Categories
Uncategorized

A Philadelphia Quaker and Fabric Row

Clement Acton Griscom, as painted by Fedor Encke, 1899. Cecilia Beaux painted a portrait of his wife and daughter at about the same time. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

“He is genial, yet you take no advantage of it; he is kindly, but his eyes can grow hard upon necessity,” said one journalist about Philadelphia mover-and-shaker Clement Acton Griscom (1841-1912), the most powerful shipping mogul in 1900s America.

Clement Griscom was a birthright Quaker, but plain he most definitely was not.  He dressed in the finest English fashion — “kid gloves and an English cutaway” — and drank champagne with every lunch.  He lived in a Frank Furness-designed mansion in Haverford, Pennsylvania.  Related by marriage to the painter Celicia Beaux, he cut a big swath in Philadelphia’s business and social worlds. Yet Griscom was always something of a rebel, despite his solid place in the Philadelphia establishment.  He refused to go to college and become a doctor or a lawyer, preferring to enter the rough-and-tumble world of international shipping. Griscom loved making money and the good life his success brought him, but his real passion was to restore the dominance that American shipping had possessed in the years before the Civil War, when sailing packets and clippers flying the Stars and Stripes ruled the waves.  Yet in the age of steam, America fell behind its longtime rival Great Britain.

Clement Griscom was a member of many Philadelphia clubs, including the Rittenhouse Club at 1811 Walnut Street, on the north side of Rittenhouse Square. His favorite architect Frank Furness was also a member.

After putting in his time as a shipping clerk and office administrator, he partnered with the Rockefellers and the Pennsylvania Railroad to build four large steamships — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana — to carry cargo, passengers and petroleum to European markets. Yet Griscom had a hard time making his American shipping business pay.  High American labor and construction costs — as well as cumbersome congressional regulation —  made his International Navigation Company unprofitable, and it only survived thanks to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s erratic support.

The Pier 53/Washington Avenue Immigration Station on the Delaware River, December 29, 1919.

In 1871, Griscom shrewdly struck a deal with the Belgian government and founded an Antwerp-based subsidiary of his company.  The Red Star Line — supported by a $100,000 annual subsidy from the Belgians — allowed Griscom not only to build ships in European yards, but also to tap into the endless tide of immigrants fleeing Central and Eastern Europe.  As a port, Antwerp enjoyed extensive rail connections with the rest of Europe, and allowed Griscom’s ships to compete head-on with the German ones in transporting people to new lives in America.  Tens of thousands of Jews fleeing czarist pograms found their way to Philadelphia (as opposed to New York and Baltimore) by way of Antwerp and the Red Star Line.  Because of its proximity to the immigration processing station, South Philadelphia (east of Broad) had one of the largest Jewish populations in America, second in fact only to New York’s teeming Lower East Side.  According to the National Archives, “Some authorities have credited the Red Star Line for more than 40% of this Jewish immigration that came to North America between 1873 – 1934.”  For a $25 steerage berth in the bottom decks of a Red Star liner, immigrants usually spent their life savings and sold most of their possessions.

From the shtetl to South Street. The intersection of South and S.7th Streets in 1964. The Red Star Line brought tens of thousands of immigrants to Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of them settled in South Philadelphia, which became the second most populous Jewish neighborhood in America. Many Jewish immigrants worked in the garment industry, which centered on South Seventh Street, known as “Fabric Row.”
South Street between 7th and 8th Streets, c.1950. The Slifkin store was owned by the same family referenced in the article “Parkside Revisited: The Slifkin Family,” dated June 18, 2012.

Griscom’s involvement in the lucrative immigrant trade allowed him to build larger and faster ships, and increased his fortune many fold.  By the 1880s, he had taken over England’s moribund Inman Line and commissioned the two largest and fastest transatlantic liners in the world: the City of New York and City of Paris of 1889.  A few years later, Griscom and his allies strong-armed Congress into allowing these British-built ships to be registered under the American flag.  For the first time since the 1850s, American now was in possession of the fastest liners on the North Atlantic route.  He also used his influence to get a substantial mail subsidy for these two ships, as well as assistance for the construction of two new ones — the St. Louis and St. Paul — at Philadelphia’s Cramp Shipyard.

