Author: Ken Finkel

Legend has it that a hapless Bulletin reporter overslept the Monday morning of June 11, 1923 and telephoned his editor from home. The conversation went something like this:

“Just got into Broad Street Station. The train was late. I’ll be in as soon as I’ve grabbed a cup of coffee.”

“You’re in Broad Street Station, huh,” said The Bulletin’s city editor as he glanced out of the newsroom window at the smoky chaos across Penn Square. “Well, I’ll tell you something – you’re going to have the hottest damn cup of coffee you’ve ever tasted.

The fire at Broad Street Station that started in the wee hours that morning would continue for nearly three days. It would interrupt the flow of more than half a million daily commuters destroy the icon of Philadelphia’s Iron Age.

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s first, relatively modest, 160-foot-wide shed had been surpassed in 1891 by the Reading Railroad’s, 256-foot structure at 12^th and Market. Not to be outdone, and to meet the needs of their expanding ridership, the Pennsy hired the same engineers, Wilson Brothers & Co., to provide a new shed as massive as their busy site would allow. This 300-foot-8-inch-wide, 589-foot-2-inch-long, 108-foot-tall, 7,000,000 pound structure (but who’s counting) earned the title of the world’s largest single-span—and held it for decades. Broad Street’s shed rose as a symbol of the most extensive transportation infrastructure known—until, and even beyond, the fire of June 11, 1923.

Temples fall and icons fail, but they can then also thrive in the imagination. “Among the cloudy memories of early childhood it stands solidly, a home of thunders and shouting, of giant engines with the fiery droppings of coals and sudden jets of steam,” wrote Christopher Morley. Broad Street Station “was a place in which a delighted sense of adventure was closely mixed with fear.” Morley found Joseph Pennell’s rendering from 1919 a “perfect record of Broad Street’s lights and tones that linger in the eye—the hurling network of girders, the pattering of passengers, the upward eddies of smoke.” The shed linked regional and national, suburban and urban power for Philadelphians and visitors who felt in it an excitement akin to that of a world’s fair. In fact, the station, a symbol and anchor of the entire consolidated system, resonated with the worship of industry expressed at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876.

Morley was completely serious in his Elegy in A Railroad Station of 1952. “I preserve in pure imagination my memory of Broad Street Station,” he wrote, as the last of the place was knocked down to make way for Penn Center.

When last we checked in with Meriwether Lewis, he had just stormed the shops of Philadelphia, buying anything and everything his “corps of discovery” might need as they made their way across the North American continent. With more than a ton and a half of “portable” soup, calico ruffled shirts, tomahawks, fishhooks (and much more) packed in a Conestoga wagon headed to Pittsburgh, Lewis went back to Washington, D.C. one last time. From there, he invited his old friend, William Clark, to share in the leadership of the expedition.

Clark couldn’t have responded with more enthusiasm: “…I will chearfully join you in an ‘official Charrector’ as mentioned in your letter, and partake of the dangers, difficulties, and fatigues, and I anticipate the honors & rewards of the result of such an enterprise, should we be successful in accomplishing it.  This is an undertaking fraited with many difeculties, but my friend I do assure you that no man lives whith whome I would perfur to undertake Such a Trip &c. as yourself.”

The expedition took 28 months, far longer than expected. Lewis and Clark and their “Corps of Discovery” covered 8,000 miles and determined that the Pacific was about 1,200 miles farther away than previously thought. No Northwest Passage existed, after all, and the mountains were taller than anyone had possibly imagined. Lewis and Clark identified and recorded everything and everyone along the way: mountains, rivers, prairies and scores of Native American tribes. They collected 178 previously unknown plants and 122 previously unknown animals.

In his annual message to Congress in December 1807, President Jefferson proclaimed the expedition “has had all the success which could have been expected.” But Jefferson knew the ultimate success would be publication of the expedition’s discoveries.  And that’s what brought Lewis back to Philadelphia in 1807. He met with a printer, issued a prospectus, and promised three, illustrated volumes that would “open views of great and immediate objects of national utility.” Lewis sat for one portrait by Charles Willson Peale and another by Charles Balthazar Julien Fevre de Saint Memin, proudly wearing his expedition outfit and the treasured ermine-skin robe given him by a Shoshone chief.

