Author: Christopher Dougherty

From Shipways to Runways: the Transformation of Hog Island, Part Two

Post author By Christopher Dougherty
Post date November 25, 2008

Whether it was the poor conditions of the site or a tough winter or contractors’ graft, preparatory construction began to drag on interminably, leading Congress to investigate the goings on at Hog Island. By February of 1918, seven months after the issuance of Hog Island’s contract, a New York Times reporter touring the site was surprised to hear no sound of rivets on steel and only 12 of the planned 50 shipways completed.^[1] The Shipping Board’s chief constructor had investigated the site a month earlier and cynically announced that it would be a wonder if the yard produced a ship “at all” in 1918. Compounding the frustration was the mounting cost of doing nearly anything on Hog Island, mainly the result of the cost-plus-profit contract system that placed expediency before oversight. Initially, the American International Corporation estimated the cost of the yard at $35,000,000. By the time the first ship came off the ways on December 3, 1918—almost a month after the Armistice—the cost of constructing the site had ballooned to $66 million. In their defense, the officers of the American International Corporation began to take a long view of the utility of the site. Perhaps not of great service to the war effort, Hog Island would be a boon to Philadelphia. At a meeting of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, the chairman of the American International Shipbuilding Corporation promised postwar employment for 100,000 Philadelphians. Hog Island, he argued, would make Philadelphia the greatest shipbuilding center in the world.^[2]

Despite the rancor surrounding the yard’s construction and operation, Hog Island only existed because of the backbreaking labor of nearly 30,000 workers laboring throughout the cold winter of 1917-1918. Before the canteens and the YMCA, there were rough accommodations and hardship. Steam injections softened the frozen ground before workers could excavate for sewer lines. Other workers waded into the cold Delaware to dig out the channels for the shipways. Simultaneous to the attention-grabbing headlines of mismanagement and corporate greed was the untold story of a unique identity forming among the “Hoggies”. They worked among their friends—blacks, Italians, Polish, Irish, and Germans—all under the glaring eyes of the foreman, the engineer, and the military policeman. And though they may have lived in barracks near where they worked, they brought their traditions, faith, and foods such as the bulky fortifying sandwich that took on the island’s name. On December 23, 1918, the boys band from St. Francis Xavier-Holy Name parishes played for a flag raising in the bitter cold. During their down time, the Hog Islanders squared off on the gridiron against the other military installations up and down the river. Much like the soldiers in the field, the “Hoggies” who worked the shipways during the war were forced to coexist and cooperate, drawing strength from the uniqueness of their difficult work.^[3]

Although massive preparation time meant that the $66 million Hog Island Yard failed to produce a single ship during wartime, the yard continued its contract assembling 122 ships from prefabricated parts. Most of these sturdy utilitarian Hog Islanders saw action in World War II but suffered high losses. Despite assurances that Hog Island would turn Philadelphia into the Clyde of America, the shipways went silent in 1921 and the timbering and piers beginning to rot, vegetation growing up through the corduroy roads. In 1925, the City purchased land near Hog Island for a municipal airfield to handle the growing traffic in passenger planes. Eyeing the derelict Hog Island property to the south with its rail lines and shipways still intact, members of the Philadelphia Business Progress Committee began advocating for an air-marine-rail terminal on the site of the old shipyard. In 1930, the City paid $3 million for the flat, well-prepared Hog Island site. As the airport expanded, its runways devoured the entire Hog Island shipyard—one monstrous technological machine consuming another.

[1] “Senate Committee to Go to Hog Island, Piez Shows Big Financial Affiliations of the Corporation’s Directors,” The New York Times, 16 February 1918.

[2] James J. Martin, “The Saga of Hog Island, 1917-1920: The Story of the First Great War Boondoggle,” The Saga of Hog Island: And Other Essays in Inconvenient History (Colorado Springs, Co: Ralph Myles, 1977). http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/hogisle.shtml

[3] “Hog Island,” Philadelphia Record Photograph Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Although there are contrary claims, linguist William Labov has demonstrated that the lexical root of the word “hoagie” was “hog-“ or “hogg” after World War I. See William Labov, “Pursuing the Cascade Model,” 25 November 2002, http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/Papers/PCM.html. This is also borne out in Eames, Edwin and Howard Robboy. 1967. “The sociocultural context of an American dietary item.” The Cornell Journal of Social Relations 2:63-75, p. 4.

