Author: Ken Finkel

As the 10th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings approached in 1955, horrors of nuclear war seemed closer, not farther away. Millions of American viewers were rattled to see the disfigured “Hiroshima Maidens” on reality TV (This Is Your Life), victims visiting the United States for reconstructive surgery. Even more frightening—if such a thing was possible—the arms race with the Soviet Union turned out ever larger and more destructive weapons.

The Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in August 1949. Four years later, they claimed to have the hydrogen bomb. In November 1955, they detonated it. Americans also had also been developing larger and more powerful warheads. In 1952, the U.S. detonated “Mike,” a 10.4 megaton hydrogen bomb with twice the explosive power of World War II. Two years after that, the Americans tested “Bravo,” a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb resulting in an explosion more powerful than anticipated. Bravo contaminated 7,000 square miles of the Pacific and blanketed the globe with fallout.

The possibilities of deploying nuclear weapons were very real. In 1950, President Truman admitted A-bombs were being considered in the Korean War. Five years later, President Eisenhower wouldn’t rule them out in the Formosa Straits Crisis. Americans grew increasingly distraught about the possibility, the probability, it seemed, that the United States would attack—or come under attack. And if this were to happen, when this happened, society as known would be over, replaced by a decimated, fragmented version managed by a government hidden deep underground.

The transition to this new, post-apocalyptic world would begin a few minutes before the bombs hit America’s soon-to-be-obsolete cities. If all went well, apocalypse management would begin with the wail of air-raid sirens signaling a mass exodus from the targets. And Civil Defense authorities figured that any city with a population of over 50,000 would be a target.

Operation Alert took place on June 15, 1955, a day that otherwise seemed like any other Wednesday. “Imaginary atom bombs ‘blasted’ Washington and 60 other American cities to theoretical rubble,” reported the Inquirer. “Thousands of officials, led by President Eisenhower, fled the capital and set up a scattered, skeleton government at sites up to 300 miles away.”  A Secret Service motorcade escorted the president and his entourage from the White House to “an undisclosed hideaway in a ‘mountainous, wooded area.’”

“Philadelphia was brought face-to-face with the grim realities of atomic war. A ‘surprise bomb’ hit the city at 2:11PM, “striking at 12th and Arch Sts. and theoretically making a wasteland of many square miles…” Operation Alert “brought traffic to a standstill throughout the Philadelphia area. … Sidewalks were emptied of pedestrians and the city’s full complement of Civil Defense personnel and equipment went into action.”

“Mayor Joseph S. Clark and members of his Cabinet left City Hall…to take command at the secret central control station set up in the Northeast. … Philadelphia ‘evacuees’ were moved out of the city…to previously prepared reception centers in Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery counties.” Police led convoys from Bridesburg to Council Rock High School in Newtown and from Germantown to Abington High School. More than 1,600 evacuated West Philadelphia in 300 cars and buses.

Casualties would be devastating. Officials “counted” 760,340 “dead” in Philadelphia and 363,860 “injured” reported The New York Times. More than three quarter of a million would be “homeless.” Across the nation, according to the Civil Defense Administration, “a partial presumed toll of more than 5,000,000” had died; nearly as many were injured. Other officials projected even more: 8.5 million Americans dead, 8 million injured and 10 million displaced. Best guesses had 25 million without food or water.

“Staggering,” said Eisenhower, who had previously admitted “if war comes, it will be horrible. Atomic war will destroy our civilization. It will destroy our cities. …[it] would not save democracy. Civilization would be ruined… No one was going to be the winner. … The destruction might be such that we…go back to bows and arrows.”

Even so, the Eisenhower Administration supported the policy known as MAD—mutually assured destruction—and the idea that Americans were “Better dead than red.”

Not everyone bought into Operation Alert, and not everything worked as planned on June 15, 1955. Schoolchildren spotted Eisenhower’s “secret” caravan and shouted, “Hey Ike!” as it sped by. In New York, resisters occupied park benches across from City Hall. One official in the District of Columbia declared: “the test will teach us nothing.” Another in Peoria, Illinois refused to cooperate, adding “I can’t see a lot of people running around with armbands on.” And in Flint, Michigan the siren system was broken. Everyone in Flint “died” without ever hearing the Cold War’s piercing, futile wail.

[Sources: “President Leads Flight of Officials To Hideaway Capital in Atom Test,” and “202,000 ‘Casualties’ Listed In City in Mock A-Bombing” in The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 16, 1955; Anthony Leviero, “’H-Bombs’ Test U.S. Civil Defense: 61 Cities ‘Ruined,’” New York Times, June 16, 1955; and Dee Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked ((Oxford University Press, 2006).]

Going back a century or so, the well-dressed edifice would carry itself with proud bearing. Such buildings lined public avenues instilling character through style and substance. At the Manufacturers Club, for instance, a grand entrance framed by pairs of freestanding columns finished in the Corinthian classical order welcomed (or intimidated) visitors. Rising above, entablatures and colonnades gave way to corbels, pediments, tasteful arches and courses of dentils—all in Green River Limestone. Bas-relief carvings of winged creatures and heraldry marked the corners. Stretching skyward, the entire towering eyeful culminated with an architectural “TA-DA” at the uppermost heights. Before the admirer’s gaze was finally relinquished, a final, rooftop finesse—a bold cornice—captivated the eye.

