Month: March 2019

Philanthropic alpha Andrew Carnegie singlehandedly upgraded American attitudes about access to knowledge. He funded the creation of more than 1,600 libraries across the land, more than a century ago, promising a hearty 30 for Philadelphia, as posted previously.

Twenty five were built between 1906 and 1930. It’s quite a collection, these palaces to mass intellect. Individually they made quite an impact. “The feeling you get from these buildings is that you’re somebody,” commented Robert Gangewere, editor of Carnegie Magazine. ”You feel you’re in a temple of learning, a serious place.” Together, they transformed attitudes. After Carnegie, community libraries seemed inevitable, like “a right, not a privilege.”

Despite the persistent belief that Carnegie libraries all look alike, there was great variety among them. As Tom Hine put it in a review of an exhibition of Carnegie’s architectural legacy at the Cooper Hewitt in 1985: “It shows grand Spanish colonial and mission-style buildings in California, little brick Georgian boxes in Wyoming and New Jersey, Romanesque in Maine, arts and crafts in Ohio.” In Philadelphia, noted Hine they “commissioned the best architects in the city to design buildings suitable for each neighborhood.”

Only four of Philadelphia’s 25 Carnegie branches remain unattributed to architects: The Holmesburg/Thomas Holme Branch, The Oak Lane Branch, The Blanche A. Nixon/Cobbs Creek Branch and the Greenwich Branch. We know the 18 architects responsible for the other 21. It’s quite a range of talent, a veritable who’s who of the design profession in the early 20th-century city.

Here are Philly’s 25 Carnegies and their architects (when known) in order of opening:

1 – Walnut Street West/West Philadelphia Branch, 40th & Walnut Street, SE corner, opened June 26, 1906. C. C. Zantzinger, architect.

2 – Frankford Branch, 4634 Frankford Avenue, opened October 2, 1906. Watson & Huckel, architects. No longer extant.

3 – Lillian Marrero/Lehigh Avenue Branch, 6th Street and Lehigh Avenue, opened November 20, 1906. G. W. & W. D. Hewitt architects.

4 – Tacony Branch, 6742 Torresdale Avenue, opened November 27, 1906. Lindley Johnson, architect.

5 – Germantown Branch, 5818 Germantown Avenue, in Vernon Park. Frank Miles Day & Brother, architects.

6 – Holmesburg/Thomas Holme Branch, 7810 Frankford Avenue, opened June 26, 1907.

7 – Spring Garden Branch, Southwest corner 17th and Spring Garden, opened November 18, 1907. Field and Medary, architects. No longer extant.

8 – Chestnut Hill Branch, 8711 Germantown Avenue, opened in 1909. Cope and Stewardson, architects.

9 – The Wissahickon Branch, Manayunk Avenue & Osborn Street, opened in 1909. Whitfield and King, architects. No longer extant.

10 – The Manayunk Branch, Fleming and Webster Streets, opened February, 1909. Benjamin Rush Stevens, architect. No longer a library.

11 – Richmond Branch,  2987 Almond Street, opened in 1910. Edward L. Tilton, architect.

12 – The Oak Lane Branch, 6614 North 12th Street, opened December 7, 1911.

13 –Charles Santore/Southwark Branch, 1108 South 5th Street, opened November 8, 1912. David Knickerbacker Boyd, architect. No longer a library.

14 – Falls of Schuylkill Branch, 3501 Midvale Avenue, opened November 18, 1913. Rankin, Kellogg, and Crane, architects.

15 – Thomas F. Donatucci, Sr./Passyunk Branch,  1935 W. Shunk Street, opened April 14, 1914. John Torrey Windrim, architect.

16 – South Philadelphia Branch, 2407-2417 South Broad Street, opened in 1914.  Charles Louis Borie, Jr., architect.

17 – Paschalville Branch, 6942 Woodland Avenue, opened in 1915. Henry C. Richards, architect.

18 – The Haddington Branch, 446 North 65th Street, opened on December 3, 1915. Albert Kelsey, architect.

19 – The McPherson Square Branch, 601 East Indiana Avenue, opened in 1917. Wilson Eyre, & McIlvain, architects.

20 –The Nicetown-Tioga Branch, 1715 Hunting Park, opened ca. 1917.  John Torrey Windrim, architect. No longer extant.

21 – Logan Branch, 1333 Wagner Avenue, opened November 16, 1919. John Torrey Windrim, architect.

22 – The Kingsessing Branch, 1201 South 51st Street, opened on November 29, 1919. Philip H. Johnson, architect.

23 – Blanch A. Nixon/Cobbs Creek Branch,, 5800 Cobbs Creek Parkway, opened in 1925.

24 – The Greenwich Branch, 4th and Shunk Streets, opened in 1929. No longer extant.

25 – The Wyoming Branch, 231 East Wyoming Avenue, opened October 29, 1930. Philip H. Johnson, architect.

