Historic Eden Hall
comes tumbling down

A demolition crew last week began tearing down the historic, but badly dilapidated, Eden Hall chapel in East Torresdale, seven months after a prominent local family was forced to abandon a restoration effort when a major arson fire severely damaged the structure.
By late in the week, most of the 158-year-old Gothic revival-style landmark had been reduced to rubble by a Fairmount Park Commission contractor.
Last March, a park commission official revealed that the city agency planned to demolish the chapel because it lacked the money to restore it or even repair the damage caused by a three-alarm blaze on July 18, 2006. A group of teens set the fire after breaking into the boarded-up and fenced-in stone structure. Flames enveloped the wooden roof and left the interior exposed to the elements.
Even before the arson, stabilization and restoration of the decaying and oft-vandalized site were expected to cost in the millions as descendants of Joseph C. Fluehr Sr. started a fund-raising campaign for the job. The city park surrounding the chapel is named in memory of the longtime Torresdale resident and real estate agent.
For more than a century, the chapel and accessory buildings served as a convent and boarding school for girls, operated by a semi-cloistered order of Catholic nuns. The parents of St. Katharine Drexel, who owned a home nearby on the present-day campus of Frankford Hospital-Torresdale, helped finance construction of the chapel and school.
After the nuns left in 1969, the property fell into the hands of the city. When development threatened the open space, Fluehr’s advocacy helped preserve the site as a park.
Earlier fires destroyed the classrooms and living quarters, which were then razed.
Nicholas Lawrence, then 19, of Bustleton, was the lone adult convicted of arson as a result of the 2006 fire. Several youth co-conspirators were found delinquent in juvenile-court proceedings.
Lawrence was sentenced to spend five to 23 months in a city prison work-release program. ••