U. buys late prof's home for SAS acad. programs

A home at 4106 Locust Street that the University bought last week for about $500,000 from the widow of a late Penn professor will be converted into a School of Arts and Sciences facility by next June, according to Tom Lussenhop, Penn's top real estate official. The facility -- a stone mansion that was the home to Criminology and Law Professor Marvin Wolfgang -- will likely house the Fox Leadership Program and the Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society. It would mark the first time an academic center will be housed in the West Philadelphia neighborhood. Wolfgang's widow, Lenore Wolfgang, has occupied the home since her husband died of cancer in April 1998. While SAS has yet to make a final decision on the use for the facility, Lussenhop called the University's purchase multifaceted. It is advantageous, he said, both for SAS programming and in preventing a University City property from being "carved up" into multi-tenant housing units. The University had been negotiating for the three-story property since last spring, when it hired Political Science Professor John DiIulio from Princeton University to direct both the Fox program and the CRRUCS. "We wanted to find a facility for John and we showed it to him," SAS Dean Samuel Preston said on Friday. Preston said he does not expect the new facility's off-campus location to hinder the popularity of the Fox Leadership or CRRUCS programs. CRRUCS, a program to create and evaluate faith-based urban development efforts, will examine religion's role in society from an academic research perspective. "It is close enough to campus to serve the student population well," he said. Penn professors, students and community members who live right next door to the property have mixed feelings about their new neighbor. Student Committee on Undergraduate Education Chairperson Aaron Fidler, a Locust Street resident, said the University's current plans sound interesting and worthwhile. "The area doesn't get a lot of activity now that's not social," the Wharton senior said, pointing to what could be an "intellectual environment shift" as SAS expands the bounds of the University. And while History Professor Walter Licht said he welcomes the new addition, he cited one drawback. "There may be a bit more traffic moving in and out of the building," said Licht, a divisional SAS dean who oversees the University's research centers and CRRUCS. "[CRRUCS] is a center about the city," Licht stressed. "It will be in the city." While Licht mostly favors luring families into the University City community, he said it would be hard to imagine one family moving into a house as large as the roughly 4,500-square-foot Wolfgang estate. Like Lussenhop, Licht also criticized the trend of converting single-family homes into multi-tenant buildings over the past 20 years. Other community members say they are skeptical of the University's use for the house. Spruce Hill Community Association President Barry Grossbach said he has no qualms with the University buying the property to prevent partition, but wishes administrators had consulted with the community before deciding to use it for office space. "If they were having discussions about this a year ago, why are we hearing about it for the first time?" Grossbach said, adding that he learned of the purchase late last week. He said he would have liked to see the property used as a University-owned provostial residence, like University President Judith Rodin's home in Eisenlohr Hall at 3812 Walnut Street. "[This will be] an area of contentious discussion," Grossbach said.