PhillyHistory Blog

It’s been more than a decade since the Preservation Alliance started issuing its annual Endangered Properties List. This year the list features eight properties bringing the total to a hefty 84.

Has this ritualistic exercise in advocacy proved a success? Yes, if you consider coverage of the list’s release had become part of Philly’s December news cycle. But there are navigational challenges in getting the word out. Accessing the annual lists requires going through a mix of separate web pages (from 2003 to 2007) then a couple of pdfs (2008 and 2009) before the most recent format: a combination of web pages and pdfs (2010 to 2013). Each list is numbered, but not clearly dated. For instance, the 7th annual list came out in 2009 but was issued in the Alliance’s Winter 2010 newsletter. Only a preservationist with OCD would navigate through it all.

If this advocacy tool is to be effective in raising sights (and help prevent razing sites) it needs to be built on a clear, comprehensive web presence that can be easily located, augmented, enriched, updated and shared to help inform and advance a preservation agenda. Very useful; very doable.

Has the list helped prevent razing sites? For that question, the answer is “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.”

“Yes,” if we look at the new home of FringeArts  in the High Pressure Pump Station at the foot of Race Street (listed in 2006) or the Nugent Home for Baptists in West Mount Airy (listed in 2004). But it’s a definite “no,” if we look for the Church of Christ, once at 63^rd and Vine Streets (listed in 2003). What’s there today is a spiffy new Walgreens.

Not too many victories; not too many losses. But in a contest, the worrisome “maybes” would win by a mile.

First is the Boyd Theatre, which made its second appearance this year (the Boyd debuted in 2007). The Divine Lorraine was also the subject of a double feature, in 2009 and 2010.

Does it really matter what year the former 26th District Police Headquarters at Trenton Avenue and Dauphin Street was listed in 2006?  Or that John P. B. Sinkler’s  Germantown Town Hall made the list in 2010? Or that the Royal Theater debuted in 2011? Or that both its neighboring District Health Center No. 1 at Broad and Lombard Streets and the Roundhouse at 7^th and Race Streets were listed last year? Listing dates don’t matter; what does is documentation, information, and ultimately, preservation.

So, as the list of preservation challenges grows longer, what are the latest additions?

Age before beauty: From 1894, there’s the Flemish-revival Engine House #46 at Water and Reed Streets. “One of the most intriguing” buildings in the Pennsport neighborhood, wrote Inga Saffron. There’s the 1946 Robinson Store at 1020 Market Street designed by Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck in 1946. In its day, and especially at night, the Robinson Store was one of those buildings capable of giving chills. Here’s a specimen of “the surging tide of modernism” that never really reached us” here in Philadelphia, writes the Alliance’s Ben Leech. “It’s a Don Draper dream” writes Liz Spikol.

But Don Draper isn’t real. The Robinson Store, on the other hand, is…and very much endangered. It’s survival… well, that may be a dream.

By the 1830s, you’d have thought folks might begin to grow a bit tired of seeing every last architect translating their city into the Greek. And they might have, had it not been for William Strickland’s way of combining the very old and the very new. This most creative of the homegrown generation of architect/engineers didn’t shy away from moving the game up a few notches. Strickland pulled out his copy of Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, a book that had been around for seventy years, and had long been used as a source by architects including Benjamin Henry Latrobe, John Haviland and Strickland himself.

But the stakes were higher now. Strickland faced the challenge of making architectural sense on a very prominent and oddly-shaped building lot defined by Dock, Walnut and Third Streets. And he found himself working in the shadow of his mentor’s masterpiece, the Bank of Pennsylvania. This tough site demanded a commanding solution—and an innovative one. Squeezing a rectangular Greek temple onto a triangular building lot just wouldn’t do. Strickland needed to find design solutions that were even bolder, but also more carefully considered.

And so he did. Strickland positioned on the narrow end of this wedge a raised, semi-circular portico, making this eastern façade look like a grand entrance on a civic square. (In reality, this is the grand, rounded-off back of the building. Strickland made Third Street the user-friendly entrance.)

