Changing Skyline | 2 Phila. historic buildings wrongly leveled

By the time you read this, fresh asphalt will be cooling on another surface parking lot in Old City. That lot replaces two historic buildings that doggedly held the corner of Front and Chestnut Streets for almost 200 years, serving the neighborhood as it transitioned from a center of maritime commerce, to a blighted warehouse district, to a trendy place to live.

In a city as old as Philadelphia, you expect to lose a few historic structures now and then. What makes this case stand out is the high-profile location and the fact that the city was firmly on the side of preservation. Three agencies joined forces to defend the pair of Greek Revival buildings from an ambitious developer who considered them a nuisance. That official city policy, however, was undermined by a building inspector who acted on his own initiative and assisted the owner in obtaining a demolition permit.

Bulldozers smashed the two 1830s buildings to dust last month, but the case is likely to reverberate a long time in City Hall. The matter is under investigation by Philadelphia's inspector general, Seth Williams. Officials at three agencies - the Historical Commission, the Department of Licenses and Inspections, and the Law Department - are engaged in discussions about what went wrong and how to plug the loopholes.

They need to do more than talk. What happened at Front and Chestnut Streets reveals deep structural weaknesses in the city's preservation system.

The demolished buildings occupied Philadelphia's oldest commercial intersection, and were a reminder of its thriving 19th-century maritime economy. But they were also an integral part of the city's 21st-century Internet-age, leisure-time economy. This summer, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. begins a campaign to encourage tourists to venture from Independence Mall to the real "Historic Philadelphia" of Old City. Too bad they'll see a decidedly unhistoric parking lot at the end of Chestnut Street.

In hindsight, it's clear that the city was too accommodating in its dealings with the property owners, Harvey and Robert Spear. Even before they bought the two buildings in 2005, for a whopping $1.5 million, the structures had been cited by L&I as unsafe. But because the Spears planned to incorporate them into a high-rise condo project on the empty lot next door, the city didn't press the developers to make stabilizing repairs. That was Mistake No. 1.