[Sources: Thomas Hine, “Public Libraries were his gifts to the world,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 25, 1985; Stevenson Swanson, “Carnegie Legacy Built on a Need for Knowledge,” Chicago Tribune, November 25, 1985. Free Library of Philadelphia, Digital Collections, Carnegie Libraries (Institutions).]

“I am in the library manufacturing business,” gloated steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who had been making dozens of grants around the country to build new public libraries. From New Hampshire to Texas, Maine to Montana, groundbreakings were planned or underway. New York had gotten the largest chunk of money, more than $5.2 million. Carnegie made that announcement back in 1899.

As 1903 got off to a chilly start, Philadelphians impatiently waited their turn.

But if Philadelphia was to see any of Carnegie’s wealth, City Council and the Mayor would have to increase their spending on libraries, each and every year. Librarian John Thomson went to Washington, D. C. and met with Carnegie, ready to admit that a city of 1.3 million people couldn’t be adequately served by the city’s current fourteen branch libraries, most of which were in rented, re-purposed houses. With the right level of support, however, Thomson would welcome the idea of an expanded, state-of-the-art, urban library system. But he couldn’t commit funds he didn’t have.

“I am Aladdin,” Carnegie told the librarian at the meeting. “You, Mr. Thomson, and the trustees of the Free Library of Philadelphia are the lamp. I rub the lamp… But you do the work. You devote your time, your brains, your health to the task. I merely supply the polish.”

And, as both men knew full well, Philadelphia would be obliged to pay more, much more, for an expanded improved network of libraries. “I do not want to be known for what I give,” Carnegie claimed, “but for what I induce others to give.”

“This is not charity, this is not philanthropy,” he said, “it is the people helping themselves by taxing themselves.”

A few days later, Thomson received the anticipated letter: “After listening to you,” Carnegie wrote, “I beg to say that it would give me great pleasure to do for the city of Philadelphia what I have done for New York, provided always that Philadelphia will do what New York has done for herself.” (Carnegie committed to pay for the construction of what would amount to 67 libraries in New York for a total of more than $5.2 million. The city agreed to cover for the costs for land, books, staffing and ongoing maintenance.)

“You tell me that a complete system of branch libraries for Philadelphia would require thirty of such branches,” Carnegie continued in his letter to Thomson, “and you estimate that twenty to thirty thousand dollars apiece would be sufficient for these, but I do not think this sum would be enough. You should have lecture rooms in these branch libraries and our experience in Pittsburgh is that we have not spent enough upon them. The last branches there cost a great deal most than the first.”

“I think, therefore, it would be well for you to spend fifty thousand dollars apiece for these branch library buildings, and it would give me great pleasure to provide a million and a half of dollars as the same may be needed to erect thirty branch libraries for Philadelphia provided sites be given and the city agree to maintain these branch libraries at a cost of not less than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.”

“The branch libraries are the most popular institutions of all,” observed the steel magnate, “and I think, the most useful. A great central library is, of course, needed. But even before it in usefulness I place the local libraries, which reach the masses of the people.”

Before Carnegie’s offer, library trustees in Philadelphia were actually considering shuttering all but one of their fourteen current branches as “unsuitable.” But with the new offer on the table, they voted to accept it. The decision would be subject to approval by City Council and the mayor.

George McCurdy, president of Common Council, responded cautiously, acknowledging the gift as “handsome,” adding “the city will have to take into consideration the probably expense… it means an outlay of $150,000 a year for maintenance alone, exclusive of our big central library (the plans for which were underway along the Parkway). If the city is obliged to buy a score or more of sites, that also means a big outlay, and we will have to consider the propriety of expending so large a sum at this time.”

McCurdy hoped Carnegie’s “magnanimous offer” might “stimulate some of our own wealthy citizens to make similar gifts, either for a central library or for the purchase of sites. We have men here who could duplicate the gift, and should do it from a spirit of civic pride.” Discussions dragged on for a year before the city officially accepted Carnegie’s offer.

Among the earliest branch designed, bid and built was the “Grecian style” Lehigh Avenue Branch (now the Lillian Marrero Library) designed by architects G. W. & W. D. Hewitt. “When new [it] was one of the biggest libraries in the state,” wrote Inquirer’s Thomas Hine in 1985, “a classical building of immense pretension and grandeur standing on its own little Parnassus in the heart of the industrial city.”

“The cornerstone of the first Carnegie Library of the chain to be erected in this city was laid at Sixth and Lehigh avenue” the afternoon of April 10, 1905. The complete building would be outfitted with granite steps, Corinthian columns and be made of either Indiana limestone or Pennsylvania white marble. Beneath a giant reading room, would be a nearly equally large auditorium. The anticipated cost—about $100,000—was twice what Carnegie originally anticipated, and as much as five times what Thomson originally imagined for a typical branch.

That same year, the West Philadelphia Branch in the French Renaissance style by C.C. Zantzinger also opened. So did the Tacony Branch, designed by Lindley Johnson. Over time, twenty-two more, from Passyunk to Manayink, Cobbs Creek to Kingsessing would follow, joining the 1,689 libraries Carnegie leveraged into existence throughout the United States. “In 30 years,” wrote Hine, Carnegie “spent $56,162,662 and single-handedly increased the number of American public libraries four-fold.”

