1929 — with the Great Depression looming — was not the most opportune moment to start a career, especially for a rare woman architect. But that was the year Elizabeth Hirsh Fleisher graduated from the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

So the married mother of three girls returned to Philadelphia to launch a life in design. Her husband Horace had himself received a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard. The family moved to Cheltenham Township as they settled into their new lives and kickstarted careers with help from their well-connected friends who were united by a dedication to progressive causes. Thus began a lifetime of collaboration with friends and colleagues from the worlds of art, architecture, landscape architecture and the tight-knit German Jewish community through which the Fleishers were each second-generation Americans.

Elizabeth’s first job was working for architect Edward P. Simon who had designed the Fidelity Trust (now Wells Fargo) Building on S. Broad Street and Municipal (later JFK) Stadium. In 1932, the year after she left Simon’s firm, she received her first private commission from family friend Moses L. Blumenthal, who was an illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post and whose eponymous candy company created Goobers & Raisinets. The project was the conversion of an early 19th-century grist mill into a residence on East Church Road in Elkins Park.

Elizabeth and Horace would eventually become neighbors with Blumenthal after they built a colonial revival house for themselves that neighbored his property. Perhaps this proximity between the Fleishers and the Blumenthals led to Elizabeth’s eventual board membership at the Fellowship House, a nonprofit center that grew out of the Philadelphia Friends’ Young People’s Interracial Fellowship, where Blumenthal had been active.

Friends and family

As she recalled in a 1960 missive to her undergraduate classmates at Wellesley, Elizabeth relied on friends and relatives in those early days to provide her with work until “the commissions grew big enough to see with the naked eye.”

Elkins Park was where many well-to-do Jewish families were relocating from some of the more stylish enclaves of central North Philadelphia. Indeed, the Hirsh family had made the move to the area by the time Elizabeth and Horace had returned after graduate school. Architect Louis Magaziner had altered a property for Elizabeth’s father there after his move from a brownstone on Green Street.

Indeed, Elizabeth’s connections were impeccable. Her father Harry Hirsh was the founder of Belmont Iron Works and deeply involved in Jewish philanthropy. Her husband Horace was a scion of the Fleisher Yarn Company founders; first cousin Samuel’s endowment created the beloved Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philadelphia.

Both the Hirsh and Fleisher families were heavily involved in Jewish philanthropy, like the National Farm School (now Delaware Valley University), founded in 1896 by their Keneseth Israel rabbi, and the Jewish Hospital.

Architect Louis Magaziner produced designs for both institutions, as well as for the Oak Lane School where the Fleisher daughters were enrolled and Elizabeth was on the board.

As he did for many emerging architects, including Louis Kahn, Magaziner helped launch the budding careers of Elizabeth and Horace Fleisher. The couple opened an office near him in the Architects Building on Walnut Street where they met many future collaborators.

Elizabeth had a lifelong interest in music and medicine, initially preparing for medical school with courses at Penn when she was a new mother. It was a 1926 snag in the hosiery business that inspired the family to follow Horace to the Boston area for his studies that Elizabeth immediately seized as her own calling.

A fruitful friendship

In 1935, a year after she received her architectural license and had formed a firm with Horace and architect D. Owen Stephens, Elizabeth’s early relationship with Edward Simon bore fruit. Simon had by then become the head of the Eastern Division of the Federal Housing Authority and initiated new funding models for affordable housing development. Fleisher, Stephens & Fleisher were awarded the com- mission for 16 houses on Howland Street in the Lawncrest neighborhood of Philadelphia.

Here, Elizabeth turned the rowhouse type 90 degrees for a wider elevation with the houses presenting as center hall colonials, increasing the window count for air and daylighting. The block was featured in several articles including one in Building Modernization in 1937, adding to Elizabeth’s design credentials.

Handy connections

Harry Hirsh’s colleagues on the board of the National Farm School led to a few residential commissions in the scarce 1930s. Arthur K. Stern wrote children’s books and dabbled in real estate. Drawings his colonial revival house in Fox Chase are archived at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Likewise, Lessing Rosenwald commissioned Fleisher, Stephens & Fleisher for a “Garden Group” that complemented his 54-acre Alverthorpe Park estate in Abington Township. The son of Julius Rosenwald moved to Philadelphia from Chicago in 1920 when a Sears store was built on Roosevelt Boulevard and joined Congregation Keneseth Israel.

