PhillyHistory Blog

In the 1890s, sociologist W.E.B. DuBois and his wife moved to the 600 block of Rodman Street, known then as Carver Street, and previous to that, St. Mary Street. Here, in what DuBois called “the worst Negro slums of the city” he went door-to-door documenting the city’s so-called “Negro problem” or, as he preferred to call it, “the submerged tenth.” Philadelphia’s notorious 7^th ward had long been known as the city’s most impoverished, crime-infested, disease-ridden. And in his landmark study, The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, DuBois reported on the full spectrum of residents, including the “the working class,” “the poor” and the “vicious and criminal class.”

The latter made a most lasting impression. “Murder sat at our doorsteps,” DuBois later recalled. Everyone remembered (or had heard tell of) the violent demise of the California House the tavern attacked and burned by a mob in 1849. That raw incident served as inspiration for George Lippard’s novel, The Killers. A quarter century later, St. Mary Street served as a gritty counterpoint to the Centennial celebration, an urban scene ridden with “squalor, filth, misery, and degradation.”

In the first years of the 20^th century, this would become the place Henry Phipps, steel magnate turned philanthropist, imagined as ground zero for making positive change with the construction of a new hospital dedicated to the study and treatment of tuberculosis. Phipps and his medical experts knew that the rate of fatalities from tuberculosis, the leading cause of death in the city’s Black neighborhoods was as much as quadruple its rate in white communities.

With a commitment of $1.5 million (equivalent to nearly $50 million today) Phipps and his team had every reason to believe they could significantly reduce the impact of tuberculosis in Philadelphia’s poorest, most afflicted neighborhood. All it would take, Phipps believed, was education, training and therapies administered by a fully staffed and properly equipped brick-and-mortar hospital.

In 1903, the Henry Phipps Institute opened its temporarily quarters at 238 Pine Street. A decade later, the Institute moved to a new, larger fully staffed facility at the northeast corner of 7^th and Lombard Streets – just around the corner from old St. Mary Street – in the belly of the urban beast.

This was a new strategy for Phipps, who in previous years, attacked the scourge of tuberculosis by creating a tuberculosis sanatorium in White Haven, Pennsylvania, a rural borough about 100 miles to the north. But in time, Phipps came to realize that transporting sick and dying patients away from the city’s most diseased neighborhood to a far-flung pastoral setting wouldn’t result in permanent change in the slums of Philadelphia.

Lasting change, the Phipps team believed, would be more likely with cutting edge treatments administered at home in a large, purpose-built multi-storied hospital that looked like it belonged. Phipps hired New York architect Grosvenor Atterbury to design for 7th and Lombard Streets, a red brick building with “marble finishings along old Philadelphia colonial lines.” One wing was devoted to research; other housed resident physicians, dispensaries, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Four wards and adjacent porches facilitated all-important access to sunlight and fresh air. With these neighborhood-based interventions, the Phipps team believed it would be only a matter time before tuberculosis in Philadelphia was under control, if not eradicated.

But neighbors and even some medical professionals objected to this strategy. At a protest meeting one physician from Jefferson Medical College suggested, in a “vigorous speech” that such a facility in the heart of the city would dangerously increase the presence of the fatal pathogen. A petition opposing the Phipps Institute at 7th and Lombard garnered 800 signatures.

The Institute, insisted Lawrence Flick, Phipps’ medical director, would have to be built in Philadelphia. And “if this city does not appreciate the good that would accrue from such an institution,” the donor would take his funding to New York.

“One of the chief purposes” of a Philadelphia-based institution, Flick affirmed, is that medical professionals would “keep in close touch with the poorer classes, and this [could] only be accomplished by having it located in the midst of their homes.” Not only should the Institute built in the city, it should be sited “in a crowded section.” That was Phipps’ “unqualified wish.” Groundbreaking remained on schedule in July 1911. The new structure opened with fanfare in the Spring of 1913.

