender, moved into a twin on Central, where "I was near the stores, train [and] hospital," said Mowbray, now 92 and widowed for 33 years. "The trolley was only two blocks" away.

Good thing, since she and at least seven neighbors didn't drive. But they sure could talk. Save for the harshest winter months, they did it shouting porch to porch, said Marlene McGarvey.

"Big Mar" and her husband, Charles, moved to Central in 1973, first renting a house with coal heat and, two years later, buying the unit next door for $12,800 because it had gas. There they raised three children, including the street-hockey player with the bad aim; he grew up to be the township's chief fire officer.

Chas McGarvey, now 48, lived with his parents until 1993. There was no reason to leave, he said. "You left the doors open . . . the windows open." And the yard tidied-up. "Hedges were perfect," he said. "Grass was always cut."

That started to slip when college students showed up on the block as tenants of investment owners. By the time the hospital began buying up homes, eight were rentals.

The most aggravating tenant, according to the consensus, was David Madeira. He admits he deserved the title.

In 1994, as a University of Pennsylvania graduate student, he moved into 13 Central and promptly irritated the neighbors with his revulsion to yard work. Granted, he was following a tough act: The previous owner was so fastidious, she dug out dandelions with a teaspoon.

Now a husband, father, entrepreneur and homeowner in Berwyn, Madeira remembers the elder Charles McGarvey's bluntly confronting him one day. He told the young fellow, "You're going to kill the neighborhood."

That accusation would soon be redirected at Bryn Mawr Hospital.

The hospital's invitations to "a light supper and important presentation" landed on Central in late September 2002.

A week later, the neighbors gathered at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Propped on easels around the dining room were color sketches of a barely recognizable Central Avenue - a tree-lined promenade of stores and cafes with apartments built over them. There was a parking garage, too.

"It looked beautiful," Janet Giersch recalled. "But our houses were gone. Everybody's jaw dropped."

Astonishment gave way to anger when the manila envelopes were handed out. Each contained a purchase offer that Central's owners, to a person, found insultingly low. Not that they were even looking to sell. For many, the long-term plan was to leave the street "carried out in a box," Dolores McNamara said.

That year, there would be just one sale - an investment property at 7 Central that went for $150,000.

As the months passed, hospital officials kept upping the offers. Increasingly, the deals were proving irresistible, especially to Central homeowners facing costly repairs to their aging homes.

In 2003, the hospital bought 17 houses, at prices ranging from $160,000 to $300,000.

Among them was McNamara's, for $290,000. She wanted to end the anxiety that rendered her breathless in the middle of the night, she said. "I thought, sell or drop dead."

At 70, she lives in a Haverford Township condo where, she said, "my neighbors couldn't be better." But when she talks of her "happy home" on Central, tears flow.

Also in 2003, the McGarveys took their leave, for $250,000. Charles, a mailman in Haverford for 33 years, was dying of lung cancer.

"My husband said, 'We never had $250,000 in our life,' " Marlene McGarvey, 74, recalled of the decision to sell.

Along with a condo in the complex where McNamara settled, they bought a Toyota.

Charles died about a year later, at 76. Since then, Marlene has missed Central more than ever, she said, and takes a ride to see the old house, for the moment still standing.

"I look at my rose bushes," she said. "They're beautiful, and they're still blooming."

When the hospital's offer reached $290,000 in August 2003, the Murtaughs caved. Vince, now 73, had had two strokes and was "fed up with the [hospital's] haranguing."

Their sons' friends from the firehouse helped them move to a $200,000 three-bedroom, two-bath rowhouse on Dayton Road in Bryn Mawr.

"I have a nice home here. I have lovely neighbors," Millie, 67, said in a living room twice as big as her old one. "But it's not Central Avenue."

Nor is the assisted-living community less than a mile away, where Mowbray spends her days in a one-bedroom apartment with touches of Ireland all around her. Her legs could no longer carry her up her rowhouse stairs, so she sold in 2004 for $300,000.

Jim and Betty Cairns held out until the summer of 2006, when just about everyone else was gone and demolition had begun. They and Jim's mother, Nellie, next door, tied for the top price, $335,000.

Nellie, 78, moved in with a daughter in Reading. To find house prices and property taxes that fit their budget, Jim and Betty went to Newark, Del., where they bought a place near some cousins.

But in a way, they never left Bryn Mawr. Every weekday, Jim logs 80 miles round-trip to Parvin's Pharmacy, where he has worked since 1988.

On Sundays, he and Betty worship at Lower Merion Baptist Church. Their youngest son, Bobby, died of a colon disease in 2000, in his junior year at Harriton, and he is buried in the church cemetery. A bench in the center of town is dedicated to him.

Jim and Betty, both 60, plan to be buried next to him.

Until then, she said, "this is a life turned upside-down."

For six years, Giersch refused to abandon her three-story twin, built by her grandfather in 1914. If she left, it would be only after her two sons graduated from high school. The younger just did.

In the end, she accepted a trade: her house for a bigger place around the corner, renovated by the hospital.

Early last month, she took what she called "the walk of defeat" to the hospital to hand over her keys.

"I will go on," said Giersch, 55, who can see the old house from the upper floors of her new home. "It's just sad."

Hers was not the last beating heart on Central.

On the west side, Nick Lyons is dug in at one end, Bill and Elba Doorly at the other.

A church organist, Lyons has lived there for 48 of his 60 years. He declined to be interviewed, although he decried the grassy lots between his house and the Doorlys' as a "prairie."

Watching the neighborhood literally fall around her has been "very sad," said Elba Doorly, whose two-story rowhouse has been in her family nearly 30 years.

Some former neighbors suggest that the Doorlys are just holding out for more money.

Not so, said Elba. With Bill turning 79 and her on the cusp of 68, she said they were simply sticking with their plan to live on Central "in our old age" - within walking distance, ironically, of their doctors at the hospital.

Besides, the offers have stopped as hospital administrators take the next seven months to assess exactly what they want built there.

"I know there's been a lot of emotion and pain," Gilbert, the hospital president, said in an interview. "In the end, as people look back at it, I hope" the new Central Avenue is considered "a positive."

Like Giersch, Leigh Anne Smith, and other Central devotees, Elba Doorly has gone before the commissioners to ask that they zone Central so its redevelopment would be residential only - preferably modestly priced. But the new zoning allows everything the hospital initially planned and more, from museums to inns.

Although the commissioners enacted that zoning, some have promised to use their influence to return at least a measure of affordable housing to Central.

If that happens, Jim Cairns said, he'd be back in "less than a minute."

Others aren't so sure.

"It will never be what it was," said Chas McGarvey. "A part of my life is gone."