Author: Steven Ujifusa

In light of the impending demolition by the University of Pennsylvania of the David Porter Leas mansion at 40th and Pine, it is a good time to revisit the life and work the man who designed it….

Longwood Plantation in Natchez, Mississippi sits just as it did in 1861, when scores of carpenters laid down their tools and fled to their homes up  North.  The largest and grandest of this summer colony’s mansions, Longwood is a bizarre blend of styles: an octagonal Italianan Renaissance palazzo crowned by a Byzantine onion dome.   The houses’s owner, cotton planter Dr. Haller Nutt, died one year before the Civil War ended, and his impoverished family moved into the basement.  Right out of a William Faulkner novel, it was known simply as “Nutt’s Folly.”

The career of Longwood’s designer followed a similar trajectory: astonishing success and extravagance followed by decline and neglect. Samuel Sloan (1815-1884) was not a Southerner, but a Philadelphian.  A native of Chester County, Sloan was trained as a carpenter, a common vocation for up-and-coming architects before formalized training was available in the United States.  Sloan was an artist to a certain extent, but he was also a very practical and aggressive businessman, described by a biographer as, “brash, opportunistic, inventive, a quick learner and a driving worker who was hungry for success and who had, throughout his life, an abiding belief in America’s destiny.”*

During his peak in the 1850s, Sloan specialized in speculative suburban twin homes for the upper-middle class and mansions for the wealthy.  Sloan’s blue ribbon commission was Bartram Hall, a veritable castle for railroad baron Andrew Eastick that included the grounds of the old John Bartram estate. It was probably the Eastwick palace that attracted the attention of the eccentric Dr. Haller Nutt, who probably instructed Sloan to outdo his Philadelphia counterpart.

Bartram Hall is long gone, but his residential designs are still extent in the Philadelphia “Streetcar Suburbs” of Germantown, Chestnut Hill, and West Philadelphia. Perhaps his most famous surviving commission  is Woodland Terrace, erected in the early 1860s for developer Charles M.S. Leslie.  Woodland Terrace occupies a small side street near the intersection of 40th and Baltimore Avenues (immediately to the north of scenic Woodlands Cemetery)  and consists of several four-story Italianate twins and detached houses.  This gem of a development is one of the last expressions of the “picturesque” suburban movement that reached its height before the Civil War.

Sloan’s signature Italianate style is a romantic interpretation of the Tuscan villas of the Renaissance.  According to James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell, the Italinate style was “every bit as romantic as the Gothic Revival but infinitely better adapted to the freer (and more family-oriented) lifestyle of an increasingly large and prosperous middle class.”* It is defined by flat roofs, large overhanging cornices supported by elaborate brackets, and as well as whimsical features such as campanile towers, conservatories, and cupolas.  Cross ventilation was important in Philadelphia’s humid summers: these houses boasted large floor-to-ceiling windows and generous porches overlooking tree-shaded streets.  The exterior walls were either exposed random-cut ashlar or stuccoed.

During the late nineteenth century, most of the big twin houses on Woodland Terrace were owned by Center City merchants who commuted to work on the horse-drawn trolleys.*** Because of its proximity to the University of Pennsylvania, Woodland Terrace and the immediate area also became a favorite address for faculty and for the city’s early twentieth century “creative” class.  Paul-Phillipe Cret (professor of architecture and designer of Rittenhouse Square, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Rodin Museum, and the original Barnes Foundation) lived with his wife in a large twin at 516 Woodland Terrace and frequently hosted dinners for students in true French fashion.  Just to the north, artist Adolph Borie occupied a Sloan-designed villa at 4000 Pine Street, which included a walled garden and a modern studio addition. During the 1920s, the Bories hosted salon-style parties where artists, writers and the city’s moneyed elite could freely mingle.****

After the Civil War, Sloan’s picturesque but relatively restrained style fell out of favor, and was replaced by the “baroque” grandeur of the Second Empire a and the cool classicism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  The once-prosperous Sloan fell on hard times, and supported himself by publishing a series of architecture books and a magazine entitled The Architectural Review.  He died forgotten in 1884.

*Samuel Sloan (1815-1882), Architect, Philadelphia Architects and Buildings.  http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm?ArchitectId=A1287

**James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell, “Architectural Styles: Italianate,” Olde House Journal, http://www.oldhousejournal.com/architectural_styles_italianate/magazine/1565

***WEST PHILADELPHIA: THE BASIC HISTORY, Chapter 2: A Streetcar Suburb in the City: West Philadelphia, 1854-1907. http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/wphila/history/history2.html

****Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 339.

 

The popular image of American collegiate architecture — majestic Gothic halls “with ivy-overgrown” to quote an old Penn song– was born in Philadelphia, the vision of two Quaker architects: Walter Cope (1860-1902) and John Stewardson (1858-1896).

Ironically, neither of them completed college.  Cope took drafting classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, while Stewardson dropped out of Harvard and then apprenticed himself to Frank Furness. During their brief lifetimes, they transformed the look of American universities — their elegant buildings still grace the campuses of the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr, Princeton, and Washington University in St. Louis.  They popularized a style that became known as “Collegiate Gothic,” inspired by the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Ralph Adams Cram, a Boston-based architect who was the leading proponent of Gothic Revival church architecture in America, wrote admiringly of Cope & Stewardson in 1904: “The Philadelphia group has stood and is standing for nationality, for ethnic continuity, and for the impulses of Christian civilization.”*

During the late nineteenth century, college administrators debated on whether American universities should follow the British model — one that focused the undergraduate experience and knowledge for its own sake — or the German one — which emphasized graduate studies and “practical” scientific research. The University of Pennsylvania, which moved it its West Philadelphia campus in 1872, was firmly in the “German” camp.  Its law and medical schools were nationally well-regarded, but its liberal arts undergraduate program was comparatively neglected by donors and administrators.

