Author: Ken Finkel

“My God, it’s Reiss!” shouted Alfred Haggerty. The patrolman had noticed something at the bottom of the gaping pit at the intersection of 5^th and Clearfield and stared at it for minutes before realizing it was the body of the missing police officer.

A week before, Joseph A. Reiss and his partner, patrolman Joseph Cheplick, responded to a call to investigate a street cavein. Within minutes of their arrival, Reiss had “plunged into a 20-foot-deep, water-filled hole that suddenly opened beneath him.”

“Policeman Vanished in Huge Cavein,” read the headline on August 2, 1959.

Gunner’s Run, one of the many creeks buried by the city in the 1880s, still flowed in a 12-foot brick conduit more than 20 feet below. This creek-turned-sewer was out of sight and out of mind until the rains. Then came the caveins, again and again.

As Cheplick told what happened that fateful Saturday night, he and Reiss “got out of their car for a closer look. Chelplick was about 20 feet behind his partner when Reiss reached the hole and peered over the edge.  “I saw dirt crumbling away under the pavement where Joe was standing,” Cheplick said. “I yelled, “For God’s sake, Joe, get back!” Then I saw his spotlight fly up in the air and Joe disappeared in to the hole.”

“The edge crumpled and he was flung into the hole. He disappeared from sight.”

Cheplick ran back to their squad car, “got a rope and worked his way back to the crater. He tried to lower the rope into the hole. “But when I got back all I could see was swirling water. Joe was gone…” Cheplick “was forced to retreat as the ground on which he stood fell away.”

At the missing officer’s home in Bustleton, Marie Reiss, prayed “in her living room and…begged God to keep her husband alive in the pit that swallowed him… She wept because she realized the chances were slim. Mayor Richardson Dilworth told her so. Her friends have told her the same—in an effort to soften the blow… But Marie Reiss clung to the thread of possibility.”

In the light of day, Cheplick returned to the scene and choked back tears as he showed exactly where Reiss had fallen in. “It was here,” he told the Water Commissioner, pointing to one edge of the pit, “that’s where he disappeared.” The rescue team “descended into the sewer and penetrated to within fifty feet of the collapsed wall, but saw no sign of the missing patrolman.” As hopes of rescue turned to recovery, few expected that Reiss’s body remained close to the cavein. The sewer overflow emptied out in the Delaware two miles downstream. That’s where a Harbor Patrol boat idled in the Delaware River, just off the foot of Somerset Street and Port Richmond.

After a week of waiting and watching, that patrolman Alfred Haggerty spotted Reiss’s body in the the crater at 5th and Clearfield turned out to be the only break. Immediately, “police and firemen erected a platform in the pit about 15 feet from the bottom and then began lowering a ladder to the bottom… A crane was swung into position to recover the body.” Then, “suddenly, the water fed by the afternoon’s heavy rains swirled up over the body” and carried it away.

A mile and three-quarters downstream, beneath the pavement at Richmond Avenue and Somerset Street, Water Department workers Anthony DiNicola and Edward Potts had been maintaining a watchful vigil. And it was there, less than an hour after Haggerty spotted Reiss, that they would recover his body from a 12-foot square, concrete interceptor chamber.

Two days later, after the viewing, the Police and Firemen’s bands lined up along Cottman Avenue and played “Nearer My God To Thee.” At the Requiem Mass that followed at the Church of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, near Bustleton Avenue and Welsh road, “a detail of 100 policemen representing all branches of the department stood at attention” as the pallbearers, including Joseph Cheplick, passed by. In the front of the church, that sad Wednesday, as city and police leaders filed out after the Mass, stood Marie Agnes Reiss and her two children.

Now, only Marie alone knew she was carrying a third child.

[Sources consulted at the George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Newsclipping Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University: “Policeman Vanished in Huge Cavein,” August 2, 1959; “Caveins Slow Rescue at Street Pit,” August 3, 1959; “That’s Where he Fell In, Officer Cries at Cavein,” August 4, 1959; “Policeman’s Wife Clings to Hope,” August 4, 1959; “Divers Recover Body of Policeman in Cavein,” August 9, 1959; “Mayor Attends Rites for Reiss,” August 12, 1959;  “Cave-In Widow Has A Daughter,” March 2, 1959. Also see “In Memory of Patrolman Joseph A. Reiss #2672.”]

That morning, just like any other Thursday, John Connor stepped out of his family’s two-story rowhouse, near 13^th and Moore Streets, and made his way up Passyunk Avenue to his job in Center City. Summer still lingered in the sunny September air, and the 23-year-old Connor looked forward to another day behind the wheel of Merchant & Evans’ new, custom-made delivery truck.

