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After All These Years: Political, Erotical and Mystical Claes Oldenburg


Purchase Photo View Nearby Photos Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin, 15th and Market Streets, in 1979

At first, the idea of a 51-foot paintbrush in front of an art school/museum seemed unoriginal, little more than a logo for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Had Claes Oldenburg, after more than thirty five years and in his fourth major work in Philadelphia, sold out?

We expected Oldenburg to be more the outsider here, more outrageous. We wanted the old Oldenburg, the one whose work spilled out originality, as he recently described to The Wall Street Journal. That sculptor once proposed replacing the Washington Monument with a giant pair of upended scissors. That artist imagined a giant toilet float for the Thames in London and a working windshield wiper threatening the Chicago waterfront.

Philadelphia's might-have-been screw monument. Illustration by Kirk Finkel based on Wikipedia Creative Commons photograph by Spikebrennan and "Cemetery in the Shape of a Colossal Screw," in “Oldenburg Draws Seven New Wonders of the World,” Horizon (Spring 1972).

Oldenburg, we always heard, originally proposed a screw monument for 15th and Market Streets, something he only imagined for São Paulo, Brazil. Could Rizzo-era Philadelphia, a city barely willing to accept a clothespin, allow a 45 foot-tall screw across from City Hall tower? Not on your life.

Someday, we may learn the full story about Philly’s first Oldenburg proposal, but we do know he had in the wings a less offensive idea: a clothespin. And in 1976 Philadelphia dedicated the first of Philadelphia’s major Oldenburg works: Clothespin, Split Button, Giant Three-Way Plug and now Paint Torch. These span Oldenburg’s entire, at times envelope-pushing, career.

In the early 1960s, in his New York studio, Oldenburg pushed the envelope plenty. His Pop Art manifesto staked out new artistic territory: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” Would Oldenburg be willing and able to push the envelope on the streets of Philadelphia? What we seem to have across from City Hall and at the museum is something less than the “political-erotical-mystical” art we were promised.

But looks can be deceiving. As it turns out, Paint Torch floats above its site and gently commands Broad Street with scale, color and texture. It deploys a Pixar-tight caricature quality reminiscent of a helium parade balloon. Its form renders precious—in the best sense of the word—details of the Academy’s Furness façade, as well as those of City Hall a block to the south. By comparison, Clothespin is upright, uptight even. Clothespin’s rough, Cor-Ten steel surface does no favors for its promise of play, although the stainless steel spring does invite our imaginations. (Are they the arms of two figures in an embrace? Do they say “76”? Or is it merely a spring?)

In 2011, as in ’76, we find Oldenburg likes to play with our reading of these details. Looking at the top of Paint Torch, we see the brush pushing against something. There’s no canvas above Broad Street—only the outside world. What is this giant brushstroke? It looks like a tongue sticking out.

Could this be a lesson for art students to move beyond their teachers, as Oldenburg did? Could it be that Oldenburg, in the fullness of time, is getting back at Philadelphia? Or is it just an innocent dab of paint?

We are glad to see that Oldenburg has made something here that is, after all, “political-erotical-mystical.” The sculptor didn’t sell out. What he did, it seems, is to perfect the subtle, sometimes necessary art of tweaking one’s host.

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Finding Philadelphia’s “Wow Factor”


Purchase Photo View Nearby Photos Construction of the Sesquicentennial Bell at the base of Broad Street, 1926

Philly history is telling us something: We lost our sense of humor at the bottom of Broad Street.

Consider the new spine of lights proposed for a stretch of Broad, the 2 ½ miles from Spring Garden to Norris. These 29, 55-foot tall stalks of light are meant to restore North Broad Street’s long-absent “wow factor,” according to the folks at the Avenue of the Arts. But history suggests otherwise.

Want to find Philadelphia’s “wow factor?” Go back to Broad Street and Oregon Avenue in 1926. That was the real deal: a monumental, iconic claim of Philadelphia as the nation’s “Cradle of Liberty.” Sesquicentennial designers installed a giant sculpture right in the center of Broad Street on what’s now Marconi Plaza. Never before or since has the city seen something so bold, so apt—so much fun. Visible for miles, the giant Sesqui bell seemed to be in a kind of conversation with the 38-foot-tall statue of William Penn on City Hall. “Make no mistake,” these two sculptures seemed to be saying, “you’re in Philadelphia, and there’s a message to share. We’re saying it here and we’re making it come alive—with light.”

