Author: Ken Finkel

Pretty much anything might be found, past or present, at the Sesquicentennial International Exposition, the lesser of Philadelphia’s two World’s Fairs.  Mounted at the bottom of Broad Street in 1926, visitors passed under the giant, electrified Liberty Bell, famously lit with 26,000 light bulbs and plunged into a world that was familiar, but also oddly uncertain.

The “Tower of Light,” led through to a “Gladway” and scores of exhibit buildings, rides and restaurants. A recreated “High Street 1776” connected a giant new stadium to “Treasure Island” amidst a landscape of lagoons, a Japanese tea house and a Military Camp. At the southernmost end of the grounds, just before the exhibits gave way to the Navy Yard, stood the largest exhibit building of all, the “U.S. Government, Transportation, Machinery, Mines & Metallurgy” building, aka the Palace of Manufactures and Industries. At 11.5 acres, this building didn’t seem like an afterthought, but in mid-June, weeks after opening day, it was still only framed out in steel.

When the Palace of Manufactures and Industries finally did open, this 1,800-foot-long, V-shaped building was packed with everything from the “World’s Mightiest Electric Locomotive,” from the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, to Pullman cars, trolley cars, electric cars, gasoline cars, tractors, locomotives and fire engines. Wedged between exhibits of General Electric and the Miners Association of Bolivia, the Atlantic Refining Company fabricated a pavilion made by the Fine Arts Papier Mache Corporation of New York. Here would be a full-size facsimile of the classical gas station Atlantic Refining had opened with fanfare are Broad Street and the Boulevard nearly a decade earlier.

Its architect, Joseph Franklin Kuntz, of the Pittsburgh firm W. G. Wilkens and Company, had reason to believe his vision joining past and present in gas station design might still catch on. Since the middle of the last decade, Kuntz had designed temples to the gasoline gods, high-end, Greek-Revival stations. In 1923, in a vote of confidence, Atlantic Refining awarded Kuntz the commission for a classically-inclined headquarters at Broad and Spruce Streets.

In a 1922 article, “Greek Architecture and Gasoline Service Stations” Kuntz made the case that bad gas station design was bound to happen, but could be avoided. “In an infant industry that grew to gigantic proportions almost over night, certain makeshift arrangements were inevitable in preparing to cater to a constantly expanding volume of trade. In consequence, our automobile highways have been dotted by nondescript buildings which offended the eye of the beholder, and possessed but one solitary attribute as a justification for their existence—utility. Like the bill-boards, these structures threatened to become a permanent blot upon the landscape.”

But Kuntz believed bad gas station design wasn’t inevitable. “The Atlantic Refining Company,” he wrote, “decided to make a radical departure from established precedent and erect a series of ornamental service stations that would minister to the needs of its customers and at the same time served as an advertising medium for its product, combining the function of service and the quality of beauty in approximately equal proportions. Situated at various points in the cities and villages along the principal highways of Pennsylvania and New England, these beautiful little edifices delight the eye as well as they serve the public. … Constructed of terra cotta, in white or colors…and ornamental plaster in harmonizing shades, they afford a wide variety of types and sizes, with special designs to suit individual locations and space requirements.”

Kuntz was particularly proud of his “dainty little edifice” at 40^th and Walnut Streets, “a reproduction, on an enlarged scale of the monument to Lysycraties, in Athens.” This gas station’s “perfect proportions will linger long in the memory,” Kuntz wrote, “striking contrast to the great majority of buildings erected for the purpose of supplying the wants of modern charioteers.” A didactic approach to “practical city beautification,” Kuntz believed, was the “only effectual method of preventing architectural monstrosities;” the only way of “applying esthetic interest to natural human needs in the building up of cities and towns.”

He was wrong, of course. As the papier-mâché dried at the Sesquicentennial, this anachronistic, historical-esoterical interpretation of the American gas station was about to be replaced by a thoroughly modern idea, that superior gas station design could be sleek, bright and contemporary. That gas stations could convey cleanliness, speed and be of this world. Within another decade or so, the modern gas station replaced Kuntz’s designs, would take over the service station industry—and, eventually, the American cityscape.

Broad and Fairmount is no ordinary intersection. Look at the five vistas it offers: toward Center City or North Philadelphia, up Ridge Avenue or down or out toward Fairmount, and it’s clear: this is a gateway with a grand, if gritty, sense of self.

