Author Archives: Ken Finkel
Designing Your Friendly, Neighborhood (Almost Modern) Bank
So your client the bank president has done his due diligence, his “sober deliberation,” and insists on opening two branch offices. This bank has always been a headquarters-only operation, but the depositors have spread out across the city. As architect, you’re not sure what new bank buildings should look like in the far-flung neighborhoods of [...]
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What a Nineteenth-Century Bank Should Look Like
Long before he designed the icon of American Democracy—the dome of the U. S. Capital—Thomas Ustick Walter was certain about the power of architecture. In the 1830s, after finishing Moyamensing Prison and while at work on Girard College, Walter bemoaned the public’s general ignorance. “If the mass of the people were generally well informed on [...]
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The Crew Cuts, Long Hairs and a Culture War Kickoff
Larry Magid didn’t need to go to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City to hear The Crew Cuts in July 1960. He knew their six-year-old hit Sh Boom and preferred the original version by The Chords. Back in 1954, the 12-year-old Magid and his West Philly buddies heard the difference between the two—loud and clear. [...]
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When Rocks Talk: “The Boys of Mount Airy” and a Woman from Germantown
Bare rock makes a mute memorial. When a boulder loses a plaque once carried, it instantly loses voice, power, and a good measure of its dignity. What to make of the boulder at Germantown Avenue and Sedgwick Street in front of the Lovett Memorial Library? It’s been missing two plaques for forty years. There it [...]
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The Wedding that Ignited Philadelphia
Advocates of peace and freedom gathered in Philadelphia 175 years ago today. They had come to dedicate Pennsylvania Hall, “the first and only one of its kind in the republic,” according to abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld. Three days later, this new building “consecrated to Free Discussion and Equal Rights” was reduced to ruins, burnt by [...]
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Lower Schuylkill: The Upside of Philly’s Underside
It’s a shame no one has anything good to say about the drive from Philadelphia International Airport to Center City. It’s a gritty but grand entrance, this ride on PA 291, aka the Penrose Avenue Bridge, aka the Platt Memorial Bridge to US 76, aka the Schuylkill Expressway—a ride punctuated by the usual roadwork, billboards, [...]
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The Cannonball House: Beyond Preservation Purgatory
Peter Cock couldn’t have picked a more off-the-beaten track location for his farmhouse. In the 1680s, and for a long time after, nobody coveted the swampy rise that broke the horizon near the Schuylkill as it meandered to the Delaware. Why would they? With so much rich, dry land in every direction and with William [...]
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Silent Film; Outspoken Posters: When “The Sea Hawk” Came from Hollywood
In 1967, when the late Roger Ebert was named film critic for The Chicago Tribune, he imagined rather large shoes to fill. After all—as he related the story in his 2011 autobiography, Life Itself: A Memoir—everyone at The Tribune and in Chicago, for that matter, knew reviews had been published under the byline Mae Tinee [...]
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A Classical, Papier-Mâché Gas Station at the Sesquicentennial
Pretty much anything might be found, past or present, at the Sesquicentennial International Exposition, the lesser of Philadelphia’s two World’s Fairs. Mounted at the bottom of Broad Street in 1926, visitors passed under the giant, electrified Liberty Bell, famously lit with 26,000 light bulbs and plunged into a world that was familiar, but also oddly [...]
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PSFS: Modernism Remaking the Workaday World