Long before the invention of the electric bulb, light had been the city’s best metaphor. Philadelphia was created around the central Quaker belief in an “inner light,” that divine spark in everyone so essential to the idea of equality and community. Later came the notion of the light of Liberty, something worthy of a new and independent nation.


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The Sesquicentennial Bell lit up the night, June 1, 1926.

How to make these metaphors come alive on the street? Cue the electric light. For more than a century, Broad Street, the founding city’s longest, widest public avenue, has been a light laboratory, a stage for meaningful illumination. At the end of the Spanish American War in 1898 lights adorned the temporary arch at Broad and Walnut. Lights draped from City Hall celebrated Philadelphia’s 225th birthday in 1908. Powerful spotlights permanently illuminated City Hall’s tower in 1916. And as recently as 2005, wild light play continued at City Hall. But nothing topped Broad Streets convergence of form, meaning and light more than when the gargantuan, sheet metal blow-up of the Liberty Bell was switched on in 1926, for the nation’s 150th birthday.

We don’t know what creative genius proposed this 80-foot sculpture covered with 26,000, 15-watt light bulbs. (We do know D. W. Atwater of the Westinghouse Lamp Company designed the illumination.) Switched on May 31, 1926, the Sesqui Bell predated Pop Art by a long shot: Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg weren’t even born until the late 1920s. Warhol painted his Campbell’s soup cans 36 years later; Oldenburg installed his giant Clothespin 50 years later. “I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch;” wrote Oldenburg in his Pop Art manifesto, considered avant garde in 1961: “I am for the blinking arts, lighting up the night.”

We’re convinced: Philadelphians in the 1920s were way ahead of the curve. They knew how, where and with what to light up Broad Street. They were in touch with Philadelphia’s “wow factor.”

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Philadelphia as Athens of America: More than Skin Deep


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The Merchants Exchange Building by William Strickland at Walnut and Dock Streets, ca. 1859.

Philadelphia’s façade of choice used to be one bedecked with columns—and the more the better. Greek and Roman orders ruled from the late 18th century clear through much of the 19th century. Whether you had a bank, a church, a town hall, a school or an asylum, classical features conveyed the “right” message as visitors passed your portal. Want to convey a sense of wealth? Go Greek. Need to speak the language of civic importance or educational authority? Say it with a stack of stone cylinders. Folks were even willing to forgive their pre-Christian origins as they prayed behind pagan porticoes.

Benjamin Henry Latrobe gets the credit for giving Quaker Philadelphia permission to lose the red brick and cloak everything in white marble. And he practiced what he preached in 1811 when he orated that “the days of Greece may be revived in the woods of America and Philadelphia become the Athens of the Western World.” Latrobe’s own Philadelphia commissions: the Pump House in Center Square and the Bank of Pennsylvania were (literally and figuratively) classics.

None of Latrobe’s major works survive in Philadelphia, although you can see his marble magic in other places. Latrobe went on to Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Richmond before succumbing to Yellow Fever while on the job in New Orleans. (There’s an excellent hour-long documentary about Latrobe at PBS online.)

Where Latrobe left off his students and their students picked up and carried on. There’s William Strickland’s Merchant’s Exchange (illustrated here) and his Second Bank. There’s Thomas U. Walter’s Founder’s Hall at Girard College and many others, including the Mercantile Library, U.S. Naval Home, U.S. Mint, Jefferson Medical College, and the First Independent Presbyterian Church.

Philadelphia as the Athens of America was always more than skin deep. The very idea that Philadelphia would inherit Greek arts and ideals goes back to the very beginning, when Penn named his city in Greek. That Philadelphia would become the New World’s center for democracy, arts and learning might have been pushed aside for a few busy decades, but it wasn’t ever entirely forgotten.

In the early 1730s, founders of the Library Company of Philadelphia had written of Philadelphia as “the future of Athens in America.” A few years before that, Philadelphia poet George Webb, who David S. Shields calls “the first major prophet of the America of Athenaeums, civic temples, and ‘new Romans’,” wrote a poem that concludes with a few relevant lines:

Stretch’d on the Bank of Delaware’s rapid Stream
Stands Philadelphia, not unknown to Fame:
Here the tall Vessels safe at Anchor ride,
And Europe’s Wealth flows in with every Tide:

Who (if the wishing Muse inspir’d does sing)
Shall Liberal Arts to such Perfection bring,
Europe shall mourn her ancient Fame declin’d,
And Philadelphia be the Athens of Mankind.

