After two failed efforts, Spruce Hill tries for a historic district to cover its vast collection of Victorian homes

The first time neighborhood activists tried to bring a historic district to West Philadelphia’s Spruce Hill, the Berlin Wall was still standing.

Now, almost 40 years later, a third attempt is beginning.

The motivations are similar to what they were when the Soviet Union still existed. This neighborhood is home to the largest collection of Victorian architecture in America.

It is also on the University of Pennsylvania’s border, and many of the ornate buildings are owned by student-housing companies.

Preservation activists have long feared that the gilded houses that make this corner of University City unique will be whittled down by demolition and replaced by generic apartment buildings that will age like goat cheese left in the sun.

“This is what goes on out here, right now, and there is nothing that we can do to stop that,” said Barry Grossbach, a longtime member of the Spruce Hill Community Association and chair of their zoning committee.

Previous efforts to create a historic district in Spruce Hill were met with intense backlash from student-housing companies, the university, and local homeowners concerned about the cost burden of preservation.

The goal is to make it very difficult to demolish relevant neighborhood buildings, Grossbach said. But preservation regulations limit how homeowners can tweak exteriors and also require specific, and often more expensive, materials for repairs.

Opposition to the latest Spruce Hill historic district proposal includes some of the same people who have attacked the idea since its first proposal in the 1980s.

“It’s extreme overreach to say we are going to keep all of Spruce Hill intact as it is,” said Michael Karp, owner of the University City Housing Co., one of the area’s largest landlords.

“It doesn’t allow the organic growth of the city. If the city’s going to stay healthy, it needs to be able to regenerate itself and accommodate new housing and commercial needs,” Karp said.

On Tuesday, the Spruce Hill Community Association held a panel discussion on the historic district, followed by audience questions. The reaction to the district was mixed, with some audience members concerned about the costs to homeowners, and a few others concerned that it could limit housing options. But ardent opposition was limited.

That’s just the beginning of the process, which will eventually require approval by the city’s Historical Commission. The preservationists hope to submit a plan to the commission before the end of the year.

The city’s Historical Commission obtained the power to designate historic districts in the 1980s, and Spruce Hill was one of the first neighborhoods in line. But preservationists instead saw their application gather dust, as communities like Rittenhouse Square and Society Hill were accepted first.

“They kept moving other groups, other neighborhoods in front of us,” Grossbach remembered. “It continued to sit and sit and sit.”

They tried again in the 2000s, after being told that the original application had to be redrafted.

By then, reinvestment in the neighborhoods to the west of Penn began to ramp up, and then-Councilmember Jannie Blackwell, a longtime ally of Karp, was more explicit in her opposition. She cited cost concerns for working-class homeowners. She threatened to introduce a bill to require all historic districts to be approved by City Council.

Opposition from Blackwell and other City Council members had a chilling effect on preservation advocacy across Philadelphia. No new historic districts were minted between the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2017, a time when development surged after decades of stagnation. Demolitions spiked in response.

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

Now, Blackwell is gone from City Council — defeated by Jamie Gauthier in 2019 — and former preservation critics like Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr. are newly supportive of historic advocacy.

Under Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration, the Historical Commission has seen its budget expanded and staff added. Buildings are being protected at a rapid clip.

Last year West Philadelphia’s Powelton Village — with an architectural vernacular much like Spruce Hill — became the largest historic district created in over 20 years.

“The mood of the city has changed,” said Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. “The commission is willing to consider districts again. More and more neighborhoods are seeking the protection that historic status can provide as a way to preserve their neighborhood character.”

The Spruce Hill Community Association’s latest historic district plan would cover 1,984 buildings, stretching from 39th Street at its eastern extreme to 47th to the west, and Woodland Avenue in the south, almost to Market Street in the north.

A district of that magnitude will create a gargantuan amount of work for the Historical Commission. To make things easier, both bureaucratically and, the neighborhood group hopes, politically, the district would be carved into a quadrant and approved in bite-sized chunks.

The first section would be the one closest to the University of Pennsylvania, from 40th to 43rd and Woodland to the south side of Spruce Street. This is where old Victorians have been most aggressively converted into undergraduate student housing and where institutional landowners like Karp hold the most sway.

“It’s ironic that they want to start in the place where the landlords own all the property and have the highest wear and tear from students coming in and out,” said David Adelman, CEO of Campus Apartments, another major University City student housing company. “[Why not] start it in the heart of the community and prove that the Historical Commission can keep up with all the repair requests and the approval process?”

The concentration of rental property near Penn is exactly why preservationists want to start in this section of the neighborhood. They fear that changing market forces, such as a 2018 dictate from Penn that students live on campus for the first two years, will push property owners to demolish old buildings where profits have dropped.

Also, since the pandemic, students want more privacy. They want their own bathrooms. Group houses are out; studios are in.

As a result, he said, some institutional property owners plan to demolish older stock to build amenity-rich housing tailored to modern tastes.

“Things have changed out here rather dramatically since Penn required more students to live on campus,” Grossbach said. “That emptied out the neighborhood.”

Critics of historic preservation contend that it can be exclusionary, saddling buildings with regulations that only the wealthy can afford to follow while preventing the construction of apartment buildings that could house more people.

Spruce Hill is already one of the tonier neighborhoods in the city. It receives security and other services from the University City District. The new historic district would also closely map to the catchment area of Penn Alexander elementary, a coveted public school subsidized by Penn that has driven up area home prices.

“Spruce Hill runs the risk of being a glorified HOA at some point,” said Phil Gentry, who lives just outside the proposed district. “I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where historic preservation was used to keep out affordable housing for many, many generations. That’s why I don’t live there anymore.”

District designation prevents the demolition of buildings that contribute to historic interest, limiting where new housing can be built. “Noncontributing” properties are subject to much less review, and if a lot is vacant when the district is created, projects proposed for it are subject to nonbinding review.

Buildings in a historic district have to conform to specific standards when they, say, replace windows. The cost of those materials can be substantially higher than average replacement prices. Changes to the facade would also be subject to review by the commission.

Grossbach says the Spruce Hill Community Association is far from an exclusionary neighborhood group. He points to area apartment projects it has supported, despite calls for building only new single-family homes. The group has backed zoning that allows some of the Victorians to be carved into apartments and others into duplexes.

“We’re just trying to prevent people from just knocking down buildings,” Grossbach said. “We’ve looked at everything, and a historic district is the least worst choice that we have. It’s the only way to have some protection.”