Author: Ken Finkel

The start of a long-simmering naming debate for Center City can be traced to the waning years of the 19^th century.

“Barber, first-class, wants situation in center city,” reads a classified ad in the Inquirer from 1898. But the next year, another ad reads “Errand boy, about 14 years old, strong, active; center of city. And then in 1900 we see; “Bartender, age 30, good mixer; capable of taking charge: 7 years central city reference.”

Which would it be? For the next half century, any of the three would suffice.

“Central City” seemed to dominate for a few years. “Housework –an honest and respectable girl wants general housework in small, private family. Central city reference” and “Barber, first-class, wants situation in 10-cent shop. Married, young man, speaks German and English, central city” and “Licensed Saloon (Central City) – Handsomely equipped; running $800 weekly; sickness cause: great sacrifice; $17,000.”

But then “center of city” seemed to make a comeback. In May 1906 we find a headline: “How Realty Rises In Center Of City.” In 1910 we see another: “1000 New Lamps Flood Center of City with Light / Mayor Turns Switch Inaugurating System of Illumination / Brilliance Extends River to River.”

In Our Philadelphia of 1914, Elizabeth Robbins Pennell likes the relatively clunky “centre of the town.” One example: “with the Law Courts now in the centre of the town and the new Stock Exchange at Broad and Walnut, and stores everywhere, nobody could live in town; the noise of the trolleys is unbearable; the dirt of the city is unhealthy; soft coal has made Philadelphia grimier than London…”

Classifieds support the usage of “of.” “Bartender – Young German for centre of city” or “Shisler Built Homes $1900 to $3800” only “20 minutes to center of city.” Or one of a dozen appearances, for houses in the Olney neighborhood promoting “One Fare to Center of City.”

A Philadelphia Tribune headline from 1932 reads: “Maniac Slays 1, Wound Pair, Ends Own Life: Hundreds Dodge in Center of City As Bullets Sizzle By.” (“Death and Destruction barked from a maniac’s gun last Thursday night near Ninth and Market streets and hundreds of Philadelphia’s citizens escaped death by dodging while sizzling hot lead whizzed through the air.”)

If Christopher Morley had been inclined, his Travels in Philadelphia, published in 1920 would have mentioned Center City at least once. He was not so inclined.

That’s not to say the usage of “Center City” was nonexistent. We find one from 1916: “Saloon Saloon – Near center city / Bar averages $450 weekly; old established. Selling account sickness.” And in 1920 we see a mention of the” YMCA building, 1421 Arch, “in the Center City Building.” In 1926, there are two more appearances: An ad for Greenwood Terrace near the Jenkintown Station: “Suburban Charm with Center City Convenience” and an ad for ”C.T. Electric Trucks. … which delivers the Inquirer “to the newsdealers of the center city area.” And in 1929, the Philadelphia Gas Works put out the word for its “Center City Dump” at 22nd and Market Streets. (“Save time and expense by dumping conveniently instead of hauling to outskirts of the city. 50 cents per load…”

In 1937, “Center City” gave way to “Central City” in the Federal Writers’ Project’s Philadelphia, a Guide to the Nation’s Birthplace. “There was a time when the central city was dotted with abattoirs. Now, however, excepting two large slaughterhouses on Gray’s Ferry Avenue, and one at Third Street and Girard Avenue, all are far from the city center.” And: “The central city section had already begun to take on the appearance of a metropolis. The main streets, such as Market, Chestnut, and Broad, were crowded with buildings and shops of substantial size.” And “By 7:30 there is a lull in the central city as the sphere of activity shifts to the home.”

Newspapers of 1930 put forth the headline: “$50,000 in Jewels Stolen at Door of Central City Hotel” and “Boy Boot Blacks Banished From Mid-City Streets.” The article suggests that the proposition, “Shine Mister?” by “hundreds of juvenile bootblacks on central city streets, will be heard with diminishing frequency…” And a page-one headline: “Federal padlocks for central city hotels, cafes and clubs may follow as a result of “wet” New Year’s Eve and other parties staged on their premises…”

“Central City” appeared to be an almost uncontested choice in 1930. “3 Central City Blazes Quelled Within Hour” read a headline. When Strawbridge and Clothier opened its new store in Ardmore, an ad promised that its location “will offer special allurement to the motorists who do not wish to run the gauntlet of central-city traffic.”

Headline in February 1940: “Parking Meters Backed for Six Months’ Tryout – Experts Favor Them for Central City.”

“Street Widening Called Key to Mid-City Traffic” read another headline that Spring.  “The ultimate solution of central city traffic congestion and its resulting high-accident rate must be major reconstruction of its traffic arteries…” And in December of the same year, “Yule Traffic Control Urged by Businessmen – Tow Squad Busy in Central City.”

And the Cushman’s Sons bakery had many locations. “There’s a store near you” promised the ad, citing the Main Line as well as Logan, Tioga, West Philadelphia, Germantown, Chestnut Hill and no less than four shops in “Central City.”

As recently as 1969, the Inquirer criticized “Stop-Gap Airport Transportation” suggesting “SEPTA’s proposed bus line from central city to the airport” was only a stop-gap measure.

We know one thing for sure: “Center City” would win out. In 1940, “Center City” appeared in the Inquirer less than 200 times compared with more than 1,200 for “Central City.” In 1950, the imbalance grew even greater. More than 1,700 appearances of “Center City” and more than 2,400 for “Central City.” By 1960 the score would flip to more than 3,400 impressions of “Center City” and less than 900 for “Central City.” By 1980, “Center City” would appear more than 10,000 times. By then, “Central City” faded to just over 500 impressions.

“Center City” had prevailed.

