Month: April 2018

The Autocrat and the Engineer (Part II)

Post author By Steven Ujifusa
Post date April 26, 2018

The Joseph Harrison Jr. house at 227. S.18th Street, modeled on the Pavlovsk Palace in St. Petersburg. Photograph dated 1866.

As the capital of Imperial Russia, St. Petersburg was a city of many palaces. Some belonged to the Romanov family, such as Peterhof, the Winter Palace, the Pavlovsk Palace, the Anichkov Palace, and Tsarskoe Selo. Others belonged to wealthy Russian nobles, such as the Yusapov, Beloselskiy, and Stroganov clans. Many had been constructed in the 18th century, as part of Czar Nicholas I’s ancestor Peter the Great’s initiative to Westernize Russia and have its upper classes adopt the manners of the French and Italian aristocracies. By the mid-19th century, these pastel pink and green confections were filled with malachite tables, gilded candelabras, and Old Master paintings. During big parties, their windows glowed with candlelight, magnified many-fold by crystal chandeliers and mirrors.

The fount of their owners’ wealth were vast tracts of farmland and the unpaid labor of thousands of serfs.

Writer Ivan Goncharov satirized what he saw as a self-indulgent and indolent aristocracy in his 1859 novel Oblomov, in which the title character barely has the energy to rise from his bed. Why should he have motivation when money passively streamed in from his country estate?

The Stroganov Palace in St. Petersburg, built in the 1760s. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

“When you don’t know what you’re living for, you don’t care how you live from one day to the next,” Ilya Ilych Oblomov says in the novel. “You’re happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep you bury the tedious question of what you lived for that day and what you’re going to live for tomorrow.”

Oblomov ultimately dies of his own laziness.

To Philadelphian Joseph Harrison, the cosmopolitan opulence of St. Petersburg was a stunning contrast to the sober propriety of his native Philadelphia. Yet he remained immune to the malady of “Oblomovitis.” He worked hard (and no doubt played hard) during his many years in Russia. He successfully designed a series of new locomotives for the St. Petersburg to Moscow railroad, as well as new freight and passenger cars. He also constructed a locomotive repair facility on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. His crowning achievement was the replacement of an old pontoon rail bridge over the Neva River with the cast-iron Bridge of the Annunciation. According to Harrison’s biography in Cassier’s Magazine, Czar Nicholas I was amazed at the Philadelphian’s creativity and self-discipline, and as a result the monarch bestowed “numerous  other tokens of the friendship  and esteem” on the American engineer, the most prominent of which was the Order of St. Ann, awarded to those who had performed exceptional feats of civil and military service. Its motto was “Amantibus Justitiam, Pietatem, Fidem” (“To those who love justice, piety, and fidelity”).

Bridge of the Annunciation, St. Petersburg. Designed by Joseph Harrison, Stanisław Kierbedź, and Alexander Brullov. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

The Greek Hall of Pavlovsk Palace. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Thanks to Czar Nicholas I’s patronage, Joseph Harrison came back to Philadelphia a very rich man. In 1855, during one of his periodic visits home, Harrison commissioned architect Samuel Sloan to build a new city house for his family, on a 75 feet by 198 feet lot fronting the-then mostly undeveloped Rittenhouse Square.

Sloan had made a name for himself as a designer of picturesque suburban villas and urban townhouses in the Italianate style. Harrison instructed his architect to build an adaptation of the Pavlovsk Palace in St. Petersburg, an 18th century czarist residence he and his wife Sarah had admired during their time abroad. Built by Catherine the Great for his son Grand Duke Paul (Czar Nicholas I’s father), Pavlovsk was a jewel of neo-classical design.

