Author: Ken Finkel

Contemplating “that vast gray labyrinth” of Philadelphia, with “great Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world,” G. K. Chesterton imagined Philadelphians could “feel the presence of Penn and Franklin” just as his English brethren could “see the ghosts of Alfred or Becket.” But Philadelphians didn’t need to use their imaginations. They could literally see Penn from every quarter of the city, miles from the center, where a giant statue of the founder had been installed 500 feet up, on top of City Hall tower.

Philadelphia’s love affair with the Founding Fathers would persist, but they’d soon turn on their late-19^th century City Hall. By the 1950s, when Lewis Mumford lectured at Penn, City Hall was seen as “an architectural nightmare, a mishmash of uglified Renaissance styles welded into a structure rugged enough to resist and atomic bomb…” It is “woefully obsolete,” wrote Mumford, but “the problem of whether to do away with it…is not an easy one to solve…because wrecking it would wreck the wrecker.”

But for the cost of demolition, City Hall survived. And as long as it had to remain in the center of the plan, city planner Edmund N. Bacon was going to make the most of it. In a new biography, Gregory Heller tells us Bacon “saw the dominance of City Hall tower in the skyline as a critical element to the city’s historical continuity.” Bacon “created an unwritten ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that no building would rise above the statue of William Penn atop City Hall.”

“Developers would periodically meet with Bacon and propose a building taller than City Hall tower,” Heller learned in his interviews. “They would query whether the height limit was legally mandated, to which Bacon would respond: ‘It’s only a gentleman’s agreement. The question is, are you a gentleman?’”

Throughout the 20^th century, gentleman’s agreements were mostly associated with spurious and immoral practices: limiting Japanese immigration, preventing the employment of African Americans or denying real estate to Jews. Legal scholars begin discussions of the practice with this somewhat amusing (or chilling) definition: “A gentlemen’s agreement is an agreement which is not an agreement, made between two persons, neither of whom is a gentleman, whereby each expects the other to be strictly bound without himself being bound at all.”

Bacon used the idea of a gentleman’s agreement to challenge the civility of (and presumably quickly end meetings with) developers audacious enough to bring him proposals for skyscrapers. But was there an actual gentleman’s agreement, or was it just a useful ploy to bury projects that would alter the city’s skyline? Over the years, the origins of the gentleman’s agreement have remained a mystery.

On April 28 1956, seven years into Bacon’s tenure as Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, The New Yorker published the first of Lewis Mumford’s two articles that, interestingly, do not mention Bacon, but do introduce Philadelphia’s “gentleman’s agreement.”  With the “Chinese Wall” coming down, Mumford concludes the city was looking up, although how far up wasn’t open to discussion. “Without legislation and with nothing more solid than a gentleman’s agreement, the tallest of the city office buildings have been piously kept lower than the bronze figure atop” City Hall. “Sentiment and symbolism have made unnecessary—temporarily at any rate—any legislation.”

In 1963, when a developer proposed a sixty-story building, Bacon responded that “for the first time in the history of Philadelphia” a project “would violate the gentleman’s agreement that William Penn will not be topped by private construction.” The Planning Commission responded by approving a “height limit ordinance” of 450 feet that made its way through the Mayor’s office and to City Council, where it eventually died. The gentleman’s agreement remained, though worse for wear, its authority unclear.

The following year, another developer proposed a tower taller than City Hall for 15^th and Market Streets and Bacon found himself at odds with his own Planning Commission. As built, the project came in shorter than proposed, but the challenge now seemed possible. “Not all Philadelphians favor squat skyscrapers,” wrote Glynn D. Mapes in The Wall Street Journal of November 29, 1967.  Philip Klein, vice chairman of the Commission, hankered for a proposal “that would top William Penn.” Said Klein: “It’s time Philadelphia did something like this. I’d fight for it all the way. No city can be a big city without tall buildings.”

Philadelphians loved tradition, something like what Chesterton appreciated and Bacon perpetuated. “It still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did one hundred years ago,” Chesterton had written in 1922, “I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.”

OK, Philadelphia was different from other American cities. But a real challenge to the city’s traditional skyline, gentleman’s agreement or not, was mounting. And in 1984, the question would again be posed: Could Philadelphians maintain an honest love affair with the past if the past didn’t also dominate their city’s skyline?

