A very eerie yet breathtaking building in North Philly with a fascinating history. The building has been vacant since 2000 and is now in this dilapidated state.
http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2005-01-13/cover.shtml (go to this link to see interior photos)
Left Behind by Mike Newall
A rare look inside North Broad's Divine Lorraine, a hotel with a heavenly past on the cusp of (commercial) resurrection.
It sits in beautiful disrepair. The glass front door is spiderwebbed as if someone smashed it with a baseball bat. Orange peels and fast food containers litter the sidewalk. A man in rags sits on the steps with a 40-ounce bottle of beer. In the lobby, a chandelier casts a dull glow across the marble, the mahogany and the alabaster. It is cold and spectral inside, and a walk down the long foyer to the pigeonhole desk is like stepping into The Shining.
Time passes silently in the Divine Lorraine Hotel, onetime playground of the industrial barons and pearl-clad matrons who resided along North Broad Street at the beginning of the last century. Later it would become home to the Universal Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine, the controversial and colorful religious leader who claimed to be Christ incarnate and whose followers oversaw the Lorraine for more than half a century. Under their watch, it became the first high-caliber hotel in Philadelphia to allow black guests.
In 2000, the Peace Mission Movement decided to forego the costs of renovating the aging Lorraine and sold her to a New York developer. Since then she has sat vacant. The Peace Mission Movement had kept such good care of the Divine that a person could eat off the floors.
But now the elements have taken their toll and she is crumbling from within. Her wallpaper is peeling, her pipes leaking, her wood splintering.
In November, the most recent owner, Philadelphia-based E.B. Realty, finalized the purchase of the vacant lots surrounding the Divine from the Philadelphia School District. The acquisition allows the developers to pursue plans to transform the Divine into a swanky apartment house and retail space, which they hope will be the jewel of a fully resuscitated North Broad Street one day. Construction could begin as early as next spring.
For now, only the clatter of the caretaker's keys can be heard jingling through the empty hallways. The Lorraine's sole guardian is David Peace, a sturdy, stoop-shouldered man with terra cotta skin and a face not unlike Ichabod Crane's. He addresses men as "brother," women as "sister," and labels himself a "free thinka." In his eighth decade, he has his health and his mind and professes not to drink, smoke or chase women.
"I'm in the world but not of it," says Peace, standing in the Divine lobby on a recent windswept afternoon, his voice sounding as if transmitted through a phonograph recorder. "Don't look for me in some gambling den or some other place not of the Scripture. You won't find me there, brother. Don't look for me out on some date with a woman on a Saturday night. It won't happen."
Peace's asceticism — and last name — are rooted in the Peace Mission Movement, which demands clean living and chastity of its followers. He arrived at the Divine in 1952 spiritually sick, he says, and seeking a good night's rest.
"I got my healing here," says Peace, his breath before him in the cold, ethereal light of the lobby. "There was a special atmosphere at the Lorraine. You could feel it when you walked off the street. It was something you had to experience yourself."
Built in 1894, the Lorraine was originally designed as a luxury apartment house for Philly's nouveau-riche industrialists. Still counting their first millions, they spurned the elitism of Rittenhouse Square's established wealth and stomped toward the outlands of North Philadelphia.
North Broad would hold the fortunes of the future, augured the kings of the Gilded Age, and the Lorraine would be its gem. She was built in grandeur on a 4-acre swath of land at the intersection of Broad Street and Ridge and Fairmount avenues. Ten stories of Pompeian brick and ornate marble. Oversized, lavish suites with tile-lined fireplaces and private servant staffs. A grand banquet hall. A polished barroom. Rooms even had electric lighting and telephone service.
In the early 1900s, North Broad began a shift from residential mansions to a commercial district, and the Lorraine was transformed into a luxurious hotel. Great galas and debutante balls were hosted in its banquet hall.
Now, aside from a horror-flick crew using the Divine as a backdrop, only David Peace traverses the grounds, on the lookout for squatters, scroungers, breached or busted windows, or signs of infestation. Many rooms contain only a few pieces of furniture, strewn about and covered in plaster. Others have neatly made beds and wrapped cakes of soap in the bathrooms. In one room, a threaded needle rests on a knitting tin. In another, a Bible sits on a nightstand opened to John 11:11: "Our friend, Lazarus, has fallen asleep, but I am going so that I may awake him out of his sleep."
Some say sounds of music and laughter echo from the banquet hall at night and that the unsettled spirit of a murdered woman roams the seventh-floor corridors. Peace scoffs at the ghost tales.
"Ain't nothing here but the presence of God," he says as he cranks up the elevator, which leaks oil and shakes like a jalopy.
In 1939, God rolled into Philadelphia on a 16-car train, dubbed the "Divine Special," in the form of Father Divine, a bald, squat, itinerant African-American preacher whose real name is believed to have been George Baker. He had centered his Peace Mission in New York City, but he ran afoul of the authorities there and former mission members who claimed he bilked them out of their finances.
A self-proclaimed deity and ardent civil rights activist, Father Divine also oversaw a real estate empire. In 1948, he acquired the Lorraine for $485,000, assigned the deed to 300 of his followers, and commissioned the two-story, neon-red Divine Lorraine Hotel sign that still stamps the North Broad skyline. His properties were looked upon as "heavens" by his followers and were considered part of the "promised land."
Father Divine opened the doors of the Lorraine to people of all races and creeds, and his rates were dirt-cheap. The hotel's 246 rooms were often completely booked with clientele ranging from businessmen to holy rollers, traveling students to reformed stumblebums. Scores of Peace Mission Members lived and worked at the Divine.
He converted the grand 10th-floor auditorium into a place of worship and opened up the first floor kitchen as a public dining room. Wholesome meals were offered to the working class of North Philly for only 25 cents.
Food was bountiful in the "promised land," but there was no beer in the icebox. Guests had to abide by Father Divine's "International Modest Code." No drinking. No smoking. No undue mixing of the sexes. No vulgarity. No blasphemy. Evangelical attire at all times: men in Sunday's best, women in stockings and long skirts.
"The atmosphere here has been purified," says Peace.
With his thick hands and strong back, David Peace was assigned to work in the boiler room of the Divine. He lived in the hotel for close to a decade and now resides at a Peace Mission property along South Broad Street.
(When Father Divine died in 1965 and did not rise from the dead as his followers thought he might, his wife, Mother Divine, 50 years his junior, took over leadership of the Peace Mission's numerous properties in Pennsylvania, including the Divine and a 73-acre estate in Gladwyne.)
Most of the time, Peace refuses to become nostalgic about his former home.
"It's served its purpose," he often says. "I look at it like a pair of shoes. If my shoes wear out, I don't go barefoot. Brother, I buy a new pair of shoes. I'm not thinking about yesterday. Brother, I'm thinking about today."
But on this bleak winter's day, Peace is reflective as he stares out upon the city, which seems sad and beautiful from the eerily silent banquet room on the 10th floor of the Lorraine.
Headlights snake down Broad Street and paint a gold cylinder through the gray mist. Hard-bitten men stand hunch-shouldered in front of the Ridge Avenue homeless center. A woman lugs groceries up the subway steps. Scraps of dirty newspaper blow along the dirty street.
The world below seems foreign and distant, removed.
"There is something about this place," Peace says respectfully. "It is something set apart."
