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Alexander Johnston Cassatt: The Man Who Spanned the Hudson

The mansion of Alexander and Lois Cassatt, 202-206 S.19th Street/West Rittenhouse Square, 1971, just prior to demolition.

Alexander J. Cassatt (1839-1906) was not a Philadelphian.  He was a Pittsburgh transplant who had started his career as an engineer with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and proved himself to be a master of transportation logistics.  As vice president of “The Railroad,” Cassatt enjoyed the good life.  He was the proud owner of a Frank Furness-designed mansion on West Rittenhouse Square and bred hackney horses on the Main Line, which his company had developed in the 1880s.

Cassatt was first and foremost a workaholic — he received his academic training from the notoriously rigorous Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, the same school that produced Brooklyn Bridge designer Washington Roebling. In 1899, Cassatt came out of retirement to assume the presidency of the mighty corporation. “Mr. Cassatt is a man of wealth, independence, and social prominence,” The New York Times noted in 1899. “He is fond of the comforts and enjoyments which wealth enables its possessors to enjoy, and it was only a few years ago that he voluntarily retired from the post of First Vice President of the Pennsylvania system because the work had been too exacting. In his letter of resignation at that time he said, ‘My only object in taking this step is to have more time at my disposal than any one occupying so responsible a position in railroad management can command.”

It was a decision that ultimately cost Cassatt his life.

After assuming the presidency of the Pennsy, he started planning one of the greatest construction projects in the country, one that would push the limits of engineering and his emotional endurance: a new set of tunnels underneath the Hudson and East Rivers, crowned by a new railroad terminal in the heart of Manhattan. He would battle accidents, reversals, and the extortionist machinations of New York’s Tammany Hall.

During the second half of the 19th century, the Vanderbilt family’s New York Central had a monopoly on Manhattan railroad traffic.  Their Hudson River and Harlem lines leapfrogged into the city across relatively narrow river crossings on the northern end of the island and terminated at Grand Central Station at 42nd Street and Park Avenue.   The Pennsylvania Railroad, on the other hand, which approached New York from the southwest, was blocked by the mighty Hudson River, almost a mile wide at the line’s Weehawken terminus.  After disembarking from the train, passengers were herded into ferries that landed them in the midst of Manhattan’s “Tenderloin” district, which the New York Herald described as “Least wholesome spot in town, where vice and greed full many a man brought down…The iron horse has sent your dives to join the other nightmares of the Tenderloin.”  Even worse, freight had to be offloaded from cars and manhandled onto barges and pushed across the river by tugs. Most of the brothels and saloons paid protection money that flowed directly into the pockets of Tammany Hall and the police department.

For Cassatt, head of the largest corporation on the face of the earth, this was unacceptable for his passengers and shippers.  Excavation of the railroad tunnels under the Hudson River started in February 1904, under the direction of engineers C.M. Jacobs and George Gibbs.  Several blocks of brownstones, saloons, and wooden boarding houses were dynamited to make way for the new railroad station.  Oddly enough, Cassatt and the Pennsy board skipped over Frank Furness — designer of Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station and the president’s own Rittenhouse Square mansion —  and selected the august New York firm of McKim, Mead & White, whose most notable Philadelphia commission was the Germantown Cricket Club.  Perhaps Cassatt wanted to win political and cultural favor with New Yorkers by using a New York firm.  Moreover, by the early 1900s Furness’s wild, polychromed style was out-of-date compared to McKim Mead & White’s restrained, academic classicism. Charles Follen McKim, the firm’s most academic and tightly-wound partner, drew up an enlarged adaptation of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, built out  of solid pink granite and covering four square blocks of Manhattan.   The Pennsylvania Railroad declared that the designers of the station, “were at pains to embody two ideas.  To express in so far as was practicable, with the unusual condition of the tracks below the street surface and in spite of the absence of the conventional train shed, not only the exterior design of a great railway station in the generally accepted form, but also to give the building the character of a monumental gateway and entrance to a great metropolis.”

