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When Mechanization Took Command

Street Cleaning Machine – Elgin Motor Sweeper, October 31, 1917 (PhillyHistory.org)
Street Cleaning Machine – Elgin Motor Sweeper, October 31, 1917 (PhillyHistory.org)

Great 20th-century cities demanded forward looking solutions. When Philadelphia announced its intentions to join the City Beautiful Movement, grandiose cleanups would call for something more than the pith-­helmeted army of “White Wings.” Marching, uniformed  broomsmen were more reminiscent of 19th– century colonial conquests than 20th-century urban efficiency.

The new solution would be a machine, and the more newfangled the better. Sprinkling and sweeping devices were horse drawn and required abundant supporting labor on foot. Squeegee machines were moving in the right direction. They slicked down miles of asphalt, but anything pulled by a horse was still old-school, manure producing, and self-defeating. What could maintain the explosion of new highways and byways and blend in with booming vehicular traffic? It would need to be something self-contained, something that looked and played the part.

In 1911, the first internal combustion powered sweeper seemed to have it all. But it was limited by a too-small collecting capacity. And its steel-rimmed wheels were out of step with rubber tire technology.  This sweeper did accomplish twice the work “at half the cost of the horse-hauled machine sweeper” but its engine moved it along at a snail’s pace and its inability to maneuver led to increased traffic congestion.

John M. Murphy, an Illinois farmer turned windmill maker turned Elgin, Illinois City Father crafted the solution with a new and improved “street sweeping machine.” Murphy’s machine was agile; it kept up with automobile traffic. It didn’t damage the pavement; it didn’t raise dust and left no debris behind. The Elgin Motor Sweeper received U. S. Patent number 1,239,293 on September 4, 1917. And a month later, an unidentified city official called for the city’s new acquisition to be brought up to the northeast corner of Philadelphia City Hall where he posed with it.

No question: the Elgin Motor Sweeper would cost-justify itself in Philadelphia, just as it had in beta testing on the roads of Boise, Idaho. There, the sweeper worked two, eight-hour shifts and cleaned 275,000 square yards of pavement per day—twice as much as the horse-drawn method. The operating cost? Nine cents per 1,000 square yards compared with a whopping 31 ½ cents using the old technique, according to the company history. “News of the fantastic new sweeper spread to Pocatello, Idaho—to Portland, Oregon” and, of course, to Philadelphia. “Fifteen Elgins were produced and put to use in 1915, twenty-three in 1916, forty-two the following year”—1917—when Philadelphia’s was proudly photographed.

The days of the “White Wing” army were over. Machines with names like “Gutter Snipe” would clean city streets in the 20th century. Mechanization, made elegant by innovation and compelling by fiscal responsibility, had taken command.

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West Philadelphia Italianate

4037 Pine Street 1964 ashx
A large Italianate summer villa at 4037 Pine Street, dating from around 1860. The detailing was inspired by Italianate Renaissance palazzos, only executed in wood and stucco rather than stone.

According to The Architectural Review of 1870, an Italianate home was a friendly structure, an anti-castle of sorts: “The Italian style is well adapted to many parts of our country, and is known by the absence of acute gables, buttresses, embattlements, and clustered columns. Instead of these are found: the hip-roof; in place of the gable or pediment; the pilaster, instead of the buttress; the balustrade instead of the battlement; the semicircular arch instead of the square head.”

The Italianate style proliferated throughout West Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill, and other Philadelphia streetcar suburban communities in the 1850s. It was romantic and whimsical, yet at the same time practical for family use, especially in the hot summer months. An Italianate villa was little more than a big box, with walls of stone or stucco-covered brick, and topped with projecting eaves and often a wood-and-glass cupola perched atop of the hipped roof. Twin houses often had a tower at the middle of the facade.

The cover to the January 1857 edition of Godey's Lady's Book. Architects like Sloan and Downing used such publications to distribute their architectural plans.
The cover to the January 1857 edition of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Architects like Sloan and Downing used such publications to disseminate their architectural plans.

Samuel Sloan, a Philadelphia architect and protégé of influential designer Andrew Jackson Downing, had a hand in many developments on the eve of the Civil War. Like Downing, Sloan had an entrepreneurial, even self-promotional streak. He supplemented his architecture practice by writing articles and creating designs for publications such as Godey’s Lady’s Book. His influence can be seen on Baring Street in Powelton Village and on Woodland Terrace near the intersection of Baltimore Avenue and 40th Street. For Sloan, homeownership was a Republican virtue, one that strengthened not just the city, but the nation as a whole:

The man who has a home feels a love for it, a thankfulness for its possession and a proportionate determination to uphold and defend it against all invading influences. Such a man is, of necessity . . . a good citizen; for he has a stake in society.

