Joe Frazier Wins Belated Embrace as Philadelphia Starts a Fight

Like many African-Americans here, Mr. Frazier had fled the segregated South as a teenager. He worked in a slaughterhouse, sometimes punching sides of beef to train — a scene immortalized by Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky,” though Mr. Stallone has said he based the title character on the fighter Chuck Wepner.

       

Mr. Frazier went on to win a gold medal in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo despite fighting his final bout there with a broken thumb.       

Mr. Frazier’s management group bought the gym in the late 1960s and later turned it over to him after he retired from fighting, Mr. Hand said. Mr. Frazier kept the doors open for neighborhood youths who could not afford gym dues. He remained a regular in the neighborhood, buying lottery tickets at a Getty station and his signature felt hats from a store on Germantown Avenue.       

“Everyone used to run and get his autograph, but basically he was just an ordinary guy,” said Marcella Carr, 48, who lives in North Philadelphia. “We’d just say, ‘Hey, Joe.’ ”       

Mr. Frazier lost the gym to back taxes in 2008, said Leslie Wolff, who was Mr. Frazier’s marketing representative during the last seven years of his life. “Joe earned a good living, but he had a lot of debt from decades of mismanagement,” Mr. Wolff said. As important as the gym had been to the neighborhood, the movement to save it was started by an outsider, Dennis Playdon, an adjunct professor of architecture at Temple University, who grew up in South Africa. He noticed the “For Sale” sign on the building last year.       

“It occurred to me this was going to be an endangered building, and Joe Frazier’s Gym shouldn’t be lost,” said Mr. Playdon, whose students began researching the building.       

The cause got a lift in June when the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed it as one of the country’s 11 most endangered historic sites.       

Mr. Playdon and his students are working with the trust and the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia to get the building listed on the Philadelphia Historical Commission’s register of historic places and on the National Register of Historic Places. They are also trying to find a sympathetic buyer. Broad Enterprises Group L.L.C. bought the building last year for $365,000 and put it back on the market for just under $1 million.       

Joshua Villwock, a real estate agent representing the property, said the price reflected not only renovations to the building, but also Mr. Frazier’s link to it.

“There is value in the fact that Joe Frazier’s name is still on the building,” Mr. Villwock said.       

Lorenzo Carrecter, the athletic director of a nearby recreation center, said the gym, and Mr. Frazier, saved him from the streets by giving him a place to box as a young man.       

The gym should be saved, said Mr. Carrecter, 53. “We owe it to him.”