Girard Avenue Historic District

Girard Avenue between Broad Street and Girard College contains a dense concentration of houses, churches, institutions and commercial blocks built mainly from the 1840s through the 1890s. Its west end began with St. Matthew's Episcopal Church and the brownstone Greenhill Presbyterian Church, designed by John Notman in 1847, while the Church of the Gesu, by E.F. Durang, on Stiles Street at 17th Street, has a monumental columned facade and a barrel-vaulted nave. Rows of Greek Revival and Italianate houses followed, and later monumental brick and brownstone townhouses by Willis Hale and others stand near Broad Street. Girard Avenue was half again the normal street width, and the 1875-76 Girard Avenue Bridge and the trolley line increased its visibility. The district is valued for its scale, its German-American patronage, and its record of changing late-nineteenth-century architectural taste, with about 97 percent of its buildings contributing or significant.