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The Cannonball House: Beyond Preservation Purgatory

The Cannonball House in the way at the Southwest Treatment Plant. July 18, 1956. (PhillyHistory.org)
Detail of the Lower Schuylkill from Thomas Holme’s map of Pennsylvania, 1687. (The Library of Congress)

Peter Cock couldn’t have picked a more off-the-beaten track location for his farmhouse. In the 1680s, and for a long time after, nobody coveted the swampy rise that broke the horizon near the Schuylkill as it meandered to the Delaware. Why would they? With so much rich, dry land in every direction and with William Penn’s ambitious “green Country Town” drawing folks six miles upstream, these brackish bogs were, literally, a Swedish-settler’s happy backwater. But the site proved good for farming, and provided well enough for the next owner to expand the farmhouse. That brick house stood quiet and alone for the better part of the 18th century.

Then all hell broke loose on the lower Schuylkill.

With the American Revolution in high gear and the British occupation of Philadelphia underway, control of the city’s port meant that the British would need to take the American-controlled fort built downriver at Mud Island, just below the mouth of the Schuylkill. At Fort Mifflin, as the installation would become known, several hundred American troops were garrisoned. And for weeks they foiled British attempts to reach the city by river. In a siege that would be the largest the largest bombardment of the Revolutionary War, six British ships bristling with 209 cannon would overwhelm the American’s ten. Over five days with an estimated 10,000 cannonballs flying, the fens of the Schuylkill were quiet no more.

Nor were they safe. On November 11th, at the start of the siege, a cannonball entered the rear wall of the old farmhouse, passed through and exited the front wall. From that day forward, old Swedish farmhouse would carry a new name: the Cannonball House.

And for the next 219 years, the Cannonball House, a survivor that would eventually come to be considered the oldest house in Philadelphia, would be treated with veneration, deference, and respect. Artists would sketch it; antiquarians would photograph it; and the Historic American Buildings Survey would document it.

By the start of the 20th century, as the city’s population expanded and its farmland shrunk, the now city-owned Cannonball House served as a “model farm” until the demand for sewage treatment overwhelmed the need for demonstrative agriculture. And the Cannonball House quietly accommodated as the Southwest Treatment Plant enveloped it. When operations started in December 1954, 100 million gallons of sludge passed through each and every day.

As the bicentennials of the battle of Fort Mifflin and the birth of the nation approached (and the 1950s sewage plant grew creaky) Philadelphia’s oldest house became its newest problem. Expansion demanded more land. “I wish the British had done a better job,” the Water Commissioner confided to a reporter.

The Cannonball House in preservation purgatory, September 3, 1976. (PhillyHistory.org)

In 1974, the Philadelphia Historical Commission decided that the Cannonball House wasn’t important enough to be listed on the National Register. But it was too important to be demolished. The Commission urged it be moved to a new site across from the entrance to Fort Mifflin. And in 1975, the main section of the Cannonball House was lifted from its foundations and wheeled slowly down the road. The Environmental Protection Agency, expecting local follow through to finish the job, picked up the $168,000 tab. And for next 21 years, the Cannonball House was a house without a home in preservation purgatory. And Fort Mifflin had a historic headache in its would-be parking lot.

In this uprooted state, deteriorated and on temporary cribbing, the orphaned Cannonball House was unable to charm its way into even the preservation-inclined heart of Inquirer’s architecture critic, Thomas Hine, who put it in December 1981: the “Cannon Ball Farm House has little claim to our minds and hearts…it requires some bravery to choose to forget it.”

Forgetting would take place, but it wouldn’t be brave. One day, in November 1996, what the British didn’t do, what sewage engineers wouldn’t do, the city, in violation of its own review requirements, did do. They demolished the Cannonball House. Raw sewage got treated; historic preservation got mistreated; and Fort Mifflin got its parking lot.

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Neighborhoods Uncategorized

1601 Locust Street and “The Perfect Square”

The Daniel Baugh mansion, designed by Hazelhurst & Huckel, 1900. Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church is in the background.

The imposing Daniel Baugh mansion, which once stood on the northwest corner of 16th and Locust, was one of dozens of grand residences built to last the ages but only lasted a few decades.  Its ephemeral presence is a contradiction: perhaps no American city is more conscious of its past and traditions.  Yet at the same time, Philadelphia could be just as quick as New York to destroy its architectural treasures.

