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Bright Lights; Beautiful City, or a Collision of Hope and History

City Hall Illuminated during Founder’s Week (detail). October 1908. (PhillyHistory.org)

Never mind that Philadelphia actually dated back to 1682, that its 225th anniversary had come and gone the year before. Philadelphians were in the grip of a new and overpowering love affair with the city and it was fine to fudge the details. In 1908, they mounted an over-the-top celebration of the original city and called it “Founders Week.” But it was really more about the bright new century than the dim and dusty past.

“There is a promise in the sky of a new day,” proclaimed Charles Mulford Robinson of the 20th century city. “The tall facades glow as the sun rises; their windows shine as topaz; their pendants of steam, tugging flutteringly from high chimneys, are changed to silvery plumes. Whatever was dingy, coarse, and ugly is either transformed or hidden in shadow. The streets, bathed in the fresh morning light, fairly sparkle, their pavements from upper windows appearing smooth and clean. There seems to be a new city for the work of a new day.”

“City Beautiful” Philadelphia would be bathed in sunlight during the day. At night, it would be brilliantly illuminated by electric lights. At the center of it all, at the intersection of Broad, Market, past and future, stood City Hall, symbolically lit, top to bottom. Founder’s Week producers strung lights along its many rooflines; they aimed searchlights hundreds of feet up to the giant statue of the founder. Down at street level, the building became a billboard for a giant portrait of William Penn ensconced in a welcoming, promising electric sunrise.

The illuminated promise was that Philadelphia’s founding purpose (whether it had been made 225 or 226 years before) was still very much alive. “Philadelphia Maneto” the electric sign flashed up and down Broad Street: Let Brotherly Love Endure.

During Founders Week, the beautiful, hopeful historic city was “choked with humanity,” residents and visitors jamming parades, receptions, unveilings, commemorations, displays, processions, and patriotic exercises. A “River Pageant” animated the entire Delaware waterfront, from Fort Mifflin to Allegheny Avenue. At Franklin Field, thousands attended “Philadelphia,” the Musical Historical Drama. Violet Oakley’ designed a “Historical Pageant” that featured operatic floats and elaborately costumed actors anticipating Hollywood’s Golden Age. On the celebration’s final day, before the fireworks, the City and the Quaker City Motor Club co-sponsored a 200-mile automobile race on a brand new “speedway” in West Fairmount Park. All in all, gushed The New York Times, it was “probably the greatest civic celebration ever held in America.”

One of the 28 Lamps at City Hall, 1909. (PhillyHistory,org)

City Hall’s lighting scheme was more than mere wattage, it was civic theater. And it had been brought to life on Saturday, October 3rd, the day before any other Founders Week events. School children from across the city convened to christen a ring of “Memorial Lamp Poles,” 28, 22-foot, cast iron lamp standards on the plaza surrounding City Hall, each with 28 glass globes. Why 28? That’s how many districts, townships and boroughs had been consolidated in 1854 to form a bigger, better, safer and more prosperous metropolis. The public plaza around City Hall was now the civic centerpiece where all citizens could embrace the past and future promise—in the brightly illuminated here and now.

“Illumination of Food Sign – North Side of City Hall.” October 4, 1917. (PhillyHistory,org)

Who could take on such a project? That would be the next generation the Royers family, the iron founders whose shop at 9th and Montgomery had been operating since just after the Civil War. Now, decades later, B. Frank Royer of Smyser-Royer would have a “complete drafting and engineering departments, designing studio, pattern shops, two large foundries, extensive machine and fitting shops” manufacturing everything from “lamp posts for Country Estates” to “Spiral Stairs and Marquises” in cast iron, bronze or aluminum. Smyser-Royer was understandably proud of their work and illustrated the City Hall lamps in their catalogs, bragging that with little more than “a coat of paint” these fixtures could last “almost forever.”

At City Hall. “almost forever” turned out to be 23 years.

