The Bergdoll Mansion is a historic house located in the Spring Garden neighborhood of Philadelphia. It was designed by architect James H. Windrim and built in 1886. It is in a Beaux Arts / Italianate style.
The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. [1]
The building was constructed as the home of the Louis Bergdoll family, owners of the City Park Brewery. Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, scion of the well known brewing family, was a playboy, aviator, and World War I draft dodger. [2] In 1920, Bergdoll was apprehended in the mansion by authorities searching for him due to his draft dodging. [3]
The 14,000-square-foot (1,300 m2) mansion has eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, two kitchens, mahogany woodwork, multiple fireplaces, frescoes, and mosaics. It was listed for sale in 2012 with an asking price of $6.9 million. [4]
The house was damaged by a fire in 1989. [5]
Fairmount Park is the largest municipal park in Philadelphia and the historic name for a group of parks located throughout the city. Fairmount Park consists of two park sections named East Park and West Park, divided by the Schuylkill River, with the two sections together totalling 2,052 acres (830 ha). Management of Fairmount Park and the entire citywide park system is overseen by Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, a city department created in 2010 from the merger of the Fairmount Park Commission and the Department of Recreation.
Fishtown is a neighborhood in the River Wards section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Located northeast of Center City Philadelphia, its borders are somewhat disputed today due to many factors, but are roughly defined by the triangle created by the Delaware River, Front Street, and York Street. Some newer residents expand the area to Lehigh Avenue to the northeast, while some older residents shrink the area to Norris Street. It is served by the Market–Frankford Line rapid transit subway/elevated line of the SEPTA system, and the historic Route 15 Girard Avenue trolley line. Fishtown has long been a largely working class Irish Catholic and Irish American neighborhood, though in recent years it has seen a large influx of young urban professionals and gentrification.
Independence National Historical Park is a federally protected historic district in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that preserves several sites associated with the American Revolution and the nation's founding history. Administered by the National Park Service, the 55-acre (22 ha) park comprises many of Philadelphia's most-visited historic sites within the Old City and Society Hill neighborhoods. The park has been nicknamed "America's most historic square mile" because of its abundance of historic landmarks.
Brewerytown is a neighborhood in the North Philadelphia section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. An unofficial region, Brewerytown runs approximately between the Schuylkill River's eastern bank and 25th Street, bounded by Montgomery Avenue to the north and Parrish Street to the south. Brewerytown derived its name from the numerous breweries that were located along the Schuylkill during the late 19th century and early 20th century. It is now primarily a residential neighborhood, with a growing and active commercial sector along Girard Avenue.
The Reading Terminal is a complex of buildings that includes the former Reading Company main station located in the Market East section of Center City in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It comprises the Reading Terminal Headhouse, Trainshed, and Market.
Samuel Sloan was a Philadelphia-based architect and best-selling author of architecture books in the mid-19th century. He specialized in Italianate villas and country houses, churches, and institutional buildings. His most famous building—the octagonal mansion "Longwood" in Natchez, Mississippi—is unfinished; construction was abandoned during the American Civil War.
Grover Cleveland Bergdoll was an American socialite, early racing driver and aviator, who became notorious as a draft dodger in World War I. He was imprisoned for this in 1920 but soon escaped to Germany, not returning to serve his sentence until 1939.
Wilson Eyre Jr. was an American architect, teacher and writer who practiced in the Philadelphia area. He is known for his deliberately informal and welcoming country houses, and for being an innovator in the Shingle Style.
Lynnewood Hall is a 110-room Neoclassical Revival mansion in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. It was designed by architect Horace Trumbauer for industrialist Peter A. B. Widener and built between 1897 and 1899. Lynnewood Hall is the second largest surviving Gilded Age mansion in the United States and once housed the most significant and diverse collection of art in American history, additionally recognized as one of the most important collections of Western European Art in world history. The collection had been assembled by Widener and his younger son, Joseph E. Widener.
The Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire is the oldest property insurance company in the United States. It was organized by Benjamin Franklin in 1752 and incorporated in 1768.
Mount Pleasant is a historic mansion in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, atop cliffs overlooking the Schuylkill River. It was built about 1761–62 in what was then the countryside outside the city by John Macpherson and his wife Margaret. Macpherson was a privateer, or perhaps a pirate, who had had "an arm twice shot off" according to John Adams. He named the house "Clunie" after the ancient seat of his family's clan in Scotland.
Lemon Hill is a Federal-style mansion in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, built from 1799 to 1800 by Philadelphia merchant Henry Pratt. The house is named after the citrus fruits that Pratt cultivated on the property in the early 19th century.
James Hamilton Windrim was a Philadelphia architect who specialized in public buildings, including the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia and the U.S. Treasury. A number the buildings he designed are on the National Historic Landmarks and/or the National Register of Historic Places, including the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia and the National Savings and Trust Company building in Washington, DC.
City Park Brewery, also known as the Louis Bergdoll Brewing Company, was a brewery in North Philadelphia, built in 1856. Several brewery buildings were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 as a historic district. Louis J. Bergdoll started his brewery business in 1849 at 508 Vine Street, Philadelphia, and briefly operated as Bergdoll and Schemm. From 1856 until Charles Psotta's death in 1876, the firm was known as Bergdoll and Psotta. In 1856 the firm built new quarters on 28th and 29th Streets near Fairmount Park and the Schuylkill River. In 1881 the firm was incorporated as City Park Brewery. Louis Bergdoff died in 1894, but the firm continued to operate as a brewery until Prohibition in 1920, and then for a single year after the repeal of Prohibition, in 1934.
George W. Sharswood School is a K-8 school located in the Whitman neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is a part of the School District of Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Freight Shed is an historic freight station in the Southwest Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, along Broad Street. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011 and is today part of the Lincoln Square mixed-use development.
Cedar Grove Mansion, located in west Fairmount Park, was the summer residence for five generations of Philadelphia families. The house was built as a rural retreat from city life, and was originally located within the present day Frankford neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia, about 4 mi (6.4 km) beyond the colonial-era city limits. In 1746, Elizabeth Coates Paschall purchased the property on which the house was subsequently built. Paschall was a widow with three children who had inherited her husband's dry goods business and desired a rural retreat from the city near her father's farm in Frankford. Construction of the grey stone house on a plot of 15 acres (6.1 ha) along Frankford Road began in 1748 and continued to 1750.
Ormiston Mansion is a 2+1⁄2-story, red brick, late Georgian period house located in east Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. The house was constructed in 1798 with a large wooden porch in front and a smaller porch in the rear. Many of the original interior features remain including fireplaces with marble mantles and a Scottish bake oven. The cedar shake roof includes a widow's walk and Federal-style dormers, while six large shuttered windows are on each side of the house, and five on the front. The first floor interior includes a large drawing room spanning the entire width of the house, a kitchen, and a dining room with a large door leading to the rear porch. The back of the house overlooks the Schuylkill River.
The Rockland Mansion is a 2+1⁄2-story, Federal-style mansion that is located in east Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, overlooking the Schuylkill River.