To hear Michael Blichasz tell it, none of this would have happened if he hadn’t gone asking for a copy of the deed.
City officials never would have come knocking on the door of his nonprofit museum, the Polish American Cultural Center, curious how he came to be the supposed owner of a multimillion-dollar property in the heart of Philadelphia’s historic district.
They never would have begun scrutinizing the decades-long paper trail, the political handshakes, and the forgotten promises made to the once-powerful community leader.
And the quaint Polish history museum that has operated in Society Hill since 1987 would still have its home.
Because for nearly 30 years, City Hall never questioned whether Blichasz’s nonprofit actually owned the building at 308 Walnut St.
“No one mentioned a word about it,” Blichasz, 79, said. “It was totally silent.”
That silence started unraveling seven years ago when, Blichasz said, he requested a copy of the deed in order to get a state grant to make repairs on the five-story property. He had somehow avoided an inquiry for decades, despite securing other grants and contracts to keep alive his nonprofit’s mission: providing Polish immigrants with a one-stop cultural hub that could connect them to city services.
Officials at the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA) scratched their heads at the request, according to Blichasz. Records showed the authority owned the museum building, not the Polish group.
PRA eventually took Blichasz to court, accusing him of squatting in the property and failing to pay back millions in loan installments. Blichasz said former Mayor W. Wilson Goode and other elected officials in the late 1980s purchased the property for his group and promised to pay off the debt as a gift to the Polish community.
But apparently those promises were never written down.
“The city has no records [or] evidence anyone in the city ever agreed to pay the balance on behalf of [the Polish museum] to obtain ownership of the property,” Jamila Davis, a PRA spokesperson, said in a statement.
This much both sides agree on: The Polish American Cultural Center came to occupy the historic building thanks to a rare and generous arrangement in 1987.
Goode approved a $2.1 million bond to buy a permanent home for United Polish American Social Services, a nonprofit run by Blichasz that had been aiding the city’s Polish immigrants since the early 20th century.
The grant led to the birth of the city’s first and only Polish museum, where Blichasz amassed an exhibit hall full of national folk art, portraits of famous Poles such as Pope John Paul II, and historical artifacts dating from the first immigrant settlers to these shores in 1608 to the diaspora that followed the 1939 invasion of the Nazis.
But Goode’s act of benevolence came with a caveat: According to the bond agreement, if the Polish group failed to keep up with payments, the city could kill the deal and take back the building. Blichasz claims Goode and other elected officials at the time, many of whom are now dead, promised he would never have to pay a dime.
“They said, ‘You will pay zero,’” he said.
A copy of a $81,875 check Blichasz provided to The Inquirer represents one of the only payments made by the nonprofit to the city — in August 1988. PRA said Blichasz’s nonprofit, all told, paid about $155,000 toward the bond taken out by the city, which grew to $4.6 million with interest.
The Goode administration later applied for a federal grant through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to pay off the property, according to records provided to The Inquirer.
Blichasz said he was under the impression the deal was done. But those federal funds never materialized — and the city didn’t seek to settle the debt for decades.
Bicentennial cash and ethnic tensions
The museum’s origins lie in the summer of 1987, when City Hall faced accusations of racial and ethnic favoritism.
The city had just unlocked $2 million left from the 1976 Bicentennial, and Council members had sent half that money to nine Black community groups. Anger simmered among white ethnic leaders like Blichasz.
“Reverse discrimination,” Councilmember Joan Krajewski said at the time.
Critics asserted also that regardless of race, the fund was supporting activities with few ties to America’s birthday celebration — from a Trinidadian steelpan orchestra to a Polish-American festival at Penn’s Landing led by Blichasz.
At the time, however, Blichasz’s nonprofit was also trying to move its headquarters from Fairmount to Philadelphia’s historic district.
And the city had already agreed to pay for the new building.
After the city inked the bond purchase on behalf of the Polish group, Blichasz vowed to increase the nonprofit’s annual budget by 50% to keep up with repayment. Goode promised the group leniency, but newspaper articles from the time show no offer to fully wipe the debt.
Blichasz was confident. Donors in the Polish community, he said, would “respond with joy” to bring this first-of-its-kind museum to life in Philadelphia.
But the joy proved less than hoped.
Months later, Blichasz was back at City Hall asking for a bailout. His group had raised only a fraction of its $1 million goal and needed an additional $350,000 to pay the mortgage and museum build-out costs.
He pointed out that the city had financed capital projects for other ethnic groups, including the Mummers Museum, the African American history museum, and the Jewish museum.
“This is going to tell us just how appreciated the good, taxpaying Poles are by this country,” Blichasz said at the time.
The museum, he promised, would be “an attraction” that would more than repay its debt.