More than shade or protection from the elements, such overhangs provided a powerful visual terminus confirming stature. Projecting over the sidewalks, they reached outwards as declarations of potency, demonstrations of consequence transforming buildings into destinations and citizens into spectators. And here, at the heart of Center City at Broad and Walnut, the group proclaiming its grand arrival was the city’s’ nouveau riche: the manufacturers.

Throughout the second half of the 19^th century, Philadelphians had come to expect architectural statements along the rooftops of South Broad Street. La Pierre House and the Academy of Music claimed a more modest skyline in the 1850s. Horticultural Hall and the Art Club updated it in the 1890s. Philadelphia’s earliest skyscrapers on Broad Street offered their own kind of “visual liveliness.” Architectural historian David Brownlee observed that the “chateau-esque pinnacles of the Bellevue Hotel, the boldly massed modern classicism of the Fidelity (now Wells Fargo) Building, the strong cornices of the two Land Title towers, and the Art Deco belfry of the PNB (built as the Lincoln Liberty) Building rise together with City Hall’s tower to create one of the world’s most distinctive and animated skylines.” What’s missing today, writes Brownlee, is the biggest, boldest, roofline of them all. The Manufacturers’ Club “suffered a bad haircut” when it’s “giant Florentine shadow caster, proportionately one of the biggest cornices in the city, was removed.”

The Manufactures’ Club earlier, 5-story Queen Anne style building by Hazehurst & Huckle opened at 1409 Walnut in the 1880s. But membership quickly expanded beyond the city’s textile manufacturers to include any industry. By 1912, 1,800 members strong, the club had acquired the site of the Hotel Bellevue after it merged with the Stratford. One architectural competition later, the club signed on Simon and Bassett and builders Irwin & Leighton and the construction of the 10-story steel frame clubhouse was underway.

Simon and Bassett designed it in the Italian Renaissance style, and a rendering was exhibited in 1912 at the Eighteenth Annual Architectural Exhibition Held by the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the T-Square Club. It featured a paneled mahogany lobby, a lounge and café above a basement billiard room and a rustic, tiled grille. On the second floor, members found the library and card rooms. An auditorium for 1,200 occupied the third floor. Above that were three floors of guest rooms, an elaborate banquet hall overlooking Broad Street on the 8^th floor and a dining room above it all. “One of the handsomest and best equipped clubhouses in the world” praised one architectural journal.  A welcome contrast to “the familiar bleak ‘skyscraper’” wrote another. “A tall building of truly artistic conception … one of the most impressive sights of South Broad Street.”

Edward P. Simon partnered with David B. Bassett from 1908 to 1919 and produced another great cornice that survives. This one, from 1917, is atop the historically designated Pomerantz Building at 1525 Chestnut Street. Hidden City, called this cantilevered cornice “audacious.” Its historical nomination (see the .pdf here) described it as a “radical projection” extending “more than seven feet out from the plane of the façade” causing it to “almost…float above the sidewalk.” Instead of harkening back to classical times, this feature endowed its building with something ironic. Simon & Bassett “used the daring projection of the cantilevered cornice as a reminder that the building’s structure is modern.” So, too, with the spreading cornice at the Manufacturers’ Club.

How, then, did this most expressive and defining attribute disappear?

Cornices were considered dangerous. Almost immediately after the Club opened, Philadelphians read of an earthquake in Avezzano, Italy that “knocked cornices off buildings in Rome.” Closer to home, cornices and ornamental coping were falling off Philadelphia’s own City Hall. “Danger In Cornices,” read one headline. To reassure a worried public, city officials removed five tons from the upper reaches of City Hall.

It was only a matter of time before the Manufacturers Club at Broad and Walnut would get a similar shearing.

PhillyVoice called the other day with a burning PhillyHistory question: “When did Rittenhouse Square get its ritzy rep?” And always willing to help out, I explained how the place managed to become and remain “Philadelphia’s most fashionable neighborhood.” Brandon Baker’s fine column (read it here) focuses on the city’s who’s who: the wasp-y aristocratic types, their friends and allies who populated the square and nearby streets with mansions during the second half of the 19th century.

Now there really are two ways to pick apart that question. One is to respond the way I did, something that’s been done repeatedly, in book after book, naming names and ogling great fortunes, grand mansions and lavish weddings. Who can resist the temptation of drawing juicy quotes from Nathaniel Burt’s The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy? And there’s more. We could have turned to Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class where Digby Baltzell analysed the “Victorian gentry” and their “handsome mansions” surrounding the Square.

That’s one way to tell the tale. And while it’s not wrong, it is one sided. Balance, imagined as an afterthought (the French call it L’esprit de l’escalier) was sorely missing. And it would have been supplied by Dennis Clark’s essay on Rittenhouse the nearby companion neighborhood once called “Ramcat,” just to the southwest of the Square.