Here, in Philadelphia, a few blocks from the city’s riverfront, facing the morning sun (the same that illuminated ancient Athens) stood Strickland’s masterpiece. Unlike his others Greek Revival buildings, this was no replica ripped from the pages of Antiquities of Athens. Here was a 3-D billboard of Greek features serving Philadelphia, here and now.

For the cupola, which pulled the entire project together, Strickland found inspiration in Stuart’s illustration of a 334 BC monument still very much standing on the streets of Athens. The Choragic Monument of Lysicrates was a self-congratulatory, 21-foot pedestal for a choral prize won at a performing arts competition, part of the same festival that produced the great dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Stuart and William Henry Playfair designed literal replicas in Staffordshire and Edinburgh. Here in Philadelphia, Strickland took great liberties with the design—and achieved very American results.

He moved the “monument” from street level to the roof. He blew it up to double the size of the original making a giant 40-foot-tall, 14 feet diameter skyline-defining structure. And instead of interpreting the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in stone for the ages, Strickland designed it in wood that he knew could last only a few decades. (It would be replaced about every sixty years.) Now, far from Europe, this Pop-Art scaled, archeologically correct, ephemeral monument would echo the past. But even more important, here above Philadelphia’s 1830s cityscape, this landmark would live very much in the moment.

The Merchants Exchange, and, in particular, the tower at its eastern end, would become an essential element in a new, high-tech information network. Long before 1837, when Samuel F.B. Morse patented his telegraph (and way longer before anyone dreamed of the internet) Europeans and Americans had “optical telegraphs” capable of quickly transmitting coded messages over great distances. As early as 1807, the U.S. Congress had debated and eventually voted in favor of funding a 1,200 mile long chain of optical telegraph towers connecting New York and New Orleans – a project that fell by the wayside. But it wasn’t farfetched. More than a decade earlier, Claude Chappe’s invention, the “semaphore visual telegraph,” came to life in France as a 143-mile connection between Paris and Lille that would grow into a network of more than 500 towers across Europe extending 3,000 miles. In 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, he envisioned extending the technology across the English Channel.

So when American architect William Thornton envisioned connecting North and South America in 1800, the possibilities made level heads reel. Before long, American businessmen in Boston and New York had their own optical telegraph networks. By the time the Merchants Exchange was under construction, an optical telegraph in Boston tracked shipping, commerce and investments on a real-time basis.

“Time and distance are annihilated,” became the popular proclamation, a mantra of the 1830s.

No surprise, then, that the Merchant Exchange’s cupola high above Dock and Walnut Streets played triple duty: as a perch for clerks with telescopes identifying ships making their way to and from the Port of Philadelphia, as a place to send and receive messages flashing from New York across the plains of New Jersey, and the most lasting message of all: that Philadelphia had finally come into its own as a modern day version of ancient Athens.

“The period from the Civil War into the new century saw the transformation of Philadelphia into an industrial giant. … The impact of this explosion of industry and technology almost obliterated Penn’s green country town…in a smog of steam and smoke, of endless gridirons of workers housing, of railroads and factories, freight yards and warehouses. It was Philadelphia’s Iron Age.”

So begins a chapter of the same name in Philadelphia: A 300 Year History. As the 19^th century progressed, Philadelphia’s “Iron Age” would be increasingly evident to anyone with imagination, but especially to architects, engineers and “practical mechanics.”

As early as 1826, when everyone else was applauding the new canal culture, William Strickland believed the railways promised much more. He was ahead of his time. So was architect John Haviland, who, even earlier, imagined cities entirely made of the stuff. “The improvement and general introduction of cast iron bids fair to create a totally new school of architecture. It has already been occasionally employed in bridges, pillars, roofs, floors, chimneys, doors, and windows, and the facility with which is moulded into different shapes will continue to extend its application.”

