Categories
Historic Sites Neighborhoods Snapshots of History

As Times Goes By on Lancaster Avenue: 1:05pm, April 22, 1914

The date is Wednesday, April 22, 1914.  On that day, George Herman “Babe” Ruth played his first professional baseball game, pitching for the (then minor league) Baltimore Orioles, in an exhibition game against the major league Philadelphia Phillies. To the amazement of the spectators, Babe Ruth proved to be one of those rare pitchers who could also hit! He left the game with a six hit, 6-0 win.  Incidently, Baltimore’s Major League Team at the time was the quaintly-named “Terrapins,” the main ingredient in the city’s famous turtle soup.  The terrapins went the way of the dodo the following year, and the Orioles replaced them as Baltimore’s MLB team.

The residents of the Philadelphia neighborhood of Belmont, like so many other Americans, were bewitched by baseball.  However, sports radio broadcasts were still a decade away.  Like telegraphs, wireless radio receivers of the time could only pick up Morse code dots and dashes.  Those unable to attend a baseball game at Shibe Park due to work or family obligations had to be content with detailed newspaper accounts published in the evening papers.

Belmont at the time was a solidly middle class neighborhood, largely a mixture of German, Italian, and Eastern European Jewish families. Although residents of Belmont enjoyed more leisure time than the factory workers of neighborhoods like Kensington, they still toiled long hours in the shops, groceries, law offices, and other small enterprises that lined Lancaster Avenue.  At 1:06pm at this day, the streets, were relatively empty, aside from a lone pedestrian and a couple of electric trolleys whooshing by. According to architect Robert Morris Skaler, whose family owned  L. Skaler & Sons kosher butcher shop, the owners usually lived above the store and all children were expected to help out with the chores. After hours, the adults would retire to the local pubs such as Trench’s Saloon to scan the Evening Bulletin and discuss the merits of various players, the rising star Babe Ruth among them.  After leaving classes at E. Spencer Miller School, the kids would have the same debates while hanging out at Furey’s ice cream parlor.  Or they would reeanct the game in games of half-ball on Belmont’s side streets, which at the time were almost car-free. On warmer spring nights, the sounds of upright pianos and Camden-made phonographs (popularly known as Victrolas) emanated from rowhouse windows.  Those who could spare a few dollars for a vaudeville show flocked to the William Penn Theater at 4063 Lancaster Avenue, completed two years earlier and able to seat 3,200 people at a time.

Students at the E. Spencer Miller School, 43rd and Westminster Avenue, June 14, 1933, 19 years after the railroad clock photograph.

The clock that stood outside 4255 Lancaster Avenue, located outside of the Walter M. Engle jewelry store, proudly noted that it kept railroad time. Inside the ornate little Engle store, another wall clock reminded the customers that it kept “True Time.”   Until the fall 1883, almost all cities and towns in the United States kept their own local time, based on when the sun reached its highest point in the sky.  Yet railroads such as the Pennsylvania, Union Pacific, and the Chicago Burlington & Quincy had greatly reduced the time it took to transport freight and passengers across the country.  Morever, railroad managers needed uniform time schedules to keep hundreds of trains on schedule and from crashing into each other.  Finding local time too burdensome (and it was), the railroads divided the country into four time zones, very close to the ones we know today. Despite a fair amount of local grumbling, most Americans adapted their lives around this executive fiat.

In 1914, a clock marked”Railroad Time” in front of a store on Lancaster Avenue signified modernity and predictability, essential traits in industrial powerhouse city such as Philadelphia. So did the dangling electric streetlight and the telephone wires overhead.  On Sundays, the bells of Belmont’s many  churches chimed in sych with the subtle thunk of the Engle clock’s minute hand.

The city of Philadelphia on April 22, 1914 had its share of poverty and labor unrest, but by and large, was prosperous and secure.  Yet within a few months, the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary would plunge the world into the bloodiest war in history. American joined the fight on the side of Britain, France, and Russia in April 1917. Scores of the young men of Belmont would leave their jobs, families, education (and their old time zone) behind to fight in the trenches, patrol the seas, and soar in the skies. Industrial production ramped up, the pace of life quickened, and time became even more precious.

At war’s end, Congress made the five zones of “railroad time” synonymous with national time.

Sources:

“What Happened on April 22, 1914,” OnThisDay.com, https://www.onthisday.com/date/1914/april/22, accessed April 8, 2020.

“Railroads Create the First Time Zones,” History.com, November 16, 2009,  https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/railroads-create-the-first-time-zones, accessed April 8, 2020.

Robert Morris Skaler, West Philadelphia: University City to 52nd Street (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), pp. 95-99, 107.

Jeff Gamage, “A Collection of Postcards Captures Phila’s Changes,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 8, 2014,

https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/20140208_Collection_of_postcards_captures_Phila__s_changes.html, accessed April 8, 2020.

Categories
Historic Sites Public Services Snapshots of History

Irving T. Catharine, Philadelphia’s School Design Czar

The Joseph W. Catharine School, S.66th Street and Chester Avenue. October 26, 1937.