After symbolic meaning drifted away, the lamps became only so much street furniture. Over the years, they blended into the backdrop of daily life. City carpenters built grandstands around them; subway contractors tolerated their presence. During the Sesquicentennial, the audience of a German oompah band crowded around them. And by the early 1930s, they were gone and forgotten.

What stands today on City Hall plaza, more than century later at a time when we take light for granted? A lonely pair of modern facsimiles, relatively dim and meaning-free.

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Dreaming about Philly’s Endangered Buildings?

Engine House #46, Reed and Water Streets, 1896. (PhillyHistory.org)

It’s been more than a decade since the Preservation Alliance started issuing its annual Endangered Properties List. This year the list features eight properties bringing the total to a hefty 84.

Has this ritualistic exercise in advocacy proved a success? Yes, if you consider coverage of the list’s release had become part of Philly’s December news cycle. But there are navigational challenges in getting the word out. Accessing the annual lists requires going through a mix of separate web pages (from 2003 to 2007) then a couple of pdfs (2008 and 2009) before the most recent format: a combination of web pages and pdfs (2010 to 2013). Each list is numbered, but not clearly dated. For instance, the 7th annual list came out in 2009 but was issued in the Alliance’s Winter 2010 newsletter. Only a preservationist with OCD would navigate through it all.

If this advocacy tool is to be effective in raising sights (and help prevent razing sites) it needs to be built on a clear, comprehensive web presence that can be easily located, augmented, enriched, updated and shared to help inform and advance a preservation agenda. Very useful; very doable.

Has the list helped prevent razing sites? For that question, the answer is “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.”

“Yes,” if we look at the new home of FringeArts  in the High Pressure Pump Station at the foot of Race Street (listed in 2006) or the Nugent Home for Baptists in West Mount Airy (listed in 2004). But it’s a definite “no,” if we look for the Church of Christ, once at 63rd and Vine Streets (listed in 2003). What’s there today is a spiffy new Walgreens.

Not too many victories; not too many losses. But in a contest, the worrisome “maybes” would win by a mile.

Robinson Store, 1020 Market Street. Built in 1946. (Library of Congress)

First is the Boyd Theatre, which made its second appearance this year (the Boyd debuted in 2007). The Divine Lorraine was also the subject of a double feature, in 2009 and 2010.

Does it really matter what year the former 26th District Police Headquarters at Trenton Avenue and Dauphin Street was listed in 2006?  Or that John P. B. Sinkler’s  Germantown Town Hall made the list in 2010? Or that the Royal Theater debuted in 2011? Or that both its neighboring District Health Center No. 1 at Broad and Lombard Streets and the Roundhouse at 7th and Race Streets were listed last year? Listing dates don’t matter; what does is documentation, information, and ultimately, preservation.

So, as the list of preservation challenges grows longer, what are the latest additions?

Age before beauty: From 1894, there’s the Flemish-revival Engine House #46 at Water and Reed Streets. “One of the most intriguing” buildings in the Pennsport neighborhood, wrote Inga Saffron. There’s the 1946 Robinson Store at 1020 Market Street designed by Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck in 1946. In its day, and especially at night, the Robinson Store was one of those buildings capable of giving chills. Here’s a specimen of “the surging tide of modernism” that never really reached us” here in Philadelphia, writes the Alliance’s Ben Leech. “It’s a Don Draper dream” writes Liz Spikol.

But Don Draper isn’t real. The Robinson Store, on the other hand, is…and very much endangered. It’s survival… well, that may be a dream.

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The Very Model of an Ancient-Modern Monument

Demolition of “Pennsylvania Bank, 1867,” Detail of albumen print by John Moran, photographer. (The Library Company of Philadelphia)
The Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, from James Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, 1762. (Smithsonian Libraries)

By the 1830s, you’d have thought folks might begin to grow a bit tired of seeing every last architect translating their city into the Greek. And they might have, had it not been for William Strickland’s way of combining the very old and the very new. This most creative of the homegrown generation of architect/engineers didn’t shy away from moving the game up a few notches. Strickland pulled out his copy of Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, a book that had been around for seventy years, and had long been used as a source by architects including Benjamin Henry Latrobe, John Haviland and Strickland himself.

