September 28, 2006 Issue
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Classified Chestnut Hill Local Online Editor Don't Miss an Issue, Tell us what you see or ©2006 Chestnut Hill Local Winner of One |
Richard Wood Snowden First of a three-part series by PETER MAZZACCARO |
The Town Hall meeting room was packed with local business heads, interested residents and Chestnut Hill Community Association officers when Richard Snowden made his entrance. He strolled to the front, ready to sell the crowd. It was no big deal for him; he’d performed for a crowd many times before. He was known for blunt words, brash delivery—his attitude could cut Wissahickon schist. He wanted the CHCA to let him sublet a property they owned in the prime 8400 block of Germantown Ave., just beneath where the meeting was taking place, and use it for a Gap retail store. It was February 3, 2000. The Gap, it turned out, wanted to open a special baby and children’s clothing store and convert the children’s section of their current shop into a bath and body concept. “You could make $35 to $40 per square foot!” he had proclaimed in a letter to CHCA leaders. There was a problem though. The CHCA had already decided to let a local business owner, Maria Reister, move her boutique to the space from a poorly exposed corner store at Germantown and Rex avenues. She was a signature away from having the lease at a rate of $24 a square foot and suddenly she was stuck in the audience as Snowden made his pitch, fuming at her sudden change in fortune. “I had thought we had an agreement,” she said. Suddenly the agreement was out the window. The CHCA had decided to hear Snowden’s final offer. Legend was (is) in Chestnut Hill that Richard Snowden, a fifth generation Chestnut Hiller and the most prolific property owner on the Hill since the Woodward family built their empire of rental homes, was a tough guy to do business with. His reputation was poisonous on the Hill. It was hard to believe when he made his enterence. A youngish, blond-haired preppy in khaki and button-down shirts, Snowden lacked the hunched menace of Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. He often looked like a mild-manered and well-dressed landscaper on the street. He certainly didn’t appear to be the guy everyone liked to talk about: the man who was mean to the small businessman; the man who was accustomed to getting his way, or he’d blow up and stop playing. “I was at one meeting of the [Chestnut Hill Business Association] where he got in an argument with Paul Roller (a well-known and perennially bearded restaurateur of Roller’s and Flying Fish fame), and he just left. It was like a kid who didn’t get his way and decided to pack up his toys and leave,” one business owner told me on the condition of anonymity. But Snowden usually got his way. Like the famous Blue Moon fight of 1997, a battle that lasted nearly four months. The Gap deal should’ve been easier. When Snowden spoke to the crowd he was firm. Chestnut Hill needed to keep a “high-quality national retailer” like the Gap in Chestnut Hill. “Opening the Gap would be a use that would be beneficial to Chestnut Hill,” Snowden continued. Then he put a little mustard on his case, “The Gap is the best retailer in the country and perhaps the world. The fact that they own their own property... have been in business for more than 10 years, speaks worlds about the community.” Snowden wasn’t alone, Hank O’ Donnell, the owner and operator of O’Doodles toy store and a stalwart of the Chestnut Hill business community, endorsed Snowden’s plan. A good quality chain store would be good for the whole Hill, O’Donnell argued. Still, after much handwringing and moments of near despair over the lost potential income Snowden’s higher rent could have produced for the CHCA coffers, the CHCA stuck with Reister. No one said it directly, but Snowden seemed to make most in the room uneasy. He was direct, blunt with his point of view. “Renting to Maria at $24 is a subsidy,” Snowden said. His was not the way of the old-time landlords whose names are canonized by locals old enough to know them: Russell Medinger and Eli Schmidt. Nancy Hubby, an original member of the CHCA, recalled days when the community kept a fund designed to stabilize rents in the neighborhood. Chestnut Hill was changing too fast for many and it was as if Snowden represented all the worrisome elements of that transformation. Snowden was too big. He could ruin Chestnut Hill. In one final sale he could put dozens of people out of business. The community owned the property Reister wanted, and it was the duty of the CHCA to offer the subsidy. Snowden didn’t get angry. Not visibly. He’d had a few shaky run ins with the CHCA before. He did say in an interview after the incident he felt the CHCA had betrayed him, particularly for allowing a Local reporter to witness the meeting, and publicizing