Historic Sites

From Shipways to Runways: the Transformation of Hog Island, Part One

Post author By Christopher Dougherty
Post date November 25, 2008

Soon after America declared war on Germany in April 1917, songwriter George M. Cohan released his jaunty, rousing call to arms “Over There”. But despite the popular fervor to take the fight to Europe, the U.S. did not possess the merchant fleet to make war “over there.” With only 430 cargo and passenger ships in its merchant marine, America relied on foreign ships for nearly 90 percent of its overseas trade.^[1] Successful German U-boat campaigns in the early months of the war exacerbated the shortage.

With a meager merchant fleet unprepared to serve its troops overseas, the Wilson administration turned to the private sector for assistance. Eventually the government would run 132 shipyards spending over $200 million on ship construction. But no yard was more ambitious and controversial than Hog Island, where the Philadelphia International Airport is presently located. On 31 July 1917, under the aegis of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the government lavished a multimillion dollar contract on a nebulous conglomerate, the American International Corporation, to construct a massive shipyard on boggy land a company subsidiary had advantageously purchased two months earlier. Paying twenty times the assessed value for the land, the American International Shipbuilding Corporation set its dredges to work. Ceaselessly throughout the summer and fall of 1917, the dredges bolstered the flat island with millions of tons of Delaware River spoil.^[2]

From the perspective of the popular press, the process of turning the 860-acre tract “where formerly the song of the mosquito was the only sound to greet the ear of the surveyor or fisherman” into a teeming military industrial complex inspired the same pride in America as Cohan’s martial ditty. National Geographic called Hog Island a “wonderful industrial center” in September 1918. The Historical Outlook, a magazine for teachers published in Philadelphia noted where once was “a low lying unsanitary swamp—merely a strip of wasteland” stood forth the next summer “the greatest shipyard in the world.” In many ways, Hog Island was a projection of early 20^th century American idealism—capital, technology, and scientific management in the service of progress.

But in other ways, Hog Island was too big for its own good. The contractual obligation to supply “at least” 200 ships meant massive expenditures for site preparation and infrastructure were needed. Writers were fond of hyperbolic comparisons of the yard’s infrastructure to major American cities. Hog Island’s electrical power plant was sufficient to light the combined needs of Albany, NY and Richmond, VA. Its water system could deliver twice the capacity of the city of Atlanta. Its sewer system was equal to that of Minneapolis. With its 70 miles of rail lines sustaining twenty locomotives and 465 freight cars, 250 buildings, 3,000,000 feet of underground wiring, a hospital, trade school, 12 canteens and restaurants, hotel, 5 mess halls, and telephone traffic equal to a town of 140,000, comparisons to a small city were apt.^[3]

[1] “Ugly Ducklings,” Time, 13 January 1941.

[3] Ralph A. Graves, “Ships for the Seven Seas: The story of America’s Maritime Needs, Her Capabilities, and Her Achievements,” The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, September, 1918.

“A Few Facts About Hog Island: the Greatest Shipyard in the World,” the American International Shipbuilding Corporation, 5 August 1918.

Urban Planning

Creativity in Cast Iron: Strickland Kneass’s Chestnut Street Bridge

Post author By Christopher Dougherty
Post date February 21, 2008

For Strickland Kneass (1821-1884) engineering was not about letting tradition dictate uninspired designs nor did the profession thrive in clannish fiefdoms of expertise. Trained in the era before formal engineering curricula, Kneass saw engineering as an organic profession whose rules, though important, were always secondary to imaginative solutions. In his nearly half century of work in the private sector and his seventeen years of service to the City of Philadelphia as Chief Engineer and Surveyor, as a sewer and drain expert, as a bridge builder, and as Fairmount Park Commissioner, Kneass distinguished himself as a polymath designer and organizer who deftly navigated between the shoals of tradition and innovation.

The remains of Kneass’s boldest design, a bridge whose scale and use of cast iron made it singular in the United States and throughout the world, stands ignored by hundreds of thousands of motorists, pedestrians, and joggers who pass it. A vestige of his Chestnut Street Bridge (1861-66): the eastern granite abutment and the central pier, though ignobly incorporated into the current highway overpass, still testifies to the creativity and vision of one of the city’s most talented builders.