The buildings of Frank Furness and Louis Kahn are known world-wide. Yet below the architectural superstars were the work-a-day architects who made their livings designing prominent structures that still dot the city. These included department stores, theaters, police and fire stations, parish churches, and warehouse blocks.  These architects saw their business as a service, and made comfortable livings in good economic times, especially if they had a steady corporate, ecclesiastical, or public client.

Irwin Thornton Catharine (1884-1944) was one such architect.  His name might be forgotten, but during his career he was one of the city’s most prolific builders. Trained in architecture at the Drexel Institute, Catherine’s career received a strong boost in the education sphere due to (in typical Philadelphia fashion) a family connection: his father Joseph Catharine was the long-time chair of Philadelphia’s Board of Education.  Appointed to the position of Superintendent of Builing in 1923, the junior Catharine was now insulated from the economic uncertainty that plagued the architectural profession.  From 1918 to 1937, he supervised the construction of 104 new public schools within the Philadelphia city limits, oversaw additions to 26 old ones, and substantially renovated at least 50 others. Working within a limited but defined budget, Catharine’s work was both elegant and utilitarian. During the 1920s, Catharine’s studio produced buildings in a stripped-down collegiate Gothic style, blocky three or four-story structures punctuated by turrets, high arched windows, and a grand central entrance. By the 1930s, however, Catharine shifted to a more streamlined variant of the Art Deco style, popularly known as “Moderne”, at Bok High School and John Bartram High School, although he also toyed with Mediterreanean motifs at South Philadelphia’s Charles W. Bartlett Junior High School (now the Academy at Palumbo).

Charles W. Bartlett Junior High School, 11th and Catharine Streets, November 26, 1932.

In addition to soaring auditoriums, libraries, rooftop playgrounds, and gymnasiums, Catharine added a novel feature to public school buildings in the 1920s: indoor public bathrooms on each floor (replacing the outdoor latrines in many older school buildings), with marble partitions betwen the toilets.  In a 1925 newspaper interview, Catharine claims to have solved the pesky graffiti problem in school bathrooms:.”Once every [toilet] partition put up was wood; nowadays white marble is used,” he said. “And the children have been the direct cause of this. There is something in the nature of every boy which makes him want to carve his initial or whole name in a wall. If he isn’t clever enough with his pocket knife, he writes his name. White marble partitions and walls make it impossible for him to use his knife.”

Auditorium of the Joseph W. Catharine High School.

One of his last projects was a school at S.66th and Chester Avenue, named in honor of his father Joseph.

Irwin T. Catharine died in 1944.  After World War II, Philadelphia’s school designs veered away from Catharine’s brick and stone historicism and toward the the steel and concrete of the International style.

Sources: 

“Irvin T. Catharine,” Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 2020, https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/22844, accessed February 27, 2020.

“63-Prop, Philadelphia Public Schools Thematic Nomination,” National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form,” United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, October 20, 1986, https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64000730_text, accessed February 27, 20202.

Philip Jablon, “Why All Philly Schools Look the Same,” Hidden City Philadelphia, June 29, 2012.

Categories
Historic Sites Snapshots of History

The Model T with the “Mother-in-Law” Seat

A Ford Model T roadster with a “mother-in-law” seat parked in front of townhouses at 216 and 218 North 19th Street, August 8, 1912.

In the early 1900s, the government was not in the business of regulating car design and safety.  The only real government requirements when it came to owning one were license plates and registration.  Luxury cars of that era, especially European imports such as Mercedes and Napier, were so complicated to drive and service that most owners had live-in chauffeurs who doubled as mechanics.

In 1908, the Ford Motor Company rolled out its $850 Model T.  Powered by a twenty-horsepower in-line four cylinder engine, the car had a top speed of about 43 miles per hour.  It was also mechanically simple, had interchangeable parts, and was easy for self-trained owners to fix. Thanks to Henry Ford’s pioneering use of the assembly line, Model T’s dropped steeply in price over the next decade, to a low of $250 by the early 1920s.  When the Highland Park plant outside of Detroit was operating at top speed, a Model T Ford could be assembled in only 93 minutes, from start to finish.  Yet the Tin Lizzie’s reign over the American auto market could not last forever. By the early 1920s, General Motors’ Chevrolet marque was beating Ford on price, style, and amenities, especially color choices. Due to dropping sales and its outdated technology, the Model T was phased out in 1927 and replaced by the more modern and stylish Model A.  Over the course of its 19-year production run, Ford had built a staggering 10 million Model Ts.

After-market “isenglass” side curtains on a Ford Model T touring car, in a c.1915 advertisement.  The song “The Surrey with the Fringe on the Top” from the musical Oklahoma! references the use of isenglass in bad weather. Source: The Old Motor.

The most popular and practical body style for the Model T was the four door “touring car.”  The roof was a collapsible leather top. In very bad weather, the owner could roll down transparent “isenglass” (made from fish air bladders) side curtains to keep the rain and wind out.   Few Ford Model T’s were enclosed — a closed body added significant weight and reduced the top speed to around 35 miles per hour.  A closed body also raised price beyond the reach of the typical Ford customer.  Enclosed sedan and limousine bodies needed much more powerful engines, and as a result were the domain of much more prestigious automakers such as Packard and Pierce-Arrow.

