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Campo’s and Our Lady of Loreto (Part I)

The oldest surviving cookbook, De re coquinaria (On Cookery), was compiled by Marcus Gavius Apicius in the first century A.D., the high water mark of the Roman Empire.  Each region of Italy has been reveling in its own favorites ever since: “pane con la milza” (open-faced pork spleen sandwich) from Sicily, coretello (minced lamb and lamb innards) from Abruzzo, ‘Nduja (spreadable sausage) from Calabria, and penne with arugula and tomatoes from Puglia.

For Italian immigrant families who came to the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, village recipes were crucial parts ties to their familial and regional pasts, and they died hard in the American urban melting pot.  The Philly cheese steak, supposedly “invented” by brothers Pat and Harry Olivieri, did not come along until the 1930s, and originally called for an Italian roll and provolone cheese, not the Americanized orange cheese product.

To Ronald Donatucci, the current registrar of wills and native of the Girard Estates neighborhood, the Jews and the Italian-Americans of Philadelphia shared many common cultural traits, among them a love of food, a focus on education, and (more often than not), a strong mother figure. “They’re so similar,” Donatucci recalled. “My father instilled education in myself and my siblings.” Like the Jews, with whom they often coexisted in tightly-packed rowhouse blocks, Italian immigrants quickly applied the trades they learned back in the old country to the streets of Philadelphia, especially in culinary and the building trades.  And they kept these businesses in the family. Bakeries, cheese shops, and confectionaries flourished in Italian neighborhoods. Older women in various neighborhoods would go to the early Sunday Mass at their local parish church, then do their grocery shopping for the week.  Young boys were expected to help them with their bags.

Food was not just central to regular family gatherings, but also to the myriad feast days and festivals of the Roman Catholic calendar year.  Each village had its own patron saint.  One of the biggest, of course, was the Festa di San Giuseppe (Feast of St. Joseph, patron saint of Sicily), celebrated every March 19 with limes, wine, fava beans, cookies, breadcrumbs (representing the sawdust from Joseph’s carpenter shop), and zeppole cakes.

1106-1114 South Street 5.3.1930ashx
Campo Butcher Shop on the 1100 block of South Street, May 3, 1930.

One such culinary family was the Campo clan–friends of the Donatuccis–who settled in Southwest Philadelphia in the parish of Our Lady of Loreto.   In 1905, the three Campo brothers (Fernando, Francesco, and Venerando) arrived in Philadelphia on the Red Star liner SS Friesland.  They were natives of the Sicilian village of Cesaro. According to Ferdinando’s great-grandson Michael Campo, the family had been butchers for generation: there were at least seven men named Campo operating butcher shops in Sicily in the early 1900s.   Most likely through family help and local Italian-American banks, Venerando raised enough capital to open his own butcher shop at the intersection of Carpenter and South 9th Street in Philadelphia. In the meantime, his brother Ferdinando opened a similar establishment in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Eventually, Ferdinando’s son Ambrose opened another butcher’s shop, this one at 62nd and Grays Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia, and joined a brand new parish that had opened its doors in the neighborhood.  The church, finished in 1938, was the anchor of a neighborhood of tidy brick rowhouses surrounding the main thoroughfare leading from West Philadelphia to the new Philadelphia Municipal Airport.  When aviator Charles Lindbergh dedicated the airport shortly after his epic 1927 transatlantic flight, Philadelphia’s city fathers named this arterial street in his honor. Designed in the fashionable Art Deco style by local architect Frank L. Petrillo, Our Lady of Loreto was a radical departure from the baroque and Byzantine revival popular with church architects such as Henry Dagit and Edward F. Durang.  Inside and out, Our Lady of Loreto (the patron saint of air travel) looked more like a 1930s airport terminal than a church.  According to Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron, “Petrillo’s design cleverly links that story with the great technical advance of the 1930s: commercial air travel. Because streamline moderne’s strong, horizontal lines evoked speed, it was a favorite architectural choice for new airports’ terminals.” The airplane theme didn’t stop with the building envelope.  According to church teaching, on May 10, 1291, a flock of angels flew the house where the Virgin Mary was born from the Holy Land to the comparative safety of the Italian village of Loreto.

The mural on the church’s facade depicted this miracle as propeller-driven planes swoop around the heavy-lifting angels.

Feast of St. Anthony, c.1985. Image courtesy of Michael Campo.
Feast of St. Anthony, c.1985. Image courtesy of Michael Campo/Our Lady of Loreto Facebook group.

The modern style of the church reflected the forward-looking aspirations of the 1,200 or so families who belonged to the parish,  They saw Southwest Philadelphia as a step up from cluttered old South Philadelphia.  For the members of this parish, the most important festival was the feast of St. Anthony, which took place on the first week of June. “I remember being a kid and my parents giving me a dollar to pin on the St. Anthony statue, for which I would get a blessed roll,” remembered Michael Campo. “The roll was from Mattera’s Bakery, which was the neighborhood bakery, and located on the same intersection of 62nd and Grays Avenue, as the Church and Campo’s.”  Following the parade was a carnival, complete with fireworks and a dunk-the-clown contest.  “Looking back on it, it was probably a couple roman candles,” Campo said of the fireworks dislay, “but when I was 10, It felt like I was at Disney World.”

Sources: 

Campo family history provided to Steven Ujifusa by Michael Campo, June 23, 2016.

Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, June 23, 2016.

Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, October 18, 2016.

Anna Maria Chupa, “St. Joseph’s Day Altars,” Louisiana Project, Houston Institute for Culture, http://www.houstonculture.org/laproject/stjo.html, accessed October 16, 2016.

Damian D’Orsaneo, “The Sad Fate of Our Lady of Loreto,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 27, 2003, http://articles.philly.com/2003-05-27/news/25459497_1_church-attendance-final-mass-parish-school, accessed October 14, 2016.

Interview of Ron Donatucci by Steven Ujifusa, January 26, 2016.

Natalie Hardwick, “Top 10 Foods to Try in Sicily,” BBC Good Food, http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/top-10-foods-try-sicily, accessed October 14, 2016.

David Rosengarten, “The Cuisine of Abruzzo: Easy to Love, Not So Easy to Describe,” The Huffington Post, August 6, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rosengarten/the-cuisine-of-abruzzo_b_5651554.html, accessed October 14, 2016.

Inga Saffron, “Good Eye: This Catholic Church Celebrates the Miracle of Flight Two Ways,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 14, 2016, http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/inga_saffron/20161016_Good_Eye__This_Catholic_church_celebrates_the_miracle_of_flight_two_ways.html?photo_3, accessed October 15, 2016.

“Puglia,” Rustico Cooking, http://www.rusticocooking.com/puglia.htm, accessed October 14, 2016.

“The Best Food of Calabria,” Walks of Italy, https://www.walksofitaly.com/blog/food-and-wine/food-of-calabria, accessed October 20, 2016.

 

 

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Neighborhoods

A Brief History of St. Francis de Sales – The Great Dome of West Philadelphia (Part II)

St. Francis de Sales Philadelphia 1.14.1963
St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church, January 14, 1963.

St. Francis de Sales was formally dedicated and opened for worship on November 12, 1911. Originally consisting of about 600 families, the parish swelled to 1,500 by the mid-1920s. Pastor Michael Crane’s power and influence grew so great in the Philadelphia archdiocese that in the early 1920s Pope Benedict XV elevated him monsignor to auxiliary bishop, or assistant to the Cardinal, which made his church into a cathedral (Latin for “throne of the bishop”). He died at the St. Francis de Sales rectory in 1928, but his chair remains in the sanctuary to this day. In the ensuing decades, St. Francis de Sales served not just the neighborhood, but also the students of the nearby universities such as the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the University of the Sciences.

