For Lease: Victorian Manor Fixer-Uppers in Woodland Setting

Philip Price Jr. was driving past Fairmount Park with his son in the early 1980s when he saw one of the park’s neglected Victorian manors go up in flames.

“I thought it was just a tragedy,” said the 71-year-old Price, a member of the park commission board.

About a century earlier, his great-great-grandfather, Eli K. Price, had helped the city acquire private estates along the Schuylkill River to form a vast city park that protects Philadelphia’s watershed and provides its residents with a pastoral retreat.

The Fairmount Park homes later served as beer halls, house museums and housing for park employees. Restrictions on their use and funding problems had left many vacant and vandalized by the time Price watched Richland burn.

The nonprofit Fairmount Park Historic Preservation Trust is now trying to find tenants who will refurbish the buildings while drawing people to little-known corners of the 9,200-acre park that includes the Philadelphia Zoo, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and dozens of ball fields and playgrounds. In return, the trust will grant them long-term leases.

“The biggest obstacle is finding people [tenants] willing to partner, and getting a strong public consensus that this is what we want to do at Fairmount Park,” said Matthew Rader, the trust’s executive director. “Some people believe it should be more of a passive park.”

In early November, developer David Groverman won approval to open a cafe at Ohio House, an underused site in a lonely stretch of the park that was built for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Groverman plans to spend $300,000 to restore the property, which he hopes will become a meeting place for park visitors.

The trust has raised money to save a hidden architectural gem: a small porter’s house that long served as a jail for park police, but was left to rot when the force disbanded in the 1970s. The Sedgeley Porter’s House was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who would later design the U.S. Capitol. The house -- now rented by the Philadelphia Outward Bound Center -- is one of America’s earliest Gothic Revival buildings.

A mental-health group spent $1 million last year to convert the long-vacant Rockland -- a Federal-style country house built about 1800 -- into its headquarters, with modern cubicles in the basement and an ornate ballroom-turned-conference-room a floor above.

The Psychoanalytic Center offers a unique training site for visitors once they find their way.

“Nobody has any real addresses in the park,” said M.J. Bobrow, an administrative director. “It makes FedEx deliveries interesting.”

Philadelphia today sets aside a few million dollars, in a good year, for capital improvements in the park, while the trust has an operating budget of about $600,000.

Price said he welcomed Fairmount Park’s continuing evolution, noting that park officials in other eras had agreed to host the Centennial and to build the zoo in the park.

“Each generation, we search for ways to preserve this great asset,” he said. “I think it’s the greatest urban park in America.”