Month: October 2012

Philadelphia’s most effective tool in its industrial transformation during the late 19^th century wasn’t a tool at all, although it could be considered a machine for living. As architectural historian George Thomas put it, the rowhouse was “the quintessential object of Industrial Philadelphia.”

But the Philadelphia rowhouse had far older roots. In 1800, Scottish-born “architect and house-carpenter” Thomas Carstairs took the idea of a row and stretched it out for a full city block on Sansom between 7^th and 8^th Street, turning real estate into revenue and meeting the city’s ever-growing appetite for housing. Over the next several decades, as the city grew across its 17^th-century grid, the rowhouse evolved into an upscale solution for urban living. Architects John Haviland and Thomas U. Walter demonstrated how the repeated form could also become something chic and generous. But as the city’s population soared past one million in 1890, the rowhouse was effectively reclaimed for the working class. By the end of the century, Thomas writes, “as far as the eye could see, there were some fifty square miles of row houses and factories, most of which had been built in the previous generation.”

The two-and three-story rowhouse had become part the city’s successful mix of immigration, employment, coal, real estate and banking. Between 1887 and 1893, no fewer than 50,288 rowhouses were built, enough for a quarter million people. Rowhouse construction had seen a boom before, with more than 50,000 built between 1863 and 1876. But now, in the last decade of the 19^th century, the Philadelphia rowhouse had grown more compact, more simplified and even more adapted to the lives of  the working family. With the help Philadelphia’s 450 savings and loan associations, a two-story  “Workingman’s House,” as it became known, could be had for about $3,000 and paid off in about a decade.

Sure, other cities—New York, Boston, Brooklyn and Baltimore—had rowhouses, but Philadelphia’s were more efficient, plentiful and affordable. More than anything else, the late-19^th century Philadelphia rowhouse propelled Philadelphia to become the Workshop of the World.

In 1893 the world took notice. The Columbian Exposition in Chicago exhibited a single specimen, a two-story “Workingmen’s House” designed by Philadelphia architect E. Allen Wilson. Other models of American housing on display included an Eskimo house and a logger’s cabin. The Philadelphia exhibit in Chicago was so popular, legend has it, that curious visitors wore out the floorboards.

The Philadelphia model was more than a mere solution to a housing problem; it became an effective tool for a modern society. “The two-story dwellings of this city are, beyond all question, the best, as a system, not only owing to the single family ideas they represent, but because their cost is within the reach of all who desire to own their own homes,” glowed a rowhouse proponent in the early 1890s. “They have done more to elevate and to make a better home life than any other known influence. They typify a higher civilization, as well as a truer idea of American home life, and are better, purer, sweeter than any tenement house systems that ever existed. They are what make Philadelphia a city of homes, and command the attention of visitors from every quarter of the globe.”

Between 1890 and 1910 Philadelphia grew from a city of a million to 1.5 million and added miles more rowhouses with ever greater repetition and monotony. Variations of one sort or another added to the city’s grammar of forms. Over time, some rows would be demolished to make way for new schools, while others would have their brick facade veneered with permastone, a literal interpretation of the romantic idea that even in a modern industrialized city, home is castle.

When poet Beth Feldman-Brandt wrote Taking Down the South Street Bridge in 2009, she had no idea how powerfully her final line, “We are used to finding our way among ruins,” resonates in PhillyHistory.

The original South Street Bridge was supposed to be a marvel of Philadelphia’s Iron Age. Giant iron columns, versions of a design innovated by the Phoenix Iron Company of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, supported sections spanning the Schuylkill River. The manufacturer had hoped for more of a splash in Philadelphia at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. For the grounds of the first American world’s fair, they proposed a 1,000-foot observation tower. If built, this would be about twice the height of City Hall, then under construction, and about as tall as the Eiffel Tower, started a decade later. Metaphorically, the Phoenix Tower would rise from the ashes of the bitter, bloody Civil War. Had the proposal been approved, the Phoenix Tower would literally have been cast from recycled government military canon. But it wasn’t approved. Instead, the biblical sentiment of beating swords into plowshares would play out at the South Street Bridge, which opened for traffic months before, and miles away, from the Centennial grounds.

Just a few seasons later, the bridge’s columns began to crack. Engineers diagnosed the cause as moisture in the rubble fill packed inside, expanding as it froze. They strapped on a series of iron belts that kept the cracks from spreading, but there wasn’t anything engineers could do to retrofit a design flaw at the bridge’s western approach. Beneath the roadbed, brick arches resting on granite piers which, in turn, rose from hundreds of wooden piles driven into the muddy riverbed. Problem was, in critical places, the piles had been driven down through only fifteen feet of mud, as far as packed gravel.

When the gravel shifted, piles slipped, piers tipped and arches cracked. Then, early one February Sunday morning in 1878, “the crippled arches gave way at the haunches and fell,” as assistant project engineer David McNelly Stauffer later put it. Like dominoes, “arch after arch went down, and the bridge was not much more than a wreck.”  There had been no casualties, but the two-year-old South Street Bridge was now useless.

