Author: Ken Finkel

When it comes to talking about urban change, words serve their purpose, until they are considered inadequate, wrong or just go out of style. “Slum” and “urban renewal” for instance. Usage of these terms peaked in the second half of the 1960s, but then faded. Could it be we’re beginning to see a similar downturn for “gentrification”?

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined “gentrification” in 1964. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts,” she wrote of a downtrodden district in London, “it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” Glass’s word focuses on the shifting “social character” of communities—poor neighborhoods becoming upscale destinations.

A year before Glass introduced the term, Nathaniel Burt wryly noted in Philadelphia Gentleman: “Remodeling old houses is…one of Old Philadelphia’s favorite indoor sports, and to be able to remodel and consciously serve the cause of civic revival all at once has done to the heads of the upper classes like champagne.” Burt understood “the Renaissance of Society Hill” was “just one piece of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle” with the potential “to transform the city completely.” But a one-word shorthand for that complex puzzle? Not for Burt.

City planner Edmund Bacon preferred “renewal” in his 1962 film, Form, Design and the City. But, according to Denise Scott Brown, Bacon put too much emphasis on retailing and on “a certain kind of ‘center city living’ as expressed by Society Hill … its coffee bars, tree lined streets, cobbled squares.” Such amenities appealed more to “sophisticated intellectuals and professionals” than to anyone else. Anyway, Scott Brown concluded, they are “only part of the story.”

But the cat was soon out of the bag. The popular press and the public came to love the idea of gentrification. In October 1977, the Inquirer introduced the word on page one: “Gentrification is an imposing word for a process familiar to all Philadelphians,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer, “especially to those who lived 20 years ago in Society Hill, or 10 years ago near the art museum or more recently and Queen Village…  A neighborhood close to Center City, filled with poorer residents, mostly renters, is suddenly “discovered” by middle-class people who rush in to buy and renovate the houses in the area. The run-down neighborhood suddenly becomes attractive. Higher-priced shops and restaurants open. The sidewalks, gardens, curbs, even the streets themselves are better tended. And the poor? Well, the poor go elsewhere.”

In the year following Cramer’s story, “gentrification” appeared five times in the Inquirer and the Daily News. In 1979 and 1980 it was used 25 times. Between 1981 and 1990, “gentrification” had become a staple of urban discourse, appearing more than 500 times. Just “as Ruth Glass intended,” noted social scientists, gentrification “simply yet very powerfully” captured “class inequalities and injustices”—even if some preferred the term for the wrong reasons. It implied the existence of a privileged “gentry” bored by their suburban experiment, willing to return to the city for less foliage, but a richer quality of life. Popular opinion assumed gentrification would, in time, significantly transform the entire city.

The term gained credibility and legitimacy as an accepted shorthand for the cycle of disinvestment, decline, reinvestment and revival. Public and planners came to believe that gentrification’s cycles of disinvestment and reinvestment were desirable and sustainable—a viable model for urban change.

As evidence, advocates presented the soaring values of Society Hill real estate, which rose nearly 250 percent during the 1960s alone. Discussions quickly turned to “what would become the next Society Hill”? Queen Village? Fairmount? Northern Liberties? But those were only three neighborhoods in a city with scores more, most lacking proximity to Center City.

Critics saw gentrification as “pompous and irrelevant,” an “anti-vernacular” “Trojan horse for post-industrial sustainability.” Neil Smith’s close look at data on the newcomers to Society Hill in the 1960s revealed that the vast majority were not the suburban “gentry” being re-urbanized, but folks from other city neighborhoods. Only 14% came from suburbia. Smith concluded that “the so-called urban renaissance has been stimulated more by economic than cultural forces.” When it came to making a “decision to rehabilitate an inner city structure, one consumer preference tends to stand out above the others—the preference for profit.”

How had this flawed shorthand made its way into the heart of the urban lexicon? In “Walking Backwards to the Future,” researchers suggested that perhaps the original, heady promise of a dual upgrade in class and investment was the result of “too many glasses of chardonnay … shared between researcher and gentrifier.”

Today, more and more, studies discussing gentrification include commentary suggesting counter-intuitive, even contradictory findings suggesting that it is not the defining experience in Philadelphia, or most American cities. One recent Pew study found that only 15 of Philadelphia’s 372 residential census tracts gentrified from 2000 to 2014, and that these tracts tended to be contiguous with, or near, Center City. Meanwhile, “more than 10 times that many census tracts—164 in all—experienced statistically significant drops in median household income” during the same years.

In other words, after more than half a century, “gentrification” may finally be fading as the reliable, accurate and useful description for urban change. Instead, we should be examining the more complicated “broad array of influences” and those, for the time being, are averse to shorthand.

[Sources include: Denise Scott Brown, Review of Form, Design, and the City, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 28:4, 1962; Richard Ben Cramer, “Back to the City, London Style,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 9, 1977; Susan Mayhew, A Dictionary of Geography, (Oxford University Press; 5th ed.2015); Dylan Gottlieb, “Gentrification,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, (Rutgers, 2014); Neil Smith, “Gentrification,” The Encyclopedia of Housing (Willem van Vliet ed., 1998); Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People,” in The Gentrification Debates: A Reader (Routledge, 2013); Tim Butler and Chris Hamnett, “Walking Backwards to the Future—Waking Up to Class and Gentrification in London,” Urban Policy And Research, 27:3, 2009; Philadelphia’s Changing Neighborhoods—Gentrification and other shifts since 2000 (PEW Report, May 2016).]

Every day in the depths of winter, coal cars trundled down Washington Avenue supplying the city’s lifeblood. You wouldn’t know it looking at the trackless six lanes of blacktop today, but locomotives once hauled hundreds of thousands of tons of anthracite to at least thirty coal yards between 2^nd and 25^th Streets.

