Author: Ken Finkel

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.

Even though the statue of William Penn would be bolted in place more than 500 feet above the sidewalk and seen much farther away by most Philadelphians, it really mattered that the statue on City Hall make a good first and lasting impression. After all, at 36 feet 8 inches, here would stand the tallest figure on a building anywhere in the nation, nearly 17 feet taller than the statue of Freedom on the U.S. Capitol.

“Notwithstanding its great height,” explained sculptor Alexander Milne Calder in 1886 as he worked on the figure, Penn “will be quite plainly visible from the street, therefore every care has to be taken with regard to the features and every other detail.” What Calder had in mind was a statue facing South Broad Street, its bronzed expression bathed in sunlight. When the sculptor’s plans were scrapped by a new architect who turned Penn’s face away from the sun to gaze to the Northeast, and Penn Treaty Park, the scorned sculptor quipped that his greatest work had been “condemned to eternal silhouette.”

In fact, Calder had a number of reasons to turn his Penn’s back on the past, especially the place where he and the Native Americans may have signed a treaty. In his modernized redo of Penn, Calder wanted to pull away from the old image (and the myths they rode in on) to create something entirely new. “What we want is William Penn as he is known to Philadelphians, not a theoretical one or a fine English gentleman.” And as he worked, Calder admitted he felt conflicted. “I have not absolutely settled upon the final figure,” he added.

Calder also felt the heat. Ever since 1872, when John McArthur, City Hall’s original architect, proposed to replace the first idea an allegorical figure of Justice with a statue a real person, there had been no shortage of opinions as to how this giant Penn might be made to look. This image would dominate the city’s skyline immediately and, presumably, forever.  What it might suggest about Philadelphia, Philadelphians (and Philadelphia history) mattered then, and Calder knew it would matter now.

He hadn’t gotten any real pushback on the hundreds of statues he created for City Hall closer to the ground—figures people could actually see, but didn’t care all that much about. After working 13 years on the massive project, when he finally got to the tower groupings and to the largest sculpture of all, Calder planned on going for a “manly beauty,” something different than the Rotund, Bejowled Founder painted by Benjamin West in the 18^th century or the Jolly Penn reinforced ad nauseum by Edward Hicks’ paintings in the 19^th.

Historians really had nothing to go on, there were no portraits of Penn at that time to serve as a guide, but that didn’t stop them from insisting on accuracy and authenticity. They argued at length about Penn’s clothing and the style of his hat. City Fathers, who had seen the project take far longer and become far more expensive and controversial than they had ever dreamed, just wanted building and sculpture done—with no further embarrassments.

What could possibly be embarrassing in 1886? A roly-poly Founder-figure defining the skyline, perhaps. Or a statue reminiscent of the corrupt, Gilded Age politician (see Thomas Nast’s caricature of Boss Tweed). This was the year Philadelphia politician Boies Penrose, aka “Big Grizzly,” a man of massive appetite (he was known to have a dozen eggs for breakfast and a turkey for lunch) and great girth (he’d reach 350 pounds) took his seat to the State Senate.

What could be embarrassing atop the white-marble frosting of City Hall? A figure recalling President Grover Cleveland’s White House wedding from the previous June. Cleveland stood firm in his wedding picture as the heaviest American president to date. (In time, only Taft would outweigh him.)

So it did matter—a lot—what this new Penn looked like. And as he worked through a series of maquettes, Calder would come to give his Penn a complete makeover, figure and face. He’d lose the gut and the double chin, acquiring a dimple. He’d get fancy ruffles, buckles and curls. Most of all, Calder made a figure that could stand almost joke-free. He gave the city a Quaker Zeus—if such a thing was possible.

Something to celebrate this #WilliamPennWednesday.

No question about it: Philadelphia’s WOW is greatly diminished. (And by WOW, we mean the city’s claim to the title “Workshop of the World.”) In the middle of the last century, just under half of the city’s workers made things. Now only one in twenty does.

With very few exceptions (like the surviving DisstonPrecision in Tacony, the subject of a recent post at AxisPhilly) the city’s sprawling industrial complexes are gone. And with the departure of the likes of Baldwin Locomotive Works, Stetson Hats, Quaker Lace and hundreds more smaller mills and factories, we can barely imagine what the city was like before it ran, literally, out of steam. What we have in their place are echoes of pride about all that once was Philly-made, a level of bluster and noise that rings as true with the city’s character and soul that 1776 does—and, come to think of it, maybe even truer. But what’s gone is gone.

How did Philadelphians celebrate their WOW factor when they still had it? With as much pride and bluster as the facts might convey. Apparently, there’s a long tradition of finding solace in the scale of what Philadelphia made.

