Month: August 2013

Just as Howe and Lescaze were getting to work on their PSFS Building in the late 1920s, Harry Sylk was starting up his Sun Ray drug store chain. Before long, the two would play out their similarities and differences—International Style versus Pre Populuxe—on the street. And where these design cousins would never intersect, they would redefine one of Philadelphia’s most dynamic intersections.

Twelfth and Market Streets had been Philly’s hot corner since the 1890s, when the Reading Railroad installed its masonry cliff of a head house in front of a giant train shed. Its interior was spoken for, but people animated the sidewalk. Pictures of 12^th and Market from 1911 and 1914 confirm: this intersection was the heart of Center City, and possibly its soul. Problem was, the blank, anonymous corner niche of rusticated head house didn’t add all that much. It cried out for a kiosk – and a domed version, visible in the 1911 picture. The corner demanded little attention, only the decision to walk straight, right or left.

Until PSFS. In the early 1930s, Howe and Lescaze’s monumental curve of granite, steel and glass put the Reading Terminal Headhouse in perspective. So 19^th century; so out of date. Could the power of PSFS possibly inspire its opposite corner to move into the 20^th century?

It could. And in true 20^th century fashion, it took the swagger and shamelessness of American retail to take up the challenge.

In the late 1920s, brothers Harry, Albert and William Sylk started with a “cut rate” store on Ridge Avenue and built a retail empire. The Sun Ray chain eventually grew to more than 150 stores in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland.

The Sylks were promoters as much as retailers. When flying saucers were spotted in Roswell, New Mexico Sun Ray promoted its new Patterson, N.J. store by dropping discs from an airplane and offering free ice cream for anyone who could bring one in. At Easter, Sun Ray gave its customers free chicks. The Sylks didn’t just advertise on radio, they bought two stations: WPEN AM and FM.

Store location remained their first priority. “Wherever there was a Woolworth’s store,” Harry Sylk told the Inquirer, “we tried to open a store right next to them…”

Signs became Sun Ray’s other first priority. The Sylks likely stood on the sidewalk across from the commanding curve of PSFS, appreciating Howe and Lescaze’s commitment to retail at the street level. This was their same language, only the Sylks spoke it with an earthier accent. Their corner, the Sylks figured, could update the Victorian kiosk with modern lines and materials. They would brag and holler where PSFS purred.

“Sun Ray; Super Kiosk,” proclaimed their first sign as it curved around the corner. Over time, and abiding by the time-tested principle that there’s no redundancy when it comes to promotion, the words “Super Kiosk” were replaced with “Sun Ray Drug Co.” Neon lit it all.

Powerful? Sure, especially at night. And cluttered. And disappointingly unanimated. Why use neon halfway, asked Max Sarnoff, the Sylk’s sign man extraordinaire? While on the West Coast, Sarnoff had seen the light: “…I wanted to put show biz in the sign business.” Back from Hollywood, via Miami Beach, Sarnoff later told the Sign Builder Illustrated how proud he was of his giant, neon mortar and pestles for Sun Ray. But nothing Sarnoff did combined lights and action like his giant Sun Ray sign with neon bands chasing around the corner of 12^th and Market.

A bit of Las Vegas in the Quaker City.

Between 1890 and 1950, the city had more than doubled in population, from about one million to just over two. But in the second half of the 20^th century, Philadelphia’s population dropped by more than 550,000—a loss, on average, of more than 110,000 residents every decade. It was a remarkable reversal that redefined the city in the second half of the 20^th century.

From the Civil War to after World War II, construction and employment booms powered Philadelphia’s expansion. Mile after mile of meadow and farmland had been transformed into red brick neighborhoods. They stretched, as far as the eye could see, interspersed only by churches, factories and freight lines.

By 1890, a short hike from the Odd Fellow’s Cemetery, bordering the lower branch of Cohocksink Creek, surveyors extended Penn’s original grid up to North Penn Village. Speculators divided the grid which now extended northward from Center City, into more development-friendly rectangles. Between York and Dauphin were cut smaller streets: Arizona and Gordon. And along the 400 feet, from corner to corner, speculators put up one more block of two-story row houses. By 1895, thirty stood between York and Arizona, 26^th and 27^th.

Open space just about disappeared as North Philadelphia rose up. Until the middle of the 20^th century, anyway. Then, not only did growth come to a screeching halt, it did an about face. In the Spring of 1954, when city photographer John McWhorter photographed a vacant lot on the 2600 block of West Arizona Street, vacant lots were still the exception. Over the next half century, many more of the original thirty houses on that rectangle between York and Arizona, 20th and 27^th disappeared. Today, only half remain.

We were reminded in a recent Inquirer story, accompanied by a useful map, that eight North Philadelphia census tracts each dropped by more than 10,000 residents from 1950 to 2010. What remains today at 26^th and Arizona was at the heart of this precipitous decline. It’s census tract: 169.01 – Susquehanna to Lehigh, 25th to 31^st– lost 10,780 residents, falling from 16,604 to 5,820. This 65% decline, more than double the citywide drop of 26.7%, outpaced even Detroit’s 61% decline in the same time period. Among Philadelphia’s 385 census tracts, 169.01 and five adjacent tracts lost more than 49,000 residents between 1950 and 2010—more than one-eleventh of the city’s total decline in population.

Are there any clues as to how this dramatic demographic shift played out? Any why this particular neighborhood was hit so hard?

