Eleanor Gesensway

Eleanor Gesensway, known as Ellie, and her husband Dan bought the house at 626 Spruce Street in 1964. They had a contractor complete renovations until the spring of 1967. Although the work was not yet finished then, the family moved in and did the rest of the work themselves.

Ellie talks about the regulations of the Redevelopment Authority and how they were inconsistently enforced; working with an architect, a general contractor, and sub-contractors; and delays in getting the renovations completed. She speaks about the difficulty of getting a construction loan because the neighborhood was redlined. She believes that OPDC may have had unwritten policies about what kind of people were acceptable owners in various parts of the neighborhood. She talks about exclusion in general and gives examples of incidents where she personally felt excluded.

She became involved in Save Spruce Street, an effort to save the row of historic buildings at 700 to 714 Spruce from demolition by Pennsylvania Hospital. She mentions her role in the Let Lits Live Coalition to oppose the demolition of the department store.

She discusses how her family enjoyed living in the city. She talks about the schools her children attended, the kind of education they got, and her views on public schools, and she tells some stories about teachers. She describes the devastating effect of the 1973 teachers’ strike, but finishes with an upbeat story of getting a zoning variance to widen the living room of their house to make space for her husband’s grand piano.

Transcript

Note: The narrator wanted to make a number of material changes to the transcript of her interview. The following version reflects those changes and differs significantly in some sections from the taped interview and from the final transcript of it prepared by the transcriber. This version also lacks time markers.

DS:      The date is January 5, 2008. I am Dorothy Stevens, and I will be interviewing Eleanor Gesensway, spelled G-E-S-E-N-S-W-A-Y.

[Tape is turned off, then on again]

DS:      Ellie, would you spell Eleanor the way it should be.

EG:      Sure, I am E-L-E-A-N-O-R. And Gesensway was spelled correctly and pronounced correctly, which is quite amazing. [Laughs]

Read Full Transcript

© 2008 Project Philadelphia 19106™. All rights reserved.

About the Interview

Interviewer
Dorothy Stevens
Transcriber
Cynthia J. Eiseman
Interview Location
626 Spruce Street
Interview Date
January 5, 2008
Interviewee
Gesensway, Eleanor
Narrator Type
Redeveloper - Restoration
Oral History Sources