This is s an equal-opportunity provider, Broad and Fairmount is, offering a sense of place with a complex choice of message. It lets you know where you’ve been and where you’re headed. It’s a place that favors the public even more than it accommodates the private, something we’re inclined to forget with all of our recent focus on the proposed Divine Lorraine Hotel development project.

Consider the sheer longevity of Broad and Fairmount as a public place. Generations before Ridge Road was upgraded to Ridge Avenue and Plumstead Lane shed its country airs and became Fairmount Avenue, Philadelphians knew this intersection. Broad Street was still a half-mile the south, contained in its original grid. What a revelation, it must have been, when the rutted road that would become Broad Street ventured a mile north from Center Square and connected so neatly here, making a six-point intersection.

By the 1860s and 1870s, as the city continued on its decades-long tear building 100,000 rowhouses, Broad and Fairmount served as a hub for the construction trades. (See our earlier post on the rowhouse as the “quintessential object of industrial Philadelphia.”) Broad and Fairmount supplied building crews throughout North Philadelphia with whatever they might need: lumber, brick, marble, iron and coal. Here, precisely a mile north of the rising white-marble City Hall, Broad Street became a boulevard straighter, prouder and more urban than the old country roads ever could. And as North Philadelphia grew, the marble yards were replaced with homes, schools, churches, synagogues, clubs and hotels —buildings of the new bourgeoisie. Of course, to finance it all the new Broad Street Bourgeoisie also needed banks. These became as essential, even more so, than any other institution.

The American Trust Loan and Guaranteed Investment Company, built at Broad and Ridge in 1890, wasn’t supposed to look like an ordinary bank. Architects Louis C. Baker and Elijah James Dallett had worked with Frank Furness, the most individualistic and eccentric of 19^th-century bank architects. And when they went out on their own at the peak of the Broad Street boom, they brought with them an appetite for expression and innovation. No surprise then, as this building was finished, the American Architect and Building News gave it a full-page illustration.

The American Trust and Saving Fund greeted arrivals from all directions with engaging overstatement. Above was a bell tower and a roof line of stone columns. Below, rusticated brownstone arches set apart by masonry checkerboards held half-lunette windows proclaiming the golden words: “Bank,” “Bank,” “Bank.”  The architects wrapped the institution’s expansive name around its entire angled façade in giant, sans-serif letters. Plate glass windows proclaimed in gold: “Money for Homes on the Installment Plan.” Baker and Dallett designed more than a bank; they created a billboard for banking.

Today, the American Trust Loan and Guaranteed Investment Company is still living out its mission as both medium and message. The bell tower is gone, but the building is covered with billboards and advertising. And before the billboards, which date back to at least the 1940s, this building always prominently communicated whatever it offered the community: hardware, auto supplies, ice cream. This commitment to messaging confirms the psychology of this strategic intersection and validates the bank in its civic role as narrator of public space.

This communicative role is catching. It played out across Broad Street, where the owners of the Lorraine Hotel recognized the opportunity to proclaim its presence with prominent rooftop signage. And more recently, graffiti artists embraced and compounded the same idea. One day, the graffiti will be gone and the Divine Lorraine’s giant red-neon letters will be re-lit. But for that signage to make sense— for this place to make sense—we need to understand it as part of the venerable, gritty and glorious gateway that is Broad and Fairmount.

On a sharp, clear summer evening in 1973, I found myself walking up 10th Street with Louis Kahn, listening to the architect talk about his city. Just before we approached Spruce, Kahn pointed above a one-story Laundromat on the west side of the street. There, a cluster of brick chimneys profiled against the western sky rearranged itself as we walked, accommodating every step with a fresh perspective. Before we passed by the last of these views, Kahn declared: “That is what a city should look like.”

I stared in silence. And every time I’ve passed by since, I stare again. In fact, any time I see a cluster of red-brick chimneys in this city of brick chimneys, I ask myself: What did Kahn mean?

We kept walking north, crossing Spruce, and Kahn’s tone about the city became less complimentary. Tenth Street is not really a street at all, he said, but a road. This time, I had the presence of mind to ask what he meant and Kahn explained: The traffic barreling by was a disconnecting force. Vehicles traveling from one distant, unrelated place to another added nothing to the life of this place, this community. In fact, they diminished it—and our experience there. That, he might have said, is what a city should not look like.