Charles Walker’s gritty diary of labor in the bowels of an Aliquippa, Pennsylvania steel mill helped popularize the “men of steel” macho. Four years later, the same steel manufacturer that employed Walker, Jones and Laughlin, upped the ante commissioning a giant statue for the Sesquicentennial Exhibition, the world’s fair in Philadelphia. This grandiose sculpture, “the Spirit of Steel,” featured three classically-inspired heroic males making steel, the central figure holding a winged I-beam aloft, an offering to the world.

These heroic, men-of-steel interpretations further solidified the legend of the Pennsylvania steelworker as American folk hero. The fictional legend of Joe Magarac would take it even further. In 1931, Owen Francis introduced a comic-strip-style, Paul Bunyanesque man-of-steel in Scribner’s Magazine. This gentle immigrant giant would “appear out of nowhere to protect steel workers from molten steel and other dangers” in the mills. Magarac was both management and labor-friendly, working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year enthusiastically squeezing out steel railroad rails “from between his fingers.”

These exaggerated, overwrought masculine images of the American steel worker came to an abrupt halt in the 1980s, when American steel manufacturing was caught off guard when “Germany, Japan, and other steelmaking nations built brand-new capacity” leading to a sharp decline in production, employment and optimism. It resulted in a halving of industrial employment and the collapse of the entire industry. By the end of the 20^th century, Pennsylvania’s “out-of-date steel plants” and the laborers who had perpetuated the legend had all but disappeared.

Steel’s bleak future would have been unimaginable on the sunny Wednesday afternoon of August 4, 1926 when visitors to the Sesquicentennial in deep South Philadelphia considered the day’s options. In the stadium, one could watch the “Mounted Police Gymkhana,” an “exhibition of relay racing, rescue racing, Roman riding, pyramid riding, mounted wrestling, trick riding and platoon formation.” A “Super-Contest of Rodeo Champions,” also scheduled in the stadium, promised “the greatest context of brain and brawn … ever witnessed.” In the Sesqui Bathing Pool the Women’s Swimming Championships were underway. In the Sesqui auditorium, the Philadelphia Orchestra performed Brahms symphony No. 1 in C Minor. And at 2 o’clock, that busy day, a crowd gathered for the steel statue’s dedication. There, in the promenade extending Broad Street into the fairgrounds the Sesqui’s own military band provided music before speeches by Mayor Kendrick and steel executives before Gloria Vittor, the five-year-old daughter of sculptor Frank Vittor, yanked the cord releasing drapery over the gigantic grouping.

The Inquirer described the heroic figure and it’s setting: on the right side of the monumental figure “stands a furnaceman, exerting his strength to tilt a huge ladle of molten steel into ingot molds. On the left side there is a smith swinging a huge hammer and typifying the traditional worker in iron and steel. Flames from the furnaces sweep up around the legs of these three figures. On the pedestal on which they stand there is done in bas-relief a series of striking sculptural pictures of scenes in the steel industry; men working  before open-hearth furnaces; others chipping steel and loading it upon ‘buggies;’ trains of cars hauling coal and iron ore, fleets of steel barges transporting products upon the  interior rivers;  blast furnace plants in operation and rolling mills pouring forth tongues of flame.”

That night, “fifty 500-candle power searchlights, concealed in the base of the group [flooded] multi-colored rays of light upward around the pedestal and the stalwart figures of the steel workers,” added the Pittsburgh Gazette Times.

The Italian-born sculptor Frank Vittor had established himself in Pittsburgh eight years prior to the Sesquicentennial. Vittor “created the individual plaster pieces in his Pittsburgh studio using live models in order to realistically depict the muscles and facial details,” we learn from historical curator Nicholas P. Ciotola, “He then shipped the completed work by freight trains to Philadelphia, where he assembled it and coated it with a composition of wax, oil, and paint to protect the plaster from the elements. When unveiled, The Spirit of Steel weighed two tons and stood towering ninety feet high – taller than all of its surroundings on the event grounds.”

Vittor received a gold medal from the Sesquicentennial Exhibition Association for his sculpture. He would attract other opportunities to glorify the story of steel. In the 1930s, Vittor received a commission “for what would become his most lasting tribute to the industrial might western Pennsylvania,” four figures: pioneers, transportation, electricity, and, of course, steel, for the pylons of Pittsburgh’s George Westinghouse Memorial Bridge.

Unlike the monumental plaster “Spirit of Steel” at the Sesquicentennial, these were carved in stone.

[Sources: Making Steel, Stories from PA History, ExplorePAHistory.com (WITF and PHMC); Clifford J. Reutter, “The Puzzle of a Pittsburgh Steeler: Joe Magarac’s Ethnic Identity,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 63 (January 1980); Nicholas P.  Ciotola, “From Honus to Columbus: The Life and Work of Frank Vittor,” in Italian Americans: Bridges to Italy, Bonds to America. Edited by Luciano J. Iorizzo and Ernest E. Rossi, (Teneo Press, 2010); “Steel Industry Statue at Sesqui-Centennial Dedication Wednesday,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, August 1, 1926;  “Steel Men to Give Statue Wednesday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 1, 1926; [Daily Schedule] The Sesqui-Centennial International Exhibition, The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1926; Statue “Steel” Unveiled, The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 5, 1926; Frank Vittor [obituary] The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan 25, 1968.]

For more about the story of Pennsylvania steel, see this post: “Men Of Steel.”

“Steel is perhaps the basic industry of America” wrote Charles Rumford Walker, an Ivy Leaguer with a passion for Big Steel. In the summer of 1919, Walker “bought some second-hand clothes and went to work on an open-hearth furnace” at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Mill in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania.

“In a sense it is the industry that props our complex industrial civilization, since it supplies the steel frame, the steel rail, the steel tool without which locomotives and skyscrapers would be impossible.”

Walker “believed that basic industries like steel and coal were cast for leading roles either in the breaking-up or the making-over of society.”

