Even in a neighborhood as earthy and diverse as Mount Airy, the massive Flemish-brick building in the 6600 block of Germantown Avenue looks as if it were plucked from the edge of a canal in Amsterdam.
Yet the structure, built in 1892 and designed by William Lightfoot Price, fits perfectly into plans the nonprofit Mount Airy USA community-development corporation has for the block and others along the avenue.
Using grants from 13 sources and taking advantage of the city's 10-year tax abatement for residential construction, the organization has created four retail spaces on the first floor and carved six condominiums from the top floor.
Architect Cecil Baker designed the restoration/renovation, which began in 2004 with Domus Construction of Philadelphia as general contractor.
"As you can imagine, it took us a while to assemble the funding," said Farah Jiminez, executive director of Mount Airy USA, which bought the building from the estate of physician/preservationist William H. Winston, in whose honor Winston Commons was named.
The outside funding - from Wachovia Bank, HGTV's Restore America initiative, and the state - was to encourage the renovation of the structure for mixed use and does not impose income requirements on buyers, Jiminez said.
Yet, according to Neil Kugelman of Elfant Wissahickon Realtors, whose team of agents is marketing the condos, the units come with $50,000 forgivable second mortgages that help bring the prices below what a similar condo in Center City would command.
Prices range from $179,900 for a one-bedroom, one-bath unit to $271,900 for a two-bedroom, two-bath unit. The tax abatement on the 1,729-square-foot two-bedroom-plus-loft unit, for example, results in an annual tax bill of $593. Condo fees range from $200 to $350 a month, depending on the size of the unit.
There is parking at the rear of the building.
The developers are targeting empty-nesters and young professionals, and, while Kugelman acknowledges that there has been considerable buyer interest, "the location has a lot of people not willing to take the first step. I figure that if one person buys in, others will see it and quickly follow."
Marketing the properties has been made easier by Mount Airy USA's approach to revitalizing the block - "to transform the neighborhood through a variety of real estate strategies," as Jiminez described it.
Once home to two nuisance bars, including one in the Winston Commons building, this stretch of Germantown Avenue is surrounded by established residential neighborhoods, including 11 new low- and moderate-income townhouses in the 200 block of East Montana Street that the development corporation recently completed.
In the same block is Phebe Commons, Mount Airy USA's first commercial project, completed in 2002, which houses its offices, a new post office, other businesses, and a cafe. It is so called because of a runaway slave whose name was discovered on a poster found during historical research, said Jason Salus, the group's director of real estate development.
The 18th-century Wagon Wheel Inn was on the site of Phebe Commons, but it, too, had become a nuisance bar by the mid-1980s, and, despite hopes of restoring the building, it had to be demolished.
Other businesses have found their way to this stretch of Germantown Avenue, and the streetscape is beginning to resemble what it was when Winston Commons was new.
The one fly in the ointment is the joint PennDot-city project to rebuild Germantown Avenue from Winston Road to Nipon Street, replacing the crumbling Belgian blocks that take a toll on tires and tie rods.
Though the neighborhood welcomes the idea of rebuilding the avenue - which would also accommodate the tracks of the Route 23 trolley line for future operation - community leaders are worried that the dislocation caused by the work will undo the progress of several years.
Mount Airy USA staffer Elizabeth Moselle is working with the city and the state to try to reduce the impact caused by that nine-month reconstruction project, set to begin next month.
"We are trying to prevent what has happened in other areas of the city, such as the El reconstruction in West Philadelphia, where businesses hung on for so many months, and then all the city did to compensate was send them checks for $2,500," Jiminez said.
Special events and programs will be scheduled to bring foot traffic to the areas during the work, to keep the businesses - many of them new - up and running.
To drum up interest in the condos and what the redeveloping neighborhood is offering, Mount Airy USA hired Sandra Salky of Diane Bryman Accents in Chestnut Hill to stage some of the the units.
In addition, the work of some Mount Airy craftspeople is being featured, including screens in the third-floor condo loft by Charles Todd of Mount Airy Custom Furniture, which took over part of the old Mount Airy Post Office building in the 7200 block of Germantown Avenue.
"It is an interesting neighborhood," said Todd, who followed his wife from Tennessee three years ago when she took a teaching job at Penn. "There aren't very many craftspeople in the city compared to the suburbs because of taxes and the higher cost of doing business, so there's less competition for us to deal with.
"The fellow with whom I rent space and I haven't run out of work for very long for the last six months," he said, and "most of the business comes from an eight-mile radius, which means there's money out there."
See a slide show on the transformed Winston Commons building at http://inquirer.philly.com/slideshows/Features/070204ajhairyEndText