As America’s Gilded Age “Silicon Valley,” industrial Philadelphia was in the business of “facts and things.”  The city needed engineers, architects, corporate lawyers, bankers, and medical professionals, not philosophers or artists. There was little room for the sentimental (and frankly indolent)  good cheer that defined college life on the other side of the Atlantic. Penn needed laboratories and classrooms, which had to be clean, modern, and efficient.  Students lived in boarding houses or commuted from home.

Dr. William Pepper Jr., an eminent Philadelphia surgeon, took Penn’s helm in 1883 and embarked on a massive fundraising and building campaign, founding the School of Engineering, Architecture, and the Wharton School of Business.  He then hired acclaimed architect Frank Furness to design the world’s most modern university library.  The enormous brick edifice (known today as the Fisher Fine Arts Library) had the cruciform footprint of a Gothic cathedral, but otherwise was unashamedly modern in its detailing and construction.  As historian Michael J. Lewis wrote in his biography of Frank Furness: “There was nothing serene or contemplative in this building of higher learning but, rather a kind of vulgarity and loudness…No temple of passive contemplation, Furness’s library was a running engine, where knowledge was stored as latent energy to be applied to active pursuits.”***

The cosmopolitan Furness did not romanticize the past.  Rather, he celebrated the present and the future. Furness might have used historical motifs, but freely distorted them as he saw fit. Industrial materials and modern construction techniques were not to be plastered or paneled over, but to be left exposed, and celebrated.

The new library, dedicated in February 1891, was only the first part of a monumental expansion program.  Furness also sketched plans for an enormous Alumni Hall, which would be located cheek-by-jowl with the Library.****

The University of Pennsylvania was not alone in following the “practical” German model.  In 1873, railroad tycoon Johns Hopkins donated $7 million (the largest philanthropic gift in American history at the time) to start a university in Baltimore that focused on graduate programs in the arts and sciences.** For his part, Harvard president Charles William Eliot took little interest in shaping the experience of his undergraduate population, preferring a laissez-faire approach that resulted in socially-stratified student body

Sadly, Furness never got the chance to build the rest of Penn’s campus.  Provost Pepper, his greatest champion, worked himself to exhaustion, retiring in 1894 and dying four years later.  His replacement, the sugar baron Charles Custis Harrison, felt that the best course of action was to model a new set of dormitories along “Oxbridge” lines.  The fiery modernist Furness, Harrison decided, was not the man to design buildings in “ye olde English” manner, with historically-correct gargoyles, turrets, and oriels.******  Harrison was  not only was well-connected — he was rich enough to pay for many of the university’s initiatives out of his own pocket.*******

Furness and Harrison probably had a clash of egos — the provost described the mercurial architect as being “intensely interested in his own architectural views.”******* Furness left the project in 1894 — his Alumni Auditorium was never built.

Under Harrison’s leadership, Penn shifted away from the German model towards the English one, with its greater emphasis on undergraduate education and socialization. Harrison hired the firm of Cope & Stewardson to design a new group of dormitories that became known as The Quadrangle.   Along with a growing number of college administrators, Harrison concerned with the lack of community in the undergraduate population.  These dormitories would also allow more students from outside Philadelphia to enroll at Penn.   There were also political and racial undertones in the aesthetic shift towards the academic Gothic style.  Gothic, unlike Furness’s modernism, was the language of  “throne and altar.”   In Victorian England, architects such as A.W.N. Pugin (designer of the Houses of Parliament) and critics such as John Ruskin (author of the influential The Seven Lamps of Architecture) were champions of its revival as the British national style.

During the 1890s and early 1900s, there was growing hostility among native-born Americans against the waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants settling in big industrial cities like Philadelphia. This fear was particularly acute among the upper classes. Administrators such as Abbott Lawrence Lowell at Harvard and Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia worried about how these new arrivals could be assimilated, if at all, into America’s educated elite.   Lowell, who served as president of Harvard from 1909 to 1933, had the dubious distinction of being an honorary vice president of the Immigration Restriction League.

As beautiful as they were, the buildings were a kind of reassertion of English Protestant culture in American higher education. Ten years later, Ralph Adams Cram wrote of these groundbreaking buildings: “[T]hey are what they should be: scholastic in inspiration and effect, and scholastic of the type that is ours by inheritance; of Oxford and Cambridge, not of Padua or Wittenberg or Paris.” Of the tower erected to the memory of the alumni killed in the Spanish-America War, Cram mused: “American heroism harks back to English heroism; the blood shed before Manila and on San Juan Hill was the same blood that flowed at Bosworth Field, Flodden, and the Boyne. Therefore the British base of the design is indispensable, for such were the racial foundations.”********

As a result, the finicky Cram complained that much of the Quadrangle’s Elizabethan decorative detail had been “Germanized,” a “mistake” he declared that Cope & Stewardson did not repeat with their later buildings at Princeton.  Ultimately, by the 1920s Collegiate Gothic spread to colleges and universities throughout the nation, and it did not fully die out until the advent of the International Style in the 1950s.

The Quadrangle and the Library survive to this today, and are among the most beloved landmarks on the Penn campus.