By the middle of the century, advocates of industry like Edwin T. Freedley shrugged with confidence: “Philadelphia is situated in the district entitled to be called the centre of the Iron production of the United States.” A decade earlier, local rolling mills had produced about 5,000 tons of iron annually. Now, just after the Civil War, production had ramped up to 30,000 tons. In the same years, production of pig iron nearly doubled from 400,000 tons to more than 770,000. The time when iron meant “nails, screws, bolts, tie rods and hardware,” as Henry Magaziner put it in his book The Golden Age of Ironwork, was over. Iron now meant the possibility of all kinds of design feats: “bridges, water towers, and greenhouses”—even “full cast iron facades” of entire city blocks, in whatever style. All of it would be prefabricated. And, even more impressive, all of it would be fireproof.

Iron design, patents, production and construction began to transform city streets from New York to New Orleans. In the early 1850s, Philadelphia’s the first cast iron façade, The St. Charles Hotel on Third Street, tested the public appetite. By 1866, when the 4,400-ton cast-iron dome of the nation’s Capital in Washington, D.C., designed by Philadelphia architect Thomas U. Walter, was declared “a masterpiece of American will and ingenuity” the way was clear: iron offered amazing architectural possibilities.

In North Philadelphia, the brothers Royer were ready. For a decade they had been honing skills at their Hope Foundry on 9^th Street, above Poplar. Now, just as iron‘s grip took hold, they opened a new, expanded facility at 9^th and Montgomery Avenue, “an extensive and complete Foundry for the production of Architectural Iron Work.” Four brothers: Alfred, Benjamin, J. Washington and William Royer, all “practical mechanics,” had made “Building Castings” their specialty. “They now employ fifty men,” wrote Freedley in 1867, “and have a good supply of orders some of considerable magnitude.”

The Royers cast iron features for the Seventh National Bank at 4^th and Market Streets, the mansard-roofed Post Office at 9^th and Market Street and McArthur’s David Jayne mansion at 19^th and Chestnut Street. For Oak Hall, Wanamaker & Brown’s clothing store at 6^th and Market Street, the Royer Brothers created a new, “massive and beautiful front…light and ornate,” which, according to Freedley, was “probably not equaled by any other Iron Front in Philadelphia.” The Royers’ reach extended to commissions in reading and Pittsburgh and, within a few years, they would cast the façade for the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware.

By the 1890s, John S. Stevens took over the foundry at 9^th and Montgomery. But the Royer name—and the Royer brand—would remain prominent on both the foundry’s sign and on the cast-iron column that stood for decades at the corner.

A long-lost monument to Philadelphia’s Iron Age.

Things looked up in 1850. Eight stories up, to be precise. The future seemed bright for Dr. David Jayne, his new building and booming business on Chestnut Street. Jayne’s patent medicines in handy little bottles had been flying off the shelves ever since he figured out how to make people feel good spending money on tonics and pills. If Jayne’s vermifuge (for intestinal worms) or his sanative pills (for overall health) or his alteratives (to restore normal health) wouldn’t do the trick, there were always his expectorants and ague mixture. And even if you felt just fine, you probably could look a little better. For that, Jayne offered an array of oleaginous hair tonics and dyes.

How did he manage such a level of success? Since 1843, physician and master marketer Jayne had published and distributed free almanacs providing health advice to millions of loyal readers across the United States and around the world. Over time, more than half a billion copies of Jayne’s Medical Almanac and Guide to Health were printed and distributed. And beginning in 1851, nearly every one featured the image of his building on its cover.

The Jayne Building was no ordinary edifice. Only at street level did it seem like others along the lower blocks of Chestnut. But the higher it rose—and it soared to more than 133 feet with its two-story, tin-covered, Gothic tower—the Jayne Building stood taller than any other place of business in the city. Squinting away its Gothic motif, it even looked like a skyscraper. Since Louis Sullivan, who later designed the real thing in Chicago, briefly worked in the architectural offices of Frank Furness across street, there might even have been an influence.

In 1950, on the building’s 100^th birthday, Charles Peterson publicly made this claim. “In the annals of the American skyscraper there was, perhaps, nothing more daring as the design for this building…” Peterson proposed it be allowed to stand (without its tower, which had burned in a dramatic fire in 1872) as one of Chestnut Street’s monuments to American history. He had the Jayne Building documented by the Historic American Building Survey (Peterson had some pull there, having founded the program in the 1930s), and he talked about it and even distributed a two-page mimeographed handout to anyone who was game. Peterson bent Louis Mumford’s ear as he researched a series of articles about Philadelphia for The New Yorker in the Spring of 1956.

