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Cleaning Up In Philadelphia

Broad and Arch Streets - Looking South - During Clean Up Week Parade, April 20, 1914. (PhillyHistory.org)
“White Wings” at Broad and Arch Streets – Looking South – During Clean Up Week Parade, April 20, 1914. (PhillyHistory.org)

What with coal ash, horse droppings and the refuse of day-to-day life, cleaning the early 20th-century city proved no small task. But for South Philadelphia pig farmer turned politician Edwin H. Vare, cleaning up in Philadelphia proved to be quite a lucrative operation, both literally and figuratively.

Back then, the city didn’t clean its streets—private contractors did. And year to year, the competition to win and hold contracts for the city’s six districts grew fierce—and political. Before long, the powerful Vare Brothers obtained contracts for every last city street. And they’d hold onto at least several of these handsome contracts until the City Charter of 1919 turned the massive undertaking back over to the city.

In the early decades of the 20th century, cleaning the city also included annual demonstrations of influence, displays of military-style choreography and campaign advertising. As early as 1900, the newly-minted army of 150 uniformed street sweepers, “White Wings,” as they became known, passed in review of before city officials. “Each man wore a uniform of white; his helmet, jumper and overalls were immaculate, and each was armed with a formidable brush, or about 24 inches callibre,” reported The Philadelphia Inquirer. Commanding each company were leaders in “neat gray uniforms” issuing orders in Italian, or Hungarian or whatever the native language of that particular squad. By 1912, these white duck uniforms and pith helmets became standard issue. By 1913, parades became an annual event.

"White Wing" with Broom,  Shovel and Wheelbarrow, 1912. (PhillyHistory.org)
“White Wing” with Broom, Shovel and Wheelbarrow, 1912. (PhillyHistory.org)

“Every citizen is requested to join in the crusade against dirt and filth,” proclaimed Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg in April 1914. He asked everyone to do their part “in cleaning out rubbish and waste material from rooms, closets, hallways, garrets, roofs, cellars fire escapes, yards, all dark corners and out of the way places.” And to reinforce the city’s commitment, the mayor designated April 20th to 25th as “Clean-Up-Week” launched by a parade on Broad Street. At the head of the two-mile long march, peppered with eight brass bands, rolled a single, ash wagon bearing a giant sign. Then came a car packed with contractors, then superintendents on foot, then the “White Wings”—uniformed, helmeted blockmen and gangmen wheeling bag carriers or wielding brooms. They were followed by sprinklers, squeegee machines (as we saw previously),  flushers, machine brooms, dirt wagons, ash wagons and rubbish wagons. In all, 2,000 street cleaners and 750 pieces of equipment paraded by.

Advertisement for Clean Up Week, 1914 (Google Books)
Advertisement for Clean Up Week, 1914 (Google Books)

But the procession was only the half of it. The Director of the Department of Public Works sent out 3,400 personal letters to every manufacturer of brushes, brooms, buckets, vacuum cleaners and advertisers of same. He wrote to evey last civic group and major business. All mail from the city bore gummed stickers in yellow and blue with the words, “Remember Clean-Up Week, April 20-25, 1914.”  Police handed out 260,000 four-page printed bulletins. School children were issued blue and yellow buttons. More than 20,000 display placards appeared in the windows of department stores and retail merchants. Every one of the 700,000 Philadelphians settling in to view films at any one of the city’s 205 “moving picture houses” would see slides directing their attention to “Clean-Up-Week.” And inside the city’s 3,200 streetcars were posted neatly designed placards featuring the figure of William Penn wielding a broom from atop City Hall.

As to the metaphor of the broom signifying sweeping political reform? Apparently, that hadn’t yet caught on.

[Sources for this post, all from The Philadelphia Inquirer, include: “‘White Wings’ Pass in Review Before City Officials,” January 3, 1900; “Spick and Span City is Aim of Clean-Up Week,” April 12, 1914; “White Wings Will Herald Clean-Up Week’s Approach—Men and Equipment to be Shown in Parade Today,” April 18, 1914; and “White Wings in March Clean-Up Weeks’s Prelude – 2000 Street Cleaners, Spick and Span, Seen in Parade,” April 19, 1914.]

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Behind the Scenes Snapshots of History

The Wreck of the “Governor Ames”

A three masted lumber schooner docked at Race Street and Delaware Avenue, January 17, 1900.
A three masted lumber schooner docked at Race Street and Delaware Avenue, January 17, 1900. 

