September 28, 2006 Issue                                       

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©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Richard Wood Snowden
The ups and downs of a new age landlord

Second of a three-part series
August 2, 2001

by PETER MAZZACCARO

One of the biggest attractions on any summer night in Chestnut Hill is ice cream from Bredenbeck’s Bakery. Once the sun is down, young couples and parents with their children crowd the short cement stairway of the ice cream room at Bredenbeck’s. Almost every night a small mob can be seen idling around sidewalk benches, slurping their evening treats.

Bredenbeck’s is one of many shops that line the 8100 block of Germantown Avenue. The block is an entrance to Chestnut Hill’s Lower, or South, Hill, a quiet block of old shops and independent antique dealers. Karen Boyd, Bredenbeck’s energetic owner, has been in Chestnut Hill for 18 years and says she’s still enthusiastic about doing business in her block.

“Business has been very good,” says Boyd, resting for a moment in the early morning between business calls and baking duties. “I love the Hill.”

Boyd says the block has had its ups and downs since she opened Bredenbeck’s but that overall, business has been steady. Much of it has to do with the tenacity of the block’s business people: Paul Roller, owner of Flying Fish Restaurant, Ariumi Norio of Norio’s of Tokyo, Carmen Notarianni of Carman’s Shoe Repair and others. Also some credit goes to Richard Snowden of Bowman Properties.

“Richard has bought a lot of buildings in Chestnut Hill and he’s sunk a lot of money into those buildings,” Boyd says. “I think he’s tried to improve the buildings he has purchased and that says a lot. I think he truly has the best in his heart for Chestnut Hill.”

In fact, the 8100 block, particularly the east side where Snowden owns a hefty portion of the commercial real estate, is an attractive strip of small colonial-scale shops with a healthy dose of floral decor and tasteful trim. It is the kind of work Snowden excels in — beautifying and restoring historic properties that others might have let deteriorate.

Snowden is a hero of sorts to historic preservationists and other who have trumpeted his tasteful restoration work and the stabilizing effect that work has had in Chestnut Hill. Still, Snowden has been a magnet for controversy in his nearly 20 years in Chestnut Hill. His emergence as the most visible and prominent landowner in Chestnut Hill has marked a new turn in the neighborhood, where his brash style has earned him a healthy batch of critics. His work is changing the Hill, and not everyone is so sure the change is for the better.

The Hill, it is a ‘changin’

Frank Salemno, war veteran and barber, has seen the block outside his timeless barber shop at 8140 Germantown Ave. change countless times. “I’ve been in business for 60 years! You know why?” He yells the question reclined in one of his three black leather barber chairs. He crunches a crispy apple and grins. “An apple a day...,” he says.

Salemno discusses business in the 8100 block of Germantown Avenue, particularly how it has changed in the six decades he’s cut hair in the neighborhood. He was one of the many Italian-Americans who opened a business in the “Lower Hill” when it brimmed with shops, many owned by Italian immigrants who’d come to Chestnut Hill with the waves of stone masons who built the prevalent stone homes of the Woodward Company in the early 20th century. To Salemno, the “old neighborhood,” a place of tight knit harmony and useful shops, has become crippled with antique stores. The only remnants of Salemno’s neighborhood is Carman’s Shoe Repair, a business started by an Italian immigrant in the ’30s and currently owned by his son, Carmen Notarianni Jr.

“At one time this whole block was all old Italians,” Salemno said from his perch. “Now? Everyone’s gone.” He proceeded to run down an interminable list of people he knew on the block who had passed on, naming the individual followed by a shout of their living status. “There was Marion and Henry’s hairdressers, now they’re dead and gone. The Casale’s Bicycle shop. Wonderful people — he’s DEAD! Galante’s market down the street? they’re DEAD! George Reinoehl’s Dodge — he’s DEAD! Domenic Portelese the barber — DEAD!”

Many of the old business owners have had family that moved on, not wanting to retain a family business or even a piece of real estate in the lower blocks of Germantown Avenue. Many put the old home up for sale and Snowden has consistently been around to make the purchase.

Asked about what Snowden has done with the properties he’s bought up in the last half a dozen years, Salemno turns sour. He swats the air in front of him, a motion a parent would use to swat junior’s hand as he made for a pre-dinner cookie. “I don’t care for ‘im,” he says.

“There’s too many restaurants and antique stores in Chestnut Hill. There’s no stores for you and me. No stores for regular people,” he said. “There used to be a shop, Bill Lippincott’s men’s store. If you wanted a shirt like this (pointing to a short-sleeved button-up) you got it! You want a pair of pants? You got it! Silk tie, white socks? You got ‘em!”