No matter that New York’s Empire State Building, which opened in 1931, was more than two-and-a-half times taller than Philadelphia’s PSFS Building. The Quaker City’s skyscraper was many times more modern. Philadelphia had “gone Gershwin” with an architecture “slick and sheer and shining…alive to the tempo of the day.” So refreshing compared with “the frumpy, bastioned City Hall” a few blocks to the west. The PSFS embraced modernism not for its own sake, but because it offered solutions that were, above all, functional. As urban planner Frederick Gutheim later gushed, “When functionalism in the United States was raw, red and steamy new it found few more devoted followers than Howe and Lescaze.”

”The sleek, streamlined bank and a 27-story slab of glass-walled office space by architects George Howe and William Lescaze turned out to be “the biggest and proudest thing in Philadelphia.” Known for its commanding role in the skyline with four, 27-foot-tall letters in red neon, PSFS provided an even more innovative achievement closer to the ground. There, its architects solved the difficult question of how a skyscraper might relate to, and make the most of, a busy urban intersection.

That design question fascinated bank president James M. Willcox, who wasn’t interested in style per se, but was committed to where and how to most effectively, practically, and aesthetically design and build. Willcox balked at Howe’s traditional-looking, first proposal in 1926 and instead had him put up a temporary, ground level bank to test customer demand. Meanwhile, Willcox commissioned Howe to design a set of neighborhood branches, two identical pairs that started historical and wound up modern. Then, in 1928, Howe left his longtime firm (Mellor, Meigs & Howe) and he left historicism for modernism.

For the 12^thand Market Street site, diagonally across from the Reading Terminal, Willcox had an ambitious array of demands. He wanted a bank, commercial space, hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space, and, for a time, he even demanded five stories of above-ground parking. By late 1929, when Howe and his new partner, the young, progressive Swiss architect William Lescaze got to work on the revived project, the biggest question was how to acceptably address Willcox’s complex program for the street level. He distrusted “ultra-Modern.” What he wanted, Willcox later explained, was “ultra-Practical.” It was the architects job to prove that modern and practical were one and the same.

If some savvy Gatsby type had whispered a single word to guide the architects to a smart, elegant and ultimately “ultra-practical” design, that word would have been “steel.” Even though Howe was not used to, or comfortable with the material, the PSFS commission obliged Howe “to face the problem of steel construction.”

And steel’s possibilities “startled” Howe. He wasn’t used to such “novelty,” such “frank interpretation of modern functions,” and soon realized he was now free to get at “the underlying principles governing architectural design.” Lescaze showed the way, with drawings envisioning something complex, elegant and modern, a building like no one had seen in America. According to William Jordy, Lescaze’s street level promised a building “bathed in a mysterious luminescence… weightless as it rises effortlessly in the night above its scrubby competition.”

The weight of the office tower would be supported by rows of steel columns. And a giant steel truss would bridge the banking floor with a 63-foot span. Howe and Lescaze delineated their 2^nd-story banking hall with a giant, sweeping band of windows, leaving “the ground floor free for…the kind of shopping traffic from which the bank drew its clientele.” Above, three more floors of bank offices served as a transition from the base to a boldly-cantilevered, 27-story office tower. Then came the great, groundbreaking neon sign.

Before Howe started the project, he and his partners used architecture to help clients avoid reality, and in particular, the realities of the city. “The critical weakness of the romantic architect,” Lewis Mumford criticized Howe in 1925,” is that he is employed in creating an environment into which people may escape from a sordid workaday world.” By the end of the decade, with the encouragement of an enlightened patron and the vision of a creative partner, Howe managed to make a complete aesthetic conversion. In the PSFS building, Howe and Lescaze addressed the purpose of architecture: “to remake the workaday world so that people will not wish to escape from it.”

The PSFS building turned out to be “much more than a superb marriage of function and technological innovation,” wrote Robert A. M. Stern. “It is a superbly crafted object, refined in its every detail…that rarest of phenomena of our time, a working monument.” And its style wasn’t one more in a long line of styles; the PSFS showed the way to live in the world, and a way to make the most of it.

This might have been called many things. In 1931 they called it Modernism.

So your client the bank president has done his due diligence, his “sober deliberation,” and insists on opening two branch offices. This bank has always been a headquarters-only operation, but the depositors have spread out across the city. As architect, you’re not sure what new bank buildings should look like in the far-flung neighborhoods of North and South Philly, but one thing you do know are your marching orders: these banks must “invoke…a degree of awe mixed with reassurance,” similar to “the venerable main office at Seventh and Walnut.”

You’ve had banker-clients before and they like what you’ve done for them. But high-end country houses, faux-farms with fore courts, paneled libraries and goose ponds aren’t anything like this new project. What is called for here? Something stone and urban; something with gravitas. You search for inspiration and find it, along with the desirable dose of the “venerable,” in the palaces of the rich and powerful Medici. Yes, if this look spoke to the citizens of Renaissance Florence, it certainly could also be a convincing choice for burgeoning Philadelphia. So you design a pair of palazzo banks, one at 11th and Lehigh and another at Broad and McKean. Your boss is pleased and business is good.

