A historic district designation could be coming to Washington Square West

Washington Square West could become one of Philadelphia’s latest neighborhoods where a large portion is protected from demolition as a result of a yearslong effort by the local civic association and preservationists and over the objections of some property owners and urbanists.

The Philadelphia Historical Commission’s committee on historic designation has recommended that the city create the Washington Square West Historic District, which would be the city’s largest new historic district in decades. It would include 1,441 properties across roughly 26 city blocks. More than half of those properties already are listed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places.

The Washington Square West Civic Association and the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia co-nominated the district, which they said is culturally significant to Black, immigrant, Jewish, and LGBTQ+ communities.

The district would stretch about half a square mile in an area between South Broad and Eighth Streets and Sansom and South Streets.

The committee on historic designation makes nonbinding recommendations to the Historical Commission, which is scheduled to discuss whether to create the new district at its public meeting on June 14. Owners of properties that are included in historic districts need the commission’s approval to make changes to the outside of buildings, and properties are shielded from demolition. Much of the proposed district in Washington Square West is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which does not protect buildings from demolition.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of other places, especially in Center City, where you’re going to find this breadth and depth of history represented in one place,” Deborah Miller, an archaeologist on the committee on historic designation, said at the committee’s public meeting last week.

“I see a district like this,” she later added, “and the more I think about it and the more that I look through the inventory, I’m just really impressed by how wonderfully diverse the neighborhood is, both in its architectural styles and its histories.”

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Property owners who spoke against the creation of the district said owners should have gotten more notice about efforts to historically designate the neighborhood. They argued that designation is a burden for them and stifles further evolution of the neighborhood and that the proposed district includes too many properties and too wide of a time frame — from 1740 to 1985.

Suzanna Barucco, a historic preservation consultant and member of the committee on historic designation, said the proposed district represents the way the city should look at its history — “more broadly, not more narrowly.”

“In preservation, we used to look at just the Colonial period, right? ‘Washington slept here,’” Barucco said. “And the way we’ve changed our outlook is to understand that it’s not just one early period but this continuum that makes places significant, whether it’s a historic site that has changed over, you know, decades or centuries, or whether it’s a community. It’s this continuum that makes it significant. And each of these periods occur in this place, and this architecture occurs in this place and contributes to this larger story.”

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Hanna Stark, director of policy and communications at the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, called Washington Square West “a key Center City neighborhood, which illustrates the development of Philadelphia’s residential and commercial core over more than two centuries.”

“It is time to recognize the significance Washington Square West played in the progression of Philadelphia’s development westward,” Stark said. The proposed district “illustrates the neighborhood’s major developmental trends and architectural styles.”

Drew Moyer, a neighborhood resident and board member at the Washington Square West Civic Association, which has spent years working on the historic designation, said the neighborhood has been grappling with questions about its identity, such as whether it’s still a Gayborhood and whether to support a new Sixers arena next to it. He said neighbors often talk about the “fabric of the neighborhood,” especially relating to development.

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The civic association “believe[s] there is no greater contributing factor to the fabric of our neighborhood than its history and the historic properties within it,” Moyer said. He lives in a home built in 1837 that the Historical Commission designated as historic and said he worked with the commission during renovations, including an addition and new windows.

“Vocal opponents currently, with all due respect, do not negate the majority of voices in support of the effort over many years,” Moyer said. “Perhaps the absence of a major historical building demolition in the last couple of years has quieted the emotions on this topic for some, but they will surely be reawakened should another landmark in our neighborhood be destroyed.”

Supporters of the proposed historic district pointed out that Washington Square West sits between Society Hill’s district to the east and the Rittenhouse-Fitler district to the west. David Traub, cofounder of the preservation group Save Our Sites, said Washington Square West is “an unfortunate gap in what could be a continuous run of protected old and historic buildings extending from river to river.”

» READ MORE: Three Philly neighborhood groups took different paths to create historic districts

5th Square, an urbanist advocacy group, opposes the creation of the historic district, saying it will make home modifications more complicated and expensive and raise rents and home prices by restricting development.

“We should not be discouraging more residents in this amenity-rich neighborhood, and residents should not face added cost for repairing their homes,” the group said in its online petition against the proposed district, which asks city officials to instead support the designation of individual properties “to achieve a balance between preservation and development.”

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Greg Hardes, whose home would be included in the proposed district, said he strongly opposes the designation and argued that the wide range of eras and events represented by included properties should disqualify the district’s nomination.

“If this nomination meets the Philadelphia Code requirements, a historic district designation could just as easily be proposed for the footprint of our entire city,” he said. “There may be smaller portions of our neighborhood that reflect specific social histories, such as the LGBTQ community, but they should be carefully identified and demarcated.”

He said he hoped city officials took residents’ concerns seriously, “because I know that there are similar concerns from many in our community.”

Of the 1,441 properties included in the historic district nomination, 173 are considered significant properties. More than three-fourths of the total — 1,120 — are considered contributing properties. And the rest are considered noncontributing and subject to less review.

Attorney Matthew McClure spoke against the proposed district on behalf of Parkway Corp., the parking and real estate company that owns a parking lot at 13th and Locust Streets, one of a bunch of parking lots that would be included. There’s no doubt that the neighborhood has “a tremendous amount of important buildings that are historically designated and can be historically designated,” he said, but the proposed district lacks a unifying theme in its nomination that covers 245 years.

“Unfortunately, this is a kind of a kitchen-sink approach, where everything was thrown in,” he said, and this approach “is too much here.” He asked that if the city creates the historic district as proposed, the commission list Parkway Corp.’s property as noncontributing.

“It’s a parking lot,” he said.

Oscar Beisert, an architectural historian with the Keeping Society of Philadelphia, which advocates for the preservation of historic properties, said he objected to the idea of excluding the parking lot in the middle of the Gayborhood because there’s no known archaeological significance. He said the area used to be home to Black homeowners and impoverished residents, groups whose stories didn’t get preserved or documented.

“And so I find it offensive to suggest that these places that once housed and may have archaeological resources would not be eligible because we can’t tell you what happened there,” Beisert said. “We won’t be able to tell you unless there’s archaeological work done there.”

Miller, the committee member, agreed. “Archaeology is very much a part of this district,” she said. “I know people don’t like to hear that, but it is.”