Yet there still is a nagging question: what if Frank Furness had designed more of this great university’s buildings?

*Ralph Adams Cram, “The Work of Messrs Cope and Stewardson,” The Architectural Record, Vol. XVI, No. 5, November 1904. p.413.

**The John Hopkins University: Facts at a Glance.  http://webapps.jhu.edu/jhuniverse/information_about_hopkins/about_jhu/facts_at_a_glance/index.cfm

***Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 183.

****Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 186.

*****Robert Morris Skaler, Images of America: West Philadelphia, University City to 52nd Street (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), p. 26.

******Charles Custis Harrison Society. http://makinghistory.upenn.edu/giftplanning/harrisonsociety

*******As quoted by George E. Thomas, Jeffrey A. Cohen, and Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: The Complete Works, Revised Edition, (Princeton, NJ: The Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). p.115.

********Ralph Adams Cram, “The Work of Messrs Cope and Stewardson,” The Architectural Record, Vol. XVI, No. 5, November 1904. p.417.

 

 

The painful crucible of the Revolution transformed George Washington from an land-grabbing, status-obssessed Virginia planter into a charismatic, measured leader of men.  Although a mediocre military strategist, Washington’s strength was his ability to keep his rag-tag army together. He wore down the enemy not by dazzling displays of generalship, but by attrition (The Battle of White Plains) and occasional surprise (The Battle of Trenton).

Like many great leaders, Washington surrounded himself with men of greater abilities than his own, tapping their resources while struggling to maintain their loyalty.  General Nathaniel Greene, who led Cornwallis’s army on a wild goose chase around the American South before cornering it on the Yorktown peninsula, was a brilliant military tactician who remained loyal to Washington through thick and thin.

General Benedict Arnold, a self-made merchant from Connecticut, was another trusted subordinate.  In addition to organizing a heroic but unsuccessful raid on Quebec at the start of the war, Arnold led a fierce charge at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, suffering a bullet wound to the leg which left him crippled for life.   The victory at Saratoga was pivotal in convincing France to pledge her financial and military support to the American colonies.

Yet despite Washington’s praises, Arnold was prickly and embittered after Saratoga, feeling that a lesser military strategist, his superior General Horatio Gates, received all the public glory. Arnold, like Washington, relished living the high life, and the war ravaged his financial interests.  “Having made every sacrifice of fortune and blood and become a cripple in the service of my country,” he snarled to Washington, “I little expected to meet the ungrateful returns I have received from my countrymen.”*

Tragically, Arnold, unlike Washington, never gained control of his darker, selfish side.

After the American victory at Saratoga, Congress finally granted Arnold a promotion to Major General. Washington then appointed Arnold to the plum position of Military Governor of Philadelphia, which had just been evacuated by the British Army.   As soon as he assumed office in 1778, the convalescing general was assiduously courted by the city’s social and political elite.  Many, of course, remained loyal to the British Crown. The battle-soured Arnold must have welcomed such diversions: as social historians Harold Eberlein and Horace Mather Lippincott wrote of the era: “Society was gayer, more polished, and wealthier in Philadelphia than anywhere else this side of the Atlantic…”**

One frequent social caller was 18 year old Margaret “Peggy” Shippen, the daughter of jurist Edward Shippen IV and his wife Margaret Tench Francis.  Young Peggy was not only highly-intelligent and charming, but ravishingly beautiful.  She was also a die-hard Loyalist, and embittered by her father’s refusal to let her attend the infamous “Mischianza” ball organized by fun-maker Major John Andre in honor of British General Sir William Howe.  Following Howe’s departure, Arnold’s house on Market Street became the center of power in Philadelphia, and Peggy had no intention of remaining on the political sidelines.

Arnold and Shippen were married in April 1779. The 37-year-old widower was head-over-heels in love with his beautiful young bride.  She also had everything the deeply-indebted Arnold craved: position in society, beauty, brains, and a big bank account.  By then, the one-time hero of Saratoga felt that independence was a lost cause, and was looking for a way to save his skin in the event of British victory.

Shortly after the wedding, Arnold purchased a new home for Peggy: Mount Pleasant, a grand Palladian mansion overlooking the Schuylkill River.  It was built in the early 1760s by Scottish-born sea captain John McPherson, who spared no expense in decoration and furnishings.  Mount Pleasant bore a striking resemblance to Chief Justice Benjamin Chew’s famous Cliveden in Germantown: a symmetrical Georgian composition (most likely based on British pattern books of the era) with two flanking outbuildings.  John Adams, who had mixed feelings about Philadelphians and the finer things in life, described Mount Pleasant as the “most elegant country seat in Pennsylvania.”**

The Arnolds lived at Mount Pleasant for a year, entertaining lavishly.  But the restless Benedict Arnold was still short of cash, and in 1780, Washington offered him command of the strategically-vital fortress at West Point, New York. Anyone who controlled West Point controlled the colonies: its guns made it impossible for British ships to sail unimpeded up and down the Hudson River.

General Henry Clinton, commander of British armed forces in America, reasoned that if he could get his hands on West Point, he could cut the colonies in half and end this stubborn rebellion once and for all.  In an arrangement brokered by Major John Andre and Peggy Arnold, Benedict Arnold would receive a handsome bribe of 20,000 pounds sterling and a commission in the British army in exchange for turning over West Point. Not only would this sum save Arnold from his financial woes, but would allow him to escape the hangman’s noose waiting for Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Greene.

