Author: Steven Ujifusa

Categories
Events and People Neighborhoods Snapshots of History

A Cursed Mansion in Belmont: The Rise and Fall of the Rorkes (Part 1)

Allen B. Rorke (1853-1899). Philadelphia Inquirer, December 27, 1899,

In the 1890s, the self-made construction magnate Allen B. Rorke appeared to be living the Gilded Age dream.  Fame, fortune, social standing, and grand houses were all his.  He belonged to the Union League, the Masonic Order of the Odd Fellows, the Legion of Honor, and the Clover Club.  Among his construction clients were the Poth Brewing Company, the Philadelphia Traction Company, and Jacob Reed & Sons. He resided with his family in a townhouse at 131 S.18th Street, just off fashionable Rittenhouse Square.

As a loyal member of Philadelphia’s Republican Party machine, Rorke was considered by his friends to be an ideal candidate for mayor.

Yet in the laissez-faire circus of late 19th century Philadelphia, the pressure to maintain appearances was crushing. And appearances could be deceiving.  One observer noted that, “His contracts were always carried out with a disposition to do more rather than less than his specifications called for.”

The son of a master carpenter, Rorke, like so many tradesmen’s children, left school at 14 to apprentice himself in his father’s trade.  At 21, he struck on his own. One of his earliest construction projects was the Horticultural Hall at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, a colossal cast-iron and glass pile designed by Hermann Schwarzmann.  By his 30s, Rorke had a healthy portfolio of building projects in the Philadelphia area.  His City Directory listing advertised for “estimates and Plan furnished upon application, for Banks, Warehouses, Mills, Churches, Dwellings and Buildings of every description” (Philadelphia City directory, 1884, p. 1369).  Like many other prominent builders, he maintained an office in the Philadelphia Bourse Building, near Independence Hall.

129, 131, 133 S.18th Street, 1963.

Rorke’s most high profile project was the construction of the new Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg. Designed by architect Henry Ives Cobb, the structure was a replacement for a neoclassical structure that burned in a spectacular fire in 1897.  Yet many in the Pennsylvania state government were unhappy with the Rorke/Cobb collaboration.  One observer derided it as an  “unadorned, unfinished, several-story brown brick structure that looked like a factory.” The legislature decided that, rather than upgrade the structure, they would spend the money on on a more grandiose home.

As a way of solidifying his dynastic ambitions, Rorke purchased a big lot at the corner of 41st and Odgen Street in West Philadelphia as the site of his son Franklin’s new suburban home.  It was an odd location for a socially-ambitious businessman: the Belmont neighborhood at the time was comfortable but hardly fashionable.  Yet the Franklin Rorke mansion rivaled the big homes under construction a few miles to the west in Overbrook Farms. Unlike the nearby twins and rowhouses, Franklin’s turreted Queen Anne mansion at 862-872 North 41st Street was a freestanding structure, surrounded by a garden and stone fence.

That summer, as the new family mansion rose on 41st Street, the Rorkes vacationed at the Seaside Hotel in Atlantic City. The nation had fully recovered from the Panic of 1893, and the luxury hotels of the Jersey Shore were booked to capacity from June to September. The Philadelphia Times described the children as an “exceedingly clever lot.” That fall, a laudatory article appeared in the Philadelphia Times, praising Rorke as “the nation’s greatest builder.”

On Christmas Eve of 1899, Allen Rorke spent the day with his son Franklin in West Philadelphia. The mansion at 41st and Ogden was nearing completion. The following day, at his townhouse on Rittenhouse Square, Rorke complained that he wasn’t feeling well. He then collapsed to the floor, felled by a stroke.  A second stroke rendered him unconscious. He died on December 26, his wife and sons Franklin and Allen Jr. at his side.

His funeral which took place at his Rittenhouse Square home. Governor William Stone and Mayor Samuel Ashbridge served as honorary pallbearers.  Soon after the doors of the Rorke family’s grand West Laurel Hill family mausoleum were locked, his grieving wife and sons received another jolt. High society pundits speculated that Rorke had left a legacy north of $1 million, a princely sum in fin-de-siecle Philadelphia and enough for the three heirs to continue on in high style. Instead, “the nation’s greatest builder” had left his family a mere $952.56, or about $20,000 in today’s money.

Franklin and Allen Jr. were also left their father’s construction firm.  The question was whether or not they could salvage it, and their family’s fortunes.

Sources: 

Allen B. Rorke, Findagrave.com

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/60364125/allen-b.-rorke

“Builder Allen B. Rorke Is Dead, But His Work Will Live On,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 27, 1899

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/20696094/allen_b_rorke_obit_phila_inq_27_dec/

Sandra Tatman, “Rorke, Allen B,” Philadelphia Architects and Buildings 

https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/1274

H.R. Haas, “862-72 N. 41st Street,” Nomination for Historic Building, Structure, Site or Object, Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, Philadelphia Historical Commission, March 7, 2017

https://www.phila.gov/historical/Documents/862-72-N-41st-nomination.pdf

“Big Season is on in Atlantic City,” The Philadelphia Times, June 27, 1899.

Categories
Behind the Scenes Snapshots of History

Books in Trust: The Germantown Friends Free Library – Part 1

Germantown Friends School Meetinghouse, 34 W. Coulter Street.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  Proverbs 29:18

Today, Germantown Friends School is well-known for its strong arts and theater programs.  Yet there was a time not too long ago when the school could not acquire fiction for its library.  The restriction lay was written into a type of ancient trust so common in Philadelphia institutional life.  The Cope Trust, set up in the 1870s to fund the purchase of new books in a library open to both students at GFS and the greater Germantown community, explicitly forbade the librarians from acquiring “works of fictitious character commonly called novels.”