But before the new Institute could succeed there would be one more barrier to address.

Many suffering with tuberculosis, including and especially Black folks, chose to shun professional medical help and remain at home. Without patients, no amount of philanthropic generosity, cutting-edge hospital design and medical professionalism would be able to overcome longstanding mistrust of medicine. The Institute’s Dr. Landis later recalled this dilemma: “A few Negro patients came to the Institute… [but] in a dying state. Fewer still visited the dispensary, paid one or two visits, and then passed out of sight.” During the decade before the new building opened, the average annual number of Black patients served by the Institute was only 51.

What could be done to achieve a change in public perception and participation? What would it take to finally achieve change in the belly of the urban beast?

The solution, it turns out, was hiding in plain sight.

In early 1914, shortly after the new hospital opened, its managers hired a Black nurse for the first time. Her name was Elizabeth Tyler.

(Sources: “Henry Phipps Institute,” January 10, 1903, The New York Times; From The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Mr. Phipps Gives Over a Million for a Hospital,” January 10, 1903: “No compromise on hospital site,” January 13, 1903; “Oppose Hospital,” January 30 1903; “Against Phipps’ Institute,” February 6, 1903; “Phipps Institute Will Open To-Day, ”February 9, 1903; “Opposition is Dead,” February 13, 1903; “Clear Site for Institute,” October 5, 1909; “To Build Hospital for Consumptives,” July 9, 1911; “Phipps Institute, Enemy of White Plague, to Open,” May 4, 1913; “50 Years at Phipps,” February 1, 1953. Philadelphia Builder’s Guide, v. 26, No. 16, p. 247, April 19. 1911. H.M.R. Landis, “Tuberculosis and the Negro,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1928; J. Margo Brooks Carthon, “Life and Death in Philadelphia’s Black Belt: A Tale of an Urban Tuberculosis Campaign, 1900–1930,” Nursing History Review. Vol. 2011; 19: pp 29–52.)

In the first decade of the 20th century, deaths from tuberculosis in Philadelphia spiked at more than 250 per 100,000. By the end of the 1920s, that rate plummeted to 80 per 100,000.

(Nearly a century later, tuberculosis is no longer a leading cause of death in the United States. Worldwide, the current annual mortality rate remains just over 16 per 100,000. The tuberculosis mortality rate in the United States is .2 per 100,000.)

What brought about such dramatic change? Left untreated, the mortality rate for tuberculosis was greater than 50%. Treatments with vaccines and (eventually) antibiotics had significant impact. Improved interventions included testing, tracking and surveillance. Public health professionals advocated for improvements in living conditions including the construction of sanatoriums for thousands of patients. In all, a rising emphasis for widespread public education created and deepened an effective culture of health.

On June 6, 1926, a week after the opening ceremonies of Philadelphia’s second world’s fair, the Inquirer published an article with the headline “Tuberculosis Work Exhibited At Sequi.” It described a large and comprehensive display produced by Dr. Isador Kaufman of the Kensington Dispensary and the Phipps Institute. The exhibit, strategically positioned near the entrance of the Palace of Education and Social Economy illustrated many “approved forms of treatment and care” and focused on an array of preventative measures.

The exhibit presented eighteen “electrically lighted, attractively decorated ” glass-fronted cases, each “three and a half feet long, two feet eight inches high and two feet six inches deep.” Each case included a “photographic background and enlarged, mounted figures to supply the action.” Each of the eighteen was devoted to a different phase “of treatment and preventive work.”

In four parts, the sanatorium section showed a patient taking the rest cure, a second engaged in occupational therapy a third illustrated the importance of recreation, and a fourth in the role of nutrition, based at the sanatorium’s dining room.

Another cluster introduced “dispensary work, illustrating doctors and nurses at work on patients receiving instruction in the work of the visiting nurses.” Another case showed “open air schools and outdoor camps for children suffering from tuberculous.

