Father Divine’s Peace Mission is auctioning off another of its historic North Philly mansions

Another notable property in North Philadelphia’s mansion district is set to be sold off this month.

The historic 35,000-square-foot house at 1530 N. 16th St. is one of the neighborhood’s few surviving mansions built in the late 19th century for the city’s manufacturing tycoons.

“It’s a mansion in a neighborhood where people don’t really live in mansions anymore and haven’t in decades,” said Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia and admirer of the “architectural beauty” of the late-Victorian, Italianate home.

The property will be the second historic North Philly mansion built around 1890 to be sold in just over a year by the International Peace Mission Movement, the religious organization founded by a charismatic civil rights leader who claimed to be God and whose followers called him Father Divine.

» READ MORE: Reviving Father Divine: Can a new documentary and museum save the dying Peace Mission movement? (From 2017)

The two mansions that the Peace Mission bought more than 70 years ago were part of a Philadelphia real estate portfolio that spanned North Philadelphia, Graduate Hospital, and West Philadelphia. The organization once owned such properties as the iconic Divine Lorraine, which it operated as the city’s first racially integrated hotel.

As the Peace Mission’s membership has dwindled, the organization has been selling off its properties one by one. After the scheduled Aug. 28 auction of the mansion on North 16th Street, the organization’s only remaining property in Philadelphia will be the Circle Mission Church, Home and Training School at Broad and Catharine Streets. The Peace Mission’s last stronghold is the Woodmont mansion, a National Historic Landmark on 73 acres in Gladwyne.

“In the preservation community, we’ve long anticipated that the [Peace] Mission would eventually start to downsize their real estate portfolio,” Steinke said. But he said he was sad to see the organization moving on.

“They’ve been fantastic stewards of so many landmark properties for so many years,” he said. “It’s really an amazing legacy that they’ve owned and managed these properties for as long as they have and took such great care of them for so long.”

The mansion on North 16th Street is part of the North Broad Street Mansion District on the National Register of Historic Places. And since 1971, it has been listed on Philadelphia’s historic register, a designation that protects the building from demolition. The home’s first owner was Albert Disston of the Philadelphia-based Disston Saw Co.

In May 2023, the Peace Mission auctioned off a mansion a few blocks away to Rohr Chabad, a Jewish studies center. Rohr Chabad paid about $1.4 million for the mansion built by streetcar magnate Charles E. Ellis at 1430 N. Broad St., just south of Temple University’s main campus. The new owner is advertising the Ellis mansion, which Philadelphia historically designated in 2018, as an office building for lease.

» READ MORE: Broad Street mansion associated with Father Divine is sold at auction

The Peace Mission used the Disston mansion as a residence and a place to host banquets, religious services, talks, and Bible classes. Members called it the Bible Institute, and it was a branch of the group’s Unity Mission Church, Home and Training School.

Lois Kukcinovich, a 93-year-old former member of the Peace Mission, used to play piano in the mansion’s main dining room during banquets. The Chicago native joined the group with her mother at 5 years old, was renamed Victory Love, and moved to Philadelphia in 1945 to live with other members and Father Divine at the Peace Mission’s property at Broad and Catharine Streets.

Kukcinovich said her mother upholstered furniture for the Bible Institute and worked there as a cook. The North Philadelphia resident hasn’t been inside in decades but remembers “going into all those different rooms,” the stained-glass windows, and the furniture.

“I know there was something really beautiful about the antiques,” she said.

Kukcinovich left the organization at 25 to get married, which the Peace Mission did not allow. Since the organization doesn’t have many followers left, auctioning off the building makes sense, Kukcinovich said. “It’s too bad they couldn’t have sold it before, so people could have enjoyed that money.”

The organization now has fewer than two dozen members, said Alan B. LeCoff, an associate at the firm Barry S. Slosberg Inc., which is auctioning the Disston mansion and has auctioned four other Peace Mission properties in Philadelphia.

The four-story Disston mansion was one of the few homes designed by the prominent church architect Edwin Forrest Durang.

“It’s truly a marvel,” LeCoff said. “It’s gonna sell. It’s just a matter of how much it’s going to sell for.”

Notable features of the mansion include marble floors, 18-foot doors, crystal chandeliers, hand-painted mural ceilings, banquet rooms, a catering kitchen, and an auditorium. The home’s large and intricate fireplace mantels could very well cost $20,000 a piece, LeCoff said. “They’re that elaborate.”

In 2018, two nearly 8-foot-tall stained-glass windows thought to date back to the mansion’s construction were stolen. They were recovered and have been stored at the Woodmont mansion in Gladwyne. Those stained-glass windows will be included in the sale of the mansion, which has at least 19 total.

A few Peace Mission members lived in the mansion up until a few years ago, but the organization is “looking forward to having this property transformed and transferred to someone who can care for it,” LeCoff said. “They know it’s time to let go.”

When the on-site auction happens this month, Steinke of the Preservation Alliance said, “the best-case scenario would be a buyer who’s interested in the building for its history and architecture.” He said a new owner is most likely to want the property for residential use.

“A lot of us who care about these things hope that whoever buys it at auction will retain and maintain the historic interior, which we understand is almost perfectly intact from the original,” Steinke said.

The mansion’s spot on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places does not protect its interior.

On a block with boarded-up buildings and an overgrown lot, the property was well maintained, said Louis Massiah, noted documentary filmmaker, founder of Scribe Video Center, and lifelong resident of the neighborhood. He called the mansion “a work of art.”

“It’s complicated because the Disston house really comes out of 19th-century capitalist privilege,” Massiah said. He said the Peace Mission gave the property more of a connection to the community — a connection that should be extended by turning the mansion into a “community asset” that includes some kind of public use.

“I hope it can be well used by people. People that need a place to live,” Massiah said. “This is an opportunity to both preserve the house and the heritage but also make it accessible and usable and something the community feels a greater sense of claim” over.