Odd Center City building getting new owner

The Hale Building at Chestnut and Juniper Streets is under contract to be bought by Brickstone Realty Cos., offering new hope for the revival of one of Center City's most eccentric architectural landmarks.

Brickstone, whose restoration credits include the former John Wanamaker and Lit Bros. department stores on Market Street, plans to renovate the seven-story building at 1326 Chestnut and revamp its upper floors into offices for advertising firms or other creative users, managing partner John Connors said. The ground floor will be divided between two restaurants, he said.

"That building is iconic," Connors said Friday. "Architecturally, it's one of a kind."

The owner and seller of the 51,500-square-foot building is 1326 Chestnut Street Associates, which has held the property since 1985, according to city records.

The building was completed in 1887 by architect Willis G. Hale - who also designed the Divine Lorraine Hotel on North Broad Street - as offices for the now-long-defunct Keystone Bank.

With its ornate columns, cornices, and balconies set into a stone-and-brick facade under a mansard roof, the Hale building has become an architectural touchstone that walks the fine line between gorgeous and grotesque.

"Hale's Keystone Bank almost defies description," a surveyor wrote in a report to the state historic preservation office in 1981. "A man who could invent a thousand motives in the course of a design, Hale was inclined to use them all in the building."

Over the years, the Hale's tenants included detective agencies, insurance companies, and the architectural offices of Hale himself, author J.P. Webster wrote in Vanishing Philadelphia: Ruins of the Quaker City.

Later upstairs occupants included the Bellevue Health Spa, which featured saunas and steam rooms that were "closed in the late 1980s after the discovery of HIV and AIDS put an end to the open sexual behavior that had apparently been taking place there," Webster wrote.

The ground floor, meanwhile, had became marred by a modern tiled storefront installed over the building's Chestnut Street facade to accommodate retailers, which remains intact.

In 2009, developer Alon Barzilay proposed changing the largely vacant property into a hotel with a ground-floor restaurant, advancing a design that replaced the modern storefront with a glass alcove rather than attempting to restore one of its earlier frontages.

Connors said his plan for the Chestnut facade would be similar to Barzilay's, which was ultimately approved by the city's Historical Commission and found to be eligible for federal preservation tax credits. "We wouldn't be trying to re-create something from its past," he said. "We'll probably go with something that's a bit more contemporary."

Source: Philly.com