Mansion

At Smithville Mansion near Mount Holly, the holiday season will have a Victorian theme, "Christmas with H.B. Smith: 1865-1887. " Special holiday tours will begin tomorrow and continue through Dec. 30. The mansion and grounds just off Route 38 in Eastampton were the home and workplace of Smith, a 19th-century inventor and industrialist who made woodworking machinery. In 1977, Friends of Smithville, the preservation group that oversees the operation of the Victorian-era mansion just outside Mount Holly, decided to decorate the mansion for Christmas tours as a fund-raising event.

The signs of aging are apparent. The peach-colored paint on the front porch of the Glen Foerd mansion on the Delaware is peeling. On the outer buildings, the bricks are eroding. But the signs of repair are just as obvious. Workers in painters' clothes are scraping away old plaster. Inmates from the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center are restoring the shutters. And students in the Philadelphia Youth Corps are painting the outer buildings with 200 gallons of paint that two companies donated.

The Rittenhouse Square mansion of the late Henry P. McIlhenny, where the former chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art housed his world-class art collection and entertained royalty, is scheduled to be sold at sheriff's sale in October. The mansion, a group of three townhouses on the southwest corner of Rittenhouse Square, has been listed for sale to satisfy a $2.7 million Common Pleas Court judgment awarded to Bell Savings Bank, of Upper Darby, which holds a mortgage on the property.

This ain't no cat, daddy. That cute, friendly bundle of fur seen cavorting around Allen Iverson's Gladwyne mansion lately is a Rottweiler puppy, a gift to basketball's bad boy for his 27th birthday on June 7, neighbors say. The pup's name is Gemini, neighbors said, and it reportedly was a present from a family member. Despite the trying times - A.I. holed up in his mansion waiting to surrender today to police to face charges of threatening two men while armed with a gun - the tensions haven't seemed to put a damper on the pup's sunny disposition.

It's a sign of the times, said Realtor Arthur Wheeler as he pointed out the window of the Austin mansion in Rosemont to construction workers digging in the courtyard below. Like many other suburban mansions, the old Austin home is being modified for a new use - in this case, a life care retirement community named Beaumont at Bryn Mawr. Wheeler is developing the community on 50 acres of the former estate of railway baron William L. Austin on North Ithan Avenue. The heart of the estate, also called Beaumont, is the mansion, built about 1914.

What the heck can you do with a decaying turn-of-the-century 110-room mansion? Those trying to save Lynnewood Hall in Cheltenham Township are racking their brains over this question. "Maybe Walter Annenberg would want to buy it as a permanent home for his art collection," says Greg Cotler. "Maybe Temple University can use it as a school for the performing arts. It's next to Temple's Tyler art school. " Cotler, a lawyer who lives near the empty mansion, is merely thinking out loud.

The West Chester Planning Commission last week voted to probe a proposed zoning change for the former Leaf mansion that, among other things, was suggested by Councilman Mitch Crane, executor of the Natalie Leaf estate. The commission voted, 5-0, to create a subcommittee, consisting of Chairman Nancy G. Klabunde, David Sweet, and Kathy Brigham, to investigate why the borough's Planning, Zoning and Housing Committee recommended the change. The council's housing panel, which was composed of Crane and Councilwoman Susan Armstrong, recommended that the Borough Council change the zoning on the Leaf mansion at 26 W. Union St. from residential to commercial.

Just hours after a committee announced plans to raise $2 million to convert a city-owned Fairmount Park mansion into a residence for future Philadelphia mayors, Mayor Goode said it was an "inappropriate" time to discuss such a project. Goode said that while he supported the concept of a residence for his successor, who will be elected in 1991, and future mayors, it was not "a priority" and he objected to details being disclosed now. Goode expressed his displeasure during a news conference he called to discuss his appointment of a panel to advise him on how to deal with the city's financial woes.

The Glen Foerd Conservation Corp. has received an $1,800 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to study how best to maintain the Glen Foerd estate in East Torresdale. The grant will help pay for a study to provide a master plan for the restoration of the mansion. The study will be done by John Milnor Architects of West Chester, specialists in historical restorations, said William Haas, director of the corporation. The total cost of the study is $122,000, with additional money coming from a $50,750 city Class 500 grant and the corporation.

Delaware Rest Inc., a for-profit corporation, has acquired the historic Zurbrugg mansion on the riverfront in Delanco Township and will reopen it as a residential health-care facility after extensive renovations. The 80-year-old mansion had been operated for nearly 40 years as the Bible Presbyterian Home under the aegis of the Bible Presbyterian Church in Collingswood. The last tenants moved out in December 1988. Delaware Rest purchased the property, which occupies an entire block at 531 Delaware Ave., for $505,000 in March and plans to spend "upwards of a half- million dollars" in renovations, according to Vince Amico of Bordentown, vice president of the new corporation.