Dagit, who lived only a few blocks away from his masterpiece, was the founder of an architectural dynasty. His sons continued designing churches under the moniker of Henry Dagit & Sons, and his grandson Charles Dagit Jr. studied at the University of Pennsylvania under Louis Kahn before starting his own successful firm of Dagit-Saylor. Shortly before his death in 1929, the Dagit patriarch designed another West Philadelphia church, the Church of the Transfiguration at 55th Street and Cedar Avenue, also inspired by the Byzantine style. “Aided by a large corps of draughtsman, artists, and engineers in his office,” the firm’s brochure stated, “no detail has been slighted, and the entire work has been pushed with a promptness that has delighted both pastor and congregation, who take great pleasure in saying, ‘Well done!'” Membership in St. Francis de Sales parish became a Dagit family tradition: generations of the architect’s descendants were baptized and married under its honey-hued tiled dome.

The dome of St. Francis de Sales. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
The dome of St. Francis de Sales. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.

Yet like so many other grand liturgical structures in urban areas, by the second half of the twentieth century it began to suffer from years of deferred maintenance, especially as the congregation shrank in the 1970s and 80s. The grand dome leaked almost as soon as the building was consecrated, and the dripping water caused salt to leach out of the sanctuary walls. In more recent years, vandals spray-painted the facade with graffiti, including the statue of St. Francis de Sales, which was taken down and lent to another parish for safekeeping. In the late sixties spirit of Vatican II, the parish commissioned postmodern architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to design a modern Plexiglas altar and neon lighting system. The outcry among the congregation was so great that it was taken down within a few years. The architects were furious. “It was like watching your child die and not being anything to do about it,” steamed Scott Brown. The original gilt-and-marble main altar donated by James Cooney was restored to its former grandeur, and is still in use today.

A decade ago, the parish faced a true emergency: the facade had pulled eight inches away from the main structure of the church. Without any intervention, the front of the church was in imminent danger of collapsing onto Springfield Avenue, taking the two towers with it. To fund these emergency repairs, the Archdiocese made the tough decision to close another West Philadelphia parish: the Most Blessed Sacrament at 56th and Chester Avenue. According to Michael Nevadomski, sacristan at St. Francis de Sales, the sale of MBS and its attached school (once advertised as the largest Roman Catholic school in the world) raised $1.2 million, much of which went to pay for the urgent restoration needs of St. Francis de Sales. Workers erected scaffolding in front of the facade and meticulously removed and replaced each of the stones. The bas-relief of the Virgin Mary above the west doors is still undergoing restoration and sits under protective wraps.

South doors of St. Francis de Sales. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
South doors of St. Francis de Sales. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.

Today, although it has only has about 500 registered parishioners, St. Francis de Sales reflects the diversity of its West Philadelphia neighborhood. There are masses in Vietnamese and Spanish, as well as traditional and “charismatic” services. Its parochial school is one of the best and most affordable educational options in the Cedar Park area.  Restoration of St. Francis de Sales continues “on a shoestring budget” notes Nevadomski, but the most serious structural repairs are over, ensuring that the gold-and-pearl Byzantine dome will gleam over the rooftops of West Philadelphia for decades to come.

Sources:

Ron Avery, “Their Tradition Is Built to Last Dagits: A Family of Architecture,” The Philadelphia Daily News, October 30, 1995. http://articles.philly.com/1995-10-30/news/25693182_1_philadelphia-architects-catholic-church-sons

1890-2015, St. Francis de Sales Parish, United by the Most Blessed Sacrament, pp.10, 12, 14, collection of St. Francis de Sales Parish, courtesy of Michael Nevadomski.

Henry D. Dagit, Architect, collection of Paul H. Rogers, p.43.

Interview of Michael Nevadomski, Sacristan, St. Francis de Sales Church, September 6, 2016.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Neighborhoods

A Brief History of St. Francis de Sales – The Great Dome of West Philadelphia (Part 1)

St. Francis de Sales, 47th Street and Springfield Avenue, January 14, 1963.
St. Francis de Sales, 47th Street and Springfield Avenue, January 14, 1963.

 

Note: the original article published on September 16, 2016 has been recently updated with new information provided by Michelle Dooley and the St. Francis de Sales History Committee. 

n 1980, Eugene Ormandy was ready to retire from his long tenure as Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.  For one of his last recordings with the “Fabulous Philadelphians,” the octogenarian conductor chose a rendition of the Symphony #3 (Organ) by Camille Saint-Saëns, with Michael Murray as organist, to be recorded on the Telarc label.

A great organ symphony needs a great organ! Michael Murray recalled that “the Telarc folks and I visited half a dozen churches in the Philadelphia area to try out organs, before settling on the St. Francis de Sales instrument.”

St. Francis de Sales at 47th and Springfield Avenue had the second largest pipe organ in the Delaware Valley, surpassed only by the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ in Center City, arguably the largest musical instrument in the world.  The Haskell/Schultz instrument was also of the 19th century French type, which made it well suited to the flamboyant French Romantic repertoire of Saint-Saens and his contemporaries.

It took several days for parish organist Bruce Shultz and assistants to prepare the instrument to Ormandy’s specifications, since Ormandy preferred a higher-than-usual “442 pitch to make the sound brighter.” The police closed the surrounding streets during the recording so that the “Fabulous Philadelphians” could work their magic without the distraction of honking cars and squealing trolleys in the background.

 

This was only one of many times in its long history, that this grand church has had a moment of fame.

St. Francis de Sales parish was established by Archbishop Ryan on May 14, 1890 to serve a community comprised mostly of Irish and German immigrants seeking a foothold in what was then suburban West Philadelphia. The first masses were held in a rented hall above a store at 49th and Woodland. The first building, a combination chapel/school (today’s SFDS school auditorium) was constructed on a portion of the property at 47th and Springfield Avenue in 1891.

The parish’s second pastor, Rev. Michael J. Crane, declared that he would like to build a permanent church where “the soul would be lifted up to exultation; an edifice in which the liturgy would be carried out in all its mystical beauty.” In 1907 Archbishop Edmond Francis Prendergast laid the cornerstone for the new building.

Designed by prominent local architect Henry Dandurand Dagit (1865-1929), the “Byzantine Romanesque,” (also called “Byzantine Revival”) structure took four years to complete. Rafael Guastavino designed and built its imposing domes using his own patented system of interlocking tile and special mortar that did not require internal bracing. (Only 600 Guastavino structures are known to exist, and they are much prized. The Penn Museum and Girard Bank-Ritz Carlton Hotel are the other two Philadelphia examples). The four rose windows and six long windows in the church were one of renowned Philadelphia stained glass artisan Nicholas D’Ascenzo’s first big commissions.

St. Francis de Sales was arguably Dagit’s crowning achievement.  He lavished uncommon care on its design and construction, in no small part because. he lived at 4527 Pine Street, and this was his family’s parish. He even commissioned statues of his daughters as “angels” to decorate the interior.

Although well-versed in historic styles, Dagit wanted to give a modern twist to his churches. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, French catholic architects were promoting a “Byzantine-Romanesque” style, with domes and rounded arches, to differentiate from angular pointy protestant gothic. This must have seemed to Dagit like the perfect historic inspiration for a church whose patron saint, Francis de Sales, was French.  Along with the traditional glass mosaics and marble statuary, Dagit added modern touches such as rows of electric light bulbs along the cornices and archways and the self-supporting Guastavino dome which eliminated the need flor view-obstructing interior support pillars.

The original boundaries of St. Francis de Sales stretched from the Schuylkill River at 42nd Street over to Locust Street, up to 55th street and back to the River with a jog to 58th street from Baltimore Ave. Among the contributors to the new building was James Cooney, who donated the main altar. He lived at 4814 Regent St., owned a fleet of oyster schooners on the Delaware Bay, and also had an oyster-selling business downtown at 116 Spruce Street. Jean-Baptiste Revelli, who lived at 4609 Cedar Avenue, donated funds for one of the long stained glass windows. Known as “Baptiste,” the Assistant Manager and Maitre d’Hotel of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel was a celebrated personality, whose address book included many world leaders and international celebrities and whose “ideas as regards table decorations have won him worldwide fame.” The St. Joseph Altar was donated in memory of the deceased wife of James P. “Sunny Jim” McNichol, a prominent Philadelphia politician and also half-owner of the construction firm that built the Market Street subway tunnel, Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and Roosevelt Boulevard.(McNichol’s adult children lived on the newly-constructed 4600 and 4700 blocks of Hazel Ave.). Eleanor Donnelly, known as the “Poet Laureate of the Catholic Church” in America donated the Blessed Mother altar to memorialize her deceased family (including her brother Ignatius, a Minnesota senator who taught her to write poetry as a child, and who is remembered today as the author of Atlantis: the Antidiluvian Age – a seminal classic of Lost-City-of-Atlantis lore). General St. Clair Mulholland, an Irish-American Civil War veteran and first Catholic police chief of Philadelphia, who resided at 4202 Chester Avenue, donated one of the dome windows.