an attempt to charm a property away from a small business woman. It was bad publicity. “This was a breach of trust!” he vowed, and left it at that. And in walked Snowden Richard Snowden’s new office in the top floor of the old Chestnut Hill Pediatrics building on the corner of Southampton and Germantown avenues is impressive. A magnificent room of wooden, book-stuffed shelves, an antique desk laden with blue prints—it’s an office one would expect to see inhabited by a war-tested colonel or a retired sloop captain. In fact, from the size and pitch of the office and its corner window centered behind Snowden’s desk, it’s easy to imagine the angular building as a ship pointed north up Germantown Avenue, aimed beyond Jenks School and into the blocks of Chestnut Hill’s most prized retail space. Sitting to be interviewed on an antique arm chair, Snowden is tense. “No questions about my personal life or my finances.” he says. And it’s agreed. He’s sensative to rumors and allegations. He tries to avoid the talk and stay out of the local newspaper when he can. He is, however, happy to discuss the genesis of his life’s business, Bowman Properties. Snowden was born in Philadelphia to a Chestnut Hill family but grew up in the Portland, Oregon area. Snowden’s mother, Julie, a Hiller by birth, was determined to leave the area. “She didn’t want to look out her window and see the same neighborhood every day for the rest of her life,” Snowden said. Snowden’s late father, Charlie Snowden, was a career journalist and a respected editor of the Oregon Journal and later The Oregonian of Portland. Snowden was drawn to Chestnut Hill because of his family’s ties to the area and its historic stock of buildings. His maternal grandmother Virginia Wilmsen still lives in the Chestnut Hill area (Wyndmoor) and is a backer of Snowden’s many property enterprises. Snowden says his grandmother is only part of the family business, which includes two sisters and a niece, and that the primary financing comes from his whole family. His grandmother has been involved, he says, because of her own interest in the preservation work he and Bowman properties have done. Shortly after his arrival in Chestnut Hill in 1980, Snowden, a political science major with a degree from Kenyon College in Ohio, took the helm of his first project, the residential development of the Anglecott Nursing Home. The Nursing home had closed in late 1980 after 40 years of operation and Snowden emerged with a group of anonymous backers in a bid to purchase the 2.5 acre property with the intent to subdivide the nursing home and the accompanying carriage house into nine single-family condominium units. The young Snowden had gathered finances to buy the property and assumed the title of Managing Partner of Anglecott Associates. He told the Local at the time that he would keep the identity of his associates anonymous “for privacy purposes.” The Anglecott project drew a few barbs from local residents who thought Snowden was going to use his position as a member of the CHCA to procur an endorsement from the CHCA necessary for winning zoning variances from the city. Snowden abstained from voting on the project and won support from many in letters to the Local and at a number of community meetings. In 1985 Bowman Properties was formed, with Snowden in the same managing partner role as with Anglecott. Bowman is a family name Snowden says he and his family partners chose for the accompanying archer emblem that appears on all of the property firm’s signs. Snowden’s first commercial investment was the Garden Gate Cafe property at 8139 Germantown Ave. and 6 E. Hartwell La. in 1985. The property signified Snowden’s emergence as a visible property owner on Germantown Avenue, particularly in the blocks known in local parlance as the “Lower Hill,” both for its change in altitude from the “Top of the Hill,” and the shift of social and economic status in the same direction. The Lower Hill stretches from the Chestnut Hill Hotel at the 8200 block, south to the TLA video shop in the 7600 block. “I prefer to call it the Southern Hill,” Snowden says. Snowden owns a great deal of retail space but he probably has more apartment units. Many of his retail buildings have store fronts at the street level with a group of apartments above and behind. The Lorenzon building on the northwest corner of Willow Grove and Germantown avenues, marked by an empty, corner retail space, has four retail units and 15 occupied apartments, according to Snowden. “I’ve probably built more apartments on the avenue than anybody in the last 40 years,” he says. “I have a deep commitment to the mixed use. I lived over a store when I first got out of college, and I fell in love with that kind of living. It was one of the reasons I started this business.” Besides being the most visible property owner, Snowden has the most concentrated control of any