Coal powered nearly every factory and heated nearly every shop, school, theater and home—a quarter of a million of them. On extremely cold days, a  large school, just one of the city’s 231, would consume as much as 10 tons. The University of Pennsylvania needed 150 tons to stay open. In all, the city could burn as much as 19,000 tons. Every day.

And on the first frigid week of January 1918, it all ground to a halt.

The temperature dropped below zero during the final days of December 1917 and would remain in the single digits for more than a week. The flow of coal from upstate stopped, and soon so would the city itself. Frigid, coal-less Philadelphians turned to the dealers of Washington Avenue, but their stockpiles were quickly exhausted. William Bryant at 10^th Street had been promised a shipment of 50 tons, but by the time the coal cars arrived, four-fifths of the contents were gone. The coal famine of January 1918 had turned citizens into coal hoarders and coal thieves. And as mobs they would decimate the coal supply of Washington Avenue.

City officials estimated as much as “half the population was without coal.” Mayor Thomas Smith urged “public recreation centers, school buildings, churches, theaters, moving picture houses and hospitals be thrown open to receive suffers and keep them warm.” As schools and factories began to close down, he appealed to “good Samaritans to take cold neighbors in.”

Philadelphia’s coal famine threatened “social and economic catastrophe.” On January 2, 1918, the coal-less poor, many of whom were newly arrived immigrants, took the matter into their own hands.

“Driven to desperation after burning fence rails, old furniture and every bit of available fuel, the poor began a series of raids on coal cars on Washington avenue” reported The Philadelphia Tribune. “Men, women and children with buckets, bags, push carts, baskets, toy express wagons and even baby buggies, worked like beavers in and among the switching crews carrying the precious fuel to their homes. There were at least 2,000 persons in these crowds and the police and railroad crews did not interfere, as the people were freezing and desperate… Women and children, for days, had stood shivering at the yards weeping and begging for coal.”

“We’re almost starving, my babies and me,” a widow sobbed to an Inquirer reporter. “It’s all right to almost starve. We’re pretty near used to that, but we can’t freeze. I could, but my babies can’t.”

“You must help us!” shouted cold and hungry women and children to the police called in to stop them. “The officers shrugged their shoulders and turned their backs” on the crowd and the coal cars. The mob took that as encouragement. Children quickly “crawled over the heads of the police…on the coal cars.”

“In a second…  a black shower descended upon the ground near the cars. As fast as the bits of coal struck the ground they were picked up and stored carefully away in a bag or a bucket or an apron.”

“What can we do?” asked one of the policemen,. “The poor devils are hungry and cold. …When a woman, lugging a baby to her breast, pushes me aside… why, I am not going to be the one to stop her.”

“I’ve seen more real misery in the last few days down here around these coal cars than I ever saw in all my police experience,” he added.

More than 150 tons of anthracite would be liberated on Washington Avenue’s coal-yard corridor that first week of 1918. According to the Inquirer, “most of the coal stolen was consigned to the J. W. Matthews Coal Company, Tenth street and Washington avenue;  William A. Bryant, of Tenth street and Washington avenue, and S. Margolis, of 815 Washington avenue.” At 12^th and Washington, men and boys emptied a coal car.

And while the police turned the other way, the railroad did not. “In the midst of the raid on one of the cars came the chugging of a freight engine. No one paid the slightest attention. The engine was hastily coupled to the car. It drew away. Not one of the coal-seekers jumped. They still continued to toss out bucket after bucket of coal.”

On the ground, “those…left behind followed the slow-moving engine and car, picking up fuel as it was thrown to them. This was only one of several raids by persons driven frantic by the want of fuel, …who, armed with buckets, bags, wheelbarrows and pushcarts, defied the police and railroad guards and mobbed trains of coal when they arrived along Washington Avenue.”

South Philly’s “coal-hunters were undaunted.”

[Sources: “Coal Lack Closes 43 Public Schools; Blame Cold Alone …Severe Weather Conditions Halt Coal Train On Way Here,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 3, 1918; “Suffering Crowds Storm Coal Yards; Railroads Helpless,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 4, 1918; “Coal Famine Grips Our City—Much Suffering,” The Philadelphia  Tribune, January 5, 1918;  R.R. Stockholders…Ask Refuge for 100,000 Suffering From Cold Here,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 5, 1918;  Men, Women and Children Empty Cars of Fuel Despite Efforts of Policemen and Guards,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 6, 1918.]

The Top Hat Cafe opened at 1235 Locust in the early 50s, and almost immediately slid off the rails.

Outside the bar, on March 1, 1952, Nicholas Virgilio “was slapping around a 16-year old girl…when a sailor grabbed his hand to stop him.” Virgilio, 23, known as “Lothario of the taprooms” a/k/a “Nicky the Blade” “swung around, grabbed a switchblade from his pocket and plunged it into Glenn Long, 19, a sailor at the Navy Yard.” It would be the first of several murders by Virgilio, the most notorious of which would be the 1978 bar room execution of an ex-judge in Atlantic City.

The new captain of the police station at 12th and Pine, Frank L. Rizzo, knew a bad thing when he saw it. Rizzo chose the Top Hat for his very first raid.

The mayor-to-be showed up at the stationhouse at 3:30A.M. on Friday, May 30. He and three other officers walked two blocks north to The Top Hat Café. “Within minutes, Rizzo and his team had arrested the bartender, two waitresses, the owner, nine patrons” one of whom scuffled with Rizzo, ripping the captain’s new suit.

For Rizzo, that raid would be the first of hundreds targeting the Locust Strip.

Le Bon Bon Club replaced the Top Hat in the mid ’50s, with new neon, but otherwise the story was the same: strippers mixing with patrons, after hours service, under aged drinking, B-girls solicitation of drinks and other nefarious services. The naked city, literally and figuratively in all its gritty glory.