Then comes the commission for two more branches, and you begin to get a little queasy about your descision. The idea of putting up one, maybe two 15^th-century palaces on city streets seemed OK, but littering the city with cookie-cutter Renaissance replicas is beginning to feel a bit silly. And now, your boss is demanding you wire them up with blazing lights—so uncharacteristic of the Medici. “How inappropriate,” you respond.

Then you consider: it’s the 1920s, and electricity isn’t anachronistic—but maybe you are. So you make your “first concession to the machine age,” turn your back on historical ornamentation, simplify your lines and mount rows of lights on your new facades. And much to your surprise, your two new neighborhood branches in West Philadelphia and Logan don’t look so bad. In each case, a “great block of stone, flooded in strong white light, dominates” the shopping strip (.pdf) and business is “phenomenal.” Later, an architectural historian suggests this second pair of branches might have been a breakthrough, one that predicts your “imminent conversion to modern architecture.”

But you are not a modernist—not quite yet. In one more year, (1928) you will remove your name, the last in the firm of Mellor, Meigs & Howe, and sigh with great relief: “I delivered my last Jumbo, Anti-economy Romantic Country House Package.” Then you will really begin to explore the possibilities of how design might be used to “acknowledge contemporary conditions of modern life.” And for that adventure your boss has in store for you the challenge of a lifetime: the commission for a new Philadelphia Saving Funds Society building in Center City, at 12^th and Market Streets.

Long before he designed the icon of American Democracy—the dome of the U. S. Capital—Thomas Ustick Walter was certain about the power of architecture. In the 1830s, after finishing Moyamensing Prison and while at work on Girard College, Walter bemoaned the public’s general ignorance. “If the mass of the people were generally well informed on the subject of architecture,” he wrote “nations would look to their Architects… for the means of handing down to ages yet unborn the story of their power and greatness.”

At the same time, the two-decade old Philadelphia Saving Fund Society launched a search for just that kind of certainty. What should their first permanent home look like? They wanted to get some of Walter’s certainty in stone.

Walter had already designed a couple of banks, though none in Philadelphia, and liked the language of the Greek Revival. He had proven his hand with this 1836 façade in West Chester and confirmed there once again what sophisticated urbanites knew: classicism meant stability and strength. Sure, churches adopting the style had to worry they were adopting the temples of pagans, but the only barrier for a bank, as they fell under the spell of classical design, was expense. Schools, too, hoped to echo ancient Greece in their buildings, but unless they had the fortunes of a Girard College, they had to do with less. With the wealth and trust of its depositors, the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society had no reason not to go classical.

The groundwork had already been laid by Benjamin Henry Latrobe in his Bank of Pennsylvania and William Strickland in his Second Bank. Both were based on temple designs in Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens.  The final volume of that four-part classic on classicism had been published in 1816, the same year the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society was founded. By 1839, there was no remaining doubt: if you wanted a great institution, you had to make an entrance on marble steps, between authentic columns and capitals. Banks had to look like Greek Temples—even if they had to be wedged into a row on busy Walnut Street.

Times changed and so do styles. By 1869, when the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society needed a new and larger building, they commissioned Addison Hutton to design something fire-proof and burglar-proof, something “calculated to inspire the entire community with implicit faith in the solidity of the Institution.” (.pdf). A portico would have been dated then, but granite stolidity spoke loud and clear, and the new design worked.

Thanks to the availability of jobs and loans, Philadelphia’s bank of choice soon found itself facing a dilemma. As the 19^th-century turned into the 20^th, depositors lived and worked farther and farther away from the bank. By 1924, president James Willcox considered the wisdom of building branch banks, an as-yet unproven amenity. He turned to the architectural firm of Mellor, Meigs & Howe where George Howe had become the bank executives’ favorite designer of grand suburban homes (later jokingly called the “Wall Street Pastoral” style). Howe delivered a pair of identical “polite, quiet little buildings, unobtrusive and tasteful,” a “North Office” at 11th Street and Lehigh Avenue (illustrated) and a “South Office” at Broad and McKean. As architectural historian William Jordy later put it, the firm’s “characteristic suavity” helped the Italian Renaissance look as natural as it could in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods.  With rusticated walls and nail-studded oak doors, Howe succeeded in creating a “magnified strongbox,” but his generous windows also suggested a work space inside. Most of all, wrote Howe’s biographer Robert A. M. Stern, “the design conforms to ‘accepted tradition’ for banking architecture.”