Actually, he did say that. “The street is a room of agreement,” Kahn said in his famous speech two years earlier, when he received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. “The street is dedicated by each house owner to the city in exchange for common services. … Through-streets, since the advent of the automobile, have entirely lost their room quality. I believe,” he continued, “that city planning can start with realization of this loss by directing the drive to reinstate the street where people live, learn, shop and work as the room of the community.”

In his lifetime, Kahn had witnessed how the automobile had nourished, but also had ravaged the city. And now he believed that the very idea of the city street was at risk. “A city is measured by the character of its institutions…the street is one of its first… Today, these institutions are on trial…they have lost the inspirations of their beginning.” To this day, walking along that stretch of storefronts on 10th Street between Spruce and Locust, you can feel the tension; you can sense the loss.

In less than one city block, we had seen the best and worst of the city.

Decades later, the chimneys still appear to be in a silent dance with one another. There’s still as much life above those rooftops as there ever was. Maybe that’s what Kahn was telling me that day. If liveliness above the rooftops isn’t matched by life on the street, the city has failed.

A living city needs both: a dance above and below. It’s about life, movement, form and synchronicity up there, but we also need it down here. That is what a city should look like.

New technology breeds new characters. Space travel, for instance, brought us super pilots who have “the right stuff.” Railroading created the conductor and the hobo. Digital technology gave us garage entrepreneurs and hackers. And when we go back to the origins of the telescope we find discoverers and heretics.

Photography expanded the human repertoire with the ham, the camera hog, or as Woody Allen would later depict it, the Zelig character. In 1839, when news of the daguerreotype’s ability to depict as-is reality arrived from Paris, it wasn’t at all clear what a camera hog should act like, or what this person might look like. In that brief, rare, uncompetitive moment of pre-photographic history, the notion of being the most-photographed held uncertain value. Anyone could step in to seek the uncontested title.

Who would enter this lopsided contest and become Philadelphia’s first camera hog?

The sole-entrant and hands-down winner was John McAlllister, Jr. (1786-1877), a son of Scottish immigrants born in Philadelphia more than half a century before anyone had heard of a daguerreotype. McAllister’s appetite for his own reflection had been whetted when Anna Claypoole Peale painted a miniature in 1817. (You can see it, online, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) By then, McAllister had taken over the family establishment on Chestnut Street, a business that specialized in whips and canes but had made a brilliant strategic segue to spectacles. The McAllisters claimed Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of bi-focals, as their company logo. In time, they’d mount a gilded bust of Franklin over the store entrance and built a solid reputation for quality and innovation.

By the dawn of the photographic age, McAllister also had a deeply cultivated respect for posterity. He had, as John Fanning Watson, wrote, “a strong liking for local antiquities [and] devoted himself to the collections of a library rich in works of all kinds, but particularly… old newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, essays, etc. connected with the history of Philadelphia.” As wonderfully authentic and evocative as these treasures were for McAllister, they paled in comparison with the stark honesty of the daguerreotype. These simply overwhelmed the imagination. History had nothing quite so potent to share.

If the past couldn’t be frozen in time in daguerreotypes, McAllister was bound and determined to make sure the present would be. The present, McAllister knew, would fast become history. And the business was well positioned as suppliers for the growing daguerreotype market. By 1856, Philadelphia would have more than 100 studios; the McAllisters knew them all.

In the Spring of 1840, when McAllister learned Robert Cornelius was getting ready to open the first portrait studio on Eighth Street, he made certain to be Cornelius’ first customer. Before most Philadelphians sat before a lens one time, McAllister had completed dozens of sittings. Any reason would do. The classic Chestnut Street storefront is being replaced with modern plate-glass? McAllister poses in front of his father’s paned window with top hat and cane. A new shipment of daguerreotype lenses and plates arrives? McAllister’s poses on the roof in a test image. No event, family or business, no new technology would be introduced without McAllister making another appearance before the camera. As his hair grew longer and his sideburns grew wilder (this was not a contest of vanity) McAllister would visit studio after studio. And when he ran out of photographers to visit, he had them come visit him at home, both homes, for that matter.

Fueled by success, the business moved to larger quarters at 728 Chestnut Street, In the last days of 1854, McAllister took one last opportunity to gather family and loyal employees to pose one last time. After the new shop opened, McAllister arranged himself among a collection of globes, astronomical models, and other scientific knickknacks as the centerpiece, the sole human specimen. This collector of historical stuff knew full well that we—the inhabitants of the deep future—would be looking at him, and looking after him for posterity. McAllister bet on what he knew as basic antiquarian logic: the winning collector is the one who is himself collected.