Manufacturing, and manufacturing jobs, once thrived along the nearby Glenwood Avenue corridor. The 1910 Philadelphia Atlas shows coal yards, brick yards, lumber yards, planning mills, furniture factories, brass foundries, factories making pipes, pumps, processing tobacco, weaving textiles – plenty of places for employment. But when the Great Depression hit, and unemployment for the general population stood at 24.75%, unemployment among African Americans was as high as double that rate. And in the depth of the Depression, as we know from J. M. Brewer’s color-coded real estate map, 26^th and Arizona was an African-American community.

As Amy Hillier tells us, the Brewer map and the subsequent Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps, “established highly racialized neighborhood standards” and were used by mortgage companies to inform their lending decisions. Red shading on the Brewer map shows 26^th and Arizona as “Colored” and the quality of the housing there “lower of working class” to “decadent.”  Two years later, a data sheet accompanying the HOLC map describes the entire area west of Broad to Fairmount Park between Poplar and Cumberland as “solid town, two and three story, brick houses, forty years old or more,” a neighborhood that “originally housed a large part of the city’s more prosperous middle class” but “is now fast approaching obsolescence, with its population almost entirely Negro.” The neighborhood stood out in red, which signified “hazardous.”

By the 1950s, after two decades of disadvantage and disinvestment, conditions in North Philadelphia were about to get even worse with a steep decline of Philadelphia’s manufacturing economy. At its peak in 1953, a hearty 45 percent of the city’s entire labor force worked in industrial jobs. But by the start of the 21^st century, this had fallen to an anemic 5 percent.  Once again, North Philly’s neighborhoods would be among the biggest losers.

Before long, vacant lots would become the rule in North Philadelphia, not the exception. For a time, some would say, the terms “vacant lot” and “North Philadelphia” were synonymous.

We’re dealing with “a Bird of bad moral Character,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. The bald eagle, agreed William Bartram, was nothing more than “an execrable tyrant” who “supports his assumed dignity and grandeur by rapine and violence, extorting unreasonable tribute and subsidy from all the feathered nations.”

But the bird had been good enough for the ancient Romans who mounted miniatures on their standards as they marched to battle. And, as we saw in our last post, the eagle would suffice for the new Republic. In almost no time, on wings of patriotism and the desire to create a national iconography, the image of the bald eagle lifted from the Great Seal to, larger than life, the hearts and minds of the new Americans.

In his museum on Independence Square, artist Charles Willson Peale exhibited portraits of the Founding Fathers and a living, breathing bald eagle that screamed at him in recognition. Peale had great expectations for the nation and, so too, for his eagle, hanging its cage with the sign: “FEED ME DAILY 100 YEARS.” Peale’s eagle lived for a decade in captivity, from 1795 to 1805, and after it died he resurrected it, posed and stuffed.

In the new century, the prolific chisels of Peale’s sculptor friend, William Rush, secured for the bald eagle a permanent place in the American decorative motif. Rush’s carved and gilded eagles appeared in churches Saint John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church (it’s now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) and on public buildings, including Fairmount Waterworks (this piece is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Carved, cast or painted, eagles were becoming the go-to patriotic icon.

By the mid-century, the place of the eagle was secured not only in the American hearts and minds, but on America’s streets. In 1848, the Philadelphia Gas Works welcomed home soldiers returning from the Mexican-American War in a display at Independence Hall. An eagle with “a halo of stars” hovered above a thirty-foot “Goddess of Peace,” one of the many “figures in fire” of bent gas-pipes lit by 4,000 gas jets.

Eagles appeared on buildings throughout the city: Chestnut Street; 8^th Street: and Broad, where John McArthur, Jr. (later the architect of Philadelphia City Hall) mounted a giant eagle six stories above the entrance, above the cornice of his new luxury hotel, LaPierre House.

When the nation celebrated its 100^th birthday in 1876, the roof line of Memorial Hall crackled with personifications of Industry and Commerce, Agriculture and Mining, Science and Art. On each of four corner pavilions were perched four eagles, 16 in all, made of galvanized zinc and with huge wing span. Sometime after the Centennial, Memorial Hall’s eagles had no problem taking off, never to be seen or heard of again.

At Philadelphia City Hall, on the other hand, the eagles mounted at the foot of the Founder stayed put. Sculptor Alexander Milne Calder topped City Hall tower with four bronze eagles with 14-foot wingspans.

With a second new century came still more eagles. After the Louisiana Purchase exhibition in 1904, John Wanamaker bought and installed in his department store August Gaul’s giant bronze bird. And, as Penny Balkin Bach tells us in Public Art in Philadelphia, when New Yorkers decided to demolish Pennsylvania Station in 1963, Philadelphia’s Market Street Bridge got four of Alexander Weinman’s 22 granite eagles. The rest were distributed to locations around the country. But Americans everywhere knew Weinman’s eagles from his representation on the reverse of his “Walking Liberty” half dollar.

After more than 200 years, could we possibly be growing weary of the eagle, tired of its fierce and serious pose? Not so long as we continue to interpret the bird freshly, which may mean ironically, satirically or humorously, whether in blinking neon or bronze. “The important thing,” as Jacques Lipschitz sculptor of the “Spirit of Enterprise” on Kelly Drive put it, is finding and working with “some kind of freedom in expression.” And wasn’t that one of the freedoms the Founders had in mind?