Monthly Archives: April 2012
Poor Richard in a Roman Toga
Benjamin Franklin lived in the here and now; he wasn’t so much the toga type. Early on, Franklin and friends formed what they called the “Leather Apron Society” and cultivated their image as well-read, regular fellows. It wasn’t beyond Franklin to slice up a rattlesnake (or an image of one, anyway) to make the point that the [...]
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Reverend William Henry Furness: A Philadelphia Unitarian
Born in Boston and educated at Harvard, Reverend William Henry Furness (1802-1896) came to Philadelphia at the tender age of 22 to nurture the city’s small Unitarian community, which had been founded by scientist and British immigrant Joseph Priestly in the 1790s. Like Quakerism, which holds that the light of God is in all of [...]
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Parapets, Pinnacles and Perpetuity
Monument Cemetery Gatehouse just before demolition, Broad Street at Berks Street, March 3, 1903. Philadelphians were dying to get out of town in the 1830s and 1840s—and so were city dwellers just about everywhere. Parisians started the trend, opting for a rural burial at Le Père Lachaise Cemetery before Americans caught the bug. Soon, the [...]
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Andrew Jackson Downing on Tulpehocken Street
People’s pride in their country is connected to pride in their home. If they can decorate and build their homes to symbolize the values they hope to embody, such as prosperity, education and patriotism, they will be happier people and better citizens. [...]
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Never a Dull Moment: The Rough and Tumble History of Philadelphia Newspaper Publishing
The Evening Telegraph at the Lincoln Building on Broad Street, South of City Hall. Photograph by N.M. Rolston, October 4, 1916. When Philadelphia boomed so did its newspapers. The city’s population, about 81,000 in 1800, expanded fifteen-fold over the next century to 1.3 million. This did wonderful things to make Philadelphia a robust newspaper reading, [...]
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Le Corbusier Dynamites the Drexel Block
In his writings on architecture and city planning, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887-1967) was fond of using the “royal” we: We must create a mass-production state of mind: A state of mind for building mass-production housing. A state of mind for living in mass-production housing. A state of mind for conceiving mass-production housing. In [...]
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William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company