Photography offered McAllister excellent odds. And a century and a half later, we can see he clearly won his bet. McAllister came out ahead at the Library of Congress, at the Library Company of Philadelphia, at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, and, of course, here at PhillyHistory.org.

Forget all you know about gas stations: the self-service pumps, the lifts, bays, stretches of oil-stained concrete, bright signage and bad coffee. Imagine a time before all that, from a century ago, when the widespread sale of gasoline was inevitable but the solution as to how and where was not yet known. In an earlier post, we saw how Gulf Refining Company figured out a way to meet the logistical challenge of filling empty tanks. Gulf succeeded in selling lots of fuel, and it did so with a minimum of flair and imagination.

By the 1910s, the expression of stability, permanence and civic responsibility, aka City-Beautiful Classicism, had been put to work on behalf of railroads, power plants, and movie theaters—so why not put it to work for the oil industry?  At a time of uncertainty, flux and extraordinary profits, why wouldn’t rich companies go on the charm offensive building palaces where sheds would suffice?  Executives at the Atlantic Refining Company knew full well theirs was a dirty business. They had known it back in the 1860s when the company first stored and spilled oil and spun a positive corporate image on the banks of the Schuylkill River. Now, in the new century, the automobile was the big new thing. It seemed this might be as big as the railroad had been in the last century. The automobile would take over and transform the city, for better or worse. If ever there was an need to deploy the full persuasive powers of architecture, this was that time.

Responding to Gulf’s success, the Atlantic Refining Company’s marketing task force turned to the ideas of Charles Mulford Robinson. In his new book, Modern Civic Art: Or, The City Made Beautiful. Robinson considered the urban boulevards and bridges built to accommodate the automobile and wrote: “It is the triumph of modern civic art, to transform these necessary girdles and girders of the structure of the city into ways of pleasure and beauty. Here the whirr of the electric car, there the rush of swiftly passing motor cars—these are elements of the scene that may count not less distinctly in the total power to please than does the verdure.” Really? Millions of cars might offer as much as parkland? The man who inspired the City Beautiful Movement just wouldn’t allow himself to have an ugly thought.

Atlantic seized the opportunity and brought in an architect to leverage these new and positive thoughts about the automobile. Between 1917 and 1922, Joseph F. Kuntz of the Pittsburgh firm W. G. Wilkens and Company designed for Atlantic a handful of gas palaces in Pittsburgh and no less than 16 in Philadelphia. These polychromatic terracotta “temples” appeared like beacons on the boulevards. They flattered and pandered to the new urban driving breed. Atlantic set out to appeal to “automobilists, who find considerable pleasure touring over its smooth and well-kept roadways and bridges.” While Gulf staffed its utilitarian stations with men, Atlantic populated their temples with women outfitted in dark blue woolen uniforms, riding breeches and black leather accessories. With seventeen pumps, Atlantic advertised, “there will be absolutely no waiting” for service.

The gasoline was basically the same as Gulf’s product, but the experience was very different. Atlantic became widely known and admired for its “Greek temple effects.” Architect Kuntz developed a unique design for each new location which he refined in drawings and tested in miniature plaster models. Knowing customers would be buying gasoline day and night, and that they were concerned about the possibility of electric lights igniting fuel, Kuntz concealed electrical lights to outline the buildings and their colonnades. By 1922, sixteen busy Philadelphia intersections had unique gas temples by Kuntz, including 40th and Walnut, Cobbs Creek Parkway and Ludlow Street, Walnut and Fifty-fifth and just a few blocks south of the first success, at Broad and Lycoming.

What would Gulf do to keep its customers happy? They did the only thing a modern gas station could do: they kept their prices competitive and offered road maps and oil changes—for free.

“The ideal filling station has never been built,” scoffed a big oil executive in 1922. “I don’t think it ever will be built. But we are trying to get it.” Quite an admission from a man whose company (Standard Oil of Indiana) operated 1,400 stations of its own. The idea of the gas station had been around for nearly a decade, but the form was still very much evolving. By 1920, 15,000 had cropped up across America; by 1929 more than 120,000 littered the landscape. Other than dispensing gasoline to a burgeoning number of vehicle owners, no two oil companies could agree what a gas station ought to look like. And with money to be made, there was no time for debate. So, in the name of gasoline sales, and the bottom line, the city’s streets, boulevards and highways became a living laboratory of asphalt, brick, tin and flashing electric signage.

