William Penn admitted Philadelphia was “a holy experiment” about the same time some of his early settlers were conducting a less-than-holy, culinary experiment. They invented scrapple, a folksy staple that, for all its native plainness and inherent modesty, has managed to hold its own for more than three centuries. Scrapple has always been completely real and entirely ours, an endearing strand in the city’s gastronomical genome. Who would argue that Philadelphia’s DNA isn’t partly scrapple?
Liberty Bowl at Municipal (later J.F.K.) Stadium, December 20, 1960. (PhillyHistory,org)
Top that, Boston baked bean.
Nowhere else in America had a more ancient and authentic food, the “apotheosis of the pig,” claimed newspaperman Louis N. Megargee in 1901. In his column Seen and Heard, Megargee pitted the Boston baked bean and Philadelphia scrapple and found the former wanting in both character and venerability.
Originally little more than a culinary-cul-de-sac, scrapple evolved into a self-sufficient, self-deprecating, completely genuine Philadelphia meme. Earnest 19th century recipe books enshrined scrapple in literature and lexicon, but didn’t quite come to terms with the fact that, in the end, scrapple was more metaphor than meal.
William Bunn did.
“The Hon. William M. Bunn is best known as the brightest start in the constellation of orators, wits and raconteurs that illuminate the city of real Brotherly Love,” wrote James McCartney in the introduction to Bunn’s speeches and toasts of 1908. “In all the United States, there is no many on whose brow has been placed oftener the laurel wreath of adoring fame for after-dinner speaking.”
Here are excerpts from Bunn’s toast to scrapple delivered to a gathering at the Hotel Majestic, Broad Street and Girard Avenue:
What’s in a name? Usually, something—sometimes much; occasionally more— sentimentally, everything. Philadelphia, Brotherly Love, for instance. Something in that…Scrappletown and Slowtown— more in them.
Scrappletown— why, I read in a Philadelphia daily…that Philadelphia was consuming 12,000 pounds of scrapple weekly…
Incidentally, will you just ponder on the faith, the unwinking, unthinking blind faith of the thing! Scrappletown takes her scrapple on trust— just as she took her Schuylkill water on trust for so many years.
Scrappletown ! Takes its booze on trust: stands up to the gilded bar of a thousand dollar licensed saloon, calls for straight goods first time, never looks at the blend label on the bottle— takes it on faith first time. Second time, couldn’t see it if did look. Third time and so on to the limit— well you all know how it is yourselves; you’ve all been there— wouldn’t amount to much if you hadn’t in real worldly experience. And—what is worldly experience? Scrapple. What is booze? Scrapple.
Ever investigate politics? Something singular about the term. A noun of plural form that takes a verb in the singular. The verb is the only thing about it that is singular, though, in Scrappletown.
Scrappletown isn’t a village anymore…
You get politics on the house-top, in the cellar; at the legal bar, and the licensed bar; at the club, office, sociable; in hall and pulpit; in Chinatown, Little Italy, Rittenhouse Square; at weddings and funerals; in stock brokering and philanthropy; you can get into politics for nothing and come out with nothing. … You can get it raw or hashed or mulched; but in the end, both ends for that matter, it’s all—what? Scrapple!
Scrapple.
If there’s anything in this progressive twentieth century with no mystery, no sham, no big odd nonsense about it, it should be and therefore, is society. It is a want to know, you know, society a high art, high jinks, high ball society. A horse show, dog bench, stock board society. An eloping, divorcing society—and out of doors, automobiling society. It sails the ocean blue and climbs the Matterhorn. It spells its one or more middle names in full and hyphenates its patronymics. It remembers its pedigree and forgets its prayers. It scorns those whose forefathers never distinguished themselves and envies those whose forefathers and foremothers did. It aspires to be known abroad. And it is known. … It is scorified, glorified. It is followed, courted, married and divorced— more glory. It shows itself the wide world over. It tires of monotony— goes on the stage— shows itself some more— much more. It marries some more. Not much more to be sure, but enough for glory. With the sparkle and glitter of the footlights on the stage, the rustle and glow of paper and coin in the banks there’s glory enough to be sure; but it’s all scrapple— SCRAPPLE.
Oh, but it’s all great, though. We shine for it, and pine for it; look up to it, crook down to it; adore it, implore it; chase it, embrace it. It skips everywhere, tips everywhere. It doesn’t die. It elopes to Paradise. Maybe St. Peter will need an introduction; but that’s pure speculation.
Oh it’s glorious, all glorious. But it’s all scrapple— scrapple. And isn’t it glory enough to know that this is Scrappletown; and scrapple is the real thing. No doubt but it’s a made up thing, blind, fearfully, and wonderfully made, to be sure; but Philadelphia is plucky; it makes no scrutiny into the mutiny. It takes its medicine like a little man, and asks no questions. What proves to be good for it it clings to. …It’s all mystifying, vexatious. But then it’s all scrapple.
