In the 1920s, Mt. Airy left behind a sleepy, bucolic past and burst forth with 20th century offerings. Developers poured money into its main commercial strip along Germantown Avenue, constructing new Art Deco buildings and businesses to cater to an influx of new residents. Suddenly, there was a bustling new game in town along Northwest Philadelphia’s main thoroughfare.

A century later, in many ways, Mt. Airy once again has the feel of a quieter community tucked between the more heavily-trafficked neighborhoods of Chestnut Hill and Germantown. But is history set to repeat itself?

In July, Quintessence Theatre Group closed on a $2.3 million purchase of the front portion of the Sedgwick Theater, a 1928 Art Deco playhouse in the heart of Mt. Airy’s commercial district and the crown jewel of its Roaring Twenties renaissance. With major renovations planned for the building’s former lobby, which now serves as a 150-seat performance space, and dreams of one day restoring the full theater to its former spellbinding glory, Quintessence producing artistic director Alex Burns thinks big things could once again be in store for his native Mt. Airy.

“This is a new era for the theater and will just bring literal light to the avenue,” Burns said, referencing plans to install a new, well-lit marquee that will protrude from the Sedgwick’s facade. “Our hope is that it won’t only benefit Quintessence, but will expand the sense of a nightlife district in Northwest Philadelphia. Bring in new restaurants, bring in new retail, bring in an exciting new energy.”

The rumblings of redevelopment extend far beyond the footprint of the Sedgwick. Buoyed by a 2019 zoning overlay that allowed for higher rooflines, greater density, and less parking along Germantown Avenue, real estate developers are making fresh incursions into Mt. Airy. Just down the block, TierView Development is transforming the former National Bank of Mt. Airy. Built in the heyday of the 1920s, the three-and-a-half-story bank is now undergoing the most significant change in its history, as Tierview will maintain and restore the building’s Wissahickon schist facade while constructing 19 new residential units via an overbuild and connected new construction to the rear.

Next door, developer Stuart Udis in May completed a $1.73 million purchase of the ornate Tourison Building, named for a family of developers who built both the Sedgwick Theater and much of East Mt. Airy’s housing stock in the early 20th century. Udis pulled permits this summer to rehab the building’s limestone facade and renovate nine existing upstairs apartments. He’s also seeking a new restaurant tenant for a ground floor corner retail space that has sat empty for years.

A few blocks removed, on Mt. Airy Avenue, Udis is also pushing ahead with the construction of 12 new townhomes and an 18-unit apartment building at the site of a former auto shop. Udis said he now has a total of $35 million in investments in the neighborhood and is obviously high on its redevelopment potential. “It’s a neighborhood where people want to live,” he said.

Nearby, the beep-beep-beeps and bang-bang-bangs of more new construction ring out. At the former site of the Trolley Car Diner along the neighborhood’s border with Chestnut Hill, Main Street Development has started vertical construction on a five-story, 114-unit apartment building, which will also include some 6,000 feet of commercial space, a project of unprecedented scale for the strip.

At the far other end of Mt. Airy’s commercial corridor near the border with Germantown, yet more development awaits. Along this stretch, well-known Northwest Philadelphia developer Ken Weinstein has already converted part of the historic St. Michael’s Evangelical Lutheran Church into a pediatrics office and is still seeking a new use and tenant for the main chapel. He is also plowing ahead with more projects nearby, having recently redeveloped a Colonial-era home into a green housewares business and last year plunking down $950,000 to buy the Pelham Trust Company Bank, a locally-beloved 1907 structure he aims to turn into a destination restaurant. “It’s a really exciting time for Mt. Airy right now,” said Weinstein.

Yet, not all are sold that it is for the best. Linda Bell, president of the community organization East Mt. Airy Neighbors, has lived in the neighborhood for all of her 70-plus years. She notes Mt. Airy is a diverse community with a history of debate about which way to steer it, so it can be difficult to pigeonhole community sentiment. Still, she quipped that “even Stevie Wonder can see” the neighborhood and its demographics are changing.

