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Urban Planning

Carstairs Row

Perhaps one of the things Philadelphia is famous for is its abundance of rowhouses. In fact, rowhomes are the single most numerous type of housing in the city. From small, utilitarian houses in the older sections of Philadelphia such as Queen Village to the large rows complete with porches, bay windows, and gingerbread trim in West Philadelphia, the row home provided Philadelphians with a space efficient and cost efficient means of housing in a rapidly expanding and industrializing city.

In envisioning Philadelphia, William Penn had planned a “greene country towne” where homes would occupy big open lots. However, Penn’s first purchasers quickly divided and sold parts of their plots to new arrivals who wanted to live close to the business and industrial areas by the Delaware River. The area towards the Schuylkill River remained undeveloped however. At a time when most people got around by foot, living even this short distance from the main areas of activity was akin to living virtually disconnected from the city. As plots near the Delaware River were divided and further subdivided, Penn’s green country town quickly began to resemble the crowded cities of Europe that he had hoped Philadelphia would stand in stark contrast to. Houses and shops were erected right next to each other, often sharing a wall on one or both sides. Indeed, this type of “terraced housing” was the most common type of housing in European cities.

Philadelphia’s Elfreth’s Alley is hailed as the longest continually occupied street in the country. It would therefore be easy to assume that the attached houses on Elfreth’s Alley are the oldest rowhouses in Philadelphia. However, on closer inspection, the different facades and rooflines of the Elfreth homes show us that they were built at various times and by different builders. This can also be applied to other colonial-era housing in Philadelphia. The homes may share walls, but this was done more so out of necessity rather than planning.

The first planned row of look-alike housing to be built at one time was Carstairs Row at South 7th and Sansom Streets. Begun circa 1799, Carstairs Row was the brainchild of developer William Sansom. Sansom purchased the property at Walnut Street between Seventh and Eighth Streets at a sheriff’s sale. The land had previously belonged to Robert Morris, and the sale included Morris’ unfinished mansion designed by L’Enfant (and sometimes referred to as Morris’ Folly). Since this area was still undeveloped and a bit off the beaten track at the time, Sansom’s purchase and development of the land was the first speculative housing development in the United States. Sansom then bisected the property with his namesake street. In order to attract potential tenants, Sansom used his own money to pave the Sansom Street at a time when most other Philadelphia streets were little more than dirt roads. Sansom then hired architect Thomas Carstairs to design a row of twenty-two look-alike houses on the south side of Sansom Street. The rowhouses were the first to be purposely designed to have uniform facades and share walls.

Today, Carstairs Row is a part of Philadelphia’s famous Jeweler’s Row. The continuous flat facades of Carstairs Row meant easy conversion into commercial properties. Though Carstairs Row still exists, it has been heavily modified and updated over the centuries to fit changing business needs and requirements. Numbers 730 and 732 Sansom Street have retained some elements of their original design but raised entrances and other changes fundamentally alter their facades. However, 700 Sansom Street, one of the corner properties, remains remarkably unchanged since it was originally built. It stands as yet another example of the Philadelphia of the present coexisting with elements of the rich history of Philadelphia’s past.

References:

Ames, Kenneth. “Robert Mills and the Philadelphia Row House,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 1968): 140.

Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/index.cfm.

Schade, Rachel Simmons. “Philadelphia Rowhouse Manual: A Practical Guide for Homeowners,” Philadelphia City Planning Commission and The National Trust for Historic Preservation, www.philaplanning.org/pubinfo/rowhousemanual.pdf.

Wolf, Edwin. Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Camino Books/The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1990), 129.

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‘There’s A Party Going On Right Here:’ Philadelphia Civic Celebrations – Part Three: Race, Redevelopment, and the Bicentennial


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From their inception, Philadelphia’s civic celebrations were invested with political messages and social values that, as the city’s population grew more diverse, often betrayed the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the City of Brotherly Love. As celebrations increasingly became city-wide endeavors, they served as a means to build communities, both real and imagined, and define civic identity based upon who was invited to participate and in what fashion. More often than not, African-Americans found themselves excluded from civic celebrations, beginning with the earliest Independence Day festivities and continuing into the 20th century. While individuals like prominent black sail maker James Forten criticized efforts to drive free African-Americans away from festivities at Independence Hall in 1813, public commemoration only grew more segregated along racial lines over time. In response, African-Americans largely resolved to celebrate their history and achievements in their own manner, though these efforts often did little to resolve both the political and racial conflicts underlying Philadelphia’s public observances.