The rest, as everyone knows, is history.  Benedict Arnold’s plot failed when American militiamen captured Major John Andre on September 23, 1780, the plans of West Point’s fortifications in his boot.

Upon finding out that the jig was up, Arnold hightailed it across enemy lines, leaving his wife and young child behind.  When General Washington showed up at West Point, Peggy Arnold feigned ignorance and madness so successfully that he allowed her to slip away.  When he found out that Peggy had used to her guile to hoodwink him, Washington’s rage knew no bounds.  He assumed (quite naively) that a woman of Peggy Shippen Arnold’s breeding could only be a victim of her husband’s treachery, not a willing accomplice in espionage.

Savvy Peggy was well aware of this weakness, and exploited it to the hilt.

For the rest of the war, Washington was obsessed with getting his hands on his former confidante.  After British troops under Arnold’s command sacked Richmond, Virginia, an enraged Washington ordered the Marquis de Lafayette to capture and “execute [him] in the most summary way” to “make a public example of him.”***

The next best thing Washington could do was make an example of Major John Andre. Obsessed with chivalry, Andre pleaded to be executed by firing squad, as befitting an officer. Washington was unmoved.  The man who masterminded the Philadelphia “Mischianza” ball (which Peggy sulked at not being able to attend) was hanged as a spy.

The wily Benedict Arnold evaded Washington’s wrath, and reunited with Peggy in New York.  Following General Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the couple fled to England for their lives.  In London, Arnold never received the warm welcome he expected, and ended up a social outcast.

The exiled former hero of Saratoga and squire of Mount Pleasant died in 1801, a broken and impoverished man.

As for Peggy Arnold, she may have been a Loyalist femme fatale of sorts.  Yet to her credit, she remained “loyal” to her husband to the end.  She died in 1804.

*As quoted in Ron Chernow, George Washington: A Life (New York: NY: Penguin Press, 2010), p.380.

**Horace Mather Lippincott and Harold Donaldson Eberlein, The Colonial Homes of Philadelphia and Its Neighborhood (Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1912), p.113.

***Edward Teitelman and Richard W. Longstreth, Architecture in Philadelphia: A Guide (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1974), p. 121., http://www.quondam.com/17/1761.htm

****As quoted in Ron Chernow, George Washington: A Life (New York: NY: Penguin Press, 2010), p.387.

 

William Bucknell was born in Marcus Hook in 1811, the son of English immigrants, and had very intermittent schooling.  Trained as a woodcarver, he married Margaret Crozer, daughter of John P. Crozer, owner of the Mattson Paper Mills and a generous donor to the Upland Baptist Church. Leveraging his connections, Bucknell invested his savings in laying gas lines in the city of Chester, founding the Chester Gas Company in 1856.

Natural gas was one of the byproducts from coal mining, and by the mid-nineteenth century its flickering light illuminated private homes and streets all over Europe and America.  Along with kerosene, a byproduct of oil, “coal-gas” was a cheaper and more efficient lighting fuel than labor-intensive whale oil.

Bucknell was one of many entrepreneurs who got rich from Pennsylvania’s so-called Iron Triangle, a robust economic engine built on iron ore, coal, and railroads.* During the mid-nineteenth century, men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, and Bucknell exploited central Pennsylvania’s rich treasure trove of natural resources.  Coal of course had been used to heat homes and power engines for generations.  In 1859, the first commercially successful oil “gusher” shot into the air in Titusville, Pennsylvania.  Railroad companies such as the Pennsylvania rushed into the area to build freight lines. Trains transported the crude oil to refineries in Cleveland and Philadelphia, as well as iron ore to the steel mills of Pittsburgh. Ports like Philadelphia and Chester became the funnels through which the riches of central Pennsylvania flowed to the rest of the country and the world.   Many families who had made fortunes in coal and oil settled around Philadelphia’s genteel Rittenhouse Square. Their employees toiled in tough mining towns such as Hazleton and Johnstown, which were frequently rocked by labor riots organized by the famed “Molly Maguires.”

After conquering Chester, Bucknell moved on to Philadelphia, competing with the likes of fellow robber barons Peter Widener and William Warren Gibbs, both directors of the immensely successful and notoriously corrupt United Gas Improvement Company.  Like his Cleveland counterpart John D. Rockefeller Sr., Bucknell was a devout Baptist who gave liberally to his church and to charities.  One of his greatest beneficiaries was the First Baptist Church, which in the 1890s lofted an enormous sandstone building at 17th and Sansom, directly behind Bucknell’s Italianate mansion on Walnut Street.

Yet like Rockefeller, a founder of the University of Chicago, Bucknell was interested in forwarding higher education, and served on the Board of Trustees of the Baptist-affiliated University at Lewisburg, located near the source of his coal and gas wealth.  In 1881, Bucknell saved the school from financial ruin by donating $50,000 to the University.

In gratitude, the trustees renamed the school Bucknell University.

*Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 187.

On a cold, drizzly morning in November 1894, 25,000 men, women, and children surged through the gates of Philadelphia’s Cramp shipyard to witness the launching of the largest liner yet built in the United States.  She was the SS St. Louis, the 11,000 gross ton flagship of the American Line, owned by Philadelphia shipping tycoon Clement Griscom.  Attending the launching were President Grover Cleveland, shipyard president Charles Cramp, and First Lady Frances Cleveland, who would be the ship’s godmother.

