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The Rittenhouse Club: Henry James’ Favorite Perch

Rittenhouse Club 10.8.1924
The Rittenhouse Club, as shown in 1924. 1811 Walnut Street.

Only the discreet letters “RC” on the brass doorplates identify 1811 Walnut Street as the former home of one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious clubs. The Beaux-Arts facade remains, but the building behind it is gone. Paneling from the club still survives in the bar of Rex 1516 restaurant on South Street. The remaining furniture — much of it designed by member Frank Furness — as well as the extensive collection of artwork — was scattered to the winds following the club’s sale of the building in the early 1990s. The lower two floors now house a Barney’s. The upper three floors, with their commanding views of Rittenhouse Square, are part of the 10 Rittenhouse condominium complex. They are vacant, but have most recently been listed at $15 million.

For nearly a century, the view from those bow windows was considered the finest in the city.

At least in the eyes of one famous author.

The Rittenhouse Club was founded in 1874 by a group of Philadelphia gentleman who originally named it the “Social Art Club.”  According to Philadelphia social chronicler Nathaniel Burt, its membership had “more literary and less sporting tastes” than the membership of the older Philadelphia Club.  This trend continued well into the club’s existence. According to one still-living member: “At the Rittenhouse Club, one would find Latin commentary scribbled in the margins of the library’s books. At the Philadelphia Club, the members would be most concerned with the latest racing news from Saratoga.”

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Greek-revival houses at 1815-1819 Walnut Street, demolished in the 1960s and replaced by a high-rise. The Rittenhouse Club is on the far right.

 

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was big and rich enough to support two major men’s clubs, plus the distinctly political Union League. The Main Line and Chestnut Hill were still largely weekend and summer retreats — most wealthy families still lived and worked in town. The Rittenhouse Club’s membership eventually purchased the home of Congressman James Harper on the north side of Rittenhouse Square, which by the 1880s was arguably the most fashionable address in Philadelphia.  By 1900, the club raised funds to purchase an adjoining townhouse to create an even larger structure fronting the square.

If the Philadelphia Club was an annex for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Rittenhouse Club served a similar function for faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and the gentlemen architects of the T-Square Club. Here, members of the business elite mixed with architects, clergymen, and professors.  Among the members during the club’s Gilded Age heyday were steamship magnate Clement Griscom, architect Frank Furness, his Shakespeare scholar brother Horace Furness, University of Pennsylvania provost Dr. William Pepper, his nephew Senator George Wharton Pepper, and financier E.T. Stotesbury.

Perhaps the club’s most famous admirer — if not member — was the novelist Henry James, who although born in New York, had moved to London and became a British subject.  In The American Scene, James described his view from a soft leather chair of the Rittenhouse Club as that of “the perfect square.”  His host was the pistol-wielding Dr. J William White, chief surgeon of the First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry and director of athletics at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Rittenhouse Square on April 18, 1913.

James was an inveterate snob, but he wasn’t the only one content with the view. As Nathaniel Burt quipped, “there do not seem to be many stories of hearts being broken because of a failure to get into the Rittenhouse Club; nonetheless, those that are in it are sufficiently pleased.” To be a member, one had to have the means and the time for leisurely wet lunches.  The cuisine was Edwardian in its richness, the wine list extensive. Membership depended heavily on family, college, and private school connections. Talking business was strictly prohibited.  And like other urban clubs of its type, its membership committee generally excluded those who did not come from the “right” background.

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The opening number to the Disney musical film “The Happiest Millionaire,” set at Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr.’s townhouse at 2014 Walnut Street in the 1910s. “Fortuosity” is sung by an Irish immigrant (played by Tommy Steele) who had just been hired to work as the Biddle family’s butler. Elated, he struts through Rittenhouse Square on his way to meet his new employers. Ultimately, “The Happiest Millionaire” proved less enduring than Walt Disney and the Sherman brothers’ previous collaboration: “Mary Poppins.”

Following World War II, the Rittenhouse Club suffered a long decline, in which the building slid from elegance into genteel decay. Funds ran low, and the membership roster dwindled.  Businesses moved out of town, and the three martini lunch became a relic of the past.  In addition, the federal tax code no longer allowed individuals to write off their club dues on tax returns.  As a result, many of the city’s clubs disbanded. Those that did survive opened up their membership rolls to previously excluded religious and ethnic groups. In the early 1990s, the Rittenhouse Club sold its building and found new quarters in the city.

