Author: Ken Finkel

Artist Augustus Kollner hit the ground running as soon as he arrived in Philadelphia from Germany in 1839. Thing is, the ground in Philadelphia was changing under Kollner’s feet.

In watercolors, lithographs and etchings, Kollner captured scenes of a city in transition, a grid expanding uniformly to accommodate the railroad, the factory and miles of previously unimagined rowhouses. Kollner’s wistful titles of his collections: “City Sights for Country Eyes” and “Bits of Nature and some Art Products, in Fairmount Park” speak, again and again, of his attraction for surviving surprises like the shack and tethered goat on the rocky outcropping at 27^th and Aspen Streets.

Kollner the brinksman knew this texture—the goats, the shacks and the rocky remnants they stood on—were all disappearing. What could an artist do? He documented as much as he could, and preserved his work in tidy albums and portfolios, filling the better part of his house at 616 North 7^th Street. When Kollner died in 1906, his life work was nearly lost, sold as waste paper for two dollars.

Long before then, of course, the flattened, expanded city grid had won out, replacing all remaining picturesque bits of rural life with industrial necessities. By the turn of the century, Domenic Vitiello tells us,the Baldwin Locomotive Works employed more than 11,000 and produced more than 1,200 locomotives each and every a year. Baldwin took over the triangular block along Pennsylvania Avenue between 26^th and 27^th hard by Pennsylvania Avenue’s sunken tracks with a roundhouse to launch its locomotives.

The industrial city was going strong when Baldwin decided to move its operations to Eddystone, Pennsylvania. At the same time, an alternate and competing vision for a grand civic boulevard, in the form of the nearby Parkway, promised to transform the city industrial into the City Beautiful. Within a couple of short decades, the smoky red-brick roundhouse (seen at the upper left in this photograph) was rendered obsolete—an antique.

What would replace it?

Just across 26^th Street from the roundhouse, the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company would light the way. This Art Deco building from the late 1920s, a white-limestone temple to the gods of insurance, is seen here in an aerial view effectively separating the old, working-class, rowhouse neighborhood from the Parkway. Fidelity Mutual stood as a lodestar for the new idea for a 20^th century civic city, a place that would continue to call itself the Workshop of the World, but in reality had moved beyond that very 19^th- century identity.

The civic buildings along the Parkway would be up to the task of forging this new identity, but what could augment Fidelity Mutual’s beacon-like claim to the present?  First, the 2600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue would need to be connected to the new Parkway by covering the half-dozen depressed tracks with a new grade-level deck along Pennsylvania Avenue. Then the challenge of what the new high-rise residence dubbed “2601 Parkway” might look like could be tackled by the office of architect Paul P. Cret. In fact, the project would evolve over nine years. As David Brownlee put it in Building the City Beautiful, Cret eventually stripped his idea of a building “of all detail and produced a series of ‘moderne’ alternatives that assumed an “expressionist guise.”  No less than 161 drawings for the project are listed in the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings database, and at least one other drawing for a proposed design found its way into the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Why was 2601 so important?

As we’ve come to realize nearly a century later, the success of the Parkway cannot be measured by the impressive facades and ambitious missions of the institutions along its path. Rather, what defines success in the post-industrial, civic city is the value these institutions have for the communities they serve. For that reason, the transformations of 27^th and Aspen then, and now, complete the story.

Of all the places where Mother Jones might have started her famous 1903 protest known as the March of the Mill Children, which did she find the most strategic? Philadelphia’s Kensington Labor Lyceum at 2^nd and Cambria Streets.

Of all the halls where Mother Jones might have advised a thousand young seamstresses on the verge of the “the great Philadelphia shirtwaist strike of 1909” which did she visit? Philadelphia’s Labor Lyceum at Sixth and Brown Streets. (Become “independent workers who will assert their rights…get the spirit of revolt and be a woman.”)

When Eugene V. Debs came to Philadelphia in 1908 campaigning for the U.S. presidency, on what stages did he proclaim: “We are today upon the verge of the greatest organic change in all of history. … We are permeated with the spirit of the new social order and of the grander civilization…. Here in the United States we are very happily approaching the third revolution”? Debs’ advocated his “third revolution” on stages at both Labor Lyceums: Northern Liberties and Kensington.

At the Kensington Lyceum in January 1921, thousands of textile workers filled “every seat and windowsill” and “every inch of standing room” before marching up 2^nd Street to support strikers at the textile mills. “Bright-eyed girls,” burly men and “careworn women” were stirred by the “silver tongued” labor leader Abraham Plotkin and his warnings. “The fellow who hasn’t a job and is cold, and whose stomach hurts all the time from hunger is dangerous. … Out of unemployed come the tramps, out of the tramps come the criminals, and out of the criminals, the jails. We’ve learned this from hard knocks.”