The detached or semi-detached suburban home — as opposed to the urban townhouse (for the rich) and the rowhouse (for the middle and working classes) — not only gave its owners a sense of privacy, but also the architects a chance to experiment with stylistic variety. Rowhouses, no matter how big, had uniform facades, with only a dash of Greek Revival or Roman-inspired trim around the front door or windows. During the 1850s and early 1860s, the American suburban home came into its own as a distinct type, neither townhouse nor country retreat nor farmhouse. Thanks to the horse-drawn streetcar, an office worker could live several miles away from his place of business in the city center. Any hints of commerce were banished as soon as he crossed the threshhold. There were also supposed health benefits — anyone who could afford it could move away from the disease and congestion of Center City, especially during the summer months.

4012-4014 Pine Street.ashx
Italianate twins at 4012-4014 Pine Street, built c.1860. The bracketed cornices and flat roofs are signatures of this style.

And what better style to evoke a bucolic getaway than an Italianate villa, inspired by the ancient stone castles of sunny Tuscany? Some Italianate homes grew to mansion proportions, such as the Allison home at 42nd and Walnut (now home to the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College) and the now-vanished Anthony J. Drexel compound at 38th and Locust. But most were built on speculation for middle-class Philadelphians seeking an upgrade from a cramped rowhouse: lawyers, doctors, and small business owners. Much of the ornamentation was hackwork by historical standards, but faithfulness to Italian Renaissance models was less important than charm. By the 1850s, the classically inspired Federal style had given way to a “picturesque” romanticism. Homes were supposed to fit into their natural settings rather than be imposed upon them.

223 S. 42nd Street, 1964 ashx
223 S.42nd Street, a freestanding Italianate mansion constructed around 1860 on what was then the western edge of West Philadelphia and fronting the large estate of banker Clarence H. Clark. Clark and his neighbor Anthony J. Drexel developed the surrounding area with large homes in the 1870s and 1880s. The Greek-inspired front porch is probably a later addition. 
3800 Baring Street 12.14.1962.ashx
The south side of the 3700 block of Baring Street, 1962. Like the Woodland Park houses, which were developed by the Hamilton family estate, these Italianate twins date from the Civil War area. Their porches are supported by simple Tuscan-style columns rather than elaborate cast-iron filigreed pillars. During the early twentieth century, the first house on the right (3726 Baring) was occupied by the Wolfington family, manufacturers of bus and automobile bodies. 

The Civil War changed drastically changed the Philadelphia streetscape. Samuel Sloan’s architecture practice collapsed. His most ambitious project, Longwood mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, was halted in mid-construction. Gone were the simple, the sincere, and the picturesque. Philadelphia’s prosperous citizens, many of whom had grown rich from supplying the Union Army, demanded more ornate, impoosing residential architecture, with stricter reliance on European models, and adorned with more glitter and gold than mere stucco and wood could offer.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SI6CMxVF0M&w=640&h=360]
A tour of the “Loch Aerie” mansion in Chester County, PA, built in 1865 by Philadelphia architect Addison Hutton for businessman William E. Lockwood.

[1] The Architecture Review, 1870, as quoted in Willard S. Detweiler, Jr., Chestnut Hill: An Architectural History (Philadelphia: Chestnut Hill Historical Society, 1969), p. 26.

[2]Alexander von Hoffman, “Home Values Are Down, and Not Just at the Bank, The Washington Post, July 20, 2008.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071802559.html

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Rogue Abattoirs and the Plight of Philly’s Meat Men

Interior of Slaughterhouse (Abattoir) at 5319 Westminster Avenue, Dr. Schreiber, Meat Inspector. January 16, 1909 (PhillyHistory.org)
Interior of Slaughterhouse (Abattoir), 5319 Westminster Avenue, Dr. Schreiber, Meat Inspector. January 16, 1909 (PhillyHistory.org)

“If we do not want to eat the stuff ourselves,” declared veterinarian Charles Allen Cary in 1887, “we had better bury or burn it.” Experts of the American Veterinary Association called for more inspections of dairies and slaughterhouses to reduce the amount of tubercular meat and milk reaching consumers.