Having died a year before the bridge was completed, project engineer John W. Murphy wasn’t around to present his side of the story. Stauffer stepped in, blaming “the tremor produced in the piles by travel on the bridge” allowing “percolation of water down their sides.” Stauffer admitted “the ground underlying this approach is an alluvial deposit, treacherous and unstable in character” but defended the project’s construction. “It is a matter of record that the piles under pier No. 2 were from 28 to 30 feet long,” he wrote. Possibly so, but that wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that the piles under the pier that failed first were only half that length.

Stauffer’s reputation didn’t seem to suffer much, if at all. Before and even after the collapse, he had capitalized on his bridge expertise. He had written of the innovative construction technique (the Plenum-pneumatic process in sinking the cast-iron columns) in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. After the collapse, in a markedly different tone, Stauffer promoted his services for City Council’s investigations in order that “the public may be enabled to form a correct judgment as to the methods actually pursued by the builders.” Later, he continued to boast about the bridge’s successful arches at its eastern approach. Decades later, Stauffer was still in the business, having included tunnels in his repertoire. But he also pursued another passion, collecting historical prints and compiling a four-volume dictionary of their artists. Stauffer’s American Engravers Upon Copper and Steel, published in 1907, soon became a classic research tool.

In all of the discussion of the new, new, South Street Bridge, the collapse of the first South Street Bridge in 1878 drifted from memory. Today, we find some comfort in the claim made of Street Department’s chief engineer and surveyor, that here is “the largest and most complex project in the history of the Streets Department.” It’s bicycle-friendly, pedestrian-friendly and has a wild lighting scheme. But history compels us to ask: does all of this rest on a foundation of solid rock?

“Immediately south of Independence National Historical Park,” wrote historian Louis Mumford  in 1956, “down as far as Lombard Street…is a district that should not be left to time, change and the conflicting aims of real-estate operators. This district has become nondescript—a mixture of seedy residences, lunchrooms, factories, lofts, tombstone-makers’ sheds, old burial grounds and historic churches… This part of Philadelphia is still known as Society Hill, and it still contains many houses that justify the name… rows of elegant dwellings of impeccable craftsmanship, which only need a little loving care to be nursed back to life.”

Mumford imagined more of what was already underway—a sweeping and positive transformation of an inner city when the very term was synonymous with decay.  Philadelphia had discovered its lightning-in-a-bottle solution, the key to Center City’s turnaround and Society Hill’s success. It wasn’t so much about historic landmarks or landmark developments, although these would be part of the mix, but hundreds (and thousands, city wide) of residential properties with age and character where Philadelphians could  make history theirs.

The city planner behind Philadelphia’s array of projects, including this calculus, knew he was onto something. And by November 1964, Edmund Bacon had parlayed success into fame with a TIME magazine cover story featuring his own façade framed by old and new icons of Society Hill. “Renewers of the city want not only to bring people back from the suburbs to shop, but back to town to live,” wrote TIME. “Society Hill is studded with 18^th-century houses and historic landmarks, and Bacon opened up vistas around them by chopping out the factories and dingy warehouses, threading greenery through them and building new houses in harmony with the 18th-century beauties.”

By the fall of 1964, Ford and Mary Jennings had snagged their diamond-in-the-rough at 521 Spruce Street and were well on their way to a state-of-the-art renovation and restoration. As Bacon held forth for TIME, the Jennings’ held hopes that their plans would be approved by the Philadelphia Historical Commission. Construction began shortly after, and soon 521 Spruce was awarded the city’s 289^th historic plaque. The Jennings installed it with pride beside their brand new front door.

If the door wasn’t historic, the doorway was. Five-twenty-one Spruce seemed liked any many other houses in Society Hill—but this one carried an extra-added association with its first resident, John Vallance. In 1792, the year the house was built, Vallance, Philadelphia’s leading artist/engraver was at work on illustrations for America’s first encyclopedia and the famous L’Enfant plan of the soon-to-be-new national capital in Washington D.C.

Twentieth-century Philadelphians had come to expect as much of their past. Everywhere you turned in Society Hill stood something remarkable, but just as remarkable was the success of the neighborhood’s revival. The sheer scale of this turnaround was one of the main reasons why Society Hill earned a place on the National Register as “the first large-scale urban renewal project to plan for historic preservation.”  No single project, or even collection of developments, could have surpassed the crowd-sourced community building achieved in Society Hill in the third quarter of the 20^th century.

But in all this renewal, something special about these gems was getting lost. It had tugged at Mumford in the 1950s when he wrote of the nearby Headhouse at 2^nd and Pine Streets: Here was “a building that should be treated tenderly and remain undisturbed.” An appreciation of the nuances of patina and accrued features  had fallen by the wayside. Now something harsh and hard had replaced it. In the rush to restore, preservationists purged all but the distant past, or a facsimile of it, anyway. Evidence of intervening time, and, by default, the building’s sense of itself—its very authenticity, was compromised. That’s the irony of Society Hill: buildings that had survived in spite of preservation were suddenly being “saved” at the hands of it.

Nuance didn’t have much of a chance as this dynamic played out. At the Headhouse, which underwent restoration as well, a feel for the complex past gave way to a simpler, cleaner, and ultimately less interesting interpretation. At 521 Spruce, and at hundreds of other properties, the elusive patina and the authenticity of acquired age wouldn’t–and didn’t—stand up to the untender restoration aesthetic that came to define Society Hill.