When New York’s Pennsylvania Station opened on September 8, 1910, it was heralded as the greatest railroad station in the world, “and the largest building in the world ever built at one time.”  Not only did trains arrive under the Hudson River from Philadelphia, but also from the recently-acquired Long Island Railroad.   The concourse, modeled on that of Paris’s Gare d’Orsay, was like the nave of a Gothic cathedral wrought of steel and glass rather than limestone.  And unlike Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station, trains did not have to pass over a hideous “Chinese Wall” viaduct. Rather, they ran silent and smokeless through tunnels, powered by electricity.

What Furness thought about his rival’s Pennsylvania Station is unknown.  What is certain is that by 1900, Furness had fallen upon hard times, and was struggling for commissions.   Thankfully, Cassatt did select Furness to design the 13-story Arcade Building at 15th and Market, cheek-by-jowl with his older (and increasingly soot-stained) Broad Street Station.

Broad Street Station, 15th and Filbert Streets, October 26, 1925.

Yet the project mastermind did not live to see his dream come true.  Cassatt died of heart failure 1906 at his home on Rittenhouse Square, one of several Pennsylvania Railroad presidents who dropped dead on the job due to stress and overwork.  A colleague eulogized Cassatt as “the only railroad statesman this country has ever produced.” The thousands of men slaving away in the tunnels battled mud, physical overexertion, and decompression sickness, otherwise known as “the bends.”  In addition, the residents of the area who did not lose their homes had to endure dangerous blasting; on November 19, 1904, Bridget Markey suffered severe lacerations to her face when a flying rock smashed through her window.  “Families living near that spot said yesterday that their houses might be on the same layer of rock,” The New York Times reported, “for whenever a blast when off it shook their pictures off the wall and shook everybody up.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDQY3JjX508?rel=0&w=480&h=360]
Excavating the Pennsylvania Station tunnels, 1905.

Cassatt’s above-ground architectural legacy did not fare well after his death.  Broad Street Station and the Arcade Building came down in the 1950s, replaced by the bland office towers of Penn Center.  In 1961, amid much public protest, the ailing and bog-bound Pennsylvania Railroad ripped down their New York terminal and replaced it with an office tower and sports complex.  Finally, in 1972, the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, owners of Alexander Cassatt’s mansion on Rittenhouse Square, tore down the old brick structure and replaced it with a high-rise hotel. By that time, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had merged with the New York Central in 1968, had collapsed into bankruptcy, never to emerge again.

Pennsylvania Station in 1911, a year after completion. The PRR boasted that although the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia was larger, their new station was the largest building ever erected at once. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

The statue of Alexander Cassatt that once graced Pennsylvania Station now resides, lonely and out-of-context, at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Lancaster County.  It bears the following inscription:

Alexander Johnson Cassatt, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad 1899-1906. Whose Foresight, Courage and Ability achieved the extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad into New York City.

Four of the pink granite eagles that once adorned the facade of Penn Station are now perched on the Market Street bridge over the Schuylkill River.  The rest of the station’s remains ended up in the swamps of the New Jersey Meadowlands.

Today, the name Cassatt is usually associated with Alexander’s sister Mary, the famed Impressionist painter.  Penn Station might be a distant memory, but for the 300,000 people who travel through the Hudson and East River tunnels every day, Alexander Cassatt’s legacy has stood the test of time.

Even if they do, to paraphrase historian Vincent Scully, come and go like rats rather than gods.

Portrait of Alexander Johnson Cassatt by his sister Mary. Source: allpaintings.org.

Sources:

“Alexander J. Cassatt,” The New York Times, June 18, 1899.

“Houses Set A-Tremble from a Heavy Blast,” The New York Times, November 19, 1904.

“New Pennsylvania Station is Opened,” The New York Times, August 29, 1910.

Jill Jonnes, Conquering Gotham, A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels (New York, NY: Viking Press, 2007), p.129, p.244.

Noble, Alfred (September 1910). “The New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The East River Division.” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 68. Paper No. 1152.

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When Rocks Talk: “The Boys of Mount Airy” and a Woman from Germantown

Mute Memorial Boulder at Germantown Avenue and Sedgwick Street. (Ken Finkel)

Bare rock makes a mute memorial. When a boulder loses a plaque once carried, it instantly loses voice, power, and a good measure of its dignity.