This might seem Philistine by today’s standards, but this stipulation had as much to do with economic sense as the philosophy of Quaker “plainness.”   In the mid-19th century, most children left school at 14, and libraries were places driven young people could further their education without the assistance of a teacher. The Scottish-born Andrew Carnegie, who arrived in Pittsburgh with his family at age 11, worked as a “bobbin boy” in a mill for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for a meager $1.20 per week. Unable to attend school, Carnegie petitioned a local subscription library for access during his precious hours off.   He was turned away. Not only could he not afford the $2 subscription fee, but also it was only open to local apprentices, not to the general public, let alone millworkers. Incensed, the teenaged Carnegie wrote the local Pittsburgh paper about his treatment. The library relented, and let the immigrant boy into the stacks. Carnegie eventually got a job as secretary/telegraph operator for Pennsylvania Railroad president Thomas A. Scott, and went on to be America’s most successful steel producer.  In his retirement, Carnegie would donate $60 million of his fortune to the construction of almost 1,700 public libraries throughout the United States. Many continue to serve their communities to this day.

When, in the wake of the violent Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, he was asked why he gave so generously to libraries, but refused to increase his workers’ wages, he retorted: “If I had raised your wages, you would have spent that money by buying a better cut of meat or more drink for your dinner. But what you needed, though you didn’t know it, was my libraries and concert halls. And that’s what I’m giving to you.”

In 1853, the same year Scott hired the young Carnegie to work at the PRR, the Germantown Quaker Alfred Cope donated funds for a permanent library that could be used by the students Germantown Friends School and members of the surrounding community.  Previously, GFS’s book collection was squeezed into the meetinghouse’s cloakroom.  The reading list was quite serious. Among its 200 or so books were George Fox’s Journal, the eight-volume The Friends Library, Piety Promoted, and Penn’s Rise and Progress. Readers who took out a book for more than two weeks were fined twelve-and-a-half cents a week.

Salvation for Germantown Friends’ library came in the form of Alfred Cope. Heir to a Philadelphia shipping fortune, he never entered the family business due to frail health.  His father Thomas Pim Cope was founder of the Cope Line, which operated a fleet of transatlantic sailing packets between Philadelphia in Liverpool.  Like New York’s Black Ball Line, the Cope Line introduced the revolutionary idea of regularly scheduled departures.  Previously, ships waited until their holds were full until setting sail. This practice, while saving merchants money in the short term, left passengers and merchants waiting for days or even weeks. The Cope Line turned the old business model on its head, making passengers and merchants tailor their schedules around the shipping line’s The vagaries of wind and weather made regularly scheduled arrival times impossible until the advent of steam-powered transatlantic liners in the 1840s.  During the Cope Line’s six decades of existence, the business made the Cope family one of Philadelphia’s richest clans.  Henry Cope, another son of Thomas, took his inheritance and purchased 55 acres on Germantown’s Washington Lane.  Named for the Cope family’s ancestral village in England, the Cope estate is now the Awbury Arboretum.

Awbury Arboretum, intersection of Washington Lane and Ardleigh Street, June 1, 1956.

In 1857, Alfred Cope purchased a building on Germantown Avenue to house new classrooms for GFS, as well for the now-800 volume library. The books had previously been rather unceremoniously shoved into the Meetinghouse’s ladies cloakroom.  Fifteen years later, the chronically-ill Cope made his final gift: $13,000 to erect a purpose-built home for the Friends Free Library, which would be open to both students of the school and the wider Germantown community. The new library opened its doors in 1874, its shelves lined with 5,634 books: 1,500 children’s books, 25 Friends volumes, 262 science books, and 238 biographies.   Yet when setting up the trust that would fund the acquisition of new books, the Cope family inserted an important stipulation for this public-private library: no fiction, except for children’s books.

The newly-appointed librarian William Kite vigorously defended the stipulations set forth in the Cope Trust, and according to one account, “the factory girl who tended a spinning jenny, the messenger boy, the studious young man with notebook, he found something for them all, even for the rowdies who plagued him by coming in droves and asking fot tracts which he knew they would not read.”

Within a century of its founding, however, the Friends Free Library realized that to stay culturally current, it had to find creative ways to acquire works of fiction — in the interest of the community and the students of Germantown Friends School.

Interior of the Friends Free Library , 1881. Courtesy of the Germantown Friends School Archives.

Steven Ujifusa, a Philadelphia-based historian, is the author of Barons of the Sea: And Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship (Simon & Schuster 2018).  He has appeared on National Public Radio, CBS Sunday Morning, and is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award for Non-Fiction.  His first book, A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the SS United States, was named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best non-fiction books of 2012.  www.stevenujifusa.com

Sources:

Bill Koons, “A Short History of the Friends’ Free Library,” Collection of Germantown Friends School.

“Friends Free Library of Germantown, 1848-1948, Some Notes in Retrospect, Collection of Germantown Friends School.

Susan Stamberg, “How Andrew Carnegie Turned His Fortune Into a Library Legacy,” NPR, August 1, 2013. https://www.npr.org/2013/08/01/207272849/how-andrew-carnegie-turned-his-fortune-into-a-library-legacy, accessed August 16, 2018.

“Our History,” http://awbury.org/our-history/, accessed August 21, 2018.

 

 

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites

Apothecary Roses of Germantown

Wyck, 6026 Germantown Avenue, September 20, 1957.

The Wyck mansion, located in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, is not just one of the oldest structures in the city, but is also home to the oldest surviving rose garden in the nation.

The first section of the dwelling dates to 1690, when Germantown was a satellite of the new city of Phialdelphia. For the next three centuries, it was occupied by the descendants of the Milan-Wistar-Haines families, German Quakers who had settled in Pennsylvania to escape persecution and to find better opportunities in William Penn’s religiously tolerant colony.  As the family prospered over the years, the house grew in size and comfort. In the 1820s, architect William Strickland, designer of the neoclassical Second Bank of the United States and the Merchant’s Exchange, extensively renovated it into the spacious dwelling it is today. Yet true to its owners’ Quaker values, Wyck remained solidly plain, inside and out.  Members of the Society of Friends prized quality, but scorned extravagance. For families like the Haines of Wyck, prosperity was an important spiritual test of their values, and not an excuse to be idle or indulgent.

“Celesiana” Damask Rose, also konwn as the “Germantown Rose” because of its wide cultivation in Germantown during the 18th century. Painting by Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Wikipedia Commons.