But “accepted tradition” no longer meant as much as it once did. Two years after the new branch banks were up and running, Willcox asked Howe to add electric signs. At first the architect protested “the inappropriateness of such an anachronistic feature.” The boss responded: “If my business will benefit by it, shouldn’t I have it?” Howe reconsidered, and saw the light. In the next few years, both men would leave the past behind and go completely electric.

Larry Magid didn’t need to go to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City to hear The Crew Cuts in July 1960.  He knew their six-year-old hit Sh Boom and preferred the original version by The Chords. Back in 1954, the 12-year-old Magid and his West Philly buddies heard the difference between the two—loud and clear.

“It was kind of a moral outrage,” Magid later recalled to the Inquirer’s Dan DeLuca. “It just didn’t seem fair. Because the Chords‘ version was a better song. And that was not just for me, but for many kids.”

The Chords, an African-American group from the Bronx, had written Sh Boom in the back seat of a Buick and they had put on the map. But with marketing guidance from executives at the Mercury label, four white boys from Toronto who didn’t even like the song were transformed from The Canadaires into The Crew Cuts and sold more than five million copies. Sh Boom became a #1 record – one of the first examples of doo-wop on the record charts. It won Downbeat’s poll as the best rhythm and blues song of the year. And with Mercury on their side, the formula of turning Black hits (Oop-Shoop, Earth Angel, Ko Ko Mo, Don’t Be Angry) into “safe-sounding harmonies” for White audiences became the Crew Cuts’ calling card.

Their success was about music, but it was also about hair. With white-bread sound and looks to match, the Crew Cuts launched a line of hair products making in-store promotional appearances for Collegiate Hair Cream. They recorded a jingle version of their hit for Sh-Boom Shampoo.

In the summer of 1960, the Crew Cuts, appeared at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier with Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma whose recording of Paper Roses had peaked at #5 on the Billboard Pop chart. Later as spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission, Bryant became even better known for her appearance in television commercials singing “Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree” and her delivery of the tagline: “Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.” In 1977, Bryant came out as an anti-gay rights activist.

The Crew Cuts remained together for 12 years, breaking up about the time young audiences took up with Rock and Roll.  A few years after that, Larry Magid opened The Electric Factory at 22^nd and Arch Streets, a former tire-warehouse where he booked groups including Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. They filled the place with audiences of 5,000—not once, but as many as two or three times a night. By then, the Crew Cuts were long out of style, and so were crew cuts. It wasn’t about hair, although hair played its part. It was about the rise of an American Counterculture.

In the Spring of 1969, when a drunken Jim Morrison of The Doors allegedly exposed himself on stage in Miami, Anita Bryant and more than 30,000 others gathered soon after at Miami’s Orange Bowl in a “Rally for Decency.” The next day, Pat Buchanan, a young speechwriter in the Nixon White House seized the opportunity to publicly mention the rally and “the pollution of young minds.”

The Culture Wars had officially begun.

Bare rock makes a mute memorial. When a boulder loses a plaque once carried, it instantly loses voice, power, and a good measure of its dignity.

What to make of the boulder at Germantown Avenue and Sedgwick Street in front of the Lovett Memorial Library? It’s been missing two plaques for forty years. There it stands, mouth open, as it were, ready to say something that must be important, but no words come. They are long gone, stolen, sold for scrap and melted down.

Thank goodness for archives, where images of bronze have no scrap value whatever. A photograph “restores” the words from both missing plaques and gives the boulder back something of its long-lost voice.  We learn it was brought from Valley Forge and suddenly the situation has an extra dose of authority—or is it pretense? Whichever, the Valley Forge connection offers meaning to the main event: a list of local World War I casualties. The patriotic rock suggests the sacrifice of “THE BOYS OF MOUNT AIRY WHO FELL IN HEROIC SERVICE FOR THEIR COUNTRY AND HUMANITY” may indeed have been part of greater things.

With the singing of “America” and a prayer, this boulder with its plaque bearing 35 names, in a park of red oaks and dogwoods, was unveiled on Memorial Day weekend, 1924. No American neighborhood was without its own list to mourn and honor. This “Great War,” the first one to offer all the benefits of industrialization, would be the nation’s second bloodiest: 16 million deaths, an estimated 10 million of which were men in service. The numbers are staggering. Germany lost nearly 1.8 million soldiers; Russia 1.7; France 1.3; the British Empire lost more than 900,000. The list of American “boys” is 116,516 names long.

