Germantown's obvious, yet elusive, potential

On a recent afternoon, a woman in a minivan pulled up to the group of neighborhood activists and city officials gathered outside Germantown Town Hall. "You're planning to do something with this building?" the woman asked. "Please, you've got to do something good with it."

The 1923 Town Hall - a refined Beaux Arts version of the neoclassical Merchant's Exchange in Old City - has been empty since 1995. It stands, deteriorating, on Germantown Avenue directly across the street from Germantown High.

"It's really depressing to be in that school all day looking out here at this building wasting away," said the woman. She drove away.

For those at Germantown High, and for the assembled activists and officials, Town Hall is a daily reminder of Germantown's lingering unmet potential.

The ceremonial hall with entablature memorials to Germantown's World War I dead is a refined, graceful space, remarkable even in a neighborhood that is a showplace of American architecture between 1700 and 1930. Germantown's streetscape is as exuberant and variegated as any city district in America, its organic urban form the antithesis of Center City's oppressively rational grid. And today, like Town Hall, it is stuck, seemingly too expensive to fix, its potential obvious and yet painfully elusive.

"Where's Germantown going?" asks Alan Greenberger, deputy mayor for planning and economic development. "That's a question we keep asking. Germantown should be fabulous. I'm not sure I know why it isn't."

"I have always thought," says Cindy Bass, newly elected Eighth District councilwoman, who will take office in January, "that this is one of the neighborhoods that has the most potential to grow and develop. Its potential speaks for itself."

So much of that potential lies in the neighborhood's turrets and towers, crests and colonnades, porches and porticos, in the slate and stucco and stone. In 1933, when the National Park Service launched the Historic American Building Survey, they began the immense project in Germantown because of the area's rich architectural history.

"We are a 326-year-old community with connections both deep and broad," says David Young, the director of Cliveden, the historic mansion on the site of the Battle of Germantown. "We think that's cool, but it means nothing if there's no connection to contemporary life."