Warburton House

About this property

Warburton House, also known as the Warburton Hotel and The Lucy Eaton Smith Residence, is an historic hotel that is located in the Rittenhouse Square East neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It was named for Lucy Eaton Smith, whose name in religious life was Mother Mary Catherine De Ricci of the Sacred Heart, who founded a Dominican pontifical institute in Albany, New York. Designed by noted New York architect Arthur Loomis Harmon (1878–1958) and built in 1926, this historic structure is an eleven-story, U-shaped, steel frame and brick building with cast stone and granite trim that was created in an Italian Renaissance Revival style. It has a stepped back form and rooftop loggia and was originally built as a residential hotel for professional women. From 1952 to 2001, it was owned by the Dominican House of Retreats and Catholic Guild and known as The Lucy Eaton Smith Residence. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. In 1924, the Emergency Aid of Pennsylvania (EAP, a WWI relief organization) celebrated its tenth anniversary by planning a women's building as a memorial to the organization where it would also establish permanent headquarters. The hotel would be open to all women. Mary Brown Warburton, then president of the EAP, hired New York architect Arthur Loomis Harmon to design a multi-story hotel building in the heart of Philadelphia's growing downtown. The site of the hotel was selected on the northeast comer of South 20th and Sansom Streets where several earlier nineteenth century rowhouses were recently demolished. When completed, the Italian Renaissance Revival styled hotel had a full service restaurant, snack bar, ballroom and roof top band alcove. There were 150 guestrooms situated on the upper nine floors of the building. In February of 1927, the Warburton House opened and the EAP moved its headquarters into the building. A cast stone lintel was incorporated into the Sansom Street elevation proclaiming the building the Emergency Aid Building. The building was known as and advertised as the Warburton House in honor of Mary Brown Warburton. The hotel became a bustling place. Women from every state and territory as well as many foreign countries signed the guest register. During that time, the organization greatly expanded its services. It distributed food, clothing, and healthcare accessories for indigent families and offered vocation training and sewing classes to children disabled by polio. Additional spaces were rented throughout the Warburton House providing rent money to the organization and offering services to the hotel guests. The 1930 City Directory of Philadelphia lists five small businesses along South 20th Street in addition to the EAP: a tailor, Bertha Page, a milliner, a florist, and an optician. It is not known where in the building these retail spaces were but presumably they occupied the South 20th Street storefront ground floor level.'

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Philadelphia County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Philadelphia County.

More historic places in Pennsylvania

Browse all historic places in Pennsylvania.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Pennsylvania history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.