From one count, 1,448 were from the neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Of these, 34 called Mount Airy home. Each left behind family, and memories that faded over time, and faster after the plaques disappeared. But again, archives tells us more than we knew.

Listed sixth is Mortimer P. Crane, baptized on July 1, 1894 at the church on McCallum and Tulpehocken Streets. The Cranes lived at 6440 Greene Street. Mortimer struggled to get into Yale, later found work at one of his father’s mining companies and when war and the rush of patriotic fervor came, Crane enlisted.

While flying in formation during a maneuver on May 15, 1918, Crane’s airplane crashed near Amesbury, Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge. He died instantly of a fractured neck. If we know it, so did those who dedicated this monument six years later: a Court of Inquiry found that Crane’s own “error in judgment” caused the accident. He turned, clipped another plane, tore away a part of his own wing, and crashed.

We know about Crane because he was an officer, and from a rich family. But each of these men had families, memories and stories. We don’t know much, but now we know their names:

Stanley H. Berry; Albert R. Bolay; John Breidenfield; George M. Brooks; Anthony Cimino; George A. Dawson; Herbert K. Dewees; James Duffy; Thomas B. Durrick; Frank C. Erb; George William Esher; Jacques A. Fiechter; Edward Fisher; William Fleming, Jr.; Earl S. Horsey; Charles Joseph Houston; Clement Cresson Kite; Harrison Knox; Harry Linaka; Edward Joseph Malone; Robert Joseph McCamman; William J. Merkle; Ralph Thurman Mills; Clark B. Nichol; John Potts; Alfred L. Quintaro; Herman P. Saylor; George P. Shepherdson; Harold J. Sheppard; William Sibel; Gerald G. Speck; George G. Whitson; and Jacob Zaun III.

The blank boulder echoes the spirit of their sacrifice.

And the archival photograph tells us more. The long-gone plaque also spoke of “MARCIA MAXWELL BARTLE, U.S.M.C., FIRST WOMAN TO ENLIST IN PHILADELPHIA.” Bartle’s skills as an experienced switchboard operator were needed at the Philadelphia Marine Quartermaster’s Depot.

Good thing the planners for the renovated Lovett Park won’t be casting away this historic stone.

Or will they?

Advocates of peace and freedom gathered in Philadelphia 175 years ago today. They had come to dedicate Pennsylvania Hall, “the first and only one of its kind in the republic,” according to abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld.

Three days later, this new building “consecrated to Free Discussion and Equal Rights” was reduced to ruins, burnt by an angry, rioting mob.

How could such a thing happen in the City of Brotherly Love?

It’s a question that has puzzled historians ever since—and plagued a few Philadelphians at the time. Days after the riot, the reverend William Henry Furness, agonized from the pulpit of his church: “Similar outrages have been perpetrated… in other parts of our country… but now the evil has come close to us—to our very doors. The whole city has been illuminated by the glare of the incendiary’s torch.” Furness feared Philadelphia was becoming a place where “savage delusions…will rule us with a rod of iron, destroying every feeling of security, and extinguishing among us the last spark of personal freedom.”

For years, the burned-out shell of Pennsylvania Hall remained on 6th Street, south of Race Street, in view of Independence Hall.  How could such a thing happen here, in Philadelphia? What, exactly, riled the crowd to respond with violence?  What, or who, would have been the catalyst for this catastrophe?

We look to Angelina Grimké. The most famous radical woman in America in 1838 was in town to address a packed Pennsylvania Hall. And when she spoke on May 16, the growing anti-abolitionist mob outside the hall reacted. “As the tumult from without increased, and the brickbats fell thick and fast,” recalled William Lloyd Garrison, her “eloquence kindled, her eyes flashed and her cheeks glowed.” This privileged woman of Southern society, who, with her sister Sarah had left behind plantation life and wealth to go on a speaking tour about the evils of slavery, had been energized and eloquent before large audiences throughout Massachusetts.

In Philadelphia, the mob outside the new Pennsylvania Hall interrupted Grimké ’s speech. She acknowledged their presence and challenged them: “What is a mob? What would the breaking of every window be? What would the levelling of this Hall be? …What if the mob should now burst in upon us, break up our meeting and commit violence upon our persons — would this be anything compared with what the slaves endure?”

Grimké ’s reputation as someone willing to question, to speak and to break society’s rules on behalf of her cause came to a head in Philadelphia that week. The very same day the Hall was dedicated, Grimké  and Theodore Dwight Weld, the man who encouraged and trained her to work the abolition lecture circuit, got married in Philadelphia. And because they Grimké  and Weld were both so public, so key to The Movement, the “wedding of the most mobbed-man and the most notorious woman in America” would be anything but a private matter.