The son of a Philadelphia engraver, Kneass attended the Rensselaer Institute, later Polytechnic Institute, when that institution began developing its own idiosyncratic approach to training civil engineers. For a young Kneass attending the Troy, NY school in the late 1830s, the curriculum—which still included geology, law, Biblical history, and surveying—was far from a dry inculcation of mathematical formulae. Despite a rigorous schedule that roused students at dawn, “there was considerable flexibility, informality, and probably even laxity in the actual operation” of the school. Students were taught to work through problems, develop their own conclusions, and report on their findings during examinations. A Rensselaer engineer, an advertisement touted, “are taught all these things (23 subjects of civil engineering) and many others, with the appropriate instruments in their hand, accompanied by short lectures of their own.”

Graduating in 1839 at the age of 18 with full honors, Kneass reaped the benefits of this diverse technological education and soon lived up to the reputation of the multifaceted Rensselaer engineer. In 1847 he assisted the Pennsylvania Railroad in laying out a portion of their Harrisburg to Pittsburgh segment. He also worked as a draftsman at the Naval Bureau of Engineering and as a topographer for the British Commission mapping the U.S.-Canadian border. Later, in 1869, he assisted James Worrall in surveying the famous 12 Mile Arc border between Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

In 1855, Kneass resigned as chief engineer for the North Pennsylvania Railroad to become Chief Engineer and Surveyor of the City of Philadelphia. He found the bureaucracy of the recently-consolidated city in shambles. He soon concentrated all the operations of the seven survey districts and standardized grade plans, weights and measures, and designs for sewerage. In 1865 he organized a Registry Bureau as the central repository for property data and building plans. All the while he made recommendations for the improvement of the city’s sewer and storm water systems.

Undoubtedly, Kneass stayed abreast of the new developments in bridge construction; he knew of popular ornamentation then in vogue in Europe and construction management methods. He probably followed the reorganization of his alma mater on the pattern of the progressive French Ecole Polytechnique. He certainly knew of the iron bridge at Colebrookdale, England over the Severn River—the often-reproduced icon of the Industrial Revolution built in 1791. Perhaps closer to home, he knew of William Strickland’s use of iron members at the Chestnut Street Theater. And he may have recalled the work of two innovative Army engineers at Dunlap’s Creek in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. There, Captain Richard Delafield and Lieutenant George W. Cass constructed the country’s first metal arch bridge in 1836 as part of the Cumberland Road.

The success of these projects, and a willingness to try new materials, may have influenced Kneass’s design for the Chestnut Street Bridge in 1857 which included an unprecedented amount of cast iron. Though it is unclear who supplied the cast iron, two features made iron attractive. One was the adaptability of the casting process. Artistically and practically, cast iron offered designers great flexibility. Bridges made of a multitude of smaller, mass-produced components could be assembled easier and were inherently safer. This, coupled with the proximity of Philadelphia’s cast iron suppliers, led Kneass to build a bridge around two sweeping 184’ arches using six cast iron ribs. Yet Kneass was no bare functionalist and his line and watercolor drawings abound with Gothic arches in stone and iron. And though Kneass was applying an untested material to a major arterial bridge, he still followed an important standard practice: overbuilding the bridge to ensure safety redundancy. Each rib, he estimated, could sustain a transient load of 486,000 lbs. Anticipating increasing traffic, Kneass wanted wider approaches—a detail the shortsighted city councils wrong-headedly vetoed as the bridge had to be widened in 1911.

Construction began in 1861 and by 1864 the center pier was completed as evidenced by the date “1864” etched into the stone shield on the central pier’s southern side. Two years later the bridge opened to the public at a cost of $500,000. For most of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the bridge remained a point of pride for American civil engineers. “As far as known, with the exception of the Chestnut-street bridge, Philadelphia,” wrote engineer Malverd Abijah Howe in 1897, “there are no cast-iron arch bridges of any magnitude in the United States.” Despite its apparent stolidity Strickland Kneass’s Chestnut Street Bridge did not last a century and it was demolished in 1958, perhaps because its massive western abutment sat right in the path of the Schuylkill Expressway.