As a “hot-blast man on the blast-furnace” stationed at a pit deep inside the mill, Walker learned “the grind and the camaraderie of American steel-making.” Here are excerpts from his book Steel; The Diary of a Furnace Worker.

The pit was an area of perhaps half an acre, with open sides and a roof. Two cranes traversed its entire extent, and a railway passed through its outer edge, bearing mammoth moulds, seven feet high above their flat cars. Every furnace protruded a spout, and, when the molten steel inside was “cooked,” tilted back-ward slightly and poured into a ladle. A bunch of things happened before that pouring. Men appeared on a narrow platform with a very twisted railing, near the spout, and worked for a time with rods. They prodded up inside, till a tiny stream of fire broke through. Then you could see them start back in the nick of time to escape the deluge of molten steel. The stream in the spout would swell to the circumference of a man’s body, and fall into the ladle, that oversized bucket thing, hung conveniently for it by the electric crane. A dizzy tide of sparks accompanied the stream, and shot out quite far into the pit, at times causing men to slap themselves to keep their clothing from breaking out into a blaze. There were always staccato human voices against the mechanical noise, and you distinguished by inflection, whether you heard command, or assent, or warning, or simply the lubrications of profanity.

As the molten stuff rose toward the top of the ladle, curdling like a gigantic pot of oatmeal, somebody gave a yell, and slowly, by an entirely concealed power, the 250-ton furnace lifted itself erect, and the steel stopped flowing down the spout. … When a ladle was full, the crane took it gingerly in a sweep of a hundred feet through mid-air, and … the men on the pouring platform released a stopper from a hole in the bottom, to let out the steel. It flowed out in a spurting stream three or four inches thick, into moulds that stood some seven feet high on flat cars. …

I looked up and saw the big ladle-bucket pouring hot metal into a spout in the furnace-door, accompanied by a great swirl of sparks and flame, spurting upward with a sizzle.

 “At last,” I said, “I ‘m going to make steel.”

 “Get me thirty thousand pounds,” said the first helper when I was on the furnace that first night. Fifteen tons of molten metal! …  The overhead crane picks [up the ladle] and pours [molten steel] through a spout into the furnace. As it goes in, you stand and direct the pouring. The craneman, as he tilts or raises the bucket, watches you for directions, and you stand and make gentle motions with one hand, thus easily and simply controlling the flux of the fifteen tons. … It was like modeling Niagara with a wave of the hand. Sometimes he spills a little, and there is a vortex of sparks, and much molten metal in front of the door to step on. …

 At a proper and chosen instant, the senior melter shouts, “Heow!” and the great furnace rolls on its side on a pair of mammoth rockers, and points a clay spout into the ladle held for it by the crane. Before the hot soup comes rushing, the second-helper has to ‘ravel her out.’ … Raveling is poking a pointed rod up the tap-spout, till the stopping is prodded away. You never know when the desired but terrific result is accomplished. When it is, he retires as you would from an exploding oil-well. The brew is loose. It comes out, red and hurling flame. Into the ladle it falls with a hiss and a terrifying “splunch.” … The tap stream at steel heat is three feet from your face, and gas and sparks come up as the stream hits the ladle. You’re expected to get it in fast. You do. …

In a few seconds the stream fills a mould, and the attendant shuts off the steel like a boy at a spigot. The ladle swings gently down the line, and the proper measure of metallic flame squirts into each mould.

A trainload of steel is poured in a few minutes.

Source: Charles Walker, Steel; The Diary of a Furnace Worker (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1922).

“Some people may think that this is the most virtuous place under the sun, but let them look over these pages, and perhaps they may open their eyes in amazement at the amount of crime committed nightly in “this City of Brotherly Love.”

So began an anonymously-authored Guide to the Stranger, or Pocket Companion for the Fancy Containing a List of the Gay Houses and Ladies of Pleasure in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, published in 1849.

“Many hundred men, yes, I may say thousands, are weekly led into the snares employed by the wily courtezans [sic],” whose estimated numbers “are ten thousand and upwards.”

Actually, we have no way of knowing. But we do know from the Library Company’s online exhibition—Capitalism By Gaslight—that “the trade thrived … that prostitution grew into “a highly lucrative business for some girls, young women” and the “widowed or abandoned” who “turned to prostitution to support themselves and their children.” The so-called oldest  profession “allowed young women (many of them African Americans) a modicum of economic and social independence they could not have had otherwise. Savvy women worked their way up to become successful madams who lived in relative comfort.”

Prostitutes, or sex workers—“disorderly women as they were frequently called—were familiar figures in the landscape of the disorderly city” wrote historian Marsha Carlisle. “They moved freely and openly in parks, on the streets, and in places of amusement. Along with paupers and peddlers, they used public spaces to their own advantage. … Their brothels were households in mixed neighborhoods, but their working environment included the streets, the parks, the theaters and local taverns.”

Prostitutes based in the dozens of brothels west of Washington Square solicited in nearby theaters (Arch, Chestnut and Walnut Street Theatres) whose owners appreciated the fact that sex workers attracted paying customers. According to Carlisle, “prostitutes had displayed themselves from the third tier of the theater from the beginning of American drama. They came to the theater from the brothel households in groups, often several hours before curtain time. Once there, they made contact with customers, old and new, in the upper gallery, to which there was a special entrance for their use.” At one point, Philadelphia’s theaters were said to “swarm” with “crowds of painted prostitutes,” who “exhibited their shamelessness” in the “broad glare of the lamps.”

Mary Shaw and her clients could easily escape the “broad glare.” Shaw’s well-appointed “bed house” flourished just a few steps south of Walnut Street, just down Blackberry Alley. The guide credited Shaw as a landlady “of the cleverest sort” known “for her amiable disposition and kindness of heart” in addition to a most convenient location. No less than seven other brothels lined Blackberry Alley (now Darien Street) which ran two blocks from Walnut to Spruce.