A decade later, Rizzo testified in Washington before the Senate Rackets Subcommittee about Philadelphia’s “‘exotic’dancers-turned-B-girls” of the Locust Strip. “These obscene and indecent shows will simply not be tolerated,” he told the Press. “They must clean up and run respectable places of business or get out…This is the beginning. We’re going to keep after them until they clean up.”

And Rizzo’s sustained campaign seemed to make a difference—for a while, anyway. “For the time being, the personality of Locust St. is being suppressed.,” wrote  Joseph Daughen in The Bulletin. “The awesome image of Rizzo’s Raiders has apparently thrown fear into the hearts of the stripperie operators, and the come hither hostesses are now thither.”

But as Jeff Goldblum (playing Dr. Ian Malcolm, a chaos theory expert in Jurassic Park) put it: “Life, uh… finds a way.”

Nine years later, the Locust Strip was “a collage of schlock on a one night stand,” wrote Fred Hamilton in The Bulletin. “The present Locust st. bust-out joint” lies “somewhere between the cult of the 33 RPM record and the era of Day-Glo paint. … “It has all the glamour of post nasal drip.”

“The Strip is not blaring music and flashing neon,” he wrote. “It is a handful of broken-down joints… It is busty girls and scratchy records played full volume and all the flat black painted walls you’ll ever want to see. The strip is a cliché…”

A year later, Sandy Grady noted yet another crackdown on “B-girls.” “Last week District Attorney Arlen Specter buried The Strip under a ton of padlocks.” Nine bars in all, were closed, including the Bag of Nails 1231 Locust, The HMS Pinafore, 1233 Locust and The Revolution, 1219 Locust.

“The Strip looks like the inside of Grant’s tomb,” wrote Grady.

He found an enraged cabbie: “Look mac, if you’re from out of town hunting action forget! Locust Street is dead. Go over to Jersey. Listen Mac, this is the fourth biggest town in the country and it’s a graveyard,” the cabbie fumed. “The do-gooders killed this town.”

“It’s just dirty” complained “a girl in a see-through blouse” to Bulletin reporter L. Stuart Ditzen, “Every city has its strip.”

“Yeah agreed a timid looking man in a brown suit who said he was a patron of the padlock bars. ‘Every city has its strip.’”

The Why Not Lounge at 1305 claimed to be the final holdout. In May 1974, the Why Not went away, too. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board had ended an era. Or so they thought.

Three years later, The Bulletin’s D. I. Strunk went in search of the Locust Strip and found it alive, if not very well. He visited the PGA Bunny Club, Salsa, Footlights Lounge and Bag of Nails. He encountered “girls… dressed in pasties and tiny bikinis.” He saw them “dance and gyrate against mirrors…so smeared that a ton of Windex couldn’t clean them.”

Strunk saw the “potpourri of racial and social and economic classes who come to drink and look…men with knit caps, sailors, businessman, customers, clerks, lawyers” all coming “to sit and drink and watch together under the same roof.”

“I come down here to think and forget about other things,” said one regular, lawyer named Tom.

“Everybody has their eyes on somebody else’s fancy,” philosophized another, Jerome, standing in the shadows outside All in the Family Lounge.

Life finds a way.

[Sources: “Two Girls, 16, Testify They Got Liquor in Cafe,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 31, 1952; “Fiery Hearing Climaxes Raid on Cafe by Rizzo,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 31, 1952; “Rizzo Vows Midcity Cleanup, Nabs 13 in Raids on 3 Clubs,” Philadelphia Daily News, July 25, 1961; “Center-City Booze Bistros Have Lost Their A-Peal,” by Joseph Daughen The Bulletin, June 14, 1962 ; “Locust Street Strip—a Collage of Schlock and Lots of Hard Sell,” by Fred Hamilton, The Bulletin, August 13, 1971; “Dancers and Barmaids Are Glum as 9 ‘Strip’ Bars Close,” by L. Stuart Ditzen, The Bulletin, June 10, 1972 ; “That Crackdown on B-Girls Ends All Our Worries,” by Sandy Grady, The Bulletin, June 13, 1972; “Era is Ending as Bars Close on Locust St.,” by Joseph D. McCaffrey, The Bulletin, May 15, 1974; “They Try to Keep Locust Lushland Sedately Sinful,” by D. I. Strunk, The Bulletin, October 16, 1977; S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Camino Books, 1993); “‘The Blade’ is Cut Down: Killer Nicholas Virgilio dies in Prison,” by Kitty Caparella, The Philadelphia Daily News, March 18, 1995.]

“I rob banks,” Willie Sutton famously quipped, “because that’s where the money is.” Sutton didn’t realize that’s also where the tear gas was.

Disguised as postal messengers early one morning in February 1933, Sutton and a partner in crime gained entrance to the Corn Exchange National Bank & Trust at 60th and Ludlow Streets. They tied a guard to a chair, but the guard freed himself, managed to release tear gas—and foiled the robbery.

Tear gas had become an accepted law enforcement tool—one of the more successful technology transfers from the battlefields of World War I to urban America. Months before the Treaty of Versailles, military leaders were gung ho to demonstrate the potential of tear gas in places like Philadelphia.  “More effective than clubs, and less dangerous than bullets,” they boasted.

Brass in Army Chemical Warfare Service promised that tear gas had positive “psychological impacts.” It could offer police “the ability to demoralize and disperse a crowd without firing live ammunition.” Tear gas, according to recent history in The Atlantic “could evaporate from the scene without leaving traces of blood or bruises, making it appear better for police-public relations than crowd control through physical force.”