The Labor Lyceums were places were free speech reigned and where all ideas were welcome.

The idea of the Lyceum was first presented at a Labor Day picnic in 1889, the brainchild of Frederick Wilhelm Fritzsche, a self-described “labor agitator” from Germany. The city’s first Labor Lyceum thrived in rented quarters at 441 North 5^th Street and served as a headquarters for unions and a home away from home for workers. Members would come for meetings, for votes, and for “mental and moral improvements” in the form of classes in typewriting, singing, drawing, cabinetmaking and English. When Lyceums had the space, they’d also offer libraries packed with books, in German and English.

In 1893, the Congregation Keneseth Israel vacated their large (126 by 96 feet), ornate 1860s building at 809-817 North 6^th Street (just north of Brown Street) for a larger synagogue on Broad Street where Temple University’s Law School stands today. The burgeoning Lyceum immediately stepped in and bought the building.

“Labor’s New Home,” read the Inquirer headline describing the move to the new quarters. “Over three thousand men were in line with banners and brass bands…entered the new building…” The Fresco Painters’ Union led the procession “with their blood-red flag and badges;” followed by the Typographers, with their banners with Guttenberg and Franklin. There were the Metal Workers, the Carpenters, Cigar Makers’, Cigar Packers, Dyers, Leathers Workers, Blacksmiths Wheelwrights, Harness Makers, Barkeepers, Waiters and the Socialist Labor Union.  They arrived at the new building and “crowded into the big hall… decked with greens and flags.”

The idea of the Lyceum was so successful that, less than two years later, the city’s textile unions hired architect A. C. Wagner to design and build the Kensington Labor Lyceum in the heart of the city’s s textile district, on Second Street just north of Cambria.

When Fritzsche died in 1905, the Lyceum on 6^th Street became his memorial. “Thousands Mourn Dead Socialist,” read the headline. Fritzsche’s body laid “in state in the hall” as “five thousand men and women trudged through the rain and icy streets” to pay last respects. “The auditorium was decorated with long streamers of red bunting, the symbol of socialism, kept in place by black rosettes. Over the catafalque hung the inscription: ‘Arbeiter Aller Lander Vereinigt Euch.’” Workers of the World Unite.

What’s left today? No buildings. Only faded memories, a handful of archived images and newspaper articles.

And a whole lot of history.

[Consulted newspaper articles include: “The Labor Lyceum,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 4, 1891; “Labor’s New Home,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 23, 1893; “World of Labor,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 1899; “Thousands Mourn Dead Socialist,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 13, 1905.]

The gathered mourners were done sharing memories. The moving eulogy was over and the choir’s hymn reached its final “amen,” echoing a dozen times through the streets of Mantua. Now, the waiting excavator reared back, its giant claw raised against the blue sky hovering over the two-story rowhouse at 3711 Melon Street. The Funeral for a Home had reached the moment where ceremony was about to give way to reality. The claw gently picked up the blanket of flowers placed above the cornice and brought it down to the street. The next bite would be a chunk of the 142-year old cornice.

Most of the hundreds in attendance considered this ceremony as something unusual and new. And it was unusual. But the event wasn’t entirely without precedent. Another Philadelphia rowhouse was celebrated before its demolition in February 1907, although the speeches then didn’t deal with memory or community.

In the Fall of 1907, inspired by a grandiose vision of civic progress, the city served notice to more than 700 property owners whose homes stood in the way of The City Beautiful.  The idea of a grand boulevard connecting City Hall and Fairmount Park had been talked about for more than thirty years. Now the Parkway was a project with a timeline. In January, contractor Howard E. Ruch signed a contract with the city to demolish everything between Callowhill to Hamilton Streets that stood in the way. He had 95 days to complete the job, even though the majority of the residents were still in place.

Director of Public Works John R. Hathaway decided if eggs were going to break, he might as well make an omelet. Hathaway cast displacement and demolition as historic “improvement” and commandeered George Washington’s birthday to choreograph a ceremony around the start of demolition.

The first house to come down would be one of the few emptied rowhouses. On February 22^nd, officials dressed for the occasion gathered at Ruch’s nearby office and then, just before noon, held a procession to 422 North 22^nd Street, the first residence “marked for demolition.”