Looking, for instance, at a printed bird’s eye-view of the city from 1908, The Philadelphia Of To-Day, The World’s Greatest Workshop, we see that the margins packed with what might be considered, for lack of a better word, trivia:

Philadelphia with only one-sixtieth of the population of the Republic, produced one-twentieth of all its manufactures.

Philadelphia has 16,000 manufacturing plants, employing 250,000 skilled laborers, each year consuming $400,000,000 of raw material and producing $700,000,000 of manufactures.

Philadelphia manufactures 8 locomotives every working day, or 2,663 in the year. These locomotives on a perfectly level track would haul 168,000 loaded cars of 50 tons capacity.

Philadelphia manufactures each year 45,000,000 yards of carpet, enough to put a belt around the earth and leave a remnant long enough to reach Cincinnati.

Philadelphia manufactures each year 12,000,000 dozen hose and half hose, enough to allow 2 pairs for every man, woman and child in the United States.

Philadelphia manufactures each year 4,800,000 hats. The bands, end to end, would reach from Philadelphia to Denver.

Philadelphia manufactures each year 180,000,000 yards of cotton piece goods, enough to make a pair of sheets for every family in the United States.

Of course, that’s all in the past, unless we’re talking about DisstonPrecision, the successor to Henry Disston’s Keystone Saw, Tool, Steel & File Works, which started in a cellar near 2nd and Arch Streets in 1840. They no longer make handsaws at the factory, which moved to Tacony in 1872, and the place is a shadow of its former self. But the making goes on at New State Road and Knorr Street, as it has continuously since 1872. And so with Disston, (thanks to Scranton and Licht, Silcox twice, and TIME) the numbers resonate less abstractly, and even a bit more sweetly.

The number of steps to manufacture a handsaw blade: 82.

Disston’s marketshare of the American handsaw business in 1940: 75 percent.

Disston’s annual usage of coal in the mid 1870s: ten thousand tons.

Order placed by the country of Afghanistan in the mid-1930s: 10 Disston Tractor Tanks.

The number of Disston saws sold annually to amateur and vaudeville musicians: about 500.

In 1918, 3,600 men and women worked in 58 Disston buildings. Those who had been employed for a decade or more: 1,400.

The number of cross-cuts through four-foot hemlock logs in an 8 hour shift made by Disston’s 9’ 2” diameter saws: 900.

And today?

How long it takes the 600 teeth of DisstonPrecision’s 6’ 10″ circular saw to cut through a steel I-beam: two seconds.

Philadelphia’s WOW lives on, after all.

Declaring Independence, you have to admit, was Founding Father bluster—a grand and gutsy act of defiance. Before the colonies could actually and truly claim independence, there’d be a whole lot of bloodshed and years of uncertainty.

So maybe, come the next 4^th of July, when folks celebrate the anniversary of this declaration with parades, picnics, concerts and (of course) fireworks, they might consider that there’s another day in the American calendar equally worthy of patriotic revelry. That’s the day America could claim the trifecta: independence, liberty and, most important of all, peace.

Today, January 20^th, is that day.

What? No fireworks?

For all intents and purposes, the Revolutionary War ended when the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781. But there’d be no lasting or meaningful peace until the players: Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, as well as the would-be United States of America, agreed to all kinds of arrangements, concessions and processes. Until that delicate, negotiated moment, Britain withheld recognition of American sovereignty and maintained military forces on American soil.

In Paris, “two months of hard bargaining” by negotiators (including Americans John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, William Temple Franklin, John Adams and Henry Laurens) “resulted in preliminary articles of peace in which the British accepted American independence and boundaries.” We’re told by the State Department’s official historian that the terms of this agreement also resolved “prewar debts owed British creditors… restitution of property lost during the war by Americans loyal to the British…and provided for the evacuation of British forces from the thirteen states.” On January 20, 1783, six-and-a-half years after July 4, 1776, Americans could finally stop holding their breath and get on with the job of becoming a free nation. The “Definitive Treaty of Peace” would be signed formally the following September.

Imagine Eleazer Oswald’s relief and excitement upon hearing the news on March 23, 1783, shortly after the Triumph docked at the port of Philadelphia. Oswald, a Revolutionary War veteran, had paid his dues as a lieutenant colonel of artillery and, for a time, as prisoner of war. More recently, he had set himself up as a printer above the London Coffee House at Front and Market Streets.

Not only was the war finally and officially over, but the United States was, in the eyes of its former enemies, a free and sovereign nation. No matter that the day was Sunday. As soon as Oswald heard the news, he ran to his print shop and set his headline in the largest font he could find.

