Main Street Manayunk is a place where powerful forces are colliding. There is the tension between the past and the present, with the historic mills of yesteryear and vestiges of a blue collar community more and more giving way to upscale condominiums and nightlife. Then there are the physical dangers posed by the Schuylkill River, which has long overflown its banks and flooded the district, and is expected to increasingly do so as the Earth’s changing climate brings ever heavier rainfall.

Can smart building design help Main Street navigate this perilous transition? Jeremy Avellino, an architect and owner of Philadelphia-based firm Bright Common, is out to prove it.

Avellino recently hosted a tour of 4050 Main Street, a 27,000-square-foot, two-story historic factory on the far eastern end of Manayunk’s commercial strip, at the intersection of Shur’s Lane.  The building dates back to around 1850 and housed a variety of industrial and commercial uses over its lifespan before falling vacant over the past decade.

Now, it is in the process of rebirth, both physically and spiritually. In 2022, Citylight Church, a growing congregation of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination based in Manayunk, purchased the building as its first permanently-owned location. Working with Bright Common, the church agreed to a plan that will leave the first floor of the former factory designed to intentionally flood and then quickly rebound, with primary use limited to a parking garage. The second floor will then be effectively sealed from below, designed to minimize water intrusion or other resulting damages. At the time of tour, the renovation was still under construction, but completion is anticipated later this year.

Avellino said his firm has also designed the renovation to bring congregants in through the river side of the building to enter as opposed to the street, so that they can contemplate its place in space and time. “We wanted to bring people in procession on their way to Sunday workshop, to nature, to remember, not just to care for the Earth, but remember this place flooded,” Avellino explained.

A Life by the Water

Records of the Philadelphia Historical Commission date the building at 4050 Main Street to 1850, which would place its establishment squarely in the midst of Manayunk’s first transformation from natural landscape to industrial boomtown.

Scull and Heap’s 1750 map of “Philadelphia and Parts Adjacent” show little happening in that part of what is now Northwest Philadelphia, save for a ferry in the vicinity of present day Wissahickon Station (later referred to as Jones Ferry), and, a few miles to the northwest, the homestead of the Levering family. This rural character continued in the decades that followed, as an 1808 map depicted development along what is now Ridge Avenue, but nothing save a variety of streams and creeks closer to the river’s banks.

That would change with the arrival of the Schuylkill Canal system and the Manayunk Canal in the early 1800s. Soon, numerous mills and other industrial operations began to populate along what is now Main Street, taking advantage of the new access to copious hydropower. By the mid-19th century, dozens were in operation, spinning out everything from cotton, to paper, to nails.

The exact context of the construction of what is now 4050 Main Street is difficult to discern. The building was added to the city’s historic register in 1983 as part of the Manayunk Main Street Historic District. Yet, details about the building in the nomination are limited to a short physical description of its Italianate facade and an original name of Roxborough Mills.

Many 19th century materials reference a Roxborough Mills location on Shurs Lane further up Manayunk’s slope, although an 1862 atlas of the city does depict structures and a steamboat landing near the present day location and lists the name of “Roxborough Mills” at a larger structure nearby at the site of the present day Manayunk Brewing Company.

The building’s middle history is easier to track down. By the late 19th century it is clearly depicted on maps and titled the “Fidelity Machine Works.” An 1891 ad in The Philadelphia Inquirer lists a need for the services of a good pattern maker for textile machinery at the location. By 1898, a notice in the same paper announced the factory would become the new location of the Wilson Childs Wagon works, a nationally-renowned company originally founded in Philadelphia in 1829. Historical records show the company made what would be millions in today’s dollars selling wagons and parts to the Union during the Civil War, but in the decades that followed, transitioned to a focus on Cuban and South American marketplaces.

“The firm will make a speciality of building Cuban cane wagons and patent iron hub wheels for the South American trade,” the Inquirer notice revealed. “The first floor will be used as a machine shop and the second floor for body making.”

