The Legendary Blue Horizon

What's historically significant about a building? Is it the grand ballroom, a theater's auditorium, the marble friezes adorning a train station's head house? Or is it the box it all came in?

In most cases, at least in Philadelphia, only the latter is recognized. Friends of the Boyd spent years struggling to convince its various owners and the Historical Commission that the most valuable piece of the puzzle was behind its humble Chestnut Street facade. They managed to convince the public, but not the powers behind the decision, and demolition seems to have begun. 

It might be counterintuitive, but historically designated landmarks are not very marketable. Most prospective buyers, whether they're purchasing a hotel or a house, don't want to be burdened with costly restorations within their own property. In fact, there are very few cities where the interiors of private property are dictated with such rigid requirements. Colonial Williamsburg may be one of the most notable exceptions. 

For the most part, owners prefer to make their property their own, even if that means gutting the columns and wainscoting from a Victorian twin and replacing it with the open floor plan and Pergo of a suburban McMansion. As unfortunate as that may seem to history and architecture nerds like myself, it's understandable. The Historical Commission has to maintain the balance between preserving our landmarks and retaining their salability. 

However, when you consider the fact that the White House was gutted and rebuilt from the inside out in 1952, it would seem that nothing is truly sacred.

Buildings like the Boyd are equally the sum of their parts. Its screen, seats, and lobby are as significant as its Art Deco face. However other buildings in Philadelphia meeting a similar fate aren't necessarily significant for any particular brick or transom, but for the events that took place within. In these instances, the interior is often far more important than the facade.

The Legendary Blue Horizon on North Broad Street is nationally synonymous with boxing. After closing five years ago, several plans have called for restoring it as a boxing venue, razing it for a hotel, and most recently, preserving the facade and building a hotel within. But the problem with this logic is even more pronounced here than it was at the Boyd. While the Blue Horizon is undoubtedly a beautiful building, it's essentially three brownstones that can be found throughout the city. The building's true significance lies behind its front doors, and its converted interior's role as a famous boxing arena. 

It's exterior's preservation is essentially pointless, especially as a hotel. Like Philadelphia International Records on South Broad Street, it's not the building that's historic, it's what took place here. Ten years from now this North Broad hotel will either look like several converted brownstones, or a tower awkwardly ascending from a false front. Few will remember what took place here or the famous names that fought inside. Allowing the Blue Horizon's interior to be demolished is like throwing out the LEGOs and saving the box. The building is just a vessel. And without its arena, it will just be a hotel.

When those in charge of protecting our historic landmarks fail to recognize the dynamic complexities of what truly makes a place historic, our efforts to preserve our history become exhausted and what we salvage becomes meaningless. 

Sigma Sound Studios

The Sound of Philadelphia is coming down to make way for Carl Dranoff's towering SLS International Hotel and Residences on South Broad Street. Philadelphia International Records was definitely a Philadelphia institutions, and an American one. But uptown in a forgotten pocket of Center City, perhaps the last pocket to be terraformed by new condos and hotels, Sigma Sound Studios is also no-more. 

BizJournals has the skinny.

The small building that gave us Macho Man and Disco Inferno, the latter a song that never seems to end, has been sold and will be converted into apartments. It isn't clear yet whether the building will simply be renovated, grow, or like the Sound of Philadelphia, demolished for something larger. Sigma Sound Studios isn't a huge building, and in an emerging neighborhood literally steps from City Hall, its redevelopment would likely profit from additional space.

This neighborhood - the place I've called home for almost eight years - is a unique one. It's long-gone warehouses once housed films from studios like Warner Brothers and MGM throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s. But throughout much of the 20th Century, it was also a notorious red light district. Rumor has it, in the early 20th Century, sailors docked on Delaware Avenue were forbidden from walking the streets of what was often called the Furnished Room District, so named for its abundance of flop houses, brothels, and drug dens. 

As late as the early 2000s, XXX book stores occupied Arch Street and loosely named "massage parlors" still play a part in what's left of a neighborhood clinging to its seedy past. Likely because of its history, the district bound by Broad, 11th, Market, and Vine was targeted for reconstruction in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Unfortunately its history - the good, the weird, and the untoward - has been scraped from the historical narrative of Philadelphia with very little record. 

