Selling a childhood home steeped in Philadelphia art history

It’s never easy to sell your childhood home, but imagine if it contains the studio of a man once known as the “Mayor of the Arts” in Philadelphia.

For more than 40 years, artist Sam Maitin worked out of the 1810 rowhouse near Seventh and Pine and lived upstairs with wife, Lilyan, son, Izak, and daughter, Ani.

Sam died in 2004 and Lilyan in 2019, and next month, the house is to have a new owner. Ani and Izak are sorting through a lifetime of memories and working to relocate their father’s collection.

“I did not want to sell the house, but, as you can imagine, it’s really expensive to keep up,” said Ani, 53, who lives in Chestnut Hill. “The history of all the people that came through — to me, it has almost museum-like qualities.”

Maitin, known for abstract murals and collages, is credited by many with bringing color to Philadelphia.

“From his public art sculptures and murals to his posters and prints, Sam was able to share his message of color, beauty and justice to an extremely wide audience,” said artist Craig Stover, Maitin’s assistant from 1992 to 1999 and the former director of the Allens Lane Art Center in Mount Airy. “As soon as you become aware of his work, you realize it’s everywhere.”

Indeed, hospitals, universities, private homes, synagogues, and community centers all over Philadelphia have Maitins, as do art museums in the United States and Europe. Prominent local works include murals in the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Academy House on Locust Street. Maitin’s last commission was an interactive piece for the relocated Please Touch Museum.

Also a community activist, Maitin advocated for artists, protested injustice, and volunteered for nonprofits. As a work-from-home dad, he served as the emergency contact for neighborhood kids attending McCall School.

“He was a unique civic spirit,” said William Valerio, director and CEO of the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill. “He believed a great city had to have a great cultural life.”

As a young artist, Maitin shared a studio with five others for $60 a month near 12th and Walnut Streets, often sleeping on a cot. He longed for a ground-floor space of his own.

He purchased the rundown Pine Street rowhouse in 1961 for $9,000 (that would be about $84,000 today). When he and Lilyan were married in the studio not long afterward, they had to cover holes in the floor so guests didn’t fall through.

The Maitins arrived at the advent of government-driven “urban renewal” in the diverse, working-class immigrant neighborhood — three years before I.M. Pei’s now iconic Society Hill Towers were completed.

“The neighborhood was really different then,” Ani said. “There were actually a lot of empty lots and abandoned buildings around here.”

There was a “friendly little bar” that Sam loved at Eighth and Lombard — “a ramshackle old place where Blacks and whites, rich and poor, could relax and share ideas over 15-cent beers,” he told The Inquirer in 1979. And just behind the Maitin house was an auto shop, where they often pushed their VW microbus for repairs.

Sam engaged his older brother Irving, a Penn- and Harvard-educated architect, to renovate and credited him with creating a beautiful house out of “a dilapidated pile, years before the address became fashionable.”

Irving raised the roof 10 feet to create a loft suite, divided by a gigantic rolling barn door. He carved out skylights and strategically placed transoms and windows to maximize natural light.

In contrast to the Federalist exterior, Irving chose midcentury modern decor inside with bright splashes of color, not unlike Sam’s paintings.

» READ MORE: A Revolutionary-era house with a modern interior in Society Hill

The kitchen picture window overlooked what would become a courtyard when the Maitins bought an adjacent lot in the 1970s. Sam laid “every single brick and Belgian block,” Ani said, scavenged from nearby demolitions and street repaving.

The house’s high ceilings and white walls proved perfect to display Sam’s work, and to save on gallery fees, the Maitins often hosted art shows there.

The at-home shows “were never hugely successful,” Ani said, “but they were very fun.”

A painter, printmaker, sculptor, muralist, and graphic designer, Maitin was a prolific artist, sometimes to the dismay of his dealers — and his wife.

He had major exhibitions in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo, and his work is in collections at the Tate in London, the National Gallery in Washington, and MoMA in New York, as well as at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Woodmere.

But he also devoted hours to creating posters, invitations, and emblems for nonprofits and civic organizations such as the YMHA. He once designed decorative ceiling tiles for a radiation treatment room for cancer patients..

“Dealers tell me not to do posters. It makes your work available to everyone for nothing,” Maitin told the Daily News in 1993. “Well, I despise the elitism of art. … Art is an attempt at a gift. It’s an offering.”