“The party… entered the house and one by one [climbed] up a rickety ladder…onto the roof. There, just as the clock struck 12, the Director raised his silver pick and began loosening a brick on the chimney. … Several hundred persons on the street below gave a cheer as the first brick was pecked out and held aloft.”

At a luncheon following the ceremony, City Councilman John W. Ford, presented Hathaway with the silver pick in its custom-made, satin-lined case. Accepting it, Hathaway proclaimed: “I regard this as an era in Philadelphia’s history, and I shall cherish this souvenir to my dying day.”

A contrasting scenario was playing out around the corner at 2223 Hamilton Street. John Kelley and his wife were attempting to keep their bricks, their home, in place. While Hathaway and his “Parkway Group” conducted ceremonial street theater, Kelley, who had previously believed “there was a chance of his home escaping demolition,” realized all hope was lost. Already ill and now grieving “over the fact that the house which he and his family occupied was to be dismantled,” he soon received a final notice to vacate. Within days, Kelley died. Grieved to Death over Loss of Home, read the newspaper headline.

Walking from the Melon Street ceremony, I overheard a conversation between two Mantua  neighbors.

“What’s this all about?” asked one resident.

“They’ve come to bury the neighborhood,” was the response.

This time, there wasn’t a silver pick to take home. But there were lots of questions about the history, meaning, and future of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods.

[Consulted newspaper articles, all from the archives of the The Philadelphia Inquirer, include: “Working on Parkway Property Owners Are Notified to Vacate,” October 23, 1906; “Contract Awarded for Parkway Work,” January 1, 1907; “Parkway Started by Razing of First Building,” February 23, 1907; “Parkway Progress Opposed by Tenants, “March 1, 1907; “Grieved to Death over Loss of Home,” March 3, 1907.]

“During the Philadelphia textile workers’ strike in 1903,” wrote reformer John Spargo in his 1916 book, The Bitter Cry of the Children, “I saw at least a score of children ranging from eight to ten years of who had been working in the mills prior to the strike. One little girl of nine I saw in the Kensington Labor Lyceum. She has been working for almost a year before the strike began, she said, and careful inquiry proved her story to be true.”

Spargo was trying to do something about the fact that, in the second half of the 19^th century, urban industrialization had turned cities into giant child labor pools. American textile companies employed more than 80,000 children and Pennsylvania was among the worst offenders. As historian Walter Licht explains in Getting Work in Philadelphia, between 1860 and the end of the century the percentage of 14 year olds at work jumped from eight percent to more than 40 percent. In Philadelphia, the mills of Kensington were ground zero for child labor.

It hardly mattered that the employment of children less than twelve years of age had been illegal since the 1840s. State officials, mill owners, and parents all figured that 50,000 working children was simply an economic necessity. Even if it meant there’d be no education. Even if it meant the very lives of children were in danger. “Children who work in the dye rooms and print-shops of textile factories, and the color rooms of factories,” wrote Spargo, “are subject to contact with poisonous dyes, and the results are often terrible.”

“Progressive era reformers quickly singled out Pennsylvania as the worst offender,” writes historian Joseph M. Speakman.  As early as 1890, Florence Kelley noted that child labor in Pennsylvania, flourished “almost unchecked.” And Jane Addams pointed to Pennsylvania in 1905, noting “there were more children employed in manufacturing industries in the state than in all of the cotton states of the South.”

“The high point of publicity on the issue,” writes Licht, came in late 1906, when “more than 25,000 Philadelphians crowded into the city’s Horticultural Hall,” (on Broad Street adjacent to the Academy of Music) to see “’An Industrial Exhibit,’ which dramatized with shocking photographs the use and state of child labor in Philadelphia Industry.” Advocacy organizations were embarrassing Philadelphia, the city promoting itself as the “Workshop of the World,” with the equally well-earned and dubious title: “The Greatest Child Employing City.”

But it took a special effort to move the issue child labor to the forefront, ahead of the other pressing concerns. In April 1903, wrote Philip Scranton, “all the unions in the textile industries of Philadelphia met in convention at the Kensington Labor Lyceum” and agreed that they would strike for better pay and a reduction from a 60-hour to a 55-hour workweek. Within a few months, more than 90,000 textile workers had walked off the job. Twenty-five percent of this striking workforce was less than 15 years of age.

Enter Mary Harris, aka Mother Jones, who once claimed: “I’m not a humanitarian. I’m a hell-raiser.”

Knowing full well that at least ten thousand of the textile strikers were children, Jones imagined the power of a spectacle: an army of children in protest. She quickly organized one in the center of Philadelphia.

