Wissahickon Hall in East Falls turned 176 years old this year. The impressive, and forlorn, former creekside inn that motorists pass while navigating the twisty turns of Lincoln Drive is also getting a numerically-appropriate birthday gift: an injection of $776,000 in funding from owner Philadelphia Parks & Recreation (PPR) to buoy its aging facade and mechanical systems.

Earlier this year, passersby may have noticed scaffolding going up around the hall’s two-story, gallery-style porch, along with construction vehicles and equipment. PPR has confirmed this is part of a two-phase, $608,000 project to repair or replace numerous aspects of the building’s structure and facade, including framing members, historic columns, gutters, porch decking, a marble plinth, and windows. That work is about 40 percent complete and should be finished next spring. It has also performed additional interior repairs, including repointing and infilling stone walls–strengthening the building’s foundation–and then replastering. 

The work was needed, a PPR spokesperson said, to follow up on issues found during engineering assessments in 2008 and 2014. Such concerns were amplified when a car crashed into the building in 2015 and Hurricane Ida flooded its first floor in 2021.  “PPR takes the building’s preservation seriously and has, for over 140 years of City ownership, maintained the building to the best of our ability,” the spokesperson said, adding that PPR also paid $168,00 in 2023 to replace the hall’s boiler system.

But to what end? Parks and Recreation said that its Street Tree Management unit, which inspects and monitors 130,000 street trees throughout Philadelphia, has operated out of the building since 2008. Yet, even before the current construction project, activity appeared scant. Is there a better use?

Alex Bartlett wonders. The Northwest Philadelphia native and curator and archivist at the Chestnut Hill Conservancy has driven by Wissahickon Hall countless times in his life. He has always been enamored by its historical significance as one of two remaining historic inns along the Wissahickon Creek, the Valley Green Inn being the other. The hall is listed on the National Register of Historic Places within the Wissahickon National Register District. It is not listed for legal protections on the Philadelphia Register.

Bartlett has been inside Wissahickon Hall just once, when he got into a fender bender in the 1990s and exchanged information at the hall, which was then the headquarters for the Philadelphia Police Department’s 92nd District. He was taken aback by the condition of the interior of the building, where large chunks of plaster were missing from the walls. “Clearly, at the time, nothing had happened in that building for decades, any kind of repairs,” Bartlett said.

Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, noted that PPR is responsible for the maintenance of over 200 historic structures in the city’s park system, a monumental task for the cash-strapped department. For some buildings, PPR will eventually find a way to achieve great things, with Steinke pointing to last summer’s rehabilitation of a former guardhouse in FDR Park as a prime example. Yet, others fall into and remain in disrepair, with little to no information from the City about when they’ll be repaired or reused. “They’ve got a lot on their plate,” Steinke said. 

Both Bartlett and Steinke acknowledge the problematic reality of achieving a better use for Wissahickon Hall: location, location, location. Unlike Valley Green and its cozy cocoon of trees, ducks, and pedestrians along Forbidden Drive, Wissahickon Hall is just a few feet from the de facto speedway of Lincoln Drive, where southbound lanes are unable to legally access the property. Instead, most vehicular traffic would likely have to wind through East Falls to ingress and egress into auxiliary parking areas along Gypsy Lane. That’s a detour that curbs the enthusiasm of even an aficionado like Bartlett for something like a restaurant. “How sustainable is that? I don’t really know what the tourist [potential] is. I’ve worked or lived here all my life. Would I go there? Probably not,” said Bartlett.

A “Palace” Along the Creek

Long ago, Wissahickon Hall didn’t have to worry about a lack of foot traffic. Built in 1849, it originated at a time when Wissahickon Valley was making the transition from an industrial workshop to a recreational destination–what the nonprofit Friends of the Wissahickon calls the valley’s “Road House Era.” 