“One is tempted to agree with Mr. Peterson’s conclusion,” wrote Mumford, “that this building must have provided Sullivan with his image of the skyscraper as a ‘proud and soaring thing’ whose character would be established by stressing vertical lines, for the Jayne Building looks like a crude model of a Sullivan skyscraper of a generation later.” But “whether this unique and historic structure…should be spared, as a national monument,” Mumford added, “is one of the many difficult questions that confront the directors of that project…”

That  project, of course, was Independence National Historical Park, which favored 18^th-century buildings über alles. And within months wrecking crews were busy taking Jayne down.

Over the years, city planner Edmund Bacon had monumental disagreements with Peterson. In this case he agreed completely. Bacon later called the demolition of the Jayne Building ‘‘the worst single act of architectural vandalism that I’ve ever experienced.”

For scars like that, and the regret that followed, there would be no tonics or ointments.

Rolling Hills? Maybe once upon a time. But at the dawn of the 20^th century, when the City of Homes meant rowhouses, as far as the eye could see, Philadelphia had to be flat—or as close to flat as humanly possible—if it was to have any value on the real estate market.

And so, one by one, Nature’s dips, rises and rolls were raised up or shaved down as the city grid marched north. Once flattened, Philly invited horse drawn streetcars on its newly leveled streets, which meant developers and then new residents. Mile by mile, that’s how the city boomed to more than double its population between the Civil War and 1900.

As mid-century became turn-of-the-century,Broad Street forged northward past Ridge Avenue to Monument Cemetery (Temple University, today). It then trundled over the bridge at Cohocksink Creek (soon to become Dauphin Street), over Gunners Run (just south of the would-be Allegheny Avenue) and past Hunting Park, where a race-course-turned-public-park sprawled to the east. Now, little more than a wide lane, Broad Street approached the largest creek so far—the Wingohocking. And as it flowed eastward to join Frankford Creek, the Wingohocking did what creeks do: it meandered a bit to the north, and then a bit to the south, crossing where Courtland Street was supposed to be, no less than four times from Broad to 6^th.

What’s to be done when the dips are gullies are actually valleys surrounded by rolling hills? Philly’s flatlanders had a ready-made solution. Run the creeks through giant culverts: massive, man-made, underground masonry aqueducts large enough to allow Mother Nature to carry on unimpeded—out of sight— and possibly out of mind. And even more convenient: these hidden, creek beds could double as the city’s backup sewer system, on an as-needed basis, when the occasional flood strikes. Above, on the level, it’s business as usual.Or that was the idea.

So they channeled the Wingahocking where it meandered. And over it, and over anything that laid lower than the idea grade for Philadelphia, well, that, too, would be covered with a deep layer of fill. Ambitious? To be sure. But doable.

By the 1880s, historians Scharf and Westcott had seen it happen, again and again. “There have been great changes in the face of [Philadelphia], in its levels and contour, and in the direction and beds of its water-courses… Some streams have disappeared, some have changed their direction, nearly all have been reduced in volume and depth…in the building of a great city.” Scharf and Wescott had seen a lot, but nothing like was about to happen along the Wingohocking. As water historian Adam Levine tells it: “In some watersheds, it took many years to completely obliterate the main stream and its tributaries.” West Philadelphia’s conversion from Mill Creek to sewer “took more than 25 years, and the city’s largest such project, the burying of both branches of Wingohocking Creek, took about 40 years.” Raising the 80-acre Winghocking valley up to city grid grade would require as much as 40 feet of fill.

Aside from urban esthetics and environmental ethics, this massive project had every reason to work—if only the contractors had used rock and soil for fill. But, in one of Philadelphia’s most egregious and purposeful bungles, the fill hauled in by specially-designed streetcars was ash and cinder, an estimated 500,000 cubic yards of it. In time, the consequences would be as dire as the hauling and dumping project had been efficient. “It took decades for the inadequacy of the ash to be revealed,” writes Levine. But when the fill washed away, gas lines ruptured and the neighborhood above found itself in the midst of “an epidemic…of sagging porches, cracking foundations” and worse, much worse.