“A great crowd gathered in the public square in front of the city hall,” wrote Mother Jones in her autobiography. “I put the little boys with their fingers off and hands crushed and maimed on a platform. I held up their mutilated hands and showed them to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia’s mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children. That their little lives went out to make wealth for others. That neither state or city officials paid any attention to these wrongs. That they did not care that these children were to be the future citizens of the nation.”

“The officials of the city hall were standing the open windows. I held the little ones of the mills high up above the heads of the crowd and pointed to their puny arms and legs and hollow chests. … I called upon the millionaire manufactures to cease their moral murders, and I cried to the officials in the open windows opposite, “Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit.”

“The officials quickly closed the windows, as they had closed their eyes and hearts.”

On July 7, 1903, Mother Jones and her sign-carrying “children’s army” embarked on a 92-mile March of the Mill Children, departing the physical and spiritual home of organized textile labor in Philadelphia: the Kensington Labor Lyceum at 2^nd and Cambria Streets. Destination: the Long Island, New York vacation home of President Theodore Roosevelt. The trek would become famous, if it’s impact was delayed. Not until 1909 did the state raise the minimum age of employment to 14 and reduce the work week to 58 hours.

For more on Philadelphia’s Labor Lyceum Movement, see this post.

What became of the perpetrators of the Zanghi-Cocozza Memorial Day murders after Anthony “Musky” Zanghi named names and Piero Francisco testified?

At first, city officials thought they might have come to the end of the gangster wars in South Philadelphia. In a sweep the Saturday night following the Memorial Day murders, police raided seven “sore spots” and “disorderly houses” between 5th and 11th, Christian and Federal Streets—“all the places where men and women of questionable character congregate” and hauled in more than 100 suspects. “We are going to keep up the raids until all habitual criminals have fled from the city,” they declared, “the death dealing warfare must come to an end.”

But of the six arrested: John Avena and Salvatore Sabella (two of the gunmen on foot) Dominick Sesta and Luigi Quaranta (who fired shotguns from a car), driver John Scopoletti and Antonio Dominic Pollina, aka Mr. Miggs, all but Quaranta were soon back on the street. Despite hopes for law and order, more witnesses than perpetrators went to prison—for their own protection, of course.

Innocent bystander Piero Francisco saw more of Philadelphia from behind bars than anywhere else, during his visit to the city. Francisco briefly worked for Zanghi and had the misfortune of witnessing the murders. After his court appearance and several attempts on his own life, Francisco spent 20 months in protective custody. Finally, in the Spring of 1929, he left City Hall under armed guard to return to Italy on an unnamed steamer, never to seen or heard from again.

After his release from protective custody, “Musky” Zanghi returned to his usual gangland ways and met his end in New York City late one August night in 1934. Zanghi left behind a widow. Antoinette, seven children, and apparently a stash of counterfeit one dollar bills with which Antoinette augmented the earnings at her 8th and Montrose Streets fruit stand.

Instead of being the beginning of the end, the arrests in 1927 were more like the end of the beginning of the Philadelphia Mob. The arrests read more like a Who’s Who of the emerging Philadelphia mob. From left to right in the illustrated lineup we have:

Joseph Ida: Zanghi could not place Ida at the murder scene and he was quickly released. Ida would head up the South Philadelphia family in the 1940s and much of the 1950s, only to flee to Sicily after having escaped arrest, though not indictment, after the famous raid of the Apalachin Meeting in 1957. Ida’s successor was Antonio Domenic Pollina (“Mr. Miggs”), also arrested for the 1927 murders. Pollina briefly led the Philadelphia Family before the start of Angelo Bruno’s reign, which came to a conclusion with his own murder in 1980.

John Avena: “The biggest numbers man in South Philadelphia,” whose crime interests were as deep as they were wide, Avena took charge after Sabella “retired” in 1931. Avena had repeatedly been a target and on August 17, 1936, he was the first mob boss in Philadelphia to be killed, along with Martin Feldstein, another racketeer. They were standing at Passyunk and Washington Avenues when drive-by shooters, thought to be from the rival Lanzetti brothers, killed both men. Avena left behind a widow, Grazia, two children, a diamond-encrusted wrist watch and $8,000 in safe deposit box. Pius Lanzetti, who ordered the killing, was himself gunned down the following New Years Eve.