“It is difficult for Americans today to imagine the grandeur of the elite life-style of a Rittenhouse Square at the end of the nineteenth century,” wrote Clark. “The class culture of such neighborhoods created what amounted to a fairyland of elegance and display protected by Victorian codes of civility and discrimination. These enclaves of privilege combined with architectural eclecticism with passionate embellishment, lavish furnishings, and an adoration of English upper-class family etiquette. Flamboyant architects like Frank Furness and Theophilus Chandler designed edifices for an almost hysterical display of wealth—here a mansion for the sugar baron James Scott, there a Renaissance palace for Mrs. Sarah Drexel Fell. The structures on the square became wildly adorned shrines to aggressive vanity and the obsessive flaunting of riches.”

“But,” Clark continues, “an aristocratic way of life requires much more than money and manners if it is to remain in ascendancy. It demands presumptions of superiority, the exercise of assured authority, and the collaboration of a servant class to do the thousands of jobs necessary to guarantee an elaborate system of personal comforts and princely appointments. … The working people who served were often from such impoverished backgrounds that they had no choice but to serve, and some may even have been beguiled into servility by the mere thought of association with the elegance which they labored to support.”

“In the 1880s, Rittenhouse Square was the scene of an interdependent relationship between rich and poor.” And so Clark fills in the back story: “The servants required to prepare and serve the meals, shop, clean the household, do the laundry, and care for all the details of the privileged establishments on Rittenhouse Square were drawn for the most part from the South Philadelphia Irish community. After 1850, ‘Irish’ in Philadelphia became virtually synonymous with servant.  According to the United States census of 1870, there were 24,108 domestic servants in the city of whom 10,044 were born in Ireland.  Among the remainder a large portion were of Irish parentage.”

“The great households of Rittenhouse Square were caught in a social dilemma. It was impossible to pursue the extravagant life-style of mannered elegance and luxury without servants, but those most readily available were from a group alien in outlook, habits and background. Nevertheless, wealth had to make the best of it and be served by such poor as there were. …  For the Irish a similar ambiguity characterized their connection with Rittenhouse Square. It was demeaning for them to be forced to serve families whose wealth was founded upon notoriously exploitative mills, factories, and railroads. … Many a railroad pick-and-shovel man looked with deeply mixed feelings upon his daughters’ employment in the great houses of men whose railroads had meant for him a lifetime of miserable toil.”

There you have it. Upstairs and downstairs.

Clark’s chapter appeared in the aptly titled book: The Divided Metropolis. Yes, history is always so much better when it reflects reality—complicated, conflicted and contested as it inevitably is.

Mummery took a fortuitous step in 1949 when weather forced postponement of the New Year’s Day parade. A week later, on Saturday January 8, Nature and Public collaborated to produce the best turnout ever. An estimated 2 million people, double the million celebrants from previous years, came out and lined Broad Street.

As 1950 rolled around, most Philadelphians only dreamed of enjoying the parade from the temporary bleachers surrounding City Hall.

Was good weather and willing citizenry enough to double the size of the crowd in 1949? A close look at contemporary color footage shows plenty of sunshine and packed sidewalks, but no way to guess the size of the crowd that stretched for miles and lasted all day long. For that, we turn to social scientists who practice the finely-honed art of crowd estimation.

They have a name for it. The estimate of 1949 was a SWAG, a “stupid wild-ass guess.”

There are SWAGs almost no one bothers to challenge, and so we live with them. The Boston World Series parade in 2004 (2 million) or the Chicago Stanley Cup parade in 2013 (3 million). In 1949, no one in Philadelphia seemed to worry that two million was about the same as the city’s entire population (in 1950, the census counted 2,071,605). Nor would they question the logic that two million people require a Broad Street many times longer to accommodate a crowd that size. Estimated crowd sizes at parades and celebrations are rarely contested.

Not so with political rallies and protests. Remember the controversial discrepancy in the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C.?  Organizers estimated that crowd between 1.5 and 2 million people; police put the number at 400,000. Controversy-fueled revised estimates moved the needle up to 837,000—with a twenty percent margin of error.

Ah, science.

Mummers parade numbers were accepted without question, except for one memorable case in 1994. Police estimates came in at a paltry 22,000, generating a SWAG that sent shock waves up and down Broad Street. City Hall’s bleachers alone were capable of accommodating nearly that many attendees, argued one official. Twenty-two thousand was about a fifth of the 100,000 estimated the previous two years and less than a fifteenth of the 350,000 of 1991.  “That report has people going crazy,” commented parade grand marshal David L. Cohen. “A ridiculous figure,” declared then City Councilman and Mummer Jim Kenney, a member of the Jokers New Years Association.

Twenty-two thousand—a figure subsequently revised to 70,000—was even lower than the estimate from 1964, perhaps the Mummers’ poorest attended year—the year traditional blackface Mummery was banned. Crowds stayed away in droves, according to The New York Times, after learning about what testimony offered to a three-judge Common Pleas Court considering the case. Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary spoke about the possibility of “physical violence” and “serious upheaval” as a result of “an active recruiting program being conducted in Harlem to come here and protest.” Leary informed the court that the local chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had told him “blood would spill in the streets” if the practice of blackface continued. A former State Supreme Court Justice testified about “the possibility of widespread disorder and rioting.” And the acting director of the Commission on Human Relations confirmed “the possibility of a physical clash and its spreading is very real and very grave.”

