Boathouse Row
The fifteen buildings of Boathouse Row were constructed between 1860 and 1904 and reflect the many stylistic shifts of that period. They were built by rowing clubs (and one ice skating club) that were associated with one of the new social phenomena of the late nineteenth century: recreational athletics. The concept of free time and the notion of using that time to exercise the body were new.
Rowing and sculling (the one- and two-oared versions of manual boat propulsion) were ancient in origin, but they were reinvented as recreational sports in the mid-nineteenth century. The damming of the Schuylkill River in 1822 created a huge, calm lake that was perfect for the slender, unseaworthy, but fast craft that were favored by enthusiastic oarsmen, and in the 1850s rowing clubs began to build simple boat sheds on its banks.
The clubs came together in 1858 to form the “Schuylkill Navy,” the oldest amateur governing body in American sports. Their restriction of races to amateurs, beginning in 1872, clarified the distinction between amateur and professional athletes. At the behest of the “navy,” in 1860 the city allowed the erection of permanent boathouses and a clubhouse for the skating club.
The two oldest buildings in this picturesque ensemble, both built in 1860, are the tiny Gothic cottage of the Quaker City Barge Club (# 3, architect unknown) and the Philadelphia Skating Club’s towered and bracketed Italianate villa (# 14, now the Philadelphia Girls Rowing Club, architect James C. Sidney).
The next oldest clubhouse is the Crescent Boat Club (# 5), originally built in 1869-1871, but much enlarged and transformed with half-timbering by Charles Balderston in 1890-1891. It is attached to the east to the Pennsylvania Barge Club, now Hollenback House and the headquarters of the Schuylkill Navy, which was built in 1892 to the design of Louis Hickman and expanded in a bold Tudor manner by Clarence Eaton Schermerhorn in 1912.
As old as the Crescent in its origin is the double house of the University Barge Club and the Philadelphia Barge Club (# 7-8). Erected in 1870-1871 in the mansard-roofed Second Empire style, it was transformed into a Shingle Style villa, capped by twin pyramidal roofs, in two building campaigns, 1893 and 1901. The architects are unknown.
Another complicated history is attached to the connected buildings of the Malta and Vesper clubs. (#9-10). The original 1873 house is said to be buried inside, but the picturesque Queen Anne exterior, which mixes shingles, half timbering, and stone, is largely the work of George and William Hewitt (Malta 1901) and Howard Hagar (Vesper 1898).
The University of Pennsylvania’s original 1874-1875 boathouse, a small Gothic Revival structure by an unknown architect (#11), is sympathetically bookended by large 2020-2022 additions by Ewing Cole architects. It is now the Burk-Bergman Boathouse. Its small Gothic contemporary, the West Philadelphia Rowing Club of 1878 (#12) has been less happily subsumed by stuccoed twentieth-century wings.
The Undine Barge Club (#13), built in 1882-1883 and largely unaltered, is unmistakably the work of Frank Furness. Stylistically unplaceable, its character is defined by the muscular use of materials—wood and stone—and by bold compositions—like the oriel jutting from the northeast corner.
Calmer and more conventional but no less handsome are the last three of the original boathouses to be built. The Bachelors Barge Club, which is the oldest on the river, occupies its third clubhouse (#6), designed in a Roman classical style by the partners Edward Hazlehurst and Samuel Huckel. The Sedgeley Club’s Colonial Revival building of 1902-1903 (#15) was designed by Arthur H. Brockie to wrap around the 1887 Turtle Rock Lighthouse, a functioning aid to navigation. And Walter Smedley created a serious but unpretentious neo-Georgian home for the Fairmount Rowing Association in 1904 (#2),
In 1994-1998 Lloyd Hall (#1), the only public building on Boathouse Row, was built to replace Plaisted Hall, the public boathouse built in 1881 to the design of Russell Thayer.
Photo credit: Visit Philadelphia®