Photo by Kendon Photography
Nominating a project for awards is always an opportunity to dig into the surprising life of a building and of the city—particularly so in Philadelphia. The renovation of Mann Rivera Older Adult & Recreation Center was recently completed in the spring of 2025, and so we decided to take a chance at putting a mid-century modern building in front of the jury for the Preservation Alliance awards this past spring.
CICADA worked with HACE, the current steward of the recreation center, and the Rebuild program to peel back layers of temporary maintenance measures, rework programming to bring the youth recreation and older adult uses together in the same building, and bring the building up to current sustainability design standards, while preserving the elements that make it quintessentially mid-century modern.
Completed with a cornerstone engraved with “1954,” the Mann Recreation Center was a prime example not only of modernist design and technology, but also of the ideals at the time. This recreation center came about at a time when the Philadelphia Department of Recreation had just newly formed, and the neighborhood population started booming. The Mann Rec Center was touted as an “ultra-modern” state-of-the-art development, which reflected the sense of progress the department had at that time in the history of the city’s administration. In the three decades that followed, the department created 149 recreation spaces in the city, speaking to an immense optimism towards the role of the city in expanding access to public recreation. When the city entered a period of austerity circa the 1980s, the Fairhill neighborhood rallied around its rec center. They advocated strongly for maintenance funds to keep it from closing, renaming the center after local activist and community leader Ramonita Negron Rivera in the 1990s. Then in 2016, the newly-founded Rebuild program brought an infusion of city funds to this recreation center.
Photo from the Athenaeum of Philadelphia
Photo by Kendon Photography