Merchant & Evans had just about outgrown their building at 517 Arch Street. They’d done quite well since the Civil War, when Clark Merchant retired from the Navy and built a business in brass, bronze, copper and tin. Over time, he aligned the company with the building trades. And by now, 1913, with Powell Evans, of International Sprinkler Company fame at the helm, success was only the beginning. Under Evans, the firm had expanded its offerings. Their fireproof products would soon be standard everywhere, if the insurance companies had their say about it—and they did. Soon, few large structures rose without sprinklers, fireproof metal doors and shutters. But more: Evans saw potential in the automobile market and turned the company’s talents to the manufacture of clutches, alignment joints, rear axles, jackshaft transmissions, grease cups and metal tire cases. Before long, Merchant & Evans would even build their own “motor trucks,” not too unlike the models they assembled for deliveries and pickups in Philadelphia. The company was widely recognized as “one of the premier metal houses of the United States” with plants in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Wheeling, West Virginia and offices from New York to Kansas.

As Connor approached Merchant & Evans’ loading dock on Cuthbert Street side of the building, his delivery truck was already packed. This September morning, just as he did every day, Connor headed out from company headquarters with a full load of metal products that just about doubled the weight of his 3-ton truck.

Connor navigated the grid Philadelphia making stops and gradually unburdening some of his heavy load. In Northern Liberties he skirted the well-known stretch near 2^nd and Germantown, where a cave-in of the Cohocksink, rumors had it, nearly claimed at horse-drawn streetcar in the 1880s. But Connor knew this wasn’t a rumor, he knew this wily underground creek-turned-sewer had nearly claimed a trolley car filled with passengers only one year before. And it would grab him too, if he made the wrong turn, on the wrong street, on the wrong day. Especially in a truck weighing more than two-and-a-half times what a Model-T Ford did—standing completely empty.

By late afternoon, Connor trundled through the busy traffic of North 9^th Street, stopping, as his work orders dictated, at building sites, mills, wagon works, machine shops and hardware factories. As he approached the Girard Avenue Farmers Market and the new Girard Avenue Train Station, Connor knew from experience he had to avoid the intersection of 9^th and Girard. And so he made a left turn onto Thompson Street.

Heading east to quieter quarters, with Seyferts’ Foundry and the American Smelting Company fading in his rearview mirror, Connor passed narrow Darien Street and glimpsed two church steeples straight ahead, at Thompson and Franklin. Then, in front of Heickhaus’s Groceries and Provisions, Connor saw out of the corner of his eye a “hump in the cobblestone paving.” He swerved; but too little, too late. With no further warning, Connor “felt the street suddenly sinking beneath him” and “plunged head-on into a collapsing mass of cobblestones and dirt.” As the truck dropped, Connor didn’t have time to think, he just “threw himself backward.” Then, as the debris-covered front of the truck shuttered and steamed, he saw water shooting from both front and back of the chasm. Worse, he smelled natural gas. Connor “clawed his way upward along the tilting surface” of the truck. “The odor of escaping gas was so powerful Connor had barely enough strength to climb over the edge…and stagger to safety.” But stagger he did, and safe he was. Connor escaped “scarcely a minute” before a great explosion echoed throughout the neighborhood.

As for Merchant & Evans, they survived, too, and rolled onward. Within a few years, Powell Evans moved the entire Philadelphia operation to a new plant near 20^th Street and Washington Avenue. And the company proclaimed in advertisements that “rapid motor trucks” of their “own manufacture” were “used daily to make free delivery in all parts of the city.” No word as to whether John Connor ever got behind the wheel again.

[Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, September, 19, 1913. “Huge Truck in Sewer Cave-In, Large Vehicle Falls Through Street When Old Cohocksink Collapses.”]

With an investment of $100,000—the equivalent of millions in today’s dollars—City Fathers assured Philadelphians that the “noisome” Cohocksink, the creek that drained much of North Philadelphia, had finally been contained. No longer would its “fetid and polluted waters” meander in plain sight, sluggishly making their way to the Delaware. It was 1871, and this country-creek-turned-urban-sewer would forever be “closed from view…shut off from further sight and further mischief.” City life could continue, unimpeded, above.

Or so they thought.

In spite of the best of intentions, this “work of magnitude and importance”  would not tame the Cohocksink. With runoff from the expanding grid of North-Central Philadelphia, this underground “solution” gained power as it flowed to the Delaware. By the time its “fetid and polluted” waters got to Northern Liberties, the Cohocksink could become much more mischievous, especially when swollen with storm water.

Time and time again, the Cohocksink dramatically carried away bits and pieces of the city. In November 1888, the horses and delivery wagon of wholesale grocer Henry Graham were saved only by tremendous efforts on the part of driver and a handful of pedestrians, who managed to pull a half-swallowed horse onto solid ground at Germantown Avenue near 2^nd Street.