On December 9, 1909, the lumber schooner Governor Ames set sail from Brunswick, Georgia on a routine coasting voyage to New York. Onboard were 14 souls, including Captain King and his wife. Lashed onto her upper deck was a cargo of freshly cut railroad ties, most likely headed for the New York Central Railroad’s supply yard.

Captain King was in command of a unique vessel. When launched in 1888, the Governor Ames (named after Massachusetts governor Oliver Ames)  was the only five masted schooner in the world, and one of the largest cargo vessels afloat, grossing 1,600 tons and stretching 252 feet in length. She was also an expensive ship, costing $75,000. Her owners, the Atlantic Shipping Company of Somerset, Massachusetts, had built the Ames for short cargo runs up and down the Eastern Seaboard, as well as longer runs to South America. She was also swift, with a reputation of being “speedy and a good sea boat.”

Yet the Governor Ames got off to a bad start on her maiden voyage from Boston to Baltimore. In December 1888, she was dismasted off Cape Cod and ran aground on Georges Bank. As the wrecked ship groaned and wallowed in the Atlantic, the wet and shivering crew prayed for help before the Ames broke up. “Here we remained clearing up and waiting for assistance,” recounted J.F. Davis, the brother of the Ames’s captain. “Up to Sunday we saw but few vessels, and they passed at a distance. Sunday, the fishing schooner Ethel Maude of Gloucester ran up to us, and we made a bargain for a passage for myself and the two extra carpenters to Gloucester. The extent of the damage at the time I left the vessel was about $10,000 due to loss of spars.”

Miraculously, no lives were lost, and the maimed Ames did not break up. Help arrived, and she was re-floated and repaired by February of the following year. She departed New Haven, Connecticut for Buenos Aires, Argentina carrying 2,000,000 board feet of lumber, expected to sell for $15.50 per square foot. Three months later, she departed Portland, Maine, carrying a similar sized cargo of spruce, valued at nearly $30,000 and according to The New York Times, “the largest cargo, perhaps with one exception, ever taken by an American vessel.” Ill-luck continued to dog the Ames. She ran aground again in 1899, this time in the warm waters off Key West while en route from Philadelphia to Galveston. To refloat her, the crew had to throw 200 tons of coal overboard.  This time, she suffered minimal damage.

Governor Oliver Ames of Massachusetts (1831-1895), namesake of the schooner "Governor Ames." Source: Wikipedia.com
Governor Oliver Ames of Massachusetts (1831-1895), namesake of the schooner Governor Ames. Source: Wikipedia.com

After the Key West grounding, the curse on the Ames lifted. When Captain King guided his vessel up the stormy Atlantic Coast in December 1909, the Ames and been accident-free for almost a decade. She had even survived a few brutal trips around stormy Cape Horn, hauling New England lumber to Australia. Although the air was frigid and the iron seas menacing, this run to New York would be a routine trip by comparison to battling Cape Horn westerlies. The Governor Ames was a twenty year old veteran.

***

The sailing ship did not die out with the coming of the deep water steamer in the mid-19th century.  Well into the 1900s, soaring masts were a common sight along the Delaware River. Big, steam-powered craft did wipe out the clipper ships and North Atlantic packets on the ocean routes, but the versatile schooner remained popular for hauling  basic, low-cost bulk cargoes such as coal, timber, gravel, railroad ties, and ice, especially to and from smaller ports that did not have railroad access.

The name of this three-masted schooner depicted at Race Street and Delaware Avenue hast been lost to history.  There was little concept of tall ship “romance” when this photograph was taken. People took these ships for granted. It was only after the schooners vanished — supplanted first by the railroad and the Mack truck — did people lament their disappearance. As singer-songwriter Stan Rogers said about the Nova Scotian schooner Bluenose, she “knew hard work in her time. Hard work in every line.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWUD_r6E4U8&w=480&h=360]
1930s footage of the Nova Scotia schooner “Bluenose” racing against her Gloucester, Massachusetts rival “Gertrude L. Thibault.” Set to the music of Stan Rogers.

A schooner has two or more masts, all of which are rigged with “fore-and-aft” sails.  The triangular sails allowed captains to sail their ships close to the wind, something that square riggers could not do.  They could also tack easily, making them maneuverable in coastal waters and remote ports. Most importantly, their lack of yards  — with exception of topsail schooners, which had one or two square sails on their foremasts — meant that the crew did not have to climb aloft to make or trim sail except in an emergency.  On a schooner, a crew almost always remained on deck to hoist and lower sail. By the late 19th century, steam-powered donkey engines on deck assisted the crews with the heavy-lifting on bigger schooners.