Carnegie’s grant to Philadelphia was his second largest library grant ever.

[Sources: In The Philadelphia Inquirer – “Carnegie Will Endow Thirty Free Libraries,” January 7, 1903; “Mr. Carnegie’s Gift to Philadelphia,” (Editorial) January 7, 1903; “Carnegie Gift to Camden; Opening at Washington,” January 8, 1903; “Councils Must Decide on the Carnegie Offer,” January 8, 1903; “Library Trustees Will Meet Today,” January 9, 1903; “Trustees To Accept Mr. Carnegie’s Gift,” January 10, 1903; “Library Bill Signed, January 12, 1904; “Will Bid Upon Two Carnegie Branches,” October 1, 1904: “Corner Stone for Carnegie Library,” April 11, 1905; “To Dedicate New Carnegie Library – Lehigh Avenue Branch,” November 18, 1906 and Thomas Hine, “Public Libraries Were his Gifts to the World,” July 25, 1985. Also, Theodore Wesley Koch, A Book of Carnegie Libraries. (H.W. Wilson company, 1917).]

“The academy never stood apart from American slavery,” argues Craig Steven Wilder in his book Ebony and Ivy. “In fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”

“The American college is largely the story of the rise of the slave economy in the Atlantic world,” Wilder noted.

Producers of the the podcast Shackled Legacy: Universities and the Slave Trade agree.“Profits from slavery and related industries helped fund some of the most prestigious schools in the Northeast, including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Yale.” Wealth from “slavery built several schools in the North. And in many southern states enslaved people built college campuses and served faculty and students.”

A few years ago, Georgetown University In Washington, D.C. admitted slavery’s role in their founding. Educators “orchestrated the sale of 272 men, women and children for $115,000 – $3.3 million in today’s dollars – to pay off the school’s debts.”

At first, the University of Pennsylvania denied “any direct involvement between Penn and the slave trade.” Then a group of students and faculty calling themselves The Penn Slavery Project released revealing research. “Seventy-five of the school’s early trustees, including over twenty of the founding trustees” were either owners of slaves or had financial ties to the slave trade.

The more we look, the more we see: in 18^th and 19^th-century America, education, philanthropy and the slave trade were woven into a massive tangle of moral compromise that generally was kept secret.

But not always.  In one prominent Philadelphia case, not only did folks know it, you might say they even owned it.

Consider the Institute for Colored Youth (later Cheney University) the nation’s earliest institution of higher learning for African Americans, founded in 1837 and still standing at 915 Bainbridge Street.  The ICY was made possible with funds from Richard Humphreys, a Caucasian silversmith who left a $10,000 bequest (more than $260,000 in today’s dollars) to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in order to establish a school for “…instructing the descendants of the African Race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanical arts and trades and in Agriculture…in order to prepare and fit and qualify them to act as teachers in such of those branches of useful business…”

Thing was, Humphreys’ fortune originated in the coffee and sugar plantations of Tortola, the Caribbean Island where his parents, members of the Society of Friends, held and benefited from the labor of hundreds of enslaved Africans. At the time of Humphreys’ birth in 1750, his parents were among about 100 British colonists on the island who owned 10,000 Africans brought there to toil and die. The Quakers on Tortola were said to be “self-conscious about their plantations being cultivated by slave labor.” But the Humphreys continued to hold slaves, and accumulate wealth, so long as they lived on the Island.

When Octavius V. Catto (himself an ICY alum) delivered a commencement address more than a year after the Emancipation Proclamation, he acknowledged Humphreys and the Quakers for their “proverbial sympathy and charity for the oppressed,” and their “consistent opposition to ignorance, intemperance, war, and slavery.” This, said Catto, made Humphreys’ name “inseparable from our heartfelt gratitude and respect.” Instead of focusing on the source of the funds, Catto turned his listeners’ attention to the overwhelming need for education of the formerly enslaved, “those millions of human beings now scattered through the Southern country…”

Education, declared Catto, would be their continued path “to come forth into the sunlight of Freedom . . .”

[Sources: Octavius V. Catto,”An Address Delivered at Concert Hall on the Occasion of the Twelfth Annual Commencement of the Institute for Colored Youth,” May 10th, 1864, ExplorePaHistory.com; “Richard Humphreys (1750-1832)” in Philadelphia, Three Centuries of American Art (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976), pp. 128-132; Jennifer Schuessler, “Dirty Antebellum Secrets in Ivory Towers,” The New York Times, October 18, 2013; Sheila Simmons, “UPenn Claims No Traces of Slavery in its DNA,” The Philadelphia Tribune, September 9, 2016; “Shackled Legacy: Universities and the Slave Trade,” American Public Media podcast, September 4, 2017; Madeleine Ngo, “Penn has acknowledged its ties to slavery, but student researchers say their work is far from over,” The Daily Pennsylvanian, August 24, 2018.]