Before workmen could repair that gaping hole, another storm opened it up even more just as a horse-drawn streetcar passed over. The driver, “realizing their peril” as “the ground was rumbling and sinking,” lashed his horses into a gallop, and…got onto firm ground” before “the earth beneath the tracks gave way.”

Engineer Frank Seaville, slipped into the “yawning chasm.” If not for the efforts of fellow workmen, Seaville would have “fallen into the malodorous and swift rushing waters” to certain death. William F. Keppler wasn’t so lucky. When another storm caused a collapse over the Cohocksink, Keppler was swept away.

The gorge at Second Street soon extended “from curb to curb,” compromising homes and ruining businesses. Clothier P. Ostheim & Sons lost their Christmas trade. Store-keepers along nearby Girard Avenue: a baker, a butcher, a tobacconist and a pair of saloon keepers lost goods and customers. Rising waters extinguished cellar furnaces as far away as 4th and Girard.

Sinkholes opened in nearby streets with increasing frequency. “A mighty stream of water poured through the Cohocksink sewer last night,” reported the Inquirer in January 1889, “and near the big break at Germantown and Second Street masses of earth and masonry were heard giving way as the torrent swept toward the river.” That rainy summer the Inquirer reported yet “Another Big Cave In.” The waters “carried away sidewalks, and threatened to undermine houses.”

Frustrated residents above the Cohocksink pleaded with City Council “to take immediate measures to prevent further breaks.” Repairs would take years.

As work continued, so did the storms. In September 1894, a nighttime deluge led to another, familiar “deep rumbling” heard throughout Northern Liberties. Everyone knew what happened: the Cohocksink claimed yet another chunk of the city.

(Sources in The Inquirer: “Municipal Improvements,” January 4, 1871; “Work of the Storm,” November 12, 1888; “Like a Yawning Chasm,” December 18, 1888; “Another Break in the Cohocksink Sewer,” January 10, 1889; ”Snow, Rain and Slush,” January 21, 1889; “Cohocksink Sewer Again,” March 22, 1889; “Another Big Cave-In,” July 31, 1889; “Cohocksink Sewer,” May 23, 1894; “City Deluged By Heavy Rain,” September 9, 1894; “The Earth Dropped,” July 29, 1899.)

Little “blue-eyed, pink-cheeked” Nona Martin, the five-year-old from Chestnut Hill, stood motionless, “awed by the numberless masses that stretched away before her vision down Broad Street, as far as the eye could see.” By her side, on the platform, was her grandfather, William G. McAdoo, the “tall, gaunt, commanding” Treasury Secretary. Behind them loomed the giant statue, draped in white.

The parade had started as the the clocks struck noon. Twelve hundred schoolgirls “dressed as Goddesses of Liberty,” escorted by the Police Band, marched northward from Broad and Jackson Streets. Each held in her uplifted hands torches of Liberty and the flags of France, England, Belgium, Italy, Canada, Japan, Poland, and, of course, the United States. Behind the “procession of the goddesses” marched 5,000 marines and sailors. The pageant was great; the crowd greater; the music spectacular.

Bands played “Over There.” Then Clarence Whitehill, baritone of the Metropolitan Opera Company, stepped forward. “A hush fell over the multitude. His voice rang out the first words of the hallowed ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’” (recently recorded by another baritone, Reinald Werrenrath, at Victor in Camden.) As Whitehill’s voice echoed over the silent crowd, “it was as though an electric current had been sent through the solid masses of humanity.”

According to the plan, at the conclusion of the singing, at the moment the words “Sweet land of liberty… wafted to the crisp Spring air from many thousands of throats,” McAdoo would pull the cord allowing “the veil to fall from the Statue of Liberty.” He then would announce the start of the Third Liberty Loan Campaign to finance The Great War.

But McAdoo had another idea. As “the last strains of patriotic song still were echoing down Broad street, over the heads of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children, between the walled land made by skyscraper office buildings,” he handed the cord, “the other end of which ran to the top of the white drapery” to his granddaughter.

The crowd fell silent in anticipation as the time had come to unveil Philadelphia’s plaster Statue of Liberty, a 29-foot replica of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s 151-foot monument in New York Harbor.

This Liberty-lookalike, mounted on a 22-foot base designed by architect John T. Windrim, had been the work of sculptor Max Voight, himself once an arrival from Germany among the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Voight’s international, hand-picked team of sculptors included an Italian, a Frenchman and a Russian: Salvatore Morani, Armand Maeme and Nathan Adelman. Their work on the statue had been followed in the newspapers and documented “by moving picture films,” as was increasingly the custom. Towering, 51-feet above Broad Street, Liberty’s flaming torch lit up Philadelphia’s nights and served as beacon, booth and site of symbolic gesture.

“Each subscriber will be entitled to ascend the stairway to the foot of the statue and drive into the pedestal a large headed tack bearing his initials. This will transform the pedestal gradually from a wooden to a metal surface.”

