Month: February 2020

In 1923, the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company (PRT) placed an order for 135 double-end passenger cars and 385 single-end passenger cars from the J.G. Brill Company for their extensive web of trolley lines throughout the city.  According to the Electric City Trolley Museum Association, the PRT’s purchase represented the largest single order for surface passenger equipment in American history of that time.  What the Baldwin Locomotive Company was to steam engines, J.G. Brill was to trolley cars. These 5200 series steel trolley cars were a vast improvement over their wooden predecessors. They were equipped with two Brill 39E2 trucks, two General Electric (GE) #275 motors, and General Electric K68 controllers. Despite their modern engineering, they still bore a strong resemblance to the old horse-drawn streetcars of only a few decades earlier. An additional series of updated 5200 trolleys, known as 8000s, arrived a few years later.

The president of the PRT from 1911 to 1929 was a British immigrant named Thomas H. Mitten, who oversaw the vast expansion of Philadelphia’s public transportation system after the Widener family turned its attention to other enterprises. Mitten’s renewal of Philadelphia’s aging Victorian-era trolley fleet might have been part of his desire to improve labor relations: the PRT had long been plagued by strikes and other forms of labor unrest.  To make the PRT workers happier, Mitten organized employee outings to Willow Grove Park, started a formal worker education program (with the goal of improving trolley operations), as well as sick, death, and pension benefits.  Mitten also announced that workers would draw their wages from a pool of 22 percent of gross passenger revenues.  Some heralded the Mitten Plan as a new era of harmony between capital and labor. Others saw it as merely another form of “welfare capitalism.”

On October 1, 1929, Thomas Mitten was found dead in a lake near his summer home in the Poconos.  It remains unclear whether his death was an accident, suicide, or foul play. Regardless, the city had launched an investigation into Mitten’s personal finances.  In 1927, Mitten had purchased a bankrupt bank and resurrected it as the Mitten Bank Securities Corporation. He then gave the PRT workers the opportunity to put their holdings of PRT stock into accounts at MBSC. Mitten then swapped out his workers’ stock holdings for $18 million worth of MBSC stock. Within a few weeks after Mitten’s death, the stock market crashed, and both the MBSC and the PRT spiraled into bankruptcy, destroying the life savings of 26,000 deposit holders.  Financier Albert Greenfield oversaw the reorganization of the PRT, which would finally emerge in 1940 as the Philadelphia Transit Company.

In the late 1930s, the first of the Art Deco “Streamliner” trolleys appeared on Philadelphia’s streets.  However, scores of Thomas Mitten’s updated and overhauled 5200s and 8000s remained in operation well into the 1950s.

James Wolfinger, Running the Rails: Capital and Labor in the Philadelphia Transit Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), pp.95-97, 119.

“Trolley Tracks: Trolley Beginnings,” Philadelphia Trolley Tracks,  http://www.phillytrolley.org/Phila_trolley_history_1924/Phila_trolley_history_1924.html, accessed February 14, 2020.

“The Rise and Fall of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania, December 7, 2012, https://hsp.org/blogs/fondly-pennsylvania/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-philadelphia-rapid-transit-company, accessed February 14, 2020.

“5205 – Historic Background,” Electric Trolley Museum Association, http://www.ectma.org/5205html.html, accessed February 14, 2020.

We were pleased to find an international inventory of equestrian statues. It reaches way back to ancient times. Marcus Aurelius from the year 176 is there (of course) along with Alexander and many other greats from Europe and beyond: Brazil to Vietnam; Mongolia to Somalia; Congo to Uzbekistan.

From the 1600s through the 1700s, the number of equestrians remained surprisingly modest: only 15 or so per century. Then came the 1800s, the golden age of bronze statuary, with more than 250 equestrians. We find the European monarchs (many of all the Louis, Georges, Phillips and Napoleons) as well as American generals from the Revolution through the Civil War.

You might expect horse-borne poses passé in the age of the internal combustion engine. But the 20th century proved a hotbed of hundreds more the world over. There are counter-intuitive, catch-up monuments, like that of the ancient Roman General Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo whose success drove a jealous Emperor Nero to demand his suicide. This statue in The Netherlands dates to 1964.

The 20th century list includes equestrians of King Rama V Chulalongkorn in Bangkok, Thailand, aka King Rama V (1908), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Turkey (1927) and Bassel al-Assad, the older brother of Syria President Bashar al-Assad, who died in a car accident in 1994.

When was the dawn of Philadelphia bronze age? Not when you might expect. As the nation’s capital in the 1790s, a Washington on horseback was proposed to top  off a “Monument designed to perpetuate the Memory of American Liberty” but they didn’t get around to casting the Father of His Country for another 60 years, and about another 100 in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, in the 1850s and 1860s, Andrew Jackson made two appearances (Washington, D. C. and New Orleans) and George Washington made three (Richmond, Washington, D.C. and Boston) before finally landing a Philadelphia appearance in the 1890s.

Worldwide, more than 400 equestrian statues were dedicated between the 1880s and the 1920s. Of those, 135 were American. Twelve are in Philadelphia starting with General John Fulton Reynolds in 1884 and, three years  later, General George Gordon Meade. From 1890 to 1911 the city enjoyed a rush of nine more equestrian bronzes, five more generals, a Medicine Man, Joan of Arc and Remington’s Cowboy.

But seven years before launching this rash of mostly legend-leaning generals, Philadelphia’s very first equestrian, a figure straight out of authentic mythology, was installed on the pediment of Saint George’s Hall, 13th and Arch Streets. On June 6, 1877 a cryptic headline in the Inquirer reads only “St. George.”

“Quite a number of persons were collected yesterday at Thirteenth and Arch streets to witness the unboxing of the statue of ‘St. George and the Dragon,’ which arrived on Monday evening by the ship ‘Hawthorne.’ It was cast in antique bronze by Messrs. Elkington & Co., of London and Birmingham, and is one of the handsomest specimens of art ever brought to this country. It weighs 3400 pounds, and including the horse, is twelve feet in height. Owing to its great size, it was cast directly on the Thames, so as to be ready for shipment….”

Saint George’s building-pedestal lasted only another 26 years and the sculpture followed its owner, the Society of the Sons of St. George, to a new home further west on Arch Street before spending four decades in deep storage. In 1975, the bronze was unveiled a third time in Philadelphia, on Martin Luther King Drive at Black Road in West Fairmount Park.

Reynolds, on the other hand, an early casualty at Gettysburg (he was fatally shot in the back of his neck during the first minutes of the three-day battle) held his ground, a patch of sidewalk at City Hall, for 135 years and counting.

[Disclosure: the author is on the board of directors of the Association for Public Art.]