It was in the mind of Scrappletown ‘s immortal bard when he wrote the deathless lines: This world is all a fleeting show / Since Adam ate the apple / Its smiles of Joy, its tears of woe, / Deceitful shine, deceitful flow — / There’s nothing true but — Scrapple.
“A curious thing about Philadelphia,” wrote Edith Elmer Wood in 1919, “is that pigs were permitted to be kept in the thickly settled parts of the city until quite recently. A start was made to do away with this condition, the 40,000 piggeries of a few years ago having been reduced to almost 10,000.
Then, in the Spring of 1917, Health Department officials declared that Philadelphia would be demolishing it’s last remaining piggeries.
Up until the early 20th century, urban spaces required animal agriculture. There’d be no transportation without horses. “Hogs cleaned up household slop,” Vitiello and Brinkley remind us, “chickens scratched at the waste that the pigs left behind. Sheep and goats grazed on the commons… Many urban families kept or boarded dairy cows for a supply of fresh milk. Cattle were driven from ports, and later rail stations, to markets and slaughterhouses throughout the city. Animals were everywhere, as were the nuisances that they created as they bellowed, kicked up dust, dropped manure, and knocked over passersby.”
Runaway Pig at the Jersey Market, Front and Market Streets, ca. 1850 (detail). The Library Company of Philadelphia.
For the first couple of hundred years, the idea of banning farm animals would have been absurd, impossible even. Keeping them under control was more likely, though always challenging. As early as 1705, city ordinances forbade “cattle and swine from running at large through the streets.” Once caught, the meat from these runaways would be forfeited, shared equally by captor and the almshouse.
In the mid-19th century, hogs were fattened for market adjacent to a large distillery in the northwest quadrant of what is now Center City (at 23rd and Summer Streets). Feed consisted of grain mash from the distillery. This symbiotic relationship continued for more than three decades before the increasing number of nearby residents led to a contested closure. Appeals continued until May 1845, when the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania heard the case.
“At the time of the trial, and for a few years previous, the city had been rapidly extending in that direction… Several public institutions of great importance however had…been erected in the immediate neighborhood; and it was the alleged injury inflicted on these, as well as on the dwelling houses lately erected in the vicinity, that formed the principal ground of complaint.”
Farley’s Piggery – Maiden Lane, 10-12-1916 (PhillyHistory.org)
“The buildings in question were capable of accommodating as many as a thousand hogs…that in the warm weather the stench was so intolerable, as to make it almost impossible to pass through the street, on which the establishment opened, without nausea; and that when the wind was from the northwest, it was perceptible for half a mile towards the heart of the city; that the water of the Schuylkill was infected by the great quantities of filth and ordure which were discharged; that the value of property adjacent was diminished from ten to fifteen per cent., and that the comfort of the residents thereabout was materially affected by the effluvia.”
The court heard evidence for more than a week.
Piggeries had been there “from time immemorial,” claimed the defense. Moreover, they argued, the distillery “was essential to the city.”
The court agreed with the previous ruling: “Piggeries had to be removed from city limits, no matter how well established or profitable they were.” Citizens “are entitled by right to healthy air, and to a use of the public highways unimpaired by any adjacent nuisance” and “a hog pen in a city is a nuisance.” In fact, “the keeping of pigs in a community like this, whether there be one or a thousand, is indictable.”
Yet, as we read in Vitiello and Brinkley, the “debates between farmer-businessmen and city officials” continued for more than half a century longer. As the city expanded in the late 19th century, with permission from City Councils, pig farmers continued to thrive just beyond the fringes of the city’s built-up sections.
“Desperate efforts are being made by the pig owners of the First Ward [in South Philadelphia, east of Broad Street] to get from under the eye of the Health Officer and run their pens as of old,” reported the Inquirer in 1886: “the pens had been newly whitewashed and the masses of decaying garbage covered up and out of sight.” Further to the south and west, pigsties “owned by Mr. Rubel…at 31st and Maiden lane were in very bad condition. … The garbage…was left to fester, and the stench arising from the mass of filth among which the remaining animals were wallowing, exhaled an odor that could not but be highly prejudicial to public health.”
Detail of “Plan Showing Existing Conditions in South Philadelphia, December 13, 1915. (PhillyHistory.org)
“Pigs Have Got to Go,” editorialized the newspaper as late as 1914, by which time urban expansion guaranteed proximity to piggeries. Yet they remained legal in several areas, including along Maiden Lane. “Modern cities and hog pens cannot be made to go hand in hand,” declared editors, but they fell short of calling for a complete ban.
Not so Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg. His “war upon piggeries” would include a veto of any proposed expansion piggery district. Before long, the city conducted raids on the illegal piggeries of South Philadelphia.
In 1916, John Donohoe, who owned a massive piggery on League Island Road managed to remove his livestock only 15 minutes before a noontime raid by officials from the Bureaus of Health and Sanitation joined by a half dozen mounted police and 25 laborers with orders “to demolish Donohue’s pens.” Freshly unemployed pig farmers and farm hands greeted the raiders “with hoots and jeers.” Meanwhile, owners of the remaining, smaller piggeries read the writing on the wall and dispensed with their stock “as fast as possible.”