As William Penn said: “There is but little need to spend time with foolish diversions for time flies away so swiftly by itself; and, when once gone, is never to be recalled.”

Like the house itself, the rose garden at Wyck is a superb blend of neoclassical aesthetics and Quaker utility. The garden’s layout is a simple square, bisected into quadrants by two walkways. It lacks fussy formal elements such as box hedges and elaborate plantings. In the early 19th century, roses had medicinal as well as aesthetic value, a practice hat went back to the Middle Ages.  In monastic apothecary gardens, medicinal plants were grown to cure all sorts of ailments.  Physicians believed that illnesses were caused by imbalances in the body’s four elements, or “humours.”

  • blood (air)
  • phlegm (water)
  • yellow bile (fire)
  • black bile (earth)

It was the physician’s job to bring balance back to these four humours, and the job of the apothecary (a predecessor to the modern-day pharmacist) to dispense the right combination of herbs and plants. Herbs cultivated for their supposed medicinal value included sage (‘fresh and green to cleanse the body of venom and pestilence’), hyssop (a hot purgative also used to heal bruises), chamomile (a sedative and poison antidote), dill (a cure for indigestion), and cumin (soothing ointment for skin and eyes).  Although most of these remedies were based in superstition, some proved to be based in science, most notably foxglove, which is still used to make medication for congestive heart failure.

The Wyck rose garden, restored in the 1970s after decades of neglect, contains many varieties thought to have been lost. These include historic varieties renowned for the beauty and fragrance of their flowers, but unlike modern “hybrid tea” bushes most the roses at Wyck only bloom once a year. Among the formerly “lost roses” catalogued by rosarian Leonie Bell in 1972 are “Elegant Gallica” and the “Lafayette,” the latter supposedly named in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette to commemorate his 1825 visit to Wyck.

“Celebration of the Roses,” May 26, 2018. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
Rose garden arbor at Wyck. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.

The most “practical” rose at Wyck is Rosa Gallica Officinalis, also known as the “Apothecary’s Rose.” The Haines family almost certainty used its blooms to brew teas, as well as make remedies for stomach ailments, sore throats, rashes, and eye problems. Another rose cultivated at Wyck, Celesiana (known in the 18th century as the “Germantown Rose”), whose bright pink petals were mixed into pipe tobacco.

Today, Wyck’s master gardener Martha Keen and her staff continue to cultivate these rare local varieties, selling cuttings to the public every spring. Wyck, along with Bartram’s Garden, the Philadelphia Flower Show, and Chanticleer, all contribute to the Quaker City’s unofficial status as “America’s Garden Capital.”

Note: the author is proud to have Wyck specimens of Celesiana, Elegant Gallica, and Lafayette in his West Philadelphia garden. 

Sources:

“Quaker Quote Archive,”Ben Lomond Quaker Center, http://www.quakercenter.org/quaker-quote-archive/, accessed June 1, 2018.

“The Wyck Rose Garden,” http://wyck.org/home/rose-garden/, accessed June 1, 2018.

The Rose Garden at Wyck (Philadelphia: Wyck Historic House and Garden, 2018), p.3.

Mark Whitelaw, “The Apothecary’s Rose: Medicinal Values,” Rose Magazine, http://www.rosemagazine.com/articles04/medicinal/, accessed June 1, 2018.

“What to Grow in a Medieval Herb Garden,” English Heritage, May 6, 2016. http://blog.english-heritage.org.uk/grow-medieval-herb-garden/, accessed June 1, 2018.

 

Categories
Behind the Scenes Events and People Historic Sites

The Autocrat and the Engineer (Part II)

The Joseph Harrison Jr. house at 227. S.18th Street, modeled on the Pavlovsk Palace in St. Petersburg. Photograph dated 1866.

As the capital of Imperial Russia, St. Petersburg was a city of many palaces.  Some belonged to the Romanov family, such as Peterhof, the Winter Palace, the Pavlovsk Palace, the Anichkov Palace, and Tsarskoe Selo.  Others belonged to wealthy Russian nobles, such as the Yusapov, Beloselskiy, and Stroganov clans. Many had been constructed in the 18th century, as part of Czar Nicholas I’s ancestor Peter the Great’s initiative to Westernize Russia and have its upper classes adopt the manners of the French and Italian aristocracies. By the mid-19th century, these pastel pink and green confections were filled with malachite tables, gilded candelabras, and Old Master paintings.  During big parties, their windows glowed with candlelight, magnified many-fold by crystal chandeliers and mirrors.

The fount of their owners’ wealth were vast tracts of farmland and the unpaid labor of thousands of serfs.

Writer Ivan Goncharov satirized what he saw as a self-indulgent and indolent aristocracy in his 1859 novel Oblomov, in which the title character barely has the energy to rise from his bed.  Why should he have motivation when money passively streamed in from his country estate?

The Stroganov Palace in St. Petersburg, built in the 1760s. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

“When you don’t know what you’re living for, you don’t care how you live from one day to the next,” Ilya Ilych Oblomov says in the novel. “You’re happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep you bury the tedious question of what you lived for that day and what you’re going to live for tomorrow.”

Oblomov ultimately dies of his own laziness.

To Philadelphian Joseph Harrison, the cosmopolitan opulence of St. Petersburg was a stunning contrast to the sober propriety of his native Philadelphia.  Yet he remained immune to the malady of “Oblomovitis.” He worked hard (and no doubt played hard) during his many years in Russia. He successfully designed a series of new locomotives for the St. Petersburg to Moscow railroad, as well as new freight and passenger cars. He also constructed a locomotive repair facility on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. His crowning achievement was the replacement of an old pontoon rail bridge over the Neva River with the cast-iron Bridge of the Annunciation.   According to Harrison’s biography in Cassier’s Magazine, Czar Nicholas I was amazed at the Philadelphian’s creativity and self-discipline, and as a result the monarch bestowed “numerous 
other tokens of the friendship 
and esteem” on the American engineer, the most prominent of which was the Order of St. Ann, awarded to those who had performed exceptional feats of civil and military service.  Its motto was “Amantibus Justitiam, Pietatem, Fidem” (“To those who love justice, piety, and fidelity”).