Writing the book, it turned out, was more challenging than crossing the continent. Processing the expedition’s scientific and geographic discoveries proved overwhelming for Lewis. The coordination of artwork depicting specimens, charts, and maps based on the expeditions stacks of journals proved too much for a man also burdened with alcoholism and depression. One delay led to another and two years passed when a frustrated and angry Jefferson wrote Lewis that “I have so often promised copies to my literary correspondents in France, that I am almost bankrupt in their eyes.”  Lewis, who had not yet completed even a single chapter, committed suicide a few months later.

After Lewis’s death, the project fell into the hands of a reluctant William Clark, who visited Philadelphia to find a more experienced author. As Charles Willson Peale painted Clark’s portrait (illustrated here) he urged Clark to stick with the project, but Clark knew that Philadelphia had more willing and more able literary talents. Nicholas Biddle and his associate Paul Allen were the ones for the job.

Lewis’s stumbling block had become Biddle’s stepping stone. But Biddle wanted nothing to do with the scientific findings, which guaranteed the narrative would be of limited value. Clark knew the publication would suffer in the hands of an ambitious cosmopolitan far removed from the expedition (Biddle, the Princeton graduate, was destined for a career in banking and finance), but he also knew the plagued publication would finally be over with. And while many other discoveries could come out over time, here, finally, was the chance to publish his manuscript map, the first of the American West.

By the Spring of 1814, when The History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Source of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the Columbia River to the Source of the Pacific Ocean finally appeared, the words had passed through the hands of at least seven writers and two publishers and taken six years to write. The book’s map, on the other hand, had remained relatively unscathed.

Like Lewis, Clark had written extensive diary entries, and they would prove valuable, but the map was a graphic, first draft of the entire expedition. Along the way, Clark had transcribed information drawn in dust by tribal elders. Back in Washington D.C., he had witnessed Jefferson’s excitement as the President knelt on the floor of the White House inspecting his unfurled map. As far as Clark was concerned, Biddle’s text didn’t much matter. He put his faith in his map of the American West, a map which, inch-for-inch, had it all over any hand-me-down written account.

Until Doug Heller stepped forward about a decade ago, the real meaning of Sixth and Market Streets had been lost to historical background noise. As webmaster of USHistory.org at the Independence Hall Association, a unique perch for building online content and public understanding, Heller learned the story of The President’s House in Philadelphia, which stood at Sixth and Market, and created a dedicated page. Then, over the next decade in a thousand updates, Heller expanded the page into an authoritative, exhaustive encyclopedic account.

Heller rewrote the rules of play and literally changed history, online and on the street.

He restored to public memory the long-lost President’s house, where George Washington and John Adams conducted their presidencies in the 1790s during the nation’s infancy.  He saved from oblivion the stories of Washington’s servants and slaves who worked and toiled in a city that history had wrongly assured us was free of slavery. And once he moved the truth from the abyss of history into the foreground of American consciousness, Heller shed light on the efforts to represent this narrative in brick and mortar. If ever there was a case of the internet bending the arc of the American historical narrative, this was it.

Of course, Heller didn’t do it alone, and that’s the whole point. First came Ed Lawler’s scholarly articles, The President’s House in Philadelphia: The Rediscovery of a Lost Landmark. Then came the advocacy of a group calling itself the ad hoc historians, the debate over the facts with Independence National Historical Park, the introduction of ATAC (Avenge the Ancestors Coalition), and the key role of journalists producing news stories.  Heller posted hundreds upon hundreds of articles, before and after Stephan Salisbury and Inga Saffron’s pivotal, page one account in The Philadelphia Inquirer of Sunday March 24, 2002: Echoes of slavery at Liberty Bell site. What followed, from Boston to Atlanta, Chicago to Los Angeles, NPR to The International Herald Tribune assured that the truth, with all its contradictions and complexities, had finally been embraced.

Heller augmented the site with Lawler’s biographies of Enslaved persons of African Descent, with documentation of the work of INHP archeologists, with anything that might help build the ephemeral into reality.  In his role, from his perch, Heller understood that all of this would add up to something greater, much greater, than their sum of its moving parts. It took the better part of a decade, but Sixth and Market Streets is now reinterpreted, forever reconnected to its deep and complicated past.