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By and large, the most significant African-American civic celebration in Philadelphia was the 1913 Emancipation Exposition, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. After Congressional support for a national exposition fell through, activists in Philadelphia received $95,000 in state funding for an exposition at the site of today’s Marconi Plaza at Broad Street and Oregon Avenue. Despite strong criticism from the white community and bureaucratic maneuvers over building permits, African-Americans organized an exposition site that included an Agricultural Hall, an Administration Building featuring an auditorium, dining room, and exhibit space, and an Amusement Building with concert and lecture halls. Crucially, the area in which African-Americans were permitted to stage the exposition was an Italian neighborhood to which they had no historical or contemporary connection and was also the southern-most limit of the city’s residential and commercial development at the time. Nonetheless, 5,000 visitors attended the Exposition’s opening Congress and other festivities throughout its run included an athletics festival and lectures about African-American progress and achievements. The Exposition also included a parade down Girard Avenue that drew an estimated crowd of 25,000 to 50,000 spectators.

The buildings at Broad Street and Oregon Avenue were subsequently demolished after the Exposition, which was largely forgotten and overshadowed by the Sesquicentennial festivities on the same site in 1926. However, inspired by the Exposition’s efforts to memorialize Emancipation as part of the legacy of the Civil War, Richard R. Wright Sr. created National Freedom Day in the 1940s to mark the day that President Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery into law.


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In the latter half of the 20th century, the racial politics of civic celebrations were further exemplified by the Bicentennial festivities and the redevelopment projects that accompanied them. As far back as the 1950s, city officials conceived of the Bicentennial as Philadelphia’s emergence as a viable commercial center and tourist attraction as the city transitioned from its industrial past to a post-industrial future. Hoping to stem the tide of manufacturing losses and the middle-class exodus to the suburbs, reformist Democrats like Richardson Dilworth developed plans for a new transportation infrastructure, including the construction of the Vine Street and Crosstown expressways, multi-level parking garages, pedestrian walkways, and a downtown shopping plaza that would make Philadelphia the nerve center of the region. On the whole, these redevelopment plans favored the city’s central business district and largely neglected neighborhood housing, save for the revitalization of Society Hill. Benefiting from its close proximity to Independence Hall, which was undergoing its own redevelopment with the demolition of areas north of the site to make way for Independence Mall, Society Hill was aesthetically transformed into a historically rich environment of luxury apartments and green spaces. Under the direction of planner Edmund Bacon, other redevelopment projects included the revitalization of spaces along the Delaware River, Walnut and Market Streets, and the area between City Hall and the Ben Franklin Parkway, all culturally rich and historic areas through which Philadelphia would be defined.


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To critics, redevelopment favored the white middle-class at the expense of African-Americans and other minorities, many of whom were forced out of neighborhoods like Society Hill either by demolition or rising housing costs. To activists like Milton Street, the Bicentennial celebrations, which would be staged in the revitalized Center City district, embodied these injustices and provided a focal point for protest. While Bicentennial planners envisioned a combined international exposition and patriotic spectacle that showcased the downtown area, Street organized a counter-Bicentennial called “People’s ‘76” that would take place in city neighborhoods and emphasize popular participation in the Revolution. Ultimately, neither side’s plans were fully executed, as the idea for an international exposition was scrapped for lack of a feasible site and “People’s ‘76” faltered due to lack of funding and participation. By default, the theme of the city Bicentennial was family entertainment, with a July 4th parade featuring high school bands and cheerleaders and a 50,000 pound, five-story birthday cake at Memorial Hall baked by the Sara Lee Company. For their part, “People’s ‘76” did stage a competing parade on July 4th, which included African-Americans, Native Americans and Puerto Rican nationalists among others and ran through North Philadelphia to highlight its blighted manufacturing and residential districts.

Ultimately, the Bicentennial concentrated and intensified opposition to the city’s redevelopment projects and protests continued in the coming decades under the leadership of Milton Street. From the early days of the new nation to the 20th century, Philadelphia’s civic celebrations were invested with political and social significance that extended far beyond the day’s events and offer fascinating portraits of Philadelphia throughout its history.

References:

Andrew Feffer, “Show Down in Center City: Staging Redevelopment and Citizenship in Bicentennial Philadelphia, 1974-1977,” Journal of Urban History, vol. 30, no. 6 (September 2004): 791-825.

Charlene Mires, “Race, Place, and the Pennsylvania Emancipation Exposition of 1913,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 128, no. 3 (July 2004): 257-278.

Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Edwin Wolf, Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City (Philadelphia, PA: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1990).

