Another new life for Tinicum's Lazaretto

The historic Lazaretto, a 213-year-old building that once served as a quarantine hospital and that is unlike anything still standing in North America, almost didn't make it.

When its owner balked at a surging tax assessment, developers snapped up the property, salivating at the potential of the 10-acre Tinicum Township tract as a parking lot serving neighboring Philadelphia International Airport.

But in the end, preservationists and a stubborn Board of Commissioners won out. There will be no field of cars on the Delaware County site where, starting in 1801, thousands of immigrants were treated as they arrived in the New World.

On Tuesday, the board voted to apply for $1 million in Community Development Block Grant money from the county, adding to the $2.5 million already set aside to renovate the 16,000-square-foot brick building.

When it reopens in an estimated two years, it will be the new headquarters of Tinicum Township's municipal government and Police Department.

"It's such a good feeling to be able to preserve that building," said Thomas Giancristoforo, president of the commissioners. "I might have family members who landed there. Maybe a lot of people did."

The Lazaretto's road to preservation was circuitous, complicated by multiple incarnations as a yacht club, pilot-training base, and seaplane landing station.

But when it was built in 1799, it was a defense against deadly yellow fever epidemics.

The Lazaretto - named after St. Lazarus, patron saint of lepers - was the successor to another hospital of the same name near Fort Mifflin. That facility was deemed too close to Philadelphia and its vulnerable masses when yellow fever struck in 1793, 1797, 1798, and 1799, killing thousands and crippling the region.

So the Tinicum site, farther from the city, was selected for the new hospital, which opened in 1801.

At the Lazaretto, immigrants were examined, treated, and isolated if found to have communicable diseases.

The hospital was in operation for nearly a century until another yellow fever epidemic ended its service as a quarantine facility. In 1870, 14 people in and around the hospital died of the disease, and officials closed it in 1895. Quarantine operations moved to Marcus Hook.

Afterward, the Georgian-style Lazaretto became the summer home of the Philadelphia Athletic Club, a vacation spot for the wealthy.

"The elite of the city came down for bicycle outings, to play lawn tennis, baseball," said David Barnes, a historian and member of the Lazaretto Preservation Association of Tinicum Township. "It was a country club."

Within several years, the Lazaretto underwent yet another incarnation. It became the home of the Philadelphia School of Aviation, a trendsetter in seaplane instruction and Pennsylvania's first water-flying school. Later, the U.S. Army took over the site to train squadron fighters for World War I.

After the war, Frank Mills, who had taught at the aviation school, bought the property and reopened it as a flight school. The Lazaretto remained in his family, which continued to operate it as a seaplane base.

In 2000, taxes shot up after a county reassessment. Frank Mills' son, Bob, sold the property to Island Marine Partners for $2.1 million. Until the sale, the site was the oldest continuously operating seaplane base in the nation.

The new owners' proposals sent a shudder through preservationists and township officials. Demolition was on the table.

The township rejected three plans the developer submitted - for a hotel, a restaurant complex, and an airport parking lot. A court case was imminent. The owners, however, said they would be open to an offer.

In 2005, the township paid $3.1 million for the property, proposing to use part of it to build a fire station. Funding for first responders was more readily available after the 9/11 terror attacks, Tinicum historian Bill Moller said.

Preservationists didn't like the plan. The firehouse, they argued, would compromise the site's historic integrity and block views of the hospital building. They sued the township to stop construction.

The two sides later settled the suit by agreeing to proceed with the firehouse and to form the Lazaretto Preservation Association of Tinicum Township. The new board, whose members are nominated by the township and preservationists, makes decisions about the Lazaretto's future.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building is "not just a wonderful piece of architecture," said John Gallery, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. "It's important in the history of public-health treatment in the country."

The Lazaretto has survived its own life-and-death struggle, and, as Moller said, now "can rest" easy.

at 610-313-8211 or kholmes@phillynews.com.