Mansions erected on large pieces of ground were built in the area during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Few were built after the 1929 onset of the Great Depression, and the area remained largely undeveloped until after World War II.
Today, the area is a residential-only neighborhood known for its abundance of large black oak trees.
Laverock Farm
Laverock Farm in 1922
Arthur E. Newbold built a Colonial-Revival mansion and estate, "Farleigh," on the north side of Willow Grove Avenue in 1895.[1] His son, Arthur Jr., hired architect Arthur Ingersoll Meigs of Mellor, Meigs & Howe to transform the mansion into a Norman-Revival manor house. Between 1919 and 1925, Meigs created "Laverock Farm" – a working farm housed in a group of exquisitely-crafted buildings that deftly mixed the antique and the modern.[2] It was awarded the 1925 Gold Medal for Excellence in Design by the Architectural League of New York.[3]
In an influential review in The New Republic titled "The Architecture of Escape," critic Lewis Mumford denounced "Laverock Farm" and buildings like it as "architectural anaesthesia" and "hocus-pocus":
The critical weakness of the romantic architect is that he is employed in creating an environment into which people may escape from a sordid workaday world, whereas the real problem of architecture is to remake the workaday world so that people will not wish to escape from it.[4]
"Laverock Farm" lasted barely 30 years, it was demolished in 1956.[5] A development of split-level houses was built on the former estate and as infill around other existing houses.
^James B. Garrison, "Laverock Farm," Houses of Philadelphia Chestnut Hill and the Wissahickon Valley, 1890-1930, Acanthus Press, New York, 2008, pp. 202-07.
^Lewis Mumford, "The Architecture of Escape," The New Republic, vol. 43 (August 12, 1925).
