Save Our Sites

Save Our Sites is active today. It hosts a series of illustrated lectures and book talks on Philadelphia architecture and preservation, recorded for its YouTube channel; it sends a newsletter to its members; it leads tours; and David S. Traub speaks for SOS at most monthly meetings of the Philadelphia Historical Commission and its committees. For the latest, see News.

A running record of the buildings and districts on which David S. Traub has spoken for Save Our Sites, most often in support of designation, and sometimes asking for a better design. Each entry links to the Commission’s published minutes.

The SOS newsletter goes to members by email. To receive it, or to join a tour, write to SOS (see Get in touch, below). An archive of past newsletters and tours will be added here.

Preservation runs through his whole career. As an architect he has restored buildings in the city’s parks and neighborhoods, among them the 1916 Boat House in FDR Park (1992), pavilions at Blue Bell Park and Belmont Plateau (1998), the Fish Hatchery building in Pleasant Hill Park (2000) and the Anne Sophia Penn Chew Farmhouse in Mount Airy (2011), and his restoration of houses on St. Albans Place won an award from the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia; this work is catalogued under Historic Preservation. As a photographer and author he has spent decades recording the places most Philadelphians walk past, from his 1982 Tercentenary exhibit “Philadelphia, the Concealed City” to his three books on the city’s hidden streets, courts and houses. Save Our Sites is the advocacy side of the same work.

David S. Traub co-founded Save Our Sites with John Dowlin and has long been its public voice, bringing an architect’s eye to testimony, letters and walking tours. In 2011 Save Our Sites issued a list of twenty endangered places in the city (WHYY). He has written many articles and letters on preservation issues near Rittenhouse Square for the Center City Weekly Press and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among them a 2016 letter to the Inquirer defending Sansom Street’s “Warwick Row” (see Writings).

He continues to speak for Save Our Sites before the Philadelphia Historical Commission. In November 2025 he urged the restoration of the gardener’s cottage among the Dodge Estate service buildings at 419 W. Clapier Street (minutes).

His own restoration work is catalogued under Historic Preservation.

Save Our Sites was founded with John Dowlin, one of Philadelphia’s great civic activists, who died in August 2024 at the age of 82. He is best remembered as a co-founder of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia: with David Rulon he developed the U-shaped bicycle rack now used around the world, and he founded the international Bicycle Network, led bicycle tours and people-to-people diplomacy in Cuba, and worked on the Westbank Greenway along the Schuylkill. He brought the same conviction to the city’s buildings, that ordinary places are worth fighting for. His papers are held by Temple University.