Bridge of the Annunciation, St. Petersburg. Designed by Joseph Harrison, Stanisław Kierbedź, and Alexander Brullov. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

 

The Greek Hall of Pavlovsk Palace. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Thanks to Czar Nicholas I’s patronage, Joseph Harrison came back to Philadelphia a very rich man.  In 1855, during one of his periodic visits home, Harrison commissioned architect Samuel Sloan to build a new city house for his family, on a 75 feet by 198 feet lot fronting the-then mostly undeveloped Rittenhouse Square.

Sloan had made a name for himself as a designer of picturesque suburban villas and urban townhouses in the Italianate style. Harrison instructed his architect to build an adaptation of the Pavlovsk Palace in St. Petersburg, an 18th century czarist residence he and his wife Sarah had admired during their time abroad.  Built by Catherine the Great for his son Grand Duke Paul (Czar Nicholas I’s father), Pavlovsk was a jewel of neo-classical design.

Samuel Sloan set to work at his drafting table.  His Harrison mansion was a symmetrical structure, composed of a three-bay wide center block, flanked by a pair of two story wings.  It had not one, but two arched front doorways.  No doubt influenced by the sight of all the Old Master paintings cluttering the walls of the Winter Palace, he filled his own home’s cavernous rooms with fashionable art, most notably twenty works from Charles Wilson Peale’s famous museum.  His most notable acquisition was Benjamin West’s “Christ Rejected.” The rear windows of the house looked out on a large, enclosed garden.  There was no pretense of Quaker austerity. This edifice was meant to dazzle and impress, inside and out.

When Joseph and Sarah Harrison took up residence in their home at 227 S.18th Street in 1857, they were the proud owners of one the largest and most flamboyant homes in the city of Philadelphia. Other members of Philadelphia’s ultra-wealthy, most notably members of the Drexel family, built similarly grand houses around the square in the years to come.  Flush with cash from his Russian adventures and locomotive patents, Harrison took up intellectual, civic, and cultural pursuits with gusto. He served on the boards of the Fairmount Park Conservancy and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, making a substantial donation toward PAFA’s new Frank Furness-designed home on North Broad Street.  He died in 1874.

The giant house stood until the 1920s, when it was demolished to make way for the Pennsylvania Athletic Club.

Monument to Nicholas I in St. Isaac’s Square, St. Petersburg. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Czar Nicholas I ruled until his death in 1855.  His son Alexander II took a much more liberal course than his reactionary father, freeing Russia’s serfs in 1862, one year before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. The Romanov dynasty came to a violent end in 1918, when Bolshevik revolutionaries gunned down Czar Nicholas I’s great-grandson Nicholas II and his entire family in Siberia.  The old Romanov trinity of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” had been replaced by Vladimir Lenin’s Communist rallying cry of “Peace, Land, and Bread.”

 

Sources:

“Joseph Harrison Jr. A Biographical Sketch,” Cassier’s Magazine, An Engineering Monthly, Volume XXXVII, November 1909-April 1910, http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Philadelphia/LocomotiveWorks/CassierBioJosHarrison.htm, accessed April 17, 2018.

Karen Chernick, “The Lost Mansions of Rittenhouse Square,” Curbed Philadelphia, January 17, 2018, https://philly.curbed.com/2018/1/17/16896748/rittenhouse-square-philadelphia-historic-photos, accessed April 26, 2018.

Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov: A Novel(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011).  https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1583229868, accessed April 26, 2018.

Kevin Klever, Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia, From 1847(Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2015). https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1503574806, accessed April 26, 2018.

Joseph Harrison Jr. Papers, MS.024, Hoang Tran, ed., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, January 2016. https://www.pafa.org/sites/default/files/media-assets/MS.024_JosephHarrisonJr.pdf, accessed April 17, 2018.

Categories
Events and People Historic Sites Neighborhoods

The Autocrat and the Engineer (Part I)

The Joseph Harrison Jr. residence at 221 S.18th Street. c.1900.

In view of the interest and importance at the present time of everything which relates to the development of railroading, it is well to remember what has been done in America to lay the foundations of the locomotive industry, and, therefore, we feel that it is desirable to recall the extent to which the design of the modern locomotive is indebted to the work of Joseph Harrison, Jr., although it is now more than thirty years since he passed away. 

–Cassier’s Magazine, November-April 1910

The son of a Philadelphia grocer, Joseph Harrison Jr. (1810-1874) received his early training the old fashioned way: learning-by-doing.  After cutting his teeth as an apprentice machinist, at age 25 Harrison got a job with the locomotive builder Andrew McCalla Eastwick.  While in Eastwick’s employ, Harrison came up with the solution to a problem that had long befuddled early locomotive designers. The first locomotives, such as George Stephens’ “Rocket” of 1829, were propelled by only a single pair of driving wheels.  If engineers could add additional pairs of wheels, the locomotive’s pulling capacity, especially on steep grades, would be greatly increased. But no one seemed to be able to come up with a way to evenly distribute the energy from the steam pistons to more than two driving wheels.

In 1838, Harrison patented his so-called “equalizing lever,” which, according to Cassier’s Magazine, ensured “the equal division of the load upon the two axles.”

Eastwick and Harrison’s “Hercules” engine of 1837-38. Catskill Archive.

Footage of a replica of George Stephenson’s “The Rocket” locomotive of 1829. Note the diagonal pistons that power the single pair of drive wheels. 

This invention made Harrison, and his now-partner Andrew McCalla Eastwick, very much in demand as locomotive designers.  Thanks to Harrison’s equalizing lever, locomotives could now have 4 leading wheels and 4 driving wheels (4-4-0), a configuration known as the “American type.”  By the end of the 19th century, locomotives with  as many as ten driving wheels (known as “decapods”) wold be pulling heavily-loaded freight and passenger cars over the Allegheny Mountains and into the burgeoning interior of the United States. A large percentage of the freight carried by the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads was coal, which powered the factories and heated the homes of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and other eastern cities.