The building sat vacant for a decade. Finally, the developers of 10 Rittenhouse purchased the structure and demolished everything except the limestone facade, which was restored to its full glory.  Today, anyone can go up to the second story of Barney’s and look through the same bowed windows that Henry James did a century ago.

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Portrait of Henry James (1843-1916) by John Singer Sargent. James was the author of classics such as “The Portrait of a Lady” (1881) and “The Ambassadors” (1903).

The comfy leather chairs are gone, as is the rich wood paneling on the library walls, but the view is still the same, and the square is still as close to perfect as an urban space can be.

To see a menu from a March 1903 luncheon at the Rittenhouse Club, click here

Sources: 

Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999),, p.264.

Nancy Heinzen, Perfect Square: A History of Rittenhouse Square (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009)p.95.

Liz Spikol, “Comcast CEO Brian Roberts Buys at 10 Rittenhouse,” CurbedPhilly, October 19, 2012.  http://philly.curbed.com/archives/2012/10/19/comcast-ceo-brian-roberts-buys-part-of-10-rittenhouse.php

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Events and People Historic Sites Neighborhoods

Powelton Avenue: The First Stop on the Main Line?


Footage of the last steam trains of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1954.

For those who regularly ride the Main Line trains: have you ever wondered why there are no stops between 30th Street Station and Overbrook?  After Overbrook, however, the train stops nearly every two minutes. There’s an old  — and very politically incorrect — mnemonic device for memorizing the towns on the Main Line: “Old Maids Never Wed and Have Babies. Period.”  Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr. Paoli.

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The bridge spanning the Schuylkill River in 1876, which connected Center City with the now-vanished Baltimore and Ohio station at 24th and Chestnut, designed by Frank Furness.

Thankfully, this phrase has fallen out of popular use.  As the Philadelphia Inquirer quipped in a 1988 article that quoted it: “But let’s not forget what the Main Line, at the bottom line, really is. The term is so ingrained in our local patois that we tend to detach it from the real meaning. The Main Line is – well, the main line. Tracks and sidings. Signals and stations. Switches, whistles.”

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The demolished Baltimore & Ohio station at 24th and Chestnut, designed by Frank Furness. Source: HABS/HAER
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The 44th and Parkside ballpark, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA. Source: Wikipedia.

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s development of its right-of-way was a shrewd real estate deal.  Rather than haggle with Philadelphia city government and acquire parcels piecemeal, they could buy up huge swaths of farmland outside of the city limits and develop it as they saw fit.  Until the turn of the twentieth century, there were two other stops before the Main Line trains chugged from 30th Street, through West Philadelphia, and across City Avenue: Powelton Village and Parkside.   According to architectural historian Robert Morris Skaler, Powelton became a popular residence for executives of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Baldwin Locomotive Works, and “even had a special railroad stop at Powelton Avenue for the Pennsylvania Railroad’s executives to travel by train to their offices.”  The Pennsylvania Railroad also had a stop at 52nd Street and Lancaster Avenue, labeled as the Hestonville Depot in an 1872 map. This stop later grew into a sprawling rail yard that cast a sooty, noisy pall over much of the adjacent Parkside neighborhood. Nearby was the 44th and Parkside ballpark, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA in 1903 and home of the African-American league Philadelphia Stars.

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The intersection of Lancaster Avenue and 52nd Street, the location of the now-closed 52nd Street depot and passenger stop. Photograph taken February 21, 1949.

Therefore, it could be argued in fact that Powelton Village was the first stop on the Main Line, the stretch of track connecting Philadelphia with Pittsburgh.

Much of the grand residential architecture that survives in Powelton today is a harbinger of the grand suburban development that grew up around the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line tracks in the 1890s and early 1900s. Powelton is a hybrid of streetcar and railroad suburban development: for the second half of the nineteenth century, it was serviced by both horse drawn (later electric) streetcars and by Main Line trains.  The surviving freestanding mansions on Powelton Avenue, Baring Street, and Hamilton Street are large and ornate,  yet they are set within walking distance of each other rather than being secluded on larger lots as they were on the Main Line. They are also located within a few minutes walk of the former Powelton Avenue stop.  Unlike the Main Line developments, there are also a significant number of twin houses and row house blocks intermingled with the free-standing houses.