“The section devoted to the work of hospitals [showed] a ward, an operating room depicting the pheumothorax [sic] treatment … preventive measures in hospital cases and sanitation.” Yet another section was “devoted to experimental work [showing] the modern laboratory.”

Charts and figures illustrated “the drop in tuberculosis death rate in the United States during the past twenty years” and related statistics.

The exhibition also featured “a graphic demonstration of heliotherapy” a/k/a the “sun cure,” as practiced at the Sun Cure Cottage at the Chestnut Hill Home for Consumptives.

Each case was explained “with a suitable placard stating in plain language the meaning of each individual exhibit.” These brief statements were written by authorities in the field. Each provided “easily understandable… additional details…”

According to the Inquirer, “the rapid development of the tuberculosis movement during the last twenty years, and its remarkable success in decreasing the death rate…” enabled such an exhibit with “greater scope and appeal” than might be seen “at any previous World’s Fair.”

A July 1879 Inquirer advertisement promoted “the A1 Mammoth, three deck palace iron steamship Republic” which leaves “the Race Street wharf every day at 7:15 AM returning from Cape May at 3:00 PM arriving in city early in the evening.” On board, “a band of music will accompany the boat and a variety of pleasant and amusing entertainments will be given during the passage.” The year-old steamer had quickly become a valued addition on Philadelphia’s waterfront.

“It is indeed a great treat to careworn and busy men and women to be able to shake off toil and trouble for a day and participate in the recreation, change of scene and benefit afforded by The Republic’s  breezy sails down the Delaware river and bay,” and to the ocean,” shared a reporter.

“Besides the comfort and conveniences to be found on The Republic, such as splendid meals at regular city, prices, lunches at the restaurant, refreshment stands, and café, all of which are abundantly supplied with the good things of life which the passengers can obtain at moderate cost, the attentions of first-class tonsorial artist in the barber shop.” There’s “excellent entertainment, embracing vocal and instrumental concerts, dramatic shows by funny comedians, vaudeville performances, minstrel shows, and displays of puzzling magic, to say nothing of the privilege of dancing on a fine ballroom floor to the music of a capital orchestra, or taking part in promenades for which The Republic Brass Band furnishes its charming strains.”

“A day can be spent with the utmost satisfaction and the cost is only the round-trip fair, one dollar, with children at half-price, truly a marvelously low figure when the many enjoyments and attractions are considered.”

Indeed, The Republic, this “270-foot 1,285–horse power vessel licensed to carry 2000 passengers daily” had become part of Philadelphia’s life and lore.

Imagine the shock when the steamer with 800 passengers aboard went missing somewhere shy of Cape May on August 23, 1882. “Nothing could be learned of her whereabouts.” The following morning, a large, anxious crowd gathered at the Race Street wharf “to await further news from vessels coming up the river.”

The previous morning, everything started pleasantly enough with the boat assuming “her usual speed” as she paddled downstream. The estimated time of arrival at Cape May: “a little after 1 o’clock.” But about 27 miles from landing mechanical failure brought The Republic to a complete stop. The engineer tried and failed to restore power and Captain Lackey had no choice but to drop anchor, blow off the steam and bank the fires. They then sat and waited “until assistance could be had,” from a passing ship. Help eventually arrived, but the steamer could not be towed to Wilmington, Delaware, the nearest port, until the next day.

Passengers “were not at all alarmed. . . when they found that their trip was spoiled” and that they would “have to make a night of it.” Everyone “proceeded to get their dinner as calmly as though nothing had happened.”

The cabin’s relatively few berths “were at once seized by a person who had charge of a party of women and children. They entered the cabin, closed the door, and sought consolation in sleep.” The vast majority of the passengers made do with “chairs and camp stools”or quiet places on decks where they used life preservers as pillows. Passengers exhausted their picnic baskets before emptying the larders of on-board restaurant. “Nobody went hungry,” though breakfast the next morning “was somewhat meager, consisting principally of crackers and coffee.”

