The voices of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church choir echoed off the buildings on Saturday along the 3700 block of West Philadelphia’s Melon Street.

Their usual pulpit sits around the corner at 37th and Wallace. But this past weekend, they sang at the funeral of an unusual neighbor: a small, dilapidated rowhouse at 3711 Melon, torn down that night.

As the choir sang the gospel hymn, the words seemed fitting – “Precious memories, how they linger.” Soon, memories would be all that’s left of the two-story home, a narrow rowhouse that long ago lost its partners.

Behind them, the jaws of the heavy construction excavator opened up. The truck’s arm, shrouded in a piece of black fabric, lifted and came in for the top of the home. A crunching sound interrupted the music. Soon, the crown of flowers that had been placed above the gutter sat in pieces in a black, coffin-like dump truck.

More than 600 vacant and structurally unsound homes are torn down in the city of Philadelphia each year, according to the organizers of Funeral for a Home, the name given to Saturday's unusual memorial service. Administrators at Temple Contemporary—the gallery at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art—had been looking for a way to mark this neighborhood-based sea change. So they drafted local artists Jacob Hellman and Steven and Billy Dufala, who began developing the idea of a funeral. Soon, the “homegoing” ceremony became a community partnership, as neighbors and representatives from places like Mt. Olive Baptist and the Mantua Civic Association got involved.

Most residential demolitions are decidedly less ceremonious. That’s certainly the way many neighbors in West Philadelphia’s Mantua neighborhood felt when they first heard of the idea earlier this year. But as Mt. Olive’s Pastor Harry Moore, Sr. reminded those who came to celebrate and mourn the life of 3711 Melon, “These homes are like individuals—up one day and down the next.”

So the community gathered, to remember one of its own.