“I am told that my abolition friends here are almost offended that I should do such a thing as get married,” Grimké wrote Weld a few weeks earlier. “Some say we were both public property and had no right to enter into such an engagement. Others say that I will now be good for nothing henceforth and forever to the cause…”

Grimké and Weld had sent invitations to more than 80 friends and acquaintances, about half of whom would be in Philadelphia for Pennsylvania Hall’s opening week. The wedding list, a Who’s Who of American Abolitionism, Feminism and Social Progressivism, took place in the home of Angelina’s recently widowed sister, Anna Frost, at 3 Belmont Row, later renumbered 1330 Spruce Street.

William Lloyd Garrison, the “worst of men,” according to Angelina Grimké ‘s mother (who remained in South Carolina) was out of New England, but in his element. His posse: Gerrit Smith, James G. Birney, Henry B. Stanton, and Alvan Stewart, all attended. So did the Chapmans, Fullers, Westons, Philbricks and Tappans. Weld’s former classmates from seminary, known as the Lane Rebels, showed up. No one made more of an impression walking up Spruce Street to the wedding as did Charles C. Burleigh, who grew his beard as long as slavery lasted.

The wedding was designed to demonstrate, challenge and irritate. Grimké  “was getting married in a manner calculated to shock and dismay the pillars of Charleston society, among whom she had been raised,” wrote Gerda Lerner. She meant for it to be “a motley assembly of white and black, high and low.” (Sarah Grimké noted that among the guests were “several colored persons…among them two liberated slaves, who formerly belonged to our father.”) After a brief, homemade, and ad hoc ceremony, during which Weld denounced traditional marriage vows and Grimké refused to include the word “obey,” “a colored Presbyterian minister then prayed…followed by a white one,” possibly Rev. Furness, who lived at 11 Belmont Row. The “certificate was then read by William Lloyd Garrison, and was signed by the company.” Guests then shared good wishes and a wedding cake baked with “free sugar”–grown, harvested and manufactured without slave labor.

Accounts of the iconoclastic wedding spread throughout the streets of Philadelphia and then further, in the nation’s newspapers. Accounts morphed from fact to fiction. Grimké’s commitment to “white and black, high and low” led to rumors that this had been an interracial wedding. And in 1838, even in the city of Brotherly Love, that was enough to spark, and justify, a riot.

The experiment of Pennsylvania Hall failed, but the Grimké -Weld wedding turned out exactly as intended: a spiritual, social bond based on equality and respect—far different than traditional marriage. Those who witnessed the wedding at 1330 Spruce Street on May 14, 1838 were in a culture war, the first of many redefining the meaning of marriage in America.

It’s a shame no one has anything good to say about the drive from Philadelphia International Airport to Center City. It’s a gritty but grand entrance, this ride on PA 291, aka the Penrose Avenue Bridge, aka the Platt Memorial Bridge to US 76, aka the Schuylkill Expressway—a ride punctuated by the usual roadwork, billboards, questionable signage and occasional pothole. Those features are found just about anywhere. What makes this stretch truly special is the rich urban choreography visible from atop the viaduct of concrete pylons rising above the brackish marsh. That scene offers complex and meaningful drama.

I feel sorry for those who go out of their way to avoid Philadelphia’s gritty entrance. They miss the point.

The Platt Memorial Bridge experience is considered an embarrassing nuisance. Hosts of out-of-town guests apologize for it. Hospitality hates it. The Inquirer has called it a “grimy industrial gateway … arching over sprawling oil tanks and… steaming stacks.” Most Philadelphians consider this entrance the worst of our worst, but it may actually be the best of our best.

Arriving via the Platt is a genuine and aesthetic Philadelphia experience. It’s an everyman, everywoman, everyday encounter for those in the 56,000 vehicles that pass over this 1.7-mile, 62-year-old bridge. Sure, as the Inky says, it “begins in weeds and ends by a junkyard” but that’s the beauty and the irony of it. By traversing the bridge in our cars, we’re threading a needle, that fragile zone in time and space between refined gasoline and crushed cars. Our reason for passing through breathes life into the scene and gives it a reason for being.

