Historic house in Fairmount Park gets a makeover and a new occupant

Twenty-six states built homes in Philadelphia’s West Fairmount Park as showcases for the Centennial International Exhibition in 1876. Ohio decided to go big.

The state had tons of native sandstone and lime hauled from 20 quarries to build Ohio House at Montgomery Drive and Belmont Avenue and topped the Victorian Gothic structure with a large corn stalk finial. It is the only remaining original Centennial house still in the park.

Ohio House has been refurbished as the new home of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, whose nonprofit mission is to support Philadelphia’s parks. The conservancy chose Ohio House as its base as part of a commitment to help revitalize the 1,400-acre West Fairmount Park, which it believed had been “terribly neglected and thus underused.”

“One of our core duties within the conservancy is to preserve not just the parks, but the landscape and icons with the parks,” Maura McCarthy, CEO of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, said on a tour of Ohio House this week. “So we’re really proud of the house because it’s our opportunity to show what we can do.”

In May 2022, the conservancy held a panel discussion with the Urban Land Institute (ULI) about the future of West Fairmount Park and its needs. Panelists concluded that the park’s condition was poor and its programming insufficient. Likewise, neighbors felt disconnected from the space. The ULI found that the city spends an estimated $1 million annually on West Fairmount but $3 million to $5 million is needed.

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Revitalization of the 3,500-square-foot Ohio House was a way for the conservancy to launch the start of that investment, McCarthy said. West Fairmount Park is so named because it lies on the west side of the Schuylkill. It contains iconic Philly locations such as the Mann Center, Philadelphia Zoo, Belmont Plateau, Please Touch Museum, and Shofuso Japanese House.

The 650-acre East Fairmount Park on the other side of the river is home to Boathouse Row and Lemon Hill.

The Centennial International Exhibition drew 10 million people to West Fairmount Park. Alexander Graham Bell gave the first public demonstration of his telephone, and Thomas Edison’s presented the new telegraph system.

After the fair, however, there was little use for the state houses that lined what became State’s Drive. The Ohio House opened only intermittently and was then shuttered for decades. It was placed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places in 1963 and opened briefly in 1976 as an information office for the Bicentennial. In 2007, the Centennial Café began operating at the house, followed by the Hungry Bear Café, until the building was closed again in 2016.

In 2020, the Fairmount Park Conservancy, which had leased office space in Suburban Station in Center City, began renovations of the Ohio House. Key staff began operating from the building as a base in 2021 and work continued on the house and grounds. Staff had a public opening celebration last month.

Tom McPoyle, West Fairmount Park’s Ohio House director of conservation, and a team made much needed repairs and modernization while preserving as much architecture as possible, often referring to archival photos. The building was repainted.

All three porches, which had rotten floors, had to be fixed. The original brickwork on the chimneys had to be shored up. And a three-inch slab of concrete flooring installed for the cafe had to be removed without damaging the structure. The crew added removable partition walls.

The work on just the exterior took seven months and was paid for through a $49,000 grant from The 1772 Foundation, which issues grants for historic preservation work. Interior work required six months. The Ballard Spahr law firm also gave a donation in memory of Frederic L. Ballard.

Overall, the project cost about $160,000 in materials and outside contractors.

Crews uncovered hand-cut limestone foundation blocks they hadn’t known existed. They found a booklet containing a list of companies involved in the building’s original construction. Names of quarries were found to be engraved on the exterior.

Crews recycled old material and milled new material from Spanish cedar, mahogany and cypress. They also salvaged park wood from fallen trees to make furniture.

“If there’s something salvageable, we try to keep it and reuse it,” McPoyle said in a blog post by the conservancy. “These buildings were built to a high standard of quality.”

The building also needed modern technology installed for its offices, including 25 workstations.

Allison Schapker, the conservancy’s chief project officer, is, coincidentally, from Ohio.

“If you walk outside along the exterior, you’ll see all the quarries’ names engraved in stone, so you can literally read where the pieces of this building came from,” Schapker said. “And because it was made out of stone is a large reason why it’s still here today. It was such a delight and surprise to think about Ohio … and finding myself walking around the building seeing place names I’ve known my entire life.”

Schapker said the house is in a good location for the group’s headquarters.

“We’re very fortunate because it has this incredibly prominent position right on the corner of Montgomery and Belmont,” Schapker said. “Everybody knows this building. This was an obvious choice.”

The Ohio House was designed by Heart & Sons of Cleveland. It was built by Philadelphia builder Aaron Doan & Co. to serve as a clubhouse and exhibition hall for Ohio. The stone was carted in by rail. Etchings in the stone served as ads for stone or quarry companies, such as limestone from Bossier & Huffman and sandstone from Warhorst & Co.

The house gives a solid base for the Fairmount Park Conservancy, said McCarthy, the group’s CEO.

“This is our visual commitment to West Philadelphia that we are here for the long term,” McCarthy said.