‘No Ordinary House’: the Friends of the Tanner House will host a block party to celebrate a year of community-based activities
The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 18 at 2829 W. Diamond St.
Rain or no rain, the Friends of the Tanner House group plans to party this Saturday.
It will be a celebration of a year of community programs that sought input from residents on what they would like to see happen at the historic Tanner House — where world-renowned artist Henry Ossawa Tanner once lived — after it is restored.
Tanner spent most of his adult life in Paris and was known for his religious works, such as the 1898 painting The Annunciation, which is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The block party, called “No Ordinary House: A Neighborhood Celebration of Henry Ossawa Tanner House Efforts,” will take place on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Strawberry Mansion Community Development Corp. (CDC) at 2829 W. Diamond St.
The Strawberry Mansion CDC and the Strawberry Mansion Neighborhood Action Center (NAC) are cohosting the party with the Tanner House group.
“We’ve built a community partnership network,“ said Christopher R. Rogers, co-coordinator of the Friends of the Henry O. Tanner House. The block party, he said, celebrates the end of a year of “a community envisioning project.”
In 2023, the Mellon Foundation awarded a $150,000 grant so that the Tanner House could work with existing North Philadelphia community organizations to make plans for the Tanner House in the future.
“We wanted to build awareness and engagement with other community organizations,” Rogers said. “We didn’t want to position the Tanner House as this new thing, and this exceptional space. We wanted to appreciate everything that’s already going on in the area.”
Some community partners included the Blues Babe Foundation, Tree House Books, and Healing Through the Land.
The Friends of the Tanner House hopes to one day establish an arts-based community center at the Tanner House, at 2908 W. Diamond St.
» READ MORE: Once ‘the center of the Black intellectual community in Philadelphia,’ the Henry O. Tanner House could be demolished
But a lot more work needs to be done to make the house safe.
The group began a fundraising campaign to stabilize the house in February 2022 after The Inquirer published an article that the city had declared it as unsafe, and advocates feared it could be demolished.
Not long after the Mellon grant, the National Trust for Historic Places named the Tanner House to its “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2023” list.
In the past year, the Tanner House hired Qiaira Riley, a Philadelphia-based artist, to work as a community artist partner.
“It was so hard to do this kind of programming because we were not able to use the actual house,” Riley said. “If you want to host a creative event, there are very limited options.”
On Saturday, Riley will work with Philadelphia artist Yannick Lowery, who has designed a mailbox for the Tanner House where people attending the party can write letters imagining a future for the house.
While some stabilization work on the Tanner House began last year, Rogers said “Phase 2″ stabilization construction work is expected to start shortly. In addition, the Tanner House group will need to develop a full structural and architectural assessment report to support the future redesign and revitalization effort.
For more information, contact info@savethetannerhouse.org or go to https://savethetannerhouse.org/.