Joseph Harrison Jr. Photograph from Cassier’s Magazine.

In 1843, the thirty-three year old Joseph Harrison received a summons from the richest and most powerful man on earth: Czar Nicholas I of Russia (r.1825-1855).  The czar’s mission for Harrison: to design locomotives suited to carry freight and passengers between St. Petersburg and Moscow, a distance of four hundred miles.

Czar Nicholas could not have had a more different upbringing than Harrison’s hardscrabble one. He had been raised in the splendor of the Winter Palace, surrounded by tutors and servants. Nicholas had been taught from a very young age that the Romanov family’s “Divine Right” to rule came directly from God.  Because he was the third son of the erratic Czar Paul I, few thought that Nicholas a chance of becoming the ruler of the largest kingdom on earth. 8.6 million square miles, to be exact.  As a result, he was trained as a military engineer and army officer.  Yet when his eldest brother Alexander I died childless in 1825 and another brother, Constantine, refused the throne shortly after that, Nicholas had no choice but to accept the crown.  After his mother Catherine the Great’s death in 1796, Czar Paul I forbade women from inheriting the throne. Many in Russia, especially reform-minded members of the gentry, feared Nicholas as a reactionary autocrat who sought to undo the liberal reforms of his predecessors.

Czar Nicholas I of Russia. Portrait by Horace Vernet. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Almost immediately after Nicholas became Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, a cadre of military officers refused to swear allegiance to the new monarch.  On December 26, 1825, About 3,000 of them assembled in Senate Square, St. Petersburg.  Their plea to the czar: the creation of a constitutional monarchy along the lines of Great Britain’s, complete with an elected, representative body that curbed the absolute power of the czar.

Nicholas I was incensed by this challenge to his authority. He ordered his loyal soldiers to open fire on the demonstrators.  The leaders of the so-called Decembrists were captured and executed. Others were exiled to Siberia.  During the next thirty years, Nicholas attempted to squash all liberal thought from his realm by promulgating a new educational curriculum based on the trinity of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.”  According to his educational minister Sergey Uvarov:

“It is our common obligation to ensure that the education of the people be conducted, according to Supreme intention of our August Monarch, in the joint spirit of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. I am convinced that every professor and teacher, being permeated by one and the same feeling of devotion to the throne and fatherland, will use all his resources to become a worthy tool for the government and to earn its complete confidence.”

In addition to stepping up censorship and the powers of the secret police, the czar embarked on a series of military adventures that alienated Russia’s allies, most notably Great Britain. He also had the 1,500 room Winter Palace rebuilt following its total destruction by fire in 1837. The czar demanded his official residence be restored to its former grandeur within a year. One observer of the project noted: “During the great frosts 6000 workmen were continually employed; of these a considerable number died daily, but the victims were instantly replaced by other champions brought forward to perish.”

“Fire in the Winter Palace” by Boris Green. Built in the 1760s by the Empress Elizabeth, the Winter Palace was the official residence of the Russian czars, and boasted 1,500 rooms.  Nicholas I ordered the mammoth structure rebuilt within a year.  Wikipedia Commons.

Prospects for Russia’s millions of serfs–laboring peasants who were bought, sold and mortgaged by wealthy landowners–were bleak, as well.

Harrison may have heard about Czar Nicholas’s repressive governing tactics, but when presented with such a lucrative business opportunity as the Moscow to St. Petersburg railroad, he could not say no.  In 1843, Harrison and his young family set sail for Russia.  Shortly before doing so, he and Andrew Eastwick sold their firm’s “equalizing lever” patent to Matthias Baldwin, founder of Philadelphia’s Baldwin Locomotive Company, for a tremendous sum of money.

In Russia, Harrison not only showed the czar how to run a railroad, but also would also dream up his own palace back in Philadelphia, one that would have fit right along side the shimmering pastel confections lining the canals of St. Petersburg.

Sources: 

“Joseph Harrison Jr. A Biographical Sketch,” Cassier’s Magazine, An Engineering Monthly, Volume XXXVII, November 1909-April 1910, http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Philadelphia/LocomotiveWorks/CassierBioJosHarrison.htm, accessed April 17, 2018.

Joseph Harrison Jr. Papers, MS.024, Hoang Tran, ed., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, January 2016. https://www.pafa.org/sites/default/files/media-assets/MS.024_JosephHarrisonJr.pdf, accessed April 17, 2018.

Richard Mowbray Hayward, Russia Enters the Railway Age, 1842-1855 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs), 1998, pp.42-47. 

Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University), 2001, p. 146.

 

Categories
Behind the Scenes Neighborhoods Snapshots of History

Creating Community at the Powelton Co-op – Part 2

3508 Hamilton Street. The 3500 block of Hamilton was the nucleus of a community made up of former members of the Powelton Co-op. November 9, 1959.

Part I of “Creating Community at the Powelton C0-op”

A few years ago, Gwendolyn Bye, daughter of Friendship Co-op founders Jerry and Lois Bye, was thumbing through some old photos from her 1950s West Philadelphia childhood. When she came across a class picture from the Charles Drew Elementary School, which once stood on the 3700 block of Warren Street, she realized something remarkable.

“I saw this wonderful picture of my very first grade class with Mrs. Ruby,”  she said. “‘Oh, my God,’ I say to myself. ‘My class is all black, and I’m the only white kid.’ And I didn’t even know it at the time!”

Sixty years ago, her Quaker activist parents decided to send their four children to the local public school near their home on the 3500 block of Hamilton Street. “We could’ve gone to a Quaker school,” she remembered. “But my parents wanted us to go to the local public school. And it was almost like what was going on in the South in the ’50s and ’60s was– unfortunately, they were all-white schools. My parents did the opposite. They wanted their children to go into an all-black school and integrate it.”

Gwen spent her first years at “The Court,” the first home of the Powelton Co-op, where she grew up with the community’s other small children. Many were mixed race: Japanese-African American, Jewish and Protestant, white and African-American. Here, in Powelton Village, in the relaxed surroundings of the co-op, they didn’t feel judged. They didn’t care what the neighbors said. They were simply a group of little kids who played together.