Getting taxpayers to pay for the deployment of gas-filled bombs on their hometown streets would be a hard sell. After all, as early as 1899, the Hague Conventions prohibited “projectiles filled with poison gas.” And then there was the recent horror of poison gas on the battlefields of France. But military chemists claimed they had reconstituted formulas, making them tame enough for use in peacetime America. At least that’s what Major Stephen Delanoy, fresh back from France “where he had been for more than a year perfecting various gases for the government” promised.

To demonstrate “how efficacious gas could be” Delanoy came to Philadelphia where he had a friend in Philadelphia police Superintendent William B. Mills. Together, they choreographed a high-profile experiment where 200 “volunteers” from the Philadelphia police force would be gassed at the city’s Model Farm near Fort Mifflin in South Philadelphia.

On July 19, 1921, according to The New York Times, “Police Supt. Mills took a battalion of his huskiest men into a roped-off enclosure with instructions to capture six men who were armed with 150 tear gas bombs. Three times they charged but each time we’re driven back weeping violently as they came within range of the charged vapor.”

“Before they entered the mimic battle,” Delanoy “assured the men that the substance was ‘absolutely not dangerous.’ It is merely a tear-producing, choking, nauseating gas,” he said. “But be careful you don’t swallow too much.” Philadelphia’s guinea pigs apparently swallowed just the right amount. The “sham attack” sold them on the stuff.

“The effectiveness of teargas as a mop dispeller received the emphatic endorsement of 200 stalwart Philadelphia policemen today,” reported the Times. “Police officials said the test had undoubtedly proved the value of tear gas in police work. Not only is it immediately effective in disbursing a mob, but it might be used to drive a fugitive from a barricaded building.” They imagined how a “container… placed in a bank vault…would also thwart burglaries…”

“Bullets as mob-quellers now belong to the Dark Ages” declared The Literary Digest. Police would get “gutta-percha hand-grenades containing chemical gas” and their victims would choke and copious tears would flow. “One of these bombs or grenades is equal to a hundred police clubs in a riot,” declared the officer in charge, after the Philadelphia test.”

“This method of dealing with offenders against the peace has many obvious advantages,” stated The Inquirer. “It is humane, for one thing. Riding down or shooting into a mob may cause needless injuries or deaths, sometimes of innocent bystanders.”

Within a few months, City Council approved a $2,500 appropriation to supply equipment for a new fifty-man, “gas battalion” with the Philadelphia police. Amos Fries, chief of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, who had been working “to redeploy the technology for everyday uses” provided “chemicals, material and equipment free of cost to the city.” Philadelphia taxpayers only needed to purchase “masks and other paraphernalia for local use.” Within a few years, police departments from New York to San Francisco were stocking up on tear-gas supplies.

Philadelphia police, anxious to make good on their investment, considered ways to put tear gas to work fighting a spate of unsolved robberies. Officials ordered their “bandit-chasing squad” to carry “tear bombs along with sawed-off shotguns…to end the robbers’ activities.” They didn’t have long to wait for the opportunity.

The opportunity came on October 7, 1922, when police learned of the “ransacking” at the “dressmaking establishment” of R.A. and J. A. Brown, 1530 Sansom Street. One officer fired two rounds at the suspects, and missed. They had hidden behind packing cases. No problem. Police “hurled a tear bomb against the wall directly above” their hiding spot. For the first time in an American city, plumes of tear gas filled the air. One suspect crashed through a window and escaped into a side alley.

Police captured the other suspect. According to The Inquirer: “When the air cleared sufficiently, the policemen entered the room and found George Rex, colored, twenty years old, of 18th and Lombard streets, in a stupefied condition, temporarily blinded.”

Trench warfare had come home.

[Sources: Willie Sutton’s Robberies. (PDF); Tear Gas For Mobs, U. S. Colonel’s Plan, The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 26, 1919; “New gas with K. O. Wallop May Help Police In Battles,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 19, 1921; “200 Philadelphia Policeman Weep in Flight From Tear Gas in Sham Attack,” The New York Times, July 20, 1921; “Knockout Gas for Mobs,” The Literary Digest (Funk & Wagnalls), Vol. 70, August 20, 1921; “City Police to use Gas Bombs Shortly,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 26, 1921; “Gas Bombs Prove Nemesis to Bandits,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1922 and Anna Feigenbaum, “100 Years of Tear Gas: a Chemical Weapon Drifts off the Battlefield and into the Streets,” The Atlantic, August 16, 2014.]

“The river became the scene of a strange and awful spectacle.

“The waves were suddenly crowded by a fleet of coffins, tossed wildly to and fro, each coffin borne upon the surface of the waters like a boat, with the foam dashing over its dull dark outlines. And in each coffin sat a corpse, with the death-shroud enfolding its limbs and waving along the blackness of the night, while it urged its grave-boat merrily over the waters, using a thigh-bone for an oar. And at the foot of every coffin, which served for the prow of the unearthly boat, was a lurid light burning in a skull, and flinging its radiance around over the waters, over the faces of the dead and over the fluttering folds of each death-shroud. Ten thousand coffins, each bearing its boatman in the form of a shrouded corpse, floated on the surging waves of the river, ten thousand lurid lights, each flaring from the eyeless sockets of a skull, gave a terrible radiance to the scene, and the river, far as the eye could see, was crowded by this fleet of grave-boats with their shrouded oarsmen, tossing the water aside with the skeleton bone for an oar.

“On the south, with a broad path of waves between, another grim line of coffins extended from the island to the river, the white shrouds of the corpses borne aloft by the wind, while ten thousand deathly hands swung the thigh-bone wildly overhead. In front of each line of coffins burned the lights, flaring from the orbless eyes of a skull, and now as the lurid rays gave strange radiance to the scene, the faces of each corpse, the leaden eyes, the blue lips and the brow all green and clammy with decay, became fired with deadly rage, and beating the thigh-bone on the side of each coffin, the antagonist lines of the dead began to move slowly towards each other.