Driving a Model T is very different from today’s modern cars. See how to drive one here. 

For Ford Model T customers who preferred something sportier, Ford also offered the two-seat “roadster” body style.  It was a great car for young couples. However, what if the proverbial “third wheel” wanted to come along for the ride?  Ford solved this problem by adding a single spare seat between the rear fenders.  Given its isolation from the passenger and driver, as well as being entirely exposed to the elements, this seat became the butt of jokes.  Wags would call it the “mother-in-law” seat.  It also made the already frumpy looking roadster look even more awkward.

Often situated atop the gas tank, the mother-in-law seat was also the most dangerous in the car!

Ford and other automakers got the message. By the 1920s, this extra rear seat would be merged into the body of the car and get a more charming name: the rumble seat.

Sources:

“Turn Your Tin Lizzie Into a Limousine,” The Old Motor, December 14, 2014, http://theoldmotor.com/?p=134906, accessed November 21, 2019.

“Celebrating the Model T: Only 100 Years Young,” Auto Atlantic,  http://www.autoatlantic.com/Sept08/Sept08_Ford-Model-T-is-100.html, accessed November 21, 2019.

“Model T Club of America,” https://www.mtfca.com/, accessed November 21, 2019.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Snapshots of History

Cigars with Frank Furness at 711 Locust Street

The former Frank Furness house (left, 711 Locust Street), June 12, 1958.

Reverend William Henry Furness (1802-1896), the minister of Philadelphia’s First Unitarian Church, complained that Philadelphia’s architects should liberate themselves from the demure and boring “Quaker style…marble steps, and wooden shutters.”   Yet exuberant ornamentation was not only anathema to Philadelphia taste, but it was also expensive, even in the Victorian era of cheap labor.  Reverend Furness raised his own family in a plain but substantial “Quaker style” rowhouse at 1426 Pine Street. It was well-situated and within the bounds of the Furness family’s middle class budget.

His son Frank Furness broke the mold of Philadelphia’s sober and conservative architectural language, designing buildings in an aggressive, flamboyant style that still captures our imagination.  A fine Frank Furness building, such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Library and the First Unitarian Church (built for his father’s congregation), shouted “look at me” in defiance of all Quaker modesty.

However, when it came to his own house, the architect Frank Furness found himself in the same budgetary dilemma as his minister father.  Although he rubbed elbows with some of Philadelphia’s richest families, he and his wife Fannie could not afford to build a showcase house for himself, of his own design.  His architecture practice, although financially successful for the last quarter of the 19th century, simply did not bring in enough money for him to travel in the Rittenhouse Square set. So, he and his wife did the next best thing: purchasing a proper four story townhouse in the Washington Square neighborhood, which was still respectable but had fallen in status somewhat in since the Civil War. It was still safely between the “acceptable” boundaries of Market and Pine streets, a calling card detail to which Furness’s client base would have paid attention.

Dining room of the Theodore and Martha Roosevelt townhouse, 6 West 57th Street, New York. This was also the home of future president Theodore Roosevelt when he was a young man. The interior of the Roosevelt home was designed by Frank Furness. Source: Wikipedia.

If Furness’s house at 711 Locust Street was Quaker plain on the outside, the architect made the interior a glittering showcase of his own design skill.  Yet it was the “smoking room” that really caught the attention of the visitors, if they were allowed into Furness’s inner-sanctum.  Or, in modern parlance, his “man cave.”

The “smoking room” at 711 Locust Street looked as if it had been plucked from a Rocky Mountain hunting cabin and dropped right in Center City Philadelphia.  It was filled with Native American art and textiles, pelts, unframed prints, antlers, and guns that Furness had purchased on his frequent journeys out west.  Like his fellow “proper Philadelphian” creative-type Owen Wister, he was fascinated with the ethos (and mythos) of the American West.  Here, in this rustic one story addition that he built with his own hands, he would entertain his comrades from his Civil War cavalry regiment, as well as John Foster Kirk of Lippincott’s Monthly and the poet Walt Whitman.

In the early 1880s, the publisher D. Appleton & Company released Artistic Houses, a lavish book that featured interior photographs of some of the grandest homes on the United States, including several in Philadelphia. They were built by tycoons such as William Henry Vanderbilt,  Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Marshall Field. Yet there was only featured photograph of the inside of an architect’s home: the smoking room at 711 Locust Street. The editors of Artistic Houses wrote of this space:

Frank Furness’s “smoking room” at 711 Locust Street. Originally published in Artistic Houses, 1883-84. Reproduced from HiddenCity.org.

What Mr. Furness has really achieved, from a chromatic point of view, can barely be surmised from our reproduction in black and white…but those who have seen the interior of this cozy little sanctum will agree that, in felicity of arrangement, both of lines and tones, it is artistic to a high degree, while its literary interest, if we must express ourselves–its absolutely unique. 