Not all of the parishioners were colorful, wealthy or well-known: many were tradespeople, shopkeepers, and office workers. There were also a number of Irish immigrant servants who helped with the cooking and cleaning in the neighborhood’s big houses. Apart from religious affiliation, what did they all have in common? An appreciation of beauty, an attachment to history, and a strong musical sense – qualities that continue in today’s richly diverse parish.

 

The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, 1904.
The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, 1904.

After facing decades of discrimination and violence, by the early 1900s Philadelphia’s burgeoning Roman Catholic population had truly arrived in terms of power and influence. St. Francis de Sales was the brick-and-mortar manifestation of a Gilded Age confidence.  The human manifestation of this spirit was Pastor Michael J. Crane (1863-1928), who spearheaded the construction of this magnificent church soon after he took charge of the parish.  Crane knew Dagit’s work well: he had assisted at St. Malachy’s Church in NE Philadelphia, during its renovation by Dagit in the distinctive Byzantine revival style.  An imposing, dark-haired man with bushy eyebrows and a piercing gaze, Crane insisted that no expense would be spared on his new church. Henry Dagit described the plans: “The design is Romanesque with Byzantine details.The exterior will be of marble with Indiana limestone trimmings…On either side of the main doorway will be two corner towers with large doorways flanked by polished granite columns…These towers will rise to a height of ninety-seven feet and will be surmounted by domes covered with tiles in Byzantine designs. The main feature of the design is a Byzantine dome resting on the four great arches and pendentives of the nave transepts…The dome will be sixty-two feet in diameter…The interior of the church will be imposing. The nave will be vaulted with faience polychrome sculptured terra cotta arches, on which will rest the Gaustavino (sic) vaults.”   Dagit further described an elaborate ornamentation and sculpture plan for the interior including  a glass mosaic under the rose window, and mosaic emblems of the four evangelists above the main crossing. Many of the interior details changed by the time the church was finished but the Guastavino dome continues to be a distinctive feature of the local skyline.

 To be continued…

For a look into the life of the MacMurtrie family and St. Francis de Sales Parish in the 1920s, click here for a PhillyHistory.org article dated June 28, 2010.

Sources:

Ron Avery, “Their Tradition Is Built to Last Dagits: A Family of Architecture,” The Philadelphia Daily News, October 30, 1995. http://articles.philly.com/1995-10-30/news/25693182_1_philadelphia-architects-catholic-church-sons

1890-2015, St. Francis de Sales Parish, United by the Most Blessed Sacrament, pp.10, 12, 14, collection of St. Francis de Sales Parish, courtesy of Michael Nevadomski.

Henry D. Dagit, Architect, collection of Paul H. Rogers, p.43.

Interview of Michael Nevadomski, Sacristan, St. Francis de Sales Church, September 6, 2016.

Additional Sources provided by Michelle Dooley and the SFDS History Committee: 

Boudinhon, Auguste. “Cathedral.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. Web. 21 Dec. 2017  <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03438a.htm>

Catholic Church. Archdiocese of Philadelphia (Pa.), and Philip G. Bochanski. Our Faith-filled Heritage: The Church of Philadelphia Bicentennial As a Diocese 1808-2008 / Prepared By the Archdiocese of Philadelphia ; Father Philip G. Bochanski, General Editor. Strasbourg: Éditions du Signe, 2007. 62—123, 178-181. Print

Dagit, Henry D. The Work of Henry D. Dagit: Architect, 1888-1908. Philadelphia : Henry D. Dagit, 1908. 42-45. Digital Library@Villanova University.41-44

Farnsworth, Jean M., Carmen R Croce, and Joseph F Chorpenning. Stained Glass in Catholic Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2002. Print.

Moss, Roger W. Historic Sacred Places Of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 222-227. Print

Saint Francis de Sales Church. 1890-2015 St. Francis de Sales Parish, United by the Most Blessed Sacrament 125th Anniversary; St. Francis de Sales History Committee. 6-13, 43, 49. Print.

Saint Francis de Sales History Committee. SFDS History Mysteries. Saint Francis de Sales Parish. 2018. Web. https://SFDShistory.wordpress.com

Stemp, Richard. The Secret Language of Churches & Cathedrals: Decoding the Sacred Symbolism of Christianity’s Holy Buildings. London, U.K. : New York, NY: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2010. Print.

 

 

Categories
Events and People Historic Sites Snapshots of History

Jack Thayer’s Demons: A Philadelphia Survivor’s Tale

John B. Thayer (highlighted in white) in the c.1916 group portrait of the University of Pennsylvania soccer team. Source: PennHistory.
John B. Thayer Jr. (highlighted in white) in the c.1916 group portrait of the University of Pennsylvania soccer team. Source: PennHistory.

“There was peace and the world had an even tenor to its way. Nothing was revealed in the morning the trend of which was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub it’s eyes and awake, but woke it with a start – keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since, with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.”   -John B. Thayer III, 1940

John B. “Jack” Thayer III seemed to have everything a successful Philadelphian could want.  He was the son of the second vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and educated at the Haverford School and the University of Pennsylvania.  He was married to Lois Buchanan Cassatt, granddaughter of Pennsy’s president Alexander Cassatt, the mastermind of New York’s Penn Station.  After graduating from college in 1916, Thayer served his country with distinction in World War I, and then worked in a series of investment jobs until he became partner in the investment firm of Yarnall & Company. In addition to serving his alma mater as its financial vice president, he also belonged to numerous clubs and societies.

Dr. Thomas Sovereign Gates, president of the University, called him a “loyal and trusted servant.”

Houston Hall undated.ashx
Undated photograph of Houston Hall, the student union at the University of Pennsylvania, 3400 block of Spruce Street. undated. A memorial plaque to John B. Thayer Jr. was placed here by his friends from the class of 1880.

Yet even as America celebrated victory over the Axis in that joyous summer of 1945, a dark cloud seemed to be enveloping the 50-year-old banker.  His beloved mother Marian had died the previous April.  His 22-year-old son Edward had been shot down over the Pacific a year before that.

And then there was the ever-present ghost of his father John B. Thayer Jr., whose legacy as railroad executive and sportsman was memorialized on a plaque in Penn’s Houston Hall.

Jack Thayer had spent the past three decades searching for peace.  And he found none.

On September 19, 1945, Thayer drove from his elegant home in Grays Lane in Haverford to the intersection of 48th and Parkside Avenue, parked his car, took out several wrapped blades, and slit his wrists. Then his throat.

The 4900 block of Parkside on July 2, 1954, near the spot where Jack Thayer committed suicide a decade earler.
The 4900 block of Parkside on July 2, 1954, near the spot where Jack Thayer committed suicide a decade earler.

His body was not discovered for another forty hours.

John B. “Jack” Thayer III left behind a book he had printed privately a few years earlier and inscribed to his friends and family.

***

On the early morning of April 15, 1912, 17-year-old Jack Thayer and his friend Milton Long found themselves stranded on the sloping decks of the RMS Titanic.  Two hours after the ship’s collision with the iceberg, the Titanic was down by the bow and listing heavily to port. There had been no general alarm or sirens.

The Titanic’s giant engines had stopped shortly after 11:40pm.  “The sudden quiet was startling and disturbing,” Thayer recalled. “Like the subdued quiet in a sleeping car, at a stop, after a continuous run.”

