Home of leading abolitionist Robert Purvis remains in peril

The home of Robert Purvis, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Philadelphia Vigilant Association, protector of escaping bondmen and bondwomen, and one of the most politically progressive voices of 19th-century America, teeters over 16th and Mount Vernon Streets, a moldering victim of hard times and uncertain financing.

Owned by a small developer who for a decade has sought to renovate it into condos, the vacant rowhouse suffers failing walls, water damage, falling bricks, and an increasingly cloudy future.

This week, the architecture committee of the Philadelphia Historical Commission recommended denial of the developer's petition to demolish and rebuild a particularly precarious east wall of the three-story building.

Too vague and uninformative, the committee said of Miguel Santiago's plan. The full commission will take a look at its May 13 meeting.

In February, Common Pleas Court ordered Santiago to repair rotting floors and joists and stabilize the structure by April 8. When that did not happen, Judge Bradley K. Moss fined Santiago $10,000 and scheduled another hearing for June 7. More fines loom.

Santiago, whose family has owned the house since the 1970s, said Tuesday that he would "take care of the work" and proceed with plans. "I'll take it little by little," he said, adding that the house "does have its historic value, and I'm definitely interested in its historic value and purpose."

But at the moment, and for most of the last decade, he has been unable to obtain the substantial financing needed to do the work.

The house, deemed a "significant" part of the Spring Garden Historic District, is of particular interest to black Americans, but resources to save it and awareness of its historical importance have been slow to materialize.

A workshop will be held Friday as part of a continuing effort to build interest in the city's underrecognized African American sites. Beginning at 9 a.m. at Tindley Temple United Methodist Church, 750 S. Broad St., it is organized by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

For several years, the Preservation Alliance has sought to identify sites of importance to African Americans and has built a database for them. Though far from complete, the database contains everything from the house where the singer Pearl Bailey lived as a young woman (on North 23d Street) to Fair Hill Cemetery on Germantown Avenue, where Robert Purvis and other antislavery advocates are buried.

Melissa Jest of the alliance wants residents themselves to identify what is historically significant within individual communities.

"My hope is to become familiar with those lesser-known sites that are important to the broader community," she said.

Purvis was a towering figure in the antebellum city. He was quite wealthy, thanks to his white father, a Charleston, S.C., cotton merchant, and he married the daughter of James Forten, a prosperous African American sailmaker who worked closely with the older Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in building the city's nascent free African American community.

He was a major figure in the Underground Railroad (sometimes being called its president); according to their own records, Robert and Harriet Purvis helped more than 9,000 enslaved Africans escape from bondage.

The house on Mount Vernon Street was the Purvises' third city residence. They left the first, on Jefferson Row in Center City, after it was besieged for days by an angry white mob during an 1842 riot. They moved to an estate at what is now Byberry and Thornton Roads.

Both of those houses, where the Purvises took in escaping slaves, are long gone. Purvis moved to Mount Vernon Street in 1875 after his wife's death and continued his activities on behalf of African Americans and women. He died at 88 on April 15, 1898.

Now the house belongs to Santiago, who dreams of condos but hasn't been able to come up with money for renovation. At Tuesday's meeting, John Gallery, head of the Preservation Alliance, raised the question of financing.

"My main concern with this application is that I'd want to make sure that the funding is there, the contracts are there, the plans are there," Gallery said. Without those elements, "the entire structure" of the house would be in jeopardy, he added.

Santiago said he had neither contracts nor a cost estimate for the work.

This scenario has been repeated several times since 2003, when the Historical Commission first approved Santiago's plans. Gallery believes an "intervention fund" might help - a pool of grant or loan money that could be used to stabilize important historic structures while comprehensive plans are worked out.

The Pew Charitable Trusts once seeded such a fund via Preservation Pennsylvania, a statewide group, but stopped a decade ago. Marian Godfrey, senior director of cultural initiatives, said it was successful, but the philanthropy decided it could have "more success" by taking a "longer view" of preservation.

One typical grant under the intervention fund was $3,000 to Eastern State Penitentiary in 1998, to repair the ceiling near Al Capone's cell, penitentiary president Sally Elk said. "It was critical," she said. "It allowed tours to go to Al Capone's cell."

But no such fund exists now for the city's historic buildings, and the Purvis House continues to sag.

"Is there a need for an intervention fund?" said Melinda Crawford, head of Preservation Pennsylvania. "Yes, yes, yes. We lack the ability to move quickly because we lack the resources to jump in."