As the gathered crowd stood in silence that April afternoon, Nona Martin “seemed for a moment lost as to her exact part of the affair. Her famous grandfather leaned over, spoke a word or two, and the child responded.  She gave a sudden, vigorous tug at the rope, while the draperies opened and fell, and Liberty—the personification of that for which America and most of the civilized world is now waging—stood revealed.”

“As the white sheeting fluttered to the base of the statue, the massed band struck up ‘America.’ … No less than 100,000 men, women and children joined in lifting the air as though in message to the Nation” that Philadelphians would soon part with another $136 million to fund a bloody war “in civilization’s and humanity’s cause.”

 (Sources from The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Copy of Famous Liberty Statue Rising in Phila.,”February 10, 1918; “M’Adoo To Open Loan Drive Here; To Unveil Statue,” March 31, 1918; “Huge Crowd Electrified With Patriotic Fervor at Statue’s Unveiling,” April 7, 1918.)

September had been tough, especially the middle of the month, when more than a quarter of the soldiers at the Frankford Arsenal had been hospitalized with the “Spanish Flu.” On October 1, as the corpses were counted, The Inquirer grasped for a positive tone, pointing out the number of new cases had actually fallen off toward the end of the previous month. Commander R.W. Plummer of the Fourth Naval Reserve District also tried to offer hope, that maybe, just maybe, “the crest of the epidemic of Spanish Influenza has passed.”

“Talk of cheerful things instead of disease,” advised the Inquirer on October 5. Why close down “public schools, theatres, churches, and many other places. … the authorities seem to be going daft. What are they trying to do, scare everybody to death?” The Inquirer took a position about as reckless as that of Dr. Wilmer Krusen, head of the City’s Department of Public Health and Charities. Until two days earlier, Krusen insisted citizens were in no danger.

In October 1918, Philadelphians had little time for public health; there was a fundraising parade to put on. Citizens had been ordered to do their share and buy half a billion dollars’ worth of Liberty Bonds to support the war effort, and to do so before the end of October. No way would this be possible in a city scared and shuttered.

On September 28^th the parade on Broad Street took place as scheduled; 200,000 turned out.

Symptoms of this strain of influenza began as soon as a day after exposure. On September 30^th and October 1^st the city hospitals had 466 new cases on their hands. Twenty-four hours later, The Inquirer reported an additional 635 cases.

“Within seventy-two hours after the parade” writes John Barry, in The Great Influenza,“every single bed in each of the city’s thirty-one hospitals was filled. And people began dying. Hospitals began refusing to accept patients. … On October 3, only five days after Krusen had let the parade proceed, he banned all public meetings in the city-including, finally, further Liberty Loan gatherings—and closed all churches, schools, theatres. Even public funerals were prohibited.”

Too little; too late.

From October 4^th through the 20^th, the city recorded 22,051 new cases. More than 3,900 died during those 17 days. During its most virulent four-week stretch, 47,094 cases of influenza were reported, writes James F. Armstrong. Still, denial of city officials and the Press persisted. An Inquirer article of October 9^th  carried the headline “Signs Of Epidemic Wearing Itself Out.”

The 1918 influenza pandemic and the related complication of pneumonia, cost Philadelphia something like 1% of its entire population, nearly 12,200 citizens.

“In its 10-month duration between 22 and 40 million people perished worldwide,” writes Armstrong, who estimated “the death toll in the United States at over 675,000 with over 22 million” cases.  That death toll was more than five times the total number of American casualties in World War I.

Bad all around, but no American city had been hit harder than Philadelphia.

Life on the home front? In 1918 Philadelphia, it was more like stubborn ignorance and needless death.

“Those moaning saxophones,” fretted John R. McMahon in the Ladies’ Home Journal, “call out the low and rowdy instinct.” And with degrading names like “the cat step, camel walk, bunny hug, turkey trot,” McMahon figured jazz dance mocked the dignified traditions of social dance. Most insidious of all was a move they called the shimmy. “The road to hell is too often paved with jazz steps,” McMahon wrote in an article titled, “Unspeakable Jazz Must Go!”

The shimmy rode in with Spencer Williams’ popular song, “Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble,” from 1917. Within a few years, the shimmy had just about taken over White America’s dance halls and cabarets; thriving on stage, in recordings, all the while shaking America’s sense of decency.

“With hardly any movement of the feet,” described singer and actress Mae West, dancers “just shook their shoulders, torsos, breasts and pelvises.” West introduced her version of the shimmy to New York in the Fall of 1918, and a year later her image appeared on the sheet music for “Ev’rybody Shimmies Now.” While the shimmy amused people, its boldness also shocked them. Even West conceded there was “a naked, aching sensual agony about it.”

