# Chestnut Hill

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Henry Howard Houston and Dr George Woodward, developers. 1854

Chestnut Hill, like Hampstead Garden Suburb, combines a splendid sense of isolation with convenient access to the city. Located just within the boundaries of Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill nestles between the historic settlement of Germantown and the enormous forests of Fairmount Park. It was incorporated into the city in 1854, the same year that the Chestnut Hill Railroad (now part of the Reading Line) began service from Philadelphia.

The opening of a branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1884 spurred the development of Chestnut Hill's western sector, where Henry Howard Houston, a Director of the Railroad, owned a good deal of land. Houston became a key entrepreneurial figure in the 19th-century development of the suburb: he built social centres around which residential development would naturally take place. The Wissahickon Inn and the St Martin-in-the-Fields church were both erected by him, while the Philadelphia Cricket Club was placed on land donated by Houston.¹

Unlike Llewellyn Haskell, Pierre Lorillard, or other fellow suburban builders who passed control of their developments onto neighbourhood associations of one form or another, Houston willed his interests to his son-in-law, Dr George Woodward: The family-run firm of George Woodward, Inc still owns many of the

houses in Chestnut Hill, and maintains deed restrictions to control development on property it sells.

Woodward was interested in English experiments with group and semi-detached housing, and commissioned a number of important projects for Chestnut Hill by the local architects Duhring, Okie & Ziegler.² Their project on Benezet Street is a subtle manipulation of local architectural styles which give variety to fundamentally identical houses. It is an early example of the Chestnut Hill tradition of individual and group houses designed by leading architects interested in contributing to the character of the suburb and satisfying the needs of the tenants.

Perhaps the most remarkable of these groupings is at French Village, designed for Woodward in 1919 by Robert Rodes McGoodwin. The two gatehouses in the Norman-style village flank one of the main entrances to Chestnut Hill, announcing one's arrival.³ McGoodwin collaborated with Duhring in another impressive ensemble of houses at St Martins Green, where, along with Edmund B Gilchrist, each architect designed a portion of the group sited in a half-circle around a common green.⁴ The houses were built of local ledgestone in a freely interpreted English Cotswold style that combined quite comfort-

ably with the rustic French styles popular in the town. The Cotswold style was developed in the work of Mellor, Meigs & Howe, three Chestnut Hill residents who built some of their best houses there.

Chestnut Hill is unique among American suburbs for its combination of designs by leading traditionalist and modernist architects. Frank Furness, Wilson Eyre, Mellor, Meigs & Howe, McGoodwin, and Gilchrist by themselves are an impressive body of architects to have built in an American city of any size, but they were followed by Romaldo Giurgola, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi. Unfortunately these latter three, though they built excellent houses, made no attempt to acknowledge the successful local traditions. Even Venturi's mother's house, important for its attitudes towards familiar symbols of domesticity, ignored their specific context.

## Notes

1. Willard S Detweiler, *Chestnut Hill: An Architectural History*, Chestnut Hill Historical Society, Philadelphia 1969, p. 27.

2. C Matlack Price, 'Architecture and the Housing Problem, Recent Work by Duhring, Okie & Ziegler', *Architectural Record* 34, September 1913, pp. 240-248.

3. 'A French Village, Chestnut Hill, Pa}', *American Architect* 135, April 20 1929, pp. 499-509.

4. Harold Donaldson Eberlein, 'A Group of Stone Houses at St Martins Green, Philadelphia', *Architectural Forum* 28, May 1918, pp. 181-186, plates 50-54.

1. Duhring, Okie and Ziegler, quarter circle house group, Lincoln Drive and Willow Avenue, 1917

2. George Howe, 'High Hollow', plan, 1914

158. Germantown Cricket Club,
Germantown (now Philadelphia),
Pa., 1889-91.