The Haverford School is eyeing a major campus redesign. Some neighbors see institutional encroachment.
The private school that straddles Lower Merion and Haverford Townships has proposed an overhaul of its campus, including 200 new parking spaces and turning residential homes into a playing field.
A Main Line private school is planning a campus redevelopment that would increase on-site parking and turn school-owned homes into a playing field.
The Haverford School, an all-boys private school that straddles Lower Merion and Haverford Townships, has proposed an overhaul of its campus that would involve constructing a two-story parking deck off Lancaster Avenue, razing two campus-owned homes to make way for a playing field, and taking over a public road on the campus’s southwestern edge. School officials say the proposal will take student and visitor parking off neighborhood streets and create safer traffic patterns.
Yet the school’s proposal will require a complex set of approvals from both Lower Merion and Haverford Townships, and it’s faced pushback from neighbors, many of whom warn of institutional encroachment and unintended consequences for their neighborhood’s already congested streets.
What is the Haverford School proposing?
The Haverford School, founded in 1884, enrolls around 960 students in kindergarten through 12th grades. The school’s campus sits in both Haverford and Lower Merion Townships, with the bulk of its academic buildings in Lower Merion and a handful of fields and school-owned homes in Haverford.
At the heart of the school’s redevelopment proposal is parking.
At a Sept. 10 Haverford Township planning commission meeting, Tyler Casertano, the head of school, described the Haverford School’s campus as “underparked.”
The school has around 297 parking spaces, and in any given year, Casertano said, it needs between 350 and 400. Student parking spills out into the neighborhood, which school officials say has created tension with neighbors.
The multistory parking deck proposed along Lancaster Avenue would allow 480 cars to park on campus and would connect existing lots internally, meaning drivers would no longer have to circle out onto public roads and back onto campus to look for spots.
In addition to building the parking deck, the school plans to take over Panmure Road, rezone the residential parcel of campus as institutional, and tear down a pair of school-owned homes to make way for a soccer and baseball field that would be displaced by the parking deck. One of the homes is currently vacant and the other is being rented to a Haverford College employee, according to the school.
To offset closing Panmure Road, the school has offered to provide resources to widen neighboring Buck Lane, add a safer walking path, and return Buck Lane’s traffic to two ways (it was recently reduced to one way to limit cut-through traffic). Casertano said the school has also been in conversations with Lower Merion Township about partnering to improve the intersection at Lancaster and Railroad Avenues.
Why redevelop campus?
The Haverford School’s redevelopment plan came at the heels of a strategic visioning process that called for reimagining the school’s facilities to “create intentional spaces that will evolve with our future needs.”
Casertano told the planning commission the plan will shift the “operational realities of our campus and the human density” as far away from the residential neighborhood as possible.
The proposal arrives four years after the Haverford School purchased the 43-acre former Presbyterian Children’s Village property in Radnor for $19.88 million, which it is now selling to a Gladwyne-based senior services organization.
Casertano said the school bought the Radnor property “to have the ability to use it should, through this process, we decide that it was in our best interest to use that land.”
In its strategic process, Casertano said, it became clear that having all the students at one location was “central to our culture” and that there was little appetite for making Radnor a satellite campus.
Neighbors warn of noise and encroachment
At the lengthy planning commission meeting in September, a cascade of residents said the proposal would allow the school to continue to creep into their neighborhood, disrupting its quiet character and posing a risk to neighbors’ centuries-old Quaker traditions.
Martha Sharples, director of the Haverford Friends Fiduciary Corp., which owns two properties abutting the school, said the proposal would “have no benefit and be fundamentally detrimental” for the Haverford Monthly Meeting, which holds its Quaker services at a building near the proposed spot for the new field.
Multiple members of the Quaker meeting opposed the school’s request, noting the importance of silence in their faith, which could be disrupted should a baseball and soccer field be placed adjacent to their place of worship. Currently, many Quaker meeting members said, the school’s residences and Panmure Road create an important buffer that shields the meeting from noise.
“Silence, as you have heard, is not incidental to Quaker worship. It is the worship,” member Wendy De La Rosa said. “... Imagine, for my Catholic friends, to be sitting in communion and hearing ‘goal.’ Imagine to be sitting in your worship and having to hear a baseball game.”
Others warned vacating Panmure Road and eliminating a key egress for residents would deteriorate driving conditions.
“I’m just curious what the real benefits are for the people who live in the community and pay taxes in the community,” resident Eric Hartman said at the township meeting.
Some noted a provision in the township’s comprehensive plan that calls for instituting strategies to “eliminate encroachments by institutional and commercial users into adjacent residential neighborhoods.”
Sean Livesey, an attorney for the Haverford School, said the plan is not a case of institutional encroachment, but rather unites a series of existing school-owned properties already being used for institutional purposes.
Teachers and alumni of the Haverford School, as well as a handful of residents, encouraged commission members to support the proposal, saying it would create safer traffic patterns on campus while keeping drivers looking for parking off township roads. Some commended Casertano and the school for communicating proactively with residents and incorporating feedback into their plans.
What comes next?
Municipal boundaries will complicate the school’s proposal. Rezoning a residential parcel as institutional and moving the field will require approval from Haverford Township, while building the new parking structure will need Lower Merion’s green light. The school says it has had conversations with Lower Merion but is waiting to submit official plans until it moves forward with the Haverford Township side of the plan.
Haverford Township’s planning commission, an advisory body that will provide a recommendation to the township commissioners, postponed a vote on the project, asking the school to come back with a concrete traffic and noise study.
Commission chair Maggie Dobbs told Casertano that the school’s help making improvements to Buck Lane would “be kind of the critical element to my support of this proposal.”
Inquirer Haverford
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