The experiments that ultimately gave us the American Gas Station took many forms: sheds and shacks, pyramids and pagodas, cottages and castles, wigwams and windmills. Some even led to extravagant structures modeled on mosques and temples. Design diversity would be about right, the oil executive would admit. “I would not want them all alike,” he said. “But I would demand of them a family resemblance—a Hapsburg chin, so to speak.” Selling gasoline wouldn’t be about gasoline, so much as consistency, service and branding. The oil exec didn’t know what he wanted his stations to look like, but he did know he wanted them all “recognizable at a distance.”

When did the question of what a gas station might look like first get answered? The year was 1913. That’s when William M. Burton patented his process for the “Manufacture of Gasolene,” acknowledging a “great and growing demand.” That’s the year Henry Ford dropped the price of his Model T to $550 and sold more than 308,000 cars. And that’s the year Gulf Refining Company opened the first of its purpose-built, drive-in gas station in Pittsburgh.

A century ago, fuel-hungry drivers could finally abandon the pharmacy’s ad hoc pail and funnel. Now they could drive past the lines at the tank wagon’s garden hose or the curbside pumps standing like afterthoughts outside grocery and hardware stores. In 1913, for the first time, motorists could pull up to paved stations devoted exclusively to servicing the nation’s new fleets. Gulf’s first station, an octagonal brick kiosk with a cantilevered pagoda-style roof bore the words “Good Gulf Gasoline” spelled out in lights. Need air, water, crankcase service, and tire and tube installation? Just drive up to your nearest Gulf octagon.

Shortly after the model proved itself in Pittsburgh, Gulf built another in West Philadelphia, at 33^rd and Chestnut Streets. On a good day, attendants pumped 3,000 gallons from ten 550-gallon underground tanks. “The liberal patronage of our West Philadelphia Service Station… and the number of requests from the North Broad Street District have prompted us to build another service station,” read the advertisement in The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. The new station at Broad Street and Hunting Park Avenue opened April 17, 1916. “Courteous attendants will supply you—cheerfully pump your tires or fill your radiator…free of charge.” Need a road map? They were now free, too. Gulf had found its solution for design and for service—and would stick with this formula for the next decade and a half.

How did the competition respond? The Philadelphia and Pittsburgh-based Atlantic Refining Company formed a committee to brainstorm. How could Atlantic outdo Gulf in a  “new marketing offensive?” The committee toured stations throughout the state, and beyond, and decided this challenge needed the talent of an architect. Joseph F. Kuntz of the Pittsburgh-based W. G. Wilkens and Company got the unusual commission. Gas stations were about to be ramped up to a new level of design—the likes of which had never been seen before—or since.

The battle for Gasadelphia on North Broad Street was about to take off.

NEXT TIME: Round Two

The automobile’s traction in the city started 100 years ago, but this centennial we don’t necessarily want to celebrate.

In 1899, after the first Philadelphian (Junker, Jules Junker) imported his French vehicle, it was a fast uphill ride. By 1907, there were 142,000 motors on American roads. From 1909 to 1910, when Henry Ford’s new factory began producing 1,000 Model Ts each and every day, national car sales jumped more than 4,500%. The invasion had begun.

By the end of the 20^th century’s second decade, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reported that 1,600 cars careened around Philadelphia’s City Hall every hour. That’s 26 per minute. Center City’s rush hour was born.

This scale and pace concerned city planners, even one from Detroit, who fretted in 1916: “When the streets of the cities were laid out it was never contemplated that there would be about two million automobiles operating on the highways of this country.” Yet, “it is estimated that the number of motor vehicles is rapidly going up to five million.” Actually, by the end of that decade, there were more than 6.1 million vehicles on America’s roads.

As the number of cars increased, so did the debate about their impact. Henry Ford assured that everyone who wanted a car might buy one, but a planner from New York believed proliferation was having the opposite effect. “The coming of the private automobile suddenly divided your population practically into two classes…the barons, riding not horseback, but in automobiles, forming a kind of superior stratum, and the other class, the common people, dependent upon the common carriers.”

The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin worried the abundance of cars advanced no purpose in particular. “Automobiles have become an important utility. Soon, we are told, everyone will have a motor. The difficult question remains: What shall he do with it when he gets it?”

