In May, Pennsylvania Hospital will celebrate its 275th anniversary with the launch of a new museum focused on the history of Penn Medicine. The museum, which will be housed in the Hospital’s historic Pine Building, grows out of goals set in a Conservation Management Plan (CMP) for the site, conducted by PennPraxis and the Center for Architectural Conservation. Completed in 2021, the CMP was commissioned by the Hospital to “set out the significance of [the property], and how that significance will be retained in any future use, management, alteration or repair.” The CMP includes archival research, stakeholder interviews, and field surveys that visualize the Hospital’s evolution and contextual significance over time.
Pennsylvania Hospital is the nation’s oldest public hospital and has been in continuous use for more than 260 years. The work to create a CMP for the Hospital’s campus proceeded in multiple phases. In 2020, the Weitzman team combed through archival records to understand how the property has already changed. The team then conducted stakeholder surveys to learn more about what people value in the property. The creation of the final CMP relied on the input of many members of Weitzman faculty, from historic preservation to landscape architecture.
In a recording of a 2021 public event, the project team along with Pennsylvania Hospital’s Curator/Lead Archivist Stacey Peeples, gave a detailed analysis of the site and the many ways it has been used. “It is a place both for practical institutional function as a site of healing and care, and then there is the Hospital as this site of heritage and history and culture,” says Kecia Fong, senior lecturer in historic preservation.
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