Gwen’s upbringing in Powelton gave her a perspective on race that few Americans in the 1950s had. “Racism is taught by parents,” she said. “If you just let a child experience other human beings, they’re not going to look at them based on their skin color. They’re going to look at them for who they are, other people that they play with, other people that they enjoy or like.”

She also lacked something: fear. “I didn’t have fear growing up,” she said. “I didn’t fear anybody. I didn’t fear you because you were black. I didn’t fear you because you were Jewish. I didn’t fear you because you were white. I guess I would fear people because they had guns. That I feared. I feared police.”

It was only when she entered middle school that she began hearing other kids call each other derogatory names, even at the relatively integrated Powel School on the 3500 block of Powelton Avenue. “One child would say black cracker. Another child would say white cracker. And I’d ask, ‘What is a black cracker, and what’s a white cracker?”

Her father Jerry Bye and his fellow realtor George Funderburg encouraged other like-minded newcomers to move to Powelton Village, bucked the the “blockbusting” so endemic in the real estate profession. In 1951, for example, he rented an apartment to the Lees, an African-American couple from Trenton, New Jersey.  He and other residents made sure the Lees felt welcome. “It was a nice neighborhood, an integrated neighborhood, and it was very progressive,” remembered Bob Lee, whose wife was a social worker doing fieldwork at a community healthcare center  “We all got along very well.”

By the early 1950s, the Powelton Co-op’s residents could no longer fit into a single large house. In addition to the number of single members, there were a growing number of families with young  children. Yet the core families didn’t want to abandon their special corner of West Philadelphia. They adapted by purchasing homes of their own, centered on the 3500 block of Hamilton Street. Real estate was still cheap, and many of the Co-op’s were affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, an easy walk away.  They also made plans to create a distinctive neighborhood social infrastructure: a babysitting co-op, cultural events, and their own civic assocation.

 

Sources: 

Interview with Gwendolyn Bye, October 5, 2017.

Interview with Bob Lee, November 16, 2017.

 

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Behind the Scenes Events and People Neighborhoods

Creating Community at the Powelton Co-op – Part 1

Powelton Co-op families doing the laundry in the basement of 3709 Baring Street. Mrs. John L. Atkins taking care of 21 month old Alan Bye, as his mother Lois Bye handles the washer and wringer. Mrs. John H. Wrenn hangs clothes on the line, while Mrs. Hsien Ti Tien irons a shirt.  Photo courtesy of Gwendolyn Bye.

There were some kids who were mixed. There was some kids who were Jewish, and there were some white kids, too. But it never dawned on me as a child. I never knew the difference. I went to an all-black school for the first three years of my life, which was a block away.

-Gwendolyn Bye, daughter of Powelton Co-op founders Jerry and Louis Bye. 

During the 1940s and early 1950s, West Philadelphia’s “Powelton Co-op” was a haven for people seeking a tolerant, racially-integrated community.  It was a mixture of Penn students, social activists, professionals, and musicians.  They stood against war, nuclear proliferation, and segregation. Most leaned politically to the left. Some identified as Communists, a bold stance just before the rise of McCarthyism. There was also a strong Quaker influence, as many residents were involved with the American Friends Service Committee.

“There were Jews. There were WASPs. There were gay people. There were African-Americans. It was a real mixed bag,” remembered Gwendolyn Bye, whose parents Jerry and Lois Bye met at the Powelton Co-op in the late 1940s. Regarding the Powelton Co-op’s Marxist leanings, Bye explained: “It was a much more innocent form of community and social questioning: the rich being corrupt, everything’s for everyone, we work together for the common good. And the underlying message was a very innocent one, but it was one that was very strongly felt by my mother and father and the people who formed the Powelton Co-op.”

The co-op’s sphere of influence would eventually encompass a group of blocks that today is known as Powelton Village: bounded by Powelton Avenue to the south, Spring Garden Street to the north, Lancaster Avenue to the west, and the Schuylkill River to the east.  There were plenty of big old houses that could be bought or rented for very little money, and the neighborhood was also within walking distance of the University of Pennsylvania.

Originally developed in the decades after the Civil War, Powelton Village had once been of Philadelphia’s premier streetcar suburbs. By the 1890s, it was home to German-American beer barons, Pennsylvania Railroad executives, and Quaker entrepreneurs who ignored the stigma of living “North of Market.”   Yet fashion moved on, as did the descendants of the original wealthy families.  As a result of New Deal housing policies,  most of West Philadelphia north of Market Street was “redlined,” meaning that banks refused to give prospective homebuyer mortgages. Worse still, insurance companies refused to issue homeowner policies. Much of this was racially motivated: as soon as a black family moved into a neighborhood, the whole area was deemed “hazardous” and marked as red on the lending institution’s map. During the 1940s and 50s, brokers routinely engaged in a practice known as “blockbusting,” informing white families in a neighborhood that African-Americans were moving into the area.   Afraid that their property values would decrease due to redlining, the white residents would then “panic sell.” The realtor would then sell the property to a black family, pocketing the commission. Entire neighborhoods would turn over within a decade or less. The idea of an integrated neighborhood was a foreign concept to both residents and policy makers.  Until the passing of Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which made it a federal crime to discriminate “in the sale, rental and financing of dwellings based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin,” this practice was a major driver of white flight, not just in Philadelphia, but in cities throughout the United States.

Jerry and Lois Bye, who were among the founding members of the Powelton Co-op, happened to be in real estate, but they were realtors on a mission. Devout Quakers and pacifists, they believed they could be agents for the creation of an integrated neighborhood. Among the other founders were realtor George Funderburg (an African-American) and his wife Maggie (a German-American).  In addition to the cheap housing, West Philadelphia was one of the few places where interracial couples such as the Funderburgs felt comfortable. Anti-miscegnation laws, which prohibited marriage between people of two difference races, were on the books in fourteen states. And even in states such as Pennsylvania that permitted interracial marriage, couples were often met with hostility or even violence by their neighbors.