The court granted not one, but two injunctions, one banning blackface and another prohibiting picketing by civil rights groups. “Three thousand policemen, more than half of the department’s street-duty personnel, lined the four-mile route.”  Police buses interspersed with string bands and comic divisions made for a tense and relatively muted Broad Street as parade regulars chose to watch the nationally televised broadcast from home. “Instead of the usual million,” reported the Associated Press in a story headlined “No Blackfaces Or Incidents, But Mummers Crowd Small,” attendance estimates came in as low as 35,000.

And then, blackface-free, Mummers parades bounced back to familiar levels: 1 million in 1965; 1.3 million in 1966 and 1.7 million in 1967.

But who’s counting?

(Sources Include: John Woestendiek, “A Mummers Flap Over Crowd Size The First Police Figure, 22,000, Didn’t Sit Well. It Was Adjusted Upward,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 3, 1994; Ellen Gray, “When Cops Size Up Mummers Crowd, They Man The Barricades,” The Philadelphia Daily News, January 4, 1994; William G. Weart, “Blackface is Barred In Mummers Parade,” The New York Times, January 3, 1964 and “Mummers March Without Incident,” The New York Times, January 5, 1964.)

This wooden head is all that remains of William Rush’s carved sculpture from 1809. That standing, life-sized “Nymph,” Philadelphia’s first free-standing piece of public art, held aloft a marsh bird, a bittern, which spouted a column of Schuylkill water. Originally, the sculpture and its fountain stood in front of architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s pump house at Center Square. For some time now, that’s been the site of the courtyard at Philadelphia City Hall.

Rush started carving figureheads for ships in the 1780s and soon his repertoire included luminaries and legends: Franklin, Washington, Adams, Voltaire, Hercules, allegories of Peace, Liberty, and the “Genius of the United States.” And, of course, monumental eagles.

His earliest public sculptures, Comedy and Tragedy, adorned niches on the façade of Chestnut Street Theatre. “In the execution of this work, read a notice in the American Daily Advertiser on April 2, 1808, “the genius of the artist is truly pourtrayed. He has done himself honor, and added to that of his country.”

In 1812, Rush carved a seven-foot-tall allegory of Wisdom. He added Justice twelve years later, and the pair topped off the arch spanning Chestnut at Independence Hall for the triumphal return visit of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French General essential for Washington’s win in the Revolution. Rush also carved a full-length figure of The Father of his Country.

The sculptor’s self-portrait in 1822 has him draped with boughs of pine. Except they are made of terra cotta. It’s on exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In 1825, Rush again allegorized river water with the Schuylkill Chained and Schuylkill Freed for the waterworks at Fairmount.

The Nymph and Bittern statue is often misidentified as the classical figure of Leda and the Swan. (A little background on that: Zeus admired Leda and transformed himself into a swan and seduced her. That union produced Helen of Troy, Clytaemnestra and the twins Castor and Pollux.) A good story, but that bittern is no Zeus. 

Back on earth in Philadelphia, according to Vanuxem family tradition, “the lovely and socially prominent Louisa Vanuxem (1782-1874),” modeled for Rush. Her father, the influential merchant James Vanuxem, served as chairman of the Watering Committee when Rush received the commission.

Thomas Eakins dearly wanted to believe that Louisa Vanuxem posed for Rush in the nude. Repeatedly, he depicted the scene he imagined. Those paintings now hang in museums far and wide. Eakins also produced his own sculptural studies of Miss Vanuxem.

The popularity of the young, lithe, barely-clad female figure was undisputed, and became legendary. In addition to depictions in prints and paintings, the rowdy members of the Fairmount Fire Company adopted her image as a logo. They wore it proudly on their ceremonial hats.

In 1872, the City of Philadelphia paid  Robert Wood & Co. $1,200 to cast in bronze Rush’s wood original. That figure was then reinstalled in the center of a fountain basin at the Fairmount Water Works. Today it is safely inside at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

By the early 20^th century, having almost totally disintegrated, the wooden nymph was moved inside at the Water Works. According to Linda Bantel, “shortly thereafter, John S. Wurts…a great-great nephew of Louisa Vanuxem, salvaged from the fragmentary remains the head and part of the bittern.” That head, illustrated above in a photograph of 1918, was subsequently repainted. Today it is on exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Being a Schuylkill coal-heaver wasn’t much of a life. Bosses hired fresh arrivals from Ireland to unload canal boats at the coal yards. By the hundred, crews manned wheelbarrows on the riverbank for a dollar a day, dawn to dark, six days a week. As many as 14 backbreaking hours during the summer months. One hour break for breakfast, another for supper.

Philadelphia’s appetite for anthracite had mushroomed. More than 6,500 tons passed through the docks in 1825. Nine years later, the coal heavers moved 227,000 tons. As the days grew longer in the Spring of 1835, and the coal-laden canal boats lined up along the Schuylkill’s banks, the heavers appealed for shorter working hours. Laborers in Pittsburgh and Boston had tried, and failed, to get a ten-hour work day. But a few trades in New York City did win their bid.

Now, in the Spring of 1835, Philadelphia’s laborers seized their moment to organize, and to strike.

All 300 coal heavers walked off the job, abandoning 75 coal-laden vessels at the Schuylkill docks. Marching along the riverbank, strikers threatened anyone intent on replacing them. Mayor John Swift visited as many as four times, reported the Inquirer on May 29, and found the strikers “quiet but determined”—and absolutely unwilling to back down.