The saga of Philadelphia’s Logan Triangle had begun.

Back when big fish like Frank Sinatra, Elisabeth Taylor, Joe DiMaggio or John Wayne dined at Bookbinders, Philadelphia was still a W.C. Fields joke, rich in history and starved of self-esteem. The restaurant was more about fine spin than fine cuisine, but there weren’t many choices back then. So, again and again, from the 50s through the 80s, Bookbinders got to call the shots when it came to its many expansions, often at the expense of the very history it claimed to serve up as a side dish.

The first example: the 200-year-old Drinker-Krider building at 2^nd and Walnut Streets. Soon after Bookbinders bought it, they demolished it.

Legend has it, John Drinker built this house in 1751, many years after having been born in a log cabin on the same site. (Legend also has it that Drinker witnessed William Penn’s arrival in the 1680s.) In the middle of the 19^th century, a gunsmith named John Krider bought the place and operated what became a famous gun shop and taxidermy business there. Hunters and fisherman found everything there,  from Krider’s hand-crafted guns and bamboo rods to his hunting books and dog biscuits. The building at 2^nd and Walnut became one of those anecdote-rich, go-to sites for artists, documentarians, and, of course, tourists.

Now, with a new owner in July 1952, this historic building itself was about to fall prey.

“Nowhere in the country is there a comparable collection of early buildings, wrote architect Grant Miles Simon in 1953, noting losses from “ruthless destruction…in the name of modern progress.”  These survivors, wrote Simon, “constitute an invaluable part of the documentation of American history. They were lived in by, and were familiar sights to, the many great figures of the Revolutionary and the Federal eras. Their days are few unless a tardy appreciation makes a permanent place for them in the City plan.”

When push came to shove, would Simon stand up for the lowly Drinker-Krider place? We’d like to think he saw it bordering the grand, Beaux-Arts, shrine-studded greensward he proposed eastward from Independence Hall in 1947. We’d like to think he imagined a role for near-shrines and even for non-shrines.

But the Drinker-Krider building was found to be flawed. A report by the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) found “the brick bearing walls…in poor structural condition…the south end of the party wall was extremely weak…the timber framing was badly deteriorated in spots and was in a generally weakened condition.” But instead of strengthening the walls and the framing, the building’s new owners chose to have the building condemned. They allowed HABS in for thorough documentation, then they pulled it down.

Wanting to have history both ways, Bookbinders hired Simon, who in 1956 was freshly appointed to chair the Philadelphia Historical Commission, to design a “meticulous copy” of the Drinker-Krider building, one that would allow them to expand their restaurant. On December 20, 1960, Mayor Richardson Dilworth, Mrs. Bookbinder and another official used a three-handled shovel to break ground for the new wing. With a new presence on this historic corner, across from the new Independence Historical National park, the restaurant would be able to open two new venues: the “Signers’ Dining Room” and the “Hall of Patriots Banquet Room”.

As it turned out, the reconstruction wasn’t meticulous. The new brick color lacked the hue and richness of the original; its fresh patina wasn’t anything  like what had been demolished. By comparison, the plaster cove cornice wasn’t as gutsy (HABS documented the orignal) and the shutters seemed soulless. Character and authenticity were gone. The reconstruction introduced a sad whiff of mid-20^thcentury uncertainty to the heart of Philadelphia’s historic district.

The past isn’t about great shrines or grand vistas. Real historic cities grow over time, and they grow unpredictably. They can’t be intentionally made, and they certainly can’t be remade. At its fleeting best, Philadelphia is always about its many modest, authentic gems. Each has its own story, texture, character, and distinctiveness. Kind of like a great meal.

So far as authentic history was concerned, Philadelphians would go hungry at 2nd and Walnut. That banquet would have to be found elsewhere.