In addition to Cramps, Griscom also turned to the experienced (and cheaper) shipwrights of Harland & Wolff, located in the religiously explosive cauldron of Belfast, Ireland.  He admired the company’s ability to create solid but yacht-like liners that emphasized comfort and fuel-economy rather than breakneck speed.  In the 1890s and early 1900s, Harland & Wolff of Belfast and Cramps of Philadelphia turned out a superior series of moderate-sized liners for Griscom’s companies. These included the SS Kroonland, SS Lapland, SS Finland, and SS Belgenland. Yet by 1900, most of the Red Star Line’s ships sailed out of New York on their crossings to Antwerp.  Two smaller liners, the aptly-named SS Haverford and SS Merion, continued transatlantic passenger service out of Philadelphia.  Despite Philadelphia’s reputation as an industrial powerhouse, New York was attracting the lion’s share of European immigrants. Compared to the baroque grandeur of the U.S. Immigration Station at Ellis Island, the Washington Avenue facility was quite modest.

As his success continued to build, Griscom become more obsessed with passenger ship design.  Fueled by the desire to enlist “the art and skill of the most masterful minds,” Griscom was elected the first president of the American Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (S.N.A.M.E.), the first professional organization of its type in the United States.

Yet Griscom’s winning streak vanished when he partnered with his friend J.P. Morgan in an effort to gain a monopoly of all ships on the transatlantic route.  In 1901, Morgan and Griscom started cajoling — or threatening — major British, German, and French shipping lines into accepting buy-outs in exchange for joining a massive shipping trust called the International Mercantile Marine.  What the Pennsylvania did for the railroads, Griscom hoped the I.M.M. would do for Atlantic shipping: eliminate unnecessary competition with an efficiently-run trust that gave the traveling public and exporters regularly-scheduled fares and departures.

The SS “Merion.” Built in 1902, she and her sistership SS “Haverford” sailed the Liverpool to Philadelphia route. Small compared to other passenger ships of the period, she could carry 150 in second class and 1,700 in steerage. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Cunard fought off IMM’s advances.  As did the French Line.  North German Lloyd and Hamburg-America made profit-sharing agreements with the combine. Yet Griscom and Morgan’s biggest coup was snapping up Britain’s White Star Line for a whopping $32 million. Yet they had bitten more than they could chew; the trust floundered as a result of continuing rate wars and coal strikes, as well as a slump in immigration due to the Panic of 1907. Both men would regret investing millions more dollars in the construction of three White Star superliners at Harland & Wolff.  One sideswiped an iceberg, killing 1,500 passengers and crew.  Another, His Majesty’s Hospital Ship Britannic, capsized after hitting a mine off the coast of Greece during World War I.  Her sinking claimed 30 lives.  Only the RMS Olympic died in bed — she was scrapped in 1935.

The first class lounge of the Red Star Line’s SS “Lapland,” completed by Harland & Wolff in 1909. Griscom and Morgan greatly admired the Irish shipyard’s work. Building ships in foreign yards was also cheaper than in American yards like Philadelphia’s Cramp. The grandeur of the “Lapland’s” first class quarters contrast with the steerage quarters, which were cramped, rank, and dark. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Griscom died of a stroke at his South Carolina winter home in the fall of 1912. Although Griscom’s health had been failing for years, many felt his death was  hasted by the Titanic disaster. Morgan passed away the following year.  “The ocean was too big for the old man,” The Wall Street Journal eulogized.

The Red Star Line ceased passenger operations in the 1930s, a victim of the Great Depression, as well as strict American immigration quotas that effectively barred people from Southern and Eastern Europe from America’s shores.