Giuseppe Quaranta: Despite all hopes and plans for the end of mob domination with the Zanghi-Cocozza arrests, this “dapper little man,” as newspapers described him, was the only one to be convicted. In court, Francisco had testified that “Quaranta and Sesta fired the shotguns.” Quaranta claimed he was in his “chicken store” at the time of the killings, to no avail. He found himself quickly sentenced to life in prison. In 1935, on the eve of his own execution for the murder of a policeman, William “Mollyooch” Deni scribbled a note that Quaranta had gotten a “bum rap,” that Zanghi had set him up in an extortion attempt. It was enough to throw Quaranta’s life sentence in doubt. In 1938, he was pardoned and released.

Not only did no one else spent time in prison for the Zanghi-Cocozza murders, a few lived long and healthy lives. After retirement, Sabella lived out his life in Norristown, Pennsylvania and died of natural causes in 1962.  And Antonio Domenic Pollina, “Mr. Miggs,” died in 1993, not long after his 100th birthday.

(Newspaper articles consulted at Temple University’s Special Collections Research Center in files for John Avena and Luigi Quaranta include “Quaranta Guilty in First Degree,” June 19, 1927; “‘Big Nose’ Avena Slain by Gunmen in South Phila.” August 17, 1936; and “Executed Convict Frees Life Termer,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, December 20, 1935.)

Piero Francisco spent only three years in Philadelphia in the 1920s, and more than half of his time was behind bars. To earn this, Francisco had the misfortune to witness a pair of mob murders and the willingness to share what, and who, he saw.

Francisco was only following the lead of his employer Anthony “Musky” Zanghi. Talk about making bad choices.

Zanghi, owned La Tosca Café at 9^th and Fitzwater, but Zanghi was no restaurateur. He was a gangster who hired Francisco, a down-on-his-luck dancer, to entertain café clientele. In the Spring of 1927, Zanghi was target of a failed hit that claimed the lives of his 19-year old brother Joseph, and Vincent Cocozza, an associate. After the shooting, Zanghi broke the code of silence and named names. He talked to the press, the police, the district attorney and the judges. But when it came time for the murder trial of Luigi Quaranta, the first of the assailants to face murder charges, Zanghi disappeared, leaving the State with Francisco as its one and only star witness.

Piero Francisco’s American tour wasn’t supposed to go this way. In fact, Francisco hadn’t even figured on visiting Philadelphia when he and his dance partner set sail from Italy for New York the year before. They planned to make their way to Hollywood and display their mastery of the edgy, new Apache dance style. But Francisco’s partner died while crossing the Atlantic. And having no luck finding a new one in New York, the “small, sleek-haired young ‘Apache’ dancer” made his way to Philadelphia where he earned “a comfortable salary” giving “dancing exhibitions” in Zanghi’s “cabaret”

Until the day of the Zanghi-Cocozza murders.

“Dancer Replaces Zanghi as Witness, Names 3 in Slaying” reads one headline, reporting on the first of what officials planned to be a dozen trials of the six men charged with murder.

“When the court convened . . . Francisco, a pleasant faced, dark complexioned” man in his mid 20s took the witness stand. “His dashing brown suit, his patent leather shoes, and general dapper appearance contrasted strongly with his air of perturbation.”

Throngs packed the Court in City Hall (Room 453), where Judge John Monaghan presided. And they would not be disappointed.

“Do you remember Decoration Day,” Assistant District Attorney Charles F. Kelley asked his witness. “I do, replied the dancer in a low voice” beginning more than an hour of testimony. “Francisco’s identification was positive,” Philadelphians would learn. “His account of the double murder was clear cut and unshaken on cross examination.”

“I was within three doors of this restaurant when I saw a blue sedan automobile going down 8th st. I saw John Scopoletti at the drivers wheel and saw Quaranta in back with another man I do not know.”

“When Francisco pointed to Quaranta, the stocky, immobile prisoner’s face relaxed into a cynical smile. Then Mr. Kelley asked that the other defendants be brought into the court room. The atmosphere seemed to grow tense as the men came in, and many of the spectators rose and peered at the defendants as they entered in single file.”

“Looking over the prisoners with a hesitant yet deliberate air, Francisco pointed to Scopeletti, who was standing in the middle, and said, “That man was driving the car. Make him put on his hat.”

“With a half grin, not unlike the savage grimace of Quaranta when he was first identified, Scopoletti put on his hat and Francisco then said, emphatically, “That’s him. He was driving the car.” Francisco also identified Dominick Sesta as the other man with the shotgun sitting beside Quaranta.