When British-trained architect John Haviland arrived in Philadelphia, some took him for a Benjamin Henry Latrobe doppelganger. But where Latrobe had been ahead of his time, introducing the architecture of ancient Greece at the turn of the century, Haviland, in 1816, was right on time.

For more than half a century, The Antiquities of Athens had been known as a library book filled with illustrations drawn from Grecian ruins by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. First Latrobe, then Haviland and eventually many others saw value in applying these design ideas, and helped them migrate from printed page to city street. Ancient Greece had been the original Democracy. So why not whet the American appetite for archeological accuracy in everything Grecian, from clothing to buildings. But there was more: in the 1820s, the Greek struggle for independence played out in the Mediterranean, yet another chapter in the millennia-long struggle between Christians and Muslims. And the United States had a stake in the outcome. When Greek independence became a reality in 1832, Americans felt more justified than ever in choosing, and celebrating, the Greek option.

At first, Philadelphians engaged in some serious tiptoeing toward what would eventually become a full-fledged Greek Revival. In 1818, the directors of the Second Bank opened a design competition calling for “a chaste specimen of Greek architecture.” Haviland had a design for just such a building—and had exhibited it at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts the year before—but that’s long lost. And not much else of that bank competition survives. As Matthew Baigell, Haviland’s biographer tells us, “some ten tons of documents pertaining to the Bank…were rendered into pulp” in the 1840s. What we do know is that William Strickland won the competition with his close interpretation of the Parthenon in Pennsylvania marble drawn straight from The Antiquities of Athens.

Haviland would have to bide his time with minor projects and his own three-volume book, The Builder’s Assistant (1818-1821), the first American pattern book offering up detailed Greek and Roman orders. When Haviland finally landed his first big commission, the First Presbyterian Church on Washington Square in 1820, his building was drawn, just as Strickland’s and Latrobe’s banks were, straight from the illustration of the Temple on the Ilissus in Antiquities of Athens. There weren’t funds to cast it in marble, so Haviland had the church’s portico constructed in red and white cedar and painted with enough sand in the mix so that it would look like marble. And no matter that it wasn’t any closer to the real thing; the First Presbyterian Church could claim the title as the first Greek Revival church in America.

As it turned out, the new church style was popular. Two years later, and one block away, Haviland delivered another congregation a building based on the temple of Dionysus at Teos. Saint Andrews Episcopal Church survives today as the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Saint George. Through the 1830s and beyond, the Greek option would continue to thrive.

But archeological correctness wasn’t always possible, and it wasn’t even always desirable. In 1825, when Haviland designed a building for the Franklin Institute (now the Philadelphia History Museum) he turned again to Stuart and Revett illustration of the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus. This time, Haviland made the façade his own and, as Baigell observed, and “resolved his composition more successfully than did his Greek predecessor.”

Haviland’s urge to make Greek replicas was strong, but his passion to design turned out to be even more powerful. He preferred the “Greek feeling for restraint and delicacy” wrote Talbot Hamlin, but “realized the dangers of pure copying.” Even at the First Presbyterian Church, Haviland didn’t allow the original to dictate his design. To accommodate site limitations he removed the original staircase. Sometimes, in Haviland’s published designs, he could be “free…almost to the point of eccentricity” fearlessly “combining new, creative forms with Greek detail.” And in the case of his castellated Eastern State Penitentiary, the largest, most important and influential of Haviland’s projects, here was a medieval breakaway, even if, as  Baigell wondered, “the Athenian Propylea lies somewhere in the genesis of the central portion of this design.” The drive to create lit the way: it was only a matter of time before Haviland, as well as others, would leave behind the Greek option.

What was going through Haviland’s creative imagination in the 1820s? For a hint, we turn to his portrait from 1828 by John Neagle. Next to Haviland leans a depiction of his completed penitentiary. In his right hand, a brass compass points to the inventive heart of the project, Haviland’s panopticon plan. The architect’s hand rests comfortably, if not lovingly, on his copy of the book that was the starting point for it all: Stuart’s Athens.