For more information, see the Red Star Line Museum, which is scheduled to open in Antwerp this year.

Sources:

Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians (University of Pennsylvania Press), 1999. p.253.

Charles Cramp, as quoted by Cramp’s Shipyard (Philadelphia: The William Cramp and Sons Ship and Engine Building Company) 1902, p.128.

William H. Flayhart III, The American Line: 1871-1902 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company) 2000, p.65.

Stephen Fox, Transatlantic (New York: Harper Collins), 2003, p.259, 267.

“The Red Star Line: Changing America’s Face and Place in the World,” The National Archives at Philadelphia. http://www.archives.gov/philadelphia/public/red-star-line/index.html

 

Categories
Uncategorized

An Expressive Gateway at Broad and Fairmount

Broad Street, Ridge Avenue and Fairmount Avenue, 1892. (PhillyHistory.org)

Broad and Fairmount is no ordinary intersection. Look at the five vistas it offers: toward Center City or North Philadelphia, up Ridge Avenue or down or out toward Fairmount, and it’s clear: this is a gateway with a grand, if gritty, sense of self.

This is s an equal-opportunity provider, Broad and Fairmount is, offering a sense of place with a complex choice of message. It lets you know where you’ve been and where you’re headed. It’s a place that favors the public even more than it accommodates the private, something we’re inclined to forget with all of our recent focus on the proposed Divine Lorraine Hotel development project.

Consider the sheer longevity of Broad and Fairmount as a public place. Generations before Ridge Road was upgraded to Ridge Avenue and Plumstead Lane shed its country airs and became Fairmount Avenue, Philadelphians knew this intersection. Broad Street was still a half-mile the south, contained in its original grid. What a revelation, it must have been, when the rutted road that would become Broad Street ventured a mile north from Center Square and connected so neatly here, making a six-point intersection.

By the 1860s and 1870s, as the city continued on its decades-long tear building 100,000 rowhouses, Broad and Fairmount served as a hub for the construction trades. (See our earlier post on the rowhouse as the “quintessential object of industrial Philadelphia.”) Broad and Fairmount supplied building crews throughout North Philadelphia with whatever they might need: lumber, brick, marble, iron and coal. Here, precisely a mile north of the rising white-marble City Hall, Broad Street became a boulevard straighter, prouder and more urban than the old country roads ever could. And as North Philadelphia grew, the marble yards were replaced with homes, schools, churches, synagogues, clubs and hotels —buildings of the new bourgeoisie. Of course, to finance it all the new Broad Street Bourgeoisie also needed banks. These became as essential, even more so, than any other institution.

American Trust Loan and Guaranteed Investment Company, 648 North Broad Street, ca. 1895. Frank H. Taylor, photographer. (Free Library of Philadelphia)

The American Trust Loan and Guaranteed Investment Company, built at Broad and Ridge in 1890, wasn’t supposed to look like an ordinary bank. Architects Louis C. Baker and Elijah James Dallett had worked with Frank Furness, the most individualistic and eccentric of 19th-century bank architects. And when they went out on their own at the peak of the Broad Street boom, they brought with them an appetite for expression and innovation. No surprise then, as this building was finished, the American Architect and Building News gave it a full-page illustration.

The American Trust and Saving Fund greeted arrivals from all directions with engaging overstatement. Above was a bell tower and a roof line of stone columns. Below, rusticated brownstone arches set apart by masonry checkerboards held half-lunette windows proclaiming the golden words: “Bank,” “Bank,” “Bank.”  The architects wrapped the institution’s expansive name around its entire angled façade in giant, sans-serif letters. Plate glass windows proclaimed in gold: “Money for Homes on the Installment Plan.” Baker and Dallett designed more than a bank; they created a billboard for banking.