Douglas J. Heller died last week. He is remembered and celebrated—see his obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer and a post at The New York Times’s Wordplay blog. Doug Heller, the ultimate puzzle master, took on the real-life puzzle of transformation on the street—and won.

He showed us how to play. Now it’s our move.

This time, Thomas Jefferson wasn’t messing around. As POTUS (President of the United States) and POTAPS (President of the American Philosophical Society) in 1803, Jefferson now had the power, the intelligence and the allies to mount a secret missionand finally discover—if one existed—a water route across the American continent. All he needed was “an intelligent officer, with ten or twelve chosen men, fit for the enterprise” to “explore the Missouri river… it’s course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean.”  Along the way, of course, they’d gather all kinds of information that would prove useful and valuable to the new nation.

Jefferson chose Meriwether Lewis for the venture and instructed him to prepare an expedition to the Mississippi River, up the Missouri River and into the uncharted beyond. “You will take careful observations of latitude & longitude, at all remarkeable points;” Jefferson wrote Lewis, you will observe and even collect flora and fauna along the way. And you will “endeavor to make yourself acquainted…with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue.” Learn everything about them: “the names of the nations & their numbers; the extent & limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes of nations; their language, traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, arts, & the implements for these.”  Lewis was to keep a keen eye for “articles of commerce they may need or furnish, & to what extent.”

The President had an expedition in mind here much more ambitious than a search for the North West Passage. A successful Lewis would return with enough new information to publish a veritable Encyclopedia Americana.

In order to prepare, Jefferson sent Lewis to Philadelphia to be tutored by the President’s colleagues at the American Philosophical Society: botanist Benjamin Smith Barton, geographer Robert Patterson, anatomist Caspar Wistar and physician Benjamin Rush. Jefferson had given Rush a heads up that Lewis was on his way and urged him “to prepare some notes of such particulars as may occur in his journey & which you think should draw his attention & enquiry.”

While in Philadelphia, Lewis outfitted for the expedition. With the help of Israel Whelan, who served as a guide through scores of specialty shops, Lewis went on a shopping spree the likes of which had never been seen before or since. Lewis spent more than $2,100 on everything from “calico ruffled shirts” and “strong wine” to “tomahawks” and “jews harps.” From Thomas Parker, 31 South Third Street he bought a gold chronometer; from Thomas Leiper’s, 726 Market Street, he bought 63 pounds of “pigtail tobacco.” At François Baillet’s, 21 N. 9th, Lewis bought 193 pounds of “portable soup;” in Christian H. Denchla’s, 114 North Third, Lewis scooped up 73 dozen “colored beads, small mirrors, burning glasses, pin cases, earrings, tapes and ribbons, tassels and small bells”—gifts for Native Americans. Of the 27 Philadelphia shops Whelan and Lewis visited more than 200 years ago, not one remains intact.

On June 10, 1803, a Conestoga wagon packed with Lewis’ 3,500-pound haul trundled across the floating bridge at Gray’s Ferry for points west.  And nine days later, Lewis had made his way back to Washington, D.C. and wrote his old friend William Clark, informing him of the still secret mission, and proposed that Clark share equally in its leadership. “President Thomas Jefferson and the congress of the United States wish to explore the western rivers which may run all the way across North America to the western ocean, and they have asked me to conduct the passage. The aims are to meet and begin trading with Indian tribes, to discover new plants and animals and to make new maps. My friend, could you join me to lead this enterprise with all its dangers, its fatigues and its honors?”

Next Time: Clark’s Response and more Philadelphia connections.

The Renaissance masters understood cities; they knew how to imagine them.

Important cities must have wide streets. “Broad Streets are more lightsome,” declared Andrea Palladio in 1570. When “one side of such a Street is…less eclipsed by the opposite Side, the Beauty of Churches and Palaces must needs be seen to the Greater advantage in large than narrow Streets, whence the mind is more agreeably entertained and the city more adorned.”

William Penn borrowed both the idea and the name for his own Broad Street.

