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The Parkway’s Tipping Point: a Millionaire, a Mayor and a Model

The Parkway Model Looking [North]West, Mayor’s Reception Room, City Hall. May 1911. (PhillyHistory.org)

Imagine John Reyburn’s shock when he heard the massive Parkway project was headedliterally – in the wrong direction. Demolition of the first of 1,300 buildings had been underway for two months when Reyburn, Philadelphia’s brand new mayor in April 1907, learned that the swath being cut through the northwest quadrant of Center City was off course.

Reyburn became convinced of the City’s profound mistake days after his inauguration in a meeting with streetcar magnate P.A.B. Widener, who summoned him to the palatial Lynnewood Hall in Elkins Park. One of the nation’s richest and most voracious art collectors, Widener had been trying for more than a decade to get Philadelphians interested in his vision for a new art museum. Why should the Parkway, which started out at foot of the monumental City Hall, come to a distinctly unceremonious end in the park when it could terminate with a glorious new museum, set high on Fairmount?

Reyburn agreed with Widener. And he immediately took it upon himself to adjust the Parkway’s course. Correct “the present line of the Parkway, “he wrote in his first annual address, and continue “the removal of buildings on the new line. … I want this improvement to be the magnificent work that it ought to be.” The Parkway “is an opportunity that no other City in the United States can boast.”

But moving the Parkway’s axis would add $2 million to an already complicated and expensive project. How could Reyburn convince City Council, business leaders and the public that they had gotten off on the wrong foot and the fix would be worth the cost?

First there was compromise. The Parkway’s axis would be angled to the south of its former line, but planners would also artificially extend Fairmount itself to the north.

Then there was a rethinking of the far end of the Parkway by the city’s design establishment. Architect Charles L. Borie took the idea of placing the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Fairmount and went even further. He envisioned a grand plaza surrounded by a cluster of institutions for art and art education. As Borie’s partner, Clarence Zantzinger put it, “the opportunity is…unique in any city in the world.” The Parkway had evolved into something more than an ambitious boulevard connecting park and city. Now it was becoming a sophisticated, civic and cultural solution for the new century.

Reyburn continued to build support by appointing a group of bankers and businessmen, who served, along with city officials, on a new “Comprehensive Plans Committee.” Their work was timed to conclude before a national conference on city planning convened in Philadelphia.

In fact, Philadelphia’s commitment to planning had made the city the preferred location for its Third Annual City Planning Conference in May 1911. Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., who headed up the conference the year before, said as much. In terms of city planning, Olmstead told Reyburn, “your city is the farthest advanced in the country.”

Detail of Parkway Model in City Hall, 1911. (Click image for uncropped version.)

Reyburn proudly hosted the 200 professionals who came from all over the United States. But what was he doing to build support among the taxpaying, voting citizens of Philadelphia? Journalist and planning theorist Charles Mulford Robinson, the man who popularized The City Beautiful Movement, happily noted Reyburn’s tactic designed to build public support. The conference, wrote Robinson, “was more than its title suggests or promised.” The mayor used it as an excuse to mount the “first municipal planning exhibition in America.” And the Parkway would be its focus.

For this exhibition, the Department of Public Works presented new drawings of the re-envisioned Parkway and they built a thirty-foot model that resided for a full month in the Mayor’s Reception Room. The public showed up in droves; a reported 20,000 came the first day. They filed past displays lining the corridors of City Hall to see the model, the exhibition’s pièce de résistance.

So what did Philadelphia taxpayers, those who would foot the bill for this largely expanded and hugely expensive project, conclude? The idea of the Parkway, which had first been proposed forty long years before as a way to the park, now looked like something to be proud of, a public avenue that would come to redefine Philadelphia.

For more information: David Brownlee, Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989).

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Yo, Alice: We still have the one that got away. (It’s around here somewhere.)


Purchase Photo View Nearby Photos The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets, 1925.

It’s not every day, or even every decade, that a major museum of American art opens for business. In big cities, it’s a once-or-twice-a-century kind of thing. This week, Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opens in Bentonville Arkansas “to celebrate the American spirit.” Even though the place, built on the Wal-Mart fortune, is more than 1,200 miles away from Philadelphia, we can hear the hoopla. And it might have stung our ears, had things turned out a bit differently.

By coincidence, five years ago today was the start of the most recent Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic saga. What might have been the beginning of the end of Philadelphia’s stewardship of a painting long considered “the holy grail of American painting” started with an announcement that Thomas Jefferson University would sell the painting to Crystal Bridges and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC for the record-breaking price of $68 million. “This is the most important sale of a 19th-century American painting ever,” boasted the president of Christie’s Americas, which crafted the deal. Washingtonians considered landing this picture inside the Beltway on Bentonville’s dime as a big win-win.

