Look Up! Architectural exercises on Boathouse Row

“Look Up” is a PlanPhilly feature that encourages appreciation of our architectural and historical environment. Each week, the photo essay will focus on a different Philadelphia area neighborhood and its distinctive building styles and details, all of which make up the physical fabric of the city and region.

Those who have resolved in 2011 to pursue a life of aerobic health also have the opportunity to appreciate a showcase of 19th and early 20th century architecture. The Kelly Drive, on the waterfront west of the Museum of Art, has long been a gathering spot for those seeking recreation and fitness, and a site for architects to stretch their muscles beyond institutional or residential projects.

The creation of the Fairmount Water Works and dam in the early 19th century calmed a portion of the Schuylkill and turned it into a wide skating rink in the winter and a perfect course for the new sport of rowing in warm weather. The city allowed rowing organizations to erect a few clubhouses along the river of the young Fairmount Park in the 1850s, but they were teetering, wood-frame structures that were condemned by 1859.

In the 1860s and ‘70s, more substantial buildings of stone, brick, shingle and stucco were allowed to go up – after review by the new Fairmount Park Commission – in a variety of styles that fit into the park setting.

James C. Sidney designed the oldest standing clubhouse, the Philadelphia Skating Club, in 1860. The Philadelphia Girls Rowing Club obtained title to the elegant stone building, # 14, in 1965. Philadelphia’s master architect, Frank Furness, built the handsome boathouse next to the skating club for the Undine Barge Club in 1882.

Other contributors to the row were George W. and William D. Hewitt, whose work included the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel and the Bourse Building; and ecclesiastical architects Edward Hazlehurst and Samuel Huckel Jr., who designed the Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church.

Boathouse Row is a National Historic Landmark and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

“Look Up!” John Notman’s brownstone temples

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“Look Up!: 20th Century evolution in East Falls

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“Look Up!” Modernist lines on Haverford Ave.

“Look Up!” Chestnut Hill’s modernist gems

Contact the writer at ajaffe@planphilly.com.

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