Frank Furness’s good fortune–an endless flow of commissions and long evenings with bohemian friends in the “smoking room”–did not last.  By the early 1900s, his vibrant, bold architecture of Furness & Evans was woefully out-of-fashion, and he fell on hard times.   He moved out to Media to be near his beloved brother Horace and other extended family. He died in 1912.  His Locust Street townhouse, with its famous smoking room, is now a distant memory.

Sources: 

Artistic Houses, Volume II (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1883-84), https://archive.org/stream/Artistichouses2A/Artistichouses2A_djvu.txt, accessed November 14, 2019.

Arnold Lews, James Turner, and Steven McQuillin, The Opulent Interiors of the Gilded Age (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1987), p.101.

Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), pp.142-143.

James F. O’Gorman, The Architecture of Frank Furness (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), p.15.

 

 

 

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Neighborhoods Snapshots of History

Angora Mills and the Baptist Minister

 

West Philadelphia country road near Angora Mills, 58th and Baltimore Avenue, September 20, 1906.

Entrepreneurs George and Robert Callaghan built the Angora Mills complex in 1864, at the height of Civil War-fueled demand for army uniforms. Named after the Turkish city of Ankara (not the cat breed), it stood at the intersection of 60th Street and Baltimore Avenue (in today’s Cobbs Creek neighborhood) and sprawled over 52 acres.  Angora Mills include not just a steam-powered brick textile mill, but also 54 residences for 300 workers and their families, a stable, springhouse, coal yard, and an on-site Baptist church. A Hexamer survey conducted in 1888 also indicated that Angora Mills had 4 self-acting “mules” with 4,200 spindles, 36 spinning frames 180 spindles on each, a sprinkler system and cutting edge incandescent lighting. The Angora Mills “village,”although still within the city limits of Philadelphia, was set in an idyllic landscape of farms and groves of old growth trees.    There was also a private club nearby, the Sherwood Cricket Club, a rustic venue that catered to the mill’s employees during their precious leisure time.

All that changed in 1903, when Reverend Bernard MacMackin quietly took possession of Angora Mills at a sheriff’s sale. MacMackin paid $206,000.00 for the property, fronting $76,000 in cash and taking out mortgages to cover the balance.  The Philadelphia Inquirer scratched its head at the deal: Reverend MacMackin was a prominent Baptist minister who had no real business experience, but he also happened to be an in-law of the Callaghans.  When questioned about the deal, MacMackin “refused to discuss this phase of the purchase, saying it was a personal matter.” Although connected to Center City by an electric trolley line since the 1890s, the Market Street Elevated was under construction a few blocks north of Angora Mills, making Angora Mills ripe for subdivision. Within a few years of the sale, the site was cleared, sold, and developed into blocks of rowhouses.  The mill’s name lives on in the “Angora Terrace” neighborhood. The site of the adjoining Sherwood Cricket Club is the modern-day Sherwood Park.

Reverend MacMackin apparently profited from the deal: at his death in 1916, he left an estate worth over $200,000 (the modern-day equivalent to almost $3 million) to his family.

Sherwood Park, 58th and Baltimore, the former site of the Sherwood Cricket Club, November 11, 1939. Charles A. Lamb, photographer.

Sources:

“A Minister Buys Nearly All of Angora,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 5, 1903.

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25990534/may_5_1903/

“Angora Mills, Callaghan and Brother,” Hexamer General Surveys, Volume 23, Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network.

http://www.philageohistory.org/rdic-images/view-image.cfm/HGSv23.2209-2210

Charles Alvin Jones, “MacMackin Estate, 51 A.2d 689 (Pa. 1947),” Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, Court Listener, January 9, 1947.

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4089940/macmackin-estate/

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Neighborhoods Snapshots of History

A Philadelphia Firehouse Designed by the “Other” Philip Johnson

Fire Station at 701 S.50th Street, designed by Philip H. Johnson in 1903. Photographed by R. Carrollo, December 9, 1959.

All our municipal governments are more or less bad. Philadelphia is simply the most corrupt and the most contented.”

-Lincoln Steffens, 1903

The firehouse at intersection of Baltimore Avenue and 50th Street is a redbrick Flemish revival structure dating from the early 1900s.  In the days of coal-fired kitchen ranges and unreliable electrical wiring, a modern fire station was a big draw to potential residents of Cedar Park and Spruce Hill, which by the early 1900s had become a desirable and expensive streetcar suburb.  The fire engines at the station at 701 S.50th Street were horse-drawn until at least the mid-1910s, when internal combustion engines finally became powerful enough to haul heavy ladders and pumping machinery through the streets at high speed.

 

A British fire engine, powered by an internal combustion engine, 1905. From Popular Mechanics.

Although dripping in fin-de-siècle charm, the Cedar Park firehouse was the result of a no-bid, lifetime city contract that remained inviolate for 30 years and netted architect Philip H. Johnson a small fortune.  Johnson owed his good luck thanks to a familial connection to one of Philadelphia’s most powerful political bosses. In 1903, when journalist Lincoln Steffens described Philadelphia as “corrupt and contented” (and the same year Johnson’s drafted the firehouse plans), the city’s 7th Ward was under the iron-fisted rule of the Republican boss Israel M. Durham. A longtime party operative who had served in the Pennsylvania State Senate and as State Insurance Commissioner, he lavished generous salaries on himself and his loyal associates.  He also traveled widely to Europe and the American West, all while receiving a handsome $20,000 a year salary as State Insurance Commissioner. During his final years, he became majority owner and president of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team.  Although poor health prevented Durham from watching from the stands, he kept a telephone by his hospital bed so he could manage the team and follow the games in real time.