In 1916, city planners from around the United States met in Cleveland to consider these questions and how to best help cities welcome  the automobile’s takeover. (By mid-century, Philadelphia’s Edmund Bacon still insisted the car was “an honored guest” in the city.) Planners discussed the ideal width of the urban roadbed, the ideal turning radius of the intersection, and the ever growing problem of city parking.

“The number of private pleasure vehicles left standing on the street is far greater than was the case with horse-drawn vehicles,” said Nelson P. Lewis of New York in his address “The Automobile and the City Plan.” “The motor car needs no hitching and will stay where left and it is not an uncommon sight to see the entire space along the curb occupied by motor cars for hours at a time.  …the number of them so left in the streets is much greater and is increasing at an extraordinary rate.”

Lewis called for “regulations governing the parking of such cars.” He laid out the classic urban parking dilemmas.  “If they stand in a line parallel with the curb and immediately adjacent to it, it is impossible for a particular car to leave its position unless there is sufficient space between them to allow them to turn out. If they are placed at right angles to the curb, the space occupied by them is so great as to seriously decrease roadway capacity.” Lewis identified Philadelphia as an exception: “Where the roadways are sufficiently wide, as in Broad Street…the automobiles are parked in the middle of the roadway in a position at right angles to the curb, thus permitting any vehicles to leave it position without interference.” But not every city had a Broad Street and not every street in Philadelphia was broad.

“There is going to come a time when this congestion of motor vehicles will be so much more serious than it is now,” warned a Boston planner, “there will be no practicable way of controlling it, except by encroaching upon existing parks and parkways.” Others at the conference bubbled with comments and ideas, hoping for “the designation of certain streets for the exclusive use of automobiles… the designation of certain streets for fast and slow automobile traffic … The establishment by the city of open spaces where automobiles may be left for the day.” One planner suggested “the city establish subway parking stations under public open spaces…” Another imagined “manufacturers producing a car that could be telescoped or at least stood on end in order that it may occupy less space when left in the public streets.”

Philadelphian Andrew Wright Crawford of the City Parks Association attended the proceedings and added his two cents as to what might come and what should: “The automobile in its best result is causing the diffusion of population.” But, “the motors must, in the center of the city be made to fit the city plan that is in existence, rather than the city plan should fit the motors.”

Sage and impossible advice from a tireless advocate of The City Beautiful.

It’s more than fair to say that, once again, the Royal Theater is not in line for a Preservation Achievement Award. (Nominations for 2013 are due this week to the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.) At this stage of the game, after languishing for 43 years, pretty much only wreckage remains behind the façade of the South Street institution that opened in 1920 and closed in 1970.

The entire South Street corridor had fallen victim to the proposed Crosstown Expressway. That ill-conceived and controversial project would eventually be removed from the city plan. But while blocks of South Street nearest the neighborhoods of Society Hill and Washington Square benefited from their proximity to revival and investment, those nearer to Broad Street would continue to decline. For the Royal Theater, high hopes wouldn’t be enough to overcome decade after decade of false starts, neglect and vandalism.

Today, what remains of the Royal Theater’s exterior is a handsome façade that’s little more than a canvas for murals echoing fifty years of faded memory. From the 1920s through the 40s, the Royal called itself “America’s Finest Colored Photoplay House” and hosted live performances with Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Pearl Bailey and Count Basie. That was then. What remains inside now is damaged almost beyond recognition, a hardhat site for even the most hopeful displays of hipster creative culture.

Decades of optimism, good will, vision and nostalgia have kept a dream alive, though they haven’t added up to enough to wake the Royal Theater from its longtime coma. Money might have made a difference. And great sums were lined up to arrive for the Royal revival at the end of Rendell’s second term as Governor. Just a few years ago, this project promised a haul of $31 million from Harrisburg for music producer-turned developer Kenny Gamble to create the “Royal Theater and Universal Commercial Complex.”

Funding can do a lot, but in the end, money is not fungible with well-earned, authentic preservation success. We sometimes convince ourselves to the contrary, but money is no substitute for community.

Community is what made the Royal an original and enviable success. Three-quarters of a century ago, when photographer Wenzel J. Hess visited 15th and South Streets, the Royal Theater stood at the heart of a vibrant, thriving community. The glue that worked for the Royal Theater was the same glue that held together all of the other enterprises on that stretch of South Street: drug stores, hardware stores, pawnshops, diners and Chop Suey joints, dentists, tailors, barbers, bicycle shops and bars. It was about life—the lives of the folks who made  this community and the places they lived them. People and community made South Street. And when  community declined, so did the possibility of preservation success for the Royal Theater.

