New University program hopes to paint the town

A little bit of paint can go a long way toward improving the beauty and value of a house and its surrounding neighborhood, according to D-L Wormley, Penn's managing director of community housing. In the University's latest effort to raise the quality and value of the neighborhood surrounding Penn's campus, a new University-sponsored program called UC Paint held its first information session this past Thursday at the Cavalry Church at 48th Street and Baltimore Avenue. UC Paint aims to help University City residents restore their homes to the original color schemes by holding periodic information sessions and providing a paint analyst to determine a house's original colors and paint types. About 20 people attended the workshop, in which the project's coordinators told attending residents about the aesthetic and monetary benefits of preserving the antiquity of University City homes. Nineteenth-century Victorian-style homes adorn the West Philadelphia area, making it an official historic neighborhood. Historic homes already "tend to hold, maintain and improve value" more than homes in non-historic areas, Wormley said. Making them appear more historic may further increase the property value. Don Meginley, president of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia -- a private, non-profit organization based in Center City -- told the assembled community members that historic neighborhoods exemplify many positive trends missing from other neighborhoods. Meginley cited a November 1998 study conducted by the Preservation Alliance which found that Philadelphia's historic neighborhoods are more racially diverse, have lost less population than the rest of Philadelphia over the last 10 years and attract a significant number of people moving from Philadelphia suburbs and other areas. Meginley explained that West Philadelphia homeowners tend to paint their homes non-traditional colors that diminish the beauty of a block and devalue the home itself. "I've never seen people take perfectly wonderful brick buildings with excellent context and detail and architectural features and paint it all over with a pastel color [outside of West Philadelphia]," Meginley said. As a follow-up to the workshop, a UC Paint analyst and preservationist visited about 20 homes on Saturday and used paint scraping techniques to find the homes' original colors so that residents can match the colors with modern paints and then repaint their homes. UC Paint is the first of a series of programs that will stem from a Penn home improvement initiative called PRIMER -- which stands for Preservation, Repair, Improvement, Maintenance and Educational Resources. Future programs may include a help desk for people with questions about home improvement and maintenance and a World Wide Web site to provide information about home improvement, Wormley said. The attendants applauded the efforts of the UC Paint initiative. Patricia Gillespie, a resident of the 500 block of South 45th Street, said she was happy to get help from UC Paint. "We don't want to diminish any of the integrity of the district," Gillespie said.

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