The liner St. Louis was the crowning achievement of William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company. She was America’s entry into the heated transatlantic liner competition of the late nineteenth century.   Built of steel and nearly two football fields long. St. Louis would be powered by two steam reciprocating engines able to propel her through the Atlantic at 20 knots.   It was hoped that St. Louis and her identical sister St. Paul would capture the transatlantic record from the Cunard liners Campania and Lucania.  Shipyard president Charles Cramp (son of founder William Cramp) boasted that, “each successive ‘lowering of the record’ marks a triumph for the designer and builder, a fame world-wide, and substantial benefits to mankind.”**

After her successful launch on November 12, 1894 by First Lady Frances Cleveland, St. Louis would spend another year in the fitting out basin, where hundreds of workers would turn the empty hull into a floating village.  Giant floating cranes, including one fittingly named Altas, could handle boilers and machinery weighing up to seventy tons. When complete, St. Louis could carry 1,200 passengers in three classes, most of who would be crammed into lower deck steerage berthes.  She would boast electric lights (only a few years earlier, steamships were lit by flickering oil lamps), flush toilets, and steam heating in her public rooms. Her luxurious first class interiors were designed by architect Frank Furness, who had also built Griscom’s “Dolobran estate” on the Main Line.  The first class dining room was 55 feet wide and three decks high, capped barrel-vaulted stained glass skylight.  At dinner, passengers could enjoy the melodious strains of a full-sized pipe organ.

Unfortunately, despite her owner’s best efforts, the St. Louis and St. Paul were unable to capture the Blue Riband of the Atlantic when they debuted in 1895.  They could only make 19.5 knots as opposed to the 21 knots of the two Cunard ships. The St. Paul made history in November 1899 when she carried a famous passenger, Guglielmo Marconi, who had installed his new wireless telegraph system aboard the liner.

As the St. Paul approached the English coast, Marconi powered up his transmitter and continued to send out a message in Morse code announcing the liner’s impending arrival.

Finally, when the ship was fifty miles away from her destination, Marconi got the response he was waiting for:

“Is that you, St. Paul?”  the shore station operator asked.

“Yes,” Marconi tapped back.

“Where are you?”

“Sixty-six nautical miles away.”

Thus, the St. Paul became the first ship to have her arrival radioed to shore by wireless.**

By the early 1900s, a new generation of four-funneled superliners from Britain and Germany had completely outclassed the St. Louis, and the American government failed to provide her owners with the subsidies needed to construct new vessels that could compete in terms of size, speed, and luxury.  After serving as a merchant cruiser and troop transport in both the Spanish-American War and World War I, St. Louis was destroyed by fire in 1920 and sent to the scrappers. St. Paul was broken up a few years later.

Not until the early 1950s, with the advent of the Virginia-built SS United States, would an American shipyard construct a passenger ship of comparable international prestige.

William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company, known to Philadelphians simply as  “Cramps”, was once one of the great shipyards of the world, on par with Harland & Wolff in Northern Ireland (builders of the Titanic) and John Brown & Company in Scotland (builders of the Lusitania and the original Queen Mary). The enterprise was started by William Cramp, the son of German immigrants, who founded a small yard at the foot of present-day East Susquehanna Avenue in 1830.

At its peak in the 1890s, Cramps employed five thousand men, most of whom lived in the surrounding Kensington neighborhood. It built not only passenger ships, but also cargo vessels, battleships, cruisers, and other craft for the “new”  U.S. Navy, which was in the 1890s was undergoing a massive expansion.  Rising on the stocks alongside the ocean liner St. Louis in 1894 was another revolutionary vessel: the USS Indiana, the first true battleship in the United States Navy. So well-regarded was Cramps’ workmanship that in 1899 the Imperial Russian Navy commissioned a state-of-the-art heavy cruiser, the Varyag, from the American shipyard.

In its heyday, Cramps was a landscape of vigor, energy, and gritty  beauty. In 1902, the principal buildings included a massive 1,200 foot-by-72 foot main structure (housing facilities for plate bending, piping-cutting, and joinery), as well as a boiler shop, machine shop, and blacksmith shop.*** Enormous slipways, where hulls of great ships were constructed before their launch into the churning Delaware, were topped by iron-lattice gantries.  Smokestacks soared high above Kensington’s rowhouses and church spires, spewing black coal smoke into the air.

After World War I, Cramps rapidly fell upon hard times, largely due to the Washington Treaty of 1923 which severely limited the size and construction of new warships.  After finishing the Matson liner SS Malolo in 1927, Cramps went bankrupt and ceased operations.  After a brief revival during World War II, in which the yard built submarines, the boilers went cold and the machine shops went dark for the last time.

In early 2011, the last remaining building of the William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company met the wrecker’s ball, to make way for a new I95-Girard Avenue interchange.  All that remains of one of Philadelphia’s great industrial enterprises are a few rotting piers and a massive, weed-choked lot on the banks of the Delaware River.

 

*Cramp’s Shipyard founded by William Cramp, 1830 (Philadelphia: William Cramp and Sons Ship & Engine Building Company), 1902, p.4-5.

**Degna Marconi, My Father, Marconi (Montreal, Canada: Guernica Editions, 1996), pp. 71-72.

*** Charles Cramp, as quoted by Cramp’s Shipyard founded by William Cramp, 1830 (Philadelphia: The William Cramp and Sons Ship and Engine Building Company) 1902, p.128.

 

Born in Boston and educated at Harvard, Reverend William Henry Furness (1802-1896) came to Philadelphia at the tender age of 22 to nurture the city’s small Unitarian community, which had been founded by scientist and British immigrant Joseph Priestly in the 1790s.