What to make of the boulder at Germantown Avenue and Sedgwick Street in front of the Lovett Memorial Library? It’s been missing two plaques for forty years. There it stands, mouth open, as it were, ready to say something that must be important, but no words come. They are long gone, stolen, sold for scrap and melted down.

Thank goodness for archives, where images of bronze have no scrap value whatever. A photograph “restores” the words from both missing plaques and gives the boulder back something of its long-lost voice.  We learn it was brought from Valley Forge and suddenly the situation has an extra dose of authority—or is it pretense? Whichever, the Valley Forge connection offers meaning to the main event: a list of local World War I casualties. The patriotic rock suggests the sacrifice of “THE BOYS OF MOUNT AIRY WHO FELL IN HEROIC SERVICE FOR THEIR COUNTRY AND HUMANITY” may indeed have been part of greater things.

With the singing of “America” and a prayer, this boulder with its plaque bearing 35 names, in a park of red oaks and dogwoods, was unveiled on Memorial Day weekend, 1924. No American neighborhood was without its own list to mourn and honor. This “Great War,” the first one to offer all the benefits of industrialization, would be the nation’s second bloodiest: 16 million deaths, an estimated 10 million of which were men in service. The numbers are staggering. Germany lost nearly 1.8 million soldiers; Russia 1.7; France 1.3; the British Empire lost more than 900,000. The list of American “boys” is 116,516 names long.

From one count, 1,448 were from the neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Of these, 34 called Mount Airy home. Each left behind family, and memories that faded over time, and faster after the plaques disappeared. But again, archives tells us more than we knew.

Listed sixth is Mortimer P. Crane, baptized on July 1, 1894 at the church on McCallum and Tulpehocken Streets. The Cranes lived at 6440 Greene Street. Mortimer struggled to get into Yale, later found work at one of his father’s mining companies and when war and the rush of patriotic fervor came, Crane enlisted.

World War I Monument at Lovett Park, Mount Airy. Germantown Avenue and Sedgwick Street – March 11, 1927 (PhillyHistory.org)

While flying in formation during a maneuver on May 15, 1918, Crane’s airplane crashed near Amesbury, Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge. He died instantly of a fractured neck. If we know it, so did those who dedicated this monument six years later: a Court of Inquiry found that Crane’s own “error in judgment” caused the accident. He turned, clipped another plane, tore away a part of his own wing, and crashed.

We know about Crane because he was an officer, and from a rich family. But each of these men had families, memories and stories. We don’t know much, but now we know their names:

Stanley H. Berry; Albert R. Bolay; John Breidenfield; George M. Brooks; Anthony Cimino; George A. Dawson; Herbert K. Dewees; James Duffy; Thomas B. Durrick; Frank C. Erb; George William Esher; Jacques A. Fiechter; Edward Fisher; William Fleming, Jr.; Earl S. Horsey; Charles Joseph Houston; Clement Cresson Kite; Harrison Knox; Harry Linaka; Edward Joseph Malone; Robert Joseph McCamman; William J. Merkle; Ralph Thurman Mills; Clark B. Nichol; John Potts; Alfred L. Quintaro; Herman P. Saylor; George P. Shepherdson; Harold J. Sheppard; William Sibel; Gerald G. Speck; George G. Whitson; and Jacob Zaun III.

The blank boulder echoes the spirit of their sacrifice.

From Evening Public Ledger, September 20, 1918. (The Library of Congress)

And the archival photograph tells us more. The long-gone plaque also spoke of “MARCIA MAXWELL BARTLE, U.S.M.C., FIRST WOMAN TO ENLIST IN PHILADELPHIA.” Bartle’s skills as an experienced switchboard operator were needed at the Philadelphia Marine Quartermaster’s Depot.

Good thing the planners for the renovated Lovett Park won’t be casting away this historic stone.

Or will they?