Samuel Sloan set to work at his drafting table. His Harrison mansion was a symmetrical structure, composed of a three-bay wide center block, flanked by a pair of two story wings. It had not one, but two arched front doorways. No doubt influenced by the sight of all the Old Master paintings cluttering the walls of the Winter Palace, he filled his own home’s cavernous rooms with fashionable art, most notably twenty works from Charles Wilson Peale’s famous museum. His most notable acquisition was Benjamin West’s “Christ Rejected.” The rear windows of the house looked out on a large, enclosed garden. There was no pretense of Quaker austerity. This edifice was meant to dazzle and impress, inside and out.

When Joseph and Sarah Harrison took up residence in their home at 227 S.18th Street in 1857, they were the proud owners of one the largest and most flamboyant homes in the city of Philadelphia. Other members of Philadelphia’s ultra-wealthy, most notably members of the Drexel family, built similarly grand houses around the square in the years to come. Flush with cash from his Russian adventures and locomotive patents, Harrison took up intellectual, civic, and cultural pursuits with gusto. He served on the boards of the Fairmount Park Conservancy and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, making a substantial donation toward PAFA’s new Frank Furness-designed home on North Broad Street. He died in 1874.

The giant house stood until the 1920s, when it was demolished to make way for the Pennsylvania Athletic Club.

Monument to Nicholas I in St. Isaac’s Square, St. Petersburg. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Czar Nicholas I ruled until his death in 1855. His son Alexander II took a much more liberal course than his reactionary father, freeing Russia’s serfs in 1862, one year before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. The Romanov dynasty came to a violent end in 1918, when Bolshevik revolutionaries gunned down Czar Nicholas I’s great-grandson Nicholas II and his entire family in Siberia. The old Romanov trinity of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” had been replaced by Vladimir Lenin’s Communist rallying cry of “Peace, Land, and Bread.”

Sources:

“Joseph Harrison Jr. A Biographical Sketch,” Cassier’s Magazine, An Engineering Monthly, Volume XXXVII, November 1909-April 1910, http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Philadelphia/LocomotiveWorks/CassierBioJosHarrison.htm, accessed April 17, 2018.

Karen Chernick, “The Lost Mansions of Rittenhouse Square,” Curbed Philadelphia, January 17, 2018, https://philly.curbed.com/2018/1/17/16896748/rittenhouse-square-philadelphia-historic-photos, accessed April 26, 2018.

Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov: A Novel(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011). https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1583229868, accessed April 26, 2018.

Kevin Klever, Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia, From 1847(Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2015). https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1503574806, accessed April 26, 2018.

Joseph Harrison Jr. Papers, MS.024, Hoang Tran, ed., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, January 2016. https://www.pafa.org/sites/default/files/media-assets/MS.024_JosephHarrisonJr.pdf, accessed April 17, 2018.

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A Corner Store Museum in Philadelphia? Why Not!

Post author By Ken Finkel
Post date April 23, 2018
1 Comment on A Corner Store Museum in Philadelphia? Why Not!

The corner store.

Ahem. Let me start again.

The amazing, agile, ubiquitous corner store! We’re been thinking about them for a couple of posts now: It’s 1901: Time to go Grocery Shopping in North Philadelphia and Grocery Chains and the Origins of Philadelphia’s Food Deserts. Regular readers know that, once upon a time, there were thousands of them in Philadelphia: grocery stores, butcher shops, barber shops, pharmacies, variety stores, luncheonettes, book stores, record shops and more. The corner store was the glue that held the city’s neighborhoods together.

In her thesis “Philadelphia Corner Stores: Their History, Use, and Preservation” Lynn Miriam Alpert pointed out how this vernacular urban genre stands “in stark contrast to the concentrations of commercial structures in shopping districts,” and yet is still part and parcel of the city’s rowhouse neighborhoods. Alpert relays that the corner store played an essential role in the employment of women. (In San Francisco at the start of the 20^th century, “ninety percent of female grocers lived at the same address as their stores, allowing them to remain at home while also earning a living.”) And we learn that despite the fact that “Philadelphia’s historic row house neighborhoods have undergone intense changes since their creation,” corner stores still play “an active role in the vibrance and vitality” of their communities. They served as economic drivers.