Then came the roar of escaping steam from the ship’s 29 boilers, and an occassional white rocket bursting in the night sky.

The two young men found themselves blocked from entering the lifeboats: “No more boys,” barked Second Officer Charles Lightoller.  In the distance, they saw flickering oil lamps coming from the 18 lifeboats that had made it off the ship. Jack’s mother Marian was in one of them.  The freezing cold Atlantic rose ever closer to the boat deck.  Lights from submerged portholes glowed green for a while in the black water before shorting out. Atop the officers’ quarters, a group of men struggled to free two collapsible liferafts lashed to the deck.  There was no hope of hooking them onto the davits and lowering them properly: they would have be floated off as the ship went down.

The "a la carte" restaurant on the RMS "Titanic." First class diners who chose this 120-seat restaurant over the 500-seat main dining room paid extra for the privilege of eating here. Source: Wikipedia.com.
The “a la carte” restaurant on the RMS “Titanic.” First class diners who chose this 120-seat restaurant over the 500-seat main dining room paid extra for the privilege of eating here. Source: Wikipedia.com.

“Mr. Moon-Man, Turn off the Light,” a popular song from Jack Thayer’s childhood that was almost certainly part of the Titanic band’s repertoire. From the 1979 film SOS Titanic.

Marian Longstreth Thayer. Source: Wikipedia.com.
Marian Longstreth Thayer. Source: Wikipedia.com.

A few minutes after 2:05am, first class passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie IV, who had helped women and children into the lifeboats for the past hour, was surprised to see a “mass of humanity” come up from below, “several lines deep converging on the Boat Deck facing us and completely blocking our passage to the stern. There were women in the crowd as well as men and these seemed to be steerage passengers who had just come up from the decks below. Even among these people there was no hysterical cry, no evidence of panic. Oh the agony of it.”

First and second class passengers had access to lifeboats from their deck spaces. But not steerage — they had been kept below until now. Except for those lucky enough to find their way through a maze of barriers and corridors to the boat deck level.

Gracie also noticed John B. Thayer Jr. chatting on deck with his fellow Philadelphia millionaire George D. Widener, whose wife Eleanor had also left in a boat.  Only a few hours earlier, the Widener and Thayer families had hosted a celebratory dinner in Titanic’s captain Edward J. Smith honor in the ship’s 120-seat a la carte restaurant on B-deck. Gracie remembered that the elder Thayer looked “pale and determined.”

John Borland Thayer Jr., Vice President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Source: Wikipedia.
John Borland Thayer Jr., Vice President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Source: Wikipedia.com.

Jack Thayer lost his father in the milling crowd, which after realizing all the boats were gone, began to surge with panic.

At around 2:10am, the liner’s bow took a rapid plunge downward, as seawater burst through cargo hatches, doors, and windows.

“It was like standing under a steel railway bridge while an express train passes overhead,” he recalled of being stuck on the sinking ship, “mingled with the noise of a pressed steel factory and wholesale breakage of china.

Milton Long got ready to slide down the side of the ship by using one of the dangling lifeboat ropes. “You are coming, boy, aren’t you?” Long said.

“Go ahead, I’ll be with you in a minute.” Thayer responded above the din.

Long slid down the rope. Thayer jumped.  “I never saw him again.”

Thrashing around in freezing water, Thayer could see the ship in full profile as it sank deeper into the Atlantic.

“The ship seemed to be surrounded with a glare,” he recalled, “and stood out of the night as though she were on fire…. The water was over the base of the first funnel. The mass of people on board were surging back, always back toward the floating stern. The rumble and roar continued, with even louder distinct wrenchings and tearings of boilers and engines from their beds.”

The Titanic’s electric lights flickered out, came on again with red glow, and then went out for the last time.

Newly-released CGI by “Titanic: Honor and Glory” showing the “Titanic” sinking in realtime.

Then he saw something even more terrifying: the ship breaking in half. “Suddenly the whole superstructure of the ship appeared to split, well forward to midship, and bow or buckle upwards,” he recalled. “The second funnel, large enough for two automobiles to pass through abreast, seemed to be lifted off, emitting a cloud of sparks It looked as if it would fall on top of me. It missed me by only twenty or thirty feet. The suction of it drew me down and down struggling and swimming, practically spent.”

The water began to numb his limbs, and he looked desperately for something that could support him.  Everything was too small: deck chairs, crates, broken pieces of paneling.  He then banged his head on something big.  It was one of the two collapsible lifeboats, overturned, with about a dozen men scrambling to stay balanced on its wood-planked bottom. With his last bit of strength, he swam for the boat and hauled himself on top.

Jack Thayer's sketch of how he saw the "Titanic" sink. Source: Wikipedia.com.
Jack Thayer’s sketch of how he saw the “Titanic” sink. Source: Wikipedia.com.

He couldn’t just lie there.  To keep the boat from sinking, the men had to stand up, leaning to the right and left at the command of Second Officer Charles Lightoller, the same man who had said no more boys were allowed to board lifeboats.  Also onboard was Colonel Archibald Gracie. As cold and frightened as he was, Jack did not turn his eyes away from the spectacle. “We could see groups of the almost 1,500 people still aboard,” he wrote later, “clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after part of the ship, 250 feet of it, rose into the sky, till it reached a 65- or 70-degree angle.”

When the water closed over the Titanic’s stern–at 2:20am, April 15, 1912–Thayer heard a noise that rang in his ears for the rest of his life.

The sound of hundreds of people struggling in the icy water reminded him eerily of the sound of singing locusts on a summer night at the Thayer family estate on the Main Line.  “The partially filled lifeboats standing by, only a few hundred yards away, never came back,” he wrote angrily. “Why on earth they did not come back is a mystery. How could any human being fail to heed those cries?”

Among those voices that cried out in rage and desperation in that mid-Atlantic night were those belonging to his father John Borland Thayer Jr., as well as his friend Milton Long. Over the next thirty minutes, the cries gradually grew fainter and fainter, until there was only the sound of water lapping against the sides of the collapsible boat.

At around 6:30am, the first pink light of dawn shone across the flat calm ocean.  Icebergs glittered all around. One of the partially-filled lifeboats drew up alongside the overturned collapsible.  One by one, the  men who had survived those awful few hours atop the boat scrambled aboard. Most of the 20 or so of his boatmates were crew members.   Thayer, the pampered scion of one of Philadelphia’s richest families, realized how little those distinctions mattered atop Collapsible B.  “They surely were a grimy, wiry, dishevelled, hard-looking lot,” he wrote of the men who had shoveled coal into the steamship’s boilers, seven decks below the paneled salons and suites of first class. “Under the surface they were brave human beings, with generous and charitable hearts.”

With the dawn came another sight: the smoking funnel of the small Cunard liner RMS Carpathia, whose master Arthur Rostron had steamed full-speed through the icefield after his wireless operator had picked up Titanic’s radio distress call.  She came a few hours too late to save everyone from the Titanic, but soon enough to pick up the 705 people who had made it into lifeboats.

“Even through my numbness I began to realize that I was saved,” Thayer wrote in his book, “that I would live.”

John B. "Jack" Thayer III. Source: Wikipedia.com.
John B. “Jack” Thayer III. Source: Wikipedia.com.

Sources:

Archibald Gracie, Titanic: A Survivor’s Story (Stroud, UK, 2011), p.30.

“John B. Thayer 3d Found Dead in Car,” The New York Times, September 22, 1945.

“John Borland Thayer,” Encyclopedia Titanica, http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-victim/john-borland-thayer.html, accessed April 14, 2016.

“Forgotten Journal Reveals How Man Survived 1912 Disaster,” The New York Post, April 8, 2012. http://nypost.com/2012/04/08/forgotten-journal-reveals-how-man-survived-1912-disaster/

 

Categories
Historic Sites Snapshots of History

Philadelphia’s Central High School in Perspective

The original Central High School building, Juniper and Market Streets, c.1850.
The original Central High School building, Juniper and Market Streets, c.1850.