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The Henry Cochran mansion at 36th and Baring Street, built in the 1890s by architect Wilson Eyre Jr. Photograph dated December 12, 1962

Several well-known Philadelphia architects got in on the act of building up Powelton.  Wilson Eyre Jr., designer of many large houses in Rittenhouse Square and the Philadelphia suburbs, also worked on at least two houses in Powelton Village.  One was a substantial freestanding mansion for wine merchant Henry Cochran, located on the corner of 36th and Baring Streets.  Another was a renovation of a narrow twin house on the 3500 block of Hamilton Street.  In both of these projects, Eyre displayed his characteristic sense of whimsy and invention, much of it medieval in inspiration. He also avoided the gaudy grandeur that characterized so much late Victorian architecture.  Among other commissions, Eyre was responsible for the University Museum, the Mask & Wig clubhouse, and suburban estates such as Horatio Gates Lloyd’s “Allgates” mansion in Haverford. In the words of the Historic Commission’s Diana Marcelo: “Eyre detested an overload of ornamentation. He had a feeling of proportion, and a tendency toward extended horizontal planes. His buildings had crisp lines and much expression, achieved by a careful blend of varying materials.”  The Cochran house bears more than a passing resemblance to the early residential work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In many ways, Eyre’s Powelton and Wright’s Oak Park were similar suburban communities.

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St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (now St. Andrew and St. Monica’s Episcopal Church) at 36th and Baring Streets. This was the location of Max Riebenack’s funeral in September 1903. Photograph dated December 14, 1962.

The neighborhood prospered for a few decades thanks to the station stop and the infusion of railroad money. From the 1870s until the early 1900s, because of its proximity to the old 30th Street depot, Powelton Village was a neighborhood of choice for Pennsylvania Railroad executives.  Max Riebenack was perhaps  the most prominent of the PRR executives who lived in West Philadelphia. Riebenack was an American success story: a German immigrant whose parents brought him to America as a six year old boy in 1850. By 1895, he had risen to the position of comptroller of the Pennsylvania Railroad, working alongside executives like Alexander Cassatt, mastermind of New York’s Pennsylvania Station and its tunnels.  Yet rather than move to Rittenhouse Square or the Main Line, Riebenack preferred to live “North of Market” in West Philadelphia, close to fellow German immigrants such as brewer Frederick Augustus Poth. With his newfound wealth, Riebenack purchased a plot of land for $14,000 (the equivalent of about $300,000 today)  at the corner of 34th and Powelton Avenue.  He then commissioned architect Thomas Preston Lonsdale to build a spiky roofed Queen Anne style mansion that rose high above the street.

As a high-ranking executive of one of the largest corporations in the world, Max clearly liked living large, joining many clubs during his time on North 34th Street, both in town (the Union League) and in the suburbs (the Merion Cricket Club). The house, now Drexel University’s Ross Commons, was built for grand entertaining. The Philadelphia Inquirer breathlessly described the Riebenack’s silver wedding anniversary as follows:

“A largely attended reception was given last night at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Max Riebenack, at Thirty-fourth and Powelton avenue, on the occasion of the silver anniversary of their wedding.  The house was handsomely decorated and an orchestra furnished music in the spacious hallway from behind a fern-covered nook.  The house was lighted up throughout with electric lights and crowded with guests. Mr. and Mrs. Riebenack were assisted in receiving their guests by Mrs. Conrad T. Clothier.  Many of the presents were handsome and valuable.”

Max Riebenack
Max Riebenack, Comptroller for the Pennsylvania Railroad and builder of the mansion that now serves as Drexel University’s Ross Commons. Source: Findagrave.com

Unfortunately, Max and Eleanor Riebenack suffered two terrible personal tragedies. In 1903, their thirty year old son Max Jr. died of typhoid fever in the family home on Powelton Avenue.  Five years later, another son, Henry  – an inventor and former track star at the University of Pennsylvania —  also died of disease, this time at the family’s beach house in Atlantic City, New Jersey. By the time Max Riebenack himself died in 1910, the neighborhood’s most fashionable days had past. When the Powelton Avenue stop closed, the neighborhood became much less accessible to Center City and the PRR’s offices at Broad Street Station.  Many of those with money moved to the Main Line towns past City Avenue, and the large mansions they left behind were converted into boarding houses.