No, it’s not beautiful in the traditional sense, but we need this stuff. And isn’t Philadelphia at its best when it’s averse to pretense? We’re barreling along, there’s a sewage treatment on our right, an oil refinery on our left—plumes of smoke, gas flares burning effluent high above the natural no man’s land below. This scene is nearly entirely man made, taking place above the loneliest and least welcoming stretch of the meandering Schuylkill, two miles beyond the last bit of green at Bartram’s Gardens. This is about the automobile and its victory in the 20th-century city. As drivers, we’re offered a commanding straight shot to and from the city. Rising over the crest of the Platt Bridge may is among the most dramatic and authentic that Philadelphia ever gets. Why should we allow it to embarrass us? Why would we want to avert our eyes?

Philadelphians opened the bridge in 1951; twenty years after the idea was first proposed and just as the automobile had completed its win over the 19th-century city. (The Penrose Avenue Bridge was among the last works designed by architect Paul Cret.) With a ribbon cutting and a celebratory dinner hosted by AAA, the swing bridge from Philadelphia’s Iron Age had been reduced to fading memory. Sixty years later, in June 2011, PennDOT identified this bridge one of 5,000 in the Commonwealth that are “structurally deficient” and launched a three-year “rehabilitation project.”

There’s structural integrity and then there’s experiential integrity. What wakes up both citizen and visitor and puts them in the true Philadelphia frame of mind, what completes the whole Platt experience is the car shredder at the base of the bridge. But SPC Corporation which operates this Godzilla grinder, this Rockosauraus of rust, is planning to leave town. After abandoning a plan to relocate to Eddystone, Pennsylvania, SPC’s parent company, Camden Iron & Metal announced a plan to move back to the city of its namesake. They’re behind schedule a year or so, but “sooner or later” the company confirms, “we’re going to move.”

What a pity. Just as we’ve grown accustomed to Philadelphia’s most apocalyptic and ironic vision, just as we’ve become fully conscious of this 20th-century expression of unsustainability, we’re about to lose its most dramatic expression. As the song goes: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” and then it says something about a parking lot. Exactly.

Peter Cock couldn’t have picked a more off-the-beaten track location for his farmhouse. In the 1680s, and for a long time after, nobody coveted the swampy rise that broke the horizon near the Schuylkill as it meandered to the Delaware. Why would they? With so much rich, dry land in every direction and with William Penn’s ambitious “green Country Town” drawing folks six miles upstream, these brackish bogs were, literally, a Swedish-settler’s happy backwater. But the site proved good for farming, and provided well enough for the next owner to expand the farmhouse. That brick house stood quiet and alone for the better part of the 18th century.

Then all hell broke loose on the lower Schuylkill.

With the American Revolution in high gear and the British occupation of Philadelphia underway, control of the city’s port meant that the British would need to take the American-controlled fort built downriver at Mud Island, just below the mouth of the Schuylkill. At Fort Mifflin, as the installation would become known, several hundred American troops were garrisoned. And for weeks they foiled British attempts to reach the city by river. In a siege that would be the largest the largest bombardment of the Revolutionary War, six British ships bristling with 209 cannon would overwhelm the American’s ten. Over five days with an estimated 10,000 cannonballs flying, the fens of the Schuylkill were quiet no more.

Nor were they safe. On November 11th, at the start of the siege, a cannonball entered the rear wall of the old farmhouse, passed through and exited the front wall. From that day forward, old Swedish farmhouse would carry a new name: the Cannonball House.

And for the next 219 years, the Cannonball House, a survivor that would eventually come to be considered the oldest house in Philadelphia, would be treated with veneration, deference, and respect. Artists would sketch it; antiquarians would photograph it; and the Historic American Buildings Survey would document it.

By the start of the 20th century, as the city’s population expanded and its farmland shrunk, the now city-owned Cannonball House served as a “model farm” until the demand for sewage treatment overwhelmed the need for demonstrative agriculture. And the Cannonball House quietly accommodated as the Southwest Treatment Plant enveloped it. When operations started in December 1954, 100 million gallons of sludge passed through each and every day.

As the bicentennials of the battle of Fort Mifflin and the birth of the nation approached (and the 1950s sewage plant grew creaky) Philadelphia’s oldest house became its newest problem. Expansion demanded more land. “I wish the British had done a better job,” the Water Commissioner confided to a reporter.

In 1974, the Philadelphia Historical Commission decided that the Cannonball House wasn’t important enough to be listed on the National Register. But it was too important to be demolished. The Commission urged it be moved to a new site across from the entrance to Fort Mifflin. And in 1975, the main section of the Cannonball House was lifted from its foundations and wheeled slowly down the road. The Environmental Protection Agency, expecting local follow through to finish the job, picked up the $168,000 tab. And for next 21 years, the Cannonball House was a house without a home in preservation purgatory. And Fort Mifflin had a historic headache in its would-be parking lot.