The “Working Men of Schuylkill” as they called themselves, had an evolving, two-pronged strategy. As they marched, especially at the start of their strike, their leader brandished a sword. When they spoke, their words were impassioned, yet reasonable. In an “Appeal to the Public,” they wished “for nothing but peace, quietness and good order.” But under the “present aristocratic system” that requires work “from daylight to dark,” the coal heavers claimed to be worse off than “galley slaves.” They asked not for more pay, only the guarantee of a twelve hour day—a ten-hour  workday—with a one-hour break for breakfast and dinner.

The coal merchants mulled over the strikers demand and presented their counter offer. The dawn-to-dark working hours would remain so would the pay. But laborers would be granted a third hour-long break.

More than a week into their strike, the coal heavers had the entire city’s attention and an increasing amount of sympathy. The humane logic of the “Six to Six” campaign had found a broader following. The coal heavers rejected their bosses counter offer, and on Saturday, June 6th, they marched from the Schuylkill into the very heart of the city—to Independence Square.

Led by fifes and drums, the coal heavers chanted “From Six to Six,” a slogan seen and heard in headlines, on broadsides in store windows, and “scrawled in chalk on fences.” They marched with it on banners, along with another proclaiming “Liberty, Equality and the Rights of Man.”

As the procession closed in on Independence Square, workers from other trades dropped their tools to join in. Still others carried tools as they marched. In the shadow of the State House, speeches called for a ten-hour day in all trades. Philadelphians heard a fiery reading of the “Ten-Hour Circular” from Boston, which argued “the odious, cruel, unjust, and tyrannical system” leaves workers unable to do anything “but to eat and sleep…” Work prevented them from performing “duties…as American Citizens and members of society.”

“We cannot, we will not,” stated the circular, “…be mere slaves to inhuman, insatiable and unpitying avarice.”

“The effect was electric,” wrote John Ferral, an organizer from Manayunk. And in the following days, coal heavers were joined by hod carriers, brick layers, plasterers, carpenters, smiths, sheet iron workers, lamp makers, plumbers, painters and leather dressers—20,000 workers from 20 trades. What started as a strike on the Schuylkill had grown into the first general strike in the city—the first in American history.

“The hum of business is hushed; the coal yards are deserted and shut; and every kind of business is completely at a stand,” reported Niles Register the day of the march. “The militia looks on, the sheriff stands with folded arms,” observed a visitor from France.  “The times,” worried editors at the Philadelphia Gazette, “are completely out of joint.”

But the public had aligned with the strikers. By June 8, the Inquirer reported “the opinion is almost universal that the term of ten hours per day during the summer season, is long enough for any industrious man, whether mechanic or otherwise…” Scharf and Westcott later wrote of the “strong feeling that the demand was just… that the concession ought to be made to toiling men.”

And one by one, the city’s largest employers, from the City of Philadelphia, to Eastern State Penitentiary, to the Commissioners of Southwark, to Cornelius and Son, Lamp and Chandelier Manufacturers, adopted “six-to-six” work days. The coal heavers, and thousands of other advocates of “Six-to-Six,” had won a quick and “bloodless revolution.”

[Sources: From The Inquirer: “The Strike,” May 30, 1835; “Councils,” and “From Six to Six,” June 6, 1835; “From Six to Six,” June 8, 1835; and “From Six to Six,” June 11, 1835. Leonard Bernstein, “The Working People of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the General Strike of 1835,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 74, No. 3 (July, 1950); John R. Commons et al, History of Labour in the United States. Vol. 1 (1921); Philip Yale Nicholson, Labor’s Story in the United States, (Temple University Press, 2004).] 

In the 1820s, Philadelphia investors “awoke as if from a dream” to the “immensity of the riches concealed in the mountains and ravines of their native State.” As “news of fortunes accumulated by piercing the bowels of the earth, and bringing forth [coal] from the caverns of mountains,” wrote Edwin Freedley, the anthracite trade, which “appeared yesterday but a fly, now assumed the gigantic proportions of an elephant!”

In an optimistic rush, investors who “previously laughed at the infatuation of the daring pioneers of the coal trade” now cooked up their own “plans of towns…surveys of coal lands…railways, canals and…other improvements.” They poured five million dollars into the Schuylkill coals-fields to get black diamonds to the city, digging more than 800 miles of canals and building 1,600 miles of railroad. Investors made out. So did “laborers and mechanics of all kinds from all quarters and nations” who “flocked to the coal region,” wrote Freedley, and “found ready and constant employment…” Down on Philadelphia’s Schuykill docks, arrivals from Ireland found ready, backbreaking work as “coal heavers.”  Dawn-to-dark work for a dollar a day.

Philadelphia’s appetite for coal—a skimpy 365 tons in 1820—flourished at 867,000 tons by 1840. Less than a decade after that, 5,000,000 tons of anthracite poured into the city.

Cheap coal meant cheap heat. Affordable, high-quality anthracite also gave the city’s makers an edge. “Inexpensive and abundant coal,” relates The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, “helped drive population and industrial growth. Citizens used it “to heat homes, power factories, propel steamships, and smelt iron.” Anthracite “enabled Philadelphia to transform itself from a commercial city of merchants into an industrial powerhouse. … Canals, coal, and industrial Philadelphia grew together synergistically.”