But Philadelphians saw the situation differently. And the agreement of sale contained a small clause that, as it turned out, became a potent loophole. If locals wanted the painting they had forty-five days to match the price. Raising $1,511,111 a day, day after day for a month and a half? Sounds impossible for these recessionary times, but in the flush holiday shopping season of 2006, 3,400 Philadelphians reached deeply into their pockets and, with significant help of major philanthropy, a humongous bank loan and at least one case of controversial deaccessioning, the Eakins was ours to keep. Alice Walton would just have to make do with less.

So when they cut the ribbon in Arkansas this Veterans Day, Dr. Gross (who Eakins depicted teaching the surgical technique he innovated to save lives and limbs of thousands of Civil War soldiers) will not be in attendance. So where is the painting this Veteran’s Day, this fifth year anniversary of its near departure?

Searching for Dr. Gross, we look to the Philadelphia Museum of Art website, and see one page that steers us to “Colket Gallery 151.” But he’s not there.  Another PMA webpage tells us he’s “currently not on view.” Hmmm, really? Not on view? The Academy’s website doesn’t give us a location, either.

But visitors to the museum at Broad and Cherry will find the painting hanging in Frank Furness’ central rotunda, which as it happens, was completed about the same time Eakins was painting his masterpiece.  After sixty eight million dollars and five years, you’d think we’d be more inclined to coordinate, communicate and, especially this week, to celebrate.

Could it be that we’ve begun to slip back into that old, familiar, Philadelphia complacency?  Now that’s a scary thought.

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Cracking the Sculptural Code in City Hall Courtyard


Purchase Photo View Nearby Photos City Hall Courtyard During Subway Construction, November 16, 1915, N. M. Rolston, Photographer.

Smack dab in the center of Philadelphia is a building with scads of sculpture and one persistent mystery. Philadelphia City Hall is encrusted with no less than 250 marble figures, heads, allegories, principles and attributes by Alexander Milne Calder and his team. It’s been called “the most ambitious sculptural decoration of any public building in the United States.” Yet, historians have always been a bit perplexed. City Hall is without “a coherent plan for the iconography.” All that marble and no meaning. How frustrating.

We’ve long suspected there are hidden clues. The building’s exterior and tower offer a cacophony of sculptural meaning. But when it comes to City Hall’s courtyard there are no figures, nothing to interpret. All we see there are the nearly plain white marble surfaces. In the courtyard, the world’s largest and most complex sculptural program comes to a dead stop.

How could this be? Why did these prolific Philadelphians, architect John McArthur, sculptor Calder and building commissioner Samuel Perkins opt for utter silence in City Hall courtyard? Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions, placing emphasis on the wrong sculptural syllable. Maybe it’s more about what isn’t there at City Hall than what is there.

McArthur, Calder and Perkins didn’t run out of ideas when they came to City Hall’s courtyard. Instead, what they embraced in this heart of the building (the heart of the city!) is the opportunity to express a startlingly modern idea. It’s a sculptural program turned inside out.

We the people complete the sculptural program of City Hall. That’s right. City Hall courtyard is an interactive, do-it-yourself civic sculpture, maybe the only of its kind. By being there, we literally bring City Hall to life. The sculptural program isn’t about sculpture, or historicism, or representations of any kind; it’s about the living, breathing here and now. City Hall comes alive in the same way a Quaker Meeting does; it’s powered by people.

Still not convinced? Stand in the center of the courtyard and look up. There, 510 feet above the sidewalk, more than 300 years in the past, stands the founder himself. We can’t see him beyond the beak of a giant eagle, but we know he’s there; we feel his presence. Look down, there’s the very center of the city he dreamed up. But it’s not Penn’s city anymore, it’s ours. The building is a timeline starting in the 1680s and ending, literally for the moment, anyway, with us in City Hall courtyard.

Standing in the center and searching for more confirmation, we look through the four portals and see the city come together at the spot where we stand, the center of the compass. Then we walk north, beneath the tower. There’s bound to be a hint of meaning there. And so there is: in the chamber criticized in 1876 as a “chamber of horrors” we see the carved heads of dominant animals from the four corners of the earth: bull, bear, tiger and elephant. They focus inward toward four robust, perfectly polished red granite columns. Atop of them are human figures, also from around the world. They are our symbolic stand ins, arms locked and straining, bearing the burden of the tower, the history that is so high above and so long ago.

But these figures are only symbolic. Standing there, witnessing and understanding, we participate in the meaning of the place, we join the continuum of Philadelphia. It’s all, as Walt Whitman once famously put it: “a majestic and lovely show—silent, weird, beautiful.”