Melanie Kasper Rodbart
Melanie Kasper Rodbart’s historic building preservation firm makes sure the city’s cherished past survives well into its future.
As glassy new towers have shot up across Philadelphia’s booming skyline in recent years, one Drexel grad has been hard at work making sure the city’s older, historic structures don’t fall down.
Melanie Kasper Rodbart is principal and co-founder of J&M Preservation Studio, the region’s only woman-owned firm providing in-house architectural and structural engineering services for historic preservation. She has managed dozens of projects involving the structural analysis and stabilization of many buildings that are on the National Register of Historic Places.
A highlight of her work was the restoration several years ago of the catastrophically weakened, 260-year-old roof framing over St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Society Hill. The church was once the place of worship used by our Founding Fathers, making it one of the treasures of the city’s colonial history. The entire award-winning project was completed in just 10 months without disrupting the building’s original framing or pristine sanctuary.
Currently, at Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, which now houses the Please Touch Museum, Rodbart is repairing and stabilizing two monumental bronze Pegasus sculptures that date back to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. And at Eastern State Penitentiary, she’s part of ongoing renovations to keep the 189-year-old former prison safe for the thousands of tourists who pass through it each year.
She arrived in the field of historic preservation after a stint working in bridge design and construction inspection at the Philadelphia-based firm Urban Engineers, where she landed after graduating from Bucknell University. Some fateful jaunts among the Old World cities of Europe persuaded her that she needed a new career direction.
“I was traveling to Europe a lot for personal vacations, and one thing led to another, and I was hooked,” says the Bucks County native. “I was working in the wrong field; totally working in the wrong field.”
In 2005, after completing her master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering at Drexel, she contacted Philadelphia-based preservation firm S. Harris Ltd. looking for a job. Its founder, Sam Harris, was a long-time professor of history preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. To signal how serious she was about her interest in preservation, Rodbart told him she would go back to school again, despite recently obtaining a master’s degree.
“During my interview, he said, ‘You don’t need to go back to school. If you come here, I will teach you everything about historic preservation.’ And that was just music to my ears,” she says. For the next eight years, she learned the teachings of “Building Pathology,” the book Harris authored.
When Harris passed away in 2013, Rodbart teamed up with Jessica Senker, an architect and colleague from S. Harris Ltd., and they launched J&M Preservation. Collectively, she and her business partner have worked on seven National Historic Landmarks and more than 40 historically significant sites.
She constantly finds inspiration among Philadelphia’s historic sites, like the grand ruin of Eastern State Penitentiary.
“It’s never going to be a prison again, so it tells a story, and I think it’s fascinating as a museum to tell the social aspects of that,” Rodbart says. “But also from a material pathology standpoint, that you can actually see deterioration and decay. It’s always going to be in a state of deterioration and decay. How do you manage that, and show that to the public, and keep a safe site?” — Jared Brey
