The houses at 110 and 112 Locust St., which could date as far back as the 1820s, are slated for demolition.
A state-affiliated agency plans to raze two 19th-century houses, believed to be among the oldest residential buildings in Harrisburg, as part of a bid for more office space in a historic district downtown.
The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, an affordable housing organization whose board is appointed by the governor and state legislators, submitted the demolition proposal to the city for review at planning meetings this week and next.
The agency is simultaneously seeking permission to erect a 12-story addition to its existing office building, a tan-and-gray concrete structure with a built-in garage near the corner of Front and Locust streets, along a stretch of historic mansions.
The proposed tower would exceed the 45-foot height limit in the riverfront zone where the agency’s offices are located, meaning the city would have to approve a variance before the building could be constructed.
“We’re landlocked,” said Brian Hudson, PHFA’s executive director, explaining why his agency has pursued the 12-story addition, expected to add between 43,000 and 45,000 square feet. “And we need the space.”
Hudson also noted that, although his agency is tax-exempt, it makes payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, to the city each year, and will continue to do so on the assessed value of any addition.
Bruce Weber, the city’s finance director, said that PHFA has made PILOTs of $95,237 each year since at least 2012, making it the third-largest contributor of such payments, behind PinnacleHealth and the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency.
But the plans have prompted fierce criticism from neighbors and preservationists, who accused the agency of disregarding the historic character of the neighborhood and failing to adequately notify them of the proposals.
“We’re apoplectic,” said David Morrison, interim executive director of Historic Harrisburg Association, a nonprofit that advocates for historic preservation. “That block is an intact historic block, and it’s in a historic district. Once you start taking pieces away, the whole thing starts to crumble.”
Capitol Area Neighbors, a downtown neighborhood association, has prepared a draft position statement urging the city to reject the tower plans in their current form and calling the proposed demolition “tragic and incomprehensible.”
“Locust Street is an entry way to the city that is irreplaceable in its character and beauty,” the statement said. “Perhaps two blocks remain in this heart of the city between Front Street and 2nd Street that retain this type of architectural character.”
“We support positive re-use,” said Jane Allis, the group’s president. “We’re not against any addition. We just don’t want the streetscape disrupted.”
The proposal is the agency’s third attempt in recent years to get city approval on an expansion plan. In 2008, it sought to gut the Hickok mansion, a historic brick building next door on Front Street, and rebuild it as a parking garage with an office tower above it. But neighbors opposed the plan and the city turned it down.
In 2013, however, the city approved modified plans to adapt the mansion as rental office units instead of garage space and limit the height of any addition.
The latest plans significantly surpass the modifications that were approved in 2013, Allis said. “We don’t know why they’d come back with this,” she said.
Hudson, however, described the updated proposal as a “workaround” that preserves the Hickok mansion while adding necessary space for an agency in “growth mode.”
Bids for work on the 2013 plans, he said, came in at $2 million more than expected, largely because of the expense of building on top of the Hickok. Under the new proposal, a taller tower partly occupying the footprint of the demolished houses will preserve the mansion, which Hudson said he understood to be the city’s main priority.
A more recent addition to the Hickok will be removed, but the original section will be remodeled as a community meeting space, Hudson said. The proposal also asks for an exemption from a requirement to provide parking spaces, which the neighborhood association in its draft statement said it supported.
PHFA, which the state legislature created in 1972, is a quasi-governmental agency. Its operations are funded out of program revenues and its employees are not on the state payroll.
Since its creation, it has provided more than 157,000 single-family mortgages, built more than 122,000 rental units for low- and moderate-income residents and saved nearly 48,000 homes from foreclosure, according to data on its website.
“We’re landlocked,” said Brian Hudson, PHFA’s executive director. The agency’s downtown headquarters, left, and the Hickok mansion next door.
The agency has occupied its Front Street offices since 2004, when developers completed construction of an eight-story, 168,000-square-foot tower on the site of a former city parking lot.
The two-and-a-half story clapboard houses, at 110 and 112 Locust St., appear to be among the oldest residential buildings in Harrisburg. They go back at least as far as 1889, appearing on a city atlas that year as the homes of John Feehrer and Eliza Shatluck, respectively.
A date on an exterior door identifies the construction year as “c. 1826,” which would make them older than the so-called Joseph Black house, a Georgian revival house on State Street that Ken Frew, in his book “Building Harrisburg,” dates to around 1830.
Even at that age, though, the Locust Street properties would still be younger than at least two extant city residences. One is the John Harris-Simon Cameron house, completed in 1766, while the other is the so-called Elder House, a limestone farmhouse on Ellerslie Street, near 25th and Derry, that dates back to 1740.
Terry and LaDonna King, a husband-and-wife pair, took title to the Locust Street houses in 2006 and restored and modernized them, connecting their second floors and installing central air, among other upgrades.
In 2012, however, the Kings lost the homes in foreclosure, beginning the “sad legacy of neglect” the homes have suffered since, the neighbors’ statement said. PHFA bought them from Mid Penn Bank last May for $140,000.
“I’ve watched them sit there for three years,” Hudson said. “The bank was ready to unload them, and they are deteriorating.”
Anne Yellott, who lived in the Locust Street houses from the early 1980s until 2000, described them as “exquisite” structures that served as a way station for artists and intellectuals arriving on Harrisburg’s budding downtown cultural scene.
“It was a great little place to stay,” said Yellott, who over the years hosted guests as varied as an astronaut, a Holocaust survivor visiting for a stage production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and a state museum zoologist who came with an iguana, a turtle and two coonhounds in tow.
Her favorite features were a pocket garden and a fireplace where she would burn wood throughout the winter, drawing affection from the attendants in the former city lot, who “loved the smell of firewood,” she said.
Two hearings are currently scheduled for PHFA’s proposal. The first, before the planning commission, will take place Wednesday, April 1 at 6:30 p.m. The second, before the architecture review board, is scheduled for Monday, April 6 at 6 p.m. Both will be held in city hall, in Room 213 of the Public Safety Building.
This story has been updated with information from PHFA and the city about the agency’s payments in lieu of taxes, and to correct the time of Wednesday’s planning meeting to 6:30 p.m.
