South elevation. | Photo: Joseph E. B. Elliott
After nearly four years of sitting vacant, the former Police Administration Building, aka the Roundhouse, is receiving attention again with new ideas for repurposing the iconic modernist building at 7th and Race Streets. The Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia and Docomomo US/Greater Philadelphia (DocomomoPHL) have teamed up to present a half-day symposium to present a handful of responses to a call for concepts they issued last month.
“The idea of the symposium is to shine a spotlight on the building, to keep it in the forefront of people’s minds,” explained Dan Macey, president of DocomomoPHL.
When it was planned in 1959, the new Police Administration building was intended to be a symbol of the aspirations for the City of two progressive mayors, Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth, the first Democrats elected in over 70 years. They chose a young local architectural firm, Geddes Brecher Qualls & Cunningham (GPQC) to design a new home for the police department, along with a new image after decades of corruption. David Geddes, son of the late Robert Geddes of GBQC, said the mayors’ plans matched his father’s outlook. “He was at heart an idealist. That’s why he related to Richardson Dilworth’s ideas for the city. The building was to be emblematic of community service and welcoming to the public.”
Looking east from rooftop. | Photo: Joseph E. B. Elliott
The subsequent mayoral administration of former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo bestowed a different image on the Roundhouse, as the police department became notorious for brutality, especially among Black citizens.
A department move to 400 N. Broad Street in 2022 raised the question of what to do with the Roundhouse. The City hosted a lengthy series of community engagement forums, noting that it was the first time they’d done so prior to offering a request for proposals to developers. Of the responses they received, two of the most frequent were to use the building for some form of community benefit and to acknowledge, rather than try to erase, its history.
Later that year, the Preservation Alliance and DocomomoPHL submitted a nomination for the Roundhouse to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. In November, 2024, it was rejected by the Philadelphia Historical Commission under the order of Mayor Cherelle Parker.
First floor, main lobby, looking west from south entrance. | Photo: Joseph E. B. Elliott
Today, although the Roundhouse is vacant and unused, it remains a potent and distinctive architectural landmark. “It was detailed very simply, but very nicely. For its time, it was an architectural marvel,” remarked Jack Pyburn, an architectural historian at Georgia Technical University who has extensively studied the building.
“It was very striking at the time,” recalled Geddes. “Though the exterior isn’t clean now, back then at night it would be a luminous presence. It was a beacon.”
The Roundhouse is so striking that both its exterior and interior appeared recently in the HBO series Task in the role of the Philadelphia headquarters for the FBI.
It remained one of Robert Geddes’s favorite projects. “In the last 10 or 12 years, my father had decided he wanted a webpage,” Geddes said. “I think he had worked on 300 or 350 buildings during his career. For the webpage he picked three: the Moore School of Electrical Engineering’s Pender Labs at the University of Pennsylvania [since demolished], the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Police Administration Building.”
First floor, auditorium. | Photo: Joseph E. B. Elliott
After the Historical Commission’s refusal to acknowledge the building’s architectural value, advocates were determined to keep the building and its fate in the public eye. “We’re in the process of submitting an Historic American Building Survey to the Library of Congress for the Roundhouse,” noted Macey. “We’ve taken photos in the format they require and are now working on the submission.”
The symposium aims to generate interest and support both in architectural, design, and historic circles as well as the general public. “I think the exercise for ideas was most valuable in engaging people with the building,” Pyburn said. “That’s distinguished from determining the best use of it.”
“We put out an open call for ideas. We felt it was important to not limit who could respond,” explained Hanna Stark, director of policy and communications at the Preservation Alliance. “And we’re going to record the symposium so it can reach a wide audience. We want it to be impactful and start a conversation.”
Second floor, corridor connecting east and west areas of building. | Photo: Joseph E. B. Elliott
A Q&A webinar with 60 attendees yielded 31 submissions this summer. A jury of architects and design professionals selected six to make presentations at the symposium. “We also named nine ‘honorable mentions’ and offered them an opportunity to display a poster presentation of their ideas,” said Stark. “There were some common themes and some uses that a lot of people were thinking about.”
The six presentations will be from the Design Advocacy Group, Ian Smith Design Group, KieranTimberlake, Parallel Architecture Studio, RVA Architecture, and SSPJ Design.
In addition to the presentations of selected concepts, the event will include remarks by David Geddes and Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron, a keynote address by Alan Greenberger, former chief city planner and currently the vice president of real estate and facilities and a professor at Drexel University, and a panel discussion moderated by David Brownlee, professor of the History of Art emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.