The mansion, designed by Hazelhurst & Huckel, was completed in 1891.  Designed by the same firm responsible for Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, the Baugh mansion was a defiant rebellion against the brick-and-brownstone sobriety of its buttoned-up neighbors.  Its rounded turrets broke the square outlines of the Locust street scape, and let plenty of light flood into its upper-floor rooms. (As a comparison, it closely resembles the still-extant Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., built about ten years later).

A native of Downingtown, Daniel Baugh (1836-1921) was one of those lucky Civil War veterans who returned from the killing fields of Virginia and found that the post-bellum Quaker City was the perfect place to make another kind of killing.  The war had been a boon to Northern manufacturers, and Baugh & Sons Company — a producer of chemical fertilizers located on the Delaware River — was no exception. A sampling from Baugh’s products in 1915 includes Excelsior Guano, High Grade Potato Grower, Export Bone with Potash, and “The Old Stand-By” (Dissolved Animal Base).  Factories like Baugh’s produced tens of thousands of jobs, but they were also noxious and dangerous by today’s labor and environmental standards.  Wealth from the toil and smoke of Pennsylvania’s factories, shipyards, steel mills, and coal fields flowed like a churning river into the placid reservoir that was “The Square.”  Rittenhouse Square was so sedate and proper that residents even complained about the tolling of the bells at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.  The novelist Henry James, who wrote in Portrait of a Lady that “there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea,” rather smugly described the gated greenspace as “the perfect square.”

The contrast could not be starker.

Daniel Baugh, president of Baugh & Sons, was typical of the residents of Rittenhouse Square during its late 19th century glory.  The author of King’s Views of Philadelphia wrote of his residence in 1900: “Extremely and internally one of the finest of Philadelphia residences is that of Daniel Baugh, manufacturer of chemicals and fertilizers, director of many financial and philanthropic institutions, ex-president of the Art Club, ex-president of the Girard National Bank, director Commercial Museum, etc.”  For men like Baugh, their social, civic, and business energies were solidly focused in Center City.

Yet as Rittenhouse Square peaked in the 1890s, forces were already underway that ultimately would gut it.  Baugh’s house was one of the finest in the city, but he had also established a country residence in the Main Line suburb of Merion around the same time.  Baugh was simply following the lead of Pennsylvania Railroad executives, ordered by their employer to build homes there.  The Pennsylvania Railroad, at the time the largest corporation in the city, profited handsomely from this exodus, as they were the primary developers of the Main Line suburbs. By 1921, when Baugh died of a heart at attack while wintering at The Breakers in Palm Beach, the leafy, secluded suburbs had triumphed over the grandiose, visible Rittenhouse Square.  Private schools and other social institutions had followed suit.  A few years after Baugh’s death, his enormous mansion came tumbling down and was replaced by the high-rise University Club.  His house, which must have given the wreckers a hard time, lasted for a mere quarter-of-a-century.

In one respect, Philadelphia was ahead of its time: with the help of the railroad, the upper-classes had largely vacated Center City before the Great Depression. Detroit, which embraced the automobile with gusto around the same time, experienced a similar exodus of the affluent.   In New York, by contrast, saw an residential explosion on the Upper West Side and Park Avenue. With the rise of the expressway and the suburban office park in the 1950s, that trend only accelerated not just in Philadelphia, but was put into rapid motion in older cities across the nation.  The city’s post-World War II tax structure exacerbated the problem.  Many of the Philadelphia’s traditional social, business, and cultural institutions suffered as a result.

The stubborn city-suburb divide continues to plague Philadelphia to this day, although in recent years the city’s cultural resurgence has steadily drawn suburban residents back into Center City in general and Rittenhouse Square in particular. Although most of the large mansions like Baugh’s have disappeared, the area is still blessed with a treasure-trove of brownstones and brick townhouses on Spruce, Pine, and Delancey.  These houses survive because most of them have remained viable as rental apartments rather than single family homes.

The Baugh & Sons Company plant on the Delaware River, like the mansion it paid for, is a distant memory. So too is the iron fence that once shielded Henry James’s “perfect square” from the general public who now enjoys it today.