The inevitable has been coming, if in slow motion. Twenty-one years ago (1992) The Philadelphia Inquirer reports the Royal’s owner is seeking a demolition permit. Five years later (1997) the city Law Department sets out to sue that same owner for code violations that allowed the building to deteriorate. The following year (1998) the Preservation Alliance acquires the building to buy more time but sells the building two years later with no preservation guarantees. And two years ago, the Alliance puts the Royal Theater on its “Endangered Properties List” as the owner considers demolition and then, last year, possible sale.

How long are the statutes of limitations for wishful thinking? If this slow-motion slipping into oblivion continues for another seven years, the Royal Theater will have been empty and abandoned as long as it was open and thriving. Maybe that’s long enough to find a new reality.

Jean-Pierre Blanchard wanted to make a splash, figuratively, not literally. He arrived  from France, 220 years ago, planning a display of showmanship that would, if successful, be the first balloon ascension in America—and his 45th.

On January 9, 1793, the French aeronaut and inventor readied his balloon in the prison yard at 6th and Walnut Streets, accepted best wishes from President George Washington and other luminaries, and floated skyward. Blanchard metaphorically lived his motto: Sic itur ad astra—to the stars. More precisely, he went to Deptford, New Jersey.

If not made useful, such feats of technology, skill, daring and luck were of little value. Blanchard made use of his time aloft conducting a variety of measurements and experiments, the results of which were recorded in a small book published in Philadelphia with a pleasant illustration of his balloon. Engravings were all they had in Blanchard’s time; it would be nearly half a century before photography allowed aeronauts to dream of returning to earth with “you-are-there” documentation.

“The first successful aerial photographs in America,” taken above Boston in 1860, were made from Samuel A. King’s balloon, the “Queen of the Air.” And President Lincoln’s war machine soon put aerial photography to work against Confederate troops. But King didn’t much care for sharing his basket with photographers. Another three decades passed before he went aloft with Philadelphia photographer William Nicholson Jennings.

In the early 1890s, King, brought the “Eagle Eyrie” up from his home in Tinicum to Fairmount Park for annual July 4th ascensions. In 1934, Jennings reminisced about their partnership in “Snapshots from Cloudland,” published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute.

As King prepped, Jennings found a moment to approach “the genial aeronaut to make a bid for a place in the basket for the purpose of making aerial snapshots.” King stared back “with an eye blue as the sky he loved to sail in; stroked his long beard, fleecy as any cloud he had passed through, and remarked: ‘My charge for a passenger is fifty dollars; but if you expect to make good photographs on your first balloon trip … you will be wasting your time and money.’” A first-time passenger would succumb to nerves and produce double exposures, blurred images, use erroneous settings, and on top of all of that, the summer’s “blue haze between balloon and landscape” would result in “thin,” “washy” negatives. Plus, King added, “escaping coal gas from the balloon would create a chemical fog.”

Undeterred, Jennings conducted experiments from the top of the Washington, Monument and devised a combination of orthochromatic plates and a light yellow lens filters and got him “bright, snappy” negatives. He made a “gas-tight” camera, and showed both to King.

On the Fourth of July, 1893, as “the Municipal Band struck up ‘My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon,’ all Jennings had to do was to “forget nerves, wait until the desired section of landscape came into view” hold his breath and press the button.” He “made several exposures while passing over Philadelphia at the height of about a mile…securing sharp, crisp, clear-cut negatives, from which I afterward made a number of 40” x 50” enlargements for exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London.”

King and Jennings would continue to collaborate, but their demise (King in 1914; Jennings in 1946) would hardly mark the end of the Philadelphia balloon story.

In 1956, when Hollywood adapted Jules Verne’s 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, producer Mike Todd lined up an all-star cast including David Niven and the young Shirley McLaine. The film, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture, also featured appearances by Noel Coward, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre, Red Skelton, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra. For the all-important role of the balloon, Todd turned to his friend; the self-described Philadelphia “balloonatic” Constance Wolf, who lent  her beloved “La Coquette.” The first woman to cross the Alps in a balloon, Wolf would promote the film by piloting “La Coquette” over London and Paris after its release. No surprise that, in 1959, she would replicate Blanchard’s first American ascension, and would inflate “La Coquette” again for another re-enactment, seen here, in January 1968.