Third floor, executive office outer reception area and executive office. | Photos: Joseph E. B. Elliott
Although not one of the presenters on the agenda, representatives from the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation will be participating. The group has long advocated for the building to be reused to benefit their neighborhood, which is immediately to the west and whose growth had been thwarted by the construction of both the Pennsylvania Convention Center and the Vine Street Expressway.
The producers of the symposium had hoped to offer a tour of the Roundhouse that would include visiting the interior, but as of press time, they had not received permission from the City. A tour of the building’s exterior will be led by William Whitaker, curator and collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.
Having collaborated on the Roundhouse nomination to the Philadelphia Register, DocomomoPHL and the Preservation Alliance are now working on its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. The first step is to submit it to the State Historic Preservation Office of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission by its next deadline in December. “We believe the building has national significance,” said Stark. “But to see how it presents itself elsewhere, we are working with readers from other states.”
Lower level, prisoner holding area. | Photo: Joseph E. B. Elliott
The symposium producers see the event as a first step to move the City’s seemingly stalled process forward. “The last we heard, the City was planning to do some sort of RFP on it. But they don’t seem to be planning anything very soon,” said Macey. “While the City is deciding on an RFP, the building is in good shape and still viable for immediate use.” An attempt to reach representatives from the City’s Department of Public Property was unsuccessful.
“We hope the City will see the submissions and get an idea or two to include in any RFP,” Macey added.
“Maybe this will spark some interest by a developer to repurpose it and put the rest of the lot to good use,” said Geddes. With its 2.6-acre parcel zoned CMX-4 Center City Commercial Mixed-Use, Stark feels it can address the Parker administration’s priority of creating affordable housing. “The parking lot should be developed for more density in housing. We hope to demonstrate that this can be well positioned to increase affordable housing.”
Overview, looking northwest from Federal Reserve Bank. | Photo: Joseph E. B. Elliott
Although lacking any real agency with regards to the building’s fate, advocates for the Roundhouse remain hopeful and enthusiastic. “In a sense, time is on its side,” said Pyburn. “The more people learn about it, the more they appreciate it.”
“It would be great to invigorate the space with more access,” said Stark. “Having it be a welcoming open space would be important.”
Roundhouse Reimagined: A Symposium Looking at Reusing, Repurposing and Reinvigorating the Modern Marvel will be held on Wednesday, October 29 from 1 p.m – 6 p.m. at WHYY Studios, 150 North Sixth Street. Purchase tickets here: https://preservationalliance.com/all_events/roundhouse-reimagined/
The city should put a nation wide bid for the building and see who bites or not
How about makingthe Roundhouse a international “Law Enforcement Museum.”
Before the symposium, anticipating some residential or mixed use proposals, I wanted to get a sense of the site’s history prior to the construction of the Roundhouse, when the area actually was residential, with a few small businesses interspersed. I looked at maps published from 1859 through 1959 (during the century before the Roundhouse was built) and photos from 1915 through the early 1960s.
I wasn’t surprised by what I discovered, but it was interesting to see numerous tiny rowhouses lining several courts, alleys, and streets cutting through the Roundhouse site (between Race and Cherry and 7th and 8th) prior to 1959. Many of the houses appear to have been trinities or trinity-like in form. Some of tiniest courts and alleys were not named on the historic maps, but several of the “larger” (or “less tiny”) courts did have names: Hughey’s Place/Rudolph Avenue; Mureu’s Place/Freed’s Avenue; Freed’s Court; Kenworthy’s Court; Kirkham Place; Eutaw Street; Furlong Court…with various spellings and a few re-characterizations over the decades (“avenue” to the more appropriate “alley” designation, for example).
Photos from the 1940s and 1950s show the Roundhouse site occupied by many of the same small-scale buildings which appear on the maps from the 1800s. Also, on PhillyHistory.org, there are dozens of photos from 1960, recording the construction of the Roundhouse on its newly cleared site.
I’ll be interested to see a video of the six symposium presentations, and the nine honorable mention summaries, if they’re made available. The treatment of the south side of the site along Cherry Street is critical, in my opinion. If redeveloped as primarily residential, this project has great potential to be transformative for the neighborhood.
Will the session be recorded and available to viewers like me who could not attend?
Although it really has nothing to do with the article the author couldn’t help herself but to take a cheap shot at former mayor Frank Rizzo
I was not taking a “cheap shot,” but rather repeating the public record of the Philadelphia Police Department under Frank Rizzo. Just search for it in the Inquirer 1967-71. Rizzo’s record is germaine to the history of the Roundhouse, because it cast a negative image on the building that persists to today, in direct opposition to the desired intent of the mayoral administration that built it.