Baugh & Sons Company warehouse, S. Columbus Boulevard and Morris Street, 1958.

Sources:

King’s Views of Philadelphia, 1900.

http://www.brynmawr.edu/iconog/king/main5.html

Obituary: Tuesday, 1 March 1921, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, PA, Volume 184, Issue 60, Page 13,1, Column 1.

List of Fertilizer Manufacturers and Importers and Brands of Their Fertilizers for Which License to Sell in Pennsylvania During 1915 was Taken Out Prior to February 26, 1915, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1915, p.11

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Events and People

If Rudolph Koenig Attended the Philadelphia Science Festival & Philly Tech Week


Rudolph Koenig’s full “Philosophical Apparatus” demonstrated
at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.

The Philadelphia Science Festival and Philly Tech Week 2013 presented by AT&T both return this week, for their coinciding 10-day-long homage to the thriving science and technology communities in Philadelphia. But Philadelphia’s excitement about new, sometimes oddball technology has precedent that reaches at least as far back as Ben Franklin and includes staples of our daily lives like the wired telephone.

So in honor of the more than 200 events taking place through the end of April, we decided to think back on who we might resurrect from the annals of history to attend these events and decided on a pretty unconventional figure; a Parisian, no less: (Karl) Rudolph Koenig (1832-1901).

Koenig, who is no Philadelphian, certainly seems an unlikely candidate. Originally from Koenigsburg, Prussia (now part of Russia), he made his career in Paris inventing musical oddities and theorizing about the science of acoustics. In addition to his acoustical research contributions, Koenig was best known for his finely crafted tuning forks and for creating a manometric flame and rotating mirror which proved that fire would follow the rise and fall of musical sound waves.


The siren “Telephone” component of the Koenig’s exhibit.

Koenig first came to Philadelphia for the international Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876. There, Rudolph Koenig showed off a strange acoustical item called the “Philosophical Apparatus” (top). Part of the machine, a siren, was dubbed the “Telephone” and is pictured at left.

Another piece of the apparatus was a tonometer made of more than 600 tuning forks. While the object in the picture doesn’t look like anything most of us would call a phone, the jury was reportedly so taken with entirety of his creation, that one judge commented:

There is no other [exhibit] in the present International Exhibition which surpasses it in scientific interest.

Koenig claimed a gold medal at the Exhibition for his work.

Some reports indicate that the University of Pennsylvania might have been interested in purchasing the entire apparatus Koenig exhibited, however most sources note he struggled to sell his work in the United States and returned to Paris after the Centennial a bit put off. He did eventually sell the tonometer  to the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Incidentally, Alexander Graham Bell was also at the international Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition that year, exhibiting his recently patented and ultimately more famous telephone.

With his passion for audio and penchant for invention, it seems like Koenig could make a strong showing at a PTW mobile hackathon, were it not for more than 100 years of technological advances in the way we record and transmit sound. Still, given the plethora of audio-oriented applications that will undoubtedly be demonstrated throughout the course of PTW, it seems likely that Koenig and his accoustic apparati could quickly fit right in.

References:

http://si-pddr.si.edu/jspui/bitstream/10088/2430/2/SSHT-0031_Lo_res.pdf

http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/people/data?id=per325

http://sciencetech.technomuses.ca/english/collection/sound_analyser.cfm

http://acousticalsociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/echoes/v9n2.pdf

Torben Rees, ‘Rudolph Koenig: the pursuit of acoustic perfection’, Explore Whipple Collections, Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge, 2009 [http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/explore/acoustics/rudolphkoenig/, accessed 24 March 2013]

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Silent Film; Outspoken Posters: When “The Sea Hawk” Came from Hollywood

Ludlow Street looking west from 20th, June 26, 1924. (PhillyHistory.org)
Click image for a clip of “The Sea Hawk.”

In 1967, when the late Roger Ebert was named film critic for The Chicago Tribune, he imagined rather large shoes to fill. After all—as he related the story in his 2011 autobiography, Life Itself: A Memoir—everyone at The Tribune and in Chicago, for that matter, knew reviews had been published under the byline Mae Tinee since 1915.

