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Why We Love Frank Furness

Chestnut Street from Third, looking West, with Frank Furness’ National Bank of the Republic (right) and Guarantee Trust and Safe Deposit Company (left). Both are demolished.

We didn’t always. Love Frank Furness, that is.

“The man came out of the [Civil War] a swearing, swaggering, bewhiskered figure of martial bearing, a bulldog personality ready to challenge the architectural status quo,” James O’Gorman tells us in a review of Michael Lewis’ book, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind. “He organized his office like a military unit. Having waged war, Furness would now ‘wage architecture,’ charging headlong at building programs, competitors, and critics alike. The impact of his war experiences coursed through his professional life.”

“But there was more to his work than militaristic fury,” O’Gorman assures us. For those same late-19th century decades when technology, industry and railroading dominated Philadelphia on its own terms, Furness’ work connected truth and beauty. His buildings, according to George Thomas, had “the raw impact of giant machines, even as they transcended their materials.” All of his buildings, certainly his railroad stations, but also his libraries and schools, operated as grand mechanical-aesthetical projects. Furness’ library at the University of Pennsylvania, Lewis tells us, “has been called a collision between a cathedral and a railroad station;” his Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts “a laboratory for experimenting with new technology” with machine-like balusters working their eccentric charms.

We are reminded that Furness’ clients were engineers in a world newly-refashioned by their innovations, folk who relished “visible iron trusses or riveted iron girders, the industrial repertoire.” Furness gave them that, and more. He considered the interlocking elements of his buildings “legible pieces of machinery” and he moved them, as Lewis put it, “from the train shed to the lobby and the salon.” But these buildings didn’t feel like machines. Exuberant expression was the heart and soul of Furness. As the 17-year old Louis Sullivan, a “father of modernism” put it after his first encounter with a Furness building: “Here was something fresh and fair…a human note, as though someone were talking.”

But Furness’ individualistic work, his “overscaled and willfully distorted details,” his “clashing colors,” his decorative “wry comments on mechanical details, exposed industrial materials, muscular massing, top-heavy loading, dizzying compositional juxtapositions” soon became too much exuberance for an age of rising restraint. Furness not only grew out of style, he grew to be despised—and demolished. “He  was  for  all practical  purposes consigned to  the junk  heap of history for  the  first  half  of  the  twentieth century, wrote Ian Quimby, because he embodied the worst of Victorian excess in the eyes of modernists.”

One early 20th-century critic wrote off Furness’s buildings as “the low-water mark in American architecture.” Another damned his work as a corrupting influence, citing the Provident Life and Trust Building for “meretricious ugliness.” Robert Venturi remembered “loving to hate those squat columns as my father drove me past the Provident Life and Trust Company on Chestnut Street in the thirties”–not long before its demise. No matter that this building and the nearby National Bank of the Republic were two of Philadelphia’s most interesting, most compelling structures. Public opinion had swung against “strident individualism” and the kind of “directness of expression” that would later come to define the best architecture of the late 20th century. No matter, as Lewis put it, that Furness “aspired to truth as much as beauty.”  No matter that Venturi and others would soon find Furness’ forms “tense with a feeling of life and reality” and develop an “absolute unrestrained adoration and respect for this work.” In mid-20th century Philadelphia, the days of buildings audacious enough to “echo mannerism and predict postmodernism”—buildings that fit “somewhere between Michelangelo and Michael Graves”—were numbered.

But the days when Furness’ ideas and the memory of his masterpieces, both extinguished and extant, mean something are not numbered—nor will they ever be again. We now know what Furness achieved. Like Walt Whitman, “he turned the process around.” Writes Lewis: he “looked for the poetry in the vital forces of the modern age, and sought the flower in the machine.”

A century later, Philadelphians find confidence in the truth and a healthy appetite for such poetry. Today we celebrate the genius of Frank Furness.

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Landmark or Not: The Musical Fund Hall is a Site of Conscience

The Musical Fund Hall, 808 Locust St. Designed in 1824 by William Strickland, renovated in 1847 by Napoleon LeBrun and again by Addison Hutton in 1891.

Philadelphia’s got a raft of National Historic Landmarks, the crème de la crème of historic sites. The list is long here: 65 in all, from Independence Hall to Eastern State Penitentiary to the John Coltrane House. And it would have been longer had the National Park Service let stand their original, 1974 ruling in favor of the Musical Fund Hall. But they didn’t, and it isn’t. In 1989, shortly after developers converted the hall’s auditorium into condominiums, the feds withdrew the coveted designation. In America’s most historic city, the Musical Fund Hall is the only site to hold such a dubious distinction.

No matter. Violated or not, this building stands as a genuine American site of conscience, and that’s something that can’t be taken away. Sure, the building was home to one of the nation’s earliest musical organizations and the preferred performance venue of soloists including Jenny Lind (“The Swedish Nightingale”), lecturers including Charles Dickens and political events including the first Republican National Convention. Maybe we’ve been spoiled, jaded even: in a city chock full of the past, this seems like everyday history. What makes us want to take a good, hard, second look at the Musical Fund Hall is an account revealed by Scott Gac in a book entitled Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform.

