Gloria Dei (Old Swedes') Church NHS Landscape: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Gloria Dei (Old Swedes) Church National Historic Site

Hanna, Jennifer

Gloria Dei (Old Swedes’) Church National Historic Site is located in the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, approximately one mile south of the city center. Since 1958, the 3.66-acre property has been managed by the National Park Service as part of Independence National Historical Park, in partnership with the church management of Gloria Dei. The National Park Service owns the park area surrounding Gloria Dei Church to provide a setting for this national historic site. Gloria Dei Church is a historic site within an urban park defined by the city’s street grid. Neighboring blocks offer a mix of modern residential, commercial, and transportation land uses. Most of the built environment surrounding Gloria Dei can be associated with urban renewal and redevelopment projects of the past 75 years. Today, the historic site and associated parkland feel like an island set apart from its setting, whereas it was once integrated into a working waterfront neighborhood of the 18th and 19th centuries. The present-day character is reinforced by a substantial brick perimeter wall that was built to enclose Gloria Dei in the late 1970s. As a result, the number of access points is limited to six gates, with two presently open on a regular basis. At the heart of the Gloria Dei property is a tight knit grouping of five brick buildings, a graveyard, and associated landscape features referred to collectively as the churchyard. The oldest and most significant of the buildings is the Gloria Dei Church, a two-story brick edifice with a cruciform-shaped plan and three-story brick tower topped with a wood steeple. The church anchors the east end of the churchyard and is dated to 1698-1700 with some later 18th century additions. To the south and west of the church is a burial ground with gravestones dating from the early 1700s to the present. The burial ground fills the churchyard except for its far western end where the gravestones are sparse. At the southwest corner of the burial ground is a cluster of Revolutionary War veteran gravestones that were moved to the site in 1950 from other graveyards in the city. They do not mark the locations of actual human remains. Arrayed along the north side of the churchyard are supporting buildings, arranged in east-to-west order as the two-story brick rectory (built in 1832-1833), the single-story brick Riverside Hall (built in 1864) and the two-story brick sexton’s house (built ca.1850). The Roak Building, a two-story brick Colonial Revival-style building (completed in 1971), encloses the west end of the churchyard and currently houses a preschool. Areas immediately to the north and south of the churchyard, known as the North Lawn and South Lawn, were redeveloped by the National Park Service as a park from the late 1950s to the 1970s. Many buildings were razed, mostly row houses and industrial buildings dating to the late 1700s and 1800s. East of the Gloria Dei property, outside a perimeter wall that encloses the entire park, is a roughly triangular-shaped parcel abutting Christopher Columbus Avenue that includes the Swanson Street Forecourt area, a small, paved plaza that forms a forecourt to the original front entrance to Gloria Dei Church, and lawns with scattered trees and shrubs, and a park sign. This parcel of land is owned by the City of Philadelphia and the US Coast Guard and is currently maintained by the National Park Service through an informal agreement. Vegetation, from open lawns to mature trees, strongly distinguishes the property from its surroundings. Within the churchyard, there are about a dozen older trees that predate the National Park Service’s expansion and active management of the site. Among the most distinguished of these trees are two rows of London plane trees framing two sides of the burial ground. Photographic documentation suggests they were planted in the 1910s. The North Lawn, South Lawn, and Swanson Street Forecourt were landscaped after 1958 under National Park Service supervision or guidance. A landscape improvement plan prepared by the National Park Service in 1978 indicates that many of the trees and shrubs date to the late 1970s or have been added as incidental or volunteer plantings at an even more recent date.

Gloria Dei (Old Swedes') Church NHS Landscape: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Gloria Dei (Old Swedes) Church National Historic Site

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