In 1915, when Hollywood released The Sea Hawk, the silent film directed by Frank Lloyd and based on an adventure novel by Raphael Sabatini, Mae Tinee had been on the beat for nearly a decade. By the time Ebert had been on the job that long, he had won a Pulitzer. Was it thumbs up for The Sea Hawk from his seasoned predecessor?

The Sea Hawk is more than just a motion picture!,” Tinee declared in a review of July 1, 1924. “It is the dream of the tired business man; it is the fiery secret ambition of romantic youth. It carries the wistful passion that, carefully concealed, lives in most of us—to be gorgeous, spectacular, abused, talked about with baited breath—a creature dominating a world of winds and waters and clothes that never, never came from the shops of “what men wear.” (Or women, either.)” It’s a “love story” of “a noble brother; weakling half-brother; pirate ships, duels, intrigue” presented “in kaleidoscopic fashion to the sway of music that warms the blood….”

“You may work at a regular job for a living,” added Mae Tinee, “but once inside this little theater you get aboard a Spanish galleon or a Moorish vessel or an English ship. Your mission, for a brief time, becomes either pirating or revenge. Jagged cliffs, Moorish castles, and the fair countryside of old England furnish you with picturesque background.”

America loved this expensive extravaganza that included a cast of thousands led by Milton Sills, Enid Bennett and Wallace Beery. They loved The Sea Hawk’s four, full-sized ships created just for this production. And they especially loved that no expense, no sentimentnothing whatsoeverwas spared.

The Sea Hawk “Sailed right into the heart of Los Angeles! And anchored there!” bragged a July 3rd advertisement in The Los Angeles Daily Times after the Hollywood premier. “Thousands! Thousands! Thousands!” reveled “in the glamour of the settings!” and were “swept away by the immensity!”

Great Northern Theatre – Broad Street Below Erie Avenue, March 25, 1925. (PhillyHistory.org)

That same issue featured a review by Edwin Schallert: “The grand old swashbuckling days are with us once again. The Sea Hawk visions them with rip roaring spirit of adventure. The picture is one of the ablest achievements in this history of the screen and in the current season it shines forth as a magnificent flare among a host of flickers. The premier … the first big gala…this season… took place at [Los Angeles’] Criterion Theater,” a classic movie palace on Grand Avenue which had opened in 1917 at the Kinema Theater. The “Criterion Audience Gives Enthusiastic Approval” for the cast of thousands declared yet another critic who called the lavish 12-reeler “brilliant.”

Frank Lloyd was well on his way to directing scores of films (IMDb lists 134) including Les Misérables (1917), Oliver Twist (1922), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and The Last Command (1955). In The Sea Hawk, Lloyd fully embraced Sabatini’s spirit in ships, scale, and sentiment.

The film had staying power.Five weeks after the premier, The Los Angeles Times headline reported “Action thrills and adventure on the high seas continue to please large audiences at the Criterion” under the headline: “Sea Hawk Packs ‘Em In.”

Philadelphians had been reading copies of the best-selling The Sea Hawk since the Washington Square publisher J.P. Lippincott introduced the first American edition in 1915. And Philadelphia movie-goers who had been looking forward to the film adaptation kept it in the theaters when it finally arrived in the summer of 1924. The following spring, The Sea Hawk was still up and running at the Great Northern Theater on north Broad Street.

The Sea Hawk was nothing less than a great Hollywood production. But Mae Tinee, it turned out, was something less than a great critic. In fact, she wasn’t a critic at all. Or even a reporter. Mae Tinee was a long-standing, all-purpose byline for reporters assigned, on slow news days, to spend their afternoons at matinees. And every once in a while, as in the case of The Sea Hawk, the diversion was worthwhile.

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A Classical, Papier-Mâché Gas Station at the Sesquicentennial


Constructing the Atlantic Refining Company Exhibit at the Sesquicentennial Exhibition, 1926. (PhillyHistory.org)

Pretty much anything might be found, past or present, at the Sesquicentennial International Exposition, the lesser of Philadelphia’s two World’s Fairs.  Mounted at the bottom of Broad Street in 1926, visitors passed under the giant, electrified Liberty Bell, famously lit with 26,000 light bulbs and plunged into a world that was familiar, but also oddly uncertain.