Like Quakerism, which holds that the light of God is in all of us, Unitarianism was considered revolutionary, even dangerous, by traditional Protestant theologians.  Unitarianism holds that God is not triune (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), but a single being, and that Jesus Christ was a great teacher and major historical figure, but not necessarily divine.  In his groundbreaking A History of Jesus, Furness rejected the Immaculate Conception and other miracles, arguing that, “these stories may have been pure fictions, generated by the marvelleous [sic] which the great life of Jesus did much to inflame. Or they were exaggerations of certain simple and very natural incidents, magnified by wonder.”*

To the scientifically-inclined urbanites of the Early American Republic, this was a theological breath of fresh air.  To Methodist revivalists under the sway of the Second Great Awakening, this was complete and utter heresy!

As a Boston transplant to Philadelphia, Furness was a liberal, open-minded humanist, and a devoted friend of the New England philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who preached individuality and self-reliance over conformity.  In his 1836 speech “Nature,” published by The American Scholar, Emerson argued that education should not be geared towards material gain and the practical sciences, but towards self-improvement and enlightenment:

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. … Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

The Emersonian spirit pervaded the Furness family home. Reverend William Henry Furness raised his children in a modest brick rowhouse at 1426 Pine Street, in which according to Frank Furness biographer Michael J. Lewis, “judgments about art were formulated with Puritan zeal  and in witty, forceful, literate language.”**   Furness and his wife Annis had four children, all of whom went on to pursue intellectual and artistic careers: William Henry Jr. became a portrait painter, Horace a renowned Shakespeare scholar and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Annis a German translator. Finally, there was ill-tempered, school-hating Frank, who went on to become Philadelphia’s most celebrated architect.

As prominent and educated minister, Furness’s place in society was secure, but he always felt aloof, different, a bit of a misfit in Philadelphia.  He longed for the rich intellectual ferment of Boston, and as a man of strong opinions he grew bored with polite drawing room prattle.  Despite Reverend Furness’s groundbreaking preaching and social activism on behalf of African-Americans (or perhaps because of it), Unitarianism never gained a strong foothold in Philadelphia. Most of Philadelphia’s upper class had blood or economic ties to the slave-holding South, and Furness frequently found himself shunned or verbally abused on the streets of the Quaker City. Yet Furness held his ground.  He hosted a convalescencing Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner at his Philadelphia home after he was brutally beaten by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, and personally protected abolitionist Frederick Douglass from an angry mob in New York City.***  Reverend Furness also found an intellectual soul mate in the actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, unhappily married to the slave-owning, Southern-sympathizing Philadelphia playboy Pierce Butler.****

Furness fostered ecumenical outreach with the city’s Jewish community. In the late 1860s, his son Frank Furness, who had gallantly served the Union as a cavalry officer, designed a new, Moorish-revival shul for Rodelph Shalom.  Following the dedication of this splendid structure in 1870, Furness declared to Rodeph Shalom’s Rabbi Morris Jastrow that the two congregations should have an annual joint Thanksgiving service.***** In an era when Philadelphia’s historically well-integrated Jewish community was facing increasing discrimination, this was a bold gesture.   In his own writings, Furness was sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish people in the Russian Empire.  “The Hebrew race is a great race,” he declared in his A History of Jesus. “With no civil order, no country, its remnants have been now scattered for centuries over the world, maintaining a national existence without any national institutions. What a vitality does this fact disclose!”******

Even though his children married into Philadelphia’s social establishment, Reverend Furness grew increasingly bitter with what he saw as his adopted city’s conservative, prudish, anti-intellectual climate. At an 1870 meeting of the American Institute of Architects, Reverend Furness had the gall to bite the hand that fed him. Deriding what he saw as dull Philadelphia taste, he argued that American architects must liberate themselves from the “Quaker style, marble steps, and wooden shutters.”*******

Furness retired from the leadership of the First Unitarian Church in 1875, and devoted himself to scholarship and cultural criticism.  Yet in 1886, the old minister must have felt vindicated, when new home for the congregation was consecrated at 21st and Chestnut Street.  It was a bold, craggy limestone pile, bristling with towers and adorned with colorful tiles.

This new home for the First Unitarian Church was designed by his son Frank Furness, who had followed his father’s (and Emerson’s) advice to build his own world. Like Frank Furness’s residential commissions, it stood out in bold relief against the subdued rowhouses and churches of the Quaker City.  As Reverend Furness had defied orthodoxy and convention from his pulpit, his son Frank did so with his draftsman’s pen.

The old man must have been proud, indeed.

 

*Reverend William Henry Furness, A History of Jesus (Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Company, 1853), p.19.

**Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 12.

***Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 13.

****Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 81.

*****E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston, Quaker Philadelphia (New York: The Free Press, 1979), p.302.

******Reverend William Henry Furness, A History of Jesus (Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Company, 1853), p.9.

*******James F. O’Gorman, The Architecture of Frank Furness (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), p.15.

People’s pride in their country is connected to pride in their home. If they can decorate and build their homes to symbolize the values they hope to embody, such as prosperity, education and patriotism, they will be happier people and better citizens.

                                                                                                            -Andrew Jackson Downing

Back in the fall of 2003, I took the R8 Chestnut Hill West train to visit a friend who taught history at Chestnut Hill Academy.  I had just started graduate school at Penn. Being the ignoramus I was, I stupidly thought that I was on my way to the famed Main Line suburbs that my  late Philadelphia-native step-grandfather mentioned when I was young.