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There’s a Party Going On Right Here:’ Philadelphia Civic Celebrations – Part Two: The City and its Celebrations Come of Age

In the early years of the new nation, the Federalist and Republican parties each infused Philadelphia’s public celebrations with political messages and symbolic meaning, a precedent that organizers of civic observances continued in the latter half of the 19th century. As both Philadelphia’s population and geographic limits expanded, efforts to centralize municipal government led to greater government control over public celebrations. Implicit in this control was the idea that such celebrations should elevate public taste and instruct rather than simply amuse, as celebratory rituals were intended to communicate certain social, political, and artistic values. Whether national holidays or special expositions, city elites strove to make civic observances representative of genteel culture and impose a single, united identity on Philadelphia’s increasingly disparate neighborhoods and peoples.

As Philadelphia’s population grew at a staggering rate to number nearly 2 million by 1920, its landscape and neighborhoods grew as well, sprawling over 120 square miles by the last decades of the 19th century. Due to this substantial growth, the city became more ethnically and racially segregated and so did its celebrations, which were often differentiated along class and ethnic lines. Different neighborhoods tended to follow their own calendars and modes of celebration, from Irish marching for St. Patrick’s Day to Poles commemorating the semi-centennial of the Polish Revolution. The George Washington Centennial Procession of 1832 was a rare exception to this trend, bringing together Irish, French, and German immigrant societies, as well as citizens from such outer lying townships as Northern Liberties, Southwark, and Moyamensing. The end of the Civil War in 1865 also inspired a city-wide celebration, which included a morning procession, speeches in the afternoon, and an evening banquet accompanied by fireworks. On the whole though, city-wide celebrations, save for the order of events, were loosely organized affairs that typically left participating groups to their own devices, including costumes and banners.

The celebrations of the 1876 Centennial Exposition followed a similar laissez-faire model, though a shift began in 1880 when Mayor Samuel H. King curtailed the detonation of fireworks and dispatched the city’s newly unified police force to impose order on public holidays. Two years later, city permits were required to stage parades and the focus turned towards large, urban carnivals to bring the city together rather than disparate, neighborhood celebrations. The commemoration of the Bicentennial of Pennsylvania in 1882 was the first such effort, a week-long program of parades, athletic contests, regatta on the Schuylkill River, and historical re-enactments that ended with a mass concert at the Academy of Music. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, many city-wide celebrations followed this trend, including the Centennial of the Constitution (1887), Peace Jubilee at the end of the Spanish-American War (1898), and the National Export Exposition (1899). Additionally, traditional celebrations like Independence Day also became more regimented, with the Philadelphia City Council overseeing events at both Independence Hall and nine other squares throughout the city. Notably, the day’s festivities, which included athletic competitions in Fairmount Park and fireworks over the Girard Avenue Bridge, followed a set schedule and were publicized in souvenir programs distributed across the city.

Without doubt, the high point of these coordinated, city-wide celebrations was Founder’s Week in 1908, which commemorated the 225th anniversary of Philadelphia’s founding. In an effort to elevate the week’s festivities and edify the public, local historian Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer organized a historical pageant that, with floats and live actors, followed the city’s history from “Exploration and Settlement” to “Civil War.” To emphasize artistic achievement and community solidarity, Oberholtzer selected Germantown muralist Violet Oakley to design the 68 floats and allowed ethnic organizations with ties to early settlers, such as Dutch and Germans, to participate only if they used official floats and costumes. On the whole, the pageant, which processed down Broad Street for four miles through Central Philadelphia, presented a truncated view of the city’s history that largely excluded both African-Americans and any ethnic groups beyond the earliest settlers and stressed allegiance to the city above all other ties. Oberholtzer later organized the Historical Pageant Association of Philadelphia with the purpose of producing a pageant every four years, but the Association’s initial 1912 production in Fairmount Park proved less successful, limited both by location and competing Columbus Day festivities. On the whole, pageant attendance was mediocre and the production ultimately produced a $15,000 deficit, a financial failure that dampened enthusiasm for both historical pageants and city-wide celebrations.

In the following decade, other notable public festivities included a downtown parade for World War I troops and the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in 1926, though city elites were now largely absent from the planning process. As popular culture turned towards more commercial, mass entertainment, less emphasis was ultimately placed on the educational value of public festivities, even as celebrations continued to have popular appeal in Philadelphia well into the 20th century.

References:

Scott Bruce, It Happened in Philadelphia (Guilford, CT: Morris Book Publishing, 2008).

David Glassberg, “Public Ritual and Cultural Hierarchy: Philadelphia’s Civic Celebrations at the Turn of the 20th Century,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 107 no. 2 (July 1983): 421-448.

Edwin Wolf, Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City (Philadelphia, PA: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1990).