Webb had plenty of company believing in this big idea for small Philadelphia. No, Latrobe didn’t invent the idea of Philadelphia as the rightful heir to ancient greatness. He only reminded Philadelphians what they had long known—and urged them to put the Greek out where everyone might actually see it.

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A Challenge for Philadelphia: What Should Our 9/11 Memorial Look Like?


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Public memory fails us at Second Street, Walnut to Chestnut Streets.
Photograph by Wenzel J. Hess, August 13, 1936.

America has another 9/11. September 11, 1777 also resonated with pain and sadness and was long remembered as a failure of freedom at the heart of the American cause. On that day, 234 years ago, a would-be nation embracing a vision of democracy forgot what the fight was all about.

But this story is remembered nowhere on the streets of Philadelphia. There’s no monument, no sculpture, no mural, no words in bronze to help us know and remember. This original, American 9/11 is now all but forgotten. It’s as if that day never happened.

Lucky for history, lucky for us, libraries and archives hold documents that tell the tale. The papers of Henry Drinker at Haverford College and the Brown Family at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and others that augment them are preserved and accessible. And thanks to Google books, a 300-page account of the event originally published in the 19th-century is also available. From these documents, as well as a more recent article, we can know and share what took place in Philadelphia on September 11, 1777.

What happened? Quaker Philadelphia became wartime Philadelphia. With the British advancing on land and by sea to occupy the city, loyalty and trust were no longer measured in shades of gray. By late August, Congress ordered those who were “notoriously disaffected…be apprehended disarmed and secured.” There was no ambiguity when it came to Philadelphia’s Tories. But what about the Quakers, who would neither participate nor contribute to the revolutionary effort?

Wartime leaders tended to agree with John Adams, who believed Philadelphia Quakers “love Money and Land better than Liberty of Religion.” Then reports of treasonous Quaker documents appeared – never mind that they were fabricated. Congress immediately recommended the arrest of Quakers who “evidenced a disposition inimical to the cause of America.” In early September, American forces began to “seize and secure” some of the city’s most upstanding citizens, nearly all of whom were Quakers. Without charges, and with nothing more than a list of targets and orders from Congress, armed guards broke into civilian homes and rounded up 41 men. When elderly John Pemberton refused to go “they removed him bodily from the house and took him forcibly into custody.” He and others pleaded their “affection for America,” but to no avail. All the prisoners were taken to the Masonic Lodge on Lodge Alley just west of Second Street, north of Walnut Street.

There would be no charges, no hearings, no appeals. The prisoners, their families and others protested these actions as a “stretch of arbitrary power,” “illegal,” “unjust,” and “contrary to the Rights of Mankind.” All complaints fell on deaf ears. A guard threatened to shoot a visitor attempting to talk to a prisoner through a window. Day by day, tensions grew in the streets around Lodge Alley.

A few men suffering illnesses were released. Others were let go after signing an oath swearing allegiance to the Revolution. The rest remained locked up.

On September 11, the twenty remaining men were loaded onto wagons in the midst of a crowd one witness called a “deeply emotional.” Passions rose. Someone threatened a guard, promising to “thrust his hands down his throat and pull out his heart if he dared abuse a Prisoner.” Another witness wept as the loaded wagons sat for hours, attempting to wait out the crowd. When the citizen-prisoners finally trundled away in the early evening, African-American acquaintances of John Pemberton managed to grasp his outreached hand. By then, Philadelphians just lined the way in silent protest.

These citizen-prisoners, victims of this original 9/11, were held for more than six months, out of sight but hardly out of mind in Winchester, Virginia. Two, Thomas Gilpin and John Hunt, died there. After many protests and appeals the rest were returned and released in April 1778. No charges were ever filed.

Today, the Masonic Lodge is long gone. So is Lodge Alley. This episode is forgotten. Over time, the place lost its connection with memory.

Should the site of Philadelphia’s 9/11, the site of “one of the gravest violations of individual rights…during the War of Independence” NOT be marked? Of course it should.

The real question is, what should Philadelphia’s 9/11 memorial look like; what should it tell us? How best can we restore this lost episode to living public memory?

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Time For Rocky To Step Aside?