One of Durham’s most controversial acts was the awarding of a lifetime contract to his brother-in-law Philip Johnson for City Health Department projects. No relation to the famed modernist architect of the same name, Johnson was a competent (if not particularly imaginative) architect who had previously worked at the City’s Bureau of Engineering and Surveys. After starting his own firm in 1903, thanks to the contract granted by his brother-in-law, Johnson churned out dozens of public buildings during his tenure.  Among them were the City Hall Annex (now the Notary Hotel), the Philadelphia General Hospital, the Philadelphia Hospital for Mental Diseases at Byberry. and the old Philadelphia Convention Center on Civic Center Boulevard.  After Durham’s demise in 1909, several Philadelphia mayors tried to get Johnson’s lifetime contract overturned. The courts consistently sided with Johnson, and as a result more than $2 million worth of projects flowed into the architect’s office until his death in 1933. Protected from competitive bids, Johnson made few efforts to hide the wealth garnered from the city coffers, belonging to the Philadelphia City Yacht Club and the Larchmont Yacht Club in the suburbs of New York City.

After closing in the 1980s, the Cedar Park firehouse became the home of a popular indoor farmer’s market. Today, the former firehouse now houses a quartet of Cedar Park businesses: Dock Street Brewery, Satellite Cafe, Firehouse Bicycles, and The Fireworks Co-Working Space.

Sleeping quarters, fire station at 701 S.50th Street, photographed by R. Carrollo, December 9, 1959.  Now Firehouse Bicycles.
The engine garage, photographed by R. Carrollo on December 9, 1959. Now Dock Street Brewery.
Firehouse at 701 S.50th Street. photographed by R. Carrollo on December 9, 1959. Now the site of the Satellite Cafe.

Sources: 

Sandra Tatman, Johnson, Philip H. (1868-1933), Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, 2019.

Howard Gillette, Corrupt and Contented, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.

“Israel Durham Quits: Abandons Claims to Leadership of Party Machine,” The New York Times, January 10, 1906.

“Israel Wilson Durham: Politician and Owner/President of the Philadelphia Phillies,” Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery.

 

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Neighborhoods Snapshots of History

Martin Meyerson’s Presidential Residence at 2016 Spruce Street

Facade of the President’s Residence, University of Pennsylvania, 2016 Spruce Street, 1927.

In 1970, University of Pennsylvania’s new president Martin Meyerson hired arguably the most famous architect in America at the time, Penn’s own Louis Kahn, to renovate a double-wide brownstone mansion at 2016 Spruce Street into a new presidential residence.  Meyerson was a unusual university president, in that his background was not in academia, but in city planning. Accordiing to the New York Times: “He oversaw the conversion of what had been a collection of buildings on Philadelphia streets into a true campus. Streets were closed, landscaped walkways were built, and a large park was created in the middle of the campus.”

Traditionally, the Penn president lived in leafy Chestnut Hill, the favorite enclave of Philadelphia’s upper crust and the neigborhood of many of the university’s biggest donors.  A native New Yorker, Meyerson decided to change that precendent by moving the president’s home into Center City. 2016 Spruce had been built in the 1860s by the prominent architect Samuel Sloan. Sloan’s most notable surviving commissions include the Woodland Terrace development (longtime neighborhood of Penn architecture professor Paul-Philippe Cret) and the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital at 50thand Market. Sloan’s specialized in the picturesque Italianate style.  By the early 1970s, Philadelphia’s real estate market was in a deep funk. Rittenhouse Square had fallen a long way since its Gilded Age heyday, when the author Henry James described it as “the perfect square.”  Yet the once-fashionable streets around Rittenhouse still remained popular with Penn faculty, including physician Dr. Isidor Ravdin, city planner Edmund Bacon, and sociologist E. Digby Baltzell Jr.

The student protests and strikes of the late 60s also may have had something to do with Meyerson’s decision to not live on the West Philadelphia campus.  In 1972, Harvard’s president Derek Bok (an heir to the Philadelphia-based Curtis publishing fortune) decamped from Harvard Yard to the 18th century Elmwood mansion, still in Cambridge but a comfortable mile or so from campus.

Library, 2016 Spruce Street, 1972.

Louis Kahn, who balanced private practice and teaching duties, was busy with prestigious commissions in the late 60s, most notably the National Assembly at Dhaka in Bangladesh. Yet Kahn must have felt sense of obligation to his former boss at Penn’s architecture school to undertake this relatively small project.   Trained in the traditional Beaux Arts method, Kahn was extremely respectful of the mansion’s Victorian aesthetic.  Unlike other modernist architects, who would gutted the house, Kahn used a light touch, keeping all of the intricate paneling, marble fireplaces, and ornamental plaster intact.  He added bookshelves in one of the double parlors to house Meyerson’s library, and then created a new kitchen addition at the rear of the house.  The kitchen, despite its modest size, is pure Kahn, with plenty of light and large, unornamented surfaces of wood and brick.