Indeed. The Bodega Association of the United States confirms that in 2002 alone, the small grocery stores in New York City “generated annual sales of over $7 billion and provided over 65,000 jobs with an annual payroll estimated at $750 million.” And when undocumented workers are factored in, “the actual number of jobs and the aggregate payroll may be closer to twice the official figures.”

When we consider the story of immigration in urban America, the corner store was and remains an essential and compelling feature in the community. According to Fernando Mateo, the neighborhood store faced the onslaught of competition brought on by the supermarket, survived, and to this day serves as a gathering spot, a place “where people get together and go over their daily news, and…become part of their communities.”

The story of the modest corner store in Philadelphia is part and parcel of a robust, inclusive narrative. Yet, with all of our collective interest in place, in food, in identity and in the life and character of our communities, there is no corner store museum.

Maybe it’s time to change that.

I mean, what better way would there be to connect community and memory?

PhillyHistory.org

1). Southwest Corner or Gratz and York Streets, Ed Bonnem Prime Meats, May 4, 1905

2). Southwest Corner 7th and Porter Streets, April 6, 1960

3.) Northwest Corner, 17th Street and Washington Avenue, February 7, 1917

4.) Southwest Corner, 25th and Kimball Streets, May 3, 1916

PhillyHistory.org

5.) Northeast Corner, Cumberland and Marshall Streets, La Vencedora Groceries, November 9, 1960

6.) Trenton and Susquehanna Avenues, May 11, 1900

7.) Kimball Street and Grays Ferry Avenue, July 30, 1924

8.) 47th Street and Woodland Avenue, Luncheonette, March 28, 1951

PhillyHistory.org

9.) 43rd and Pine Streets. The Great Atlantic Pacific Tea Company, August 21, 1924

10.) Southeast Corner of Spruce and Camac Streets, Camac Food Market, March 2, 1959

11.) Northwest Corner, 8th and Moore Streets. Milano’s Groceries, November 25, 1949

12.) Southeast Corner of Thompson and Lefevre Streets, July 14, 1930

Events and People Historic Sites Neighborhoods

The Autocrat and the Engineer (Part I)

Post author By Steven Ujifusa
Post date April 19, 2018

The Joseph Harrison Jr. residence at 221 S.18th Street. c.1900.

In view of the interest and importance at the present time of everything which relates to the development of railroading, it is well to remember what has been done in America to lay the foundations of the locomotive industry, and, therefore, we feel that it is desirable to recall the extent to which the design of the modern locomotive is indebted to the work of Joseph Harrison, Jr., although it is now more than thirty years since he passed away.

–Cassier’s Magazine, November-April 1910

The son of a Philadelphia grocer, Joseph Harrison Jr. (1810-1874) received his early training the old fashioned way: learning-by-doing. After cutting his teeth as an apprentice machinist, at age 25 Harrison got a job with the locomotive builder Andrew McCalla Eastwick. While in Eastwick’s employ, Harrison came up with the solution to a problem that had long befuddled early locomotive designers. The first locomotives, such as George Stephens’ “Rocket” of 1829, were propelled by only a single pair of driving wheels. If engineers could add additional pairs of wheels, the locomotive’s pulling capacity, especially on steep grades, would be greatly increased. But no one seemed to be able to come up with a way to evenly distribute the energy from the steam pistons to more than two driving wheels.

In 1838, Harrison patented his so-called “equalizing lever,” which, according to Cassier’s Magazine, ensured “the equal division of the load upon the two axles.”

Eastwick and Harrison’s “Hercules” engine of 1837-38. Catskill Archive.

Footage of a replica of George Stephenson’s “The Rocket” locomotive of 1829. Note the diagonal pistons that power the single pair of drive wheels.

