Before the Threshold

My first memory is of fresh mortar and the smell of sawdust. The masons worked through the spring of 1854, setting brick upon brick, and when they finally bedded me at the threshold, I felt the whole weight of the house settle into place above. I was the last piece—the comma between street and home.

A House Built for Ceremony

In April 1854, developer John McCrea sold the newly completed house at 1822 Pine Street to John Roset, a merchant of French heritage. The transaction was ordinary enough—another townhouse in McCrea's ambitious campaign to fill the blocks west of Broad Street—but it began a chain of ownership we can trace, deed by deed, to the present day.

The form is classic Philadelphia side-hall: four stories of dignified red brick, paired front parlors, stairs rising in a quiet arc to the upper floors. The lot runs 22 feet wide and 90 feet deep, all the way back to Waverly Street, where service once entered through a separate door. That geometry still dictates how the house works for caterers and crews today.

McCrea was a prolific builder in the mid-nineteenth century, responsible for block after block of respectable townhouses. His signature style bridged late Greek Revival and early Italianate—high ceilings, marble mantels, proportions that whispered 'Proper Philadelphia' in brick and stone. Number 1822 Pine was among his finest work, designed for a family that would entertain, that would receive callers on appointed days, that would host the ceremonies of middle-class Victorian life.

The Roset Family

John and Mary Ann Laning Roset were the first to call this house home in any sustained way. They raised children here, received callers in the front parlors, and established the rhythms of domestic life that would echo through every subsequent era. Their eldest daughter Ellen had already married the young banker Anthony J. Drexel in 1850—a connection that would bind this address to Philadelphia's mercantile and philanthropic elite.

The Drexel name carries weight in Philadelphia still. Anthony J. Drexel would go on to found Drexel University, establish one of the nation's most powerful banking houses, and shape the city's cultural landscape. That his in-laws lived at 1822 Pine Street places this house firmly within the orbit of Philadelphia's golden age of industry and philanthropy.

When John Roset died in 1870, Mary Ann kept the house. At her death a decade later, it passed into trust with the Pennsylvania Company—a decision suggesting the children had scattered to their own addresses and the old home was rented out during the 1880s while the family waited for the right moment to sell.

Life Behind the Threshold

What did life look like in those early decades? The documentary record is sparse for daily routines, but we can reconstruct the patterns from the physical evidence and the customs of the era.

The parlors were the stage. Receiving days brought callers who left their cards on the hall table. Musical evenings gathered the neighborhood around the piano. Weddings were celebrated at home, with the breakfast laid in the dining room and guests flowing between the double parlors. Wakes, too, happened here—the body displayed in the front parlor, visitors paying respects in the same space where parties had been held the week before. Every ritual of Victorian life was framed by these doorways.

A house this size required staff: a cook, a housemaid, perhaps a coachman or errand boy. They would have slept in the rear rooms or the attic, their movements timed to avoid the family's notice. Coal scuttles and hot water cans mapped the labor of each day, from the kitchen fires lit before dawn to the last lamp extinguished at night.

The seasons shaped everything. Winters meant the family 'in town'—a full social calendar, the house heated and lit, every room in use. Summers brought departure: shuttered windows, a caretaker's rounds, letters posted from the shore while the marble step warmed in the August sun.