Once Haviland was able to convince his clients that there was more potential in invention than in archeological correctness, his creative juices, and this career, took off. So long as his buildings followed the basic principles of good design, he could dress them up in any style the occasion might require. And when these design doors flew open, Haviland would consider the Greek an option, but only one. After that, he’d choose whatever struck his fancy: Gothic, Egyptian, Japanese.

Haviland had played out the Greek option; now the eclectic possibilities for American architectural styles seemed endless.

Benjamin Henry Latrobe had abundant talent and even more ambition. He left his native England for America after realizing that there were those “whose talents are superior to mine… I should perhaps never have elbowed through them.” But in America, Latrobe could claim: “I am the only successful Architect and Engineer.” Here he could find opportunities to demonstrate his skills and shape the future of a new nation, as well as his profession.

And so he did, first in Philadelphia in 1798, then in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New Orleans and beyond. By the time Latrobe died of Yellow Fever in 1820, he left a trail of buildings the likes of which had not been seen or imagined on this side of the Atlantic. He showed what the profession of architecture could do, if given half a chance.

None of it was easy. “I have had to break the ice for my successors, and … destroy the prejudices … [of]  villainous [sic] Quacks in whose hands the public works have hitherto been…” The American custom of hiring builders for design and construction frustrated Latrobe, and made his every step difficult, but within a few years after his arrival, a few standing examples demonstrated his genius. In Philadelphia, Latrobe completed two buildings that would turn heads and change minds.

One was the Pump House at Center Square. Inspired, in part, by the Roman Pantheon, Latrobe adapted the oculus at the dome’s center not for light, but to emit smoke generated by the new engineering feat inside—a steam engine. This stoking, smoking, white-marble Pump House sat smack in the center of Philadelphia’s city plan as a dual symbol: a bold reflection of young America inheriting the past greatness of ancient civilization and a temple to dawn of the industrial age at the start of a new century.

Latrobe’s second early triumph, his Bank of Pennsylvania, quickly became “one of the most influential buildings in the nation’s history.” Critic Paul Goldberger waxes in a PBS documentary, calling it “a wonder.” Architectural historians from Talbot Hamlin (“an epoch-making work”) to Jeffrey Cohen, (“a game changer”) agree.

Where Latrobe’s bank looked like a Greek Temple, the Ionic temple on the Ilyssus near Athens, and was the first building to use archeologically-correct details (published decades before in Stuart and Revett’s landmark book, Antiquities of Athens) the Bank of Pennsylvania was, as Hamlin pointed out “in no sense a copy of any ancient building.”  Here Latrobe developed a plan “simply and functionally from the necessities of the building, with a new kind of simplicity and openness. Like the Pump House, “it was a creation and not a copy.” And with its vaulted interior, “nothing this technically ambitious had ever been built in America.”

For a brief moment, Latrobe made it sound easy. “It was a plaything to me,” he reflected, adding, “so in fact, are all my designs.” They “come of themselves unmasked and in multitudes…”

President Thomas Jefferson, a fan of ancient architecture who owned and treasured his copy of Stuart and Revett, took notice of Latrobe’s display in Philadelphia and brought him to the nation’s Capital. As Goldberger describes it, Jefferson needed Latrobe to “fix [William] Thornton’s mess” at the Capitol, then under construction.

Problem was, Washington needed an architect who was also a politician, which Latrobe decidedly was not. Years later, he commented about his work there: “I have run my race in a sack, and if I have got to the goal, it has only need by tumbling on & over all obstacles & persevering to the end.” But in Philadelphia, at the Bank of Pennsylvania, Latrobe had been given carte blanche.” That building Latrobe considered his masterpiece, or as he more immodestly put it: “my first great structure.”

Nothing important by Latrobe survives in Philadelphia. The Pump House lasted only until 1828. His Bank of Pennsylvania was pulled down in 1867. But Latrobe’s influence and impact lived on.

 

Related posts at PhillyHistory: Philadelphia as Athens- of America: More Than Skin Deep and Salvaging Parts of the Greek Revival.

By the time architect William Strickland envisioned a set of columns for the portico of his Unitarian Church at 10^th and Locust Streets, fortune had turned his way. A set of Doric columns was newly available, salvaged from Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Pump House at Center Square. That building wasn’t even 30 years old, but the city had fast outgrown it. And now, in the late 1820s, Latrobe was gone and Strickland had come into his own as the city’s most imaginative and talented architect. He put Latrobe’s columns to good use.