For Bell, what has always tied together local residents of all backgrounds is a desire for a middle class, quiet way of living. She believes Mt. Airy has already lost some of that character. Not just from deep-pocketed transplants paying record rates to move into the area, but also large apartment buildings that propose to include affordable housing units. “We do not like to be sitting on top of each other. We like to spread out. We like our grass, we like our trees. If you want to live up here, you need to live up here,” Bell said. “Our families came here for a better way of life. We’re not against development, but the designs of the developments are breaking up the culture that we know as Mt. Airy.”

Agrarian to Art Deco

The most significant period of transition in Mt. Airy’s history– from farmland to early Philadelphia suburb– was cemented a century ago, according to a history of the neighborhood compiled for the successful nomination of its historical district in 2019. Originally, the landscape served as a hunting ground for the indigenous Lenape, who traversed the area through an established trail that later became Germantown Avenue. In the 17th century, William Penn purchased tracts of land in the area from the Lenape and sold them to European settlers, with about 175 residents settling in Germantown by the end of the century. The purchase of their Germantown plots also came with rural “side land” lots located in the area of modern day Mt. Airy.

The following centuries saw the significant growth of Germantown and Chestnut Hill, but Mt. Airy largely remained farmland. That began to change as the City took control of the neighborhoods in 1832, converted Germantown Avenue from a toll-based turnpike to public road in 1874, and various interests created a wealth of public transportation options in the last decades of that century.

“The rail lines and the trolley made it practical to live in Mt. Airy and commute daily to work in other parts of Philadelphia, such as the business district in Center City,” the Planning Commission noted in its historic district nomination.

Dating to Colonial times, the uber-wealthy had also built large country estates in the area, including William Allen, Chief Justice of colonial Pennsylvania and financier of Independence Hall, whose former Mt. Airy estate now lends its name to the neighborhood. However, with the arrival of the rail lines, a diversity followed. “Between 1880 and 1920, property developers such as Henry Houston, Ashton Tourison, Frank Mauran, and George S. Woodward built and sold developments in Mt. Airy of more modest year-round houses, ranging from large houses for the upper middle class to twins and rowhouses for those with lower incomes,” the nomination explained.

By the 1920s, Mt. Airy had caught up to the times. Redevelopment along its Germantown Avenue corridor brought in three-story mixed use buildings: ground floor shops serving the neighborhood’s 25,000 residents with apartments above. A White Swan Hotel– a stopover inn for travelers on the way to points further west, which also found itself the target of prohibition raids– was torn down to make way for the mixed-use, Art Deco Tourison Building. Next door, civic leaders built the National Bank of Mt. Airy and deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet, it was Tourison’s 1928 opening of the Sedgwick Theater, designed by architect William Harold Lee, that “confirmed Mt. Airy’s change from rural to residential neighborhood,” the nomination concluded.

More Change in the Air-y

Those with living memories of Mt. Airy’s more recent history agree that the neighborhood’s commercial strip has continued to change in the century since it came into its own. Yet, they offer different perspectives on whether that is a good thing.

Alex Bartlett, a native of West Mt. Airy and historian currently working as archivist for the Chestnut Hill Conservancy, said during the 1970s, “There just weren’t a lot of reasons to shop” on Mt. Airy’s Germantown Avenue. Sure, there were a few grocery stores and places to buy trading cards and grab a coke, he explained, but there were also a number of darkened store fronts and an abundance of businesses offering services like vacuum repair and furniture reupholstery that didn’t draw much foot traffic. More often than not, his family ended up in Germantown or Chestnut Hill for retail outings. On the whole, Bartlett said he’s OK with the direction Mt. Airy is currently heading, seeing it is a continuation of momentum that took a hit from COVID-19. “I think Mt. Airy was doing fairly well and is picking up where it left off before the pandemic,” said Bartlett.

Michael Boyle, also a native son who is preparing to close up shop on an Owen’s Antiques store he has owned for two decades that is catty-corner from the theater, shares a similar perspective. He also recalled an undesirable corridor in the 1970s and credits a revitalization of McMenamin’s, a long-running tavern and neighborhood institution, for helping to seed change. He said the neighborhood already now has high quality restaurants like Jansen and La Trattoria and thinks the strip would benefit from more vibrant, boutique shops like the kind that draw regular foot traffic to Chestnut Hill.