Teaching self-sufficiency
The Polish American Cultural Center opened its doors in August 1988 to a flag-waving crowd of 300 people. Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony, where visitors admired hand-cut Polish crystal and other curios from the homeland.
Alongside the museum, the nonprofit continued to provide the community with services that ranged from English language courses to help with rent and fuel rebates — work Blichasz said was “teaching Polish immigrants to be self-sufficient.”
Much of that work was also financed by the city.
Auditors later raised concern over a six-figure contract the Goode administration dealt to the nonprofit. At the time, the arrangement led former city finance director David Brenner to speculate about Blichasz’s political clout: “Where his influence comes from beats the hell out of me, but no question he’s got it.”
At some point, however, concerns over the debt for 308 Walnut St. disappeared.
As far as Blichasz was concerned, it was absolved after Goode applied for the HUD grant.
Blichasz said officials like Krajewski and Goode insisted his group not cut any more checks to the city, saying “we will take care of it.”
Why PRA did not inquire about the outstanding mortgage agreement remains uncertain. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about the matter, and city records show only one inspection of the property, in 2011.
By the time PRA took a renewed interest, Blichasz had a problem: Many of the people who helped facilitate the initial deal were no longer around to help explain.
A historic takeback
The museum fell under the radar until Mayor Jim Kenney’s first term. Soon after Kenney took office in 2016, Blichasz recalled, there was a heated meeting after the nascent administration ended his nonprofit’s six-figure social services contract.
He described the city as more interested in “giving out condoms” than providing help to an increasingly elderly Polish population.
Years later, during an insurance audit of large buildings owned by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, Kenney administration officials were baffled by 308 Walnut St. It’s not clear if the PRA even knew who owned it.
PRA officials toured the building in 2019 and found the museum on the first floor much as it had ever been. But the floors above were in shambles, according to a city employee who toured the property.
The second through fourth floors looked as if their occupants had been raptured, with calendars from the 1980s frozen on the walls and moldy cups of coffee that appeared to date to the same decade.
On the fifth floor, officials said, they found evidence that someone had been sleeping in the building along with boxes of old documents and recording equipment where Blichasz broadcast his Polish American radio hour.
PRA quickly moved to intervene.
“Based on concerning conditions observed during the tour,” PRA said in a statement this week, it hired an engineering firm to document the state of the building. The contractors reported it needed at least $1.8 million to be brought back to code. The lack of maintenance resulted “in potentially dangerous structural issues,” PRA said in a statement.
Blichasz acknowledged water damage from leaks, which he had hoped to repair with state grants. But he called the PRA’s overall assessment of the property a fiction. He said his nonprofit spent “millions” in repairs over the years out of its operating budget.
“It’s very fishy,” Blichasz said of PRA’s inspection.
The agency said in a statement that officials “attempted to negotiate” but that Blichasz “refused to cooperate and repeatedly requested outright ownership” of the property, despite not having complied with the terms of the original deal.
With no legal title, the PRA took the nonprofit to court in 2023. The agency ultimately won, wresting back control of the building. A judge ordered the nonprofit to pay $3.5 million dollars in debt and damages.
This April, the Polish American Cultural Center was evicted.
Last chance to cut a deal
As the city clawed back the property, Blichasz accused officials of negotiating in bad faith. He also suggested it was a racially motivated attack against his organization to divert funding to nonwhite community groups.
Those who could attest to the original deal are dead or not talking. Krajewski, the former Council member, died in 2013. Blichasz said he hadn’t reached out to Goode in years. Phone calls to the former mayor were not returned.
“When those people were alive, we could have had a nice get-together, a hearing,” Blichasz said. “Now they want to take me to court. I said, ‘Why? You never sat down with us to discuss this.’ All I want to do is keep the original mission and goals alive.”
The ordeal has interested at least one current elected official.
Councilmember Mark Squilla, who represents the area, has acted as a liaison between Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and Blichasz this year. Emails shared with The Inquirer showed that Blichasz turned down three compromise options from Parker that would have either allowed the Polish group to remain in the building under a new lease or helped pay for the group’s relocation.
Squilla acknowledged that the paperwork didn’t support Blichasz’s case. But he argued that his decades of contributions to the city should be considered, too.
“After we did some background research, I figured there’s no way we could find out what really happened,” Squilla said. “So I figured, ‘Why don’t we just work out a deal?’ And unfortunately, the deals that the PRA made were not accepted by the Polish museum folks.”
Squilla introduced a resolution in City Council on Oct. 9 to hold hearings on the PRA’s treatment of Blichasz.
“After 30 years, I believe that they had the right to stay in and use the building,” the Council member said.
On Wednesday, a woman approached the doorway of the museum, asking if it was open.
Inside, standing in the wood-paneled hallway that harkened back to another era, a maintenance worker shooed her away.