Family connections came in handy during the first decade of Elizabeth’s career. Horace’s cousin Alfred (Abby) Loeb Wolf and his wife Constance, née Cann, hired Fleisher, Stephens & Fleisher to design alterations and additions to their recently acquired 19th century property the Wolfs named “Wingover” in honor of their joint passion for aviation.

Abby Wolf was a Brigadier General in the US Air Force and a law partner with his brother Morris at Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen. Affectionately called a balloonatic, Canadian-born Connie Wolf was the world record holder for several balloon flights including being the first woman to cross the Swiss Alps.

The couple’s 50-acre property was located near Wings Field in Whitpain Township. Later named Oakhurst, the house was the 1996 Art & Design Showhouse. Most of its acreage that had been used as a runway was eventually redeveloped with housing although the main house with its Fleisher addition still stands on its own parcel.

Two residential commissions in those lean years also kept Elizabeth busy. One was for Edwin Wolf, whose father Morris Wolf (Abby’s brother) was married to Elizabeth’s sister Rose. Wolf was a noted book collector in Philadelphia who held the chief executive position at The Library Company, an institution founded by Benjamin Franklin. Like Horace, he was a graduate of William Penn Charter School. The other commission was for Bernard A. Kohn, a former director of the Elkan-Vogel music publishing house and a painter and printmaker whose works are in several museums including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Both colonial revival houses rendered in the local schist are still standing in Elkins Park.

Her largest commission

The largest commission Elizabeth ever took on was in 1940 when she was the architect for 304 houses for the Leedom Estates development in Ridley Park, PA. The Andrews Construction Company purchased land along Darby Creek from the Mastbaum Brothers & Fleisher real estate company. Alfred Fleisher was Horace’s cousin, whose daughter Suzanne Roberts is remembered with a theater on S. Broad Street. The two-story, brick Cape Cod houses, twins, and rowhouses initially created for the wartime workforce are all extant in a charming, well-kept subdivision.

World War II presented a real turning point for Elizabeth Fleisher. After 1940, and the death of Owen Stephens, she joined forces with Gabriel Roth to open the firm Roth & Fleisher. Partnership with architects such as Thaddeus Longstreth and a growing confidence from the successful administration of an architect’s studio opened up a certain confidence in the firm’s designs. Likewise, the colonial revival style deftly deferred to Modernism.

In the late 1940s, two different projects brought enormous publicity to the firm: the Children’s Reception Center on Callowhill Street and the Parkway House. The now-demolished children’s center offered a thoughtful alternative to an orphanage. It received universal praise for its design that intentionally avoided the jail-like atmosphere of a detention home. The project received a special AIA award. At the Parkway House near the art museum, Roth & Fleisher “were clearly influenced by the stepped terraces, pyramidal massing and curving glass forms of prewar Art Deco,” according to a 2009 essay. The Parkway holds 250 apartments of various sizes and became an AIA Philadelphia Chapter Landmark in 1989.

A special house

The piece-de-resistance in the Roth & Fleisher residential portfolio, however, was Tulipwood, the house Elizabeth and Horace designed for themselves in 1954. As empty nesters, they wanted to get closer to the people and organizations they enjoyed. Elizabeth was an active board member of the Woman’s College of Medicine in East Falls, so the neighborhood became their new home. Tulipwood was planned on a 2 ½ acre wooded site on one-level, elegantly designed as a retirement home and ready for aging in place. On one level, the residence had indoor and outdoor gathering spaces that interacted with the verdant landscape. Tulipwood incorporated the work of friends Paul Evans and Phillip Lloyd Powell, who were part of the New Hope artist colony, and Wharton Esherick, whose warm, undulating fireplace wall was at the heart of the house.

Both Fleishers lived at Tulipwood until their deaths. While sadly the house was recently demolished, the retirement life Elizabeth lived there allowed her to indulge in her own artistic pursuits and “good works” mostly at the Woman’s Medical College editing medical research papers. Elizabeth Fleisher’s life was one dedicated to design, art, and healing.

Amy Lambert is a Philadelphia-based architect with a Master of Science in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania. She has researched and written more than a dozen nominations of historic buildings to the Philadelphia Register.