Works Cited:

Gilchrist, Agnes. “Chestnut Street Bridge,” Historic American Engineering Survey, (Washington: National Park Service, 1958), 2.

Graff, Frederic. Obituary Notice of Strickland Kneass, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 21, No. 115. (Apr., 1884), pp. 451-455.

Howe, Malverd A. A Treatise On Arches: Designed for the Use of Engineers and Students in Technical Schools (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1897), xvii.

Rezneck, Samuel. An Education for a Technological Society: A Sesquicentennial History of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy: RPI, 1968).

Urban Planning

The Olmsted Brothers’ Artificial Nature: South Philadelphia’s League Island (F.D.R) Park

Post author By Christopher Dougherty
Post date November 19, 2007

When author Christopher Morley sauntered around “the Neck” one hot summer evening in the early 20th century, to his surprise he found Philadelphians living an almost rural existence amid the marshes, ash heaps and junk yards. But Morley saw that the boggy land where the Delaware met the Schuylkill – “the canal country of South Philadelphia” – held great promise. He longed to see the “wonderful Dutch meadows of the Neck reclaimed into one of the world’s loveliest riverside parks.”

Perhaps Morley knew of the city’s plan for a South Philadelphia park -perhaps he did not- but as early as 1899 the New York Times was announcing with subtle hauteur that “the winning plan for the new League Island Park at Philadelphia was drawn by a New Yorker, Samuel Parsons Jr.” But to the Times, the conditions of the site looked bleak: “the territory where it is proposed to lay out this park consists of 300 acres of low-lying land on the Delaware River…. Irrigation ditches, a sluggish, winding stream, and a small amount of what may be termed upland are all that at present represent the park.”

Though city planners placed Parsons’s design on its 1904 Plan of Park and Parkway Improvements in South Philadelphia and began laying out his design, by 1910 work had ground to a halt. Then in 1912, the city’s director of public works, Morris Cooke, asked the preeminent landscape architecture firm, Olmsted Brothers, to produce designs for League Island Park, Oregon (Marconi) Plaza and the stretch of Broad Street connecting the two parks known as the Southern Boulevard. The Olmsted firm, helmed by the son and stepson of noted landscape architecture pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted, produced two plans that worked with the low lying tidal conditions of League Island’s site. An earlier Olmsted plan borrowed Parson’s design feature of a large plaza in the center of the park along Broad Street. Later plans omitted this formal plaza. But all three designs were not short on water.

The final Olmsted plan situated Meadow Lake and Edgewood Lake inside a ring of carefully segregated lawns, meadows, and “playsteads”. While the area east of Broad Street was designed for active recreation, the western portion was to be a “landscape park.” Incorporating the design features developed by their father, the Olmsted Brothers ran curvilinear paths throughout the complex of open space and water. Just like their father’s Central and Prospect Parks in New York, a combination of altered topography and tree screens effectively walled off the city. The Olmsteds also sought to remake portions of Parson’s design: they adjusted the drives, simplified the drainage system, and made features of the park more “natural”. Thus, lawns and marsh plantings near the lakes replaced severe concrete retaining walls. (Note: some of the photos included in this essay show the retaining wall prior to demolition.) The whole effect was to create a series of well-structured, picturesque natural views and to segregate recreation spaces according to their function.

Beneath the surface, a sophisticated drainage system connected the lakes to the alluvial waters of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. This connection allowed them to “breathe” or expand and contract depending on the tides. Portions of Hollander Creek, the “sluggish, winding stream,” was banished to a viaduct and connected to the rivers.

Although the Olmsteds considered their design inalterable, League Island Park underwent substantial modifications almost as soon as it was completed in 1921. New structures were added for the Sesqui-Centennial of 1926 and the original boathouse on Edgewood Lake was converted into a Russian Tea House. The John Morton Memorial Building, now known as the American Swedish Historical Museum was added north of Edgewood Lake in 1926. Other portions of the Olmsted design have been irrevocably obliterated. The decision to construct a municipal stadium on the recreation space land to the east of Broad Street ensured that this part of the park would forever be a stadium complex. A golf course, added in 1940 in response to changing recreational tastes, removed the western portion of the Park. By the late 1940s, even the Park’s name had changed to honor America’s Depression-era and wartime leader. And although the encroachment of I-95 appears the most grievous assault on the park; its looming presence has given an unmistakable ambiance to Philadelphia’s world-class FDR skate park.

