How a Gilded Age estate on the Delaware River became a destination for urban foragers and artists

As she guided more than a dozen budding foragers around the grounds of Glen Foerd, the 19th-century Delaware River estate in Northeast Philadelphia, Alexandra Tatarsky urged them to look closely at the lush landscape of gardens, meadows, woods, and wetlands.

“Lemon clover, ground elder, garlic mustard,” she intoned, holding a phone from which Donna Summer’s “Spring Affair” pulsed gently.

“I see so many things we can eat.”

An artist in residence at Glen Foerd, Tatarsky exemplifies how creatively this gated estate seeks to attract visitors from the neighborhood and region. She’s a professional clown who sometimes performs as a character she calls “The Apocalypse Housewife.”

“We’re sort of a hidden gem up here in East Torresdale. A lot of people don’t know we’re here,” said Ross Mitchell, executive director of the Glen Foerd Conservation Corp. The nonprofit operates the estate for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.

“When it comes to historic houses, Philadelphia has an embarrassment of riches,” he said. “What we’re trying to do with Glen Foerd is make it into a cultural and environmental destination.”

“We’ve had Ballet X and EgoPo Classic Theater and Alterra Productions perform here,” Mitchell said. “In April, we had a pianist from Vienna playing Mozart on a pianoforte, with paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries behind him.”

The 2022 schedule of 50 cultural or environmental events, as well as 90 weddings, is expected to draw about 35,000 visitors. History buffs, birders, kayakers, art lovers, wedding guests, and locals enjoy the 18-acre estate at the confluence of the Delaware and the Poquessing Creek.

Originally called Glengarry, Glen Foerd was built in 1850 by Philadelphia philanthropist Charles Macalester and substantially renovated and expanded by its next owner, Frankford tanning factory owner Robert Foerderer. Constructed on a verdant bluff across from Delanco in Burlington County, it was among a number of Delaware River estates built by Philadelphia bankers and industrialists in the 19th century, many lost to development in the 20th.

If not for a dogged group of East Torresdale neighbors, Glen Foerd would have met the same fate.

“A developer wanted to build 800 condos there,” said Mary Ellen McNish, a leader of the local residents who organized and fought back.

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The estate had been owned for decades by Foerderer’s daughter Florence Foerderer Tonner, who lived there until her death in 1971. A deeply religious patron of the arts, she worshiped in a prayer room accessible from her barrel-vaulted art gallery via a secret door and grew her favorite hybrid tea roses in the gardens.

Tonner bequeathed the property to the Lutheran Church in America, which ran it as a conference center until the buildings and grounds became too expensive to maintain. But when the church tried to sell the property in 1983, an employee at Glen Foerd discovered a sentence in Tonner’s will requiring that the estate “must be used for the good of the public,” said McNish, a retired nonprofit executive who lives in Old City.

“We went to court, and we won,” she said.

McNish and nine other area residents became board members of the conservation corporation to maintain and operate the site for the Fairmount Park Commission, which took possession of the property by order of the Pennsylvania Orphans Court in 1985. The commission was incorporated into Philadelphia’s Parks and Recreation Department in 2010.

“The property has this absolutely beautiful mansion and all these other amazing buildings, but it is also special because we’re right on the Delaware and the creek,” said Sarah Ferguson, manager of environmental programs at Glen Foerd.

“We’re a wonderful hot spot for birding,” she said. “We’re a place where people can come and explore and see nature firsthand.”

Glen Foerd periodically offers public kayaking tours of the Delaware and also participates in Riverways, which is supported by the William Penn Foundation’s Watershed Protection Program. Riverways provides local high school students a chance to learn kayaking and rowing. In partnership with the Philadelphia School District, Glen Foerd also operates the Water Borne program to enable students to build boats.

And events such as Tatarsky’s, which gave participants an opportunity to learn about — and consume — edible invasive species, are “an arts and sciences blend” that Glen Foerd is well-suited to provide, Ferguson said.

Said Mitchell: “We have history, we have the river, and we have the grounds. We have an art gallery and a collection that includes the work of female artists such as Violet Oakley and the group known as the Philadelphia 10.”

“There are seven structures built in the 1850s here, including an 8,000-square-foot carriage house with a hand-cranked elevator and a horse-drawn sleigh,” said Mitchell, who was named executive director of Glen Foerd in 2019 following stints at the Barnes Foundation and Laurel Hill Cemetery.

“The house has a built-in pipe organ,” he said. “There’s a five-story water tower with a cistern on top — a gravity-fed water system for the property, built in 1853.”

Glen Foerd operates on vintage utility systems, and the entire property requires constant maintenance. The annual budget is about $840,000, more than half of which comes from weddings.

“Simply fixing what’s broken would cost an estimated $7.5 million, which doesn’t include any improvements,” Mitchell said. “So in addition to fund-raising, our goals are to expose the site to more people and build an audience.”

Urban foraging is a thing in Philly, and Tatarsky’s May 14 event attracted an eclectic group from the city and the suburbs.

“I live in a rowhouse in South Philly, and it’s not the most natural environment,” said Cameron Williams, a former Boy Scout who is a biotechnician for a pharmaceutical firm.

“I like nature, I like exploring, but I didn’t know this place existed until about a year ago.” he said.

Williams and others on the tour gamely took nibbles on the edible invasive species that, with Tatarsky’s guidance, seemed to be as available as food on supermarket shelves during the two-hour foraging event.

“Ground ivy, mullein, bamboo shoots, honeysuckle, and wood sorrel,” said Tatarsky, speaking in what she described as “my strange invented pseudo-European accent.”

Four sisters from Huntingdon Valley — Ruby, Komil, Mishall, and Huma Gharui — were making a second trip to Glen Foerd. The first was for a vintage-jewelry event.

“Huma and I have a big fascination with wood sorrel — the stem, the leaves, the flowers,” said Ruby, a tattoo artist who enjoys a practice called earthing, or walking barefoot, in her yard.

“We came here because we just wanted to learn more,” she said. “We decided to make it a whole family thing.”

In an interview, Tatarsky said she’s jazzed by what Glen Foerd offers to her, and to the community.

“Glen Foerd is open to creative proposals, and they want to make the grounds a place that is open to contemporary questions,” she said. “And that is really exciting.”