American Beaty: A Philadelphia Salvaging Legend Deconstructs His 50-Plus Year Career
beaty knew the value of this reclaimed treasure and the possibility it represented. that’s the thing with beaty — he’s a keeper of potential.
STORY by ERICA VANSTONE WITH PHOTOS BY KAT VERI
It’s winter 2022 and I’m standing in the middle of St. Laurentius Church, a condemned Fishtown landmark undergoing demolition. The pews have been long since removed, along with the floor tiles and the church’s rich plaster murals. Faded maroon and cream marble still hugs the columns, lit by the sun as it streams through the stained-glass windows. Clouds of dust rise from the floor and Bob Beaty calls my name.
Standing six and a half feet tall, the man with a white mop-top gestures to me. I turn, grabbing my son, a then-eighth grade student at St. Laurentius School, the tiny parochial building adjoining this ill-fated property.
A church on its own kind of death row, St. Laurentius closed in 2014, shortly after my son started kindergarten, when chunks of the facade began to fall onto Berks Street below. In his Christmas pageant just before this, my son had played the frankincense—a puffed costume with a white smock and cap. I can still picture him marching between these columns.
In recent months, St. Laurentius Church has again begun raining pieces of stone into the surrounding streets, forcing the city’s hand to demand the property come down.
Beaty, then, is here to do what some would consider the Lord’s work—a compassionate deconstruction of one of the city’s most beloved, troubled landmarks. Hellbent on saving as much as he can, he leans over, picking up an old Polish hymn book, handing it to my son.
“Thanks, Bob,” I say. My son pockets the book, eyeing it with quiet reverence. A memento of a time deeply personal to both of us.
For 76-year-old Beaty, people and their histories are the intangibles that drive him in the salvaging business. Known for his dedication to recycling, reusing, and reselling unearthed and forgotten treasures, Bob Beaty has been working in reclaiming—high end and low end, both in Philadelphia and beyond—since childhood.
snellenburg’s. Photo courtesy of Old Images of Philadelphia
“I was fresh out of high school,” Beaty says, sitting across from me this summer, perched at a walnut desk in his warehouse shop on North American Street. “I was supposed to go to college but my parents split up. So I got a job working at John. S. McQuade Construction Company. They were taking down a department store at 12th and Market called Snellenburg’s, one of those beautiful old classical buildings.”
Located on the American Street Empowerment Zone corridor, his current business, Beaty American, houses a chunk of his nearly-sixty-year salvaging career. As we talk, the massive tin sign from the original Bookbinder’s restaurant downtown looms over us, unlit. Plaster cornices, marble door knobs, wooden accent tables, and full marble fireplace mantels surround us as Beaty recalls first getting the salvaging bug in late 1960s on the Snellenburg’s job.
“I was the timekeeper for payroll at McQuade, making $75 a week and taking night courses at Wharton. I noticed they were throwing away everything. In a pile, I saw these granite tiles—twelve inches square, one inch thick. And a friend of mine had a pickup truck, so at the end of the day one day, he came by and we started picking them out, about two thousand of them. Sold them to a masonry contractor for a dollar a piece. So, I’m eighteen years old with two grand in my pocket.”
Beaty grins, though he insists there’s not much money to be made in salvaging. Yet, he clearly has an eye for value and a head for business. Along with the night classes at Wharton, Beaty also eventually got a degree from Saint Joseph’s University, following a two-year tour in the Marines. His experiences both in the Vietnam War and picking his way through Snellenberg’s pushed him into a more peaceful path of reclaiming and repurposing—a lifestyle that was only just coming into vogue in the 1970s amid anti-war counterculture.
“One of my biggest thrills is connecting people,” he says. “I’ve pretty much lived in Philadelphia my whole life, except for twelve years in California.”
As it turns out, these dozen years would be formative ones for Beaty, who joined a sort of salvaging commune called Ohmega Salvage—part recycling company, party hippie encampment in Berkeley, California. With a half-smile, Beaty tells me he hung with the likes of activist-entertainer Wavy Gravy and enjoyed the commune’s peaceful refuge.
Bob (4th from right) with ohmega salvage. photo courtesy of ohmega salvage.
“About half of us were doing the salvaging work, and the other half hung around smoking pot all day,” Beaty says, chuckling. “So I left, figuring I could do the same work for myself.” Though the reclaiming business may seem passive, Beaty has always been a workaholic—and, as he admits, a bit of a hoarder. Eventually moving back to Philadelphia in the 1980s, he looked for ways to enact his Berkley learnings on the east coast. And work, he did—in waste, recycling, and salvaging.
Over the past forty years, if there’s been a high-profile salvaging operation in the city, Beaty’s name has likely been attached to it. From the iconic Divine Lorraine Hotel on North Broad Street to the Academy of Music renovation on South Broad in the early 2000s, Bob Beaty knows almost everyone there is to know in the reclaim and restoration business. He points to a series of images nearby that are two decades old.