By the last quarter of the 19th century, when manufacture was strategically chosen as the theme for the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia could display its makeover to the world. By 1876, the question wasn’t what Philadelphia manufactured—but what it didn’t.

Expansion—and the fortunes made from it—seemed endless. In the middle of the 19th-century, the Reading Railroad built a facility in Port Richmond large enough to handle more than 1.2 million tons of coal every year with wharves capacious enough to handle 100 ships at a time. After the Civil War, the Pennsylvania Railroad developed its own Greenwich Point Holding Yard, along the Delaware in South Philadelphia. By the early 1890s, coal cars stretched as far as the eye could see. Greenwich car dumpers heaved 300 carloads of coal each and every day.

King Coal had rubbed his gritty elbows with Philadelphia. What could possibly go wrong?

[Sources include: John C. Van Horne, etc. Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad: Photographs of William H. Rau (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Russell Weigley, Philadelphia: A 300 Year History (W. W. Norton & Company, 1982)] 

In 1913, “seventy vaudeville and motion picture theatres were under construction” wrote Irvin Glazer. And “virtually all of them were open by the fall,” providing Philadelphia with about 350 venues theatres that excluded downtown “legitimate theatres.” Each and every one screened silent films.

Viewing options were everywhere. In addition to the Victoria at 913 Market (open since in 1909) was the Ruby Theatre at 618 Market, the Arcadia, at 1529 Chestnut, and the Palace Theatre at 1214 Market. The massive, new, 1400-seat Stanton had opened at 16^th and Market, not far from the Regent, a block to the west. But movie goers didn’t have to come to town; they could stay in their own neighborhoods and enjoy films at The Tioga, near 17^th Venango or The Apollo at 52^nd and Girard, or many, many others theatres—and more were on the way.

By 1915, as one film trade publication put it, “in the district known as Kensington, the home of varied industries and a large, live population” film fans could visit the newly-opened, 830-seat Bellevue Theatre. Front and Susquehanna had become a happening place.

Beyond the Bellevue’s ticket booth “of marble and mahogany” and lobby lined with stone tiles, potted palms, and hung with wall-to-wall movie posters, the Bellevue accommodated nickel-and-dime-paying patrons from after noon to an hour before midnight. They filed past brass railings and opal fixtures, down crimson carpeted aisles to upholstered seats to hear the tones of the echo organ and a five-piece orchestra. They’d take in the latest films—advertised in circulars, the daily papers, on billboards and posters mounted on a wagon that paraded the streets.

With a boom in venues and production burgeoning, the screen was now the place to be and be seen. The “celebrated and pulchritudinous” Kitty Gordon held back as long as she could, but as 1915 came to a close, Gordon gave in to “the green glare of the lights of a motion picture studio.”

“I felt positively tremulous as I made my first scene,” confessed Gordon. “But that feeling soon wore off and by the time the camera man was ready to ‘grind’ I was perfectly cool again. I am quite in love with this wonderful new art that furnishes one with surprises no matter which way one turns.”

In the role of the beautiful, charming, conniving Lena Despard, in an updated version of F. C. Philips’ As in a Looking Glass, Gordon did manage to make “an especially striking and attention-compelling photo drama.” The bar had been set high by stars in the stage versions of the role. Sarah Bernhardt had owned it for a time in Paris, admitting to a reporter that the “frank and easy style” of the story “touched” her “dramatic fibre.” Philadelphia ticket holders had packed The Walnut to witness Lily Langtry as the “soulless adventuress” Despard displayed in one after another glamorous gown, just as Lillian Cleves would at the Girard Avenue Theatre.

Gordon delivered in her debut. “Quite frequently,” observed critic Lynde Denig, she turned “her back to the camera and it generally happened that her gown was pronouncedly—need it be added—becomingly décolleté.” The director “surely bore in mind the probable spirit of the public, how eagerly it would await a convincing display of Miss Gordon’s much advertised back,” and, Denig noted, “how little the story mattered by comparison.” If the script “lacked inspirational qualities” the production “was fortunate in having a star capable of carrying so much responsibility on undraped shoulders.” Denig gave a thumbs up: “nobody is going to be disappointed in Miss Gordon’s beauty from whatever angle it is viewed…”

Motography’s writer agreed, adding a bit of pre-Hollywood snark on Gordon’s gowns, which “began late and ended early.” As it turned out, the anticipated “brilliance” of the her “‘polished shoulders’… had caused widespread halation. . .on the film.” Makeup had to “dull the gleam of that famous back and those celebrated shoulders with whole shaker-fulls of powder” before the camera could refocus “its undazzled eye on the dulled surface.”

But audiences were dazzled by all they saw, which culminated in an updated suicide scene, “a final thrill” of the Thelma and Louise variety, as Gordon and her vehicle are “hurled over a precipice.”

Projectors at the Bellevue clicked on into the 1930s, when the place was brought back to a life, of sorts, as a car parts shop.

Today, the much-compromised building on Front Street barely survives.