Admission cost a dime at the 9^th and Arch Museum. Indeed, dimes ruled the for-profit world of Victorian-era museums.  But in the end neither the entertainment, nor the dimes, were enough.

For more than half a century, the corner of 9^th and Arch sustained Philadelphians with opportunities for diversion, education and voyeurism. The public came and went—and so did the owners. First was Colonel Joseph Wood, fresh in town having been burnt out of his Chicago emporium. The Colonel opened the doors on a relatively simple affair: menagerie plus performance space. By 1883, the venue re-launched under the new ownership. Hagar, Campbell & Co. Dime Museum advertised “Entertainment Designed Expressly for Ladies and Children,” and claimed they had the “only great show in town.” It featured everything from “Barnum’s Original Aztecs,” the “Che-Mah Chinese Dwarf,” the “Cannibal Fan Child,” the “Living Skeleton” and “the “White Moor.” Hagar and Campbell piled on the attractions, adding “Dens of Serpents,” “the Merry Monkeys” and Punch and Judy, Johnson’s Original Tennessee Jubilee Singers, and “a multitude of other attractions.”  (.pdf)

Even so, audience demands, and museum costs, proved too high. The Dime Museum soon changed hands again. This time, Charles A. Bradenbaugh re-invented the destination as the “9^th and Arch Museum.” And this time, place and the public connected. Bradenbaugh kept the audiences coming from 1885 to 1910.

What would a visitor see behind Bradenbaugh’s colorful façade? “On the first floor,” Joseph Jackson tells us, “there were numerous forms of apparatus for testing grips, lungs, lifting power, etc. “On the second floor were cages of monkeys, a prairie dog ‘Village,’ and a few other menagerie specimens.”  The third floor provided a lecture hall packed with a series of platforms, with living “human freaks.” Regulars came to know “The Skeleton Man,” “The Fat Woman,” the “Real Zulus,” “The Human Bat,” “The Bearded Lady,” “The Elastic-Skin Man,” “The Glass Eater,” and “The Dog-Faced Boy.” Every hour, the gawking public would be invited back down to the main auditorium where they’d sit for a popular play that, no matter the length of the original, was condensed into forty minutes, give or take.

In the 1890s, Bradenbaugh dabbled in movies, allowing his visitors to enjoy that emerging medium. But the Dime Museum’s array of 19^th-century offerings remained a complicated and layered activity for the public. The simpler experience of the 20^th century movie house required, and got, a venue all its own.

A decade into the new century, Bradenbaugh saw the writing on the wall and sold out. Soon enough, the new owners of the 9th and Arch Museum recognized the same reality and did their best to turn it into an opportunity. In 1911, the museum’s new manager, T.F. Hopkins, and his press agent, Norman Jeffries, engineered (literally) a favorite local legend: the Jersey Devil.

After giving birth to her 12^th child, the story goes, “Mother Leeds” declared that the 13^th, if she had it, would be the Devil. Lo and behold, one dark and stormy night in 1735, Mrs. Leeds gave birth to her 13^th. As promised, it immediately transformed into “a creature with hooves, a horse’s head, bat wings and a forked tail.” The newborn “growled and screamed, then killed the midwife before flying up the chimney. It circled the villages and headed toward the Pines.”

According to Andrea Stulman Dennett in Weird & Wonderful: the Dime Museum in America, the headlines screamed: “The Fabulous Leeds Devil Reappears after an Absence of Fifty Years.” A “monster with long hind legs, short forelegs, a tail, horns on its head and short wings” had reportedly been captured by a farmer in New Jersey “after a terrific struggle” and would soon be “placed on exhibition at the Ninth and Arch Museum.”

“Caught!!!  And Here!!!!  Alive!!! THE LEEDS DEVIL, read Hopkins and Jeffries posters. “Swims! Flys! Gallops! … Exhibited securely chained in a Massive Steel Cage. A LIVING DRAGON more famous than the Fabled Monsters of Mythology. Don’t Miss the Sight of a Lifetime.”

In fact, the museum’s short-lived center of attention was a kangaroo with wings attached. And the audiences this mutant marsupial drew to 9^th and Arch kept the doors open for only a few more weeks. The day of the Dime Museum had passed. Frank Dumont soon bought the building for his thriving troupe of minstrels.