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Trolley Barns and Grand Hotels: A Brief Look at the Widener Empire (Part 1)

 

41st and Haverford Avenue, looking east, c.1900. The Philadelphia Traction Company’s trolley barn is the gable roofed structure on the right.

At the corner of 41st Street and Haverford Avenue, amidst the rowhouses of West Powelton, stands a cavernous brick building with a pitched roof. Looming over its neighbors, it is one of the few surviving structures of the Widener trolley car empire.

Originally, the Philadelphia Traction Company had three massive trolley sheds in West Philadelphia, each equipped with a blacksmith shop and other repair facilities. Another one survives at 41st and Chestnut Street, which was once able to house up to 300 horses.

During Philadelphia’s Gilded Age, the trolley car was the ubiquitous symbol of the Widener family’s power.  With the exception of the very rich, who had private coaches, almost every city dweller gave the Philadelphia Traction Company conductors his or her nickels and dimes while en route to work or running errands.  The trolley infrastructure is imprinted on the city’s urban landscape. Many of the rails and overhead wires have not been used in years, the bane of cyclists and drivers alike.  A century ago, the trolley shaped Philadelphia on a grand scale: it allowed the city to grow outward (a city of homes), as opposed to upward (a city of tenements and skyscrapers) like its rival New York.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo&w=420&h=315]

The humble trolley also built one of the largest fortunes in the United States.

Peter Arrell Brown Widener (1836-1915), like the salty-tongued Cornelius Vanderbilt before him, knew the power of cold, hard cash. Widener was a believer in technology and progress, not propriety and tradition.  What mattered to him was harnessing a regular cash stream which flowed from the everyday needs of the masses.  Born poor and trained as a butcher, Widener made his first small fortune by supplying meat to the Union Army during the Civil War.  Like many so-called “war profiteers,” he rose from poverty to what the New York Herald smugly dismissed as the nation’s “Shoddy Aristocracy.”  The New York Tribune, for its part, defined shoddy as:  “poor sleezy stuff, woven open enough for seives [sic], and then filled with shearman’s dust. … Soldiers, on the first day’s march or in the earliest storm, found their clothes, overcoats, and blanket, scattering to the wind in rags or dissolving into their primitive elements of dust under the pelting rain.”

Shoddy or not, Widener was shrewd.  After Appomattox, Widener took his $50,000 (about $700,000 today) and began investing in his native city’s transportation network.  Rather than trying to break into the  railroad business — the Pennsylvania Railroad was a state-chartered old boys club — Widener invested in the construction streetcar lines and developing the surrounding real estate.  A street-smart young man who loved shirt-sleeve poker and politics, he knew how neighborhoods worked. He also knew how to muscle his way into City Hall by briefly serving as City Treasurer.

Peter Arrell Brown Widener (1836-1915). Source: Wikipedia Commons.

In the boom years that followed the Civil War, the city had plenty of room to expand.  The 1854 Act of Consolidation expanded the city from a mere 2 square miles to nearly 130.  Much of this new territory was undeveloped farmland and woods. Trolley cars, unlike capital-intensive railroads, were relatively cheap to build and operate.  They were ideal people movers, as long as the city’s population and manufacturing economy continued to grow. And for a while, they did. The burgeoning factories and mills of late 19th century Philadelphia not only provided thousands of manufacturing jobs, but also plenty of white collar managerial ones.  As noted by historians Philip Scranton and Walter Licht: “At its peak in the 1920s, our setting was the third largest metropolis in the United States, an expanse of 128 square miles occupied by two million residents, and a visitor to the city could hardly overlook the industrial base that supported this complex.”

Click for Part II

Sources: 

Brian Butko. The Lincoln Highway: Pennsylvania Traveler’s Guide (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2013). pp. 50–51

Andrew Heath, “Consolidation Act of 1854,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphiahttp://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/consolidation-act-of-1854, accessed February 21, 2014.

Stephen Salisbury, “Sculptor Turns Bomber into a Greenhouse,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 27, 2011.

http://articles.philly.com/2011-09-27/news/30208695_1_bomber-panel-of-academy-faculty-david-brigham

Philip Scranton and Walter Licht, Work Sights: Industrial Philadelphia, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986), p.5.