[Sources: Irvin R. Glazer, Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z: A Comprehensive, Descriptive Record of 813 Theatres Constructed Since 1724. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); Lynde Denig, “As in a Looking Glass” Kitty Gordon Is Introduced to World Film Audience in Melodrama of Intrigue and Love,” The Moving Picture World, Vol. 27 (World Photographic Publishing Company, 1916); “Notes from all Over,” Motography, Volume 15, No. 1, p. 48, 1916; “Bellevue Theatre Opens in Philadelphia,” Accessory News, Vol. 10, No. 25, (October 1914-Jan 1915), p. 112; and from The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Mrs. Langtry at the Walnut,” January 23, 1888; “Mrs. Langtry’s Second Week,” January 24, 1888; “At the Theatres Last Night – The Girard Avenue,” October 27, 1891; “Kitty Gordon is Filmed,”  December 26, 1915.]

“With Secret Service men and city detectives following in a motor car and mounted policemen galloping ahead and behind, the Japanese commander was whirled around the west side of City Hall and South on Broad street. Those who caught a fleeting look at his immobile face gave him a noisy welcome. From the windows of the Bellevue-Stratford fluttered the flags of the United States,” that of Japan and the admiral’s, which the resourceful hotel staff had finished stitching together only minutes before.

Yes, Admiral Heihachirō Tōgō had arrived.

Down in the bowels of the Bellevue-Stratford “the pantryman of the culinary department” had readied his creation: a three-and-a-half-foot model of Tōgō’s famous battleship, the Mikasa. The model looked exactly right, down to “the number of guns pointing from turrets,” the chocolate sailors manning the small-fire guns and the surrounding waves of “billowy green bonbons.”

Tōgō’s eyes “twinkled when he saw the midget ship.” He “gravely drew himself to attention and saluted.”

Philadelphians fell all over themselves in August 1911, celebrating their 48-hours with Admiral Tōgō.  The samurai who studied naval warfare under British tutelage had put all of his finely honed skills to work against the Chinese and the Russians. Only five years before, Tōgō won what is often referred to as “the most decisive sea battle in history, the Battle of Tsushima.”

Now, this “Conqueror of Russia’s Fleet” who represented the Japanese government at the coronation of King George V in England was headed back home. But not before an American Grand Tour. Tōgō left Liverpool on the Lusitania. President Taft hosted him at the White House. Tōgō visited Mount Vernon, laying a wreath at Washington’s tomb. He’d see the Naval Academy in Annapolis; witness drills by Army cadets at West Point. And he would dine at Oyster Bay with former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had presided over the negotiations between the Japanese and the Russians that resulted in the Portsmouth Treaty. For that, Roosevelt had earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.

In his 48-hour, whirlwind tour of Philadelphia, Tōgō visited Independence Hall. He stood before the Liberty Bell and took a long, deep bow at the portrait of George Washington. Tōgō toured the Philadelphia Navy Yard and inspected a new style of “fighting mast” on the battleship Minnesota. He plied the Delaware port in a tugboat, and visited the yards of Camden’s New York Shipbuilding Corporation, which saluted Tōgō with large cannon booming a nineteen-gun salute. Back in Philadelphia, Tōgō visited Baldwin Locomotive Works (which he noted was “well known in our faraway country”). He marveled at the Mint and met the Mayor. But August heat crimped Tōgō stamina, and he passed on a scheduled visit to William Cramp & Sons Shipbuilding Company, where the Kasagi, his battleship and original flagship in the Japanese-Russian War, first took to water.

On his final evening in Philadelphia, having dined casually in his fourth-floor suite at the Bellevue-Stratford, Tōgō requested a “motor ride” to escape the city’s stifling humidity. His driver navigated into the cool recesses of Fairmount Park, presumably allowing a glimpse of the ancient Japanese Temple Gate, recently purchased, installed and landscaped at the expense of two Baldwin executives.

In all of his comings and goings, Tōgō hardly had a chance to study the two large electric signs mounted in his honor over the north and south portals of City Hall. But in the quiet of this dark, steamy August night, Tōgō’s car returned down Broad Street. Tōgō read the words aloud “as the car approached the big, electric ‘Welcome to Togo’” sign. “The Admiral instructed the chauffeur to stop and for a few minutes” and “he studied the design carefully. The blending in lights of the American and Japanese flags pleased him, but he was greatly mystified at the significance of the blue and yellow flag.”

Tōgō didn’t recognize that flag. Neither did his aide, nor did his secretary, or the Secret Service agent, or the chauffeur. The entourage hailed a policeman to learn it was “the insignia of Philadelphia.”

The Admiral “seemed amused” and delighted at this “real, official municipal welcome,” the likes of which he had never seen before—and probably wouldn’t again.

[Sources: Jonathan Clements, Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East, (Haus Publishing, 2010); Encyclopedia of World Biography; “Togo here next month,” The New York Times, July 16 1911; and the Newspaper collection at the Special Collections Research Center, Paley Library, Temple University, including “Admiral Togo, Japan’s Hero, Arrives Here. Conqueror of Russia’s Fleet is Given Great Ovation,”August 10, 1911; “Togo Leaves City After Day Spent Seeing Its Sights,” August 11, 1911, both in The Philadelphia Inquirer.)