The effort of a free people to provide for the education of their children as a necessity for the maintenance of the their political institutions makes a story of interest and importance. Especially is this true when the movement meets with criticism and opposition, when its leaders are hampered by the absence of any general appreciation of the value of the issue, and when violent prejudice of race, religion, and class is aroused and must be overcome. 

-Franklin Spencer Edmonds, 1902

For some perspective about the dismal state of today’s Philadelphia public school system: a century ago, a high school education was a luxury, not a necessity.  According to a recent article in The Atlantic: “Teens didn’t create ‘high school.’ High schools created teenagers.'”  In the 1920s, only 28 percent of American children attended high school.    For the rest of America’s teenagers, adulthood began at 14. This meant getting a job to help make ends meet: helping their parents out on the family farm, stocking the shelves at the mom-and-pop, or learning a trade such as carpentry, shipbuilding, or baking.  For the very poor, work began even younger than that: rolling cigars or sewing garments in dark, ill-ventilated sweatshops; picking stones out of coal on conveyor belts (breaker boys); collecting full spools of thread in a textile mill (bobbin boys); selling copies of the Philadelphia Inquirer on street corners (newsies), or shoveling coal into the boilers of a foundry. Child labor was not formally abolished by the Federal government until 1938, with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act under the Franklin Roosevelt administration.

During the first half of the twentieth century, those students lucky enough to attend public high school went to classes in grand buildings that looked more like castles than schools.  West Philadelphia High School, completed in 1910, had an auditorium equipped with a pipe organ. In those days, a public high school degree was generally sufficient enough to propel a graduate into the white collar middle class.  The city’s Roman Catholic population turned to an extensive network of parochial schools to provide reasonably priced education to its youth.  St. Joseph’s Preparatory in North Philadelphia was one such institution that traditionally gave working class Roman Catholics a chance at a better life than their Italian, Irish, German, or Polish immigrant parents.

Yet a college education, public or private, was out-of-the-question except for the rich or exceptionally hardworking student. If a public school graduate gained admission to Penn or Temple University, they typically commuted to and from their parents’ house by trolley or elevated rail, and had to juggle jobs and family obligations in addition to their studies.  My grandfather, a 1926 graduate of West Philadelphia High School, paid for his undergraduate studies at Penn’s Wharton School with money earned from dance band gigs.

The city’s expensive preparatory schools–which catered to the Rittenhouse Square/Chestnut Hill aristocracy–were all but closed to the city’s burgeoning immigrant and African-American populations.  They were also the surest feeders to the Ivy League, with few questions asked.

Then there was Central High School, a magnet high school that was arguably one of the most powerful engines of economic mobility in the city.  Founded in 1836, it is the second-oldest continuously operating public school in the United States. Its first home was at the intersection of 13th and Market Streets, and started holding classes only just after the Philadelphia city fathers rather grudgingly conceded to fund a public school system.  Much of the push for free education for Philadelphia’s children came from Quaker activists such as Roberts Vaux, who objected that parents had to declare shameful  “pauper status” in order to send their children to a charity school.

Central High School building at North Broad and Green Streets, March 8, 1910.
Central High School building at North Broad and Green Streets, March 8, 1910.

Once established, Central High School gained the financial support of several of Philadelphia’s richest families, including the Whartons and the Biddles. Central’s first president was Alexander Dallas Bache, a distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania and grandson of Benjamin Franklin.  Over the next century, Central was housed in a series of grand structures until the 1930s, when it settled in its current Art Deco campus in the Logan section of North Philadelphia.  Its counterparts in other cities include Boston Latin in Boston and Stuyvesant High School in New York. An applicant had to pass a grueling entrance examination, but once in, he (it remained all-boys until a 1975 Supreme Court ruling) found himself surrounded–and pushed to excel– by the best and brightest students from all over the city.  For many, it was their best shot at making it into a top college, and then onward to a successful career, in Philadelphia or beyond.  The school’s alumni roster reads like a who’s who of Philadelphia’s meritocracy: linguist Noam Chomsky, artists Thomas Eakins, architect Louis Kahn, mayor Wilson Goode, and industrialist Simon Guggenheim.

Yet students who had grown up in tightly-knit neighborhoods, rigidly segregated by ethnicity and class, the transition could be just as difficult as it was thrilling.

To be continued… 

Rendering for Central High School's Logan campus, August 1936.
Rendering for Central High School’s Logan campus, August 1936.

Sources: 

Derek Thompson, “America in 1915: Long Hours, Crowded Houses, Death by Trolley,” The Atlantic, February 11, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/america-in-1915/462360/, accessed March 14, 2016.

Franklin Spencer Edmonds, History of the Central High School of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1902), pp. 7, 13, 35.

“List of Alumni of Central High School,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alumni_of_Central_High_School_(Philadelphia,_Pennsylvania), accessed March 14, 2016.

Categories
Events and People Historic Sites Neighborhoods

Tony Drexel Goes for a Walk (Part II)

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The Church of the Savior, built in 1889, restored after a fire in 1906 The Davis mansion on the left (designed by Willis Hale, also responsible for Peter A.B. Widener’s castle on North Broad Street) was demolished soon after this picture was taken. June 8, 1969.

Although born a Roman Catholic, Drexel migrated to the Episcopal church and helped fund the construction of the Church of the Savior at 38th and Ludlow, today’s Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral.  To honor his patronage, a stained glass window was installed in his honor. He purchased and developed vacant land with homes as the streetcar lines spread ever westward.

Finally, he built up his father’s bank to be one of the leading investment firms in the nation.  In London, he worked closely with older leading financiers, most notably the Rothschilds and the Vanderbilts, to replace the standard 5-20 call bonds with 4 per cents.  He also made successful deals with the Philadelphia & Reading and New York Central railroads. Among Drexel’s proteges was a brilliant but temperamental young man from Connectict named John Pierpont Morgan, who would go on to found the firm Drexel, Morgan & Company in New York, the ancestor of today’s J.P. Morgan Chase.  J.P. Morgan himself did not share Drexel’s retiring, gentle demeanor: one observer said that Morgan’s eyes were like the headlights of an onrushing train.

Drexel himself didn’t take the street car to work, even after electrification allowed it to reach the-then dizzying speed of 15 miles per hour.  Nor did he take a coach.  Rather, he walked to his office at 16th and Walnut Street every day, almost always with his good friend, the Philadelphia Public Ledger publisher George William Childs.  “Year in and year out,” noted historian Robert Morris Skaler, “they walked the same round, making themselves well-known personalities in their day.”

In 1891, shortly before his death, he bequeathed $2 million of his fortune (equivalent to over $40 million today) to establish the Drexel Institute of Technology. Located in a terra cotta-encrusted structure at 32nd and Chestnut  Street, the Institute’s goal was provide affordable and practical education to the children of families of modest means.  It may have been Drexel’s retort to the Gilded Age elitism at his longtime neighbor, the University of Pennsylvania.

Anthony Drexel died on June 30, 1893 while on a European vacation, aged 66.  When asked to comment on the death of his friend, George William Childs could barely stop from choking up: “It is a great shock and a great blow to me and us all. We were so far from expecting anything of this kind.  I would rather it have been myself that had died–much better I had died than Mr. Drexel.”

Although Anthony had built two other houses on “the Drexel Block” for his son George William Childs Drexel and daughter Frances Katherine Drexel Paul, his descendants rapidly abandoned West Philadelphia for Rittenhouse Square, the Main Line, and Chestnut Hill.

The Drexel mansion itself is long gone, replaced by Penn dormitories. The Wharton School, which has trained generations of Drexel and later Morgan bankers, is located just across 38th Street.  Drexel University, his greatest and most long-lasting legacy, continues to thrive north of Market Street.

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The Drexel Institute, later Drexel University, at 32nd and Chestnut Street. The main building, designed by the Wilson brothers, as photographed in 1963.

Sources:

“Anthony Drexel is Dead,” The New York Times, July 1, 1893.