Was I wrong.  I learned from Dmitri that confusing this part of Northwest Philadelphia and the Main Line was a major faux-pas, to say the least.

During that train ride, remember one name standing out as the conductor bellowed the the station stops.  “Tulpehocken!”

It means “Land of the Turtles” in Native American dialect.*

Several years later, I explored West Tulpehocken Street myself.  Even though this neighborhood has declined economically since its heyday in the early twentieth century, it immediately struck me as one of the most beautiful parts of Philadelphia.  The houses on here were not just big — they were bona fide mansions.  Some, like the Ebenezer Maxwell house, were Gothic or Italianate confections.  Others were big, craggy Victorian behemoths of gray Wissahickon schist, bristling with turrets and carved wooden balconies. Tall shade trees arched lazily over the street.

This late nineteenth century residential area, known as the Tulpehocken Station District, sprang from the vision of designer Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1853), the so-called father of American landscape architecture.  Largely self-taught, Downing was a Jeffersonian at heart, who felt that the geometric, formal gardens of Europe were incompatible with the democratic American landscape. He argued that American houses and gardens should avoid the monumentality and symmetry, and aim for the informality and harmony with their natural settings and plantings.  In his watershed book The Architecture of Country Houses, co-authored with architect Alexander Jackson Davis (designer of the  famous Jay Gould “Lyndhurst” estate in Tarrytown, New York), Downing argued that the country, not the congested, industrialized city, was best suited for happy family life, and that “perfect architecture no principle of utility will be sacrificed to beauty, only elevated and ennobled by it.”

Although he died young in a steamship fire, Downing’s influence was profound. His commissions included landscaping for White House and the Smithsonian Institution.  He also trained a young British artist named Calvert Vaux, who went on to partner with Frederick Law Olmsted in the design of New York’s Central Park.   By the Civil War, Downing’s philosophy of  laying out walkable, picturesque communities had spread to numerous new developments along the East Coast, including the Philadelphia commuter suburb of Germantown.

According to the nomination form for the National Register of Historic Places, the Tulpehocken Station District is, along with the tony planned community of Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, among the first suburbs in the country to “put Downing’s theories and designs into practice.” The neighborhood was the result of the subdivision of rural parcels owned by the old Germantown Haines and Johnson families, who had owned property in Germantown since the 18th century. In the 1850s and 60s, residential development of West Tulpehocken Street remained within walking distance of the horse-drawn Germantown Avenue trolley line.  By the 1880s, electricity powered the trolleys, speeding up commuting times between Germantown and Center City Philadelphia. These homes for city commuters, although substantial, were built according to Andrew Jackson Downing’s principles of picturesque simplicity and charm. They were asymmetrical in composition and were built in either the Italianate or Gothic Revival styles.  At least one design has been attributed to Samuel Sloan, who also designed the Italianate twin houses of Woodland Terrace in West Philadelphia.

In 1884, the Pennsylvania Railroad opened a new commuter railroad line running parallel to Wayne Avenue, and a new crop of even grander homes was constructed within walking distance of the new Tulpehocken Station.  These new homes, located on Wayne Avenue and fronting the greenery of Fairmount Park, were designed by notable architecture firms such as Hazelhurst & Huckel (Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church), Cope & Stewardson (the Penn Quadrangle), and the Hewitt Brothers (the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel).*  These new homes reflected the growing prosperity of industrializing, Gilded Age Philadelphia, built to impress visitors, as well as to comfortably house large families and domestic staff.

Despite some physical neglect and subdivision of many of the large homes into rental units, Tulpehocken Street is remarkably intact today, an overlooked example of a golden age of American suburban development.

*Tulpehocken Settlement Historical Society, http://www.tulpehockenroots.org/

**Tulpehocken Station District, National Register of Historic Places Inventory–Nomination Form, http://www.brynmawr.edu/iconog/gtn/regtulp.htm

 

In his writings on architecture and city planning, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887-1967) was fond of using the “royal” we:

We must create a mass-production state of mind:
A state of mind for building mass-production housing.
A state of mind for living in mass-production housing.
A state of mind for conceiving mass-production housing.

In the 1930s, Le Corbusier (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) devised a plan to level the center of Paris and bring “reason” and “order” to what he saw as complete urban chaos.  Baron Haussmann’s 19th century low-rise apartment buildings and triumphant boulevards would be replaced by tall, concrete cruciform towers set in green, wooded parks.

Le Corbusier had nothing but disdain for historic architecture, lambasting Gothic cathedrals as hideous to behold.  In his view, commercial, residential, and industrial districts had to be separated from each other, eliminating multi-use structures that housed both apartments and “mom-and-pop” stores.  Enamored with the automobile, he argued that cities needed to be reoriented around arterial expressways, and that people should surrender the street to the car.

“We must kill the street!” he declared.

He called this vision “The Radiant City.”  He hoped it would not only bring order to the urban form, but would also eliminate class distinctions by having everyone occupying “machines” for living.

In fetishizing the urban form, the collective, and the machine, Le Corbusier had little regard for individuals, especially those in the way of what he saw as progress.

His plans for the rebuilding of Paris were never carried out, but his gospel was taken up not just by  forward-thinking architects and theorists, but also by the automobile industry and real estate developers, who loved the prospect of building new superhighways and the demolition of older urban cores.