For the shipowner, the smaller crew drastically cut reduced a vessel’s operating cost.  For example: the big, square-rigged California clipper ships of the 1850s — the most famous of which was the Flying Cloud —  needed about 60 crew members to operate efficiently.  A comparably sized five masted schooner such as the Governor Ames of 1888, built for the lumber trade, required only 12 men to sail. Not having to buy and store coal for fuel also saved money, and freed up space for cargo.

For two centuries, the schooner was the served as the humble workhorse of the American mercantile marine, a common sight in big harbors and small ports all along the Eastern Seaboard.   They were relatively cheap to build out of abundant native timber, especially in Maine. According to naval historian Howard Chappelle, “in spite of the fact that ships and square riggers have monopolized certain important trades, such as the packet and East Indian, and though they handled large and valued cargoes individually, the total tonnage and value of such cargoes were small compared to that carried by the schooners engaged in the coasting and foreign trades.”

***

On December 25, 1909, as Philadelphians gathered in warm, pine-festooned churches to celebrate Christmas, a battered, badly-shaken Joseph Speering arrived in Philadelphia on the steamship Shawmut. He was the sole survivor of the Governor Ames, which had sunk off North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras in a gale twelve days earlier. He told the press that everyone else onboard had either been drowned or crushed to death by collapsing masts, including the captain’s wife, who the crew had lashed to the rigging in an attempt to protect her from the boiling seas crashing over the schooner’s bulwarks. As the Ames’s wooden keel bounced up and down against the rocky shoals, Speering jumped overboard and clung to a floating hatch cover. He then watched the Governor Ames break up and sink.

All alone, Speering clung to the hatch cover for over twelve hours before the crew of the passing Shawmut lowered a lifeboat and plucked him from the frigid seas.

Launch of the five masted schooner "Governor Ames" in Waldeboro, Maine. Source: Wikipedia.com
Launch of the five masted schooner Governor Ames in Waldeboro. Source: Wikipedia.com
The Governor Ames under sail. She was wrecked  Source: Wikipedia.com.
The Governor Ames under sail.  Source: Wikipedia.com.

Sources:

“A Big Lumber Schooner,” The New York Times, February 15, 1889.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F05E0D6153AE033A25755C1A9649C94689FD7CF

“The Five Masted Schooner Missing,” The Philadelphia North American, March 3, 1895.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9905E3D61139E033A25750C0A9659C94649ED7CF

“A Large Cargo of Lumber,” The New York Times, April 30, 1889.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9901E6D8123AE033A25752C0A9639C94689FD7CF

“An Unlucky Voyage: The New Schooner Governor Ames Badly Wrecked,” The New York Times, December 18, 1888.

Howard Irving Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York, NY: Bonanza Books, 1935), p. 219.

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South Street Squeegee

Squeegee Machine - Broad and South Streets, June 11, 1914.  (PhillyHistory.org)
Squeegee Machine – Broad and South Streets, June 11, 1914. (PhillyHistory.org)

In the 20th century, people came to love their cars, so long as they could drive them on smooth, flat, clean asphalt. In rush hour traffic, cobblestones quickly lost their charm; Belgian blocks got old fast.

Asphalt, also known as bituminous paving was as flat could be, providing those who laid it kept it clean and in good condition. And in Philadelphia, where the total area of streets was more than 17 million square yards and growing, that took some real effort. On a daily basis, a century ago, Philadelphians cleaned 8.1 million square yards of it.

According to Elements of Highway Engineering, the city’s “broken stone roads are cleaned by brushing coarse dirt into the gutters once a week, once in two weeks, or once a month, dependent upon traffic and location. Pavements are cleaned every day, every other day, every third day, or once a week dependent upon traffic, location, and other local conditions. Smooth bituminous pavements, brick pavements in good condition, and wood block pavements are cleaned by patrolmen with brooms and rotary squeegees.”