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The Rocky Statue at its original location, July 29, 1982. Five years ago, the statue was
installed at its current location near the base of the Art Museum’s steps.

Rocky’s been in place for five years now, and it’s been 35 years since the film character gave Philadelphia a boost and Sylvester Stallone a brand worth $1.2 billion. But eventually, possibly sooner than later, Rocky will have to step aside as a Philadelphia story that has outlived its time.

Born during a recession in a place with an evaporating manufacturing economy, Rocky’s day job as bill collector speaks to the lack of opportunity in a city of homes and a paucity of jobs. In the 1970s, Philadelphians still believed they still had a shot at bringing the factories back. It took several decades more for the leadership (by then Ed Rendell in the 1990s) to openly admit industry as Philadelphia knew it was gone and a constellation of emerging economies (Eds, Meds, Tourism & Tech) would have to replace it.

Philadelphians have come to their senses and moved on, except, it seems, when it comes to Rocky.

Like Archie Bunker’s Queens, Rocky’s Philadelphia is now mostly gone, though not entirely. The spirit of the ’70s occasionally finds traction. In 2006, the same year as Rocky returned to the Parkway, Joey Vento posted a sign at his steak joint on 9th Street: “This is America, when ordering ‘Speak English?’” Vento spoke his mind, as Tom Ferrick put it in a recent Metropolis column: “And what was in that mind? A heavy dose of macho. One primal scream. Several tablespoons of jingoism. A half-cup of xenophobia. A dash of hate.”

When Joey Vento died last month, so did a little bit more of that Philadelphia, Rocky’s Philadelphia. Vento clumsily said what Stallone’s Rocky artfully implied. “Outsiders” were changing the hue and cry of the workplace, schools and streets. Vento, Ferrick points out, targeted Philadelphia’s Mexican immigrants. Rocky’s enemies were African Americans: first Apollo Creed, played by Carl Weathers, then James “Clubber” Lang, played by Mr. T. Of course, Rocky’s racism was neatly tempered by Hollywood, but it was significant in Rocky’s persona as well as the brand’s success.

The Rocky story is one of personal victory, rather than any kind of civic victory. In the 1970s, Rocky couldn’t begin to turn around a city still steeped in mid-century noir, but he could, bouncing at the top of the Art Museum’s steps at dawn in grey sweats, realize personal success.

Today, Philadelphia offers more. Yet, thousands of folks visit the Rocky statue every year, admire themselves with arms raised in souvenir images again, again and again. There’s a connection here with a 20th-century Philadelphia story that has survived into the 21st, but how meaningful is it now? Isn’t this statue, whether it’s considered a movie prop, a franchise logo, or even art, just an artifact of 20th-century American popular culture, along the lines of Archie Bunker’s chair? Visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History see that artifact behind glass.

Someday, the Rocky statue will be framed by a similar narrative. When that day comes, Philadelphia will have something to offer about what the city is, not what it was. But first, we’ll have to get past the idea that Stallone has done more for Philadelphia’s image than anyone since Ben Franklin, as Commerce Director Dick Doran put it in the 1980s. We’ll still be moved a little (or a lot) by the Rocky story, and the artifact will always be with us. Only, in the future, we’ll think of it as on the shelf, rather than on the pedestal, along with many other compelling stories out of Philadelphia’s past.

The question is, when Rocky steps aside, or is forced aside – and this should happen sooner than later – what will take his place? That we have yet to figure out. But the time is coming for Rocky to become history – and in Philadelphia there’s nothing wrong with that.

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Philadelphia Department of Records Wins 2011 Award of Merit!

We’re excited to announce that the Philadelphia Department of Records has been awarded a 2011 Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) for the work on PhillyHistory.org!

Now in its 66th year, the Leadership in History Awards from AASLH are awarded annually for projects that demonstrate excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of state and local history. The awards will be presented at a banquet held on September 16 as part of the 2011 AASLH Annual Meeting in Richmond, Virginia.

We are delighted to receive this award and appreciative of the recognition from AASLH. The photographs and maps on PhillyHistory.org enable users to discover more about the history of Philadelphia and its many neighborhoods and communities. We hope that it provides people with an opportunity to remember and explore our city’s past in a fun and innovative way.

Thank you to all the PhillyHistory.org users for supporting the project, and thank you to the American Association for State and Local History for the wonderful award!