Apr 21, 2015 2 min read

CHARLEROI – There are about 700 nearly identical small houses in historic Charleroi, helping to make the former boom town unique in Pennsylvania.

The century-old houses in the borough, which dates to 1890 and was founded as a glass-making town, are on tiny lots, two windows wide and two stories tall, and each has a gable.

“It ended up being a very large town with small houses and small store buildings,” said Monongahela architect Terry Necciai.

“It’s the largest collection of them anywhere,” said Necciai, who was hired to develop a preservation plan for Charleroi to avoid demolishing more buildings.

Nearly 1,800 Charleroi buildings were named to the National Registry of Historic Places eight years ago, a listing that requires mitigation when federal money is used to demolish a building on the list.

The preservation plan is part of an agreement Charleroi reached with the state Historical and Museum Commission on protecting the historic district, Charleroi Borough Manager Donn Henderson said.

Under the agreement, Charleroi was given permission to demolish 20 buildings.

“This is another planning tool to quit tearing down buildings and look at historic preservation as an asset rather than a deficit,” Henderson said.

The mitigation work to reach an agreement to demolish a building can be costly.

Charleroi had two such projects appealed to the federal level before the structures were torn down: a tiny row of three-room houses that needed to be removed to widen the 10th Street entrance to a glass factory, and First Christian Church on Fallowfield Avenue.

The preservation plan is designed to “come up with ideas for creative mitigation” to save buildings rather than documenting them to preserve their history before demolition, Necciai said.

One of the projects will involve creating a homeowner’s guide explaining what the community wants people to do to preserve their houses.

Necciai said he also plans to rethink local ordinances and review the historic district “to see how much has been torn down in the past eight years.”

Members of Charleroi Area Historical Society have been waiting for years for the borough to draft such a plan, said its chairman, Nikki Sheppick.

“Our purpose and mission is preservation and restoration,” Sheppick said. “That’s what we try to fulfill.”

The cost of the $40,000 project will be equally shared by the borough and the PHMC, Henderson said.