The Kindling Machinery Company of Milwaukee had the corner on the horse-drawn squeegee, a chariot-like vehicle holding 500 gallons of water that, with its roller set an oblique angle, cut a seven-foot wide swath of squeaky urban clean. As William H. Connell, Chief, Bureau of Highways and Street Cleaning in Philadelphia explained in 1914: “The operation consists of batteries of two and three squeegee machines preceded by sprinklers” about 200 yards ahead, in order, confirmed the American Highway Engineers’ Handbook, to permit the water “to saturate and loosen up the dirt on the pavement without giving it time to evaporate. … The idea of sprinkling is to soften the surface and enable the squeegee to cleanse the streets of all slime as well as the coarser materials. The squeegees are followed by two men, whom immediately sweep up the windrows of dirt into piles, and a sufficient number of carts follow to remove the dirt from the streets.”

At the dawn of the internal combustion age, especially on streets being cleaned for automobile traffic, there was something anachronistic and even quaint about the horse-drawn squeegee machine. It also came down to dollars and cents. By 1922, the original model was pitted against the new, motor-powered squeegee. The winner, hands down, was the latter, which, on a daily basis, cleaned 80,000 square yards compared with 35,000 square yards squeegeed by the horse-drawn version. The motorized model cost far less to operate. And it wasn’t pulled by horses, which were part of the problem in the first place.

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Behind the Scenes Events and People Historic Sites

Nicholas Biddle, Philadelphia Hellenophile

The Second Bank of the United States, 420 Chestnut Street, 1859.
The Second Bank of the United States, 420 Chestnut Street. A photograph from 1859.

Before he locked horns with President Andrew Jackson over the fate of the “many headed monster” (a.k.a. The Second Bank of the United States), banker Nicholas Biddle fancied himself something of a poet and aesthete.  Born to wealth and blessed with brilliance, Biddle graduated from Princeton University — at the head of his class — at the tender age of 15. This was only after the University of Pennsylvania refused to grant the Philadelphia wunderkind a bachelors degree a few years before.

The young Nicholas Biddle.
The young Nicholas Biddle.  Source: Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitalization Project.

Like John Quincy Adams, Biddle (1785-1844) was well-traveled from an early age.  In 1804, he accompanied the American minister John Armstrong to France as his personal secretary, and sat in the pews of Notre-Dame as Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France.  In England, the dashing and probably cocky Nicholas had the gumption to verbally spar with University of Cambridge dons about the differences between ancient and modern Greek. Biddle’s sojourns were hardly unique. By the early 1800s, scores of Americans had visited Europe either as diplomats or merrymakers on the “Grand Tour.” Another Philadelphian, the late Dr. Benjamin Franklin, was still revered in France, where his bespectacled visage still adorned countless Parisian homes. John Quincy Adams had been as far afield as St. Petersburg, where he served as America’s first minister to Russia.

But Nicholas Biddle was only the second American to visit Greece, the birthplace of modern democracy. In May 1806, the young Philadelphian sailed from the Italian port of Trieste and landed in Zante, Greece. For three months, he roamed through the land which had been “the first brilliant object that met my infancy.”   Like many well-educated men of his time, Biddle supported Greece’s struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire.  Another aristocratic man of letters, Lord Byron, died fighting with the Greek army twenty years after Biddle’s visit. Composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote incidental music for August von Kotzebue’s 1811 play The Ruins of Athens for a performance in Budapest. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s engravings of classical ruins were wildly popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and inspired the Americans architects such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Latrobe.

"Lord Byron in Albanian Dress," an 1813 painting by Thomas Phillips.
“Lord Byron in Albanian Dress,” an 1813 painting by Thomas Phillips. Source: Wikipedia.

Biddle, himself possessed of Byronic good looks, was conscious of the influence that Greek philosophers had on American political theorists.  “Where are her orators?” he wrote of the Greeks. “Gone forth to enlighten distant nation without a solitary ray for their country. Whilst foreign erudition has lighted its lamp at the flame of their genius, their works are unknown to posterity.”

As Biddle gazed at the ruins of the Acropolis in Athens, he came to believe that this architectural language was best suited to the ideals of new American Republic, which strangely like Greece was heavily based on chattel slavery. To Biddle, the best Greek buildings had an understated majesty. This was a result of their purity of form, use of the “Golden Ratio” of 1 to 1.618, and richness of materials over mere ornamentation.

The Doric Order as used on the Parthenon. The vertically grooved sections of the lintel are called triglyphs, while the blank portion are called metopes. The metopes usually were the backdrop for sculpture.   Source: Wikipedia.
The Doric Order as used on the Parthenon. The vertically grooved sections of the lintel are called triglyphs, while the blank portion are called metopes. The metopes usually were the backdrop for sculpture. Source: Wikipedia.