By 1919, the shimmy dominated American music publishing, recording and performing. The Ziegfeld Follies featured it that year on Broadway. Gilda Gray introduced the shimmy to Philadelphia in the “Shubert Gaieties” at the Chestnut Street Opera House, suggesting that if she hadn’t exactly invented the move, she owned it on stage. “I don’t know whether my shoulders were made to express the shimmy,” Gray told the Inquirer, “or whether the shimmy was made for my shoulders to express.”

America danced to “an explosion of shimmy tunes” and “everyone seemed to jump on the shimmy bandwagon” writes Rebecca A. Bryant in “Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the Shimmy in America.” The most famous, “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” would be joined by the “Shimmie Waltz,” “Let Us Keep the Shimmie,” “Shimmying Everywhere,” “You Cannot Shake That Shimmie Here.” Irving Berlin’s “You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea,” worried that Prohibition might kill the shimmy. But banning alcohol didn’t slow the shimmy. Philadelphia soon shook to its own song: “All the Quakers Are Shoulder Shakers (Down in Quaker Town).”

Others joined the scandalized Quaker on the cover of “Shoulder Shakers,” chiming in with their opinions about the shimmy. “Dancing Masters Join Clergy to Purify Dance,” read one headline, “International Association Blames Wave of Vulgar Dancing on Song Writers.”  Before long, from New York to San Francisco, moral authorities wanted to, and sometimes managed, to ban, restrict or censor the shimmy.

“The insidious thing,” wrote the Inquirer in an article confirming “the shimmy dance has been barred from Philadelphia,” is that “when one dancer starts the whole place must start, until the room rocks with the shimmy dance. It is more insidious than champagne, it is more insidious than drugs.” In the suburbs, the Lansdowne Club designated chaperones as “shimmy sleuths” assigning them to break up “the bunny-hugging and too affectionate ‘toddling.” In the city, the task of policing the city’s 4,000 licensed dance halls proved more challenging.

The solution? Dancing—and censoring—in the streets.

“Police Dance Censor Taboos Street Shimmy,” read the headline before the first Philadelphia street dances of 1919. Sergeant Theodore S. Fenn, assured that dancers “will do nothing ‘suggestive’ by way of street dancing while I am around…Philadelphia will dance with her feet, and her feet only. The Quaker City…will not be disgraced by the ‘shimmy’ dance.”

But the dancers had other ideas. When 15,000 jammed the Parkway to dance to the Police Band, reported the Inquirer, they were “happy in jazzing and shimmying…in…one jostling, swaying mass of sweltering humanity, in which a censor, if there had been one, would have had about as much change of imposing his ideas as the proverbial snowball.” Dancers “toddled and shimmied, dipped and slid to their hearts content….”

Someone needed to train police in anti-dance tactics and prevent “cheek-to-cheek dancing, abdominal contact, [the] shimmy [and the] toddle.” Enter dance master Miss Marguerite Walz, who would instruct 54 officers “to keep their eyes peeled for violators of the “No Shimmy” rule” while the Police Band played on. During their first outing, just “a few couples drew the attention of the censors, but policemen would step forward and touch one of the offenders on the shoulder and that was the end of it.”

Or so it seemed. The very next year, the “Hip-Dip” “wiggled its way into local terpsichorean circles,” complained Miss Walz. During a visit to South Philadelphia High School, she noticed the “Hip-Dip” and other “new and very undesirable dances,” including the “Flapper Flop,” the “Debutante Slouch” and the “Windmill Stride.”

Dance censorship, it turned out, would be a never-ending game of “whack-a-mole.”

 (Articles consulted: “Unspeakable Jazz Must Go!” by John R. McMahon, Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1921; In The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Philadelphia Sneezes at Shimmy Dance,” January 18, 1919, page 3; “Police Dance Censor Taboos Street Shimmy,” May 7, 1919, p.3; “Dancing Masters Join Clergy to Purify Dance,” June 13, 1919, p. 16; “Another Creator of the Shimmy,” October 19, 1919, p. 8; “’Sedate Dancing Only’ Lansdowne Club Edict,” January 15, 1921, p. 19; “18,000 at City Dance Miss Walz, Censor, Finds Few Violations of ‘No Shimmy’ Rule,” July 29, 1921, p. 3; “New Dances Banned. South Phila. High Girls Promise to Eschew Latest Steps,” March 29, 1922, p. 16; “’Hip Dip’ Appears Here at City’s Public Dance,” July 14, 1922, p.3.)

Philly’s Finest got into the big band business while the getting was good. Only three years after 1912, when bandmaster Lieutenant Joseph Kiefer (formerly of the U. S. Navy) started up his talented squad, he expanded its ranks to 72 musicians. He then spent the better part of the next decade riding the rising tide of American popular music.