Before long, South Philadelphia’s muddy fens were piggery free, from the Neck to Maiden Lane.
Demolition for the Parkway proceeded through the northwest quadrant of Center City like Sherman’s March through Georgia. Promising a civic and cultural boulevard, planners took no prisoners, even as they encountered the city’s best architectural gems.
Only one hiccup in the way of progress (as we learned last time) was the Medico-Chirurgical Hospital. But this, too, eventually took the fall. The hospital’s clinical ampitheatre, just west enough on Cherry Street to survive a couple of decades longer, perpetuated the original, old-school Philadelphia sin of perpendicularity. In the 20th century, at least in this quadrant of Penn’s original grid, planners switched staid for sparkle. Perpendicularity had given way to diagonality.
Anything else, everything else, would be sacrificed at the altar of the City Beautiful.
Since its founding in 1881, the Medico-Chirurgical College and Hospital periodically augmented its Cherry Street campus with new buildings, eventually filling up the entire block between 17th and 18th. Each would be a permanent addition (or so they thought) to the city’s venerable medical community, none more so than the building by Frank Miles Day & Brother, opened on October 2, 1897.
Clinical Ampitheatre of the Medico-Chirurgical Hospital. 17th and Cherry Streets., Philadelphia, PA. Frank Miles Day & Bro. Architects, Architectural Record ,1904. (Google Books)
Dr. William L. Rodman, the newly elected professor to the chair of the principles of Surgery and Clinical Surgery (and later president of the American Medical Association) welcomed all to admire this “new and commodious clinical amphitheatre,” a state-of-the art facility, “one of the most excellent, as well as the largest clinical amphitheatres … yet been erected either in the United States or Europe.”
“The amphitheatre is the most noteworthy feature of the building,” claimed the Inquirer. “The form of seating in rows … extending entirely around the central space and rising from it, tier on tier,” had been a classic form going back centuries, and locally to Pennsylvania Hospital’s of 1804. The operating pit enabled continuation of the medical tradition where the surgeon/professor/performer emulated great predecessors like Thomas Dent Mütter, Samuel Gross and David Hayes Agnew, who, according to Rebecca Rego Barry, would enter “the arena of the operating theater as a matador strides into the ring” receiving applause from “rows of ogling observers.”
Surgery as spectacle.
The refined Renaissance style of the building’s exterior telegraphed the anticipated experience within. “A high base of Hummelstown brown stone carries the superstructure, which is of Pompeiian bricks and terra cotta (fabricated by Philadelphia’s Conkling-Armstrong Terra Cotta Co.). The chief features of the front are three large arched windows, below which are marble tablets bearing the names of epoch-making physicians and surgeons, beginning with Hippocrates, Galen and Celsus and extending to Pasteur, Koch and Lister. The names of Sims, Agnew, Goodell, Pancoast, Gross and other American contributors to medical science are found upon that list.”
Parkway from Bell Telephone Building, February 7, 1919 (PhillyHistory.org)
“It is very interesting to watch an architect ‘find himself,’” observed critic Ralph Adams Cram. And in the case of Frank Miles Day & Brother “the process is perfectly logical [and] entirely continuous.” The Days extended the ampitheatre‘s performance quality to the street, emphasizing “very evident and equally dominant passion for fine line, graceful ornament and delicate colors, consciousness of composition, mass and the co-ordination of parts…”
Cram called the clinical amphitheatre as one of the Days’ “more notable works.” Others are extant: the French Renaissance Crozer Building on the 1400 block of Chestnut Street and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (designed in collaboration with Cope and Stewardson and Wilson Eyre). Neither Horticultural Hall or the Art Club, both on Broad Street, survive. The first gave way to what is now the Merriam Theater; the second lost an existential battle with a parking garage.
Buildings on [Cherry] Street being demolished, August 1939. Paul Vanderbilt, photographer. (Yale University)Tha Plaza, 18th and the Parkway, 1968 (PhillyHistory.org)
The Days’ clinical amphitheatre wasn’t exactly in the Parkway’s path—it intersected it at an odd angle—which might have facilitated survival for a few more decades. After the First World War, as part of the Graduate School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, the amphitheatre was “completely renovated, redecorated and refurbished,” and reopened in 1919, “the principle operating room (having been) completely equipped (as) one of the finest in the world.”
Not for long. In August 1939, as photographer Paul Vanderbilt traversed the city in search of its rougher edges, he captured the last of the amphitheatre’s front wall, then, finally, in the process of demolition.
Right angles had effectively been expunged from the intersection of 18th and Cherry Streets. Perhaps never to be seen again.
[Additional Sources: “Clinic Ampitheatre: The New Building oat the Disposal of Medico-Chi,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 3, 1897; Warren Powers Laird, “Frank Miles Day: An Appreciation,” The American Architect, Vol. 114, issue 2219, (July 3, 1918); “Medico-Chirurgical Hospital To Reopen,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 15, 1919.]