Yet, there’s no historical marker to be found.

At #4 Blackberry Alley, according to our guide, the “talented, accomplished, motherly, affectionate” Mrs. Davis maintains her “temple of pleasure” doing “all in her power to add to the comfort of her friends and visitors.” All of her boarders were “young, beautiful, volatile and gay.  . . . You will find few houses like it. None better.”

A few steps further to the south, Susan Wells’ house, was rated “quiet and comfortable.” Hal Woods’ was considered “tolerably fair.” Therese Owens’ got labeled a “second class house.” Furthest south, nearly where Blackberry Alley opened to Spruce  Street, one would find Ann Carson’s “genteel loafer crib…”

Houses, whether highly recommended or not, tended to provide reliable protection from the authorities. After police picked up the 15-year-old Maria Walsh parading the streets wearing “a revealing calico dress,” no bonnet, and “bright copper earrings” (“signs of a public woman”) she was charged with vagrancy and sentenced to a month in jail.

But owning real estate didn’t always keep the authorities at bay. According to Carlisle, “Blackberry Alley became the target of a nine-house raid that resulted in the arrest of sixteen men and thirty-eight women” in 1854.

Some brothels warranted dire warnings. Just two blocks west of Blackberry Alley, on Locust between 10th and 11th Streets, lived  and worked “the bald and toothless” Mrs. Hamilton. “Beware of this house,” warned the guide, “as you would the sting of a viper.”

Around the corner at No. 43 Currant Alley (now Warnock and Irving Streets) still stands Mary Baker’s “very good house” where clients would be “free from danger. The young ladies are all gay and beautiful.”

Another cluster of houses were found further to the west, at 12th and Pine Streets. They ranged from Mrs. O’Niel’s “Palace of Love,” to Mrs. Rodgers “good house—perfectly safe” to that of Catharine Ruth (alias Indian Kate) where readers were advised to “be careful.” Not far away, Liz Hewett ran “a tolerable second rate house” and “My Pretty Jane,” operated her “shanty” a “resort of very common people.”

A block south on Lombard, above  12th Street, one might encounter Madam Vincent’s “low house.” Readers were warned to “be cautious when you visit this place, or you may rue it all your lifetime.”

South of South Street, beyond the city proper, were areas beyond even the slightest suggestion of policing. “One of the worst conducted houses in the city” the guide reported of Sarah Ross’s, located at German Street (now Fitzwater) and Passyunk Road. “The girls, though few in number, are ugly, vulgar and drunken. We would not advise anybody of common sense not to say there.”

And the guide ventured into the notorious heart of Moyamensing, Bainbridge Street between 4th and 8th, finding “numerous brothels of the lowest order…houses of prostitution of the lowest grade, the resort of pickpockets and thieves of every description.” Nothing less than “the underbelly of the city,” confirmed Carlisle, who shared tales of the feared “Duffy’s Arcade,” a gallery of windowless 8-by-10-foot rooms, and the “gambling hell and brothel” known as “Dandy Hall.” Only one visit to these places could lead to “utter ruin and disgrace.”

“The stranger is earnestly admonished not to go there” urges the guide.

But historians, the keepers of public memory, must.

[Sources: A Guide to the Stranger, or Pocket Companion for the Fancy Containing a List of the Gay Houses and Ladies of Pleasure in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection (Philadelphia: 1849); Marcia Carlisle, “Disorderly City, Disorderly Women: Prostitution in Ante-Bellum Philadelphia,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 110, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), pp. 549-568; Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of 19th-Century America (The Library Company of Philadelphia: 2012).]

We were pleased to find an international inventory of equestrian statues. It reaches way back to ancient times. Marcus Aurelius from the year 176 is there (of course) along with Alexander and many other greats from Europe and beyond: Brazil to Vietnam; Mongolia to Somalia; Congo to Uzbekistan.

From the 1600s through the 1700s, the number of equestrians remained surprisingly modest: only 15 or so per century. Then came the 1800s, the golden age of bronze statuary, with more than 250 equestrians. We find the European monarchs (many of all the Louis, Georges, Phillips and Napoleons) as well as American generals from the Revolution through the Civil War.

You might expect horse-borne poses passé in the age of the internal combustion engine. But the 20th century proved a hotbed of hundreds more the world over. There are counter-intuitive, catch-up monuments, like that of the ancient Roman General Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo whose success drove a jealous Emperor Nero to demand his suicide. This statue in The Netherlands dates to 1964.

The 20th century list includes equestrians of King Rama V Chulalongkorn in Bangkok, Thailand, aka King Rama V (1908), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Turkey (1927) and Bassel al-Assad, the older brother of Syria President Bashar al-Assad, who died in a car accident in 1994.

When was the dawn of Philadelphia bronze age? Not when you might expect. As the nation’s capital in the 1790s, a Washington on horseback was proposed to top  off a “Monument designed to perpetuate the Memory of American Liberty” but they didn’t get around to casting the Father of His Country for another 60 years, and about another 100 in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, in the 1850s and 1860s, Andrew Jackson made two appearances (Washington, D. C. and New Orleans) and George Washington made three (Richmond, Washington, D.C. and Boston) before finally landing a Philadelphia appearance in the 1890s.

Worldwide, more than 400 equestrian statues were dedicated between the 1880s and the 1920s. Of those, 135 were American. Twelve are in Philadelphia starting with General John Fulton Reynolds in 1884 and, three years  later, General George Gordon Meade. From 1890 to 1911 the city enjoyed a rush of nine more equestrian bronzes, five more generals, a Medicine Man, Joan of Arc and Remington’s Cowboy.