Joseph Minardi, Historic Architecture in West Philadelphia, 1789-1930 (Atglen: Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 2011), pp.39, 70, 74, 77.

Robert Morris Skaler, West Philadelphia: University City to 52nd Street (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), p.13.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites

The Curious “Afterlife” of the Chicago World’s Fair

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The Commercial Museum in 1956, by then renamed the Civi Center Museum, at 34th and Convention Avenue.

Chicago’s “World’s Columbian Exposition” closed its doors in October 1893 . Its magnificent neoclassical buildings, designed by McKim Mead and White and recently made infamous in Erik Larson’s narrative history The Devil in the White City, quickly vanished.  For all its grandeur, the “White City” was a mirage of plaster and lathe. For a few brief months, its echoing halls and grand boulevards hosted over 27 million visitors, who marveled at paintings, industrial machinery, locomotives, and other curiosities — such as a replica of a Viking ship and prototype of the zipper.

And then there was the Midway Plaisance, which featured crowd-pleasing attractions such as a 263 foot high Ferris wheel, belly dancers, and people from around the world displayed in mock native “villages.”

Despite its brief life, most of the Columbian Exposition’s contents lived on, virtually undivided and intact, for nearly a century, halfway across the country.  One of the attendees was a University of Pennsylvania botanist named William P. Wilson, became obsessed with the idea of a “permanent world’s exposition” that would allow America to continue to display its manufacturing and industrial prowess to the world.  Yet to realize his dream, Wilson needed the ear of someone with power and money.

He found his man in Dr. William Pepper, the recently retired provost of the University of Pennsylvania.  A respect surgeon possessing a family fortune made in brewing and real estate, Pepper had spent the previous decade raising money to expand the University’s faculty and campus.  Philadelphia’s elite knew that the good doctor was a master fund-raiser.  His most recent pet project was the University of Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, located at 34th and South Streets in a hulking Byzantine palace designed by Wilson Eyre Jr.

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The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 33rd and South streets, March 16, 1961.

With massive resources and powerful connections at his disposal, Pepper commanded Wilson to purchase most of the exhibits from the Chicago exposition and ship them by train to Philadelphia.  After several years in a temporary structure, in 1897 the collections of the so-called Philadelphia Commercial Museum moved into a grand neoclassical home located cheek-by-jowl with the University Museum and Franklin Field.  Its main facade bore a striking resemblance to the one of the Louvre in Paris. Although fronted by a green lawn, it was only a stone’s throw away from the chuffing, screeching trains of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  In the tradition of its predecessor, the Commercial Museum contained exhibits that ranked various civilizations in terms of technology and progress.

Wilson, like many American scientists of his time, was fascinated by eugenics and Herbert Spencer’s philosophy of “survival of the fittest.”  For example, Wilson got a three-year leave of absence from the University to organize and mount a “living” exhibition of 1,200 Filipinos in France.  The timing of this exhibition of “human curiosities” was no mere coincidence.  For the past decade, America had been waging a bloody war against Philippine rebels desiring self-government.  The Philippines–like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam–had been handed over to America by Spain following its defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1897.  Cuba was given its independence–albeit with a government friendly to US interests–and Puerto Rico became a territory.  The Philippines, however, was given no such special status.  American imperialists viewed the Filipinos as racially inferior and hence incapable of self-government.  In the ensuing guerrilla war, an estimated 250,000 Filipinos died before the rebellion was put down.

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Cartoon by Charles L. Bartholomew, July 1898, Minneapolis Journal. Source: GlobalResearch.ca

Such imperialist behavior prompted outrage by many prominent American businessmen and intellectuals.  Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who had fled the British class system in his native Scotland, wrote in 1898 that if America took overseas possessions, then it was in danger of losing its founding republican goals forever:

This drain upon the resources of these countries has become a necessity from their respective positions, largely as graspers for foreign possessions. The United States to-day, happily, has no such necessity, her neighbors being powerless against her, since her possessions are concentrated and her power is one solid mass.

His friend and American Anti-Imperialist League colleague Mark Twain argued that it was the obligation of the United States to set the Filipinos free, and that making them a part of a new American “empire” was hypocrisy:

It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

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Commercial Museum founder Dr. William Wilson. Source: Independence Seaport Museum.

As for the Commercial Museum, it never lived up to its promise of making Philadelphia a center of international commerce.  After Wilson’s death in 1926, its prestige and revenues steadily declined.  By the 1930s, it was completely overshadowed by the Art Deco mass of the Civic Center.  It 2004, after being open only to groups of touring schoolchildren, the deteriorating structure was demolished and replaced by an expansion to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.  Its collections, the last remnants of the “Great White City,” were disbursed to other Philadelphia institutions such as the Mutter Museum, the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Free Library, and the Independence Seaport Museum.

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Proposed alterations to the Commercial Museum by architect Oscar Stonorov, 1956.

Sources: 

Andrew Carnegie, “Distant Possessions: The Parting of the Ways,” North American Review, August 1898, https://web.viu.ca/davies/H324War/Carnegie.Distant.1898.htm

“The Rise and Fall of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum,” Independence Seaport Museum, http://www.phillyseaport.org/rise-fall-philadelphia-commercial-museum, accessed December 27, 2015.

“Midway Plaisance Park,” Chicago Parks District, http://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks/Midway-Plaisance-Park/, accessed December 27, 2015.

Mark Twain, The New York Herald, October 15, 1900, http://loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/twain.html, accessed December 27, 2015.

Categories
Events and People Historic Sites Neighborhoods

The Ginkgo Tree of Chestnutwold

The present day Penn Alexander School was once the site of one of West Philadelphia’s great estates: Chestnutwold, built by Clarence H. Clark.

In its time, Clark’s banking concern was one of the most powerful in the nation. And like many businesses in Philadelphia, it was a family affair. Clarence Clark was the son of banker Enoch White Clark, founder of the firm. Enoch Clark was a New England transplant to Philadelphia, a native of Providence, Rhode Island who had made his first fortune underwriting and distributing government securities. In the absence of a national bank–the Second Bank of the United States imploded in 1836 after the machinations of President Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle– opportunists like Clark stepped in to fill the gap. The senior Clark was similar to the Austrian immigrant and former portrait painter Francis Martin Drexel, in that he established an American investment house on par with the mighty banks of Europe, such as Rothschild & Company and Baring Brothers. Clark, like Drexel, also put Philadelphia on the map as a center of American finance.

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Twin houses fronting Clark Park at 4337-4339 Baltimore Avenue, most likely built by the Clark Estate in the 1890s. Photo dated August 24, 1951.

The house of E.W. Clark & Company thrived in the mid-19th century, establishing branches in other American cities. After Enoch Clark’s death in 1854 due to complications from nicotine poisoning (heavy smoking was a stress relief for financiers then as now), his son Clarence took the reins of E.W. Clark & Company and expanded its financial activities into railroads and real estate.  He also was one of the principal backers of the 1876 Centennial Exposition.  Naturally, he established the Centennial National Bank (in a handsome Frank Furness designed building) near the railroad station at 30th and Market Street, where millions of fairgoers arrived over the course of several months.   According to a January 22, 1876 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the bank’s purpose was to be the “financial agent of the board at the [Centennial] Exhibition, receiving and accounting for daily receipts, changing foreign moneys into current funds, etc.” In this era before ATMs and electronic bank transfers, it was the perfect place for tourists to deposit their cash during their stay in the Quaker City.  The building survives as the Paul Peck Student Center at Drexel University.

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Centennial National Bank, designed by Frank Furness and commissioned by Clarence H. Clark in 1876. 32nd and Market Street, May 17, 1931.

Like his fellow second generation banking heir Anthony Drexel, Clark eschewed Rittenhouse Square for pastoral but not especially fashionable West Philadelphia.  And like Drexel, Clark decided to shape the area around his house by investing in it.  He purchased tracts of empty farmland, filling with middle and upper-middle class row houses as the trolley lines expanded westward from Center City.  These developments included the distinctive “professors’  row”  on St. Mark’s Square and the flamboyant set of Queen Anne houses on the 4200 block of Spruce.

