Holy Ghost Church - conditional use application hearing Tuesday

A conditional use hearing on the application by St. Peter's Housing Development Corporation regarding the property owned by the Phoenixville St. Nicholas Brotherhood and leased to Holy Ghost Church is scheduled for Tuesday evening at 7 p.m., Phoenixville Borough Hall.

Anyone who wishes to present information or become party or a witness to the hearing will have the opportunity to register at the Council meeting. The participant will then qualify to receive any relevant information generated by the hearing. The participant may also have other privilges, i.e., the ability to examine other witnessess.

Please make plans to attend this meeting.



Phoenixville Council to take up controversial housing debate
Monday, July 27, 2009

By Evan Brandt, ebrandt@pottsmerc.com

PHOENIXVILLE — A conditional-use hearing before Borough Council Tuesday night could well decide whether a controversial proposal to build an 81-unit senior housing complex at the gateway to the borough can move forward.

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. in borough hall, 140 Church St..

There is no shortage of issues surrounding the proposal by St. Peter's Housing Development Corp., not the least of which is who owns the property at the corner of Starr and Bridge streets on which the project is proposed.

Now the subject of litigation, again, the proposal won the faintest of approvals from the borough's planning commission at a June 11 meeting at which only four members voted to recommend the project to council.

And that recommendation, they said, was primarily so that conditions could be put on the recommendation to "send a message" to council that the planners were unhappy with the location of the project, which is to be funded by the federal Housing and Urban Development agency.

"We love the project, we hate the location," planning commission Chairwoman Debra Johnston said at the meeting.

Of course, the absence of one of the votes was expected as planning commissioner the Rev. James Evans has regularly recused himself from voting, seeing as he is the point man for the development.

Last October, Borough Council overrode the opposition of the planning commission in making a zoning change without which the entire project would not be possible. The conditional-use hearing scheduled for Tuesday night is required under the new zoning as the use proposed for the site is not an "as of right," use, but specifically requires the affirmative vote of Borough Council. Public comment is often allowed at such hearings.

As for the litigation, it revolves around the efforts by the Holy Ghost Church, an Orthodox Christian church, to sell a 1.9-acre parcel to the project developers. The problem is, it is not clear that the church owns the property.

The property appears to be owned by something called the St. Nicholas Brotherhood, founded in 1938 to hold title to the property, which was donated to the church by the Reeves family, majority holders of the former Phoenix Steel Company. The brotherhood leased the property to Holy Ghost Church for 99 years in 1941.

Over the years, according to a lawsuit filed July 13 in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas, the St. Nicholas Brotherhood became inactive, largely because its purpose required little activity. But when the church began the process of selling the land, some members objected, saying the land belonged to the Brotherhood and was not the church's to sell.

One of those who objected is a man named Joseph A. Orosz, who the suit identified as the last living founding member of the St. Nicholas Brotherhood and its last living board of directors member.

In the suit, Orosz, and others opposing the sale, claimed they have been threatened, some with excommunication from the church, if they do not cease their objections.

Orosz, who is elderly and has expressed concern about receiving burial rites from his church, then elected three people to form the new board of the old Brotherhood, according to the suit. They are MaryAnne Bradford, Helen Langner and Amy Carney, all of whom are related to some or all of the following original (now deceased) Brotherhood board members: John Rudick, Andrew Getzey, Michael Pufko, Andrew Pufko Jr., Michael Kuchma and John Kuchma, according to the suit.

The suit, which targets the church's current leadership, asserts that after losing a legal attempt to declare the brotherhood's title defunct, the church leaders then established a new Brotherhood of St. Nicholas, complete with by-laws and a board of directors, whose first action was to enter into an agreement of sale for the property in question.

As if this were not controversy enough, there is also the matter of the Underground Railroad.

It seems that in addition to being kindly inclined towards the founders of Holy Ghost church, the Reeves family, earlier in their history, was also kind to runaway slaves.

The property is said to be home to a series of tunnels in which the slaves hid during their bid for freedom.

During the June 11 planning commission meeting the developers produced a letter from the Pennsylvania Museum and Historic Commission which declared the agency had no reason to believe there is anything of historic significance on the property.

However at that same meeting, resident Karen Johns produced a letter she said was from Nilgun Anadolu Okur, a professor with Temple University's African American Studies department, which had been sent to the state agency.

Okur's letter reported the old Reeves mansion property, of which the project site is a part, was a "station" on the Underground Railroad, the unofficial name given to the network of safe-houses used by abolitionists to help runaway slaves escape in the time preceding the Civil War.

Okur further reported that the property is home to some 2,000 feet of tunnels in which the runaway slaves hid.

In an e-mail to The Mercury, Langner recently wrote that work being done on the site has revealed concrete and brick which may well be portions of the tunnels.

Although it is unclear how much, if any, of these controversial aspects of the project will be taken up by borough council, at least one, the question of ownership, is one of the conditions the planning commission attached to the approval it sent to council for consideration.


http://www.pottsmerc.com/articles/2009/07/27/news/srv0000005931462.prt