At the turn of the 20th century, tuberculosis still remained a leading cause of death in the United States. Approximately 10 percent of the cases resulted from exposure to infected cattle or cattle products. More distressing was the fact that cattle caused 25 percent of the childhood cases of tuberculosis. More distressing still was the fact that these rates were even higher in cities.

It seemed a losing battle to Franklin K. Lowry, Philadelphia’s official “Meat Detective.” In 1904, Lowry’s office reported nearly 6,400 visits to slaughterhouses and about 700 to the city’s stores and markets. His team inspected more than 205,000 cattle and calves. Nearly all of the infected animals they found and destroyed showed signs of tuberculosis.

Lowry augmented his team with a graduate of Penn Veterinary School, Dr. Albert Fricke Schreiber. Chief Meat Inspector Schreiber ramped up the search for violators and condemned more meat, sending it to M. L. Shoemaker’s Fertilizing Plant at the foot of Venango Street. Even so, with few arrests and even fewer convictions, Philadelphia’s cattle drivers and meat packers conducted business as usual—and new cases of tuberculosis went unabated.

Schreiber and his inspectors visited nearly 44,000 butchers, slaughterhouses (also known as abattoirs), storage houses and markets in 1909. He reported dropping in “quite unexpectedly, late at night, on two small downtown abattoirs” and finding “a tubercular beef carcass, from which the affected tissues had been carefully, if not deftly, trimmed out” and “being dressed for market.” A good day’s work for the meat inspectors, but an unusually successful one. With a “small and inadequate force,” Schreiber had little chance of keeping up with the violations among the city’s 150 or so small abattoirs spread far and wide, about half of which had been cited for unsanitary conditions. Nearly 375,000 pounds of meat was condemned and destroyed in 1909 alone. But it resulted in only a single fine; a single guilty plea. Business as usual.

5319 Westminster Avenue, Slaughter House for Dr. Shrieben Meat Inspector.  1-16-1909 (PhillyHistory.org)
Exterior, Slaughterhouse (Abattoir), 5319 Westminster Avenue for Dr. Shreiber, Meat Inspector. January 16, 1909. (PhillyHistory.org)

For Philadelphia to have “something remotely related to intelligent supervision,” Schreiber promoted New York’s solution: confining its abattoirs to a single section of the city. He pleaded that his force of six inspectors (only two of whom were veterinarians) be expanded to twelve, including four veterinarians, a team “approximating the scope of the problem with which we have had to deal.” Then, and only then, could Schreiber hope to seriously address the tuberculosis problem, not to mention citing many other infractions, including “the handing of meat outside in the open air, uncovered and exposed to street dust, refuse and insects.”

In 1910, attrition caused by low pay reduced Schreiber’s team to three, “a force obviously and absurdly inadequate” if the city was “to prevent the killing of tuberculous cattle, measled hogs and immature calves,” and provide anything like “systematic surveillance” of the city’s stores and markets.

The case for more staff had merit on several fronts. In 1910, Philadelphia’s population stood at just over 1.5 million (about the same it is 100 years later) and the city was still growing and diversifying. The meat inspectors needed to not only catch up, they needed to keep up with new challenges.

When the city’s meat inspection unit did expand to eight (not the requested twelve) in 1911, Schreiber still felt overwhelmed. Now, in addition to the ongoing problem of killer cattle, he wanted his inspectors hoped to turn their attention to the city’s “’pest’ sections,” to address “’persistent offenders,’” that “class of dealers, who keep dirty shops in congested localities overrun with street stands, barrow venders, and other features of like character peculiar to the sections of the city inhabited by people of foreign birth.” These newcomers, “vendors of the curbstone and push cart variety…bring in partially decomposed rabbits, heated and unwholesome poultry, and other products.” Schreiber found them “pitifully poor, woefully ignorant of the plainest rudiments of sanitation, and not infrequently belligerently obstinate in their opposition to hygienic regulations.” He found their shops “badly kept, lacking in equipment, …without order or intelligent direction, and sometimes [a] jumble two or more lines of trade obviously not compatible under one roof.”

How could Philadelphia officials address the issue of tuberculosis and also mitigate the new and growing health problems caused by “long rows of curbstone and sidewalk vendors, extending several blocks on some of our streets” with vendors who “litter the roadways, gutters and sidewalks with refuse; and allow street dirt to be “blown over and upon exposed meats, poultry and fish”? In a city evolving daily with a new, growing immigrant population and a persistent, unsolved problem of tuberculosis in cattle, the small number of city meat men had no choice but to take it as they saw it—one day at a time.