Tonight's hearing to Discuss the Future of Quaker Block

Early last winter, my Daily Local News editorial, “Will the Hickman Raze Its Buildings?” I tried to call attention to a development proposal at West Chester’s Quaker Block at North Walnut and Marshall Street.

Only a handful of stories have appeared in the Local – the latest in February – and notices about a hearing slated at Borough Hall on July 15th were posted only a few weeks ago. The hearing will focus on the zoning of the Quaker Block comprised of the West Chester Friends Meeting House, the West Chester Friends School, and another centuries-old landmark, the Hickman Friends Senior Community of West Chester.

The Hickman’s annual events include ice cream socials and outdoor concerts so it was a shock to realize that the same group that contributed so much to what sociologists might call a sense place would then seem to leave it out the equation. In the meetings I have attended, only one option has been discussed and that is to raze a pair of 19th century buildings. Recently, design plans were scuttled for another but the plan for the Sharpless-Hall Replacement Building project, as it’s called, has continued to move forward at a steady pace.

With the exception perhaps of myself, no one has addressed the fact that the Hickman’s needs and wants – to build a new facility to house residents with Alzheimer’s and dementia – will forever eradicate a prominent corner of the neighborhood. Instead of seeing a tree-shrouded c. 1890 brick structure known as Sharpless-Hall , drivers on Marshall street and passersby will see a new three-story brick building with a curved drive off N. Walnut.

Judging from the “works-in-progress” floor plans I was given by the Hickman, this latest design is no improvement. It reminds me of a Williamsburg tourist center, although I am sure the design was meant to echo the architectural gem next door, the 1936 Colonial Revival building long rented by the Hickman for senior housing.

This revised plan reveals that the Hickman no longer plans to have a underground parking nor a walled-in garden area. And public input from the two dozen or so residents who attended two community meetings hosted by the Hickman (and reported by this paper) apparently led to the rejection of the “Mary Taylor 11 plan”, as some dubbed it, in reference to the massive structure the Hickman built on the same street in 2006.

I live nearby and can’t go by the Mary Taylor House without thinking about how a typical state-of-the-art personal care facility tends to dominate a neighborhood. Only this part of West Chester is not your ordinary piece of suburbia. In addition to the Quaker Block, it’s a stately neighborhood of tall trees and mansard-roofed homes. (Speaking of trees, a towering oak currently shading an outdoor seating area will also be razed.)

The hearing focused on the dense zoning-speak of the posted signs – the “proposed Overlay Amendment to the Zoning Ordinance.” If it is passed, other meetings will no doubt pave the way for the Hickman’s plans, addressing such pertinent issues as parking.

With no underground parking and no street parking allowed, the issue is complex – how the Friends school and Meeting House will be accommodated is a mystery to me. I wonder too if the 1936 Hickman building will have to undergo any future renovations since the proposed building will have no large, central dining room and residents currently dine at the c. 1890 Sharpless-Hall.

In the words of one Daily Local reporter, the Hickman will no doubt continue to do its “homework.” The Hickman will probably continue to quell the mixed feelings such neighborhood projects tend to inspire – at one point, I was even given a personal tour of the Hickman campus.

As a resident and West Chester historian, I will never support a plan that alters so much of the neighborhood ‘s historic character. Just visualize it: if the plan goes through, the Quaker Block will be book-ended by the Mary Taylor House and new construction that will meet a need, but will be another example of the generic suburbanization of an unique neighborhood, one that has represented the borough’s Quaker heritage for 125 years.