The masters knew that cities thrive when their wide streets host a variety of public activity. Leone Battista Alberti advised that  “public ways, which may not improperly be called High Streets” should be “designed for some certain Purpose, especially a public one; as for instance those which lead to some Temple or the Course for the Races; or to a Place for Justice.”

Again, Penn borrowed the idea and the name for Philadelphia’s High Street, home to the city’s markets. Eventually, this led to an outright name change from High Street to Market Street.

Through the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Market and Broad evolved as the city’s public armature, an accommodating home for the public institutions that literally made the city. From market stall to City Hall, all kinds of civic buildings found their places along Philadelphia’s public avenues: churches, clubs, theaters, opera houses, hotels, hospitals, horticultural halls, even opulent mansions and iconic eateries. If a place was meant to contribute to Philadelphia’s public life, it had a place along the city’s civic avenues.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Philadelphians became enamored with the automobile and an urban-planning movement that called itself “The City Beautiful” and decided they had outgrown their older public avenues. Planning a mile-long, multi-lane, landscaped highway connecting City Hall to Fairmount Park, they would build a grand, new public avenue to redefine and update the city.

This 20^th century version of the Renaissance idea for a “lightsome,” “public way” would serve an expanded Philadelphia. Along it, all types of institutions would enhance and enrich public purpose. Anchored in the original Penn plan with Philadelphia City Hall, planners envisioned the Parkway cutting across the city’s northwest quadrant to accommodate schools, hospitals, libraries, museums, cathedrals, courthouses, administrative headquarters for schools and agencies, and even a hall for conventions. If it served the public, it belonged on the Parkway.

Until now. In recent years, civic institutions along the Parkway have been made out to be interlopers, placeholders for real estate to support a rising tourist economy. At the start of the 21^st century, we’re witnessing a tilt away from the Renaissance and City Beautiful principles that shaped the city and in favor of a newer, less complex notion: “The Museum Mile.”

Philadelphia leaders began using the term “Museum Mile” with frequency in 2005 and 2006, soon after the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened a new annex in the Fidelity Mutual Building. Of course, there already was the Rodin Museum, the Franklin Institute and the Academy of Natural Sciences and would-have-been but since failed Calder Museum. And at Logan Square, the cultural footprint of the Free Library of Philadelphia, then planning an expansion, was joined by Moore College of Art. The latest installment in this constellation, the Barnes Foundation, replaced the 1952 building of the Youth Study Center by architects Carroll, Grisdale and Van Allen.

The “Museum Mile” is an ambitious idea, but it’s a two-dimensional vision, considering that museums, no how well-stocked or well-appointed, do not a great city make. “No one spends two hours in a museum, then goes down the street to spend two hours in another,” urbanist Witold Rybczynski recently told the Inquirer. “I don’t think it’s a great idea to have three museums lined up in a row or three stadiums next to each other—there’s no synergy in that.”

Albert Barnes would have heartily agreed. His institution—and he went out of his way to avoid calling it a museum—would “replace the sentimentalism, the antiquarianism” and the “emotional irrelevancy” he found in museums. Appreciation of art, Barnes wrote, “can no more be absorbed by aimless wandering in galleries than can surgery be learned by casual visits to a hospital.”

Of course, visits to a hospital or other civic institution for that matter, are increasingly impossible along the Parkway, Philadelphia’s new Art Theme Park.

Broad Street once had its very own Greek Goddess, a two millennia-old statue of Demeter, aka Ceres, aka the Fertility Goddess. Zeus’s mate and Persephone’s mother had presided for decades under a spreading Hawthorn tree in the courtyard of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at 10th and Chestnut Streets. Then, in the 1870s, architects Furness and Hewitt had a Eureka moment as they composed the new building’s polychromatic façade of red brick, brownstone, sandstone and granite. Furness and Hewitt completed their composition with the Greek original over the entrance at Broad and Cherry, proving there was still some juice left to Philadelphia’s old claim as “The Athens of America.”

How did Philadelphia get its Greek Goddess? As Columbia University archeologist William B. Dinsmoor told it, Commodore Daniel Todd Patterson took advantage of his authority, his wealth and his presence in the Mediterranean in the 1820s. Patterson’s and his ship, the USS Constitution, were on a military mission that doubled as a treasure hunt. First Patterson and his crew visited the ruins of Carthage and made off with some large mosaics. Then, at the catacombs of Melos and Aegina they managed to buy collections of glass and terracotta. From Sunium they took pieces of the temple. And while near Athens in 1827, the Constitution anchored close enough to Megara to find the prize of the entire expedition: statues of Demeter and her daughter Persephone.