In its first ten years, Kiefer’s band raised enough to cover their expenses and to pay $200,000 into the Police Pension Fund Association. There were the annual ticketed benefits, but the majority of the Police Band concerts were free. That unlikely business model had been in effect since 1917, when the City brought in Kiefer’s group to replace another band, whose contract officials let expire. “The Philadelphia Police Band will hold a series of open-air concerts on the northeast plaza of City Hall,” read the announcement. The new concerts would also inaugurate community singing.

“Over night the project has taken on gigantic propositions,” project leaders bragged. I all, more than 50,000 attended to hear the Police Band’s brass quartette give a brief concert before the Community Singing Association “helped to ring out the patriotic hymns and familiar songs which make up the nightly programme.”

Philadelphia’s Fire Department jumped aboard the bandwagon starting up their own group with 27 players and Kiefer moonlighting as leader. It “bids fair to become vigorous rival of celebrated police institution,” teased the Inquirer. But Kiefer’s main focus remained with the Police Band, which grew ever-busier raising funds for pensions while performing a full schedule of free concerts.

How did they do it? Whenever and wherever they played—in neighborhoods throughout the city, at the Baker Bowl at Broad and Huntingdon Streets, at the bandstand north of City Hall, or helping Philadelphians singing in the New Year on City Hall’s south apron—audiences already knew the music, they knew the words to the songs. The listening public was familiar with the Police Band’s music, and their greater repertoire having already bought, played repeatedly and memorized popular music.

Philadelphians owned phonographs—record players. And on them they spun copies of Kiefer’s compositions in Vocalian red-vinyl: On the Campus and Comrades of the Legion. From Aeolian (Vocalian’s parent company) they played his Buckeye State and The Iron Division March (dedicated to the Pennsylvania-based division nicknamed by General Pershing for valorous service in World War I.)

Kiefer and company also included in their repertoire longtime classics, also available as records: F.W. Meacham’s  popular American Patrol (1885); W. H. Myddleton’s Down South. American Sketch (1901). And they performed the more contemporary, and no less antiquated, Swanee River Moon. For young folks wanting to dance a lively Fox Trot, they included Dan Sullivan’s Stealing (the chorus of which, “Stealing, stealing with your eyes appealing…Stealing, stealing, at your shrine I’m kneeling,” made clear this was not a song about pickpockets.)

In 1921, the City added free weekly dances on the Parkway to the long-popular sing alongs and concerts. These Thursday evening soirees turned out to be a smashing success. For the inaugural dance, July’s muggy weather didn’t deter 15,000 from turning out on the stretch of the Parkway between 17th and 18th, still decorated as a “Court of Honor” for an Odd Fellow convention.

“To Dance on the Parkway,” read the headline after the first magical evening. Philadelphians danced to Police Band tunes and transformed themselves into “one jostling, swaying mass of sweltering humanity.” Young dancers wanted nothing to do with the “old style Virginia reel by four couples in rural garb” intended to show “dancers what they have been missing.” They wanted live jazz, just like the recordings they owned and danced to at home.

Kiefer and the Police Band accommodated everyone as best they could throughout the free Parkway dances, performing “everything in [their] repertory, from a sedate waltz for the benefit of the older folk to the latest jazz turn for the enjoyment of the flappers.”

Not everyone would be as tolerant.

(Articles in The Philadelphia Inquirer consulted: “Police Band Will Give Daily Concerts,” August 26, 1917; “’Sing’ at City Hall to Attract Many,” September, 2, 1917; “Police Band to Give Concerts on Plaza,” September 2, 1917; “Great Community Sing Will be Held Tonight,” September 15, 1917;  “Firemen’s Band out for Laurels,” September 23, 1917; “Concert Series Will Aid Police,” March 10, 1918; “To Sing New Year In,” December 31, 1918; “To Dance on Parkway, June 14, 1921; “15,000 Crowd at First Dance on Parkway,” July 8, 1921; “Police Band Concerts,” May 16, 1922.)

Great 20^th-century cities demanded forward looking solutions. When Philadelphia announced its intentions to join the City Beautiful Movement, grandiose cleanups would call for something more than the pith-­helmeted army of “White Wings.” Marching, uniformed  broomsmen were more reminiscent of 19^th– century colonial conquests than 20th-century urban efficiency.

The new solution would be a machine, and the more newfangled the better. Sprinkling and sweeping devices were horse drawn and required abundant supporting labor on foot. Squeegee machines were moving in the right direction. They slicked down miles of asphalt, but anything pulled by a horse was still old-school, manure producing, and self-defeating. What could maintain the explosion of new highways and byways and blend in with booming vehicular traffic? It would need to be something self-contained, something that looked and played the part.

In 1911, the first internal combustion powered sweeper seemed to have it all. But it was limited by a too-small collecting capacity. And its steel-rimmed wheels were out of step with rubber tire technology.  This sweeper did accomplish twice the work “at half the cost of the horse-hauled machine sweeper” but its engine moved it along at a snail’s pace and its inability to maneuver led to increased traffic congestion.