But seven years before launching this rash of mostly legend-leaning generals, Philadelphia’s very first equestrian, a figure straight out of authentic mythology, was installed on the pediment of Saint George’s Hall, 13th and Arch Streets. On June 6, 1877 a cryptic headline in the Inquirer reads only “St. George.”

“Quite a number of persons were collected yesterday at Thirteenth and Arch streets to witness the unboxing of the statue of ‘St. George and the Dragon,’ which arrived on Monday evening by the ship ‘Hawthorne.’ It was cast in antique bronze by Messrs. Elkington & Co., of London and Birmingham, and is one of the handsomest specimens of art ever brought to this country. It weighs 3400 pounds, and including the horse, is twelve feet in height. Owing to its great size, it was cast directly on the Thames, so as to be ready for shipment….”

Saint George’s building-pedestal lasted only another 26 years and the sculpture followed its owner, the Society of the Sons of St. George, to a new home further west on Arch Street before spending four decades in deep storage. In 1975, the bronze was unveiled a third time in Philadelphia, on Martin Luther King Drive at Black Road in West Fairmount Park.

Reynolds, on the other hand, an early casualty at Gettysburg (he was fatally shot in the back of his neck during the first minutes of the three-day battle) held his ground, a patch of sidewalk at City Hall, for 135 years and counting.

[Disclosure: the author is on the board of directors of the Association for Public Art.]

“What enables anyone, in any country, to make a really good violin?”

Musician, collector and instrument dealer David Bromberg had pondered this question for years. And he had an answer. Sure, a violin maker would need “some talent with woodworking” but they’d also had “to have seen a great violin. That’s the secret,” Bromberg added. “It’s true even in the town of Cremona. In order to make a really good violin, you have to have seen something great.”

Flying blind, as it were, didn’t stop the occasional 18^th-century American. The Museum of the Moravian Historical Society in Nazareth, Pennsylvania preserves the earliest dated example of American violinmaking, an instrument crafted by the 19-year old John Antes in 1759.

If “colonial American makers were limited by the quality of the instruments on hand to copy” that situation would rapidly change when the European masters embarked on American tours.  According to Bromberg, “the European virtuosi treated America as their piggy bank—if they were broke, they came to America to make money. Along the way, they made a valuable contribution to American violin making, thanks to the great instruments they carried.”

“It’s possible that if you were able to trace the itinerary of these virtuosi, you’d see the lutherie improving behind them as they went,” claimed Bromberg.

One early instance: an 1843 visit by the Belgian Alexandre Artôt, “the first European virtuoso known to have visited the United States.” Violin maker Ira J. White happily welcomed Artôt and his Stradivarius into White’s Boston shop.  Not long after, the Norwegian soloist Ole Bull stopped by with his Guarneri.

When Ole Bull’s tour brought him to Philadelphia, he visited the shop of John Albert. And Henri Vieuxtemps brought his Guarneri to the Arch Street shop of Albert’s son, Charles F. Albert, himself an “artisanal violin maker and restorer.” (Much later, the Vieuxtemps Guarneri found its way into the hands of Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman). And on one occasion, the younger Albert got to repair the Stradivarius of Polish-born Henryk Wienawski, who was to perform at the Academy of Music.

Albert successfully eliminated a wolf, an unwanted overtone, from Wienawski’s Stradivarius. After trying out the repaired instrument, according to Albert’s obituary, the master “embraced Albert, and “kissing him on the forehead, [and] exclaimed: ‘young man, you have done what no other man could do for me whether in Europe or America.’”

At the start of his performance at the Academy, according to The Inquirer, Wienawski “walked about a little among the players as if he were wishing to introduce his beautiful Stradivarius to the other violins in the orchestra, so that they might go well together… “

And go well together they did.

“How can we speak with sufficient praise of Wienawski’s remarkable gifts?” wrote The Inquirer, “he is altogether unequaled by anyone we have heard, [his performance] “all full of soul and fire.” Wienawski had “a magnetic dash which was quite contagious among the orchestra, who followed him with almost equal impetuosity. … “

Albert proudly framed the bridge he removed from Wienawski’s violin alongside the virtuoso’s autograph.

“American luthiers became as good as any luthiers in the world when they had access to iconic instruments…” wrote Bromberg, “It reached a point where America was making things as good as anything found anywhere.” Yet, the idea that Americans couldn’t match the Europeans persisted. Meanwhile, Philadelphia became a center of good, and occasionally great violin making by such makers as the Pennsylvania-born Joseph Eastburn Winner, John Pfaff from Bavaria, Joseph Neff from Baden, the brothers John G. and Frederick August Klemm, Charles A. Voigt, Charles Hammermiller, the Primaveras and the de Luccias. And then there was Martin Nebel, who traded under the name of Charles F. Albert on 11^th Street, keeping the Albert name alive into the 1960s. And then there were the Moennigs, whose shops in Philadelphia survived for more than 100 years, lasting into the 21st century.

What did these accomplished Philadelphia luthiers have in common? More than one might think. Many incorporated American woods into their instruments: spruce from Blue Mountain and maple from the Poconos,  working in a local flair unknown to European luthiers.

[Sources: Erin Shrader, “David Bromberg on His Collection of 270 American-made Violins,” Strings Magazine, May 5, 2015; Christopher Germain, et al. The American Violin ( AFVBM Foundation, 2016); Rubinstein And Wienawski,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 30, 1872; “Famous Violin Maker Dead,” [Obituary for John Albert], The New  York  Times, January 3, 1900;  Charles F. Albert Succumbs to Cancer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 2, 1901.]

In the last third of the 19^th century, fueled by wealth from the industrial revolution, Philadelphia’s Victorian aristocracy established itself on Rittenhouse Square. In rows of mansions, versions of the city’s classic rowhouses on steroids, lived the alpha families, the one percent, who controlled at least half of the city’s wealth.