A small group of “emaciated” Greeks led Patterson and his crew three miles inland to the buried statues. And where the Commodore didn’t know exactly what they were, he knew they were very ancient and very good. Claiming his purchase an act of charity to feed their families, Patterson bought the less “mutilated” of the two statues and assigned 25 of his men the job of getting his treasure to the Constitution. Patterson also did his best to acquire a key missing part. “I was unable to procure the Head ‘tho I offered a high price,” he apologized in the letter dated July 16, 1828, presenting the statue to the Academy.

More than a century later, while conducting research for his article “Early American Studies of Mediterranean Archaeology,” Dinsmoor homed in on Patterson’s exploits and concluded that this haul was indeed remarkable. Not only was the figure sculpted by the same expert hand as the Persephone Patterson left behind, Dinsmoor concluded that Philadelphia’s Demeter was “the largest piece of ancient sculpture brought to this country before the Civil War.”

Patterson also realized his scholarly efforts were too little, too late.

In the summer of 1937, fearing that the now cracked Earth Mother would kill passersby, Academy officials priced out its removal. As the discussions went on and the estimates came in, the idea of removal and restoration gave way to outright demolition. Sculptor Louis Milione claimed he could “demolish the figure for the sum of $250.”—one quarter of the estimate of bringing Demeter to earth in one piece. Academy officials quickly accepted Milione’s bid and, as The Philadelphia Inquirer soon reported, the statue was “knocked apart with maul and sledge and pneumatic drill and ignominiously hauled off.”

“The fate of the Demeter is somewhat embarrassing to consider,” wrote Dinsmoor during the depths of the Second World War, “in view of the fact that the events occurred only recently and in our own enlightened environment, rather than in Nazi terrorized Europe.”

Philadelphia’s Greek tragedy also played out as an American irony. In the 1940s, Charles Rudy recycled two chunks of Demeter’s debris and sculpted Pekin Drake and Two Hearts that Beat as One. Today, both are in the Academy’s collection.

Benjamin Franklin lived in the here and now; he wasn’t so much the toga type. Early on, Franklin and friends formed what they called the “Leather Apron Society” and cultivated their image as well-read, regular fellows. It wasn’t beyond Franklin to slice up a rattlesnake (or an image of one, anyway) to make the point that the colonies should “Join or Die.” While in London, Franklin depicted Britannia herself as a quadriplegic to make another political point. In Paris, he shunned wigs and frills and put on his fur hat and a neck cloth only a little finer than burlap. Franklin generated more than his share of charisma and the French loved their rustic guest. They imagined him the charming, clever woodsman, the real thing when compared with their own plain-dressing philosophers. Little did they know, or care, that Franklin dressed down for his French fans.

Franklin couldn’t have appeared more human—more capable of conversation—than he did in Jean-Antoine Houdon’s marble bust from 1779 (see it at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). But this was no mere mortal. Houdon knew it and we know it. The French praised Franklin the inventor and revolutionary for having “seized lightning from the heavens and the scepter from tyrants.” They depicted him in classical robes protected by the Goddess Minerva as he directed the scimitar-swinging Mars to smite Avarice and Tyranny. (See the image by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.) No fur cap would do. Fragonard dressed Franklin for the part in a classic, classical toga—and it seemed about right.

George Washington had been dead for decades when, at the 100^th anniversary of his birth, Americans witnessed the deification of the Father of His Country as an enthroned, bare-chested, 30-ton Zeus. When artists depicted Franklin as a God, he was very much alive and still walking the streets.

So it couldn’t have come as too much of a surprise when the directors of the Library Company of Philadelphia (which Franklin had been instrumental in launching sixty years earlier) asked the aged Franklin if he’d mind terribly being depicted once again in a classical dress. This time, it would be a larger-than-life, full-length statue of white Carrara marble. In his right hand, extending from an arm supported by a symbolic stack of books. This Franklin would hold a scepter, inverted to represent his opposition to monarchy; this Franklin would preside over Independence Square when Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital. Of course, the living, breathing Franklin agreed to play the part—and got to again tweak modest Quaker Philadelphia with its first piece of public art. Italian sculptor Francesco Lazzarini got right to work. But Franklin died in April 1790, nine months before the opening of the library and two years before the installation of the statue.