Bell isn’t sure that is what Mt. Airy needs. She laments the loss of service-oriented businesses like laundromats, hardware stores, and grocery stores that served practical purposes for middle class families living nearby. She also feels priced out of many of the neighborhood’s newer eateries. “Back in the day, we had more diversity in business owners and types of businesses, and that, to me, felt more doable, and more walkable,” said Bell. “How many coffeeshops, how many little pubs can you have? Talking about drawing people from other neighborhoods into your neighborhood. For what?”

Bell also fears for Mt. Airy’s coveted greenspace. On this point, Bartlett agreed. Both say one of the things they most enjoyed growing up in Mt. Airy were the natural breaks in the strip, where rows of homes and businesses would give way to large pockets of greenspace, particularly visible today in campuses like the New Covenant Church and Lutheran Theological Seminary. “I would also argue development is hurting Mt. Airy because we had [open space] gaps, but they’re going away,” Bartlett said. “Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. It depends on which side of the fence you’re sitting on.”

Unarrestable Development?

To what extent further change can even be curtailed in Mt. Airy is uncertain. At the same time as it was nominating Mt. Airy’s historic district in 2019, the Planning Commission was also working with City Council to upzone the area. Among other changes, the rezoning allowed buildings with frontage on the Germantown Avenue corridor to reach heights of 55 feet by-right, as opposed to 38 feet. Developers quickly pounced, leading to the redevelopment of the National Bank of Mt. Airy and the large Main Street Development apartment building.

Weinstein said a lot of what’s now happening in Mt. Airy has to do with the overlay opening the door for development trends already being felt in other areas of the city. However, he believes much of the change is locally organic, with the Mt. Airy Community Development Corporation and a handful of local real estate developers pushing to improve Germantown Avenue for the better part of two decades. In 2007, that led to the creation of a Business Improvement District, which levies an assessment for all business owners to pay for programs like street cleaning and beautification measures along the neighborhood’s commercial corridor. A latest initiative has raised $2.8 million to install nine pedestrian crosswalks and curb bump outs along the avenue in the years ahead.

Weinstein also feels the creation of the historic district, which requires developers to keep existing facades intact and otherwise adhere to aesthetics, helped to strike a balance. He said both the CDC and the BID backed it, a “rare” event for development-focused organizations. “We want the commercial corridor to remain historic in nature,” Weinstein said. His biggest concern for the neighborhood is thus not new redevelopment, but the possibility of diminished service along SEPTA’s two regional rail lines serving East and West Mt. Airy, a major amenity of the greater neighborhood.

Philip Dawson, executive director of the Mt. Airy CDC, is also a proponent of continuing new development in the neighborhood. He particularly calls attention to the east end of Germantown Avenue outside the historic district, where in the last five years a new apartment building and grocery store opened, while businesses like a boutique ice cream parlor and bicycle repair shop also moved in. “People are seeing an opportunity in Mt. Airy, and that’s a good thing,” Dawson said. “Because it’s an area that has a historic building stock, [which takes a] significant investment, some of which has kind of languished for some time. Now we’re seeing that flip beginning to happen.”

Juston Lee Locklear, the owner of Avenues Cafe, a coffeeshop he opened in the heart of Mt. Airy’s historic business district in 2021, said he hears all perspectives from his patrons, some of whom are indeed transplants from Center City or Brooklyn. On one hand, he gets the concerns over development. As a resident of Passyunk in South Philadelphia, he dislikes walking by new construction there that is completely incongruous with the older housing stock. As a Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ business owner, he is also sensitive to concerns around gentrification and the differences of people’s lived experiences. “The locals see that change. More cars on the street, increased property values, and some of these new developments the locals cannot even afford,” Locklear explained.

At the same time, he can’t help but look out the large front window of his shop on a slow Tuesday, a gleam in his eye for the 160-plus new units of housing going up within walking distance. “As a business owner, the more the merrier,” Locklear said. “I want to have a very eclectic group of individuals, from locals, to new people looking to find their favorite coffeeshop, or someone who just moved here and are like, ‘Wow.’ Because Mt. Airy is very creative. It’s a melting pot. It’s beautiful.”

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