“Then an unearthly peal of music broke upon the air the music of the hollow skull echoing to the blow of the skeleton-bone from side to side it swelled, it rose clanking to the heavens, it deafened the ear of night with its infernal din. Nearer and nearer to each other the opposing lines of coffins drew, faster and faster they glided over the waves, wilder and more terrible swelled the music of the skeleton-bone and the skull!

“Now the opposing lines of the dead glared in each other’s faces. Now they raised their stiffened hands as if eager for the onset, and waved their white shrouds if the air. Now a thin line of water lay between each division of the dead. Hissing and whirling and plunging, the combatants drew near each other, with a low muttered groan, far more terrible than the loudest shout, each party hailed the approach of its opponent, and then with one deafening crash they closed together, corpse fighting with corpse, dead throttling dead! Coffin meeting with coffin, each urged onward by the heaving waves, each crashing madly into the prow of its antagonist, while the dead arise, and leaning over the side of their death-boats, they reach forth their arms and grasp each other in the clutch of an infernal hate! Then how the fires flaring from the orbless eyes of skulls danced to and fro. Now the river grew alive with the white robes of shrouds fluttering on the air, with the gleam of lights hissing as they sank beneath the waters, with that horrible groan of the corpse as it fought with its fellow corpse!

“Then how merrily the music of the skeleton-bone and the hollow skull shrieked over the waters, and mingling with the low-muttered groans of ten thousand thousand corpses, rose echoing to the heavens above ! Then crash upon crash with horrible yells of laughter, the shrouded dead again urged their coffins full upon each other, and fought like living men upon a battle-field! With ghastly faces mouldering with corruption, yet fired by all the passions of life, upturned to the sky, with the waves rearing and plunging all around them, with their shrouds tossing madly on the air, while the skull-fires danced to and fro they closed together in terrible combat, and fought amidst the howling of the waters.

“Another peal of the skeleton-bone and the skull, another wild burst of laughter. Like a flash of lightning the scene was changed.

“The river was calm as the joy of the Saint, first awakening from the sleep of the grave into the peace of God s own sweet rest. Pure, serene, and placid. It lay like a mirror before the eyes. Yet still in the sky overhead, hung the cloud with its letters of flame,—Wo unto Sodom—still from the letters of flame a lurid light fell over the waters, now so calm and tranquil. And the dark mass of walls and roofs which marked the position of the city, with the lofty steeples and proud domes steeped in livid light, was reflected in the calm waters, like a magnificent picture, delineated by some unearthly hand.”

[Source: Excerpted from the chapter entitled “The Last Day of the Quaker City,” found at this archive.org version of George Lippard’s classic Gothic novel, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall: a Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime, originally published in Philadelphia in 1844-45.]

Even though he despised the color, as long as Frank Rizzo carried a badge the patrol cars of the Philadelphia Police were lipstick red. Rizzo snapped at officers who spoke of them as “red cars” and one can only imagine what he said when he heard them referred to as “rotten tomatoes” or “red devils.”

As soon as Rizzo rose to the position of police commissioner in 1967, he announced a plan to replace the red with a less strident blue and white. But Mayor James H. J. Tate made it clear: such decisions were above Rizzo’s pay grade. Traditional red would reign five more years.

The order came down Tuesday January 4, 1972—Rizzo’s first full day as mayor. He barely minded the ribbing that his brother Joe, the fire commissioner, would be able to tell them apart from vehicles in his department. For the newly inaugurated mayor, “Blue Tuesday,” as the newspapers called it, was a Red Letter Day.

Why, exactly, was red so objectionable?

Philadelphia’s scarlet streak dated back to 1929, a time when color, let alone bright colors, were rare on your basic, Henry-Ford-black automobile. And 1929 was anything but an ordinary year for the Philadelphia police. The department was in a tailspin, having been documented as systemically corrupt.

Historians tell us that “spreading gangland warfare” and simmering scandal “exploded” into “a spectacular grand jury investigation” in August 1928. The city’s annual, underground, Prohibition-era economy of alcohol and other “amusements” had soared to $40 million. Nearly 1,200 bars remained open. Across the city were 13,000 speakeasies and 300 “bawdy houses.” And half of the total proceeds were skimmed off for “protection.” Investigators learned that much of that $20 million passed through the hands of police officers and district captains handpicked by ward leaders. The Philadelphia Police Department wasn’t part of the solution; it was the city’s crime problem.

Mayor Harry Mackey ordered a complete, city-wide “clean up” of the department, including redistricting. In the shakeup, 4,500 officers were transferred; at least 85 were dismissed. Precautions assuring visibility and accountability of the reconfigured force were put in place.

Red had long been associated with Philadelphia, usually in a positive way. S. Weir Mitchell titled his Philadelphia-based historical romance The Red City. Elizabeth Robbins Pennell waxed in Our Philadelphia, a book-length love letter, how “peace breathed, exuded from the red brick houses with white marble steps…” But there was also a distinct downside to Philadelphia red. Gothic novelist George Lippard considered the infatuation excessive. “The eye is wearied by one unvarying sameness of dull red brick” he noted in The Quaker City, observing that “the man who paints a house blue or yellow or pink or white, or any other hue…than this monotonous red, is…set down by his neighbors, as slightly weak minded or positively crazy.”

And then there was the notable role for the color in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s popular American classic, The Scarlet Letter, where red stood out as Hester Prynne’s badge of public shame after being found guilty of adultery.

