PHILADELPHIA
A dilapidated 110-room, 70,000-square-foot estate is back on the market, but an architect says the $20 million price tag doesn’t include the tens of millions more it needs in repairs.
The 34-acre Lynnewood Hall estate in the Elkins Park neighborhood has been in decline since the original heirs sold it in 1944, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
This July 19, 2010, photo shows Lynnewood Hall, in Elkins Park, Pa., just outside of Philadelphia. The dilapidated 110-room, 70,000-square-foot estate is on the market again, but experts say the $20 million price tag would be in addition to tens of millions more in repairs. The 34-acre estate in the Elkins Park neighborhood has been in decline since the original heirs sold it in 1944. Mary DeNadai, an architect who specializes in historic restoration, said it would take about $50 million to restore the home to its former glory, but time is running out. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The home, completed around 1900, once held one of the nation’s largest private art collections. In its heyday, the house was dripping with silk, velvet and gilded moldings, the rooms furnished with chairs from King Louis XV’s palace, Persian rugs and Chinese pottery and the halls crammed with art by Raphael, Rembrandt and Donatello.
But members of the Widener family who owned the property died or moved away. The estate was first sold to an association that wanted to build a Protestant university there. Then it was sold to a housing developer, followed by a seminary and another church.
The property went through decades of bankruptcy proceedings and was repossessed, auctioned and sold for pennies to creditors — all while descending further into disrepair.
But those who have seen the interior in recent years said most of the house’s fine, historic fixtures are still there, even though some of the rooms are destroyed by water damage and broken windows.
Mary DeNadai, an architect who specializes in historic restoration, said it would take about $50 million to restore the home to its former glory, but time is running out.
“If it continues to be neglected as it is, it will be beyond salvage” in five to 10 years, she said.
David Rowland, president of the Old York Road Historical Society, said he has seen possible buyers come and go.
“It was always loved more by the people who’d never been inside it than by the people who actually lived there,” Rowland said.