Initially known as the “Friendship Co-op,” the group’s first home was set of buildings known as “The Court,” located at the intersection of 37th and Baring Street. As shareholders in the corporation, all members shared expenses, childcare, and the household chores. A communal meal was held every night.   At the end of the year, the co-op members would get equity according to their contributions.  After a few years at “The Court,” the Powelton Co-op moved to a large house at 35 North 34th Street, and then another one at 3709 Baring Street. There were plenty of hulking old homes for the taking. A Victorian mansion in this part of West Philadelphia could be purchased for as little as $12,000. Many had been turned into rooming or halfway houses, and were generally in poor repair.

The Powelton Co-op would be this group’s laboratory, and Powelton Village was the perfect location for it.  They betted that the neighborhood would be a much better place in the long run as an integrated one, rather than one defined by a single ethnic group.  The Funderburgs, Byes, Marshalls and other founding families intended to raise their children in a place where they would feel comfortable with people from all backgrounds.

It would be a difficult road, but in the end they would succeed in achieving their vision.

To be continued…

 

The northwest corner of the 3700 block of Baring Street, December 14, 1962.

Sources:

Interview of David and Anne Lodge, December 26, 2017.

Interview of Gwendolyn Bye, July 17, 2013.

Interview of Gwendolyn Bye, October 5, 2016.

Interview of Gwendolyn Bye, December 26, 2018.

“The Fair Housing Act,” US Department of Housing and Urban Development,” https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/progdesc/title8, accessed February 16, 2018.

 

 

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Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Snapshots of History

Andrew Eastwick: Savior of Bartram’s Garden

 

Bartram’s Garden, 54th Street and Eastwick Terrace, as photographed by Widoop and Carollo, dated January 1, 1960.

Famed Bartram’s Garden, homestead of Philadelphia’s 18th century botanist John Bartram, is going through a renaissance today. The gardens are lushly planted and the main buildings restored.  The parking lot is full on warm summer Saturdays. New bike trails connect this pastoral sanctuary to Center City and University City.  The renovated barn offers programs for schoolchildren. After wandering through the botanical gardens–the nerve center of the Bartram family’s North American seed empire–visitors can rent kayaks and canoes at the river landing and paddle up and down the Schuylkill River. Picnickers relax under groves of old growth trees.  A wildflower-bedecked walking path flows down to the river’s edge.

The whole ensemble is gloriously incongruous: a pristine and beautifully-maintained vestige of Philadelphia’s colonial era, hemmed in by housing projects, oil tanks, and railroad trestles.  The shimmering glass-and-steel skyline of Center City looms in the distance, a dreamy reminder of the modern age.

What saved Bartram’s Gardens from destruction?  A larger and even grander mansion, built with the very proceeds of 19th century industry that gobbled up much of the surrounding riverbanks.  Andrew McCalla Eastwick (1806-1879) was a Philadelphia engineer credited with the invention of the steam shovel.  As a partner in the firm of Harrison, Winans, and Eastwick, he made a tremendous fortune building railroads for Czar Nicholas I of Russia.  In 1850, he purchased the 46-acre Bartram property from John Bartram’s granddaughter Ann Bartram Carr. Yet unlike many other rich men before and after him, he decided not to tear down the existing house on his property.  Rather, he left modest Bartram family homestead alone as a museum piece, and built his own mansion off to one side. According to one report, he vowed not to harm “one bush” on the Bartram family compound.

“Franklinia Altamaha,” as illustrated by William Bartram in 1762. Source: Wikipedia

Eastwick’s own house stood in stark contrast to the simple stone Quaker farmhouse lived in by three generations of Bartrams.  Bartram Hall, completed in 1851, was the first major commission of architect Samuel Sloan, who went on to design the houses on Woodland Terrace and the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disease. Built the so-called Norman revival style, it cost $30,000 (over $2 million in modern currency), and rivaled the grand estates on New York’s Hudson River, boasting 34 rooms and surrounded by formal gardens.  Its four-story tower and crenelated roofline rose high above the flowering Franklinia trees so lovingly cultivated by John Bartram.  On warm summer nights, the rich industrialist’s family and houseguests could wander through the adjacent Bartram family homestead, kept just as America’s founding botanist knew it.

A rendering of Bartram Hall, as portrayed in Samuel Sloan’s “The Model Architect.”

Yet even a man as rich as Andrew Eastwick couldn’t stem the tide of industry on the Schuylkill River.  By the time of his death in 1879, his property was completely surrounded by factories, and the river befouled by pollution.   Yet the Eastwick heirs resolved that their family home would not succumb to the same fate as the rest of the lower Schuylkill valley. In 1890, they deeded both Bartram Hall and Bartram’s Gardens to the city of Philadelphia for use as a public park.  Sadly, only six years later, the grandiose and ponderous Bartram’s Hall caught fire and burned to the ground. Today, a pavilion sits on the site of the mansion.  It is a popular site for weddings.  A community garden serving Southwest Philadelphia flourishes nearby.

The original Bartram house and garden remain, a monument not just to America’s earliest botanist, but also to Andrew McCalla Eastwick, one of the founders of the American historic preservation movement.

Sources:

“Bartram Hall, The Andrew M. Eastwick House, Philadelphia PA,” Picturesque Italianate Architecture, July 18, 2016.  http://picturesqueitalianatearchitecture.blogspot.com/2016/07/bartram-hall-andrew-m-eastwick-house.html

Kenneth Hafertepe and James F. O’Gorman, eds. American Architects and Their Books, 1840-1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), p.114.

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Behind the Scenes Snapshots of History

The Derham Body Company: Dignified Simplicity on Four Wheels

A 1920s advertisement for the Derham Body Company of Rosemont and Philadelphia, featuring a Locomobile owned by Rodman Wanamaker II. Locomobile, based in Bridgeport, Connecticut, claimed theirs was the “best built car in America.”  Edward T. Stotesbury, flamboyant owner of Whitemarsh Hall in Wyndmoor, owned a similar Locomobile. Coachbuild.com.