Today, the American Trust Loan and Guaranteed Investment Company is still living out its mission as both medium and message. The bell tower is gone, but the building is covered with billboards and advertising. And before the billboards, which date back to at least the 1940s, this building always prominently communicated whatever it offered the community: hardware, auto supplies, ice cream. This commitment to messaging confirms the psychology of this strategic intersection and validates the bank in its civic role as narrator of public space.

This communicative role is catching. It played out across Broad Street, where the owners of the Lorraine Hotel recognized the opportunity to proclaim its presence with prominent rooftop signage. And more recently, graffiti artists embraced and compounded the same idea. One day, the graffiti will be gone and the Divine Lorraine’s giant red-neon letters will be re-lit. But for that signage to make sense— for this place to make sense—we need to understand it as part of the venerable, gritty and glorious gateway that is Broad and Fairmount.

Categories
Uncategorized

Kahn’s Kind of Skyline

Cherry Street Chimney Grouping from Rear of 120. Carollo R. Widdop, April 9, 1931. (PhillyHistory.org)

On a sharp, clear summer evening in 1973, I found myself walking up 10th Street with Louis Kahn, listening to the architect talk about his city. Just before we approached Spruce, Kahn pointed above a one-story Laundromat on the west side of the street. There, a cluster of brick chimneys profiled against the western sky rearranged itself as we walked, accommodating every step with a fresh perspective. Before we passed by the last of these views, Kahn declared: “That is what a city should look like.”

I stared in silence. And every time I’ve passed by since, I stare again. In fact, any time I see a cluster of red-brick chimneys in this city of brick chimneys, I ask myself: What did Kahn mean?

We kept walking north, crossing Spruce, and Kahn’s tone about the city became less complimentary. Tenth Street is not really a street at all, he said, but a road. This time, I had the presence of mind to ask what he meant and Kahn explained: The traffic barreling by was a disconnecting force. Vehicles traveling from one distant, unrelated place to another added nothing to the life of this place, this community. In fact, they diminished it—and our experience there. That, he might have said, is what a city should not look like.

Actually, he did say that. “The street is a room of agreement,” Kahn said in his famous speech two years earlier, when he received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. “The street is dedicated by each house owner to the city in exchange for common services. … Through-streets, since the advent of the automobile, have entirely lost their room quality. I believe,” he continued, “that city planning can start with realization of this loss by directing the drive to reinstate the street where people live, learn, shop and work as the room of the community.”

Above the Laundromat on Tenth Street, South of Spruce Street in 2010. (Ken Finkel)

In his lifetime, Kahn had witnessed how the automobile had nourished, but also had ravaged the city. And now he believed that the very idea of the city street was at risk. “A city is measured by the character of its institutions…the street is one of its first… Today, these institutions are on trial…they have lost the inspirations of their beginning.” To this day, walking along that stretch of storefronts on 10th Street between Spruce and Locust, you can feel the tension; you can sense the loss.

In less than one city block, we had seen the best and worst of the city.

Decades later, the chimneys still appear to be in a silent dance with one another. There’s still as much life above those rooftops as there ever was. Maybe that’s what Kahn was telling me that day. If liveliness above the rooftops isn’t matched by life on the street, the city has failed.

A living city needs both: a dance above and below. It’s about life, movement, form and synchronicity up there, but we also need it down here. That is what a city should look like.

Categories
Uncategorized

A Philadelphia Zelig

John McAllister, Jr. posing outside the family business at 48 Chestnut Street. Detail of Daguerreotype by William G. Mason, June 17, 1843. (The Library of Congress)
John McAllister, Jr. May 6, 1840, by Robert Cornelius. The first daguerreotype sold in Philadelphia. (The Library of Congress)

New technology breeds new characters. Space travel, for instance, brought us super pilots who have “the right stuff.” Railroading created the conductor and the hobo. Digital technology gave us garage entrepreneurs and hackers. And when we go back to the origins of the telescope we find discoverers and heretics.

