A tale of two Haverford schools: One converted to apartments, the other headed for demolition

Built a year apart shortly before World War I, two solid stone schools in Havertown educated thousands of students over the decades as they became community landmarks.

Greg Prichard, preservation officer in neighboring Lower Merion Township, contrasts them with the “new, modern boxes” that sprang up afterward.

Although neither has been a school for years, the old Llanerch School, built in 1912 at the intersection of Darby and Llandillo Roads, lives on as an apartment development, its character preserved in an innovative conversion.

But the Brookline School, less than a mile away at Earlington and Kenmore Roads and built a year later, will be demolished, following a vote this month by the Haverford Township Board of Commissioners. The building was designed by renowned architect David Knickerbocker Boyd, who contributed to more than 3,000 buildings in the region, including libraries, churches, schools, and homes.

For preservationists seeking to keep the Main Line’s architectural character, the contrasting fates of the two schools demonstrate a painful truth: Luck and money often determine what happens to the area’s landmarks.

“Historic schools are among the most important buildings in Pennsylvania,” Barbara Franco, then executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, wrote in a 2008 pamphlet of a special state task force on the subject. “They are often the focal point of a neighborhood or community, built to a level of detail and craftsmanship rarely found in other buildings. They reflect community pride.”

Since 2000, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has viewed historic neighborhood schools, in effect, as an endangered species.

In Pennsylvania, school districts can be reimbursed for renovating an old school as well as building a new one and are formally required to consider renovation first.

But that has not stopped the loss of schools such as Brookline.

As a kid, Jeff Steigerwalt remembers, he played stickball and street hockey in the parking lot of the Llanerch School.

He was never enrolled there, but as an adult, he has played a major role in its survival. He bought the building in 2017 and turned it into a 13-apartment development that retains many of its original features.

Original transoms and exit signs have been retained. Each unit has a blackboard. The principal’s office is a studio apartment. The gym and cafeteria form a larger unit. With 12-foot ceilings, the building still feels like a school in many ways.

The conversion has been a four-year process boosted by the building’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The one- and two-bedroom units of the Llanerch School Apartments have just begun leasing, with rents ranging from $1,650 to $2,400 a month.

“It was a great opportunity to give the community something it wanted,” Havertown native Steigerwalt says.

With only eight classrooms, the building was considered by the district to be too small for further educational use, and the district closed the school in 1985 and sold it.

Steigerwalt says he has worked closely with the neighborhood and local historians on the design and parking.

Some neighbors had lobbied for the former school playground to be upgraded to a park. Some had been worried the site would become a high-traffic convenience store or fast-food restaurant.

The former Llanerch School became available for residential development because the school district, which had more than a dozen bidders when it marketed the school in the 1980s, sold it to a Quaker school. When that school decided to relocate to Newtown Square, it was able to sell the building to Steigerwalt without use restrictions.

Brookline was idle for longer than Llanerch, having last been used as a school in 1985, although over the years it did have other tenants, including a senior center and a kindergarten program for relatively short periods. Township officials have expressed concern over the building’s deterioration.

Blu L. Taylor, webmaster and district technician for the Haverford Township School District and a district historian, said that “as someone who lives in the township, I’m a little disappointed.” But he also said that “in all fairness, we’ve done pretty well in preserving the township’s rich history.”

Still, schools have been a main casualty of the bulldozer. Brookline will be the third school razed, and Lynnewood Elementary, at Lawrence Road and Chester Avenue, will soon follow.

The older schools closed because of declining district enrollment and the availability of space at larger, more modern elementary schools.

“It would be great to preserve it,” said Haverford Township Commissioners Chairman Gerard Hart, who lives two blocks away from the Brookline School. “We just couldn’t find the solution, unfortunately. It’s a beautiful building.”

When Brookline closed, the school district turned it over to the township under the condition the property be used for a public purpose such as a library. Private residential development wasn’t an option.

Almost any public use would require more parking, Hart says, “and that’s difficult in an inner-ring suburb.”

The commissioners said that, over several months of study, they were unable to find a public purpose for Brookline, which has had several short-term public and nonprofit tenants, including a kindergarten program and a senior center.

The commissioners considered converting it to a new library — or razing it to build a new library on the site — but decided it was more economical to renovate the existing library, nearby at Darby and Mill Roads.

Township Manager David Burman and other officials say they expect the site to become parkland.

Local preservationists question whether alternatives were considered seriously enough.

“The lack of creative thinking stuns me sometimes,” said Suzanna Barucco, a local preservationist. “Historic schools have been repurposed all over the place. In my opinion, they planned all along to tear it down.”

She also questions whether the commissioners studied the parking options carefully enough.

Although the township commissioners could not have legally sold the property to a developer, she said, they could have returned it to the school district.

Colette Bannan, a township resident who testified before the commissioners, and other preservation supporters questioned whether the engineering firm the township consulted had sufficient expertise on this type of building.

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The school “is a solid building that could last for another hundred years if properly maintained,” she told the commissioners in 2019. “It has been a cornerstone of our neighborhood for decades and deserves to be respected and cared for.”

Mindy Crawford, executive director of the Preservation Pennsylvania nonprofit since 2006, says that although “it can be acceptable to lose the building for the good of the community … I’ve always felt it frustrating that no one takes the time to look at all the options.”

She recommends that communities use a “charette” method in deciding the fate of these buildings, in which a wide variety of stakeholders participate in a formal evaluation of options.

Kathy Case, a member of the Haverford Township Historical Commission, summed up the process over the Brookline School as “lots of sentiment, many ideas, no takers.”

“School building preservation seems to be based largely on luck rather than planning,” she said.

Township Manager Burman said the Brookline demolition will start in about five weeks.