The Parthenon, commissioned by Pericles and designed by the architect Iktinos in the 5th century B.C., was built using the most “masculine” of the Greek orders: Doric.  In the Doric order, columns were massive and fluted, and topped by smooth flared capitals. The architrave – the stone lintel supported by the columns – was likewise spare, decorated with grooved triglyphs and metopes that mimicked earlier wooden post-and-lintel construction.  Because of its austerity, the Doric was the least popular order in neoclassical Western architecture, particularly in the churches and palaces that Biddle saw in France and Rome.  The other two orders, Ionic and Corinthian, were more elaborate and romantic in their aesthetic.  In the new American capital of Washington, D.C., architect William Thornton used the Corinthian order on the Capitol Building, while James Hoban used Ionic for his “presidential palace,” more popularly known as  the White House. But to Biddle, the Doric’s restraint appealed to his purest classical sensibilities, in which less was indeed more. And Doric was not tainted with associations with Imperial Rome and the European absolutist monarchies that followed it.

Piranesi's drawing of the Ionic order as used on the Roman temple of Portunus. Source: Wikipedia.
Piranesi’s drawing of the Ionic order as used on the Roman temple of Portunus. The Ionic order is used on the White House. Source: Wikipedia.
The Corinthian order, as used on the Pantheon in Rome. Source: Wikipedia.
The Corinthian order, as used on the Pantheon in Rome. The Corinthian order is used on the U.S. Capitol. Source: Wikipedia.

Biddle might have revered the ancient Greeks, but he was disgusted by the state of Athenian affairs in 1806.  He, like many Westerners, blamed Greece’s sorry state on the Turks.  The Parthenon was a victim of this long occupation.  In 1687, after having stood nearly intact for centuries, the Parthenon, which the Turks were using as an arsenal, was hit by a shell from Venetian guns.  Biddle gazed on the crumbling ruins with despair. “Are these few wretches, scarcely superior to the beasts whom they drive heedlessly over the ruins, are these men Athenians?” he wrote. “Where is their freedom?  Alas! This is the keenest stab of all. Bowed down by a foul oppression, the spirit of Athens has bent under slavery. The deliberations of her assemblies were once their laws; they now obey the orders of a distant master, and on the citadel itself, the protectress & the asylum of Grecian freedom, now sits a little Turkish despot to terrify & to command.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUPAf7eEo0o&w=480&h=360]
Overture and chorus from “The Ruins of Athens” by Ludwig van Beethoven.

The ruined Parthenon in the 1830s, with a mosque built in the center.
The ruined Parthenon in the 1830s, with a mosque built in the center. Source: Wikipedia.

The “little Turkish despot” Biddle referred to was most likely not a man, but the small mosque that the Turks had built in the middle of the ruined Parthenon.

When Biddle returned to Philadelphia, he must have looked with dismay at the architecture of his own sober Quaker City.  Most of its buildings were of plain red brick with white wood trim, various versions of the British-influenced Georgian or the somewhat newer Roman-influenced Federal style. Over the coming years, as Biddle rapidly ascended local and national power structures, Biddle made it his mission to transform the City of Brotherly Love (φιλεω “to love” and αδελφος  “brother”)  into the Athens of America.  He founded and edited Port-Folio, the nation’s first literary magazine. Soon after he married the heiress Jane Craig, Biddle remodeled his country residence “Andalusia” on the Delaware River and his city home on the 700 block of Spruce Street in the Greek style.  When appointed as the head of the Second Bank of the United States, Biddle commissioned the architect William Strickland to build an adaptation of the Parthenon as its new home. Completed in 1824, it was made entirely of Pennsylvania blue marble.

The Nicholas Biddle house at 715 Spruce Street, on the left, in February 1959. It has since been restored to its full glory.
The Nicholas Biddle house at 715 Spruce Street, on the left, in February 1959.

 

Nicholas Biddle House at 715 Spruce Street in 1972, post restoration.

Nicholas Biddle’s mortal struggle with President Andrew Jackson is well-known, as is his hubristic fall from grace.  Yet the beautiful Greek-influenced buildings he commissioned in and around Philadelphia still grace his native city, which was once known as the Athens of America.

Sources:

William Harris, “The Golden Mean,” Humanities and Liberal Arts, Middlebury College.  http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Humanities/TheGoldenMean.html#refpoint4

R.A. McNeal, ed. Nicholas Biddle in Greece: The Journals and Letters (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p.50, 219.