Over the years, the marble Franklin lost a few parts along the way. In the late 1870s, the Library Company moved from 5^th Street to Juniper and Locust and hired Frank Furness to design a new building that replicated the spirit of the original. Furness designed a new niche for Lazzarini’s Franklin. A decade later, and directly across the street, the Episcopal Academy opened its doors. Episcopal’s student body grew and so did its building. As a former student once confessed, when his classmates could, they escaped with slingshots to the school’s fourth floor balcony, which looked directly across at Franklin. But the students weren’t there to admire Lazzarini’s work. They had one thing in mind: to make Poor Richard a little poorer.

Monument Cemetery Gatehouse just before demolition, Broad Street at Berks Street, March 3, 1903.

Philadelphians were dying to get out of town in the 1830s and 1840s—and so were city dwellers just about everywhere. Parisians started the trend, opting for a rural burial at Le Père Lachaise Cemetery before Americans caught the bug. Soon, the living from Boston to Baltimore, Detroit to Dayton, Pittsburgh to Philadelphia transformed romantic rural landscapes into perpetual theme parks for the dead. Or so they thought.

Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery overlooking the Schuylkill River opened in 1836. The following year Monument Cemetery on Broad Street started up. Then came Woodlands in West Philadelphia and the business model took off. Cemeteries selling families plots of picturesque real estate with mellow names like Cedar Hill, Glenwood, Greenwood, Mount Moriah, Mount Peace, and Mount Vernon cropped up all over the unbuilt landscape. Fashionable folk anticipated spending eternity in the peaceful Philadelphia countryside.

One of the founders of Monument Cemetery, the artist John Sartain, planned to reside there after his long and productive life as an engraver. Sartain enjoyed the memory of Broad Street in the 1830s when it was only a lane “narrowed in still further by a ditch on either side, behind which was a post-and-rail fence, the boundary of adjacent fields.” He sketched a design for a Gothic gatehouse to welcome both permanent residents and short-term visitors.

But Broad Street was no country lane. Anticipating that its boulevard-like width should carry northward from the built-up city as far as the eye could see, cemetery managers agreed to set back their gatehouse “provided the other land owners on both sides of the street would do the same” and plant “a double row of trees along each sidewalk.” And Broad Street, Sartain later recalled, was “widened to its present breadth…extending this noble avenue thirteen miles in length, straight as a ray of light.” There, behind his “Gothic parapet and pinnacles,” Sartain expected to reside for eternity.

But as long as there is life, there are compromises.

While away in Europe, Sartain’s gatehouse was “spoiled by a member of the board of managers…a carpenter…who considered that every building must have a projecting cornice.”  Away went Sartain’s Gothic roofline and up came Italianate woodwork. As Sartain bluntly put it in his memoir titled, The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, “my original design is now travestied.”

That would hardly be the least of it—or the last of it. Only six years after Sartain was buried beneath his brownstone monument topped by a sphinx, the city extended Berks Street and demolished the gatehouse—after documenting it front (illustrated) and back. Now transected by a tree-lined Berks Street, Monument Cemetery filled with up with Sartain’s relatives and about 28,000 others. In 1929, the last lot-holder was laid to rest.

Rest in peace? Not on your life. At Monument Cemetery, there would be irony in the mourning. By the 1950s, as we’re graphically informed here and there, Monument Cemetery’s real estate would be reclaimed for parking by the adjacent, expanding Temple University. Cranes lifted caskets and coffins which made their way to Lawnview Cemetery in suburban Rockledge. Headstones and monuments, however, including the one Sartain had designed for himself, were carted off to another form of finality, as landfill on the banks of the Delaware River at Brideburg, not far from where the Betsy Ross Bridge would soon rise.

The Evening Telegraph at the Lincoln Building on Broad Street, South of City Hall. Photograph by
N.M. Rolston, October 4, 1916.