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“Chestnutwold,” the estate of Clarence H. Clark at 4200 Locust Street, Philadelphia, c.1900. Source: King’s Views of Philadelphia

In the 1860s, Clarence Clark built his dream house, Chestnutwold,  on a  walled lot bounded by 42nd, 43rd, Locust, and Spruce streets.   The  main house, a 34 room brownstone Italianate palace, cost a staggering $300,000, or between $5-7 million in today’s money.  Its interior boasted six foot high mahogany paneling in its principal rooms, stained glass windows, and hand-painted Japanese wall paper that was perhaps inspired by what Clark saw at the Japanese Bazaar at the 1876 Centennial.  A stained glass window in the 125 foot long library bore a quote by Goethe: “Like a star that maketh not haste, that taketh not rest; be each one fulfilling his God-given hest.”

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Clarence H. Clark (1833-1906). Source: King’s Views of Philadelphia, 1902.

An inveterate collector, Clark imported the estate’s iron gates from France, and planted a rare Chinese ginkgo biloba tree on the grounds.  As an added bonus, Clark opened a portion of his estate to the public for strolling…and admiration. To provide additional green space for his neighbors, Clark donated the land formerly occupied by the Civil War era Satterlee Hospital to the City of Philadelphia as a public park, as well as a bronze statue of author Charles Dickens. A representation of Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop sat by his knee.

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The Clarence H. Clark Jr. house at 4200 Spruce, c.1980.

Chestnutwold proved as fleeting as it was magnificent.  Clarence Clark died in 1906, leaving the huge house vacant.   Although his son Clarence Clark Jr. built a fine house at 4200 Spruce just outside the gates of the compound in the early 1880s, the Clark heirs  decamped from West Philadelphia to the more fashionable suburbs of Germantown and Chestnut Hill. Ten years later, wreckers tore the Chestnutwold mansion down.   The grounds, however, remained intact.  The neo-Gothic structures of the Philadelphia Divinity School, designed by Zantzinger, Borie and Medary, rose on the site in the mid-1920s.   After the divinity school closed in the 1970s, the old Clark estate sat mostly vacant until the completion of the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School in 2001. The school thrives to this day, educating a diverse group of children from the neighborhood Clarence Clark developed a over a century ago.

The Philadelphia Divinity School, constructed in the 1920s. 4201-4245 Spruce Street, 1978.
The Philadelphia Divinity School, constructed in the 1920s. 4201-4245 Spruce Street, 1978.

Of the original Chestnutwold, only the pair of French iron gates at the northeast corner of the four square block lot remain today.  It is unknown if the original ginkgo tree survives on the grounds of the Penn Alexander School, but this species of tree is now ubiquitous on Philadelphia’s streets, as are its stinky fruits.

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Engraving of the ginkgo tree. Source: Pinterest.com

Note: for more on the Clark Park/Spruce Hill neighborhood on Philadelphia, click here for “West Philadelphia: A Suburb in a City,” dated June 28, 2010. 

Sources:

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.

“Centennial National Bank,” http://www.brynmawr.edu/iconog/uphp/AABN/centbank/centbank.html, accessed December 9, 2015.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Events and People Historic Sites Snapshots of History

The Butler Family Feud (Part III)

"Grumblethorpe," the Wister family home at 5267 Germantown Avenue, built by Owen's ancestor John Wister in the 1740s.
“Grumblethorpe,” the Wister family home at 5267 Germantown Avenue, built by Owen’s ancestor John Wister in the 1740s.


Part I and Part II

The Virginian was a tremendous success, selling 1.5 million copies during Wister’s lifetime, and became a template for countless Western novels and movies to follow.

Despite his newfound fame, Wister found subsequent literary success elusive. Like most authors, he did not want to become a one-hit wonder. Once he was back in Philadelphia–a city that he personally despised but never left–he probably let his insecurities and melancholia get the better of him.

Especially when grappling with the ghosts of his Butler ancestors.

His next book, Lady Baltimore of 1906, was an novel about South Carolina, the family seat of Wister’s Butler ancestors.  Named after a type of cake featured in the book, Lady Baltimore was Wister’s attempt at social history, but many critics found that the narrative descended into social snobbery.  Unlike The Virginian, there was comparatively little adventure and action. While the unnamed Wyoming cowboy was stoic and chivalric in his quest to win the hand of school teacher Molly Wood, the protagonist in Lady Baltimore –a Yankee named Augustus–was a comparatively insipid character on a rather different mission: to find royal lineage in his family, at the request of his imperious Aunt Carola back in New York.  Along the way, Augustus was smitten by Eliza La Heu of Kings Port (a stand-in for Charleston). A member of the plantation gentry, the effervescently beautiful Eliza had been reduced to working at a store, but her aristocratic manners (and empty bank account) stood in stark contrast to Gilded Age nouveau riche New Yorkers, exemplified by the character Hortense Rieppe (the consummate vulgarian in Wister’s plot).

Owen Wister at Yellowstone Park, Wyoming in the 1890s. Source: Wyohistory.org.
Owen Wister at Yellowstone Park, Wyoming in the 1890s. Source: Wyohistory.org.

Yet it was Wister’s treatment of race in Lady Baltimore that shocked many readers of the day, even in the pre-Civil Rights era.  In Wister’s plot, the ultimate insult was that the South Carolinian John Mayrant, described by a contemporary reviewer from The Terre Haute Saturday Spectator as a “fine type of a thoroughbred, high-minded, proud southern young fellow,” has to work under an African-American boss at the customs house.   Mayrant and his relatives are unable to bear this insult to their dignity, and as a result, the reviewer continues, Mayrant must resign from his post, “without raising a scene, if he is true to his instincts as a southerner and a gentleman.”

President Theodore Roosevelt read Lady Baltimore and was reluctant to criticize his friend in public.  As a progressive at home and an imperialist abroad, Roosevelt had Social Darwinist views of his own, quite common among men of his class. The early 1900s was also a nadir in American race relations. The Republicans were still the party of Lincoln and hence of most African-Americans, but in the years since Union troops withdrew from the former Confederacy in 1877, Southern politicians did everything in their power to disenfranchise black voters and restore the plantation system in all but name. After reading his friend’s latest literary effort, the president privately wrote Wister to express admiration for his portrayal of Southern womanhood (after all, Roosevelt’s mother was the Southern belle Martha “Mitty” Bulloch, who refused to let her husband Theodore Roosevelt Sr. fight in the Union Army) and also to scold him for the novel’s descriptions of Northerners (“swine devils”) and African-Americans (“some of the laziest and dirtiest monkeys where we live”).

One chapter in particular, “The Girl Behind the Counter II,” must have irked the publicity-conscious president. In it, Eliza La Heu rants to Augustus about how the President of the United States (unnamed, but Theodore Roosevelt in 1906) had invited a black man (in real life, Booker T. Washington) to the White House for a formal dinner.  The actual dinner, which took place in October 1901, was controversial among both blacks and whites at the time.  One white Southern newspaper editor vented that it was, “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.” Senator Ben Tillman of Lady Baltimore’s South Carolina used even more violent language upon hearing of the dinner, threatening the deaths of a thousand blacks in the South…so that they would “learn their place again.”

Publication announcement for "Lady Baltimore," London 1906.
Publication announcement for “Lady Baltimore,” London 1906.

At the same time, many African-Americans activists felt that Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, was an accommodationist stooge. Harvard graduate William Monroe Trotter, who in a decade would famously confront another president (Woodrow Wilson) about his re-segregation of the US civil service, wrote of Washington:  “a hypocrite who supports social segregation between blacks and whites while he himself dines at the White House.”

The matter became a sore subject for President Roosevelt, who never spoke of the dinner publicly afterward. Yet he declared that, “I’ll not lose my self-respect by fearing to have a man like Booker T. Washington to dinner, even if it costs me every political friend I’ve got.”