When reform-minded leaders instituted the “Red Car System” in 1929, it almost certainly was not an allusion to Hawthorne’s tale. But less than a year after revelations of deep, widespread, systemic corruption, the choice of scarlet for patrol cars would have been at the forefront of any attempt to increase visibility and accountability. Years later, some might well have considered the color as a vestige, a residual echo of a precaution aimed at introducing transparency for a disgraced police force. They could still feel the punitive stridency of red.

As commissioner in 1969, Rizzo took delivery of 255 new, red Ford V-8s with air-conditioning, power brakes, power steering and bucket seats. From the city’s point of view, Pacifico Ford’s $911,802 price tag was the lowest of three required bids. This would be among the city’s last orders for red cruisers.

Public reaction was largely positive a few years later, when the city shifted to blue and white. “I like it,” said a woman on Market Street. “It doesn’t scream at you.” But a cabbie worried: “It just didn’t stand out like the red.”

Absolutely right.

After 43 years, Philadelphia’s scarlet streak had come to an end.

[Sources: “Huge Rum Bribes to Police Bared in Philadelphia,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 1, 1928; William G. Shepherd, “The Price of Liquor,” Colliers, December 1, 1928; “Graft Findings Hit 85 Philadelphia Police,” The Washington Post, March 14, 1929; Albert C. Wagner, “Crime and Economic Change in Philadelphia, 1925-1934,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 27, Issue 4, Winter 1936; “Police Cars to Stay Red, The Bulletin, May 22, 1968; City Gets Low Bid of $2530 Apiece for 255 Red Cars,” The Bulletin, November 11, 1969; “Rizzo Gets His Way on Police Cars,” The Bulletin, January 4, 1972; John Clancy and Don McDonough, “It’s a Blue Tuesday for Police Red Cars,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 5, 1972; William A. Lovejoy, “Phila.’s Blue “Red Cars ” Draw Favorable Comment,” The Bulletin, February 17, 1972.]

Herbert Hoover wasn’t in Philadelphia long during his campaign swing for re-election in October 1932, and he didn’t have much to say. In fact, Hoover’s entire visit lasted only 30 minutes. Still, Philadelphians turned out in a major way for the Republican incumbent—an estimated 30,000—“the biggest assemblage massed in the central city district in years” reported The New York Times.

Proof positive that “William S. Vare, the…still powerful leader of the Philadelphia Republican organization, really had determined…to send his machine all the way down for the President.”

“It was Mr. Vare’s show,” wrote The Times. “His political henchmen were there in person and had enough support to throng Reyburn and City Hall Plazas and nearby streets.” The crowd cheered Vare when he rose to introduce the President. Then “boos” echoed across the plazas as Hoover rose to speak and continued throughout his very brief remarks. (Hoover “took no notice” of the “boos” and the next morning they were explained away as the handiwork of Communists.)

He looked over the crowd, paused, and then took a few moments to praise William Penn, the Liberty Bell, and “the greatness of this city and of this Commonwealth”—anything to avoid acknowledging the fact that the Great Depression had left at least one in four Philadelphians unemployed. Anything to keep from reminding the crowd that only two months earlier, police attacked 1,500 jobless “hunger marchers” in an incident come to be known as the “Battle of Reyburn Plaza.”

The President turned away from the podium and with his entourage walked back to Broad Street Station to take a train to New York City were a crowd at Madison Square Garden—only 21,000 this time—heard Hoover’s major speech. This was no ordinary presidential campaign, he said. Americans were in the midst of “a contest between two philosophies of Government.” Hoover’s opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was “appealing to the people in their fear and their distress…proposing changes and so-called new deals which would destroy the very foundations of the American system of life.”

“We are told that we must have a change, that we must have a new deal.” But this, Hoover declared, would “alter the whole foundations of our national life;” it would undo “generations of testing and struggle.” This new deal, he stressed, would rock “the principles upon which we have made this Nation.”

Roosevelt would be risky. “Be safe with Hoover,” implored the campaign slogan.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s “brain trust” crafted a campaign strategy around not committing “any gaffes that might take the public’s attention away from Hoover’s inadequacies and the nation’s troubles.”

Three years into the Great Depression, Hoover was deeply unpopular, even in Philadelphia, with 553,435 voters registered Republicans and 85,236 Democrats. By summer, Roosevelt had developed a strong lead in the polls. But by late October, that lead had shrunk and Hoover had a narrow chance of winning Pennsylvania, If only he could dominate in its most populous city.

That’s where Vare came in. Come election day, only 39% of the nation’s voters got behind Hoover; Roosevelt won by a landslide with 57%. His command of electoral votes was even more stunning: 472 to 59. Roosevelt carried 42 states, earning 206 more than the 266 electoral votes needed to win. But he didn’t carry the Keystone State. Of Hoover’s 59 electoral votes, 36 were from Pennsylvania.

Thanks to the Vare machine.

By the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration day in early March 1933, more than 9,000 American banks had failed, industrial production had been cut in half and at something like 13 million wage earners were without jobs –more than 280,000 in Philadelphia.

What could the freshly minted president possibly say?

“This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Now that would be a speech worth getting out for.

[Sources: Lawrence Davies, “Vare Gears Machine To Win Philadelphia,” The New York Times, November 6, 1932;  “Reds Blamed for Boos At Philadelphia,” Associated Press, Philadelphia October 31, 1932;  “Great Depression,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia; United States Presidential Election of 1932, The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica; The American Presidency Project, Papers of Herbert Hoover; Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address, March 3, 1933.]

Sauntering in the deep recesses of Fairmount Park a century ago, Christopher Morley and his know-everything guide were just about “to sentimentalize upon the beauty of nature and how it shames the crass work of man” when they came upon “what is perhaps the loveliest thing along the Wissahickon – the Walnut Lane Bridge.”