In this uprooted state, deteriorated and on temporary cribbing, the orphaned Cannonball House was unable to charm its way into even the preservation-inclined heart of Inquirer’s architecture critic, Thomas Hine, who put it in December 1981: the “Cannon Ball Farm House has little claim to our minds and hearts…it requires some bravery to choose to forget it.”

Forgetting would take place, but it wouldn’t be brave. One day, in November 1996, what the British didn’t do, what sewage engineers wouldn’t do, the city, in violation of its own review requirements, did do. They demolished the Cannonball House. Raw sewage got treated; historic preservation got mistreated; and Fort Mifflin got its parking lot.

In 1967, when the late Roger Ebert was named film critic for The Chicago Tribune, he imagined rather large shoes to fill. After all—as he related the story in his 2011 autobiography, Life Itself: A Memoir—everyone at The Tribune and in Chicago, for that matter, knew reviews had been published under the byline Mae Tinee since 1915.

In 1915, when Hollywood released The Sea Hawk, the silent film directed by Frank Lloyd and based on an adventure novel by Raphael Sabatini, Mae Tinee had been on the beat for nearly a decade. By the time Ebert had been on the job that long, he had won a Pulitzer. Was it thumbs up for The Sea Hawk from his seasoned predecessor?

“The Sea Hawk is more than just a motion picture!,” Tinee declared in a review of July 1, 1924. “It is the dream of the tired business man; it is the fiery secret ambition of romantic youth. It carries the wistful passion that, carefully concealed, lives in most of us—to be gorgeous, spectacular, abused, talked about with baited breath—a creature dominating a world of winds and waters and clothes that never, never came from the shops of “what men wear.” (Or women, either.)” It’s a “love story” of “a noble brother; weakling half-brother; pirate ships, duels, intrigue” presented “in kaleidoscopic fashion to the sway of music that warms the blood….”

“You may work at a regular job for a living,” added Mae Tinee, “but once inside this little theater you get aboard a Spanish galleon or a Moorish vessel or an English ship. Your mission, for a brief time, becomes either pirating or revenge. Jagged cliffs, Moorish castles, and the fair countryside of old England furnish you with picturesque background.”

America loved this expensive extravaganza that included a cast of thousands led by Milton Sills, Enid Bennett and Wallace Beery. They loved The Sea Hawk’s four, full-sized ships created just for this production. And they especially loved that no expense, no sentiment—nothing whatsoever—was spared.

The Sea Hawk “Sailed right into the heart of Los Angeles! And anchored there!” bragged a July 3rd advertisement in The Los Angeles Daily Times after the Hollywood premier. “Thousands! Thousands! Thousands!” reveled “in the glamour of the settings!” and were “swept away by the immensity!”

That same issue featured a review by Edwin Schallert: “The grand old swashbuckling days are with us once again. The Sea Hawk visions them with rip roaring spirit of adventure. The picture is one of the ablest achievements in this history of the screen and in the current season it shines forth as a magnificent flare among a host of flickers. The premier … the first big gala…this season… took place at [Los Angeles’] Criterion Theater,” a classic movie palace on Grand Avenue which had opened in 1917 at the Kinema Theater. The “Criterion Audience Gives Enthusiastic Approval” for the cast of thousands declared yet another critic who called the lavish 12-reeler “brilliant.”

Frank Lloyd was well on his way to directing scores of films (IMDb lists 134) including Les Misérables (1917), Oliver Twist (1922), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and The Last Command (1955). In The Sea Hawk, Lloyd fully embraced Sabatini’s spirit in ships, scale, and sentiment.

The film had staying power.Five weeks after the premier, The Los Angeles Times headline reported “Action thrills and adventure on the high seas continue to please large audiences at the Criterion” under the headline: “Sea Hawk Packs ‘Em In.”

Philadelphians had been reading copies of the best-selling The Sea Hawk since the Washington Square publisher J.P. Lippincott introduced the first American edition in 1915. And Philadelphia movie-goers who had been looking forward to the film adaptation kept it in the theaters when it finally arrived in the summer of 1924. The following spring, The Sea Hawk was still up and running at the Great Northern Theater on north Broad Street.

The Sea Hawk was nothing less than a great Hollywood production. But Mae Tinee, it turned out, was something less than a great critic. In fact, she wasn’t a critic at all. Or even a reporter. Mae Tinee was a long-standing, all-purpose byline for reporters assigned, on slow news days, to spend their afternoons at matinees. And every once in a while, as in the case of The Sea Hawk, the diversion was worthwhile.