Now, five years later, Owen Wister had brought up the whole affair again– from the Southern point-of-view–in a dialogue between Augustus and Eliza La Heu:

‘If you mean that a gentleman cannot invite any respectable member of any race he pleases to dine privately in his house–‘  

‘His house,’ she was glowing now with it. ‘I think he is—I think he is–to have one of them–and even if he likes it, not to remember–I cannot speak about him!’ she wound up; ‘I should say unbecoming things.’ She had walked out, during these words, form behind the counter, and as she stood there in the middle of the long room you might have thought she was about to lead a cavalry charge.  Then, admirably, she put it all under, and spoke on with perfect self-control. ‘Why, can’t somebody explain to him? If I knew him, I would go to him myself, and I would say, ‘Mr. President, we need not discuss our different tastes as to dinner company. Nor need we discuss how much you benefit the colored race by an act which makes every member of it immediately think that he is fit to dine with any kind in the world. But you are staying in a house which is partly our house, ours, the South’s, for we, too, pay taxes, you know. And since you also know our deep feeling– you may even call it a prejudice, if it so pleases you–do you not think that, so long as you are residing in that house, you should not gratuitously shock our deep feeling?’  She swept a magnificent low curtsy at the air.

All a besotted Augustus could do was gush admiringly: “By Jove, Miss La Heu, you put it so that it’s rather hard to answer!”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtnOG7LPwjA&w=640&h=360]
Booker T. Washington meets President Roosevelt. PBS documentary “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History”

Small wonder that the sitting President of the United States took the time to write a 5,000 word letter of “advice” to Wister regarding this book.

For the Butler-Wister clan, it was a historical irony indeed. Wister’s own grandmother Fanny Kemble–who had fearlessly excoriated the slave system half a century earlier in Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839–would probably have been horrified to read Lady Baltimore.  To her, no one could have been more of a “swine-devil” than her slaveholding, libertine husband Pierce Butler II, who lived high on the hog from the unpaid labor of others.

Lady Baltimore sold well, but no where close to the blockbuster figures of The Virginian. Owen Wister himself was never able to muster up the strength to write another major book.  He continued to churn out minor works and articles, often in the paneled cocoon of the Philadelphia Club’s library.  Among them was Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880-1919.

Yet as the 1900s progressed, Theodore Roosevelt grew more progressive and outspoken–lobbying for women’s suffrage and a graduated income tax in his 1912 Bull Moose party presidential run–while his friend Wister– who lived off family money and the royalties from The Virginian–grew ever more gloomy and conservative. One historian speculates that Roosevelt’s criticism of Lady Baltimore, however private, deflated the perpetually insecure Wister’s fragile ego. He toiled away at the manuscript of a novel about Philadelphia that he called Romney, but was never able to finish it.

Perhaps because it was about a subject Owen Wister loved to loathe: his native city.

The city is a shame. They’re proud of it, yet take no care of it. . . . The bad gas, the bad water, the nasty street-cars that tinkle torpidly through streets paved with big cobble-stones all seem to them quite right. . . . Their school buildings are filthy. I heard a teacher who spoke ungrammatically and pronounced like a gutter-snipe teaching the children English. . . . Isn’t it strange that such nice people should tolerate such a nasty state of things?

Before he died in 1938, Wister severed his family’s last ties with the Old South by selling the final remnants of his ancestor Senator Pierce Butler’s Georgia land–for a paltry $25,000.

Sources: 

Stephen W. Berry, ‘The Butler Family,” The New Georgia Encyclopedia, September 3, 2014, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/butler-family, accessed November 18, 2015.

Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p.385.

Malcolm Bell Jr. Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987),  p.541.

Clarence Lusane, The Black History of the White House.  San Francisco: City Lights Publishers (January 23, 2013), p. 255.

James M. O’Neill, “Owen Wister’s Lost Tale of Phila Published,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 2001, http://articles.philly.com/2001-10-04/news/25305723_1_owen-wister-romney-philadelphia-area-locales, accessed December 1, 2015.

Owen Wister, Lady Baltimore (New York: Hurst and Company, 1906), pp.90-91.

The Terre Haute Saturday Spectator, August 26, 1906.  From Yesterdish.com. http://www.yesterdish.com/2013/12/08/lady-baltimore-cake/, accessed December 1, 2015.

 

 

Categories
Events and People Historic Sites

The Butler Family Feud (Part II)

A daguerreotype of the unhappy couple: Pierce and Fanny Butler. Southernspaces.org
A daguerreotype of the unhappy couple: Pierce and Fanny Butler. Southernspaces.org

Pierce Butler II did not reform his ways after his wife left him. Rather, he drank, gambled, and philandered his way through his remaining $700,000 fortune. To pay his debts, he sold nearly 500 slaves at auction in 1859.  According to one observer:

On the faces of all [the slaves] was an expression of heavy grief; some appeared to be resigned . . . some sat brooding moodily over their sorrows, . . . their bodies rocking to and fro with a restless motion that was never stilled.

Although the largest sale of human beings in the nation’s history netted Pierce Butler a handsome $300,000 (about $6 million today), he died forgotten and broke after the Civil War.

Fanny Kemble–who reclaimed her maiden name–ultimately got her revenge by publishing Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 in 1864, which became a literary sensation among supporters of the Union cause, especially in her native England. In it, the former master thespian spared nothing in her descriptions of slavery’s horrors, and what exactly the North was up against. Simply reading a Southern newspaper left nothing to the imagination as far as the realities of slavery were concerned, she claimed.  In response to an unnamed apologist for slavery, she wrote:

The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for the imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace–the handcuff, the lash–the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives–the wearing trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of the body, the despair of the mind, the sickness of heart–thees are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather than the exception, in the slaves experience. And this system exists here in this country of yours, which boasts itself the asylum of the oppressed, the home of freedom, the one place in the world where all men may find enfranchisement from all the thraldoms of mind, soul, or body–the land elect of liberty. 

Such words would have driven her grandfather-in-law, the original Pierce Butler, to apoplexy.  They also rattled the many upper-class Philadelphians who held Southern sympathies.  The hard truth was that out of all the Western powers in 1864, republican America was the very last to outlaw slavery.  England had done so in 1833, France in 1848, and imperial Russia (that most autocratic of regimes) in 1862.

It took a Civil War and 700,000 Union and Confederate lives to rid America of its original sin.

The Philadelphia Club, 13th and Walnut Streets. Originally built in the 1830s as the home of Thomas Butler, relative of Pierce Butler and his son Pierce (Mease) Butler II.
The Philadelphia Club, 13th and Walnut Streets. Originally built in the 1830s as the home of Thomas Butler, relative of Pierce Butler and his son Pierce (Mease) Butler II.

Senator Pierce Butler’s house on Washington Square was torn down in 1859–the year of his grandson’s bankruptcy– but descendants of Pierce Butler remained Philadelphians after the Civil War.  One of the Butler family’s Philadelphia mansions survives to this day as the Philadelphia Club, although its builder Thomas Butler (the disinherited son of Pierce I) died before its completion. The club completed the shell of the hulking structure–which bore a strong resemblance to the Washington Square house–and took up residence in 1850.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Butlers in Philadelphia was left by Fanny’s grandson Owen Wister, who used his own gift with words to portray that most romanticized of American agricultural workers: the Western cowboy in The Virginian.

It’s most famous line: “When you call me that, smile.”

Owen Wister, great-grandson of Pierce Butler I and grandson of Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler II. Wikipedia.
Owen Wister (1860-1938), author and president of the Philadelphia Club, great-great-grandson of Pierce Butler I and grandson of Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler II. Wikipedia.

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The Virginian (1914 silent film)

Sources: 

Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p.440.

Fanny Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (New York: Harper Brothers, 1864), p.10.

Stephen W. Berry, ‘The Butler Family,” The New Georgia Encyclopedia, September 3, 2014, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/butler-family, accessed November 18, 2015.

“Pierce Butler, South Carolina,” Constitution Day, http://www.constitutionday.com/butler-pierce-sc.html