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‘There’s a Party Going On Right Here:’ Philadelphia Civic Celebrations – Part One: Festivities in the New Nation


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Throughout its history, Philadelphia has played host to celebrations as diverse as its neighborhoods, from Columbus Day and Washington’s birthday to the Emancipation Exposition and the annual Mummer’s Parade. And from the first commemoration of Independence Day to the Bicentennial, these celebrations historically have been infused with notions of citizenship, public space, and civic identity. As historian Gary Nash notes, civic observances provide a means of binding diverse ethnic, racial, and religious groups together, as well as connecting the past to the present. Ultimately, public celebrations are rarely just fun festivities, but also rituals that convey and reinforce national beliefs and values. In the case of Philadelphia, such values, much like the celebrations themselves, are often points of conflict and debate that provide a unique window into the city’s history.

By and large, Independence Day is the holiday most associated with Philadelphia and rightly so since the city was among the first in the nation to mark the day with now traditional customs like parades, picnics, and fireworks. The city’s first July 4th celebration took place in 1777, just one year after the Declaration of Independence was issued and in the midst of the Revolutionary War. Festivities began around noon, as crowds gathered at the seaport to admire ships bedecked with red, white, and blue bunting and witness the discharge of thirteen cannon shots, one for each of the states in the Union. A Hessian band provided music and a private dinner for members of Congress followed in the afternoon before a parade of horses and troops made their way to Second Street. The festivities concluded that evening with a fireworks display that included thirteen rockets, another symbol of the newly united nation.


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From that first celebration, Philadelphia’s Independence Day festivities developed into a highly ritualized affair that, over the next few decades, brought the city’s disparate groups together and increasingly equated participation with patriotism. More so than other civic rituals, parades became displays of both common nationhood and civic unity in a city that, despite serving as the nation’s capital until 1800, was still a largely provincial town. In the 1790s, Philadelphia’s city limits merely extended about a mile and a half west of the Delaware River and citizens of different social backgrounds often lived in close proximity. Generally publicized in advance, parades followed published routes that underscored these physical and social realities, as they wound through densely interconnected streets and drew together a broad cross-section of the city’s population. Notably, when Philadelphia celebrated both Independence Day and the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1788, it organized the largest parade yet in the United States, with 5,000 people marching in procession before 17,000 gathered for a celebratory afternoon dinner.

Notably, as public rituals like parades wove into the fabric of civic life, they also became strategic maneuvers by the nation’s first political parties to assert power and lay claim to the nation’s Revolutionary heritage. Throughout the first decades of the republic, the Federalist and Republican parties of Philadelphia marked Independence Day with competing celebrations that voiced their conflicting views on the Revolution’s legacy. While Federalists commemorated independence from Great Britain and emphasized reverence for government, Republicans underscored natural rights and the ongoing fight for liberty, for them exemplified by the French Revolution. By and large, newspaper accounts of these celebrations reflected the newspaper’s political sympathies and Republicans in particular used the holiday to demonstrate their opposition to Federalist policies and their support for French rebels. In 1792, Republicans even went so far as to display both French and American flags at their July 4th festivities and wore Liberty caps modeled after those of the French revolutionary forces.


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As the commemoration of Independence Day intertwined with politics, both Federalists and Republicans increasingly organized other celebrations that likewise reflected their political beliefs. Naturally, election days were prime opportunities for public gatherings, as voters, politicians, and spectators crowded the streets and victors celebrated with bonfires and parades. In concert with the Society of Cincinnati, Federalists first celebrated Washington’s Birthday in 1789 with a procession of civil and military officers and a reception at Washington’s Presidential residence. After his death, Federalists commemorated Washington’s Birthday with an annual ball against the objections of Republicans, who believed honoring public officials in this way was undemocratic. For their part, Republicans organized public celebrations to commemorate Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration as President, as well as the Louisiana Purchase and, after Federalists divided over supporting John Adams’ re-election, were the only party to organize Independence Day celebrations in Philadelphia. In the early 1800s, the Federalists re-emerged to publicly celebrate Washington’s Birthday once again and in 1814 organized an elaborate procession of 2,000 participants down Arch and Spruce Streets to the Olympic Theatre. Ultimately, as these celebrations show, how and what was commemorated in Philadelphia in the republic’s early years was a snapshot of the city, its people, and its politics, one that would evolve in the coming decades and continue to be reflected in Philadelphia’s civic celebrations.

References:

James R. Heintze. Fourth of July Celebrations Database. American University. Washington, D.C. http://www1.american.edu/heintze/fourth.htm#Beginning.

Albrecht Koschnik, “Political Conflict and Public Contest: Rituals of National Celebration in Philadelphia, 1788-1815,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 118, no. 3 (July 1994): 209-248.

Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Edwin Wolf, Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City (Philadelphia, PA: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1990).