While I'll miss my cheap rent and a garden a stone's throw from City Hall, it will be exciting to see how the neighborhood evolves and how its unique inhabitants choose to remember it. Wedged between the Convention Center and the growing Loft District, change was inevitable. Hopefully it won't soullessly embrace the convention center but also retain a little bit of its heart, however jaded. Things in Philadelphia tend to do just that.

SLS International Hotel

News broke today that Carl Dranoff's SLS International Hotel and Condo at Broad and Spruce is all but a done deal. And at 47 stories and 562 feet, it's tall. Like taller than William Penn, tall.

Dranoff Properties released Kohn Pedersen Fox architects' initial renderings of the sleek tower and it's an exciting departure from Dranoff's other properties. Construction is planned to start in 2014.

Kohn Pedersen Fox

Kenny Gamble, of the legendary Gamble and Huff and Philadelphia International Records, sold the current building to Carl Dranoff.

Despite the loss of the landmark building, South Broad Street will also be losing a vacant gravel lot.

Kohn Pedersen Fox

The hotel's name pays homage to Philadelphia International Records and vested parties have hinted that more than the namesake will pay tribute to Gamble and Huff, Philadelphia International Records, and Mayor Wilson Goode, whose offices were once in the current building.

Gamble and Huff

Bradley Maule

The announcement of Carl Dranoff's forty story hotel at the site of Philadelphia International Records has caused a stir amongst both American music lovers and national historians. The small but pronounced building at Broad and Spruce, partially destroyed by a fire in 2010, is the location that Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff helped launch the careers of Motown and Disco legends.

With Philadelphia International Records and its neighbor, Utrecht Art Supplies closed, the building is currently vacant. Still, the building stands in the Broad Street Historic District so it's the prime location for Philadelphia's first museum dedicated to the Philadelphia Sound, right?

Well there's just one catch. Kenny Gamble, largely responsible for the building's iconic history, is still very much alive. In fact it is his holding division, the Great Philadelphia Trading Company that is orchestrating the building's sale to Carl Dranoff.

It's a unique situation. The building is clearly historic, but historically significant thanks to Kenny Gamble. Can the city really say, "You did a great job making history, but we're going to tell you what to do with the building that made it. But hey, thanks for the music"?

Given the impending outcome at the Boyd Theater, the city's Historical Commission has rendered itself useless, just an item on any developer's shopping list. But our private historic organizations, those truly dedicated to the salvation of our region's landmarks don't operate without their own missteps.

The simple fact is this is Kenny Gamble's building. If the city forces it from the source of the building's history, in the name of history, the city comes across as a great big ass. That doesn't mean there should be no effort to save it. But that's where Philadelphia's historic organizations need to be a little less...Philadelphian.

Gamble needs a reason to save the building, or at least its legacy. Is the building itself significant or just the music it helped create? At the very least the discussion has proposed the need for a museum dedicated to the sound brought to us by Gamble and Huff. Would a museum anchoring Dranoff's new hotel significantly honor that, or is there true history in the current building's architecture.

Do those rallying to save the building really understand why it's significant? Do they listen to records bought at Philadelphia International Records and connect it to the architecture.

Historic preservation is rarely about buildings, but historians can be somewhat ragmatic when it comes to restoration. Even at the Boyd Theater, what are historians trying to preserve? A building or an experience? An experience that few still appreciate?

At Broad and Spruce, that experience is the music, and most of that history was lost to the fire in 2010. What's left may truly be an insignificant building.

These are all things that preservationists need to consider as they campaign to save a defunct record store. Is the architecture of a building, one built decades before Philadelphia International Records, relevant to its history? Would it be relevant to anyone seeking a museum dedicated to its namesake?

South Broad has its share of underutilized property more appropriate for a new skyscraper, but as we've seen countless times, the market and zoning dictates those decisions. If Dranoff can pull off a skyscraper even more exciting than Gamble's building on Broad and Spruce, one housing a museum dedicated to the legacy of Gamble and Huff, has anything really been lost?