The “Tower of Light,” led through to a “Gladway” and scores of exhibit buildings, rides and restaurants. A recreated “High Street 1776” connected a giant new stadium to “Treasure Island” amidst a landscape of lagoons, a Japanese tea house and a Military Camp. At the southernmost end of the grounds, just before the exhibits gave way to the Navy Yard, stood the largest exhibit building of all, the “U.S. Government, Transportation, Machinery, Mines & Metallurgy” building, aka the Palace of Manufactures and Industries. At 11.5 acres, this building didn’t seem like an afterthought, but in mid-June, weeks after opening day, it was still only framed out in steel.

When the Palace of Manufactures and Industries finally did open, this 1,800-foot-long, V-shaped building was packed with everything from the “World’s Mightiest Electric Locomotive,” from the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, to Pullman cars, trolley cars, electric cars, gasoline cars, tractors, locomotives and fire engines. Wedged between exhibits of General Electric and the Miners Association of Bolivia, the Atlantic Refining Company fabricated a pavilion made by the Fine Arts Papier Mache Corporation of New York. Here would be a full-size facsimile of the classical gas station Atlantic Refining had opened with fanfare are Broad Street and the Boulevard nearly a decade earlier.

Its architect, Joseph Franklin Kuntz, of the Pittsburgh firm W. G. Wilkens and Company, had reason to believe his vision joining past and present in gas station design might still catch on. Since the middle of the last decade, Kuntz had designed temples to the gasoline gods, high-end, Greek-Revival stations. In 1923, in a vote of confidence, Atlantic Refining awarded Kuntz the commission for a classically-inclined headquarters at Broad and Spruce Streets.

The V-shaped building at the lower left is the U.S. Government, Transportation, Machinery, Mines & Metallurgy Building. Composite Map of the Sesquicentennial International Exposition from 1926, with street overlay from 2008. (PhillyHistory.org and Azavea)
Atlantic Refining Company Exhibit at the Sesquicentennial, 1926. (PhillyHistory.org)

In a 1922 article, “Greek Architecture and Gasoline Service Stations” Kuntz made the case that bad gas station design was bound to happen, but could be avoided. “In an infant industry that grew to gigantic proportions almost over night, certain makeshift arrangements were inevitable in preparing to cater to a constantly expanding volume of trade. In consequence, our automobile highways have been dotted by nondescript buildings which offended the eye of the beholder, and possessed but one solitary attribute as a justification for their existence—utility. Like the bill-boards, these structures threatened to become a permanent blot upon the landscape.”

But Kuntz believed bad gas station design wasn’t inevitable. “The Atlantic Refining Company,” he wrote, “decided to make a radical departure from established precedent and erect a series of ornamental service stations that would minister to the needs of its customers and at the same time served as an advertising medium for its product, combining the function of service and the quality of beauty in approximately equal proportions. Situated at various points in the cities and villages along the principal highways of Pennsylvania and New England, these beautiful little edifices delight the eye as well as they serve the public. … Constructed of terra cotta, in white or colors…and ornamental plaster in harmonizing shades, they afford a wide variety of types and sizes, with special designs to suit individual locations and space requirements.”

Kuntz was particularly proud of his “dainty little edifice” at 40th and Walnut Streets, “a reproduction, on an enlarged scale of the monument to Lysycraties, in Athens.” This gas station’s “perfect proportions will linger long in the memory,” Kuntz wrote, “striking contrast to the great majority of buildings erected for the purpose of supplying the wants of modern charioteers.” A didactic approach to “practical city beautification,” Kuntz believed, was the “only effectual method of preventing architectural monstrosities;” the only way of “applying esthetic interest to natural human needs in the building up of cities and towns.”

He was wrong, of course. As the papier-mâché dried at the Sesquicentennial, this anachronistic, historical-esoterical interpretation of the American gas station was about to be replaced by a thoroughly modern idea, that superior gas station design could be sleek, bright and contemporary. That gas stations could convey cleanliness, speed and be of this world. Within another decade or so, the modern gas station replaced Kuntz’s designs, would take over the service station industry—and, eventually, the American cityscape.