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The Wedding that Ignited Philadelphia

The Burning of Pennsylvania Hall on May 17th 1838. (The Library Company of Philadelphia)

Advocates of peace and freedom gathered in Philadelphia 175 years ago today. They had come to dedicate Pennsylvania Hall, “the first and only one of its kind in the republic,” according to abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld.

Three days later, this new building “consecrated to Free Discussion and Equal Rights” was reduced to ruins, burnt by an angry, rioting mob.

How could such a thing happen in the City of Brotherly Love?

It’s a question that has puzzled historians ever since—and plagued a few Philadelphians at the time. Days after the riot, the reverend William Henry Furness, agonized from the pulpit of his church: “Similar outrages have been perpetrated… in other parts of our country… but now the evil has come close to us—to our very doors. The whole city has been illuminated by the glare of the incendiary’s torch.” Furness feared Philadelphia was becoming a place where “savage delusions…will rule us with a rod of iron, destroying every feeling of security, and extinguishing among us the last spark of personal freedom.”

For years, the burned-out shell of Pennsylvania Hall remained on 6th Street, south of Race Street, in view of Independence Hall.  How could such a thing happen here, in Philadelphia? What, exactly, riled the crowd to respond with violence?  What, or who, would have been the catalyst for this catastrophe?

We look to Angelina Grimké. The most famous radical woman in America in 1838 was in town to address a packed Pennsylvania Hall. And when she spoke on May 16, the growing anti-abolitionist mob outside the hall reacted. “As the tumult from without increased, and the brickbats fell thick and fast,” recalled William Lloyd Garrison, her “eloquence kindled, her eyes flashed and her cheeks glowed.” This privileged woman of Southern society, who, with her sister Sarah had left behind plantation life and wealth to go on a speaking tour about the evils of slavery, had been energized and eloquent before large audiences throughout Massachusetts.

In Philadelphia, the mob outside the new Pennsylvania Hall interrupted Grimké ’s speech. She acknowledged their presence and challenged them: “What is a mob? What would the breaking of every window be? What would the levelling of this Hall be? …What if the mob should now burst in upon us, break up our meeting and commit violence upon our persons — would this be anything compared with what the slaves endure?”

Grimké ’s reputation as someone willing to question, to speak and to break society’s rules on behalf of her cause came to a head in Philadelphia that week. The very same day the Hall was dedicated, Grimké  and Theodore Dwight Weld, the man who encouraged and trained her to work the abolition lecture circuit, got married in Philadelphia. And because they Grimké  and Weld were both so public, so key to The Movement, the “wedding of the most mobbed-man and the most notorious woman in America” would be anything but a private matter.

The remains of Belmont Row (left) in 1929, 1300 block of Spruce Street. (PhillyHistory.org)
Detail of 3 Belmont Row, later 1330 Spruce Street, May 11, 1930. (PhillyHistory.org)

“I am told that my abolition friends here are almost offended that I should do such a thing as get married,” Grimké wrote Weld a few weeks earlier. “Some say we were both public property and had no right to enter into such an engagement. Others say that I will now be good for nothing henceforth and forever to the cause…”

Grimké and Weld had sent invitations to more than 80 friends and acquaintances, about half of whom would be in Philadelphia for Pennsylvania Hall’s opening week. The wedding list, a Who’s Who of American Abolitionism, Feminism and Social Progressivism, took place in the home of Angelina’s recently widowed sister, Anna Frost, at 3 Belmont Row, later renumbered 1330 Spruce Street.

William Lloyd Garrison, the “worst of men,” according to Angelina Grimké ‘s mother (who remained in South Carolina) was out of New England, but in his element. His posse: Gerrit Smith, James G. Birney, Henry B. Stanton, and Alvan Stewart, all attended. So did the Chapmans, Fullers, Westons, Philbricks and Tappans. Weld’s former classmates from seminary, known as the Lane Rebels, showed up. No one made more of an impression walking up Spruce Street to the wedding as did Charles C. Burleigh, who grew his beard as long as slavery lasted.