Present day critic Theodore Dalrymple has harsh words for Le Corbusier and his “Radiant City.” Comparing him to Pol Pot in the destruction his ideas wreaked, Dalrymple wrote:  “Le Corbusier extolled this kind of destructiveness as imagination and boldness, in contrast with the conventionality and timidity of which he accused all contemporaries who did not fall to their knees before him.”*

But in the years following World War II, his starstruck admirers and disciples fanned out across America, occupying positions of power and influence in major universities and big city planning departments.  Robert Moses, New York’s all-powerful Parks Commissioner, was one.   Edmund Bacon, Philadelphia’s director of city planning and builder of the Society Hill Towers, was another.

One university president that fell under “Le Corbu’s” spell was Penn’s president Gaylord P. Harnwell, a physicist who presided over the gigantic expansion of the size of scope of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, in which it grew into a truly national institution.  According to the Harnwell Papers website, during his term (1953-1970), “The campus was expanded, many new buildings erected, and all major areas and programs strengthened….a new milestone in the history of the development of the University.”**

Until the 1950s, the University of Pennsylvania had very little green space, and almost no room to expand in any direction.  Today’s Locust Walk was a busy urban street, with a trolley line that cut right through the middle of campus. According to a report from 1963, “Students were poorly housed; faculty established residences in suburbs and formed no campus connection; women students feared to be on the streets at night; traffic became a major problem and parking all but impossible. These ills were dramatized in 1956 by the senseless murder of a Korean student by a band of hoodlums who roamed the area.”***

It was the perfect time for Penn to adapt a new design philosophy that turned away from the neo-Gothic, Oxbridge aesthetic of the past and towards a modern, efficient one that reflected a cosmopolitan, modern university.  In the years following World War II, the GI Bill had led to a massive expansion at America’s universities, and prestige ones like Penn were especially popular with a growing, more socio-economically diverse student body.  Although historically Penn had a large population of commuter students, by the 1950s the old dormitories in the Quadrangle and private rooming houses were exploding at the seams.

Something had to be done.

Philosophical arguments aside, Le Corbusier’s urban high rise vision provided college administrators a way to cheaply house as many students as possible.

Soon after taking office, Harnwell instituted a bifurcated plan for the historic core of the Penn campus inspired by the vision of Le Corbusier.   East of 38th Street, it was pointless for Harnwell to tear down most of Penn’s historic buildings, as they were already occupied by academic departments and fraternities with powerful alumni who donated money to the University.   There was talk of tearing down Frank Furness’s main library — by then considered a monstrosity by most architecture critics — to make room for a more modern structure, but thankfully nothing came of it.  Locust Street was closed to cars, the trolley line running along it shut down, and it was transformed into a tree-lined pedestrian walkway that has since become a model for urban college campuses.

Penn then set its eyes on the blocks west of 38th Street.   The area known as Hamilton Village included ramshackle Victorian mansions that had once belonged to the Drexel banking family (they had long since left West Philadelphia) as well as numerous low-rise apartment buildings and 19th century rowhouses originally built for prosperous commuters.  In its salad days, Hamilton Village was simply called the “Drexel Block.”

To the followers of Le Corbusier, this one-time elite Victorian neighborhood known as “Black Bottom” represented the worst of the “old city”: dirty, cramped, riddled with blight, and bad for the circulation of cars.

The residents of Black Bottom had a much different perspective: “It was a neighborhood of very active people, people who had very high standards for themselves and their families,” remembered Pearl Simpson in a Philadelphia Weekly interview.  “Most people worked at the hospitals, on the railroad. Some people had their own businesses, like dressmakers, tailor shops, doctors, little stores and whatnot. They were very into culture and having a good neighborhood.”****

Rather than rehabilitate Black Bottom, Harnwell and his fellow members of the West Philadelphia Corporation (which included representatives from Drexel University, the University of the Sciences, and Presbyterian Hospital), decided on mass-demolition and slum clearance.  The city of Philadelphia quickly condemned Hamilton Village through eminent domain and gave it to the Corporation for redevelopment.

The residents did not leave without a fight.  During that watershed year of 1968, residents erected a barbed wire barricade on 38th Street to prevent the bulldozers from moving in, and cars were overturned and set on fire. It was, as one resident described, “urban warfare.”*****

But by the late 1960s, thousands of mostly African-American residents had been evicted from the Hamilton Village.  With the exception of a few old mansions and the Gothic St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, the blocks bounded by 38th, 40th, Spruce, and Walnut were completely leveled.

Three high-rise concrete dormitories and several low rise student residences — built according to Le Corbusier’s design principles of towers in a park — now occupy a part of campus that students today derisively call “the Superblock” or “the Wind Tunnel.”

The mass-demolition not only destroyed dozens of historic structures, but also deeply scarred relations between the University of Pennsylvania and the surrounding community.

Le Corbusier would have been proud.

*Theodore Dalrymple, “The Architect as Totalitarian,” City Journal, August 2009.  http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_otbie-le-corbusier.html

**Guide, Gaylord P. Harnwell Papers, University of Pennsylvania Archives. http://www.archives.upenn.edu/faids/upt/upt50/harnwell_gp.html

***”The Corporation,” The West Philadelphia Partnership, 1963.  http://www.uchs.net/Rosenthal/wpc.html

****Jeffrey Barg, “Black Bottom Blues,” Philadelphia Weekly, September 6, 2006. http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/black_bottom_blues-38418829.html

*****Jeffrey Barg, “Black Bottom Blues,” Philadelphia Weekly, September 6, 2006. http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/black_bottom_blues-38418829.html