“I went into a cigar store three doors from the restaurant and when I came out I saw Quaranta, Sesta and Scopoletti in the car. Then I heard shooting. The first shooting was very loud. The second shooting was like pistols. I could see smoke around the automobile.  The shooting was coming from the blue sedan they were riding in. There were about eighteen or twenty shots in all, and some of them sounded like pistol shots.” Francisco saw Joseph Zanghi fall to the pavement; he saw Cocozza being put into a car to be taken to Pennsylvania Hospital where he would be pronounced dead.

There had never been such a trial in Philadelphia. According to the newspapers, “The word went out in gangland to get” Francisco. The morning of his first appearance in City Hall, as the witness “walked along the street, downtown . . . a number of shots whizzed past him, missing him narrowly.” A few days later, Francisco “was awakened . . . to find the house where he lived burning and shots riddling the walls in a further effort to bump him off.”

To protect his witness, Judge Monaghan sent Francisco to the House of Correction. When Zanghi resurfaced, the Judge sent him there, as well.

After Quaranta’s conviction and sentence to life in prison, the other trials proved less successful. Some resulted in acquittals, others were postponed or never materialized. After twenty months of protective incarceration, Francisco and Zanghi were both released. Zanghi left Philadelphia for New York, where, in 1934, he would be killed in a fight over the spoils of an otherwise successful crime. (.PDF). Francisco, who gained fluent English reading novels during his incarceration, had no intention of staying in America. “Free Gang Witness to start a New Life,” read the headline.

Francisco had saved just enough from his daily witness fee to pay for a 2^nd class ticket on a steamer to Italy. “Officials would not reveal the exact date of his sailing, nor the ship.” And detectives accompanied him as he left the District Attorney’s office, “a free man at last.”

In newly acquired, perfect English, Francisco “thanked all those who had helped protect him” and set off, the newspaper reported, “to live quietly under Italy’s Fascist regime” having had his fill of “America’s gangland entanglements.”

(Newspaper articles consulted at Temple University’s Special Collections Research Center include “Dancer Replaces Zanghi as Witness, Names 3 in Slaying,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, June 16, 1927; “Free Gang Witness to start a New Life,” Evening Public Ledger, March 9, 1929; and “State Aids Zanghi Witness to Flee,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 10, 1929.)

As he liked to tell it, John Avena had friends at 7^th and Carpenter Streets. Thing was, Avena, aka “Nozzone,” aka “Big Nose John,” was a Sicilian-born gangster who’d eventually head up the Philadelphia mob. And if he didn’t have friends exactly, Avena had allies at the old 33^rd District police station.

Avena’s interests would come to include dope dealing, extortion, numbers and eventually two high-stakes gambling houses at 11th and Christian and 9th and Washington. The $100 counterfeit notes he passed were good enough to impress bankers, and even the Secret Service.

When federal agents set out to arrest Avena in June of 1922, the gangster bragged he got tipped off by a policeman from 7^th and Carpenter. The officer told him to “beat it” and Avena went off to New York.

When they caught up with Avena and arrested him, the bail was set at $10,000. It wouldn’t be the last time. There was a lot going on in the 1920s in the vicinity of “Dope Row” (the 800 block of Christian Street) and nearby. And cornering prohibition, gambling, and the protection rackets would grow fierce as Avena made his way to become the biggest numbers man in South Philadelphia.

A decade-long war would claim as many as twenty five lives in the neighborhood surrounding the police station. The area would earn the nickname the “Bloody Angle” (the same as the most fatal places on the Civil War battlefields of Gettysburg and Spotsylvania). And along this stretch of Passyunk from Christian Street to Washington Avenue, Avena himself would survive several assassination attempts in the 1920s.

According to this Bulletin clipping of August 17, 1936 from Temple University’s Urban Archives:

The first time came early in 1926, when police had marked him as a bootlegger. They missed that time, missed altogether. Then it was July 29, a few months later. Avena was running a cigar store at 12th and Webster streets. It was night. Outside the store “Big Nose” heard a persistent whistling, a peculiar whistle, short and sharp, as though someone were calling. He went out. He met a burst of fire, and three shots ploughed into his back as he turned around to see where the whistling visitor was. An innocent woman bystander was wounded that night.

The word went out that they had “Big Nose” at last. Three shots. The boys shook their heads. But he made the grade, and then came March 10, 1927. He was in a restaurant on 8th street near Catharine. It was night again. He stepped out and two men, lurking in the shadows, sent twin streaks of fire across the pavement. They missed. A bootleggers’ feud.

“South Philadelphia’s Public Enemy No. 1” would become famous for denying death. “He’d been news for years. Always, they said: ‘Well, Big Nose beat ‘m again. He’s going to live.’”

