The Woodlands estate got SEPTA to pay for and fix damage to its property

The growl of construction machinery reached Jessica Baumert in her office in late March 2017, and it was coming from the southwestern edge of the Woodlands estate, a protected national historic landmark in West Philadelphia.

“Get off our land!” Baumert, the executive director, yelled at a construction crew after she found that a sizable stand of trees had been clear-cut at 42nd Street and Woodland Avenue, where SEPTA was working along the Northeast Corridor tracks, according to her later testimony in a lawsuit against SEPTA and the contractor.

So began a journey of nearly seven years, ending in late January in a settlement, with the Woodlands getting $250,000 to compensate for the destroyed quarter-acre of mature trees and the transit agency agreeing to repair other damage to the 54-acre property.

A team of lawyers from the Philadelphia office of national firm Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath took on the case pro bono for the Woodlands, a small nonprofit with just four employees. Tom Johnson, a firm partner who serves on the Woodlands board, led the effort.

It wasn’t easy. SEPTA enjoys sovereign immunity protection under state law, which limits its liability in many cases. And there were complications, such as murky property boundaries between an estate that dates to about 1766 and the rights-of-way owned by two railroads, SEPTA and Amtrak.

Some of the land, about 10 feet from the tracks, was sold to the predecessor of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1854, the Woodlands’ records show.

“We would like to get a boundary survey to confirm and validate our records,” Baumert said.

The Woodlands was the country estate of William Hamilton, the heir of a wealthy family of colonial-era lawyers, who built a villa overlooking the Schuylkill on 300 acres. He doubled it in size in 1786, the earliest example of the Federal architectural style that reigned for decades in the young nation.

Hamilton, a leading botanist, also established English gardens and greenhouses, collecting exotic trees and plants from around the world, like John Bartram, a contemporary who lived not far away and became the namesake of a 50-acre public garden in Southwest Philadelphia.

Hamilton “was a show-off plant guy,” Baumert said. “He had between 9,000 and 10,000 specimens in his greenhouses, and we’re still learning what plants he had in his collection.”

On his land, Hamilton introduced a variety of hydrangea often called the blue hydrangea, the red China Rose, and the Ginkgo biloba tree to North America, and other species.

Visitors flocked to the Woodlands to examine the foliage growing there, and to admire the architecture. Hamilton’s mansion, high on a bluff, was a landmark to people traveling on the river.

That view was portrayed on a set of English decorative plates depicting points of interest in America, Baumert said.

“It was an amazing place. People describe it as sort of the Disneyland of its day,” said Johnson, the lawyer.

In 1840, a group of prominent Philadelphians who wanted to preserve as much of the site as possible established the Woodlands Cemetery Company. About 33,000 people have been laid to rest there amid a maze of Victorian-era monuments.

Now, neighborhood residents and others — about 140,000 people a year — visit the parklike property to walk or jog its paths, exercise their dogs, wander through the cemetery and relax on the grass.

Several weeks before the clear-cutting, Woodlands employees discovered a pile of rubble while walking a path along the back edge of the property, near the tracks. The pile was the remains of a bluestone-topped wall that had been built in 1866 and 1867, according to meeting minutes of the cemetery company.

SEPTA believed the wall was much newer and on its property, the railroad right of way — and if Amtrak owned it, the regional agency was maintaining it anyway. Spokesperson Andrew Busch said it was crumbling and engineers worried about a possible safety hazard.

The wall was destroyed and the trees uprooted while SEPTA was working on a project to upgrade the catenary system that supplies electric power to Regional Rail locomotives.

The Woodlands, which is across the street from the 40th Street trolley portal, also said that years of parking multi-ton SEPTA maintenance trucks on its brick sidewalks near the gate crushed parts of them.

The estate’s lawyers defeated SEPTA’s motion to dismiss the suit based on sovereign immunity by using a Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent that made an exception to liability protection for “negligent operation of a motor vehicle.”

They argued that such negligence included the earth movers and road graders that uprooted the trees and damaged the wall, as well as trucks parked on the sidewalk.

As part of the settlement, SEPTA agreed to dig up and replace 4,200 square feet of brick sidewalk and beaten-down grass, and promised not to park there again. It also must give back any bluestone the Woodlands wants to have, according to the Common Pleas Court order detailing the agreement.

The agency has been storing the rocks, Busch said.

“SEPTA buses, trolleys and trains operate alongside many historic sites every day,” Busch said. “We work closely with the community and historical organizations so that we can operate and maintain vital service without disrupting important landmarks.”

SEPTA did not admit wrongdoing, a standard condition in lawsuit settlements.

As later generations of Hamiltons began selling off parts of the estate, the Woodlands shrank to its present size. It’s still the largest remaining green space in University City.

The Woodlands also lost ground over the years to the University of Pennsylvania campus and the Veterans Administration hospital, which the federal government took by eminent domain.

The property is hemmed in by the burgeoning medical campus to the east and, to the west, the empty buildings of the University of the Sciences, now merged with St. Joseph’s University. The Jesuit institution has said it wants eventually to sell or lease the land for development.

Baumert and others see the fight against SEPTA in the context of preservation.

“There is a lot of pressure on this property,” she said. “We want to protect this for the next 200 years. We want to keep it as a refuge for people.”