“It was a good-natured, but tired, sleepy, and ‘bedraggled’ crowd that was transferred to the deck of the Felton at Wilmington” for the long awaited return trip to Philadelphia.

Keeping The Republic up and running smoothly was a continuous and necessary challenge. In the 1880s, public memory still resonated with stories of the disastrous and tragic explosion of the steamboat New Jersey on March 15, 1856. Sixty-one passengers died on the Delaware that wintry night.

Maintenance included keeping the wharf and piers in good order. Pile drivers were essential to the process, even with their notorious, persistent and violent “thump . . . thump . . . thump” accompanied by vibrations capable of clearing nearby walls and shelves. Artists and photographers found pile drivers ripe as subject matter. See George Herbert Macrum’s oil painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Thornton Oakley’s Hog Island – the Pile Drivers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. So, too, the PhillyHistory photograph of the wharf’s reconstruction in 1896 is both an archival document and, we would argue, a work of art.

[Sources: “Daily Excursions for Cape May,” Inquirer, July 29, 1879; “The Missing Steamer Safe. The Republic’s Machinery Breaks Down – Scenes During the Night,” The New York Times, August 23, 1882; “Something to Think About. The Palace steamer Republic and its Delightful Sails,” Inquirer, August 9, 1891; “Steamer Destroys a Pier,” Inquirer, June 15, 1896; Advertisement, The Philadelphia Times. June 12, 1892.]

Photographer James E. McClees recast the image of Philadelphia in the 1850s. He focused on low hanging architectural fruit – the institutional structures lining Broad Street. McClees was the first photographer to attempt such a challenging feat. And no wonder, the new technology was awkward and inconvenient, requiring McClees to leave the ease and comfort of his Chestnut Street studio with his large format (9-by-12-inch) camera, a clunky wooden tripod, cased glass negatives slathered with a sticky, noxious emulsion of light-sensitive collodion. Starting as far north as Broad and Green Streets, McClees captured Central High School’s new building. Then southward, where he added the recently-erected the Odd Fellow’s Hall and Spring Garden Institute. In all, McClees traipsed the length of Broad Street for a mile and a quarter photographing the places that were redefining Philadelphia as a thriving 19th-century metropolis. The array included a museum (the Academy of Natural Sciences), a hotel (La Pierre House), an opera house (the Academy of Music), a handful of churches (here and here) and a banker’s mansion too prominent to exclude (the home of James Dundas). Nearly all, save one, had recently opened its doors. And that exception, at the southern most point of this architectural parade, was architect John Haviland’s Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and Dumb (as it was originally named). That structure, completed in the mid-1820s, holds the distinction of being the first institutional structure to grace Broad Street. And today, that building and the Academy of Music are the sole survivors along this civic, cultural boulevard.

McClees’ depiction of the city facilitated an updated interpretation of Philadelphia as a robust, evolving urban response to the question: How would this grided city adapt to the evolving architectural styles and institutional trends after a half-century of growth and transformation? One thing everyone knew for certain: William Russell Birch’s charming, illustrated coffee-table book of 1800, Birch’s Views of Philadelphia, was woefully out of date.

What would take it’s place again as the 19th-century drew to a close, or again and again through the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st?

Today, we learn the fate of Haviland’s vintage asylum which had, in the 20th century, been re-purposed as University of the Arts, will be repurposed again. (In mid-2024 the University of the Arts announced its own demise.)

What will become of this survivor of McClees’ Philadelphia, this national historic landmark at Broad and Pine?

And another, even more challenging question: what is a city without a proud public avenue lined with thriving cultural institutions?

To help inspire this unknown future, we turn to Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech of May 2012. “Make Good Art” was delivered to the graduates of the University of the Arts. Here’s the transcript and the video. Ironic and unfortunate, now that we know what followed, but perhaps helpful at a time when imagination fails.