“And always, when he was shot, or shot at, or whenever he was on the police records, the cops used to ask him: “Come on Nosey, who did it? And what did “Nosey” always say?”

“I like to settle these things myself.”

The story continues…Zanghi’s Revenge: A Pivotal Mobster Moment

Over the years, Vincent Feldman has lovingly made 100+ photographs of Philadelphia at its worst. When he asked me to write about them for his book, City Abandoned, I agreed—happily. And the result, officially published yesterday by Paul Dry Books, is quite beautiful.

It’s interesting to compare what Vince photographed, alongside what’s here at PhillyHistory.org. The two occasionally overlap, and here’s a selection of pairs that help us get at photographic intent. It’s also interesting—necessary, I think—to consider Vince’s point of view, and the greater tradition of imagemaking in which his work resides.

What follows is an adapted excerpt from my essay in City Abandoned, where I discuss how Vince’s work may appear to be part of the new and popular tradition in urban photography that has come to be known as “ruin porn”—but is something very different.

***

In City Abandoned, Vincent Feldman asks us to step back from the Philadelphia we know—its color, its sounds and smells—and travel with him through a parallel world of rich tones, extraordinary compositions and grit-infused definition. Then he asks us to explore the city’s past and its present on his terms.

Feldman never asks us to leave Philadelphia behind. To the contrary, his often beautiful and compelling images move us to a deeper feeling and understanding of the city, even as they pose important questions about our stewardship and the city’s future. It’s the story of a city on the edge, and we’re glad to be along for this freeze-frame journey of photographic brinksmanship.

City Abandoned celebrates dignity in the battered forms of sites and institutions. It acknowledges flaws and accumulated fragments in older signage (or in newer graffiti) in equal measure. Feldman works with irony but doesn’t let irony cloud his approach; he’s got much more to see and to express. In Feldman’s compositions, symmetry becomes a strategy for taming reality, a measure of control over chaos. Deep inside the images, however, in detail far more revealing than observation on the street allows, we see evidence of disturbing disorder. These devices of composition and content are reminiscent of the works of Piranesi, or Escher. They are also reminiscent of the contemporary urban trend called “ruin porn.”

What, exactly, is the genre of ruin porn and how does it relate to Feldman’s City Abandoned?

After decades of decline, de-industrialization, population shrinkage, and neglect, the urban landscape has taken on a familiar patina typical in many American cities. In the 1980s, long before the idea of ruin porn emerged, Camilo J. Vegara and others photographed decline as sociologists and documentarians. Only in July 2009 did Thomas Morton dub the genre “ruin porn” in a blog post: Something, Something, Something, Detroit: Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff. Then, thanks to the power of the internet and NPR’s On The Media, we suddenly found ourselves with a swirling new genre of urban imagery.

“Ruin porn,” explained Peggy Nelson at Hilobrow in 2010, “seeks the poignancy of abandonment, the presence and poetry of absence. It seeks the resonant sadness seeping from recent walls and lightly collapsed roofs, the unmet expectation of empty sidewalks broken through with weeds…” Those who embrace what’s called ruin porn “come for abandonment,” writes Nelson, “they do not come for the abandoned.”

And that takes us to Detroit, perhaps America’s most popular destination for abandonment. In 2011, John Patrick Leary defined “Detroitism” as an “exuberant connoisseurship of dereliction,” an “unembarrassed rejoicing at the ‘excitement’” that every public building, every “windowless station has become a melancholy symbol of the city’s transformation in death.” The images and their audiences confirm the collective response: “The city is a shell.” An interesting shell to explore, a compelling one to photograph, but a shell nonetheless.

The ruin porn movement is not really about photography. It’s not about history and it’s certainly not about the future. These photographs may be well crafted, but “what counts, even more than the quality of the image” wrote bfp at the Feministe blog in 2011, “is dramatic presentation and, like the better-known form of pornography, ‘the nakedness of the subject.’”

Ruin pornographers tend to be voyeuristic, which Feldman is not. They are not particularly concerned with quality, which Feldman is. His dedication to composition, to scale and detail, his choice of black and white, his commitment to large format photography, aligns more closely with the 19^th-century landscapes of Timothy O’Sullivan, Carlton Watkins or the cityscapes of John Moran, than the work of fence-hopping hipsters intent on displaying decay on flickr or tumblr.

Feldman is also in the urban hunt-and-capture game, but his discourse with subjects, his visual treatise, is more that of stakeholder than trespasser. Feldman’s images raise deeper questions about responsibility. He uses his art “to get to the root of the idea that the American city is sick.” Feldman is an insider, a visual investigator taking in the whole of the city, year after year, asking questions that grow increasingly more penetrating.