“The lower 80 percent,” according to Dennis Clark, might have controlled only 3 percent of the city’s wealth, but they were indispensable “to prepare and serve the meals, shop, clean the household[s], do the laundry, and care for all the details of the privileged establishments…”

In fact, “it was impossible to pursue the extravagant lifestyle of mannered elegance and luxury without servants,” wrote Clark, even if “those most readily available were from a group alien in outlook, habits, and background.” Rittenhouse Square became a “scene of an interdependent relationship” between rich on the square and poor from nearby immigrant communities of Schuylkill, Devil’s Pocket, Ramcat and other nearby South Philadelphia neighborhoods.

Differences between the communities, created a “social dilemma” for both “the great households of Rittenhouse Square” and the overcrowded rowhouse neighborhoods where most of the Irish servants lived.

In 1870, noted Clark, “there were 24,108 domestic servants in the city of whom 10,044 were born in Ireland. Among the remainder a large portion or of Irish parentage.” In late-19^th century Philadelphia, “Irish” and “servant” became “virtually synonymous.”

And for many White Anglo-Saxon Protestant families, this presented a problem that couldn’t be overcome. Diarist Sydney George Fisher wasn’t alone in his bias that the Irish occupied “the position of an inferior race in the business of life, because by nature and education [they were] fitted for it.” Housekeeping expert and author Eunice White Beecher warned “not one Irish woman in one hundred” could “be transformed into a neat, energetic, truth-telling servant.” Plus, Clark added, “these servants were seen as threats to the religious integrity of the family and the peril to the Protestant purity of its children.”

For the Irish, “a similar ambiguity characterized their connection with Rittenhouse Square. It was demeaning for them to be forced to serve families whose wealth was founded upon notoriously exploitive mills, factories, and railroads.  … Many a railroad pick-and-shovel man looked with deeply mixed feelings upon his daughters’ employment in the great houses of men whose railroads had meant for him a lifetime of miserable toil.”

Life on Rittenhouse Square was a mutually inconvenient, if essential, compromise until the early 20^th century, when demographic and economic changes, in addition to a new appetite for life in the railroad suburbs, undid the old order. “As those whose families had reigned resplendent on Rittenhouse Square in the 1880s declined or decamped, the square became drab and unkempt. The great houses were shuttered, demolished, or converted to apartments. The flocks of servants to tend them we’re no longer affordable or fashionable. The girls from ‘Ramcat’ were becoming secretaries or nurses; some were even going to high school and college.”

The square also took on a new look.

“Like tall chimneys, apartment hotels are circling around Rittenhouse Square” fretted the Inquirer in the Spring of 1924. Sale signs “tend to change completely the serenity which long dwelt in that abode of the socially elect.”

The 52-room mansion at the southeast corner of 19th Street and Rittenhouse Square where the Scott family hosted scores of soirées, receptions and teas only a decade before, was among the first to go. “Tearing Down Scott’s Mansion” bluntly stated an advertisement for scrap building materials in February 1913. The place was reduced to so much “lumber, doors, windows, [and] good hard brick,” all sold “cheap.”

Soon after, on the same site, rose the square’s first Beaux-Arts apartment building, designed by architect Frederick Webber. The next mansion to fall was that of the Drexel family, directly across 19th Street.  And in its place rose another 18-story apartment house, this one designed by Sugarman, Hess & Berger.

“Construction Boom Strikes Rittenhouse Square Section,” read one headline in 1924. “Landmarks are Razed for Fashionable Apartment Structures,” read another. And so, demolition of mansions and construction of high rises continued until a time when even apartment dwellers protested that such buildings would “shut off sunlight from the square.”

Nevertheless, development persisted.

[Sources: Dennis Clark, “Ramcat and Rittenhouse Square,” in William W. Cutler, III and Howard Gillette, Jr. The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Westport: Greenwood Press); “Tearing Down Scott’s Mansion,” [advertisement] The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 22, 1913; “Girard’s Talk of the Day,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 10, 1924;  “Construction Boom Strikes Rittenhouse Square Section,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 1924; “Seminary Moves to Green Hill Hotel,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 3, 1940.]

“It is difficult for Americans today to imagine the grandeur of the elite life-style of a Rittenhouse Square at the end of the nineteenth century,” wrote historian Dennis Clark. “The class culture of such neighborhoods created what amounted to a fairyland of elegance and display protected by Victorian codes of civility and discrimination. These enclaves of privilege combined architectural eclecticism with passionate embellishment, lavish furnishings, and an adoration of English upper-class family etiquette. Flamboyant architects like Frank Furness and Theophilus Chandler designed edifices for an almost hysterical display of wealth.” Illustrations of these “wildly adorned shrines to aggressive vanity and the obsessive flaunting of riches” were published proudly in King’s Views of Philadelphia of 1902.

“At no other time in the city’s history, before or since,” wrote sociologist Digby Baltzell. “have so many wealthy and fashionable families lived so near one another.” Here was a neighborhood built by great industrial-era fortunes made in banking, investments, dental tools, pharmaceuticals, giant knitting mills, big sugar, and, of course, the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Perhaps the most opulent and most egregious of these houses, at the southeast corner of 19^th and Rittenhouse, was Frank Furness’ 52-room design of 1875 for Thomas A. Scott. This “quintessential railroad man of his generation,” described by a New York newspaper editor as “the Pennsylvania Napoleon,” who came across as “ambitious to take possession of the republic under a nine hundred and ninety-nine-year lease.”

As great-great-granddaughter Janny Scott recently recounted, Thomas Scott transformed “what had merely been a Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh carrier into a six-thousand-mile system of railroads stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes.” The influence of his corporation “eventually extended as far as New Orleans, Colorado, Arizona and Mexico.” Scott and his predecessor, J. Edgar Thomson, controlled “not only the biggest freight carrier in the world but the most profitable corporation in North America.”