Ron Soodalter, The Union’s Shoddy Aristocracy, The New York Times, May 9, 2011.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/the-unions-shoddy-aristocracy/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Preston Thayer and Jed Porter, “Philadelphia Traction Company Barn & Stable,” Workshop of the World (Oliver Evans Press, 1990). http://www.workshopoftheworld.com/west_phila/phila_traction.html

David Whitmire, “The Wideners: An American Family,” Encyclopedia Titanica, January 11, 2008. http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/widener-family.html 

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#WilliamPennWednesday: How Philadelphia Got Its Quaker Zeus

William Penn on City Hall Tower. (PhillyHistory,org)

 

Edward Hicks, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, ca 1830-40. (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

Even though the statue of William Penn would be bolted in place more than 500 feet above the sidewalk and seen much farther away by most Philadelphians, it really mattered that the statue on City Hall make a good first and lasting impression. After all, at 36 feet 8 inches, here would stand the tallest figure on a building anywhere in the nation, nearly 17 feet taller than the statue of Freedom on the U.S. Capitol.

“Notwithstanding its great height,” explained sculptor Alexander Milne Calder in 1886 as he worked on the figure, Penn “will be quite plainly visible from the street, therefore every care has to be taken with regard to the features and every other detail.” What Calder had in mind was a statue facing South Broad Street, its bronzed expression bathed in sunlight. When the sculptor’s plans were scrapped by a new architect who turned Penn’s face away from the sun to gaze to the Northeast, and Penn Treaty Park, the scorned sculptor quipped that his greatest work had been “condemned to eternal silhouette.”

In fact, Calder had a number of reasons to turn his Penn’s back on the past, especially the place where he and the Native Americans may have signed a treaty. In his modernized redo of Penn, Calder wanted to pull away from the old image (and the myths they rode in on) to create something entirely new. “What we want is William Penn as he is known to Philadelphians, not a theoretical one or a fine English gentleman.” And as he worked, Calder admitted he felt conflicted. “I have not absolutely settled upon the final figure,” he added.

Calder also felt the heat. Ever since 1872, when John McArthur, City Hall’s original architect, proposed to replace the first idea an allegorical figure of Justice with a statue a real person, there had been no shortage of opinions as to how this giant Penn might be made to look. This image would dominate the city’s skyline immediately and, presumably, forever.  What it might suggest about Philadelphia, Philadelphians (and Philadelphia history) mattered then, and Calder knew it would matter now.

He hadn’t gotten any real pushback on the hundreds of statues he created for City Hall closer to the ground—figures people could actually see, but didn’t care all that much about. After working 13 years on the massive project, when he finally got to the tower groupings and to the largest sculpture of all, Calder planned on going for a “manly beauty,” something different than the Rotund, Bejowled Founder painted by Benjamin West in the 18th century or the Jolly Penn reinforced ad nauseum by Edward Hicks’ paintings in the 19th.

City Hall Tower-Statue Penn’s Head ca. 1892 (PhillyHistory.org)

Historians really had nothing to go on, there were no portraits of Penn at that time to serve as a guide, but that didn’t stop them from insisting on accuracy and authenticity. They argued at length about Penn’s clothing and the style of his hat. City Fathers, who had seen the project take far longer and become far more expensive and controversial than they had ever dreamed, just wanted building and sculpture done—with no further embarrassments.

What could possibly be embarrassing in 1886? A roly-poly Founder-figure defining the skyline, perhaps. Or a statue reminiscent of the corrupt, Gilded Age politician (see Thomas Nast’s caricature of Boss Tweed). This was the year Philadelphia politician Boies Penrose, aka “Big Grizzly,” a man of massive appetite (he was known to have a dozen eggs for breakfast and a turkey for lunch) and great girth (he’d reach 350 pounds) took his seat to the State Senate.

What could be embarrassing atop the white-marble frosting of City Hall? A figure recalling President Grover Cleveland’s White House wedding from the previous June. Cleveland stood firm in his wedding picture as the heaviest American president to date. (In time, only Taft would outweigh him.)

So it did matter—a lot—what this new Penn looked like. And as he worked through a series of maquettes, Calder would come to give his Penn a complete makeover, figure and face. He’d lose the gut and the double chin, acquiring a dimple. He’d get fancy ruffles, buckles and curls. Most of all, Calder made a figure that could stand almost joke-free. He gave the city a Quaker Zeus—if such a thing was possible.

Something to celebrate this #WilliamPennWednesday.

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Philadelphia Trivia (Workshop of the World Division)

Disston Saw Works, New State Road and Knorr Street, June 25, 1901. (PhillyHistory.org)

No question about it: Philadelphia’s WOW is greatly diminished. (And by WOW, we mean the city’s claim to the title “Workshop of the World.”) In the middle of the last century, just under half of the city’s workers made things. Now only one in twenty does.

