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Second Chance's executive
director, Mark Foster, with an art deco piece
salvaged from the Philadelphia Civic Center
last year
( Maximilian
Franz) |
This Old Stuff
Architectural salvage enters the mainstream.
BY AMANDA KOLSON HURLEY
Standing tall amid piles of clutter,
it instantly caught my eye, its cool bronze and steel
and glass throwing off the dim afternoon light. Its
lines were impossibly sleek, its details stylish and
vaguely Oriental. I was smitten. But taking it home
would have cost $15,000, far more than I could afford.
My crush that day was on an art deco ticket booth.
I encountered it the way many Americans come upon
similar objects: during a weekend browse through an
architectural salvage warehouse. In Baltimore, where
I live, the biggest salvage operation by far is Second
Chance, Inc., a nonprofit that has more than 100,000
square feet of warehouse space behind the city’s
professional football stadium. Founded in 2002, Second
Chance has grown into one of the leading salvage businesses
on the East Coast and now employs more than 30 people.
The ticket booth, I later learned, had been plucked
from the Convention Hall at the Philadelphia Civic
Center, an imposing art deco landmark built in 1931.
The hall—where FDR received the nomination for
his second term as president—was razed last year.
But not before the University of Pennsylvania Health
System, which owned the building and whose expansion
led to the demolition, awarded Second Chance a contract
to salvage the hall’s rich interior.
Last January, shadowing local union workers who showed
them how to handle certain architectural elements,
Second Chance trainees gleaned multicolored terra-cotta,
oversized light fixtures, and leaded-glass windows
from the hall, abandoned more than 15 years ago. By
any standard, the yield was incredible. Yet it could
have been more substantial, said Second Chance's
executive director, a brawny, friendly man named Mark
Foster.
For more of this article, look for the
July/August 2006
issue on newsstands or e-mail
us to purchase a copy.
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