And, largely due to one infamous quotation, Scott would become “one of the most consistently and thoroughly vilified business executives in the 19th century.”

This notorious quotation, uttered during what is known as the great railroad strike of 1877, is considered “the beginning of the age of industrial and class warfare in the United States.” Janny Scott explains in her book The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father: “Four years into the longest recession in American history, and in response to new wage cuts and work rules, train crews in Maryland and West Virginia walked off the job. Then a strike broke out in Pittsburgh, where railroad workers blockaded the yards. People with other grievances against the railroad joined the protest. So did factory and mill workers and others whom the recession had left homeless and unemployed. After the National Guard troops were called in, members of the crowd attacked them. Troops fired back, killing at least ten people and wounding many more. Protesters looted gun shops, seizing weapons. Someone lit a freight car on fire, and the blaze spread; other cars, filled with coke and oil, burst into flames. Roundhouses, an engine house, a machine shop burned. Troops killed more rioters. After three days, one hundred twenty-six locomotives and sixteen hundred freight and passenger cars had been destroyed. The railroad estimated the damage to its property at two million dollars. Ever since that time, Thomas Scott, then in his third year as the railroad’s president, had been quoted as having suggested the rioters be given “a rifle diet for a few days, and see how they like that bread.”

Little did it seem to matter that at least one historian has found “the most thorough contemporaneous accounts of the riot . . . makes no mention of any such statement,” Thomas Scott’s reputation as a ruthless railroad tycoon had long been seared into public memory.

[Sources: Dennis Clark, “Ramcat and Rittenhouse Square,” in William W. Cutler, III and Howard Gillette, Jr. The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Westport: Greenwood Press); Digby Baltzell,  Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (The Free Press, 1958); Janny Scott, The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father (Riverhead Books, 2019).]

A handsome pair of facades at the northeast corner of 23^rd and Chestnut Streets. Reading from the left: a cluster of bold, brick arches up, down and across an otherwise modest, two-story structure. Gilt letters and what must be a red cross on the glass doors announce the occupant. Here’s the Philadelphia School for Nurses, founded seventeen years earlier and formerly in rented space on Walnut Street, east of Broad. The nurses bought this site only five years before this 1911 view, bringing architect Clyde Smith Adams in to design a training school, dormitories and dispensary. A practical design, with a flourish in a first-floor window taken from a Florentine Renaissance palazzo.

Perhaps architect Adams meant this as a playful reference to the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale? Or a snappy rejoinder to “Florentine Art Plaster Co. Art Gallery” next door? Or possibly both?

Nearly falling off the edge of the image, a bit further to the right (east), we see a fragment of a one-story building offering up the barest of clues. “Stephen…Stone Carv…” it reads. A quick Google search turns up an issue of a journal titled Rock Products published in Louisville, Kentucky in 1906. We’re at the studio of Stephen Cazzulo, sculptor, who, we learn, “is busy getting out models for the large Lafayette Building” at Fifth and Chestnut Streets. Cazzulo “is an expert in his line and has done work on nearly all the skyscrapers and important structures erected during the last twenty years.”

A nice payoff for a minimum investment in keystrokes. We don’t always get so lucky.

What might we learn about the Florentine Art Plaster Company? Once again, the web provides! The Smithsonian Libraries has in its vast collections a 140-page, illustrated catalogue. Even better, this publication was scanned and mounted online only a few years ago. We like to think that  Plaster Casts: Reproductions from Antique, Renaissance and Modern Sculpture has been residing in digital purgatory awaiting its fifteen minutes of social media attention. Now, reading the catalogue and perusing the illustrations of more than 2,700 items as we study the archival photograph, we feel an alignment of the research stars.

At left in the storefront window is a copy of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne on a fancy pedestal. The 4’9” pair is listed in the catalogue for $25, the equivalent of $630 today. On the right is Cupid and Psyche (not the erotic Antonio Canova version, which is tucked away inside, at the back of the shop) on an identical pedestal. Between the two, with dusky patina, is a bust of Christopher Columbus on a lion-head base. Connecting the dots, we realize the photograph was taken in mid-October, only a few days after Columbus Day. When did this become an official holiday? In Pennsylvania, only two years before.

The catalogue enables us to virtually transport ourselves through the plate glass of the storefront and into the main aisle of the showroom.

On the left we see a row of works starting with a life-size, kneeling Joan of Arc by Henri Chapu, listed for $60. Way back in the rear, there’s the unmistakable Nike, or Winged Victory of Samothrace, one of the largest items in the showroom. It’s a copy of an original in the Louvre, in a place of honor atop the main stairs. This one is 5’ 3” and is listed for $100, $2,500 in today’s dollars. But you can take home a 3’ version for $15, or a 2’4” version for $9, or even a modest priced and sized (7 inch) Victory of Samothrace for $1, which amounts to $25 today.

How about a 20” by 30” copy of Andrea Della Robbia’s terracotta bas-relief of the Madonna and Child? That’ll be $5. Or Michelangelo’s Moses? You can choose a 3’ version for $25 or something half that size for a fifth as much.  Among other Michelangelo items are his Slave, 3’ 9” at $12 and a 2′ 6″ David for $8.

Interested in Alexander the Great? Bertel Thorvaldsen’s 22-panel opus, The Triumph of Alexander into Babylon made in honor of Napoleon’s visit to Rome in 1812 is a whopping $190.

The array of European Who’s Who, from Byron to Hayden, Chopin to Hugo, Galileo to Faust, Savonarola to Shakespeare, Voltaire to Marie Antoinette—was impressive. That’s not to say a constellation of Americans weren’t represented. One could choose from a half dozen versions of Washington, Franklin or Lincoln ranging from $.25 to $20. Or Stephen Girard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain or Ralph Waldo Emerson.