This invention made Harrison, and his now-partner Andrew McCalla Eastwick, very much in demand as locomotive designers. Thanks to Harrison’s equalizing lever, locomotives could now have 4 leading wheels and 4 driving wheels (4-4-0), a configuration known as the “American type.” By the end of the 19th century, locomotives with as many as ten driving wheels (known as “decapods”) wold be pulling heavily-loaded freight and passenger cars over the Allegheny Mountains and into the burgeoning interior of the United States. A large percentage of the freight carried by the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads was coal, which powered the factories and heated the homes of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and other eastern cities.

Joseph Harrison Jr. Photograph from *Cassier’s Magazine.*

In 1843, the thirty-three year old Joseph Harrison received a summons from the richest and most powerful man on earth: Czar Nicholas I of Russia (r.1825-1855). The czar’s mission for Harrison: to design locomotives suited to carry freight and passengers between St. Petersburg and Moscow, a distance of four hundred miles.

Czar Nicholas could not have had a more different upbringing than Harrison’s hardscrabble one. He had been raised in the splendor of the Winter Palace, surrounded by tutors and servants. Nicholas had been taught from a very young age that the Romanov family’s “Divine Right” to rule came directly from God. Because he was the third son of the erratic Czar Paul I, few thought that Nicholas a chance of becoming the ruler of the largest kingdom on earth. 8.6 million square miles, to be exact. As a result, he was trained as a military engineer and army officer. Yet when his eldest brother Alexander I died childless in 1825 and another brother, Constantine, refused the throne shortly after that, Nicholas had no choice but to accept the crown. After his mother Catherine the Great’s death in 1796, Czar Paul I forbade women from inheriting the throne. Many in Russia, especially reform-minded members of the gentry, feared Nicholas as a reactionary autocrat who sought to undo the liberal reforms of his predecessors.

Czar Nicholas I of Russia. Portrait by Horace Vernet. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Almost immediately after Nicholas became Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, a cadre of military officers refused to swear allegiance to the new monarch. On December 26, 1825, About 3,000 of them assembled in Senate Square, St. Petersburg. Their plea to the czar: the creation of a constitutional monarchy along the lines of Great Britain’s, complete with an elected, representative body that curbed the absolute power of the czar.

Nicholas I was incensed by this challenge to his authority. He ordered his loyal soldiers to open fire on the demonstrators. The leaders of the so-called Decembrists were captured and executed. Others were exiled to Siberia. During the next thirty years, Nicholas attempted to squash all liberal thought from his realm by promulgating a new educational curriculum based on the trinity of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” According to his educational minister Sergey Uvarov:

“It is our common obligation to ensure that the education of the people be conducted, according to Supreme intention of our August Monarch, in the joint spirit of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. I am convinced that every professor and teacher, being permeated by one and the same feeling of devotion to the throne and fatherland, will use all his resources to become a worthy tool for the government and to earn its complete confidence.”

In addition to stepping up censorship and the powers of the secret police, the czar embarked on a series of military adventures that alienated Russia’s allies, most notably Great Britain. He also had the 1,500 room Winter Palace rebuilt following its total destruction by fire in 1837. The czar demanded his official residence be restored to its former grandeur within a year. One observer of the project noted: “During the great frosts 6000 workmen were continually employed; of these a considerable number died daily, but the victims were instantly replaced by other champions brought forward to perish.”

“Fire in the Winter Palace” by Boris Green. Built in the 1760s by the Empress Elizabeth, the Winter Palace was the official residence of the Russian czars, and boasted 1,500 rooms. Nicholas I ordered the mammoth structure rebuilt within a year. Wikipedia Commons.

Prospects for Russia’s millions of serfs–laboring peasants who were bought, sold and mortgaged by wealthy landowners–were bleak, as well.

Harrison may have heard about Czar Nicholas’s repressive governing tactics, but when presented with such a lucrative business opportunity as the Moscow to St. Petersburg railroad, he could not say no. In 1843, Harrison and his young family set sail for Russia. Shortly before doing so, he and Andrew Eastwick sold their firm’s “equalizing lever” patent to Matthias Baldwin, founder of Philadelphia’s Baldwin Locomotive Company, for a tremendous sum of money.