The New Hampshire -based Hutchinson Family performed 12,000 concerts across the United States and abroad, effectively morphing abolitionism into popular culture. In their concerts, the Hutchinson’s performed original and provocative songs, including Get Off The Track of 1844 which warns: “Jump for your lives! Politicians, / From your dangerous false positions.” (Listen here.) Wherever they went, the Hutchinsons attracted a large following, and an interracial one.

Three years after their first popular performances in Philadelphia and a few months after their successful tour in England (with their friend Frederick Douglass) the Hutchinsons returned in the Spring of 1847. After several performances before “amalgamated” audiences at the Musical Fund Hall, Philadelphia Mayor John Swift stepped in and demanded the singing stop. (This is the same Mayor Swift who was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to stop rioters who destroyed the Abolitionist’s new Pennsylvania Hall in 1838.) Swift assured Musical Fund Hall management that more shows would certainly result in rioting there, too. Starting immediately, the Hutchinsons (and all future lessees) had to agree to two conditions: “That no Anti-Slavery lecture shall be delivered” and” That no colored person may form a portion of any audience.”

Silence followed. No riot. No performance. “The Hutchinson Family Singers refused to play for white patrons alone,” writes Gac. Never again would America’s original group of protest singers hear applause in the City of Brotherly Love. Never again would Philadelphians hear the Hutchinsons’ sing:”Men of various predilections, / Frightened, run in all directions / Merchants, Editors, Physicians, / Lawyers, Priests and Politicians. / Get Out of the Way! Get Out of the Way! / Get Out of the Way! Every station / Clear the track of ‘mancipation.

But a dozen years before the Civil War and 15 years before Black and White together, fifteen years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Philadelphians did hear, and rejoice in these prophetic lines – at the Musical Fund Hall.

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Frankford’s Fate in Post-Industrial Philadelphia

Well-intentioned officials pose at the start of the flood mitigation project on Frankford Creek in 1950.

Once upon a time it didn’t matter that the Frankford Creek flooded. But that was before people lived and worked in Frankford Creek’s flood plain.

Then Frankford got its mills and its mill workers, thousands of them. Overwhelmingly, these were textile mills built during the 19th century with immigrant know-how and operated by immigrant labor. Frankforders combed, carded, spun, winded, wove, warped, bleached, dyed, starched and produced. First came woolen blankets and calico printing, then felt, then carpet, and more. In the 1820s, at least eight textile firms operated in or near Frankford. By mid-century, thirty mills produced textiles in Frankford. By the 1890s, there were no fewer than 38 employing more than 3,100 workers. Several mills were situated squarely in the floodplain.

Just about every year and ofttimes many  more, floods threated the health and welfare of Frankford’s citizens and impeded the productivity of its mills. At the turn of the 20th century, the Pennsylvania Department of Health took a hard look at the situation, realized that “Frankford Creek is in a foul and insanitary condition” and something had to be done. Harrisburg officials agreed to consider a “comprehensive sewage plan for the collection and disposal of the sewage of the entire Frankford Creek drainage district.”

Those were dry times, in 1912, when a city photographer made this charming view from Powder Mill Road past the perennially water-logged Frogmoor Street down to Frankford Creek. The early round of improvements had been made, but proved not aggressive enough. In 1946, another study found that “in 17 years only three years passed without flood damage.” Something serious had to be done.

This time, City Fathers took more drastic measures. In 1950, they chose to widen the path of the creek, forfeit any hope of the reestablishing natural banks and build a dedicated, concrete channel. The idea was to relieve the drainage problem, protect the water supply and enable unfettered production in the mills.

North Wall at Tremont Mills before modification.

The Fates had other ideas. From the mid-20th century and into the 21st, manufacturing employment in Philadelphia tumbled from 365,500 jobs to 29,800. (And that was before the Great Recession.) Just as the Frankford Creek was being transformed into the Frankford channel, mill owners were starting to abandon Frankford’s century-and-a-half tradition in textiles. Victims of the global economy, Frogmoor Mills, Frankford Hosiery, Frankford Dye Works, and Hughes Spool Cotton, La France Textile, and others sold, left town, or simply shut down. The oldest building at Tremont Mills (and possibly the first textile mill in Frankford: Samuel Pilling’s Calico Print & Dye Works of the 1820s ) was still in operation. As the city widened Wingahocking Street during the flood mitigation project someone thought to document and preserve, rather than demolish, Tremont’s (and possibly Frankford’s) oldest mill . At least two-thirds of it, anyway.

More than sixty years later, the abbreviated ruins of Tremont await their fate, boarded up above, biding time as a car parts shop, below. And like the picturesque ruins of Rome, Tremont is a survivor with a growing and appreciative following.

The time is right. Tremont is one of ten structures and the only mill in Frankford recommended for historic designation in the Philadelphia’s 2035 District Plan for the Lower Northeast. The Draft Plan was released for public comment on August 21. And the comment period ends October 1st. Now’s the time to speak up and secure Frankford’s post-industrial fate.