“Leaping high in the air from the very domes of the trees, curving in a sheer smooth superb span that catches the last western light on its concrete flanks, it flashes across the darkened valley as nobly as an old Roman viaduct of southern France. It is a thrilling thing, and I scrambled up the bank to know down the names of the artists who planned it. The tablet is dated 1906, and bears the names of George S. Webster, chief engineer; Henry H. Quimby, assistant engineer; Reilly & Riddle, contractors. Many poets have written versus both good and bad about the Wissahickon, but Messrs. Reilly & Riddle have spanned it with the poem that will long endure.”

As Chief Engineer of the Department of Public Works and Bureau of Surveys, Webster “had long argued that a high-level bridge between Roxborough and Germantown would eliminate a hilly five-or six-mile detour into the Wissahickon Creek valley.” He considered proposing “a steel viaduct with a wooden floor,” but thought better of it. Webster envisioned a bridge more appropriate for the “natural park scenery of rocky and wooded slopes.”

In 1905, City Council grated Webster his wish, authorizing construction of an elegant arched bridge, and allocated funds to unite the two neighborhoods “at the narrowest point of the ravine, along the line of Walnut Lane.” The project would begin July 5, 1906 and lasted two dramatic years.

When complete, Walnut Lane would be the largest concrete bridge in the world, inspired “structurally and aesthetically” by the Pont Adolphe over the Pétrusse River in Luxembourg, completed only two years before.

Forty thousand tons of concrete never looked so much like a line of poetry. Giant arches stretched across the ravine providing a path more than 145 feet above “the most picturesque portion of the Park.” It seemed as if the bridge was “literally springing from out the foliage of the tree tops.”

Reilly & Riddle poured concrete arches atop a gigantic falsework of steel and lumber that, “for the sake of economy” was used twice, once for each rib. In a demonstration of skill, faith and engineering finesse, “four temporary concrete piers in the stream bed supported the falsework and provided a glide path for shifting it from under the first finished rib to where the second one would rise. To move the falsework, thirty men operated a massive ball-bearing jack at pier level, nudging the 900-ton falsework 34 feet, inch by inch. The operation took three days. At the conclusion of the job, Reilly & Riddle demolished the concrete piers with dynamite, returning the creek bed to nature.

“It is the greatest bridge of its kind in the world,” glowed Mayor John Reyburn at the dedication, where school children from Roxborough, Manayunk and Germantown sang in unison. “It was conceived and executed by our own men,” he boasted, proudly suggesting that fact alone made it worth the price. Never mind that it’s status as the largest concrete arch in the world was quickly surpassed by the New Detroit-Rocky River Bridge in Cleveland and the Grafton Bridge in Auckland, New Zealand. In a city of makers, Philadelphians had made more than a bridge, they had created “one of the wonders of the world.”

Whatever became of all that construction debris, in particular the 900 tons of lumber used to build the temporary falsework? On March 29, 1908 an advertisement in the Inquirer put out the word: 300,000 feet of new pine lumber, “all sizes and lengths to 30 feet long” was available at the bargain rate of $14 per thousand feet. Come to the bridge, take your pick, haul it away. The advertisement didn’t bother to specify which side of the bridge, Germantown or Roxborough. But since the bridge had opened, that detail no longer mattered. East and West were almost one and the same.

[Sources: Walnut Lane Bridge. Pennsylvania Historic Bridges Recording Project -II, Historic American Engineering Record, (PDF); The Walnut Lane Bridge;J. A. Stewart, “The New Bridge Over the Wissahickon at Philadelphia,” Scientific American, November 30, 1907; George S. Webster and Henry H. Quimby, “Walnut Lane Bridge, Philadelphia,” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. 65, 1909; The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Mammoth Arch to Span Wissahickon,” March 20, 1906;  The Philadelphia Inquirer, “New Walnut Lane Bridge is Dedicated to City’s Use,” December 17, 1908.]

Because they could, the American Ice Company encased Old Glory in a 5-ton slab of ice, propped it up on a wagon and hauled it down Broad Street. Delighted spectators at the Founder’s Week Industrial Parade cheered the chilly float, awed at the impressive chunk from the same glacier that supplied their own kitchens. Many customers would buy as much as 5 tons before the year was out—50 pounds at a time—and they’d buy as much again in 1909. And yet again in 1910.

America had an ice addiction.

A good place to start: 6th and Market Streets in the 1780s, where the Presidents House had an 18-foot-deep, stone-lined, octagonal ice pit providing the elite with pristine river ice, all year round. By the late 1820s, Philadelphia’s appetite had grown to more than 19 tons per day, or about 7,000 tons every year, more than could be cut from the Schuylkill River, even venturing as far upstream as Norristown. In the 1830s, the city’s major ice harvester, Knickerbocker, searched out sources along the Perkiomen Creek, up the Lehigh River, anywhere cold met water. And when those sources fell short during unseasonably warm winters, they packed ice in schooners and shipped it down from Maine.

By the 1840s Philadelphians used 30 tons of ice—every day. Ice harvesters cut as much as they could, imported the rest and stored aggressively, anticipating warm winters and hot summers. Knickerbocker’s icehouses in Maine held 400,000 tons from the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers.

The addiction grew even more intense. In 1880, each and every Philadelphian consumed 1,500 pounds. Eighty-one companies employed nearly 1,300 who kept the city chilled with 500 ice-filled, horse-drawn wagons. Still, demand outgrew supply.

Until “artificial ice.” Pennsylvania had five plants by 1889. Thirty years later, it had over 200.

Knickerbocker’s at 22nd and Hamilton and 9th and Washington were said to be the largest in the world. And they had another facility along the Schuylkill at Spruce Street. There seemed no end to the supply or the demand. Between 1880 and 1914 American ice consumption more than tripled.

