Demolition

"The cabin is saved!" Ted Pollard, president of the Radnor Historical Society, was excited yesterday after Eastern University readily agree to postpone Monday's scheduled demolition of the historic log cabin on its St. Davids campus. "We're still all in shock!" Until the meeting between university president David Black and Pollard and other supporters of historical preservation, the outlook didn't look good for what a 1925 architectural book said was likely the most "elaborate log building in this country.

Paul DuSold's portrait studio is in the demolition zone. He and about 30 other painters, sculptors and photographers are in line to lose their rented space in a former factory on 12th Street if the city goes ahead with Mayor Street's stadium plan. Well over 100 properties - many vacant, but others developed as businesses, studios or condos - would be leveled to line out a playing field for the Phillies. And DuSold, whose paintings hang in Pennsylvania Hospital, the Union League and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, would miss his fifth-floor studio on 12th Street near Wood.

Cherry Hill Township has threatened to tear down the unfinished condominiums of the Hamlets development if the builder or the mortgage holder does not make the construction area safe by Friday. Earlier this month, the township building inspector cited the financially troubled InterDevelCo for construction violations because the open structures created a safety hazard. Since then, neither the firm nor Howard Savings Bank has made any move to correct the situation. "There is imminent danger to the public, and we don't know when these problems are going to be addressed," said chief inspector Anthony Saccomanno.

When the South Jersey Port Corp. opened bids for the demolition of its rusting old shipways on the Delaware River in Camden last year, the news seemed too good to be true. The agency's consulting engineers had estimated that dismantling the 10- acre site, former home of the defunct New York Shipbuilding Corp., would cost $2.6 million. But the low bidder came in at only $494,316, $1.5 million less than the next-lowest one and less than one-fifth of the estimate from S.T. Hudson Engineers of Camden.

Felicia Hill, 36 and a mother of seven, was pricing clothing in the rear of the Salvation Army thrift shop Wednesday when she felt an earthquake-like shake, heard a whoosh of wind, then saw a wall fall in, kicking up a cloud of choking dust. Through the haze, she saw only the hand of a fast-buried coworker, Kimberly Finnegan, with whom she'd been speaking moments earlier. "I started running for my life, and all I could think about was my children," Hill said Monday at a news conference in which her attorneys announced they were filing several lawsuits in the building collapse that killed six workers and shoppers and injured 13. A firefighter and a passerby whose name she never learned help pull Hill, who had been battered by falling debris, from the wreckage, she said.

Camden's city-operated demolition program has not been insured since February, and it has no insurance policy to pay for the demolition accident that damaged a South Camden cabinet shop Wednesday, city officials said yesterday. But the city's risk manager, Bill Murray, said that while Cigna Corp. canceled demolition coverage from the city's $1.6 million premium, it may pay for at least some of the damage. He said Cigna was sending a representative to assess the damage to the cabinet shop.

Dust off the bulldozers and the wrecking ball. Wayne Spilove, who wants to build a 12-story self-parking garage with storefronts on Sansom Street near 16th, got a judge's go-ahead yesterday to begin tearing down 10 unoccupied buildings he owns on the block to make way for the project. But don't start your engines quite yet. Within hours of Common Pleas Judge Gerald Levin's ruling, Spilove's attorney, Carl S. Primavera, got a call from Mayor Street and agreed to postpone demolition until cost estimates come in for alternative plans that would keep the original facades.

No decision on demolition of cathedral buildings The Philadelphia Historical Commission failed to reach a decision Friday on whether to allow the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral to demolish two historic buildings in the 3800 block of Chestnut Street and erect a 25-story apartment tower on the site. The cathedral, around the corner on 38th Street, is seeking to tear down its own parish houses, designed over a century ago by noted church architect Charles Burns, who also designed the cathedral.

THE PHILADELPHIA Historical Commission is considering a rule change that critics say would make it easier to demolish historic buildings. The rule change would remove a requirement for owners to show they made an "attempt" to sell a property to receive a "financial hardship" to justify the demolition. On Wednesday, Ben Leech, director of advocacy for the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, sent out an "advocacy alert" calling on recipients to sign an online petition asking the commission to delay making any rule changes immediately.

A group of Mount Holly residents has filed an appeal in court against a Planning Board decision allowing the demolition of the 19th-century Newbold House on Madison Avenue. Moorestown lawyer Alfred Faxon, hired by the group last week, filed the appeal in Superior Court on Tuesday. Faxon said the appeal contends that the Planning Board adopted the resolution allowing the demolition of the building by its owner, Memorial Hospital of Burlington County, "without sufficient findings.