So ended Powelton’s short reign as the “first stop” on the Main Line.

Sources:

Robert Morris Skaler, Images of America: West Philadelphia – University City to 52nd Street (Charleston, South Carolina: The Arcadia Press, 2002), p.77.

“West Philadelphia: The Basic History, Chapter 2: A Streetcar Suburb in the City: West Philadelphia, 1854-1907,” West Philadelphia Community History Center. http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/wphila/history/history2.html

“227. N. 34th Street, Philadelphia,” http://poweltonvillage.org/interactivemap/files/227n34th.htm

Sally Downey, “Tracking the Main Line from Overbrook to Paoli: The World from the 17 Stops of the R5 Local,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 5, 1988. http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-05/entertainment/26241651_1_train-station-signals-and-stations-bottom-line

Diana Marcelo, “National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form: Wilson Eyre Home” (Philadelphia, PA: The Philadelphia Historical Commission, April 1976.) https://www.dot7.state.pa.us/ce_imagery/phmc_scans/H001363_01H.pdf

 

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The Quaker City and the Second Empire

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“Dinner at the Tuileries” by Henri Baron, 1867. Emperor Napoleon III hosted many such grand affairs at the Tuileries Palace during the so-called Second Empire. Source: University of Indiana Bloomington.

In 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had the audacity — some might say hubris — to crown himself Emperor of France, just as his uncle had done half a century earlier.  He took the title of Napoleon III.

French progressives such as author Victor Hugo despaired.  They had just overthrown another king — this time the bumbling, pear-shaped Louis-Philippe of the House of Orleans.  In the monarchy’s place, they had installed a republican style of government, and Louis-Napleon had successfully won the presidential campaign in 1848.  But Louis-Napoleon had no intention of remaining a mere elected official.  His lifelong dream was to reestablish the Bonaparte dynasty, and supposedly finish the work that his family had began during the French Revolution. To do that, he had to be not president, not king, but emperor.  So only three years after his election, Louis-Napoleon engineered a coup d’etat to overthrow the Second Republic.  After much bloodshed and rioting in the streets of Paris, Louis-Napoleon and his partisans won the day.  The Bonaparte family was back in power.

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Alexandre Cabanel’s portrait of Emperor Napoleon III.

Victor Hugo himself was forced into exile, where he wrote three damning indictments of the new regime: Napoleon Le Petit (Napoleon the Small), Histoire d’un crime (A History of a Crime), and his poetry collection Les Châtiments (The Punishments).

Victor Hugo, "Imperial Reveles" from Les Châtiments, 1852
     Cheer, courtiers! round the banquet spread—
       The board that groans with shame and plate,
     Still fawning to the sham-crowned head
       That hopes front brazen turneth fate!
     Drink till the comer last is full,
     And never hear in revels' lull,
     Grim Vengeance forging arrows fleet,
           Whilst I gnaw at the crust
           Of Exile in the dust—
     But Honor makes it sweet!

     Ye cheaters in the tricksters' fane,
       Who dupe yourself and trickster-chief,
     In blazing cafés spend the gain,
       But draw the blind, lest at his thief
     Some fresh-made beggar gives a glance
     And interrupts with steel the dance!
     But let him toilsomely tramp by,
           As I myself afar
           Follow no gilded car
     In ways of Honesty.

     Ye troopers who shot mothers down,
       And marshals whose brave cannonade
     Broke infant arms and split the stone
       Where slumbered age and guileless maid—
     Though blood is in the cup you fill,
     Pretend it "rosy" wine, and still
     Hail Cannon "King!" and Steel the "Queen!"
           But I prefer to sup
           From Philip Sidney's cup—
     True soldier's draught serene.

     Oh, workmen, seen by me sublime,
       When from the tyrant wrenched ye peace,
     Can you be dazed by tinselled crime,
       And spy no wolf beneath the fleece?
     Build palaces where Fortunes feast,
     And bear your loads like well-trained beast,
     Though once such masters you made flee!
           But then, like me, you ate
           Food of a blessed fête—
     The bread of Liberty!