But the stakes were higher now. Strickland faced the challenge of making architectural sense on a very prominent and oddly-shaped building lot defined by Dock, Walnut and Third Streets. And he found himself working in the shadow of his mentor’s masterpiece, the Bank of Pennsylvania. This tough site demanded a commanding solution—and an innovative one. Squeezing a rectangular Greek temple onto a triangular building lot just wouldn’t do. Strickland needed to find design solutions that were even bolder, but also more carefully considered.

And so he did. Strickland positioned on the narrow end of this wedge a raised, semi-circular portico, making this eastern façade look like a grand entrance on a civic square. (In reality, this is the grand, rounded-off back of the building. Strickland made Third Street the user-friendly entrance.)

Perspective of Old Stock Exchange at Dock and Walnut Streets, March 24, 1915. (PhillyHistory.org)

Here, in Philadelphia, a few blocks from the city’s riverfront, facing the morning sun (the same that illuminated ancient Athens) stood Strickland’s masterpiece. Unlike his others Greek Revival buildings, this was no replica ripped from the pages of Antiquities of Athens. Here was a 3-D billboard of Greek features serving Philadelphia, here and now.

For the cupola, which pulled the entire project together, Strickland found inspiration in Stuart’s illustration of a 334 BC monument still very much standing on the streets of Athens. The Choragic Monument of Lysicrates was a self-congratulatory, 21-foot pedestal for a choral prize won at a performing arts competition, part of the same festival that produced the great dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Stuart and William Henry Playfair designed literal replicas in Staffordshire and Edinburgh. Here in Philadelphia, Strickland took great liberties with the design—and achieved very American results.

He moved the “monument” from street level to the roof. He blew it up to double the size of the original making a giant 40-foot-tall, 14 feet diameter skyline-defining structure. And instead of interpreting the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in stone for the ages, Strickland designed it in wood that he knew could last only a few decades. (It would be replaced about every sixty years.) Now, far from Europe, this Pop-Art scaled, archeologically correct, ephemeral monument would echo the past. But even more important, here above Philadelphia’s 1830s cityscape, this landmark would live very much in the moment.

East side of the Merchant Exchange Building, November 2, 1960. (PhillyHistory.org)

The Merchants Exchange, and, in particular, the tower at its eastern end, would become an essential element in a new, high-tech information network. Long before 1837, when Samuel F.B. Morse patented his telegraph (and way longer before anyone dreamed of the internet) Europeans and Americans had “optical telegraphs” capable of quickly transmitting coded messages over great distances. As early as 1807, the U.S. Congress had debated and eventually voted in favor of funding a 1,200 mile long chain of optical telegraph towers connecting New York and New Orleans – a project that fell by the wayside. But it wasn’t farfetched. More than a decade earlier, Claude Chappe’s invention, the “semaphore visual telegraph,” came to life in France as a 143-mile connection between Paris and Lille that would grow into a network of more than 500 towers across Europe extending 3,000 miles. In 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, he envisioned extending the technology across the English Channel.

Merchants Exchange, looking east from above Third St., during construction of the 3rd cupola, 10/25/1964. (PhillyHistory.org)

So when American architect William Thornton envisioned connecting North and South America in 1800, the possibilities made level heads reel. Before long, American businessmen in Boston and New York had their own optical telegraph networks. By the time the Merchants Exchange was under construction, an optical telegraph in Boston tracked shipping, commerce and investments on a real-time basis.

“Time and distance are annihilated,” became the popular proclamation, a mantra of the 1830s.

No surprise, then, that the Merchant Exchange’s cupola high above Dock and Walnut Streets played triple duty: as a perch for clerks with telescopes identifying ships making their way to and from the Port of Philadelphia, as a place to send and receive messages flashing from New York across the plains of New Jersey, and the most lasting message of all: that Philadelphia had finally come into its own as a modern day version of ancient Athens.