In the early 19th century, FOW retells, improvements in river navigation along the Schuylkill River began to draw more interest to what is now Northwest Philadelphia. In 1826, rocky outcroppings near the nexus of the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River were blasted away to allow better access and a series of road improvements began along present day Lincoln and Forbidden Drives. Visiting writers, Edgar Allen Poe perhaps most famous among them, began to sing the creek’s praises. Increased public interest followed. In 1840, Nicholaus Rittenhouse III built the first road house, the Log Cabin Inn, as a gathering place for fellow Whig party members to cavort. Six more roadhouses followed along the creek through the start of the 20th century. “I’ve also assumed that the Wissahickon got a major boost in popularity because of the Centennial Exposition of 1876,” said Bartlett, noting that visitor guides highlighted the valley. “The [inns], especially after 1876, had a pretty decent boost in popularity.”

The reputations of the inns varied widely. Valley Green Inn started as a “temperance hotel,” while the Log Cabin Inn was famous for gang fights and a menagerie of live wildlife. Resident black bears were trained to pop champagne bottles. Wissahickon Hall, the closest to the city, was instead known as an “elegant” inn that catered to wealthy patrons arriving by sleigh and carriage, with a later owner of the nearby Log Cabin Inn likening it to a “palace.”

According to City records, Wissahickon Hall was built by entrepreneur Henry Lippen and originally consisted of the main, two-and-a-half story structure, along with two ice houses, a carriage house, and horse sheds. The enterprise benefitted greatly from its location along the creek. Steps originally ran down from the drive to the creek, where there was a boat launch. As with many other nearby inns, Wissahickon Hall specialized in waffles with catfish, then abundant in the creek. However, the real money maker was the ice. Benefitting from the damming of the Wissahickon just downstream, Lippen ran a large ice business that could hold 1,000 tons of inventory at a time, supplying Manayunk, Germantown, and Philadelphia in a time well before electric refrigeration. “There’s no question of its historical significance,” Steinke said. “It’s one of the few surviving roadside inns that are still standing and a nice one architecturally to look at–an amazing survivor down through these decades.”

Yet the building has encountered its share of hardships. Newspaper records suggest flooding has been a persistent problem for Wissahickon Hall, with reports of a rising creek swamping its lower floor in October 1869. The year before, an act of the State Assembly established the Fairmount Park system, and Philadelphia began to take control of the Wissahickon Valley. That spelled greater disaster for many of the inns, as the Fairmount Park Commission’s regulations also forbade the sale of alcohol. By the early 1870s, several road houses, including the Log Cabin Inn, were closed and demolished.

Wissahickon Hall held on, with newspaper records showing Charles Lippen, son of Henry, fighting the agency into the mid-1880s over the taking of the property and proper compensation. However, by 1885 he was out. The Fairmount Park Commission offered to rent the property to him for $2,000 a year, providing he gather ice “for family purposes only.” When he countered for $1,000, the commission evicted him from the building his father had built.

Adrift

It was clear from the get-go that the Fairmount Park Commission wasn’t quite sure what to do with Wissahickon Hall. Newspaper records published shortly after Lippen’s eviction noted squabbling among powerbrokers. Former Mayor William S. Stokley advocated selling “light refreshments” from a stall on its lower floor, according to an Inquirer account from March 1885. A man named David W. Sellers opposed this idea during a “humorous” floor speech, the newspaper reported, instead advocating for fare that packed more of a punch for what he counted as 75,000 visitors a year to the valley. “Full grown men over 40 years don’t take long drives to eat ice cream or drink soda water, and the people who go out there should not be deprived of their particular refreshments,” Sellers said. “There should be established in the park a respectable tavern, inn, restaurant, or cafe where the people who are not cold water drinkers could get the refreshment they desired.”

What happened next is somewhat unclear. Newspaper records suggest the Fairmount Park Commission ultimately determined that Wissahickon Hall should be leased as a restaurant and received several applications. Yet, accounts are few and far in between afterward. A PPR spokesperson said its records reflect the hall was leased to a Nicholas Hayes under agreement that no alcohol be sold. However, an 1890 Inquirer article suggested that Hayes was indeed selling liquor at the hall without a license, benefitting from lawmen looking the other way.