Notarianni, proprietor of Carman’s Shoe Repair, a half block downhill and across the street from Salemno’s barber shop, is also wary of the antique market that has taken over the neighborhood. Notarianni’s initial battle with Snowden is famous among Snowden’s detractors, particularly due to an unflattering comment Snowden made in a 1995 Inquirer Magazine piece. Snowden praised Carman’s but asked, “does he really need prime glass?” indicating something as proletariat as a shoe repair shop didn’t belong on the Avenue. And this was shortly after Snowden had purchased the building that housed Notarianni Sr.’s original shop. Notarianni Sr. had left the building to his sisters who decided to sell to Snowden rather than retain it.

Notarianni says he’s now on good terms with Snowden and respects the work he does. He gives Snowden high marks on his ability to make an old building look good and says the developer is now a shoe customer of Carman’s.

Snowden is also positive about Carman’s. “Chestnut Hill is a real town and a real community,” he says. “We have the Chestnut Hill Launderama and Carman’s shoes. These are great businesses. ... They make it easy to live here and are part of what makes Chestnut Hill attractive.”

Notarianni thinks Snowden has done quite a bit for Chestnut Hill’s building stock, believing the developer has the best intentions for Chestnut Hill. Besides, Snowden owns so many properties in the neighborhood. If it’s good for Chestnut Hill, it’s good for Snowden, he says.

“His finished product is something you have to admire,” Notarianni says, noting the Blue Moon Restaurant, a focal point of Snowden Controversy in the neighborhood which, after nearly four years of repair and renovations, has begun to appear near completion. (Although at the date of this writing, the interior is still a tangle of wood, paint and nails. “He certainly has a drawn-out time frame for finishing up a place,” says Notarianni.)

Snowden may have a knack for property beautification, but Notarianni says he is concerned by the developer’s penchant for antique shops, which are not a draw to the block that specialty shops like Casale’s bicycle were, or even more recent institutions like the defunct Chestnut Hill Beer Distributor or Mom’s Bake at Home Pizza. Snowden operates the large Antique Market at the corner of Hartwell Lane and Germantown Avenue, and he leases to Jeffrey Dean, Lavender Hill and Martha Hutchinson Antiques, all in the same block.

“I think he’s in love with antique shops!” Notarianni says. “I think he needs more variety, like [Souli’s] tile place next door. We’ve lost a lot of shops here lately.”

Restaurateur Paul Roller — a Chestnut Hill native and a hyper-active volunteer for community events — like Salemno, feels the 8100 block has suffered under the weight of too many antique stores.

When Roller opened Flying Fish at the corner of Germantown Avenue and Hartwell Lane in 1984, the 8100 block was diversified. It was a block that had a lot of options for a shopper, a neighborhood alternative to the shopping mall.

“When the Fish first opened, it was a much more vital block,” Roller says, seated at his cluttered desk in the Top of the Hill Market, a gourmet food shop he owns behind Border’s Books in the 8700 block of Germantown Avenue.

“It had a used bookstore, a used CD store.... Intermission was in that block, Casale’s [Hill Cycle] Shop. Those kinds of stores are the work and weave of the community that make it interesting so it’s NOT the same as a mall.

“The question is, what sort of volume do antique stores generate? Not enough is the answer, I think, versus more service-oriented stores.”

Snowden admits he’s gone overboard with the antique shops. “They’re over-represented,” he says. Snowden says he was a long-time antique collector and just happened to be familiar with the business. Antique shops were a natural for him.

Still, he says, choosing shops is not an easy business in Chestnut Hill. He says he’d like to see more food in the Lower Hill as well as some home furnishing stores — The Red Brick Resellers, which Snowden brought to Chestnut Hill about a year ago is one example. The store is scheduled to open soon in the former Deb Shop building in the 7800 block of Germantown Avenue. To try to build up his holdings, he says he’s always looking for new ideas.

“Truth is, a lot of folks don’t like this market,” Snowden says. “The ghastly reception that the Napoleon Cafe had four years ago until very recently hurt our ability to attract restaurants in Chestnut Hill. [The Napoleon Cafe, a popular Fishtown restaurant tried to move to a former post office building on Graver’s Lane and was subsequently chased off by neighbors after a volley of vulgar comments and a fist fight at a CHCA meeting. The owners, blamed homophobia and discrimination for their brutal treatment.] People have enough headaches in their lives and Chestnut Hill is going to have to be flexible if it wants to have a business district that’s exciting and attractive.”