 

Louis Kahn’s kitchen addition for 2016 Spruce Street, 1972.

The end result was a house that retained its “Old Philadelphia” Victorian gravitas, but was well-suited to the modern urban family life of Martin and Margi Meyerson.

In 1980, with the memories of campus unrest fading, the University of Pennsylvania decided to move the president’s residence back to West Philadelphia.  The building chosen for the honor was the former mansion of the cigar manufacturer Otto Eisenlohr, located at 3808-3810 Walnut Street. Built in 1907, it was the work of Horace Trumbauer and his partner Julian Abele, the first African-American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture program.

2016 Spruce Street is once again a private residence, and has recently been listed for sale at nearly $3 million.

 

Sources: 

Judith Rodin, The University and Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory Tower and Into the Streets (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), p.25.

Sandy Smith, “A President’s House in Rittenhouse for $2.895M,” Philadelphia Magazine, April 30, 2018.

https://www.phillymag.com/property/2018/04/30/martin-meyerson-house-rittenhouse-for-2-895m/

Dennis Hevesi, “Martin Meyerson, 84, Leader at 3 Universities, Dies,” The New York Times, June 7, 2007.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Neighborhoods

Joseph Moore Jr., “A Remnant of the Mauve Decade”

Joseph Moore Jr. in his library at 1821 Walnut Street, undated (c.1920).

There are few interior shots available on PhillyHistory.org. The insides of the grand mansions of Rittenhouse Square and their modest West Philadelphia rowhouses have been largely lost history, their contents dispersed to family members, sold at auction during the Great Depression, or buried in landfills.

Among the few surviving images of these every day stagesets are of the townhouse of Joseph Moore Jr., a wealthy bachelor businessman and the namesake of the Moore College of Art and Design.  Born on July 19, 1849 to Joseph and Cecilia Moore, Joseph spent his twenties in the family dry goods and carriage making business. Yet like his contemporary Owen Wister, who had a nervous breakdown after his practical physician father barred him from a career as a concert pianist, Moore was bored by the monotonous routine of sales and double-entry bookkeeping.  The well-educated Moore and Wister were of a type of Philadelphian that was, in the (somewhat unflattering) words of social historian Nathaniel Burt, “born retired.”

Adrift in commercial Philadelphia, Owen Wister went west to the austere wilds of Wyoming, where he found new literary inspiration in the persona of the cowboy.

Moore looked the other way, across the Atlantic.  In 1876, Moore left the business world and spent the next twelve years as a dilettante antiquarian, roaming Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.  He authored the books The Queen’s Empire eand Outlying Europe and the near Orient, penned magazine articles, participated in archaeological digs, and immersed himself in the art museums of Paris and other European capitals. According to Rittenhouse Square, Past and Present, published in 1922, a year after his death, “he devoted years to travel and study, covering Europe, Asia, Africa and America, studying French at Blois, German at Hanover, and international law under the late Dr. Francis Wharton.”

After a dozen years abroad, Moore returned to Philadelphia and, ever the polymath, became something of a jack-of-all trades, dabbling in banking and manufacturing and apparently doing fairly well in the business sphere. He also racked up board seats and club memberships, including the Union League, Drexel Institute, and the Fairmount Park Commission. Perpetually one of Philadelphia’s most eligible bachelors (“a man of attractive personality and fine attainments”) he enjoyed hosting groups of debutantes in his Rittenhouse Square townhouse at 1821 Walnut Street, on the north side of the park, which he had inherited from his parents. But despite his wealth and popularity, he lived alone in his enormous house.

One of these images shows Moore, as an old man, sitting in the gloomy grandeur of his library.  By the time this photo was taken, the Square’s Gilded Age grandeur was fading, as wealthy families moved out to the sylvan suburbs of the Main Line and Chestnut Hill.  With the rising costs of domestic help and ever-increasing taxes, townhouses had become a financial anachronism in Philadelphia area. In this image, Moore appears to be like the character Horace Havistock from Louis Auchincloss’s The Rector of Justin: 

“He is very bent and brown, with thick snowy hair, and he leaned heavily on Dr. Prescott’s arm has he hobbled in and out of the dining room. Yet taken as a remnant of the mauve decade he is rather superb. He was wearing a high wing collar, striped trousers, a morning coat and black button boots of lustered polish.”

It appears that until his death, Moore was perfectly content to live in the past, vanished world of the “Mauve Decade.” So did Owen Wister, who preferred to take comfort in the past ideal of the Western cowboy rather than a cosmopolitan, urban future. “The cowboy has now gone to worlds invisible,” he wrote in his 1902 bestseller The Virginian, “the wind has blown away the white ashes of his campfires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth.”

Joseph Moore Jr. died at his Rittenhouse Square mansion of a heart attack in 1921, at the dawn of the raucous Jazz Age. His house did not last long after his passing. Like all of the townhouses on north side of Rittenhouse Square, it was demolished after World War II and replaced by modern high rises. Moore’s name lives on in the Moore College of Art and Design, of which is family was the main benefactor.