When Philadelphia boomed so did its newspapers. The city’s population, about 81,000 in 1800, expanded fifteen-fold over the next century to 1.3 million. This did wonderful things to make Philadelphia a robust newspaper reading and publishing town.

No less than a dozen dailies started up in Philadelphia between 1836 and 1880. During the Civil War, Charles Edward Warburton and James Barclay Harding thought afternoon readers could be better served and launched The Evening Telegraph, a newspaper with a name that actually meant something. Utilizing the telegraph, editors transmitted news from the first national political convention after the Civil War held at “The Philadelphia Wigwam” directly to their offices. The Evening Telegraph compiled and ran editorials from newspapers across the United States and Europe. It commissioned translations and serialized Jules Verne’s novels, including his popular Tour of the World in Eighty Days.

By the mid-1890s, then run by the second generation of leadership, The Evening Telegraph built a promising  future. While conducting research for his book American Journalism From The Practical Side, Charles Austen Bates toured the paper’s new quarters at 704 Chestnut Street and sat down the owner/publisher, the thirty-year old Barclay Harding Warburton. Bates came away impressed, finding The Evening Telegraph “in every respect a model newspaper’s home.” He recognized that the young Warburton needed to maintain the paper’s appeal “to the millionaires, solid business people, and the society people” but he also needed to broaden the paper’s popularity. This Warburton accomplished with an array of new features including a woman’s page, “an amateur sporting page,” pages devoted to art, literature, theater, “the secret and colonial societies,” and, on Saturdays, a “ministerial page.” The Evening Telegraph, Bates noted, “seems to appeal very strongly to both the classes and the masses.”

“At Broad Street Station and the Reading Terminal,” wrote Bates, “more copies of The Evening Telegraph are sold than of probably all other papers put together.” Warburton had increased circulation by 300%. He had increased advertising by 60%, selling to every last one of Philadelphia’s 44 banks, 28 trust companies, as well as getting “all the legal business there is.”

The Evening Telegraph thrived on Chestnut Street in a remarkable district, a complex, competitive, journalistic community. By the late 19th-century, eleven of the city’s dailies could be found between 6th and 12th Streets, Chestnut and Market Streets. To Bates, the neighborhood appeared to be thriving; he couldn’t quite imagine how fragile the state of Philadelphia journalism really was. In the first decade of the 20th century, three newspapers would fold. By the Great Depression, ten were gone.

In 1911, perhaps sensing the seachange, Warburton sold out to Rodman Wanamaker, his wealthy, dilettantish brother-in-law. Wanamaker may have bought The Evening Telegraph as a plaything, or possibly as an investment. To run the operation, he installed John T. Windrim, an architect with no experience in journalism or publishing. The paper left its 7th and Chestnut Street office for the high-priced, ostentatious Betz Building, a stone’s throw from both City Hall and Wanamaker’s Department Store. Many things were different on Broad Street, but a few remained the same. Journalists at The Evening Telegraph continued their longtime practice of “transmitting” the latest news by scribbling it on blackboards hung at street level. On October 4, 1916, this was the latest bloodletting from the front lines of World War I (the Battle of the Somme) and the score from the last baseball game (Phillies lost to the Boston Braves, 1-6).

Two years after Wanamaker’s bet on The Evening Telegraph, Cyrus Curtis, an even wealthier Philadelphian, started on an ambitious newspaper acquisition and consolidation spree. Between 1913 and 1930, Curtis, who had been hugely successful as a publisher of magazines, purchased five Philadelphia dailies, three of which he would fold. Curtis’s second target, The Evening Telegraph, acquired for its wire services, was bought and closed on June 28, 1918—after 54 years of publication.

As it turned out, Curtis’s publishing acumen didn’t quite translate to the world of daily journalism. His last acquisition, a $10.5 million purchase of the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1930, was meant as a savvy final stroke in Curtis’s plan. It was final, but not terribly savvy. After Curtis died in 1933 his company was forced to sell the Inquirer at a loss.

It wouldn’t be the last time such a thing could happen.

The now-demolished Youth Study Center and current site of the Barnes Foundation,
2020 Pennsylvania Avenue. Photograph by Francis Balionis, June 18, 1952.

