Philly buildings that deserve saving for community's sake

Buildings crumble and die virtually daily, and some are so important to the people of the city that their loss is a source of great pain. But historic preservation is usually debated around issues of aesthetics and architectural history, not tattered holes in the community or the cultural fabric.

This year, however, the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia is making an important shift in its ninth annual Endangered Properties List.

In this list, communities count.

So it is that Joe Frazier's Gym on North Broad Street and the old Chinese Cultural and Community Center on North 10th Street in Chinatown make the alliance's list, announced Thursday. The rowhouses of jazz great John Coltrane and printmaker Dox Thrash are also highlighted, along with five other buildings in Philadelphia neighborhoods.

Some of the sites are well known, such as Frazier's Gym, where the former heavyweight champ trained fighters for decades, but that now has a furniture store on the ground floor and looks to an uncertain future. The Royal Theater on South Street is also well known and has been the focus of preservation efforts going back more than a quarter of a century.

John Gallery, head of the preservation alliance, said the list was focused not on properties that reflect traditional architectural values, but on "the events, activities, and people associated with these places." It is, he said, the only way for historic preservation to have meaning within the city as a whole.

Lenora Early, who is struggling to get her nonprofit organization off the ground and rehabilitate and run the John Coltrane House at 1511 N. 33d St. in Strawberry Mansion, pointed out that Coltrane lived in the neighborhood for most of the 1950s. His ownership of the house until his death in 1967 speaks to the history of the city as a whole, she said, and to Coltrane's place within the history of jazz and black America.

The house is a National Historic Landmark but is in urgent need of repairs. An adjacent house "has been pulling on our house," Early said, leading to deterioration of the Coltrane facade.

Early's late husband, a jazz aficionado, bought the Coltrane house some years ago with the idea of preserving it and transforming it into a facility dedicated to the history and legacy of the saxophonist and composer. Stabilizing the structure, however, is the first priority, Early said.