Sore spots and empty buildings

In the midst of Snowden’s shops, on the east side of the 8100 block, a small retail space is shrouded with papered windows. The former home of Mom’s Bake at Home Pizza has been vacant since 1999.

The pizza kitchen was vacated after the business’s owner, Jack Alcorn, was told by his landlord, Richard Snowden, that his lease would be placed on a month to month basis. Alcorn had hoped to sell the business and retire to Cape May (“I figured I’d fish all day, maybe sell pizza on the side,” Alcorn says). Alcorn didn’t want the new owner to walk into a bad lease agreement.

“Snowden told me he had a food idea for the place,” said Alcorn. “He offered to buy the business for $70,000. I was asking $120,000.”

Alcorn says he has nothing personal against Snowden. “After all he’s a businessman.” And Alcorn says the move to his new location, 219 W. Willow Grove Avenue, has been good to him. His rent went from $24 a square foot to $12. The only problem is that Alcorn is still working. He needs to build the business back up before he can try selling it again.

“I had to start all over,” he said. At the asking price, he may never sell.

Asked about Alcorn, Snowden would only say he had an amicable parting of ways with Alcorn and wished him well.

Empty buildings are a sore spot for many on the Hill who feel the vacancies are among the most significant negatives to the Chestnut Hill Business district. They blame high rents and speculate over possible tax shelters and benefits Snowden might have managed to create. How else could anyone leave buildings empty for so long?

In addition to Mom’s Bake at Home Pizza, Snowden has six other prominent vacant properties on the Avenue —the former homes of: Red Brick Resale in the 7800 block; the Spring Cleaners space at the corner of Willow Grove and Germantown avenues; The Blue Moon in the 8000 block; Two Susans and The Wooden Train, both in the 8400 block; and the basement space of the Depot Restaurant, below Starbucks in the 8500 block.

Two other prominent empty buildings, the former homes of J.E. Caldwell jewelers and This End Up furniture, both in the 8500 block, are owned by other property owners.

Most of Snowden’s properties house independent businesses, yet it’s the empty properties that get the most attention. What gets Roller is how long Snowden is able to keep some of his properties empty. Snowden, Roller says, in is a much better position than most of the original property owners on the block, and in the rest of Chestnut Hill for that matter.

“The success of [my own properties] represents to me my retirement, my kids’ college education,” Roller says. “This is a very real game for me. It’s high risk. If something goes south I won’t die — but I worked really hard for those buildings and their value will ultimately have an affect in terms of my retirement.”

Snowden, on the other hand, has the money and the leisure to let buildings stay empty. It’s a luxury that his predecessors, the Frank Salemno’s of a generation ago, could not afford.

“I’ve got to get income out of my buildings,” Roller says. “Obviously he has deeper pockets and can wait for his vision, whatever it is, to come to fruition. I mean, how long has the Blue Moon been empty?”

Snowden bristles at the notion his shops have been empty for too long.

“If I wanted to have a tenant in every building I have empty in Chestnut Hill I could do it immediately,” Snowden says. “I’ve had four calls in the last week for cell phone stores. I won’t rent to cell phone stores, or nail salons. I turned down two tattoo parlors. ... You know, what I try to do is put in a business I think ‘our audience’ will appreciate. It’s expensive for us to take this posture. All I have is space and time. Every day a space is empty I lose time. If you put the wrong tenant in a block it’s like tooth decay. I’m waiting for the RIGHT tenants.”

Back at Bredenbecks, Karen Boyd is less critical of Snowden’s shop choices and credits the developer for keeping the block as busy as it is. “Right now it’s a wonderful place to do business. Laurel Hill Gardens across the street (a Snowden property) is great.”

The rapid turnover of some of the Lower Hill’s shops, she says, is not due to Snowden’s dominance on the block, but of the increasing difficulty of operating a small business. She says that when she opened Bredenbeck’s 18 years ago, four other stores opened at the same time and didn’t make it.

“The whole big picture is that retail for the small business person is getting harder,” says Boyd. She points out the number of Hill shops that close by 5 p.m., making it impossible for them to do business with the many two-income households that make up much of the neighborhood. Today, she says, there’s too much competition and it makes things hard for any small business owner who wants to have a life outside the shop.

“You have to have such a passion and love for what you do.... You have to marry it, you have to live it, breathe it, and I don’t know how many people are willing to do that.”

End of Part 2

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3