“I know what you have,” William Glackens told Albert C. Barnes of his first stabs at art acquisition. It’s an “ordinary rich man’s collection.” You spent thousands of dollars and “they are stinging you as they do everybody who has money to spend.” Forget your “fuzzy Corots,” said Glackens, put them in the “attic” and “start over.”

Barnes, the chemist-physician-manufacturer of a medicine that prevented infant blindness had set out to cure another  blindness—the kind that afflicts rich collectors with no vision. Barnes tracked down Glackens, a former classmate from Central High School who had, only a few years before, broken into the New York City art scene as one of “The Eight”—a group of realists with a distinctly populist edge. In Glackens, Barnes had someone he could trust: not a dealer, but an old friend an “eye” who could help him unlearn his rich man’s collecting habits and start him assembling art that actually meant something.

What kind of a vision did Barnes have in mind? “I want to buy some good modern paintings,” he wrote Glackens early in 1912. And Barnes had the funds to set up an unusual experiment. He sent his old friend to Paris with $20,000 (the equivalent of almost half a million in today’s dollars) on an open-ended art buying trip. Glackens knew Paris a little, but he hadn’t been there for more than a decade, since he quit his job as an illustrator in Philadelphia to go on a bicycle trip through Northern France, Belgium, and Holland. So he turned to Alfred (Alfy) Maurer, an American painter living in Paris, who, as Glackens put it in a letter to his wife just after his arrival, “is going to introduce me to a Mr. Stein, a man who collects Renoirs, Matisse, etc.”

They got right to work. Three days later, Glackens wrote home: “I have been all through the dealers places and have discovered that Mr. Barnes will not get as much for his money as he expects. … Hunting up pictures is not child’s play. Poor Alfy is about worn out.” But less than two weeks later, by March 1, Glackens had completed his mission. “I sail tomorrow,” he wrote, “everything is settled up here and the pictures being boxed. I am mighty glad it is finished and I am sick of looking at pictures and asking prices. … I will have a devil of a time with the customs people over the pictures. I am loaded down with invoices and consular certificates.”

Was Barnes’ experiment a success? On the eve of his departure from Paris, Glackens wrote: “Everything has been finished up and the pictures are being boxed by a first class packer … I am bringing you a fine collection of pictures nearly everything I started for.” When the crates fresh from Paris arrived in  Barnes’s hands on April 2, 1912, he anxiously unpacked his 33 works of art.

Among the 20 paintings Barnes beheld “a little girl reading a book” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a “bargain” at seven thousand francs ($1,400) that Glackens was particularly proud of. Barnes unpacked his first Paul Cézanne: Toward Mont Sainte-Victoire (Vers la Montagne Sainte-Victoire) from the late 1870s; his first Pablo Picasso, Young Woman Holding a Cigarette (Jeune femme tenant une cigarette) painted in 1901, and his first Vincent Van Gogh The Postman (Joseph-Étienne Roulin) from 1889.

“I have examined the paintings which you bought for me in Paris and I am delighted with them,” Barnes wrote Glackens. But  not entirely delighted. By outsourcing the task of buying, Barnes had forfeited the education of the search and the joy of the hunt. By June, he would go to Paris himself, to work with Alfy, to meet the Steins (Leo and Gertrude), to charm the dealers with his checkbook and build on what Glackens had started. But what Barnes unpacked in those crates one hundred years ago changed his vision and his confidence in collecting. Over time, Barnes would build a collection of 180 more Renoirs, 68 more Cézannes, 45 more Picassos and 6 more Van Goghs. And much, much more.

In Paris, Barnes would tackle something that Glackens did not—the world created by the new wave of modernists. “Art is in a strange state at present among the youth,” Glackens warned Barnes. “I confess that lots of things I have seen over here are incomprehensible to me as art.” Barnes took Glackens’ words as a challenge. In Paris, he made his way to those who created this “incomprehensible” art and bought some of that, too. Barnes would, in short order, make his way from art’s cutting edge to its bleeding edge.

In its own time, so would Philadelphia.

[Note:  For more on the Barnes Foundation at the site of the Youth Study Center, read another post at PhillyHistory published May 15, 2012: What’s Wrong With Philadelphia’s “Museum Mile”?