While recreational tastes may change, officials at the Fairmount Park Commission have seen the practical wisdom and natural simplicity of the Olmsteds’ plan. When tidal waters began to seep up through the bottom of FDR’s large concrete pool made from Meadow Lake, park landscape architects converted the pool into a natural marshland.

References:

Morley, Christopher. Travels in Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: David McKay Company, 1920), 65.

Heilprin, Angelo. Town Geology: The Lesson of the Philadelphia Rocks, (Philadelphia: Academy of Natural Sciences, 1885), 125.

“Proposed League Island Park at Philadelphia,” The New York Times, 2 April 1899.

“League Island Park (F.D.R. Park) Historic District Building Inventory” (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Historical Commission, 2001), 1-6.

Fairmount Park Commission Archives.

Urban Planning

The Schuylkill Expressway: Modern Highway or "Worst Mistake"?

Post author By Christopher Dougherty
Post date October 18, 2007

Though he later regretted his steadfast support for the intrusive road, mayor Richardson Dilworth saw the construction of the Schuylkill Expressway as a necessary component of the region’s postwar transportation overhaul. To Dilworth and other transit planners, the specter of gridlocked colonial streets loomed large. As early as 1931, a regional planner had derided Philadelphia’s lack of interest in the public infrastructure, calling the city a “growing child in late adolescence,” or “an ailing adult . . . rotting at the core.” With the Depression and World War II intervening, Philadelphia’s situation was dire. In 1955, the Urban Transportation and Traffic Board, an organ created by mayor Joseph Clark to better coordinate transit infrastructure, advised the creation of an 11-county transportation authority with wide control over mass transit, parking, traffic control, buses, and transportation in the air and on water. And pro-growth citizen groups like the Greater Philadelphia Movement and the Philadelphia Citizens’ Council on City Planning joined the official planners in support of a regional network of modern multi-lane limited access freeways. For the businessmen who comprised these organizations, an integrated transit and highway system would assure that center city would remain the healthy cultural and commercial core of the region. Richardson Dilworth understood what was at stake. In an editorial in the New York Herald Tribune, Dilworth portrayed the economic health of a central business district as a general barometer of regional health. “This center city,” he wrote in 1958, “must serve as an effective capital to its area by providing the headquarters for industry, business, banking, hotels, merchandising, medicine, entertainment and culture.”

As early as the 1930s, planners had dreamed of a woodsy, genteel parkway through the Schuylkill River Valley that would connect the then-state park at Valley Forge with Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. The parkway, limited only to automobiles, would offer an aesthetically-controlled and measured movement through the natural landscape. Yet this vision of a sedate, visually appealing drive fell to the exigencies of regional planning and traffic engineering. By 1947-48, the design favored by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission sought to interface with the state’s extension of the Turnpike at King of Prussia. To the delight of civic boosters, the City Planning Commission reported in 1950 that the state had “recognized that inter-regional highways connecting industrial and consumer centers can be fully effective in building up the economic vitality of the state.” Far from a leisurely parkway, the city’s new highways were designed to be people movers and catalysts for growth.

Although highway construction enjoyed popular support in the postwar years, topographic conditions, funding problems, and public resistance combined to make the Schuylkill Expressway one of the nation’s most idiosyncratic highways. Engineers cast the concrete ribbon through a landscape beset by natural and man-made obstacles, designing solutions that were unthinkable after standards set by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. Engineer Bill Allen’s narrow stretch under 30th Street Station, the left-hand South Street Exit, and scant acceleration lanes are engineering curiosities which tell of the difficulty of building an urban highway on marginal space. The monumental traffic jams that formed at City Line Avenue when the first stretch of road was completed in 1949 foretold an ominous future. Clearly, the road was so attractive that “expressway” was a misnomer.