“Who knows the future,” asked Marcus F. Pitts, superintendent of the Alta Friendly Society in the 1910 edition of The Philadelphia Colored Directory: A Handbook of the Religious, Social, Political, Professional, Business and other Activities of the Negroes of Philadelphia. “Protection is needed,” he warned, inviting potential members to stop by “the largest and strongest beneficial organization in Pennsylvania” in its new headquarters at 1622 Arch Street.

What’s a Friendly Society? For that, “we shall have to go back some three hundred years in our search for the foundation from which Forestry, Oddfellowship, Shepherdry, Druidism, &c.” to get a handle on those institutions “whose vacant niches the modern Friendly Societies fill,” explained the author of a history of the movement. The year that history rolled off the presses – 1886 – was about the same time sibling societies were thriving throughout Britain and getting a small foothold in the United States. In Philadelphia, the Fidelity Mutual Aid Association went so far as to change its name to the historically venerable, if opaque and appealingly quirky Alta Friendly Society.

British Prime Minister William Gladstone explained Friendly Societies plainly: “You go into these societies to seek your own good through the good of others.” They originated in Great Britain and hundreds more “scattered throughout the world” assuring that subscribers would receive aid when they encountered illness, death, birth, fires, or unemployment. Philadelphia had seen the likes of Friendly Societies as early as the 1790s when, a full century earlier, the African Friendly Society of St. Thomas’s issued certificates for members. But they were few and far between.

(Sources: John Frome Wilkinson, The Friendly Society Movement: its origin, rise, and growth; its social, moral, and educational influences; the affiliated orders (London: Longmans, Green, 1886); The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 25, 1887, “The Friendly Society Movement; “Alta Friendly Society,” January 20, 1906; The Philadelphia Inquirer, Saturday, January 20, 1906; The Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, vol. 21, 1906; The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 1934, “Girard’s Talk of the Day.”)

The Society Hill based H.O. Wilbur & Sons Chocolate Company started making and selling Wilbur Buds in 1894. The lookalike Hershey Kiss was first marketed in 1907. There are differences.

One might argue that the Kiss has long been the runaway winner in terms of candy making and marketing. But in 1926, the Bud had an innovative moment that should be remembered in another context.

Rebuilding rendered the brick building at Pine and Quince Streets barely recognizable. But the three-story structure, once known as the J. Sylvester Ramsey School carries with it a web of worthy associations.

Those of a certain age will remember the building as Phineas Meade’s antiquarian den, an overcrowded haven for all things old, dusty and wooden. Phin, as he was known, occupied the building from 1949 until his death in 1983.

Those interested in the history of architecture would lean into the significance of the original structure built in 1850.

Students of the Seventh Ward would recall W.E.B. DuBois’ observation that the school was the largest in the ward with a “nearly all colored” student body of nearly 500.

And then there’s the story of Philadelphia’s Trade School For Girls, which occupied the building starting in 1918.

That year, something like eleven million women and girls were in the American workforce. Philadelphia’s bourgeoning industries employed about 94,000 girls between the ages of 14 and 16. Of them, 27,000 worked in the garment trades, a number that increased year to year. Four thousand of these wage-earning girls were also enrolled in the city’s schools.

And yet the city’s public schools offered little or no training relevant to their employment.

“The majority of these women were not fitted for any type of work,” declared Cleo Murtland, an authority on industrial education. Their education is “seriously lacking.”

But things were about to change. A group of philanthropic reformers (all women) had taken over a rowhouse at 415 South Ninth Street (the building still stands) and established there a school that provided free instruction in “dress making, millinery, lampshade making and novelty work,” skills that would “enable the untrained girls of the city to earn a livelihood in the industrial world.”

With only 79 students, this first iteration of Philadelphia’s Trade School for Girls only scratched the surface. Then Philadelphia’s Committee on Vocational Education recruited Murtland from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, an “experiment without precedent” (memorialized here in a short film from 1911). Murtland hit the ground running, in Philadelphia, surveying “upwards of 600 factories, where women and children are employed” and then designing an expanded vocational curriculum to be funded and operated by the School District. During its first year, according to Murtland, “educators, employers, workers, public spirited citizens, educational, civic and philanthropic organizations … [all] urged the public school authorities to recognize its place in the public school system of the city.”