With very few exceptions (like the surviving DisstonPrecision in Tacony, the subject of a recent post at AxisPhilly) the city’s sprawling industrial complexes are gone. And with the departure of the likes of Baldwin Locomotive Works, Stetson Hats, Quaker Lace and hundreds more smaller mills and factories, we can barely imagine what the city was like before it ran, literally, out of steam. What we have in their place are echoes of pride about all that once was Philly-made, a level of bluster and noise that rings as true with the city’s character and soul that 1776 does—and, come to think of it, maybe even truer. But what’s gone is gone.

How did Philadelphians celebrate their WOW factor when they still had it? With as much pride and bluster as the facts might convey. Apparently, there’s a long tradition of finding solace in the scale of what Philadelphia made.

Looking, for instance, at a printed bird’s eye-view of the city from 1908, The Philadelphia Of To-Day, The World’s Greatest Workshop, we see that the margins packed with what might be considered, for lack of a better word, trivia:

Philadelphia with only one-sixtieth of the population of the Republic, produced one-twentieth of all its manufactures.

Philadelphia has 16,000 manufacturing plants, employing 250,000 skilled laborers, each year consuming $400,000,000 of raw material and producing $700,000,000 of manufactures.

Philadelphia manufactures 8 locomotives every working day, or 2,663 in the year. These locomotives on a perfectly level track would haul 168,000 loaded cars of 50 tons capacity.

Philadelphia manufactures each year 45,000,000 yards of carpet, enough to put a belt around the earth and leave a remnant long enough to reach Cincinnati.

Philadelphia manufactures each year 12,000,000 dozen hose and half hose, enough to allow 2 pairs for every man, woman and child in the United States.

Philadelphia manufactures each year 4,800,000 hats. The bands, end to end, would reach from Philadelphia to Denver.

Philadelphia manufactures each year 180,000,000 yards of cotton piece goods, enough to make a pair of sheets for every family in the United States.

Of course, that’s all in the past, unless we’re talking about DisstonPrecision, the successor to Henry Disston’s Keystone Saw, Tool, Steel & File Works, which started in a cellar near 2nd and Arch Streets in 1840. They no longer make handsaws at the factory, which moved to Tacony in 1872, and the place is a shadow of its former self. But the making goes on at New State Road and Knorr Street, as it has continuously since 1872. And so with Disston, (thanks to Scranton and Licht, Silcox twice, and TIME) the numbers resonate less abstractly, and even a bit more sweetly.

Henry Disston Keystone Saw, Tool, Steel & File Works, interior, ca. 1910. (DisstonPrecision)

The number of steps to manufacture a handsaw blade: 82.

Disston’s marketshare of the American handsaw business in 1940: 75 percent.

Disston’s annual usage of coal in the mid 1870s: ten thousand tons.

Order placed by the country of Afghanistan in the mid-1930s: 10 Disston Tractor Tanks.

The number of Disston saws sold annually to amateur and vaudeville musicians: about 500.

In 1918, 3,600 men and women worked in 58 Disston buildings. Those who had been employed for a decade or more: 1,400.

The number of cross-cuts through four-foot hemlock logs in an 8 hour shift made by Disston’s 9’ 2” diameter saws: 900.

And today?

How long it takes the 600 teeth of DisstonPrecision’s 6’ 10″ circular saw to cut through a steel I-beam: two seconds.

Philadelphia’s WOW lives on, after all.



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Behind the Scenes Neighborhoods Urban Planning

Campus Clearance: A Look Inside UPenn’s Lost Houses

4045 Walnut Street, c.1955.

 

Apartment building on the corner of 40th and Locust, May 8, 1953. Demolished.

It’s hard to believe that before the 1960s, adaptive reuse was an alien concept to architects and city planners.  To universities, the planning ethos of “out with the old, in with the new” was especially potent.  Disciples of Le Corbusier and other modernists were in control of the University of Pennsylvania and American schools. The classical Beaux-Arts tradition as taught by Paul-Philipe Cret was largely replaced by the Bauhaus creed of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.  There was little interest in fixing up old buildings. They represented an unenlightened past — the gloomy “horse-and-buggy era” — out of sync with modern life, technology, and especially the automobile.