John M. Murphy, an Illinois farmer turned windmill maker turned Elgin, Illinois City Father crafted the solution with a new and improved “street sweeping machine.” Murphy’s machine was agile; it kept up with automobile traffic. It didn’t damage the pavement; it didn’t raise dust and left no debris behind. The Elgin Motor Sweeper received U. S. Patent number 1,239,293 on September 4, 1917. And a month later, an unidentified city official called for the city’s new acquisition to be brought up to the northeast corner of Philadelphia City Hall where he posed with it.

No question: the Elgin Motor Sweeper would cost-justify itself in Philadelphia, just as it had in beta testing on the roads of Boise, Idaho. There, the sweeper worked two, eight-hour shifts and cleaned 275,000 square yards of pavement per day—twice as much as the horse-drawn method. The operating cost? Nine cents per 1,000 square yards compared with a whopping 31 ½ cents using the old technique, according to the company history. “News of the fantastic new sweeper spread to Pocatello, Idaho—to Portland, Oregon” and, of course, to Philadelphia. “Fifteen Elgins were produced and put to use in 1915, twenty-three in 1916, forty-two the following year”—1917—when Philadelphia’s was proudly photographed.

The days of the “White Wing” army were over. Machines with names like “Gutter Snipe” would clean city streets in the 20^th century. Mechanization, made elegant by innovation and compelling by fiscal responsibility, had taken command.

“If we do not want to eat the stuff ourselves,” declared veterinarian Charles Allen Cary in 1887, “we had better bury or burn it.” Experts of the American Veterinary Association called for more inspections of dairies and slaughterhouses to reduce the amount of tubercular meat and milk reaching consumers.

At the turn of the 20^th century, tuberculosis still remained a leading cause of death in the United States. Approximately 10 percent of the cases resulted from exposure to infected cattle or cattle products. More distressing was the fact that cattle caused 25 percent of the childhood cases of tuberculosis. More distressing still was the fact that these rates were even higher in cities.

It seemed a losing battle to Franklin K. Lowry, Philadelphia’s official “Meat Detective.” In 1904, Lowry’s office reported nearly 6,400 visits to slaughterhouses and about 700 to the city’s stores and markets. His team inspected more than 205,000 cattle and calves. Nearly all of the infected animals they found and destroyed showed signs of tuberculosis.

Lowry augmented his team with a graduate of Penn Veterinary School, Dr. Albert Fricke Schreiber. Chief Meat Inspector Schreiber ramped up the search for violators and condemned more meat, sending it to M. L. Shoemaker’s Fertilizing Plant at the foot of Venango Street. Even so, with few arrests and even fewer convictions, Philadelphia’s cattle drivers and meat packers conducted business as usual—and new cases of tuberculosis went unabated.

Schreiber and his inspectors visited nearly 44,000 butchers, slaughterhouses (also known as abattoirs), storage houses and markets in 1909. He reported dropping in “quite unexpectedly, late at night, on two small downtown abattoirs” and finding “a tubercular beef carcass, from which the affected tissues had been carefully, if not deftly, trimmed out” and “being dressed for market.” A good day’s work for the meat inspectors, but an unusually successful one. With a “small and inadequate force,” Schreiber had little chance of keeping up with the violations among the city’s 150 or so small abattoirs spread far and wide, about half of which had been cited for unsanitary conditions. Nearly 375,000 pounds of meat was condemned and destroyed in 1909 alone. But it resulted in only a single fine; a single guilty plea. Business as usual.

For Philadelphia to have “something remotely related to intelligent supervision,” Schreiber promoted New York’s solution: confining its abattoirs to a single section of the city. He pleaded that his force of six inspectors (only two of whom were veterinarians) be expanded to twelve, including four veterinarians, a team “approximating the scope of the problem with which we have had to deal.” Then, and only then, could Schreiber hope to seriously address the tuberculosis problem, not to mention citing many other infractions, including “the handing of meat outside in the open air, uncovered and exposed to street dust, refuse and insects.”

In 1910, attrition caused by low pay reduced Schreiber’s team to three, “a force obviously and absurdly inadequate” if the city was “to prevent the killing of tuberculous cattle, measled hogs and immature calves,” and provide anything like “systematic surveillance” of the city’s stores and markets.

The case for more staff had merit on several fronts. In 1910, Philadelphia’s population stood at just over 1.5 million (about the same it is 100 years later) and the city was still growing and diversifying. The meat inspectors needed to not only catch up, they needed to keep up with new challenges.