And on a local level there was Thomas Eakins’ Anatomy of Horse, 23” by 30” for $5 and his more modest Skeleton of a Horse for $2.50.

From its start in 1900, the Florentine Art Plaster Company assured customers “faithful reproductions of classic subjects.” The “connoisseur of art” or the student or the teachers would not see any “cheap tawdry ornaments.”

The talent behind the operation? Joseph Mazzoni, who, according to his obituary in 1948, “first came here from Italy as an advance agent for the Royal Italian Marine Band and settled here in 1900” to open a studio of sculptural reproductions.

And now, more than a century later, pausing to look even closer at the storefront, we see a man—why, could it be the proprietor himself? He’s looking at us from over Christopher Columbus’ left shoulder. (What a pleasant surprise.)

Here’s looking [back] at you, Mr.Mazzoni.

[Sources: “From Our Own Correspondents, Philadelphia,” Rock Products, vol. 5, no. 1;  Plaster Casts reproduced from Antique, Renaissance and Modern Sculpture … made and sold by The Florentine Art Plaster Co., Philadelphia, Pa. (The Company, 1914.); “The Latest News in Real Estate,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 4, 1906; [Obituary] Joseph Mazzoni, The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 30, 1948.]

While plumbing the breadth of the city’s clubs and their very different cultures, Nathaniel Burt acknowledged the Mummers (“one of Philadelphia’s oldest and proudest traditions, but not at all Old Philadelphian”) before landing squarely at the threshold of the city’s most venerable and “crusty coagulate mass of traditions.”

Where would this be headquartered? At Broad and Sansom and the Union League, perhaps? Not quite. “In Old Philadelphia circles,” Burt informs us in his classic book Perennial Philadelphians: Anatomy of an American Aristocracy, “it is understood that though the Union League is very honorable and important, it is not really socially flawless. A great many Old Philadelphians belong to it; for some it is their only club. It is grandly affluent and crusty, full of a rich Civil War fug, long portraits, gilt ceilings, marble floors, paneled banquet halls, thick carpets and curtains; but there is an undoubted tinge of boodle and smoke filled room about it. One seems to sense the absence of spittoons. It is a distinctly political club; once only those who had voted straight Republican could be members, and a good many figures, important politically but not very proper morally or socially, have in the past lounged in the corridors and dozed in the wide chairs. The aroma of Philadelphia’s old ‘corrupt and contented’ is very pervasive.”

Venerable and crusty? Definitely. But not “socially flawless,” and hardly “beyond reproach.”

For the elite destination at the pinnacle of Philadelphia club life, Burt directs us to 13th and Walnut Streets, where, in its architecturally inconspicuous way, the Philadelphia Club has silently stood for the better part of two centuries. Here, “at the edge of the Gayborhood,” as the Philadelphia Magazine points out, is “the oldest and most guarded of the city’s old-guard clubs.” The scale of its plain, red brick building “is so great and its condition so pristine,” noted architectural historian Richard J. Webster, “that many casual observers mistake it for a twentieth-century example of the Georgian Revival.”

Casual observers would be wrong.

“The Philadelphia Club can’t claim to be the oldest such club in the world,” Burt explains, “but it can and does claim to be the oldest in America.” The feel is “definitely stately, not to say austere, with high ceilings, white woodwork, dark portraits and discreet soft-footed servitors.” The interior “reflects a kind of ‘Philadelphia taste’ that takes many generations to lay down,” observes Roger Moss, “an effect that is well beyond simulation by the most skilled decorator.” Domestic leanings make sense when we consider that the building was originally intended as a city mansion for Thomas Butler, “kin of the Pierce Butler who married and divorced the actress Fanny Kemble” the grandmother of Owen Wister. In 1934, Wister served as club president and composed its centennial history.

Yet, in spite of its homey origins, the club has never been accused of being warm or inviting. “It is a very handsome affair, and full of handsome members,” says Burt, “but it rather lacks the Gemütlichkeit associated with most Philadelphia enterprises.”

“Blue bloods hang out to play an archaic domino game called sniff,” a home-grown variant of dominoes. The rules of this game are known only to members and explained in an otherwise unattainable pamphlet by member Benjamin Chew, entitled Chew on Sniff.

Admission to the Philadelphia Club has been equally unattainable.

“Metaphorically, at least,” Burt informs us, “bits of broken hearts litter of the pavement in front of the chaste fanlit door on Walnut Street, memorial to those who tried to get in and couldn’t. More than any other single institution except the Dancing Assembly the Philadelphia Club has stood and still stands is the Gibraltar of social order, defending the purity of Philadelphia bloodlines against the nouveau riches, and keeping up the tone of things.”

In the 1930s, Wister reminded his readers (all of whom were members, since the history was privately printed) that the club had very specific “requisites for admission.” These included “courtesy, self-restraint, a nice regard to the rules of etiquette, a command of speech, an elegance of dress, a familiarity with the habits of the leisure class, a respect for appearance, for the outside of things, a desire to make the passing moment pleasurable.” Subjective enough to deny entry to many a New Philadelphian and, as dictated by the “crusty coagulate” of traditions, all women.

Wister barely blinked as he imagined the club’s second century: “We carry on the tradition, patriotic, social, and civilized, of an honorable and happy past; and . . . we look forward to carrying our tradition on into a happy future.”

[Sources: Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Originally published in 1963); Richard J. Webster, Philadelphia Preserved: Catalog of the Historic American Buildings Survey (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976); Benjamin Wallace, “Members Only,” The Philadelphia Magazine (May 18, 2005); Roger W. Moss and Tom Crane, Historic Landmarks of Philadelphia (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Owen Wister, The Philadelphia Club, 1834-1934 (Philadelphia: The Philadelphia Club, 1934)].