Spare Sansom Street’s ‘Warwick Row’

Once again, the historic buildings on the 1900 block of Sansom Street in the Rittenhouse-Fitler Historic District—I call it Warwick Row; others refer to it as the Sansom Street Three—are threatened with demolition, this time by the Southern Land Co.

That Southern Land proposes to save one of the three, the coffee shop, is no consolation. Such an approach defeats the very purpose of the historic district, which is all about saving the aggregation of historic buildings that create an ambience. It is not about saving individual buildings. Warwick Row is an entity; to destroy one building is to spoil the integrity of the whole.

True, the three buildings are not in the best condition, but remember that the former Divine Lorraine Hotel on North Broad Street is being renovated, though it was unprotected for decades and suffered horrible deterioration. Many new uses for Warwick Row can be imagined. Whatever they might be, if we succeed in saving all three structures—providing the developers with a mix of old and new, high and low—a sturdy precedent will be set for continuing administration of the historic preservation law.

David S. Traub, cofounder, Save Our Sites, Philadelphia

Originally published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 25, 2016