Address: 400 block of West Wildey Street, Spring Garden
There is a house on the 400 block of West Wildey Street that stops people mid-stride.
It should not stand out. The block is a typical Spring Garden composition: three-story attached brick houses from the 1880s and 1890s, 16-foot lots, cornice lines at uniform height. But this facade has been repointed with an unusual care — the mortar joints are the same width as the original, the color matched to the aged brick rather than contrasting with it — and the owner has painted the window sashes a specific shade of dark green that does not appear anywhere else on the block and yet reads as completely correct.
The marble steps are original. They have been scrubbed to the point where you can see the fossil impressions in the stone. The ironwork on the stoop railing has been stripped of seventy years of paint and lacquered to a deep, warm brown.
The front door — 1890s vintage, six-panel, with the original mortise lockset — has been stripped and refinished to a color the owner describes as “the brown of a well-worn leather briefcase.”
This is not a house that has been renovated. It is a house that has been tended.
== The History of the Block ==
The 400 block of West Wildey Street was developed between 1882 and 1888 by a builder named August Deibert, who was responsible for much of the residential fabric in this part of Spring Garden. Deibert built to a consistent template — three stories, full basement, front parlor and dining room on the main floor, three bedrooms above — but varied the facade treatments enough to avoid monotony. Some houses have Italianate cornices with decorative brackets. Others have simpler Queen Anne details. The house at the center of this facade portrait has a subtle pressed-brick pattern in the spandrel panels between the first and second floor windows that most people walk past without seeing.
The neighborhood changed hands several times over the 20th century. In the 1920s it was solidly middle-class. By the 1960s it had become a rooming house district. By the 1980s parts of Spring Garden were considered among the most dangerous in the city. The current generation of owners — many of whom arrived in the 1990s and early 2000s, drawn by low prices and the quality of the housing stock — have been restoring the neighborhood for thirty years.
== What Makes This Facade Work ==
The owner, who has lived in the house for twenty-two years, describes her approach in practical terms: “I’m not trying to restore it to some imaginary original condition. I’m trying to make the decisions that the original builder would have made if he’d had twenty-two more years of information about how brick ages.”
The repointing work was done by a mason from South Philadelphia who has been working in the neighborhood for thirty years and who refuses to use premixed mortar. The window restoration was done by the owner herself, over three winters, using a heat gun and a Wagner scraper.
“The hardest part,” she says, “was the color. You’re trying to match a color that has been changing for 140 years. The brick is not the color it was in 1882. So you’re not matching the original — you’re matching the evolved thing.”
The dark green window sashes were arrived at after seventeen paint chips taped to the facade over four months. “I needed to see it in January light and June light before I committed.”
== Facade of the Week ==
This is the first installment of a recurring feature. Every week, Philadelphia RowHome Magazine will document one facade — in any neighborhood, of any age — that rewards close looking. We are interested in the ordinary made extraordinary by attention, and in the ways individual owners make decisions about the buildings they share with the street.
If you have a facade you think we should feature, contact us.