“Peace, Liberty and Independence,” it screamed. Oswald’s broadside hit the streets the following morning, scooping the newspapers. “Yesterday arrived, after a passage of 32 days from Cadiz, a French Sloop of War…with the agreeable Intelligence of PEACE.” There was little more to add, other than to list the “particular Articles respecting this happy and glorious Event….of January 20, 1783,” which included the long awaited words: “Great-Britain acknowledges the Sovereignty and Independence of the Thirteen United States of America.”

No better a reason to light up the sky over Philadelphia this January 20^th. It’s nothing less than the 231st anniversary of the First American Peace.

Mayor J. Hampton Moore knew better when he remarked, in 1933, that “Philadelphia was too proud to have slums.” Indeed, the city had some of the worst housing conditions anywhere in America. Philadelphia’s labyrinth of courts and alleys were lined with tenements that went back a long, long time—despite the best efforts of those who didn’t deny their existence.

Ignoring slums had been just about impossible since 1909, thanks to a citizens’ action group that called itself the Philadelphia Housing Commission. The Commission (which later became the Philadelphia Housing Association) “recruited an army of volunteer housing inspectors” who “combed the city’s courts and alleys looking for noxious heaps of manure… fouled privies, structurally unsafe houses, and other threats to public health and safety.” They filed complaints by the thousands. And more: they spread the word about the city’s slum conditions, advocating for reform in lectures, leaflets, meetings and, maybe most effective of all – in photographs.

Then it should have come as some relief to the city’s thousands of slum tenants and their allies when, in 1913, the state legislature passed an act creating a Division of Housing and Sanitation in the Department of Health and Charities. But the signed bill would have no impact, thanks to the inaction of City Council. The city’s slums remained intact; housing reform in Philadelphia would have to wait.

“Better government in Philadelphia is being slowly strangled,” editorialized The Evening Public Ledger in October 1914. The “cold fingers” of “Philadelphia’s Tammany twisting dexterously through a pliable majority in Councils” are failing to require landlords “to keep their properties in such repair as to make them healthy places to live in. By refusing to appropriate funds necessary to put the law into effect the majority members completely nullified it. It is now as good as dead, killed by Councils.”

Without funding, tenement occupants without water would continue to have no water; those without connections to sewers would have no sewers. Their unsafe stairways would continue to be unsafe; their broken plumbing, leaky roofs, flooded cellars and windowless rooms would remain intact.

Housing reform wasn’t only the right thing to do for the poor, largely immigrant families “caught on the treadwheel of life.” Removing slums was also about improving the overall health of the city. “Many of the future inmates of blind asylums, tubercular hospitals and prisons are made from a childhood spent amid defective living conditions,” argued The Evening Public Ledger. “Darkness, impure air, dampness, dirt and dilapidation are public enemies.”

If the lack of funding of hard-won legislation was killing reform, the Philadelphia Housing Commission would have to get back to work. No matter that the city’s slum conditions were out of sight and out of mind. Photographers documented them; and the Commission commandeered a storefront window on one of the city’s busiest streets to show how bad slum conditions were.

In November 1914, the Philadelphia Housing Commission’s sidewalk display in the window of the Sharswood Building, 931 Chestnut Street, opened eyes of those who would never otherwise see slums themselves. In the center of the window, the Commission mounted The Evening Public Ledger’s editorial demanding reform. Surrounding it, they hung pictures that attracted the attention of hundreds of “shoppers, merchants, ministers, physicians, lawyers, laborers and visitors” passing by. They were “surprised to see that conditions such as pictured… actually existed in the 20th century in this city;” they were disturbed that the conditions “told by the camera” were of homes lived-in only a few blocks away from the storefront exhibition.

“Welfare Workers Charge Councils with Responsibility for Evil Conditions” read The Evening Public Ledger headline about the display. And in 1915,the Philadelphia Housing Commission would prevail with the passage and the funding of the city’s first comprehensive housing code. But, as housing advocates knew so well, implementation would require monitoring: ongoing data collection, filing of complaints and vigilant public information campaigns.

Despite laws, agencies and advocacy, the rising number of poor residents in Philadelphia resulted in more, not less, one-room tenements. In 1922, the Philadelphia Housing Commission filed more than 8,000 complaints with the city and wrote of the ongoing problem: “The City knows that families, like rats, have taken to cellars to cook, eat and work… The City knows that the 4,837 tenements and the 2,465 rooming houses recorded are far below the actual number… The City knows there is a teeming population … in narrow alleys and courts and minor streets, approximating 60,000 persons…”

Philadelphia’s first housing code was not nearly enough. More powerful, comprehensive and systemic interventions would be needed to mount an effective war on poverty. Yet, the citizens campaign of 1914 had been a start. And in time, government would again follow their lead.