When the city’s meat inspection unit did expand to eight (not the requested twelve) in 1911, Schreiber still felt overwhelmed. Now, in addition to the ongoing problem of killer cattle, he wanted his inspectors hoped to turn their attention to the city’s “’pest’ sections,” to address “’persistent offenders,’” that “class of dealers, who keep dirty shops in congested localities overrun with street stands, barrow venders, and other features of like character peculiar to the sections of the city inhabited by people of foreign birth.” These newcomers, “vendors of the curbstone and push cart variety…bring in partially decomposed rabbits, heated and unwholesome poultry, and other products.” Schreiber found them “pitifully poor, woefully ignorant of the plainest rudiments of sanitation, and not infrequently belligerently obstinate in their opposition to hygienic regulations.” He found their shops “badly kept, lacking in equipment, …without order or intelligent direction, and sometimes [a] jumble two or more lines of trade obviously not compatible under one roof.”

How could Philadelphia officials address the issue of tuberculosis and also mitigate the new and growing health problems caused by “long rows of curbstone and sidewalk vendors, extending several blocks on some of our streets” with vendors who “litter the roadways, gutters and sidewalks with refuse; and allow street dirt to be “blown over and upon exposed meats, poultry and fish”? In a city evolving daily with a new, growing immigrant population and a persistent, unsolved problem of tuberculosis in cattle, the small number of city meat men had no choice but to take it as they saw it—one day at a time.

What with coal ash, horse droppings and the refuse of day-to-day life, cleaning the early 20th-century city proved no small task. But for South Philadelphia pig farmer turned politician Edwin H. Vare, cleaning up in Philadelphia proved to be quite a lucrative operation, both literally and figuratively.

Back then, the city didn’t clean its streets—private contractors did. And year to year, the competition to win and hold contracts for the city’s six districts grew fierce—and political. Before long, the powerful Vare Brothers obtained contracts for every last city street. And they’d hold onto at least several of these handsome contracts until the City Charter of 1919 turned the massive undertaking back over to the city.

In the early decades of the 20^th century, cleaning the city also included annual demonstrations of influence, displays of military-style choreography and campaign advertising. As early as 1900, the newly-minted army of 150 uniformed street sweepers, “White Wings,” as they became known, passed in review of before city officials. “Each man wore a uniform of white; his helmet, jumper and overalls were immaculate, and each was armed with a formidable brush, or about 24 inches callibre,” reported The Philadelphia Inquirer. Commanding each company were leaders in “neat gray uniforms” issuing orders in Italian, or Hungarian or whatever the native language of that particular squad. By 1912, these white duck uniforms and pith helmets became standard issue. By 1913, parades became an annual event.

“Every citizen is requested to join in the crusade against dirt and filth,” proclaimed Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg in April 1914. He asked everyone to do their part “in cleaning out rubbish and waste material from rooms, closets, hallways, garrets, roofs, cellars fire escapes, yards, all dark corners and out of the way places.” And to reinforce the city’s commitment, the mayor designated April 20^th to 25^th as “Clean-Up-Week” launched by a parade on Broad Street. At the head of the two-mile long march, peppered with eight brass bands, rolled a single, ash wagon bearing a giant sign. Then came a car packed with contractors, then superintendents on foot, then the “White Wings”—uniformed, helmeted blockmen and gangmen wheeling bag carriers or wielding brooms. They were followed by sprinklers, squeegee machines (as we saw previously),  flushers, machine brooms, dirt wagons, ash wagons and rubbish wagons. In all, 2,000 street cleaners and 750 pieces of equipment paraded by.

But the procession was only the half of it. The Director of the Department of Public Works sent out 3,400 personal letters to every manufacturer of brushes, brooms, buckets, vacuum cleaners and advertisers of same. He wrote to evey last civic group and major business. All mail from the city bore gummed stickers in yellow and blue with the words, “Remember Clean-Up Week, April 20-25, 1914.”  Police handed out 260,000 four-page printed bulletins. School children were issued blue and yellow buttons. More than 20,000 display placards appeared in the windows of department stores and retail merchants. Every one of the 700,000 Philadelphians settling in to view films at any one of the city’s 205 “moving picture houses” would see slides directing their attention to “Clean-Up-Week.” And inside the city’s 3,200 streetcars were posted neatly designed placards featuring the figure of William Penn wielding a broom from atop City Hall.

As to the metaphor of the broom signifying sweeping political reform? Apparently, that hadn’t yet caught on.

[Sources for this post, all from The Philadelphia Inquirer, include: “‘White Wings’ Pass in Review Before City Officials,” January 3, 1900; “Spick and Span City is Aim of Clean-Up Week,” April 12, 1914; “White Wings Will Herald Clean-Up Week’s Approach—Men and Equipment to be Shown in Parade Today,” April 18, 1914; and “White Wings in March Clean-Up Weeks’s Prelude – 2000 Street Cleaners, Spick and Span, Seen in Parade,” April 19, 1914.]