In Russia, Harrison not only showed the czar how to run a railroad, but also would also dream up his own palace back in Philadelphia, one that would have fit right along side the shimmering pastel confections lining the canals of St. Petersburg.

Sources:

Richard Mowbray Hayward, Russia Enters the Railway Age, 1842-1855 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs), 1998, pp.42-47.

Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University), 2001, p. 146.

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Grocery Chains and the Origins of Philadelphia’s Food Deserts

Post author By Ken Finkel
Post date April 3, 2018
5 Comments on Grocery Chains and the Origins of Philadelphia’s Food Deserts

4119 Bairds Court – 4123 Frankford ave. Atlantic and Pacific Grocery Store March 16, 1930. (PhillyHistory.org)

In the 1920s, the average working-class family spent about one-third of its budget on groceries. “Most households spent more to put dinner on the table than for their rent or their mortgage.”

And where “food was hugely expensive, relative to wages” neighborhood grocery stores delivered “only moderate amounts of nutrition” according to Marc Levinson. “Only token stocks of fresh fruits and vegetables” were offered. “Fresh fish and poultry were rarities.”

“The poorest third of American households consumed a sorely inadequate daily intake of vitamins and minerals, because there was little of either in the food that their neighborhood shops had for sale.”

And yet grocery stores were everywhere—on nearly every corner.

Last time we learned that by 1911, Philadelphia had more than 5,700 grocery stores, or one for every fifty-four families. By 1929, a national survey documented exactly how widespread the corner grocery actually was. There were 585,980 of them across the United States, “one for every fifty-one American families.”

Behind their wooden counters and “shelves of food …tended by store managers in dark vests, male store clerks in white aprons, and female clerks wearing long skirts and white blouses” was a world where the corporate managers determined what Americans would have to eat and from whom they purchased it. More and more, this tended to be from one or another of the expanding grocery chain stores.

Not that an independent grocer couldn’t make it. “Careful, intelligent grocers with fair credit can and do make good profits if conditions are at all favorable,” economist E. M. Patterson assured readers in 1911. Butter and eggs comprised “about 36 percent of the grocer’s total sales and provided only 10 per cent profit. Flour yielded 16 percent “but ham, bacon and lard less than 5 per cent.” Thing was, the majority of sales provided “gross profit of only about 9 percent” when 15 to 20 percent was needed to stay afloat.

Northwest Corner – 8th and Moore Streets. Milano’s Groceries, November 25, 1949 (PhillyHistory.org)

Still, an independent grocer, no matter how dedicated or talented, couldn’t manage their way out of a discount situation created by the chains. As A & P’s John A. Hartford would later put it: “We would rather sell 200 pounds of butter at 1 cent profit than 100 pounds at 2 cents profit.” It might be “good for consumers, it was bad for the hundreds of thousands of retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers who needed high food prices in order to make a living.”

According to Levinson, independent grocers “were being trampled in the price and premium wars” led by the big chains.

At the start of the 20^th century, the Great Atlantic & Pacific (later A & P) “opened an average of one store every two weeks and developed a network of more than 5,000 wagon routes for “commissioned salespeople driving Great Atlantic & Pacific horse carts” throughout much of the United States.

This market dominance paved the way for the rise of the supermarket after World War II. “While consumer spending on food rose by half between 1945 and 1948, A&P’s sales doubled and its profits trebled. In 1945, chains accounted for 31 percent of grocery sales. Just two years later, their share was 37 percent.”

“The number of supermarkets nationwide, around two thousand in 1941, hit fifty-six hundred in 1948” and the supermarket controlled “one-quarter of all grocery sales.”

The supermarket “was a national phenomenon.” But more to the detriment of places like Philadelphia, “it was a suburban phenomenon.” The city’s aging neighborhoods, with their failed and failing corner grocery stores, were transformed into food deserts.

[Sources: Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); E. M. Patterson, “The Cost of Distributing Groceries,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 50, (Nov., 1913), pp. 74-82.]