-
Washington Avenue: A Representative Example of Philadelphia's Industrial Past, Part III
By Ron Hoess
We will begin the final part of our tour down Washington Avenue starting at Broad Street and working our way eastward towards the Delaware River. One of Philadelphia's major industries, textiles, was well represented along Washington Avenue. By 1860, Philadelphia had as many people employed in the textile industry as the textile center of New England - Lowell, Massachusetts1. The industry thrived through the early part of the 20th century, with large mills located primarily in the Kensington area of the city, but also scattered in various locations...
-
Washington Avenue: A Representative Example of Philadelphia's Industrial Past, Part II
By Ron Hoess
We continue our tour down Washington Avenue at 17th Street heading east towards Broad Street. There are, of course, the ubiquitous coal yards along the way. These may seem strange to us today but were an essential feature in the first half of the 20th Century. Through World War II, nearly half of the railroad sidings along Washington Avenue were devoted to coal delivery. As we cross 17th Street looking north, we can see another element of Philadelphia's industrial past, the Philadelphia rowhouse....
-
Washington Avenue: A Representative Example of Philadelphia's Industrial Past, Part I
By Ron Hoess
For the historic background of Washington Avenue, please read "Washington Avenue: A Representative Example of Philadelphia's Industrial Past, Background History."
We will start our tour at 25th and Washington Avenue and make our way eastward. At the north east corner of 25th and Washington Avenue, we have the Robert Wilson Coal Yard.1 There were numerous coal yards all along Washington Avenue. Not only was there a demand for coal by the surrounding factories, but it should also be remembered that at the turn of the century most of the rowhouses of the surrounding area...
-
Washington Avenue: A Representative Example of Philadelphia's Industrial Past, Background History
By Ron Hoess
Philadelphia was once a major industrial center in the late 1900's and the first part of the 20th century, deservedly earning the title “workshop to the world”. Unlike other cities that were centered around a single industry, i.e. Pittsburgh and steel or Detroit and automobiles, Philadelphia had a spectrum of different industries. There were knitting mills in Kensington, steel mills in Nicetown and breweries in Brewerytown to name a few representatives.1 Today much of the manufacturing activity in Philadelphia is gone. Competition from overseas and limited capability for expansion within the confines of an...
-
The Widener Mansion
By Deborah Boyer
During the second half of the nineteenth century, prominent businessmen throughout the United States amassed great fortunes through the development of new industries including railroads, steel production, and mining. Men such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Vanderbilt became wildly wealthy and often spent that wealth on lavish houses, yachts, and travel as well as philanthropic endeavors such as universities, museums, and charitable organizations. The era became known as the Gilded Age, and many critics accused the wealthy of wielding unchecked power and taking advantage of poor workers.
During this time, there were few people...
-
Staying in Philadelphia: The Hotel Stenton and Hotel Walton
By Deborah Boyer
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, Philadelphia was home to several large and elaborate hotels. These hotels, including the Hotel Stenton and the Hotel Walton, provided lodging for travelers, apartments for Philadelphia residents, fine cuisine for both local residents and visitors to the city, and a meeting place for clubs and conventions.
The Hotel Walton, located on the southeast corner of Broad Street and Locust Street, opened in February 1896 and incorporated the Hotel Metropole, an earlier establishment on the same site. Upon its...
-
Richard Allen and the Founding of Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church
By Deborah Boyer
Throughout the 1700 and 1800s, Philadelphia was home to a large community of free African-Americans, many of whom were descendants of enslaved Africans forcibly brought to America. Members of the community formed churches, schools, businesses, and charitable societies. One of these churches, Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, would become an important part of the community and influence African-American religious life throughout the country.
The history of Mother Bethel is inextricably bound up with the history of its founder, Richard Allen. Born into a slave-holding household in Philadelphia in 1760, Allen and his...
-
Entering America: The Washington Avenue Immigration Station
By Deborah Boyer
In the early 1600s, Europeans began arriving in the Philadelphia area, inhabited at the time by members of the Lenape tribe. Over the next four hundred years, immigrants, affected by various social, political, geographic, and economic factors, would continue to leave their countries of origin and settle in Philadelphia. While the population of the United States grew throughout this time period, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an especially large boom in the growth of cities. As the American population shifted from predominantly rural to predominantly urban, immigrants also began settling...
-
Broad Street Station
By Ron Hoess
While intercity travel today primarily involves the automobile or airplane, a century ago the passenger train represented the principal mode of long distance travel. The increasing volume of rail passengers in the late 1800's required railroads to find efficient ways of delivering passengers to their destinations. In Philadelphia, the problem for the Pennsylvania Railroad was the lack of a station that would deliver passengers directly into Center City Philadelphia. In 1879, the railroad devised a plan to construct a large passenger station at Broad and Market Streets, directly opposite City Hall. The station...
-
Mapping the Sesquicentennial
By Deborah Boyer
Many of the photographs in the Philadelphia Department of Records City Archives’ collection are associated with a particular location. As photographers from the City’s Photography Unit traveled around Philadelphia capturing images of construction projects, school yards, busy commercial districts, and residential areas, they often noted the address or intersection where the photograph was taken. The other collections available on PhillyHistory.org- the photographs from the Philadelphia Water Department, the property maps from the Department of Records, and the historic maps from the Free Library- are also very geographic in nature and usually connected to a...