They succeeded in getting their message across. And with funding from the city and Murtland as principal, the school took over the school building at Pine and Quince Streets.

Murtland later wrote: “Philadelphia is one of the largest industrial cities in the country, a city of varied industrial activities, the center of the knitting industry, a leading city in the manufacture of cotton and woolen woven fabrics, a shoe manufacturing center, a community with large printing establishments, extensive jewelry factories, and many other industrial interests which employ women workers.” The city “presents an extensive and varied field for the development of vocational education…”

“Philadelphia is in a position,” wrote Murtland, “to develop an industrial education program second to none in the country.”

Courses included “custom dressmaking, children’s custom-made clothing, custom millinery, factory garment making-dresses and waists, muslin underwear, shirts and special machine work such as machine hemstitching, buttonholes, machine embroidery, two needle stitching, and bonnaz embroidery…” In a school week of 32 hours, more than half of the time was “devoted to trade work.” “The course of study” included “power-machine operating, dressmaking and millinery, with such related subjects as business methods and English.” Special attention was given “to civics and good citizenship.”

In 1919, Murtland left her position at Pine and Quince for an associate professorship at the University of Michigan where she tackled similar challenges and opportunities in Detroit.

Back in Philadelphia, the case for vocational education for girls and young women had been made. And in December 1925, the Inquirer reported the laying of a cornerstone for a new, five-story trade school for girls and women. When operational, the Helen Fleisher Vocational School at 13th and Green Streets would accommodate 1,200 girls and women.

In theory, vocational education would position young women to earn higher wages. In reality,  according to the 1922 Report of the Survey of the Public Schools of Philadelphia, there was no minimum wage law in Pennsylvania. Girls and women comprised a fifth of the workforce but earned only a tenth of the total wages. In factories and mills that produced clothing, two thirds of the workers were female. They earned only a third of the total wage.

In industrial early 20th-century Philadelphia, the glass ceiling was fabric rather than glass. And it was stitched tightly, one might say irrevocably, in place.

[Sources: Franklin Davenport Edmunds, The Public School Buildings of the City of Philadelphia from 1845 to 1852. (1915); Cleo Murtland, “Pennsylvania’s First Trade School for Girls,” The Industrial Arts Magazine, Vol. 7 (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1918); Report of the Survey of the Public Schools of Philadelphia, Volume 3 (Public Education and Child Labor Association of Pennsylvania, 1922). The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Consumer’s League Official Resigns – Philadelphia to Have Girls Trade School,” May 27, 1914; “To Aid Untrained Girls,” October 1, 1916; “Education Board Takes Trade School for Girls,” January 3, 1918; “A Trade School for Girls,” January 6, 1918; “To Teach Trades to Girls,” September 8, 1918; “School to Broaden Training for Girls in Philadelphia Industry,” November 21, 1920; “The Board of Education Programme,” January 15, 1925; “Cornerstone Laid For Trade School,” December 16, 1925.]

Passing the so-called Dirty Frank’s Bar, an amble down Pine Street soon becomes unremarkable. That wasn’t always the case.

A century ago, 1237 Pine Street, also known as James Eham’s Antique Store, formed a distinctive western anchor on what would become known as Philadelphia’s Antique Row.

Eham’s eclectic tastes were on full display here. As the Library Company captioned one of its two photographs of the Eham’s façade, he “heavily adorned” his emporium “with antiques and curiosities, including cigar store Native Americans, ship models, a rooster weather vane, and a ship’s helm. Posters, including a playbill for a production of “Our Colored Boys Over There” at the African American playhouse, the Royal Theater (opened in 1920), cover an adjacent building.” Eham, we learn, was “born enslaved in Virginia, settled in Philadelphia in 1876 and soon after became an antiques dealer. By 1927, he owned two antique stores in Philadelphia and one in New York.”