 

Why did the new emperor take the title Napoleon III? The reason was that Napoleon I’s infant son by Marie-Louise of Austria — his only legitimate heir — had technically reigned as Emperor of France for a few days after his father abdicated in 1814.  After his father’s defeat at Waterloo, little Napoleon Jr. was sent to live with his mother at Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna.  He died at 21.  He never saw his father again.

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“Le Grand Galopp de chemin de fer” by Emile Waldteufel (1837-1915), a popular dance music composer during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III. A celebration of the railroads connecting Paris to the rest of the country. Translation: “The Railroad Galop”

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“Minuit” (Midnight) by Emile Waldteufel. The chimes supposedly represent the clocks in the Tuileries ballroom striking midnight.

Now the leader of the Second Empire and ensconced in the grandeur of the Tuillieries Palace (the former Paris home of star-crossed predecessors Napoleon I and Louis XVI), Emperor Napoleon III started to refashion the old city of Paris into a modern, imperial city.  He hired city planner Baron George-Eugene Haussmann to lay out grand boulevards and oversee the construction of beautiful new apartment buildings to line them.  To accomplish this, Haussmann demolished huge swaths of the cramped medieval city, displacing thousands of residents.  He also built several new lavish railway stations, which connected Paris to the rest of the country.  Architect Hector-Martin Lefuel renovated both the royal residence at the Tuileries Palace and the Louvre museum, added grand new apartments in a neo-Baroque style. The crowning achievement of Napoleon III’s building program was the new opera house. Designed by Charles Garnier, the Paris Opera could seat 2,000 patrons in marbled, gilded splendor. The “Exposition Universelle de 1867” was arguably the high-water mark of the Second Empire — the world’s fair attracted nearly 10 million visitors from around the world.  Although its purpose was to allow nations to exhibit their artistic and industrial achievements, its real goal was to showcase Paris as the cultural capital of the world.Its success inspired a group of Philadelphia businessmen to mount a similar grand world’s fair in Fairmount Park nine years later.

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A bird’s eye view of Napoleon III’s dream project:; L’Exposition universelle de 1867. Source: Wikipedia.
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The Tuileries Palace illuminated for the June 10, 1867 gala celebrating the world’s fair. Nine years later, Philadelphia would host its own exposition, attracting millions of visitors and entertaining heads of state in a similarly grand fashion. The palace itself, built by Queen Marie of France in the early 1600s, had been the official Paris residence of the Bourbon kings and the Bonaparte emperors. Napoleon III renovated it lavishly during his reign. Set afire by radical members of the Paris Commune in 1871, its ugly ruins stood for another ten years before they were cleared.  The Tuileries Gardens remain a popular gathering space for Parisians today.   Painting by Pierre Tetar Van Elven. Source; Wikipedia.

Napoleon III might have had superb taste in architecture, but he did not possess his uncle’s military genius.  In 1870, he made the mistake of underestimating Otto von Bismarck, Minister President of Prussia.  The Franco-Prussian War was sparked by disputes by succession to the Spanish throne and control of the Southern German states. This ill-advised war caused the Second Empire to collapse like a house of cards.  German troops captured Emperor Napoleon II at the Battle of Sedan, and besieged the city of Paris itself, starving the residents into submission.  In the mayhem that followed, Communard mobs burned down the Tuileries Palace, Hotel de Ville, and other symbols of imperial power. The Louvre itself almost burned down when flames spread from the adjoining Tuileries Palace. The incomplete Opera House was spared.

France’s humiliation at the hands of Prussia and Bismarck sowed the seeds of another, deadlier conflict — one that would engulf all of Europe — forty years later. As for the former Napoleon III: he was released from captivity and exiled to England, where he died a few years later. The Bonapartes were gone for good.

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The Union League, designed by John Fraser in the Second Empire style. Opened in May 1865, one month after the Treaty of Appomattox Courthouse, which ended hostilities between the Union and the Confederacy. Photograph: c.1975.
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Family resemblance to the Union League. Second Empire twin houses at 37th and Baring Streets, dating from c.1870. Note the surviving iron filigree work on the roofline. Photo dated December 14, 1962.