If there are any similarities between Feldman’s photographs and those made by the practitioners of ruin porn, it is in the realm of social commentary. Feldman agrees that Philadelphia, like Detroit, “has had a leg kicked out from under it,” but he considers ruin porn “smothering.” He believes it brands the city as a place to avoid engagement, when, in fact, Philadelphia isn’t a ghost town, and its citizens aren’t zombies. Philadelphia is a city with a utopian legacy that remembers its past and its purpose.

After hammering away at Philadelphia’s entrenched pessimists for more than a decade, city planner Edmund N. Bacon finally got the breakthrough he’d been looking for. In the middle of the 20th century, in the midst of decline, Bacon dared to envision a revived Center City: a modern, appealing and prosperous place to live and work. According to biographer Greg Heller, Bacon pitched this vision and honed his message in publications and exhibitions. Finally, in the Spring of 1961, he created a highly-produced presentation aimed at creating maximum impact.

On April 27, 1961, Bacon presented to the national conference of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), then meeting in Philadelphia. He walked the audience through his vision for a new Center City as he and others turned a giant, blank, 24-by-14-foot panel into a plan for the modern city. Bacon suggested Philadelphia should mind its historical past and boldly asserted that his vision, his grand “design idea,” utilized the same planning principles that guided Rome’s transformation from medieval chaos to Renaissance order.

Denise Scott Brown, a new architect and planner at the University of Pennsylvania would have been in the audience. “Bacon takes a piece of chalk and slowly draws William Penn’s great crossroads and marks City Hall at the middle,” she wrote. He then brought others in to add their contributions and “the white sheet disappears; the intentions for the city slowly appear, as project after project is added…”

“The total effect is extremely impressive,” wrote Scott Brown the following year, reviewing the film version of the presentation for the Journal of the American Institute of Planners. (This was the first of Scott Brown’s published writings. For her full bibliography, see this pdf.) “The architects ‘in natural habitat’ before their plans, slightly chalky and a little abashed, are particularly successful,” she wrote. “The geometry of streets and squares behind them throws their faces and personalities into some sort of surrealist relief…”

“The performance ended with a grand finale in which the Commission staff, on two ladders, drawing and wheeling, brought the whole together by the addition of ringroads, expressways, and other circulation elements,” wrote Scott Brown. But as impressive as the giant, collaborative drawing might have been, it wasn’t quite Bacon’s final message.

That came in the form of a short monologue (more like a scolding of the architectural profession) by the architect turned city planner. “This is not planning as it is generally done; it is not architecture,” Bacon soberly instructed. “It is the form that should precede architecture awaiting the designer’s touch to bring it into life.”

Then he commanded his once and future colleagues: “The challenge to the architectural profession today is to prove that it is capable of designing an urban environment worth the price it costs. In order to do this, its individual practitioners will have to take a new view of their separate efforts and the profession as a whole must take a new view of itself. … Without a central design idea as an organizing force, the individual efforts under urban renewal will lead to chaos. With a central design idea, the creative energies of the individual architects will be stimulated to new heights, and the result will be truly architecture.”

What was this grand “design idea” that Bacon promised would transform Philadelphia into one of the great cities of the world? Scott Brown took issue with Bacon’s vision. “The ‘design idea’ seems basically to be a loosely linked series of architectural projects,” she observed, …it is too weak, and lacks the clarity of Penn’s original which it obscures.”

Scott Brown felt Bacon showed “little concern to discover what the city really ‘wants to be,’ quoting Louis Kahn, and crediting him as the one “who has driven so often to the root of city planning problems in Philadelphia.” Kahn’s “underlying presence” concluded Scott Brown, “pervades all thought here… even the title of the film.”

If Bacon had borrowed heavily in crafting his ideas, and fallen short in making it the most compelling case for it, at least he had captured, as Greg Heller put it, “the minds of the architectural profession.” Even Scott Brown conceded that Bacon had “started us all thinking.”

And the thinking would continue in focused fashion, just as Bacon had intended. Days after his presentation, the AIA located funding to film a re-staged version. And on March 27, 1962, the film version of Form, Design and The City premiered at the Philadelphia Museum of Art before hundreds of the city’s business and civic elite. Within a year, the film would be screened 167 times across the United States, even more internationally. Two years later, Bacon would be featured on the cover of Time magazine.

Thanks to Bacon, the promise of a positive future for Center City Philadelphia had officially made its way into the public imagination.