“Those photographs over there are from the Academy of Music,” he says, “It was in 2002, to replace the roof over the stage.” I eye the photos of cranes lifting beams from the eaves in a narrow Center City street. “There were all these twelve-by-twelves, white pine and white oak [from] 1857. So, you think about the trees where that wood came from, that was probably the days of the American revolution. Sixteenth century or before.”
An original founder of Provenance, the architectural salvage company directly across the street from him in Kensington, Beaty’s career musings remind me that Philadelphia is an American city rich with complicated history, and some of it more recent. His nose for both business and history resulted in reclaimed flooring for the Barnes Foundation, which moved to its permanent home on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 2012.
“Those floors are ipê from a boardwalk in Rockaway Beach, in Coney Island,” Bob says.
I feel my eyebrows furrow. “Coney Island? But isn’t ipê a tropical wood?”
“Yeah, you see ipê in a lot of boardwalks,” he says. And for today’s construction, this makes perfect sense to me—though ipê is now an endangered species. However, Coney Island’s two and a half-mile boardwalk started construction in the early 1920s. Which means the ipê began its life in South America roughly a hundred years ago, then was shipped by boat to New York harbor. After that, it spent a century battling the Atlantic Ocean and its hurricane seasons. In other words, it’s wood that’s seen a lot.
I ask Barnes Foundation Director of Operations Vince DAntonio, a longtime friend of Beaty, how a near-hundred-year-old stack of America’s playground ended up mingling with the likes of Matisse and Cézanne.
“Bob came to see me,” he said—which is, frankly, how Beaty does most of his business, boots on the ground. “And I asked him, ‘Do you have any Brazilian hardwood? We have a floor we’re supposed to go buy, and the architect specified it as new.’”
As it turned out, Beaty’s colleagues at Provenance had a barn full of ipê sourced from Rockaway. He brought some in for the Barnes to inspect. Only, according to DAntonio, “the architect took one look at it and said, ‘That looks horrible. I don't want that, I want new wood.’”
But Beaty knew the value of this reclaimed treasure and the possibility it represented. At DAntonio’s suggestion, Beaty and his colleagues milled the wood and brought it back, revealing the wood’s ancient, patterned grain. The results were stunning.
“We installed it in the job trailer,” shares DAntonio with a chuckle. “And the next time the architect came down, he saw it and said, ‘This is exactly what I want.’”
That’s the thing with Beaty—he’s a keeper of potential. And he knows not only the story, but the story behind the story of objects. Which is often just as valuable, though not everyone sees it this way. Noting the closure of several regional salvaging operations, I ask him about the state of reclaiming in and around Philadelphia.
“The pandemic really changed everything,” Beaty says. “There’re a couple factors—the source of material, the labor to extract it, and then having a place to put it. And customers. The ideal situation is having something pre-sold before you remove it.”
To cultivate business, Beaty typically calls routine sources—and potential buyers, like DAntonio. He also fields requests from his network of demolition and reclaiming specialists. However, none of these interactions were possible during COVID-19.
As a result, outlets like Philadelphia Salvage unceremoniously closed in 2023. Philly Reclaim, the Tacony-based operation that had moved a few times during its history, was started as a nonprofit with the goal of providing workforce training, not unlike Berkley’s Ohmega Salvage or Maryland’s Second Chance Baltimore. Reclaim also shuttered its doors in 2022.
“What happened with Philadelphia Salvage and Philadelphia Reclaim, it was a matter of the rent they were paying,” Beaty says. I remind him that both buildings housing these businesses weren’t in great shape to begin with—at Philadelphia Salvage, in particular, rainy days meant you couldn’t tread in certain rooms because the ceilings didn’t exist.
“That building was originally a foundry,” he says with a quick laugh. “It was built in the late 19th century. A lot of the statues you see on Kelly Drive were all cast there.”
Beaty is rich in stories. He’s formed bridges across vocations involving recycling, industrial materials, construction, fine art, and architecture in ways few other Philadelphians have. And his clients range from the fabulously notable, to the average local looking for a hinge to fit a finicky Philadelphia door.
In fact, if you need something that's decidedly not new, Bob's your guy. Or, if he isn't, he'll ruminate on it for a while and ultimately find the guy who knows a guy.
Yet, slowly feeling the march of time, Beaty is beginning to wind down his career—both at the request of his wife, and as a way to keep pace with dwindling demand. He’s shifting operations at his store on North American Street to refocus on smaller, more detailed items under the business name City Ore. As in, mining the riches the city already has to offer.
Telling me about his plans, I can’t help but ask about his predictions for the future of salvaging; I want to know if he thinks the past has a place in Philadelphia architecture and development moving forward. As always, he’s practical, but ever-optimistic.
“We have customers of every generation that appreciate old things,” he says. “It’s just like art. People appreciate modern art versus classical art. When you meet somebody, especially from the younger generation, who appreciates it, you wanna give them a big hug and say, ‘You’re here! Welcome!’”
His genuine joy in this statement makes me laugh. “Welcome home?” I ask.
“Yeah, welcome home,” he says. “We’re all old souls here.”