By the time the last stretch opened in 1959, Dilworth could boast of a new urban highway, the Roosevelt Expressway, and an embryonic mass transportation authority. But he could not forgive the road’s blunt incursion into Fairmount Park. Truly, Fairmount Park had been irreparably changed. Gustine Lake, a large public swimming hole in East Park near Ridge Avenue and City Line Avenue Bridge had been filled in for the aptly named “Gustine Lake Interchange.” Greenland Mansion in Fairmount Park stood right in the path of the Expressway – it would have sat right where the Greenland Road bridge now stands. Much sculpture was displaced and the large impervious surfaces of the road now affect the park’s watersheds. And the ever present drone of traffic interrupts the stillness. Allowing the road to bisect West Park was “the worst mistake in my Administration,” Dilworth later lamented.

References:

Bauman, John F., “Expressways, Public Housing and Renewal: A Blueprint for Postwar Philadelphia, 1945-1960,” Pennsylvania History, Volume 57, Number 1, January 1990.
Clark Jr., Joseph S. and Dennis J. Clark, “Rally and Relapse, 1946-1968,” Philadelphia: A 300-Year History. Russell F. Weigley, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 695-698.
Conn, Steven. Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 176-178.
http://www.phillyroads.com/roads/schuylkill/ (Accessed October 17, 2007).

Historic Sites

The Department of Docks, Wharfs and Ferries: Making Philadelphia’s Modern Waterfront

Post author By Christopher Dougherty
Post date September 10, 2007

Arguably Philadelphia’s most progressive mayor of the early 20th century, Rudolph Blankenburg (1912-1916) the “Old Dutch Cleanser” – sought to reform and modernize many of the city’s graft-ridden and inefficient departments. Blankenburg, realizing that Philadelphia was locked in competition with New York, Boston and Baltimore for international maritime trade, spurred the recently created Department of Docks, Wharves, and Ferries to better coordinate the city’s port facilities. As one port official put it in 1912, “New York is one of the best ports to enter, but one of the most expensive to get through.” If Philadelphia was to compete with a more advantageously situated New York, its port infrastructure had to allow quicker and easier movement of ships and cargo.

At the head of the Department, Blankenburg placed George W. Norris – a talented banker and lawyer who worked closely with the energetic reformer and technocrat Morris Cooke, the director of public works. In a move that pleased both the public and the city’s shipping and transportation interests, Cooke and Norris secured an agreement barring grade railroad crossings in South Philadelphia in 1913. From his office at the Bourse, Norris’ oversaw the collection of rents from pier tenants, regulated construction of piers and the movement of ships, and planned large-scale expansions to the city’s port. Norris’ most ambitious project, the creation of the Moyamensing and Southwark piers, would greatly expand the city’s ability to receive ships and their cargo. The “finger piers” were to extend down the Delaware waterfront to the Navy Yard like cilia, making Philadelphia the undisputed “Port of Pennsylvania.” Though the “Port of Pennsylvania” scheme was never fully realized, Philadelphia had four times the amount of municipal docks when Norris left office. The prolific engineer George S. Webster succeeded Norris as director of the Department and continued to build modern piers along the north Delaware waterfront.

The municipal piers constructed by the Department in the late 1910s-20s were sophisticated industrial machines designed to speed the movement of cargo from one mode of transportation to another. Railroad tracks ran laterally through the long buildings which also served as warehouses. Cranes and flat loading bays allowed easy movement of cargo onto waiting boxcars and all piers were connected to the Philadelphia Belt Line Railroad which ran down Delaware Ave. The piers’ reinforced concrete neoclassical facades suggested monumentality and authority while seeking to soften the gruffness of the rough commercial waterfront. The Department also built recreation piers such as municipal pier No. 57 at Penn Treaty Park in 1919.

Though finger piers became obsolete after World War II with the advent of larger ships and containerization, the presence of several municipal piers along the Delaware reminds us of the ambition and foresight of the Department of Wharves, Docks and Ferries in the early 20th century.

References:

Lloyd M. Abernathy “Progressivism, 1905-1919,” Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, Russell F. Weigley, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 546-554.

Frank H. Taylor and Wilfred H. Schoff, The Port and City of Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: International Congress of Navigation, 1912) http://books.google.com/books?id=BR291mAr4ooC&pg=PA44#PPA1,M2 Accessed 7 September 2007.

Donald W. Disbrow “Reform in Philadelphia Under Mayor Blankenburg, 1912-1916,” Pennsylvania History 27 (October 1960), 379-396.