3910 Walnut Street, c.1955.

The former Comegy mansion at 4203 Walnut Street, photographed on April 20, 1959. Built originally in the 1850s as a streetcar suburban villa, a century later it was in the heart of inner-city West Philadelphia.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, of course.  As is nostalgia.  In Penn’s defense, the GI Bill and the general “opening up” of American universities to the sons and daughters of the middle class caused serious strain on the old campus infrastructure.  Once largely the preserve  of the sons of the wealthy, an Ivy League education in the 1950s was well within the reach of young men and women from middle income families.  Penn president Gaylord P. Harnwell realized that in order to satisfy growing demand for classrooms and beds, the Penn campus would have to expand upward and westward. He built the massive new Van Pelt Library, and closed the trolley lines that ran down the middle of Locust Street, creating a new pedestrian greenway through the center of campus known as Locust Walk.  Most importantly, Penn leveled the four blocks bounded by 38th, 40th, Spruce, and Walnut Streets, replacing them with three concrete high-rise skyscraper dormitories designed by Penn Design dean G. Holmes Perkins, as well as several low-rise student housing structures. All of these were surrounded by lawns and walkways.The clean lines and smooth surfaces of the International style represented something striking, modern, and optimistic, a break with the dreary years of the Great Depression and World War II.

The Professor Henry C. Lea mansion at 3903 Spruce Street, November 9.1967. Originally built in the 1860s, this Italianate house served as the suburban residence of Penn professor Henry Lea (1825-1912). After serving as a fraternity house, it was pulled down in 1967.

The former dining room of the Lea mansion, just prior to demolition in 1967.

 

Fraternity paddles in an upstairs bedroom of the Lea mansion, just prior to demolition, November 1967.

Interior plasterwork, the Henry C. Lea mansion, just prior to demolition in November 1967.

Most of the houses on these blocks dated to the mid-to-late 19th century, and were built for middle class, white collar commuters. There was also were truly grand suburban residences built for the Drexels and other wealthy families.  Few people saw these grungy old homes as having much architectural value in the 1960s: what had once been a fashionable suburb had become a slum to be cleared. Critics derided Victorian architecture as decadent, ugly, and functionally obsolete.  From a practical standpoint, the buildings were old and run down, serving as ad hoc classroom space, student housing, fraternity houses, low-rent apartments, retail, and restaurants.  Their electrical and plumbing systems were at the end of their useful lives.  There was also a human cost to this expansion: scores of families, mostly African-American renters, were displaced. In fact, Penn’s expansion ignited tension in the surrounding neighborhood that lasted for years.

The destruction wasn’t total. Penn adapted a few houses for new uses: the Eisenlohr mansion became the president’s residence, while the Fels mansion housed the Fels Institute of government.  Two of the Drexel family houses survive as fraternity houses, while the Potts mansion survives largely intact as the headquarters of the Penn Press. St. Mary’s Episcopal Church also escaped the bulldozer.  Yet almost every other structure came down to make way for the “Superblock,” which stands in stark contrast to Penn’s historic, compact campus to the east.

Miraculously, city photographers documented many of these homes before the wreckers arrived and smashed them to pieces. These photographs give a rare glimpse into these homes, which appear remarkably intact despite decades of neglect and alterations. During this mass demolition, scavengers picked through these homes, salvaging paneling, piping, leaded glass, and other examples of fine 19th century craftsmanship.  The carved wood and plasterwork dated from a time when labor was cheap and rich materials plentiful: solid walnut pocket doors, for example, were common in West Philadelphia houses.  After the Civil War, machines could cheaply churn out elaborately ornamented furniture and fittings that previously could only have been laboriously made by hand.

Much of what is seen here in these pre-demolition shots had been dismissed not only as out-of-date, but just plain hideous.  Who wanted a monstrous Frank Furness fireplace in their home, anyway?  Most of these houses were simply smashed to smithereens and hauled off to the nearest landfill.

The remarkably well-preserved library of the Comegy mansion in April 1959: the paneling is most likely either walnut or mahogany. It is doubtful that any of this fine 19th century craftsmanship survived the wrecker’s ball.

39th and Locust Street, looking east, February 11, 1930. The Drexel mansion on the left is still standing, while the Second Empire rowhouses on the right are gone, replaced by Harnwell College House, one of three skyscrapers designed by G. Holmes Perkins.

It took a new generation of urban pioneers, real estate investors, and preservationists to realize the aesthetic (as well financial) value of historic structures, no matter how tired, in urban areas such as West Philadelphia.