When artist James Horsey Fincken chose Eham’s shop as a subject for one of his etchings, he provided a title that can only be described as dismissive. Fincken’s “Negro Junk Shop” might have seemed a charming moniker to the artist and his following, but it denied the greater story of Eham’s role in Philadelphia’s antique trade. According to Eham’s obituary published in The Philadelphia Tribune on December 11, 1930 he “had been in the antique exchange and collection business since his arrival in Philadelphia in 1876.” The headline of that obituary labelled Eham as nothing less than a “Pioneer Antique Dealer.”

Disclosure: The author’s family has been in the antiques trade on Pine Street since the late 1940s.

Everyone in the ceremonial photo-op at the gigantic “Reading Depression” featured in our previous post at PhillyHistory knew handshakes could only go so far. The December 17, 1898 celebration was tainted by the knowledge of a recent death of a laborer. And that was hardly the first causality.

Michael O’Hearn, aged 38, and Benjamin F. Moore, 50, had been “working in a pit about 15 feet below the surface [at Pennsylvania Avenue, above 16th Street] when the supports which held the sides of the embankment gave away. The loose earth tumbled down on the men. All escaped, but O’Hearn and Moore, who were almost buried from view. The other workmen went to their aid at once, and succeeded in extricating them.” Both were taken to the Hahnemann Hospital. Moore would recover, but “O’Hearn became unconscious soon after his arrival at the hospital and died within an hour.”

We know of two other fatalities from a year earlier. And one, under the headline “Killed In The Subway” suggested even more, referring to an “already long list of fatalities in connection with the construction of the Reading subway.”

James Last died in a gruesome accident in July 1897. This father of several small children, “a laborer, in the employee of contractors E. D. Smith & Co., met a terrible death in falling headfirst into a trench . . . at Twenty-third and Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Attempting to avoid a collapse at the edge of a trench where he was working, “Last dropped his hoe. . . and ran rapidly along the side, picking his way as well as he could among the loose timbers.” His “foot must have tripped over one of those obstacles,  for suddenly he literally dived over the side of the trench and went headlong down to the bottom. In an instant the cry: ‘Man hurt’ went up, and hundreds of people crowded to the edge of the trench. Lanterns were brought out, and covered with blood, the body of the unfortunate man was found. Last’s head was bent under his body and his arms hung limply by his side.” His skull was fractured in two places. Last’s arms were broken and, due to a too-hurried recovery in a construction bucket, his legs “were badly torn and mangled.”

Last never regained consciousness and died minutes after admission to a nearby hospital.

Five weeks later the Reading Depression claimed yet another life, that of Fortunato DiCola, 37, of 7th and Fitzwater Streets. DiCola met his fate at 21st and Hamilton Streets.

Di Cola and Sabidino Felli were using a derrick and a boom to remove large rocks. One “had just been loosened in the pit thirty feet below” when “the men were raising the boom slightly, in order that a chain might be passed beneath it. Suddenly the large hook which help up the end of the boom broke, and the heavy timber fell over on the bank, where the men were standing. It struck Di Cola on the head, crushing his skull,” and also injuring Felli,” who survived.

How many other laborers were killed and injured over the course of three years at this gigantic infrastructure project? Only research will enable us to build a comprehensive, accurate list of casualties. And how would we like to memorialize these victims on the streets of Fairmount? Or would we prefer to chalk up these fatal incidents as unavoidable, inevitable costs of urban development in Philadelphia’s Gilded Age?

Sources: From the The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Killed in the Subway, James Last, a Workman, Meets a Terrible Death, July 8, 1897; “Death on Subway, Another Workman Meets with Fatal Accident,” August 13, 1897; “Another Subway Fatality, Michael O’Hearn, Injured by a Cave-in, Dies in the Hospital” December 11, 1898.]