Month: November 2013

“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.