Endangered Property: Laverock Hill

The following is from the 2010 Endangered Properties issue of "Preservation Matters" from the Preservation Alliance of Philadelphia (Website). The full issue can be read Here (pdf).

Laverock Hill Estate
1777 Willow Grove Avenue, Cheltenham Township, Montgomery County

SIGNIFICANCE: Laverock Hill, Philadelphia socialite Isaac T. Starr’s early-twentieth-century estate, occupies a sprawling forty-two-acre site just beyond the northern limits of Philadelphia. Using a consistent palette of Tudor and Colonial Revival details, famed New York architect Charles A. Platt transformed an existing manor house into an imposing mansion and added a small hamlet of outbuildings — a stable, two-story carriage house, greenhouse, and caretakers cottages. Platt’s long-time colleague Ellen Biddle Shipman, an early pioneer in the field of landscape architecture, planted an elaborate sequence of formal gardens in 1915. Today, both the estate buildings and their gardens are remarkably untouched, standing as one of the few completely intact Platt-Shipman collaborations anywhere in the country and one of Montgomery County’s last intact estates.

THREAT: In 2008, Hansen Properties purchased the estate with plans to construct an age-restricted housing community. Hansen initially claimed they would retain the mansion for use as a community clubhouse for the new development. But plans presented to Cheltenham Township officials in 2009 proposed the complete demolition of the mansion and gardens to accommodate eight new four-story buildings. A township preservation overlay district that would otherwise protect the property is nullified by a clause exempting age-restricted developments.

RECOMMENDATION: The Montgomery County Planning Commission has urged the developer to reconsider the demolition of the property, citing its significance in both the township’s 2002 comprehensive plan and 2005 open space plan. Hansen Properties has developed an alternative site plan retaining both the mansion and gardens, but this plan has been tabled while the developers pursue approval of their original concept, to be reviewed by Cheltenham Township officials in early 2011. We urge the township and developer to respect the township preservation overlay district and pursue alternatives to demolition, using Hansen’s own alternative plan as a starting point for continued negotiation.