one block in Chestnut Hill. Of the 17 commercial properties on the 8100 block, for example, Snowden owns nine. The east side of the street has 10 commercial properties and Snowden owns eight, creating a virtual strip of antique stores and art galleries with Laurel Hill Gardens in the middle. Snowden says his heavy investment in the Southern Hill has been a matter of availability. “When we first got into this business,” Snowden says, “we made the conscious decision to buy exclusively south of the Hotel. When we organized Bowman back in the ‘80s, there were obvious indicators that a number of those properties would be available and no one at a community level was doing any planning for what would be the inevitable liquidation of those properties from their owners.” As he puts it, Snowden and Bowman Properties “filled a gap” left wide open by community institutions, including the Chestnut Hill Community Association and The Chestnut Hill Business Association. With obvious preferences the Chestnut Hill Community Association has shown towards the Top of the Hill, Snowden has been in charge of planning for the Lower Hill. If he didn’t do it, “who would?” he asks. “I feel as though we really fill a vacuum [in the Southern Hill]. We try to provide high quality planning there; high quality restoration. We’ve bailed the Community Association out of some really bad deals they made down there in terms of zoning and variances in which properties were just drastically mishandled. We had to go in after properties had failed under these owners and [we] completely renovated.... What was allowed to be done was shocking!” Snowden says the Porch Cellar Antiques market, which he purchased in December, 1993 was one example. The property is in a crowd of antique shops in the 7900 block where Snowden owns eight buildings. The CHCA had supported a former owner’s plans to renovate the first floor of the commercially zoned building into apartments. When Snowden bought it, he said the place was a mess. He removed the apartments and created retail space. The renovations he said, were “massive,” and could have been avoided somewhat had the CHCA not “given away a bunch of variances to let the former owner pack it with apartments.” Easements and tax breaks Restoration jobs like the Porch Cellar have earned Snowden the praise of many in Chestnut Hill who like what he does with old buildings. His work to refurbish what he calls “potential teardowns” and other less endangered structures has made him a favorite of preservationists. “His work is magnificent,” says Victoria Sicks, former president of the Chestnut Hill Historical Society. “It’s top quality in that it stabilizes the property and contributes to the neighborhood.” Not only that, Sicks says Snowden was instrumental in helping the historical society create its easement program. The easement program allows the historical society to acquire rights to a property’s façade or open space (from willing owners), thus helping preserve a property by putting limits on what an owner can do. According to Peter Lapham, executive director of the historical society, an easement is donated or sold to a qualified non-profit to hold the easement after the easement’s value is determined by an appraiser. The easement gives the holder rights over the property in perpetuity. The payoff is a one-time tax writeoff that helps the property owner save money, if he or she donated the easement. Snowden is quick to admit the tax break is a big incentive in his business. “Without [the ability to grant easements] we would not be able to restore all the buildings we’ve taken on,” Snowden said. “The tax incentives are an important way to reward people who make an investment in a historic property.” Snowden says he has placed 14 easements of all varieties with both the Preservation Alliance of Philadelphia and the Historical Society. The Historical Society holds three easements on Snowden properties. Lapham said the easement programs of the historical society, the Natural Lands Trust and the Preservation Alliance of Philadelphia, have been essential in preserving Chestnut Hill. “We [the historical society] hold 48 acres of open space and nine facade easements,” Lapham said. “Those acres aren’t enormous but they’re substantial in a neighborhood the size of Chestnut Hill. Easements are the most valuable tool we use in terms of preservation.” Snowden thrives at historic renovation, or at least in molding a building into a “tasteful” edifice. But while some historic preservationists and other aesthetic minded hillers like Sicks appreciate his work, some business owners in Chestnut Hill are dubious. They point to his growing influence in the Lower Hill and speculate what his intentions are for buying up so many properties. He might be making the Lower Hill look nice, but at what cost?
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