1825-1827 Walnut Street, October 8, 1924.

Sources:

“From the Archives: Joseph Moore Jr.,” Connelly Library Moore College of Art and Design, November 1, 2013. https://connellylibrary.wordpress.com/tag/joseph-moore-jr/

Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964), p.48.

Charles J. Cohen, Rittenhouse Square: Past and Present (privately printed, Philadelphia) 1922. https://archive.org/stream/cu31924008640652/cu31924008640652_djvu.txt

Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919), p.36. https://books.google.com/books?id=9PkVAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=white%20ashes&f=false

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Snapshots of History

The Mystery Church: St. Andrew’s Chapel of Spruce Hill

St. Andrew’s Chapel, 4201 Spruce Street, January 14, 1963.

St. Andrew’s Chapel, one of Philadelphia’s finest examples of neo-Gothic architecture, is the  only quiet place on its tree-shaded block.  The locked building is surrounded by the bustle of the children attending the Penn Alexander School and the Parent Infant Center.  From the 1924 to 1974, this church was the centerpiece of the now-closed Philadelphia Episcopal Seminary.

Alonzo Potter (1800-1865), Episcopal Bishop of Pennsylvania. Source: Wikipedia.

Founded in 1857 by Bishop Alonzo Potter of Pennsylvania, the seminary had a strong connection with the University of Pennsylvania — a strange irony since the Church of England had violently persecuted Quakers (the Penn mascot) back in Great Britain. In the early 1920s, the estate of financier Clarence Clark came on the market.  This five-acre “Chestnutwold” compound had once been one of the finest properties in West Philadelphia, boasting a brownstone Renaissance Revival mansion, and arboretum, and even a private zoo.   Looking for a new home, the Philadelphia Divinity School snapped up the Clark estate, razed all the buildings (only the iron gates remain) and made plans to build an elaborate new campus.  It hired an architectural firm with myriad Penn alumni connections: Zantzinger, Borie and Medary. The firm had made a name for itself as a designer of office buidings, museums, collegiate Gothic dormitories at Princeton, and suburban homes for Philadelphia’s upper class.  It helped that partner Clarence Clark Zantzinger was the grandson of Clarence Clark and an heir to the E.W. Clark & Company banking fortune. Zantzinger and his partners, all Penn alumni, frequently collaborated with Paul-Philippe Cret, distinguished professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. The Zantzinger firm’s most famous alumnus was a Jewish immigrant from Estonia named Louis Kahn, a 1922 graduate of Penn’s architecture school.

Rendering by Ray Hollis (circa 1922), of the Divinity School’s proposed 20 buildings. The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

The Zantzinger firm’s vision for the new Philadelphia Divinty School was ambitious: a complex of dormitories, dining halls, libraries, administrative buildings, and residences centered around the magnficient St. Andrew’s Chapel.  Completed in 1924, the grandeur of  St. Andrew’s Chapel reflected the booming economy of the Roaring Twenties.  The interior boasted ironwork by Samuel Yellin and stained glass windows by the studios of Nicola D’Ascenzo, and a carved limestone reredos echoing the famous one at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in New York.

The Dorrance Memorial Window (1924) from St. James the Greater Church in Bristol, PA. A fine example of the work of the D’Ascenzo studio. Wikipedia.com.

Yet the Great Depression slammed the brakes on the Philadelphia Divinity School’s grand plans.  Only six of of the planned twenty-two structures were built.  And unfortunately, in its badly reduced circumstances, the Episcopal Seminary could never quite match the prestige and drawing power of its counterparts in New York (General Theological Seminary) or Cambridge, Massachusetts (Episcopal Divinity School).  The school limped along until 1974, when it closed its doors and the University of Pennsylvania took possession of the property.

Today, St. Andrew’s Chapel, although sealed shut, is completely intact on the inside. The public gets a peak at one of the finest sacred spaces in Philadelphia only at an occassional concert or art installation.

 

Nave of St. Andrew’s Chapel, 4201 Spruce Street, 1980.

 

Choir stalls at St. Andrew’s Chapel, 4201 Spruce Street, 1980.

Sources: 

“At the Former Philadelphia Divinity School Site: Discovering Inspiration from the Past and Creating Spaces to Learn and Grow,” University of Pennsylvania Almanac, March 30, 2010, Volume 56, No. 27., accessed November 13, 2018.

https://almanac.upenn.edu/archive/volumes/v56/n27/divinity.html

Sandra Tatman, “Zantzinger, Borie & Medary (fl. 1910 – 1929),” Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 2018, accessed November 13, 2018.

https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/23459

Arnold Lewis, James Turner, and Steven McQuillin, The Opulent Interiors of the Gilded Age (New York: Dover Publications, 1987), p.46.

“Magnificent  Structure in West Philadelphia Undergoing Demolition by Wrecking Crew,” The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, April 7, 1916. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045211/1916-04-07/ed-1/seq-9/#date1=1836&index=19&rows=20&words=Clark+Park&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=Pennsylvania&date2=1922&proxtext=%22clark+park%22&y=-221&x=-932&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1, accessed December 9, 2015.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Snapshots of History

Books in Trust: The Germantown Friends Free Library – Part 2

Main Building, Germantown Friends School, 31 W. Coulter Street, 1964.