Despite the Second Empire’s wretched end, its grand aesthetic fascinated American architects and designers. Richard Morris Hunt, who studied at at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Lefuel in the 1840s, brought French formalism back to his American practice. The primary mentor of the young Frank Furness, Hunt designed mansions for wealthy Americans families such as the Vanderbilts — most notably the Breakers for Cornelius Vanderbilt II — as well as grand public buildings such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  During Napoleon III’s reign, Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) trained an entire generation of American architects artists whose work would transform American culture: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Chester Holmes Aldrich, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Alexander Stirling Calder (son of the sculptor of the William Penn statue atop City Hall), and Thomas Hastings, to name a few. Paul Philippe Cret, a distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania and designer of the Parisian-style Benjamin Franklin Parkway, was also a Beaux-Arts graduate.

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The grand staircase of the Paris Opera. Its palatial interiors inspired the public rooms of Philadelphia’s City Hall. Source: Wikipedia.com

In the decade following the Civil War, Gilded Age Philadelphia threw Quaker modesty out the window. The city was richer than ever, with fortunes made in railroads, manufacturing, and (in the case of future streetcar plutocrat Peter Widener) provisioning the Union Army. The Union League, designed by John Fraser and completed in 1865, was perhaps the first large-scale Second Empire structure in the city. Housing developers caught the French bug, as well.  Starting in the 1870s, row houses in Philadelphia adopted the mansard roof, a favorite architectural device of Second Empire architects.  The term “mansard” was a corruption of Jules-Hardouin Mansart, a baroque architect who popularized the hipped gambrel roof during the reign of Louis XIV.  This architectural device became  a French trademark. It was not only used on royal palaces, but also on the apartment blocks built by Baron Haussmann in Paris during the 1850s and 60s. A wood-and-slate “mansard roof” not only made a house look more imposing on the outside, but also made the attic story  habitable while minimizing construction costs. Because a mansard roof is set back from the cornice line, it use also allowed builders to comply with setback restrictions while maximizing rents.

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A Second Empire style house at 4407 Baltimore Avenue, dating from the 1870s. Photo dated August 24, 1951.

The grandest testament to the Second Empire style’s cultural impact in Philadelphia is City Hall.  In 1871, the same year as the fall of Napoleon III’s regime, Scottish-born architect John McArthur Jr. began construction of this grandiose and expensive essay in the Second Empire style.  Modeled heavily on the Lefuel’s additions to the Louvre in Paris and smothered in allegorical statues, the stone structure took thirty years to complete, by which time it was out-of-step with the cleaner lines of the neoclassical style.

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The new Philadelphia City Hall illuminated on Founder’s Day, October 1908.

Although the largest municipal building in the world at the time of its opening in 1901, critics did not herald it as an American Louvre. Rather, it was greeted as a monument to hubris, corruption, and expensive bad taste.

Much like the excesses of Napoleon III’s regime three decades earlier. In the 1950s, city planner Edmund Bacon proposed tearing the vast edifice down, sparing only the clock tower, which was crowned by Alexander Stirling Calder’s statue of William Penn. Only the cost of demolition saved City Hall from destruction.

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The destruction of the Tuileries Palace during the revolt of the Paris Commune, 1871. The Louvre Palace, which housed France’s priceless collection of art, was saved by hardworking firefighters and Paris citizens. Source: University of Indiana at Bloomington.

Sources:

Jean-Bertrand Barrère, “Victor Hugo,” Encyclopedia Britannica, November 12, 2014.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/274974/Victor-Hugo/3353/Exile-1851-70

“The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems, by Victor Hugo”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8775/8775-h/8775-h.htm#link2H_4_0106

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Taking to the Streets with the Philadelphia Police (Singing and Dancing)

Police Band in Philadelphia Ball Park, 1912 (PhillyHistory.org)
Police Band in Philadelphia Ball Park [Baker Bowl, Broad and Huntingdon Streets], 1912 (PhillyHistory.org)
Philly’s Finest got into the big band business while the getting was good. Only three years after 1912, when bandmaster Lieutenant Joseph Kiefer (formerly of the U. S. Navy) started up his talented squad, he expanded its ranks to 72 musicians. He then spent the better part of the next decade riding the rising tide of American popular music.