Photography expanded the human repertoire with the ham, the camera hog, or as Woody Allen would later depict it, the Zelig character. In 1839, when news of the daguerreotype’s ability to depict as-is reality arrived from Paris, it wasn’t at all clear what a camera hog should act like, or what this person might look like. In that brief, rare, uncompetitive moment of pre-photographic history, the notion of being the most-photographed held uncertain value. Anyone could step in to seek the uncontested title.

Who would enter this lopsided contest and become Philadelphia’s first camera hog?

The sole-entrant and hands-down winner was John McAlllister, Jr. (1786-1877), a son of Scottish immigrants born in Philadelphia more than half a century before anyone had heard of a daguerreotype. McAllister’s appetite for his own reflection had been whetted when Anna Claypoole Peale painted a miniature in 1817. (You can see it, online, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) By then, McAllister had taken over the family establishment on Chestnut Street, a business that specialized in whips and canes but had made a brilliant strategic segue to spectacles. The McAllisters claimed Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of bi-focals, as their company logo. In time, they’d mount a gilded bust of Franklin over the store entrance and built a solid reputation for quality and innovation.

John McAllister, Jr.’s family business, 48 Chestnut Street, after a daguerreotype by William G Mason, 1843. (FLP/PhillyHistory.org)
John McAllister, Jr. on the roof of 48 Chestnut Street. Daguerreotype by William Y. McAllister, 1843. (The Library of Congress)

By the dawn of the photographic age, McAllister also had a deeply cultivated respect for posterity. He had, as John Fanning Watson, wrote, “a strong liking for local antiquities [and] devoted himself to the collections of a library rich in works of all kinds, but particularly… old newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, essays, etc. connected with the history of Philadelphia.” As wonderfully authentic and evocative as these treasures were for McAllister, they paled in comparison with the stark honesty of the daguerreotype. These simply overwhelmed the imagination. History had nothing quite so potent to share.

If the past couldn’t be frozen in time in daguerreotypes, McAllister was bound and determined to make sure the present would be. The present, McAllister knew, would fast become history. And the business was well positioned as suppliers for the growing daguerreotype market. By 1856, Philadelphia would have more than 100 studios; the McAllisters knew them all.

In the Spring of 1840, when McAllister learned Robert Cornelius was getting ready to open the first portrait studio on Eighth Street, he made certain to be Cornelius’ first customer. Before most Philadelphians sat before a lens one time, McAllister had completed dozens of sittings. Any reason would do. The classic Chestnut Street storefront is being replaced with modern plate-glass? McAllister poses in front of his father’s paned window with top hat and cane. A new shipment of daguerreotype lenses and plates arrives? McAllister’s poses on the roof in a test image. No event, family or business, no new technology would be introduced without McAllister making another appearance before the camera. As his hair grew longer and his sideburns grew wilder (this was not a contest of vanity) McAllister would visit studio after studio. And when he ran out of photographers to visit, he had them come visit him at home, both homes, for that matter.

John McAllister, Jr. at home, 14 N. Merrick Street, facing Penn Sq., March 1, 1860. Photograph by Frederick DeBourg Richards. (The Library Company of Philadelphia/PhillyHistory.org)
John McAllister, Jr., ca. 1860, attr. to William and Frederick Langenheim. (The Library Company of Philadelphia.)

Fueled by success, the business moved to larger quarters at 728 Chestnut Street, In the last days of 1854, McAllister took one last opportunity to gather family and loyal employees to pose one last time. After the new shop opened, McAllister arranged himself among a collection of globes, astronomical models, and other scientific knickknacks as the centerpiece, the sole human specimen. This collector of historical stuff knew full well that we—the inhabitants of the deep future—would be looking at him, and looking after him for posterity. McAllister bet on what he knew as basic antiquarian logic: the winning collector is the one who is himself collected.

Photography offered McAllister excellent odds. And a century and a half later, we can see he clearly won his bet. McAllister came out ahead at the Library of Congress, at the Library Company of Philadelphia, at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, and, of course, here at PhillyHistory.org.