Practical Amalgamation. (The Wedding.) Caricature by Edward Williams Clay, ca. 1839. (American Antiquarian Society)

The wedding was designed to demonstrate, challenge and irritate. Grimké  “was getting married in a manner calculated to shock and dismay the pillars of Charleston society, among whom she had been raised,” wrote Gerda Lerner. She meant for it to be “a motley assembly of white and black, high and low.” (Sarah Grimké noted that among the guests were “several colored persons…among them two liberated slaves, who formerly belonged to our father.”) After a brief, homemade, and ad hoc ceremony, during which Weld denounced traditional marriage vows and Grimké refused to include the word “obey,” “a colored Presbyterian minister then prayed…followed by a white one,” possibly Rev. Furness, who lived at 11 Belmont Row. The “certificate was then read by William Lloyd Garrison, and was signed by the company.” Guests then shared good wishes and a wedding cake baked with “free sugar”–grown, harvested and manufactured without slave labor.

Accounts of the iconoclastic wedding spread throughout the streets of Philadelphia and then further, in the nation’s newspapers. Accounts morphed from fact to fiction. Grimké’s commitment to “white and black, high and low” led to rumors that this had been an interracial wedding. And in 1838, even in the city of Brotherly Love, that was enough to spark, and justify, a riot.

The experiment of Pennsylvania Hall failed, but the Grimké -Weld wedding turned out exactly as intended: a spiritual, social bond based on equality and respect—far different than traditional marriage. Those who witnessed the wedding at 1330 Spruce Street on May 14, 1838 were in a culture war, the first of many redefining the meaning of marriage in America.

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Lower Schuylkill: The Upside of Philly’s Underside

Penrose Avenue Bridge, October 4, 1951. (PhillyHistory.org)

It’s a shame no one has anything good to say about the drive from Philadelphia International Airport to Center City. It’s a gritty but grand entrance, this ride on PA 291, aka the Penrose Avenue Bridge, aka the Platt Memorial Bridge to US 76, aka the Schuylkill Expressway—a ride punctuated by the usual roadwork, billboards, questionable signage and occasional pothole. Those features are found just about anywhere. What makes this stretch truly special is the rich urban choreography visible from atop the viaduct of concrete pylons rising above the brackish marsh. That scene offers complex and meaningful drama.

I feel sorry for those who go out of their way to avoid Philadelphia’s gritty entrance. They miss the point.

Platt Memorial (formerly Penrose Avenue) Bridge – Underside. November 30, 1951. (PhillyHistory.org)

The Platt Memorial Bridge experience is considered an embarrassing nuisance. Hosts of out-of-town guests apologize for it. Hospitality hates it. The Inquirer has called it a “grimy industrial gateway … arching over sprawling oil tanks and… steaming stacks.” Most Philadelphians consider this entrance the worst of our worst, but it may actually be the best of our best.

Arriving via the Platt is a genuine and aesthetic Philadelphia experience. It’s an everyman, everywoman, everyday encounter for those in the 56,000 vehicles that pass over this 1.7-mile, 62-year-old bridge. Sure, as the Inky says, it “begins in weeds and ends by a junkyard” but that’s the beauty and the irony of it. By traversing the bridge in our cars, we’re threading a needle, that fragile zone in time and space between refined gasoline and crushed cars. Our reason for passing through breathes life into the scene and gives it a reason for being.

No, it’s not beautiful in the traditional sense, but we need this stuff. And isn’t Philadelphia at its best when it’s averse to pretense? We’re barreling along, there’s a sewage treatment on our right, an oil refinery on our left—plumes of smoke, gas flares burning effluent high above the natural no man’s land below. This scene is nearly entirely man made, taking place above the loneliest and least welcoming stretch of the meandering Schuylkill, two miles beyond the last bit of green at Bartram’s Gardens. This is about the automobile and its victory in the 20th-century city. As drivers, we’re offered a commanding straight shot to and from the city. Rising over the crest of the Platt Bridge may is among the most dramatic and authentic that Philadelphia ever gets. Why should we allow it to embarrass us? Why would we want to avert our eyes?