Strickland had met Latrobe as a boy—Strickland’s father a, bricklayer and carpenter, had worked on Latrobe’s crews. Latrobe noted the young Strickland’s skills, “the quickness of his eye and the facility of his pencil” and put the 14-year-old to work. But what began as the “joyous and grateful temperament” soon gave way to distraction and quibbling. Strickland’s talent, according to architectural historian Talbot Hamlin, was undeniable, but he soon “appeared to Latrobe as a scatterbrained person, a boy upon whom he wasted much affection…” Now, it seemed, Strickland was “too independent minded, to light-hearted and curious, to endure patiently the regular draftsman’s routine.” This “whirligig temperament” had no place in architecture. Latrobe finally fired Strickland, now 17, and the two parted ways.

Now, two decades later, and eight years after Latrobe’s death from yellow fever in New Orleans, Strickland was rising into the role that Latrobe himself had strived for, the architect who would transform red-brick Philadelphia with white marble. And Strickland was doing it by continuing Latrobe’s legacy—his commitment to the Greek Revival in America.

After splitting from Latrobe’s in 1805, Strickland worked as an artist and a draftsman until 1808, when he was landed his first major architectural commission—the Masonic Hall on Chestnut Street. This was an example, Hamlin later wrote, of Strickland “trying to leap out of the bounds of fashion.” And when the place burned in 1819, he imagined it was “no great loss.” Strickland most likely felt that way. After completing the Masonic Hall, he left the profession to travel and then settle in New York, where he eked a living painting and designing scenery for Park Theatre. Ten years later, when Strickland returned to Philadelphia to try his hand at architecture a second time, his appetite for experimentation still dominated. “Hardly a fashion or an impulse arises,” wrote Hamlin, that Strickland didn’t try to give “architectural expression; Gothic, Egyptian, Oriental, Greek, Italianate…” But Strickland’s stunning success in 1818, winning the competition for the Second Bank—outperforming even his former mentor—overshadowed his other “temporary aesthetic enthusiasms.” By the late 1820s, Hamlin wrote, it was in the general frame of the Greek Revival that Strickland found his most congenial and most accomplished expression.” And having found it, he stuck with it.

In 1828 at 10th and Locust Streets, Strickland found the opportunity to further solidify his expression of the Greek Revival while paying homage to his late master. He salvaged Latrobe’s Doric columns that had been unceremoniously pulled down in the Pump House demolition and resurrected them at the First Congressional Unitarian Church. It turned out to be an ephemeral gesture.

Just as Latrobe had every reason to believe his Pump House would stand the test of time, so did Strickland for his church. But it, too, was doomed to an early demolition, remaining up until only 1885. After that, Latrobe’s columns, which had two shots at standing for the ages, presumably became so much landfill.

In the second half of the 1820s, Strickland’s projects became a showcase for his newly evolved “touch” for the Greek Revival. His Unitarian Church, the United States Naval Asylum and the new United States Mint displayed a confidence in speaking Greek. Hamlin noted Strickland’s maturity at the Mint in his “wide spacing of the colonnade, in the stress of broad horizontals, and in the quiet wall treatment.”

But this building, too, was short lived. The Mint’s demise in 1902, wrote Hamlin a few decades later, “is but one of the many similar tragedies which have characterized the history and growth of Philadelphia as well as that of many other American cities. Architectural excellence has been the last thing considered (if it is considered at all) in judging whether or not economically obsolete buildings should be preserved.”

When the building came down, its columns were given to the Jewish Hospital, now Einstein Medical Center on Broad Street and Tabor Road. Nearly a century passed with the columns in place, framing the hospital entrance. Then, in 2000, they were in the way of road construction. One by one, the six, 24-foot columns, each weighing 28,000 pounds, were lifted by riggers and moved to storage. In the Spring of 2013, Strickland’s columns were returned to North Broad and set upright for a third time.

But who’s counting.