Maitin never made much money, Ani said. Over the years, her mother worked administrative jobs at SmithKline, Hahnemann Hospital, and the city school district “to keep us in the house.”

Maitin was born in 1928 above the grocery store run by his Russian Jewish immigrant parents at 18th and Oxford in North Philadelphia, and grew up there. He attended Simon Gratz High School and won an art scholarship to Philadelphia College of the Arts (now University of the Arts) and also attended the University of Pennsylvania.

He later taught at both alma maters, as well as at Moore College of Art and Fleisher Art Memorial. Among his students was prize-winning children’s book illustrator Jerry Pinkney, who died last fall.

Maitin loved to collaborate. While designing a mural for a wing of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he scrapped his original design after a brainstorming session with a dozen patients, ages 4 to 14.

“The idea of submitting my work to children is not new to me. I’ve always done it with my own children,” Maitin said in 1991. “Children are honest, and sometimes I need their help.”

Izak, now 55, who works for the city and lives in Pennsport, remembers his father frequently stopping him on his way out the door to seek an opinion on which pieces to show a dealer. “He’d have everything lined up in the hallway, or maybe the studio … and you’d wind up being late for school.”

Once, Ani recalled, she was annoyed at being waylaid, so she told Sam she didn’t like a painting that he’d been working on for weeks. When she returned home, she was mortified to discover he had painted over the entire background in black to start over.

“So every time I see that one, I feel a little bit sick,” she said, “because I actually really thought it was beautiful, but I was just mad at him.”

In the 1970s, Maitin tapped “his skill as a printmaker and his penchant for phrasemaking” to turn his protests against war, poverty, and injustice into a fine-art form, historian Willard Randall wrote in an Inquirer article titled “Is Philadelphia Ready for Sam Maitin?”

Maitin weighed in on everything from the Vietnam War to Philadelphia support for the arts to the gentrification of Society Hill.

The Maitins helped Dorothy Miller — Miss Dot, their beloved corner crossing guard — in her 10-year battle to retain affordable housing in Society Hill.

The city’s redevelopment plan, championed by famed planner Edmund Bacon, broke from the widespread demolition that characterized much post-World War II redevelopment. Instead, homes would be preserved, and greenways added to create a more livable neighborhood.

“In those days,” Sam recalled in 1979, “it was not surprising to attend a civic meeting and find yourself sitting next to an eminent historian, a young banker, a former mayor, a learned professor … and young people like myself without an extra dollar in our pockets or dreams of making a real estate killing.”

While more of Society Hill’s buildings were preserved than was typical of urban redevelopment, many residents couldn’t afford to renovate their houses to the strict standards required, and nearly 600 families were displaced, 20% of whom were Black and many others of Eastern European descent.

Miller, a lifelong neighborhood resident, sued to block evictions and include low-income housing.

“When we was fighting for these houses, you know who was with me at all times? Sam,” Miller told Preserving Society Hill’s oral historians in 2006. “You better believe it. I loved him. Sam was my buddy.”

In the end, 14 rental units were built on Sixth Street, and Miller and her daughter moved back.

» READ MORE: When did Society Hill become a city state unto itself? | Inga Saffron

In time, Maitin retreated from neighborhood meetings, describing himself in 1979 as being “bone-weary of listening to debate about bricks and trees and property values. That’s not what brought me down here.”

He lamented artists around the region being priced out by “their psychiatrists and doctors, followed by their lawyers and accountants ... followed by their bankers and brokers” — an issue artists face today in such neighborhoods as Northern Liberties and Kensington.

In 2021, homes in Maitin’s zip code sold for $160,000 to $3.1 million, with a median price of $416,000, according to Bright MLS. His house was listed for $1.55 million and is under contract to settle in February.

Ani Maitin had dreamed of keeping the Pine Street house to create a museum and teaching institute.

Though selling is “completely gut-wrenching,” said Ani, who works in health care and is married with two teenage children, “I wasn’t ready to dedicate my life to doing something like that.”

Instead, with Stover’s help, the family organized one last in-home art show last weekend to celebrate Maitin’s life and raise money to preserve his collection for future generations. Friends recalled the intellectual, salon-like debates that had occurred within the walls.

Stover called working with Maitin “a massive privilege,” filled with joy and exposure to hundreds of artists.

“Sam showed me that there was more than one way to live your life as an artist,” Stover said. “It was possible to have a giant impact on the world by finding new ways to share his vision.”