Philadelphians opened the bridge in 1951; twenty years after the idea was first proposed and just as the automobile had completed its win over the 19th-century city. (The Penrose Avenue Bridge was among the last works designed by architect Paul Cret.) With a ribbon cutting and a celebratory dinner hosted by AAA, the swing bridge from Philadelphia’s Iron Age had been reduced to fading memory. Sixty years later, in June 2011, PennDOT identified this bridge one of 5,000 in the Commonwealth that are “structurally deficient” and launched a three-year “rehabilitation project.”

SPC Corporation – Camden Iron and Metal, 2600 Penrose Avenue (Google)

There’s structural integrity and then there’s experiential integrity. What wakes up both citizen and visitor and puts them in the true Philadelphia frame of mind, what completes the whole Platt experience is the car shredder at the base of the bridge. But SPC Corporation which operates this Godzilla grinder, this Rockosauraus of rust, is planning to leave town. After abandoning a plan to relocate to Eddystone, Pennsylvania, SPC’s parent company, Camden Iron & Metal announced a plan to move back to the city of its namesake. They’re behind schedule a year or so, but “sooner or later” the company confirms, “we’re going to move.”

What a pity. Just as we’ve grown accustomed to Philadelphia’s most apocalyptic and ironic vision, just as we’ve become fully conscious of this 20th-century expression of unsustainability, we’re about to lose its most dramatic expression. As the song goes: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” and then it says something about a parking lot. Exactly.

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Snapshots of History

The Uncertain Future of Germantown High School

It’s been a little over two years since PhillyHistory.org wrote The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia’s Public Schools. In that time, 23 underutilized schools have been officially slated for the chopping block and the Philadelphia School District has only fallen further. As Ken Finkel noted then, many of the institutions being shuttered were built before World War II. Now buildings which were once hopefully constructed to educate Philadelphia’s youth are meeting a far less aspirational end.

Germantown High School is one of those crestfallen schools. Just shy of it’s 100th birthday, the school at Germantown Avenue and High Street in Northwest Philadelphia was constructed during an era when there were at least as many horses at the build site as cranes.

Construction workers and horses begin construction on
Germantown High School in 1914.

At the time, the neighborhood was predominantly residential neighborhood with a smattering of textile mills. The school’s early offerings were heavy on trade-oriented training. A 1922 survey of public schools noted that the school potentially had one of the best machine shops in the city at the time, not to mention a host of other workshops, including a joinery shop, a patternmaking shop, and a forge shop.

The report, which details some of the curriculum standardization challenges facing Philadelphia schools at the time, later reveals that even in 1922 the school was underutilized. Though the school had two cookery units for home economics classes, only one was in use because there were not enough teachers to manage both, according to the document. Today, the report seems to offer eerie foreshadowing. Philadelphia Public School Notebook reports that Germantown High School is at least two thirds empty, with just a 31% utilization rate.

In 2011, the school became a Promise Academy — a model of “turnaround” school championed by then-superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who recently passed away. In 2012, the school had graduation rate of 47 percent and less than 20 percent of students in Germantown’s target neighborhoods attend the high school thanks to the rise of charter and magnet schools in the city. These factors, combined, with the age of the building, made it a ripe choice for the SRC.

Now the school has become a central focus of current students, alumni, and others in the community who have been fighting to keep it off the School Reform Commission’s shut down list, to no avail.


Germantown High School nears completion in 1914.

According to many recent reports, Germantown students will be sent to Martin Luther King High School, but a 40-year history of violence and mistrust between gangs hailing from the neighborhoods around the two schools has many concerned about the transition. In the early 1970s, the Philadelphia School District “paired” the two schools such that students attended King for 9th and 10th grades, then transferred to Germantown for 11th and 12th. It was a fated attempt to reduce crowding and extinguish the neighborhood rivalries, reported Philadelphia Public School Notebook, and the pairing quickly disintegrated.

Though the school gets national recognition for educating legendary comedian and actor Bill Cosby (who eventually dropped out), that’s not enough to prevent a shuttering that seems ever more inevitable.  What will become of Germantown High School? If you have an idea of a new use for this nearly 100-year-old institution, submit your idea at the Newsworks poll available here.