“In an age in which the individual is merely a number to his employer, his bank, his insurance company and his government, humanizing influences are sadly needed. It is our belief that books and the libraries that make them available constitute one of the most powerful of these influences.”

Germantown Friends Free Library Annual Report, 1963-1964

As the Friends Free Library bustled with activity, Germantown Friends School became one of Philadelphia’s leading independent school.  During the late 19th century, Philadelphia flourished as an industrial and financial center, and many other private schools were founded to educate the children of the burgeoning managerial class.  Northwest Philadelphia’s suburban communities supported a whole ecosystem of schools, social clubs, and retail shops.  Unlike its nearby competitors, Springside School and Chestnut Hill Academy, which were based on single-sex English models, GFS had been co-ed since it’s “refounding” in 1858.   As an educational institution, it had more in common with the co-ed, progressive “Hicksite” Swarthmore College than the all-male “Orthodox” Haverford College.

In an era of increasing affluence and luxury, GFS strove to maintain its founding Quaker principles of simplicity and equality.

Unlike the Gothic finery and Georgian grandeur of the era’s preparatory school campuses, the architecture of Germantown Friends School was deliberately restrained, almost austere.  The color palate was predominately tan, gray, and brown.  There were no soaring spires or stained glass windows in the Meeting House. It grew cautiously, constructing new buildings as needed but also freely adapting nearby older structures to meet its   social club on Coulter Street became a new classroom building (fragments of the original bowling alley survive in the basement) and a converted bank on Germantown Avenue housed staff offices (the steel bank vault still resides in the basement). The Main Building, originally dating from the 1860s, was expanded many times over the years. The present-day neo-classical façade, with its arched auditorium windows and Doric columns, was completed in 1925.  According to Tim Wood, present day archivist at Germantown Friends School, “The previous version of the front, from 1896-97 renovations, was thought by some to be too ostentatious.” Francis Cope, of the Cope shipping family, added “They had made quite a respectable looking building of it, somewhat marred by the addition of a prominent and incongruous porch.” The school’s student publication, The Pastorian, though, called it “a grand new building.”

 

The remains of the bowling alley in the basement of one of Germantown Friends School’s classroom buildings. Photo by Steven Ujifusa.
The foyer of the Germantown Friends School’s Meeting House. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.

The Main Building’s entrance hall showcases a collection of plays and literature that once belonged to long-time teacher and administrator Irvin C. Poley, the man who brought the arts to Germantown Friends.  If kept out of the school’s main library, fiction flourished in Poley’s classroom.  Poley graduated from GFS in 1908, and after college returned to his alma mater to teach English. There, the Quaker instructor urged his students to dive into the classics of Western literature, especially Shakespeare. Poley helped Germantown Friends pivot toward rather than away from the arts, for, as he wrote, “the wise educator wants the arts prominent in general education not primarily for vocational use later.”

“Include in your capital of experience vicarious experience,” he urged GFS students in one speech, “what you learn from observing your parents and teachers, from friends, from first-class books, particularly fiction. Even if you ‘re the kind of person that people like to talk to intimately and if you thus know the inner life of a great many friends and acquaintances and chance contacts, you can still learn about people and about yourself from great literature, particularly from plays and poetry and essays and biography.”

Good fiction is, of course, experience minus the irrelevant,” he added, “the life of a person given unity and clarity.”

He also fostered the development of the school’s drama program. According to one yearbook, his “energetic” readings of Shakespeare’s Macbethand Julius Caesarheld students “spellbound.”

One of his students, Henry Scattergood (related to the famed cricketer Henry Scattergood) said that it was Poley who inspired him to go into teaching after graduating from Haverford College.  “Some of my clearest memories of my school life come from his classroom,” Scattergood recalled of his teacher. “I recall particularly a ninth-grade class when we acted scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and from Galsworthy’s The Silver Box,or his clever ways of putting across less glamorous subjects such as spelling. His sentence ‘Neither leisurely foreigner seized the weird height” straightened me out on the major exceptions to the ‘i before e except after c words.’ In all his teaching, Irvin Poley was always resourceful and always stretching his students. He knew and understood his students well, their weaknesses and strengths, and he continually played up the latter, so that all wanted to be their best to justify his belief in them. Even more important, he seemed every alert to seize the opportunity to relate whatever he was teaching to important issues — such as justice, fair play, decency, humility.”

 

Irvin C. Poley’s literature collection in the entrance hall of the main building of Germantown Friends School. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
Irvin C. Poley teaching an English class at Germantown Friends, c.1937. Collection of Germantown Friends School.
Irvin C. Poley leading the reading of a play at Germantown Friends School, 1963. Collection of Germantown Friends School.

 

 

Sources: 

Irvin C. Poley, “A Word in Parting,” June 11, 1958. Collection of Germantown Friends School.

Henry Scattergood, “From a Former Student,” undated. Collection of Germantown Friends School.

Timothy Wood, Archivist, Germantown Friends School.