What an opportunity for a monopoly, for the creation of an “Ice Trust” merging Knickerbocker and others into the grandly-named American Ice Company in 1899. The following April, American Ice doubled prices in New York City, paving the way by bribing elected officials. Distraught citizens heckled their mayor with cries of “Ice! Ice! Ice!” Next election, they froze him out of office.

As Philadelphians awaited the announcement of their price hike, an Inquirer reporter interviewed an American Ice official. He hedged: “Prices for the coming summer have not been fixed yet, and if I were to hazard a guess I would not know whether to say they were going up or going down.”

“‘But that is all bosh,’ declared the ice factory superintendent,” who saw no reason to increase prices in Philadelphia: “In New York there is practically no competition. Here in Philadelphia there is plenty of it. Outside of the Knickerbocker Company there are four independent natural ice companies capable of furnishing an almost unlimited supply if called upon to do so. … I can name no less than twelve artificial ice companies already in operation… having a capacity of 360 tons per day, almost ready to begin. Of the artificial ice companies output the trust controls probably thirty per cent. So you see, the trust hasn’t everything its own way here, as it has in New York, and there will be no doubling up on prices, I assure you.”

But prices did rise. It wasn’t so much a matter of supply as it was a matter of power. The Ice Trust and its successors had it, would keep it and would wield it. That is, until the electric refrigerator short circuited their vast, frozen empire.

[Sources: Vertie Knapp, “The Natural Ice Industry of Philadelphia in the Nineteenth Century,” Pennsylvania History, Vol. 41, No. 4 (October, 1974); Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); “No Advance in Price of Ice – Philadelphia Will Not Follow New York’s Example,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 12, 1900; “New Ice Making Plant in the “City of Brotherly Love,” Industrial Refrigeration, Vol. 6. Nickerson & Collins, 1894, pp. 13-16.]

Frigidaire wanted to freeze the iceman out of America’s kitchens. To accomplish this, they literally took him on, appropriating the folksy icon of home delivery as the centerpiece of their lavish Art Deco display at Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial Exposition. But instead of ice, this giant iceman statue had on his shoulder the final delivery – a new, compact electric refrigerator.

Four years earlier, the Inquirer had predicted the iceman’s demise, happily looking forward to relief from years of mopping up footprints and spill from overflow pans. The new, electric, “iceless refrigerator,” they said, “spelled doom for the iceman.” Soon he would be “an [extinct] species; a veritable Dodo…”

Dethroning Big Ice wouldn’t come fast, or easy.

In Philadelphia, one major ice company, Knickerbocker, had massive plants, one with 125 employees and storage capacity for a million tons throughout the city. With the help of 1,200 horses and mules, Knickerbocker drivers kept more than 500 delivery wagons mobile on the streets. At the start of the 20th century, America seemed to need every last one its 1,320 ice plants. And the nation’s iceboxes multiplied. Between 1889 and 1919, the the value iceboxes manufactured in the United States increased from $4.5 million to $26 million.

Eventually, electric refrigeration would become bigger, but not as long as their cost remained high and their performance poor. In 1920, a household refrigerator cost $600 (more than $7,500 in today’s dollars) and broke down about every tenth week.

Then the price point dropped and reliability increased. In addition, utilities recognized the potential goldmine in household refrigeration. Since units were always running, and consumed far more electricity than any other appliance, home refrigeration could more than double their revenues. Realizing that, electric utilities didn’t leave marketing and sales up to the manufacturers. By the mid- 1920s, they were selling nearly a third of all new electric refrigerators.

That’s the decade Frigidaire, a subsidiary of General Motors, also engaged in aggressive, creative and even whimsical marketing—and became America’s refrigerator of choice.

“How do you do, Mrs. Prospect?” Frigidaire’s door-to-door sales script began in 1923. Once in the kitchen, the salesmen would take the temperature of the family’s ice box. “Mrs. Prospect,” continued the pitch, “we find that the average ice box maintains a temperature of about 55 degrees, and I think you will agree with me that this will keep food properly for only a short time.” But, the salesman proceeded, now sharing his thermometer with the housewife, “the temperature in your refrigerator is —— degrees. This is slightly warmer than I expected. If you had Frigidaire, the temperature would certainly be —— degrees colder than you now have in your icebox. . . . Won’t you please talk this matter over with your husband tonight as, in all probability; I or one of our men will call upon him tomorrow afternoon and tell him the benefits of owning a Frigidaire.”

Between 1920 and 1925, the number of refrigerators in American kitchens rose from 4,000 to 75,000. In 1926 they boomed to 248,000 units and by 1928, 468,000. The following year, Frigidaire manufactured its millionth refrigerator. By 1930, the sales of electric household refrigerators surpassed those of iceboxes.

In the middle of the Great Depression, Americans still cleaned up after 350,000 ice boxes. They had also grown accustomed to to the hum and chugging of 1.7 million plugged-in refrigerators. By 1940, 63 percent of all households had refrigerators—13.7 million of them. Four years later, 85 percent of America’s kitchens were equipped. As Jonathan Rees, author of Refrigeration Nation put it: “the electric household refrigerator symbolized modernity. When filled with food, it symbolized abundance.” And after World War II, when just about every kitchen had one, the increased size of the American refrigerator conveyed another prized status—prosperity.

By 1953, when the last U.S. icebox manufacturer went out of business, the young, virile delivery man carrying dripping, often dirty, blocks of ice into millions of clean American kitchens, the man whose proximity to wives and daughters fueled countless rumors, would-be scandals and jokes on stage and screen, that man, the iceman, finally found a new home—and new purpose—in nostalgia purgatory.

[Sources: Jonathan Rees, Refrigeration Nation A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); “The Newest Ideas of Invention and Industry: The Passing of the Iceman,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 17, 1922; Frank Hamilton Taylor, The City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, 1900); W.C. Fields, The Dentist, (Film, 1932).]