On the market: A three-bedroom corner rowhouse in Bridesburg for $235,000
Because it's on an end, this rowhouse was a little larger than the adjacent properties.
The house in Bridesburg “was a fixer-upper when we bought it,” in 2008, says Charles Williams. He spent his whole life in the neighborhoods along the Delaware River until now, when he and his wife, Elizabeth, retired to Hamburg, Pa., near the Poconos.
They were only the second owners — the first had owned it since the mid-1920s — and he set to work immediately.
He liked the classic look and the fact that as an end house, it was a little larger than the adjacent properties — with 1,328 square feet. But inside, “it was old-fashioned,” he says, even down to the shower-free claw-foot tub in the bathroom, where he put in a vanity and a linen closet.
He added a powder room, put artificial beams in the living room ceiling, added hardwood floors and polyurethaned them, replaced much of the original piping.
The three bedrooms all have bay windows and, with a large front porch and back yard, the house gets plenty of natural light.
Most of the work was done in the couple’s first two years in the house, but he adds jokingly that “the ‘honey-do’ list never stops.” And the couple was also raising two daughters.
“I did all the work myself,” he says, and it was a bit of a busman’s holiday: After running a grocery store in Kensington, he became a maintenance mechanic for the headquarters of the Philadelphia Parking Authority. He retired in 2018.
“The house has Old World charm,” he says. “You don’t find that everywhere. There’s just no craftsmanship anymore.”
The house is 1½ blocks from the Delaware, and Williams says, “You can go down there and forget all your troubles for an hour or two.”
» READ MORE: Construction of 10-acre waterfront park in Bridesburg set to move forward
But the riverfront will soon look different with the completion of the sprawling Bridesburg Riverfront Park, scheduled for 2023.
Williams expects that the park will be a major asset for the neighborhood: “It’ll bring in a lot of younger people.”
The house is listed by Vincent Mancini of Compass Realty for $235,000.