In time, 20th century records revealed the factory’s use by various textile and chemical companies. In 1983, longtime-owner Gary Gevurtz purchased the building for use as a furniture store, which continued through its closure in 2018. The year prior, the Philadelphia Historical Commission approved a plan to redevelop the building and three adjacent historic homes into new residential. However, the plan never came to pass. Damaged by flooding in 2020 and 2021, the homes were demolished and the plan abandoned.

Building an Ark

For some, redeveloping such a parcel would feel treacherous. For Matt Cohen, lead pastor of Citylight Church, it is exciting and feels “a little bit like purchasing a time machine.” Cohen started his congregation in Manayunk in 2011. The church currently rents space at a nearby synagogue. He said its membership is young and growing, buoyed by transplant graduates of Penn State University’s main campus, where the denomination has a previously-established church. Once his congregation raised enough to purchase its own space, they wanted to look no further than Manayunk and its immediate neighborhoods, Cohen said, and found relatively limited options. The old factory at 4050 Main Street ended up checking most of the boxes and the church purchased it in late 2022.

Avellino said his team quickly realized that the first-floor space would largely not be suitable for regular use due to its propensity to flood and resulting regulations. He described working with various federal, state, and city agencies, from FEMA to the Historical Commission, as arduous. “They don’t really talk to each other,” he said of the various entities.

As part of the previous agreement to allow the demolition of the adjacent three houses and build new residences at the site, the Historical Commission asked prior ownership to restore their facades upon new construction. However, the agency ultimately canned that requirement upon the request of Citylight. The footprint of the former residences will now be used as part of the church’s entranceway, including allowing vehicular access into the first-story parking garage.

Still, Avellino framed this as an unfortunate reality of a plan that would at least give new life to the kind of industrial age building steadily disappearing from the Manayunk waterfront. Cohen, too, sees the benefit in maintaining not only the building’s physical structure, but also an element of urban fabric beyond apartments and restaurants on the strip. “Someone comes off of Main Street. It’s sort of symbolic of life is busy, life is crazy. And then now they’re walking toward this river and up to worship,” Cohen said.

Then, there is the matter of flooding. Avellino said he realized early on in the planning process that the building’s first floor would not be usable for regular programming, adding that the project was one of the first to go through a new Philadelphia floodplain management guide. That more or less cut in half the amount of usable space Citylight had envisioned for all of its needs, including worshipping, children’s rooms, offices, food prep, and other uses. “Hurricane Ida flooded the bowl here in Manayunk,” Avellino said. “We took it on immediately after a natural disaster. So that was a pretty prescient moment.”

Yet, Avellinio said the church wasn’t spooked and instead embraced his firm’s vision of a facility that would stand the test of time. He described the building’s steel and timber bones as “big and beefy,” well suited to supporting a planned 500-seat worship space, with restored historic windows looking out on one end onto Main Street and the other over the Schuylkill River.

To protect the building from floods, Avellino said the underside of the second floor had to be waterproofed to “submarine” level standards. The ground floor sits about 33 feet above sea level, but design flood elevation rises to just under the first-floor ceiling. That is the approximate location where Ida’s waters reached, the highest level in Philadelphia’s recorded history. The new design will incorporate perforated metal gates at the entrance of the garage and cinderblock-sized cutouts from the walls, which will be waterproofed. The idea is to allow the space to intentionally flood and then release waters with minimal damage to the first floor.

“The original design wasn’t to put a parking garage here. That’s rather anti-urbanist,” Avellino said. “But after a long series of hard conversations, we just realized that we’re at that moment. I don’t know if you want to call it resiliency or managed retreat or adaptation, but we realized as designers we were at this moment of, what to do with a building that probably shouldn’t be renovated, but is part of the historic fabric and narrative and culture of the city.”

Along with the flood protections, Avellino said the building is also being designed to passive house standards. “We just pitched it hard and said, ‘Why don’t we just go with resiliency and design an ark that’s net zero energy?’” Avellino said. “The clients, to my wonderment and surprise, said definitely, let’s do this.”

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