The 1904 St. Louis’ Louisiana Purchase Exposition was a gigantic affair: nearly twice the size of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and quadruple Philadelphia’s Centennial in 1876.  For Japan, the increasing scale of America’s world’s fairs turned out to be just about the perfect platform to demonstrate its expanded ambitions for the world stage. The Japanese occupied seven acres in St. Louis, more than any other nation outside the United States.

Japan had emerged as the Far East’s imperial nation and its colonial power—“the protector of Chinese territory,” according to historian Carol Christ. (Just a few months before the fair opened, Japan had attacked Russia on Chinese soil and was on its way to a decisive victory, the first time an Asian country defeated a European power.)

Japan also expressed its dominance in the creative realm. As the heir of Asian culture and the “sole guardians of the art inheritance,” Japan positioned itself as keeper of the “museum of Asiatic civilization.” When Russia backed out of their commitment to exhibit in St. Louis, Japan the imperial power and cultural ambassador stepped in with purpose and commandeered the Russian space.

Japan’s exhibition buildings were “built entirely by native carpenters,” in styles perfected hundreds of years earlier, declared one guidebook. Set in landscapes with gardens, hills, waterfalls, lakes and bridges, accented with imported, centuries old, “beautifully trained dwarf trees…drooping wisteria…peony, scented lily and blushing maple”—it all added up to a “harmonized…artistic” whole. For visitors from around the world, Japan curated a one-of a kind experience that sent a powerful message: Asian power had arrived.

And there was more. By the fair’s main entrance, millions were lured onto the Pike, a mile-long, carnival-like collection of attractions open late into the evenings. “The Pike” offered up contortionists, dancing girls and a “Zoological Paradise” complete with an elephant water slide. Visitors went “deep sea” diving, scaled miniature replicas of the Tyrolean Alps, rode burros along constructed cliff dwellings and toured “Blarney Castle.” Especially popular were rides inspired by the biblical version of “Creation” and another ride with the “Hereafter” as its theme. The Pike also staged military reenactments: the Boer War, the Spanish-American War and, the Russo-Japanese War, still in progress.

No concession on the Pike stood out more than Japan’s. Entering through a massive, 150-foot  gateway –a “replica of the famous portal in Nekko, Japan” visitors strolled “a Street of Tokyo,” brought alive by 80 actors in traditional costume. Everything was new, though constructed to appear ancient and venerable, except for one artifact that didn’t need to feign authenticity, a 45-foot tall temple gate that, for the previous three centuries, had graced the Hitachi Provence, about 120 miles northeast of Tokyo.

What would become of such a treasure when the crowds returned home? John H. Converse and Samuel Vauclain, who had made their fortunes at Philadelphia’s Baldwin Locomotive Works, imagined the “Nio-Mon, or, Temple Gate” as a picturesque addition to Fairmount Park. They bought it, paid for its transportation, reconstruction and landscaping—completed with tons of boulders worn smooth in the nearby Darby Creek. Converse and Vauclain, with additional help from John T. Morris, transformed the grove between Memorial Hall and Horticultural Hall into a picturesque and peaceful destination.

But peaceful in a big city park can be vulnerable. From the start, the City and the Fairmount Park Art Association (where Converse and Morris served on the board) took protective measures.  Artifacts exhibited inside the temple gate’s second-story chamber were transferred to Memorial Hall and later to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (One still survives in the Asian Art gallery.) But without fences or a guard, Philadelphia’s new, hidden treasure became an easy target.

Architect Albert Kelsey had seen it coming: “I deplore the possibility of this beautiful temple becoming merely another scattered unit in a poorly planned park that has not, in many instances, been laid out to heighten the effect of the many valuable works of art it possesses.” Morris called for the installation of “wire guards” to prevent “acts of barbaric young American(s), who take pleasure in stoning these fine specimens of Japanese wood carvings.”

“If the building is not protected it will soon go to decay,” Morris fretted. “If visitors are permitted to do as they want in the interior it will soon be a disgrace…” Cycles of vandalism and repair followed one another from installation in 1906 into the 1930s, when, as part of the Works Progress Administration, the temple gate got a facelift. But to no avail. Within a few more years, Park Commissioner John B. Kelly was ready to throw up his hands. Kelly suggested the gate might just have to be “torn down.”

On the eve of the temple gate’s golden anniversary in Philadelphia, in May, 1955, the City installed scaffolding to carry out another cosmetic overhaul. But before the project got underway, the temple gate burned to the ground. The culprit, according to the Philadelphia Fire Department, wasn’t vandalism, but the “carelessly discarded cigarette” from the repair crew.

Who mourned the temple gate? Who had time to? Two years after the fire, Shofuso, another cultural treasure from Japan, found its way to Fairmount Park.

[Sources include: Christ, Carol. “The Sole Guardians of the Art Inheritance of Asia: Japan and China at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8:3 (2000): 675-709; Historical Narrative of Shofuso. (.pdf); 1904: The World’s Fair. Missouri Historical Society; At The Fair: The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The Pike; Hoshi, Hajime, Handbook of Japan and Japanese exhibits at World’s fair, St. Louis, 1904; Tsen, Hsuan, Spectacles of Authenticity: The Emergence of Transnational Entertainments in Japan and America, 1880-1906. (Stanford University, 2011).]