In its first ten years, Kiefer’s band raised enough to cover their expenses and to pay $200,000 into the Police Pension Fund Association. There were the annual ticketed benefits, but the majority of the Police Band concerts were free. That unlikely business model had been in effect since 1917, when the City brought in Kiefer’s group to replace another band, whose contract officials let expire. “The Philadelphia Police Band will hold a series of open-air concerts on the northeast plaza of City Hall,” read the announcement. The new concerts would also inaugurate community singing.

“Over night the project has taken on gigantic propositions,” project leaders bragged. I all, more than 50,000 attended to hear the Police Band’s brass quartette give a brief concert before the Community Singing Association “helped to ring out the patriotic hymns and familiar songs which make up the nightly programme.”

Philadelphia’s Fire Department jumped aboard the bandwagon starting up their own group with 27 players and Kiefer moonlighting as leader. It “bids fair to become vigorous rival of celebrated police institution,” teased the Inquirer. But Kiefer’s main focus remained with the Police Band, which grew ever-busier raising funds for pensions while performing a full schedule of free concerts.

How did they do it? Whenever and wherever they played—in neighborhoods throughout the city, at the Baker Bowl at Broad and Huntingdon Streets, at the bandstand north of City Hall, or helping Philadelphians singing in the New Year on City Hall’s south apron—audiences already knew the music, they knew the words to the songs. The listening public was familiar with the Police Band’s music, and their greater repertoire having already bought, played repeatedly and memorized popular music.

Police Band, July 25, 1921 (Temple University, SCRC)
Joseph Kiefer and the Police Band, July 25, 1921. Detail. (Temple University, Special Collections Research Center)

Philadelphians owned phonographs—record players. And on them they spun copies of Kiefer’s compositions in Vocalian red-vinyl: On the Campus and Comrades of the Legion. From Aeolian (Vocalian’s parent company) they played his Buckeye State and The Iron Division March (dedicated to the Pennsylvania-based division nicknamed by General Pershing for valorous service in World War I.)

Kiefer and company also included in their repertoire longtime classics, also available as records: F.W. Meacham’s  popular American Patrol (1885); W. H. Myddleton’s Down South. American Sketch (1901). And they performed the more contemporary, and no less antiquated, Swanee River Moon. For young folks wanting to dance a lively Fox Trot, they included Dan Sullivan’s Stealing (the chorus of which, “Stealing, stealing with your eyes appealing…Stealing, stealing, at your shrine I’m kneeling,” made clear this was not a song about pickpockets.)

In 1921, the City added free weekly dances on the Parkway to the long-popular sing alongs and concerts. These Thursday evening soirees turned out to be a smashing success. For the inaugural dance, July’s muggy weather didn’t deter 15,000 from turning out on the stretch of the Parkway between 17th and 18th, still decorated as a “Court of Honor” for an Odd Fellow convention.

“To Dance on the Parkway,” read the headline after the first magical evening. Philadelphians danced to Police Band tunes and transformed themselves into “one jostling, swaying mass of sweltering humanity.” Young dancers wanted nothing to do with the “old style Virginia reel by four couples in rural garb” intended to show “dancers what they have been missing.” They wanted live jazz, just like the recordings they owned and danced to at home.

Kiefer and the Police Band accommodated everyone as best they could throughout the free Parkway dances, performing “everything in [their] repertory, from a sedate waltz for the benefit of the older folk to the latest jazz turn for the enjoyment of the flappers.”

Not everyone would be as tolerant.

(Articles in The Philadelphia Inquirer consulted: “Police Band Will Give Daily Concerts,” August 26, 1917; “’Sing’ at City Hall to Attract Many,” September, 2, 1917; “Police Band to Give Concerts on Plaza,” September 2, 1917; “Great Community Sing Will be Held Tonight,” September 15, 1917;  “Firemen’s Band out for Laurels,” September 23, 1917; “Concert Series Will Aid Police,” March 10, 1918; “To Sing New Year In,” December 31, 1918; “To Dance on Parkway, June 14, 1921; “15,000 Crowd at First Dance on Parkway,” July 8, 1921; “Police Band Concerts,” May 16, 1922.)