Scant accounts of some flooding and repair work followed in the decades after until a 1912 newspaper notice suggested a “Duran” family had taken up residence. In an email, a PPR spokesperson said the department’s records indicated the hall continued to be used as an inn during the early 20th century before transitioning at some point to use as a Fairmount Park Guardhouse. Indeed, a 1927 Inquirer article detailing a “badly damaging” fire at the hotel identifies the “Dorns” as caretakers of the building, with the park guards stationed on the first floor. PPR said that use continued until 1972, when park guards were absorbed into the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD). Officers in turn were stationed there until 2008, when the PPD moved on from the building following budget cuts and PPR moved in.

More damage ensued. In March 2008, a large tree fell during a storm and hit the building causing structural damage to the roof and rear of the hall. A Daily News piece from the following year reported the City was spending about $240,000 to repair and rehab the “stucco-stone-and-frame structure,” including a new roof, gutters, brick paving, and interior ceiling repair and electrical upgrades. “The exterior and interior are getting a new coat of paint based on historical paint analysis,” the article noted.

PPR said the hall underwent an additional engineering assessment in 2014 that discovered “structural damage to the south rubble stone wall of the building.” The hall’s porch was then “severely compromised” when a Jeep crashed through its southwest pillar in 2015.

“While measures were taken to repair the issue at the time, this accident caused considerable unseen damage to the porch as time went on,” said the PPR represenative. “Over the years water that used to be collected at the corner of the porch through the downspouts and gutter system seeped into the porch woodwork and framing members.”

The damage, amplified by Ida flooding in 2021, led to the current round of repairs, the most significant in the building’s recently documented history.

 A Different Future?

Could something different be in store for Wissahickon Hall? For the record, PPR said it does “not anticipate any changes to use of the building” and asserts parks staff continue to use it “While there have been some changes to the building over the years (it no longer has its rooftop cupola for instance), much of its character-defining features have survived and Wissahickon Hall remains a park cultural icon.”

The FOW also appears content with the present arrangements. “We’re deeply grateful to PPR for its ongoing commitment to preserving this iconic structure, which adds lasting value to the community and the park,” said Sarah Marley, interim executive director of the nonprofit.

But, the City’s ongoing ownership and management of the hall leaves Steinke a little uneasy, given the long-term maintenance backlog across all of its properties. “It’s not ideal, because they are overwhelmed and they can’t keep up,” Steinke explained. In a perfect world, more money would regularly flow to historic properties in the park system like Wissahickon Hall, Steinke said, adding that he is hopeful there might be some improvements through new leadership and fundraising campaigns by the Fairmount Park Conservancy, the City’s primary nonprofit partner in the park system.

Yet, either way, he added, there are no obvious alternative uses for Wissahickon Hall. Like any historic property, Steinke explained, a best use could be determined by a thorough and thoughtful analysis, such as by a consulting design firm. He said that can yield surprising results, citing past instances in which preservationists learned of the particular fragility of certain historic buildings and had to set aside dreams of robust public use. Thus it’s hard to speculate about Wissahickon Hall, but Steinke said it is clear that local road infrastructure is not presently conducive to a high-traffic use. “You can’t reconfigure or re-orient Lincoln Drive very easily,” he said.

Bartlett also struggles to confidently offer suggestions. There’s a little-used hiking and biking trail on that side of Lincoln Drive tracking a ridge in the woods behind Wissahickon Hall. Could that be a draw? Lincoln Drive also has a brief break in its center median just in front of the hall, presumably so emergency vehicles can connect to southbound lanes when needed. Bartlett noted some online commentators have suggested that placing a traffic light there and allowing turns onto Gypsy Lane could solve the access issue. “I do think that somehow, you know, there is an opportunity here,” he said.

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