The historic Bergdoll Mansion is on the market for $6.5 million

The Bergdoll Mansion, an architectural fixture in Spring Garden, is up for sale.

The brownstone mansion is more than 130 years old and is listed on the national and Philadelphia Registers of Historic Places. The three-story detached home on the 2200 block of Green Street was built in the Beaux-Arts/Italianate style and spans about 15,000 square feet.

Owner Siraik Zakarian, a distinguished biochemist who spent decades and millions of dollars lovingly restoring the home, died in August at 82. She lived in a first-floor suite and part of the finished basement and had tenants in six apartments above.

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Last week, the mansion was listed for $6.5 million. Its historic designation with the city protects it from demolition.

The home, which is half a mile from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, features stained glass, hand-laid tile, high ceilings, and ornate fireplaces. And it has nine parking spaces in a gated lot.

“It’s a prestige property,” said listing agent Mike McCann, associate broker and leader of the McCann Team, which is an affiliate of Keller Williams. “What’s special about it is the exterior is pretty much the original and so much of the interior is original.”

The home would make “an incredible museum” because of its size and historic details, McCann said. Or it could be an office for a foundation or attorney or the new home of a social club, he said. An individual buyer may want to convert the mansion back into a single-family home.

Given the home’s price tag, “no one’s going to purchase it for the income of the units,” he said. And he doubts a new owner would want to live there with tenants.

The home was last on the market for a short time about a decade ago, McCann said. Given the uniqueness of the mansion and the small pool of buyers who would be looking for such a large home, the property could take six months to a year to sell, he said.

The Bergdoll Mansion is a few hundred feet away from another mansion that recently changed hands after years on and off the market. Former Pennsylvania State Sen. Vince Fumo sold his nearly 10,000-square-foot home for $2.6 million this month.

The mansion was built for the Kemble family but gets its name from the Bergdoll family, the owners of City Park Brewery. They bought it from the Kembles at auction in 1906. Brothers Louis and Wilbur Bergdoll owned the home when Zakarian’s great-uncle lived in an apartment there.

Zakarian first lived in the mansion in the 1960s as a college and graduate school student. She came back in 1986 and rented her great-uncle’s apartment.

In 1989, a fire heavily damaged the mansion, and Zakarian bought it that year for $300,000 to keep it out of the hands of developers. Over decades, she spent more than $5 million on restorations, updates, and renovations, including carving apartments from huge rooms on the second and third floors and expanding the home.

“She did everything the way that it was supposed to be. And it didn’t matter what it cost,” said Robert Berndt, one of her tenants. “She basically put everything back the way it was.”

For about eight years, Berndt, 42, has lived as a tenant in the mansion — in the same library-turned-apartment where Zakarian once lived. The apartment has a balcony and a deck and windows on all sides.

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The space Zakarian used as her bedroom on the first floor was the mansion’s ballroom, he said.

Berndt helped her around the house and took care of her and her rental business as she got older, he said. Zakarian never married or had children.

“For a while, it felt like the house was her child. Then I feel like a lot of that transferred to me,” Berndt said. The two ate meals together and spent hours with each other every day.

“She was an amazing cook. She invited all the tenants down periodically for dinners and to talk and for coffee and stuff,” he said. “She loved having people in the house. Having the tenants here was very important to her.”

He said he hopes the house finds a buyer “who really appreciates it.”

“It’s the kind of property you can walk around and find new details, something you never noticed before, every day,” he said.