Four months after accusing a Canadian couple of scheming to buy - and then burn down - his famed 19-bedroom Main Line mansion in an insurance-fraud plot, a Radnor Township man has decided to drop his legal battle with the pair and split the proceeds. Disclosed in court records, the deal means both sides get far more cash than either paid, or ever offered to pay, for the estate designed by Horace Trumbauer. Jerald S. Batoff, a real estate executive who had lived on the estate since 2001, will keep more than $7 million of the $18.5 million insurance payout.

The stone walls of the house Thomas Rutter built in Berks County have remained sturdy over centuries - from the colonial period and American Revolution to the Civil War and on to the present. Within them, Rutter and his descendants were first to plot the course, in the early 1700s, of the iron industry in Pennsylvania, and later supplied munitions to George Washington's Continental Army. At the Pine Forge Mansion, overlooking the Manatawney Creek, the Rutters spoke out against slavery and turned their home into a stop on the Underground Railroad network that helped thousands of African Americans find freedom.

Developer Bart Blatstein, who has built projects across Philadelphia but raised his son and daughter out on the Main Line, plans to move into the city after agreeing to buy the McIlhenny mansion on Rittenhouse Square from drug heir Henry McNeil for $4.2 million. Blatstein, whose father once owned a recreation complex in Northeast Philadelphia, was a suburban family man as he built movie theaters and commercial strips in South Philadelphia, Manayunk and the Temple campus neighborhood in North Philadelphia, and apartments, bars, restaurants and stores at north-of-Center City sites like the Piazza complex at the former Schmidt's Brewery since the 1980s.

They packed it all up - the wagon wheels and stagecoaches, the carriages and cars, the big-box stores that sell everything from kitchenware to computers. Not the actual items, of course. The images and memories and records, loaded into 600 boxes and trucked out of Jenkintown to spacious new quarters in Abington. The Old York Road Historical Society has a new home, taking over the second floor of Alverthorpe Manor, the mansion built by a Sears heir. As part of the move, the society that for more than 75 years has studied one of the region's major suburban arteries is expanding its outreach to offer greater, more comfortable access to researchers, scholars, genealogists - and even news reporters.

NORMAN GADSON bought John Coltrane's old house in Strawberry Mansion in 2004 from Mary "Cousin Mary" Alexander, a relative of the jazz saxophonist. Not long after, he'd call up musicians in the city and ask them to come over to jam in 'Trane's house. Lenora Early, Gadson's widow, said her husband, a fervent jazz fan, intended to fix up the house and open it as a jazz venue. "He just loved jazz," Early said of Gadson. But he died in 2007, before he could restore the house, on 33rd Street near Oxford.

CAN ONE MAN who owns a blighted, vacant Germantown mansion on an otherwise beautiful block stymie every attempt by his long-suffering neighbors, the city's Department of Licenses & Inspections, the city Law Department and the much-ballyhooed Blight Court to make him fix it up? Yes, he can. Tony Byrne has beaten the system upside the head. All the mayor's horses and all the mayor's men cannot put Byrne's mansion together again. After more than a dozen violation hearings in Blight Court - which is allegedly the muscle behind L&I's attempt to force Philadelphia's most negligent owners to fix their eyesore properties - Byrne's 11-bedroom mansion at Knox and Coulter streets still looks as if TV's Addams Family lives there.

In 1735, the famed and original "Philadelphia lawyer" - Andrew Hamilton - purchased a 250-acre estate along the west bank of the Schuylkill. The estate, known as the Woodlands, was eventually inherited by Hamilton's young grandson, William. The 21-year-old, inspired by a stay in England, began to heavily renovate the grounds and mansion. The house was redone in the new Federal style popular in England, making it one of the earliest American examples of that style of architecture at its completion in 1789.

The early days of my life as a real estate writer were dominated by a number of issues, notably "active-adult" housing. In the 1960s, these were called retirement communities, and they were in Arizona and Florida. Grandma and Grandpa moved there and played golf every day. The first time I wrote about it, an editor asked whether "inactive adult" housing was what was found at Laurel Hill Cemetery, especially at those marble mausoleums overlooking Kelly Drive at Hunting Park Avenue.

Three perimeter fences and a berm separate the public from the East Park Reservoir and a look at the secrets of its urban man-made lake. No wonder so many canvasback ducks - a saddle shoe of a species with a splash of a white body and an elegant, sloping beak - have chosen the Strawberry Mansion basin for a winter home. Water Department supervisor Ricardo Everett notices them first. He has the keys to the site, off 33d Street between Oxford and Diamond, and most of the time, exclusive access to what the Audubon Society says is a rare and special place that should be transformed into an official bird sanctuary.

RESIDENTS of Strawberry Mansion were polite, but concerned, at a hearing Wednesday night on a proposed bird-and-wildlife sanctuary nearby. The National Audubon Society and Outward Bound Philadelphia are collaborating to build the East Park Leadership and Conservation Center on more than 54 acres of city-owned land surrounded by Fairmount Park. Conceptual design plans call for a two-story, 17,000-square-foot building "nestled into the berm" at the edge of the reservoir there. The sanctuary would host students to help them gain a better understanding of science and nature.