The so-called annual model change (also known as “planned obsolesce”) dates back to the 1920s, when General Motors transformed automobile styling from an afterthought into high fashion.   Dazzling new body styles, vibrant colors, and powerful engines enticed the aspiring American middle class, who began going into debt to buy a lifestyle accessory rather than a mere vehicle.

Yet between 1895 and 1930,  car buyers were often more attached to their car’s body than the actual machine , a holdover from the days of the horse-and-carriage, when highly-skilled artisans produced a variety of open and closed bodied coaches: landaus, victorias, phaetons, brakes, and cabriolets, to name a few.

Philadelphia was never much of a car-manufacturing city, with the minor exception of the short-lived Biddle Motor Car Company. Yet Philadelphia’s custom car coachwork was famous throughout the world.  John Joseph Derham, an Irish immigrant, set up shop in 1887 in the new Main Line community of Rosemont, building fine carriages for the horse-loving residents. By the early 1900s, J.J. Derham’s well-heeled customers were buying their first automobiles. Rather than buying a factory-built car body, a Derham client like department store heir Rodman Wanamaker II would opt to purchase only the chassis.  Wanamaker would then have the car (consistenting of only a wheels, frame, engine, and radiator) delivered to Derham, where he would then work with master craftsmen to come up with the car of his dreams.

This could be a daunting undertaking.  The cars that Derham’s customers chose sold for around $5,000 for the chassis alone ($100,000 in today’s money): Locomobile, Cadillac, Rolls-Royce, Lincoln, Peerless, Pierce-Arrow, Mercedes, Minverva, and Packard.  Building a custom-built body for hat chassis could set the owner back another $10,000 to $20,000. The body styles boasted the same names as the horse-drawn carriages they replaced.  A sporty two seater body, for example, was known as a cabriolet.  An enclosed formal body for opera night at the Academy of Music was a brougham.  An four door car open body, good for summer driving on winding suburban roads, was a phaeton.  Although some very rich customers owned several cars, others preferred to use two or more bodies on the same car.  According to a history of J. Gibson McIlvain & Company, Derham’s principal wood supplier in the 1910s and 20s:

“Largely because most early automobiles were manufactured with open, touring car bodies, the business prospered. Wealthy citizens of Philadelphia who wished to drive their cars in winter would come to the Derham company to a have a closed body custom-built. Every Spring the closed body would be removed and stored with Derham. In the Fall, the body would be installed in time for the cold weather.”

In an era before government-mandated safety standards, coachbuilders were free to indulge their client’s wildest fantasies.  Body panels were aluminum, and the frames constructed of seasoned ash.  Interiors were lined with velvet and leather, and accented with strips of rosewood, walnut, and mother of pearl.  To keep up with demand, every spring Derham would send a representative to the McIlvain yard to “make his selection of the finest oak, northern ash, and hickory.”

There was at least one Philadelphia lady who took the attachment to a specific body style to an extreme. Louise Audenried’s first car was a 1907 Zeidel, with a custom-built Derham body.  When Audenried bought a new car several years later, she demanded that the old body be transferred to the new chassis. Derham gave her the bad news that the old body wouldn’t fit onto the new chassis.  Louise Audenried refused to budge — she wanted exactly the same type of body.  So, Derham built a replica body that fit onto the new chassis.  In the 1920s, Audenried purchased a new Pierce-Arrow, and once again, Derham obliged.  Finally, in 1938, Audenried purchased a magnificent Packard Super Eight.  Yet rather than fashion a modern, streamlined body for this chassis, Derham did exactly as the client wished: constructing a boxy, Edwardian body on top of a powerful Art Deco drivetrain.

The J.J. Derham & Company had an office at 237-45 S.12th Street, nearby another auto body shop. Photograph dated January 10, 1917.

For coachbuilders like Derham, the good times ended with the stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out the fortunes of many of their loyal clients. Even those who still had money opted to simply buy a Cadillac or Lincoln with standard, factory-built bodies.  Most of the old line, East Coast coachbuilders  went out of business.

During the lean years of the 1930s, Derham miraculously held on, designing formal cars for the King and Queen of England, Pope Pius XII, Gary Cooper, and even Josef Stalin.

After surviving on custom jobs and classic car restorations, including a presidential limousine for Dwight Eisenhower, Derham’s Rosemont shop finally closed its doors in 1971.

A Duesenberg advertisement featuring a convertible town car body built by the Derham Body Company of Rosemont, Pennsylvania. Pinterest.com.

Sources: 

“Derham Body Company,” Coachbuilt, http://www.coachbuilt.com/bui/d/derham/derham.htm, accessed September 28, 2017.

William Barton Marsh, Philadelphia Hardwood: The Story of the McIlvains of Philadelphia, 1798-1948 (Philadelphia: William E. Rudge’s Sons, 1948), p.63.

 

 

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Behind the Scenes Historic Sites

Dr. Kirkbride’s Country Cure

Entrance to the Pennsylvania General Hospital (Old Blockley), c.1900. Source: Wikipedia.

Before it became a fashionable streetcar suburb, West Philadelphia was infamous as as place where the city’s indigent, and mentally ill were warehoused out of sight and mind. As historian Robert Morris Skaler wrote, “if one was incurable, insane, consumptive, blind, orphaned, crippled, destitute, or senile, one would most likely end up in a faith-based charitable institution or asylum somehwere in West Philadelphia, beyond the pale.”  It’s famous institution was the Blockley Almshouse, a charity hospital founded in 1797 and for many years located at the intersection of 34th and Walnut Street.  Although Blockley sold a large chunk of land to the University of Pennsylvania for its new campus in 1871, the institution continued to operate as the Philadelphia General Hospital until the 1977, Inflatable Irish pubwhen it went bankrupt.  Nonetheless, a group of dedicated physicians and reformers lobbied the Commonwealth to make mental asylums more humane and aesthetically pleasing, hoping that beauty, air, and natural light would help improve the patients’ condition.  This part of the “Romantic” aesthetic that was sweeping the nation. One example of this aesthetic was Laurel Hill Cemetery, a pastoral urban park meant to elevate the spirits of the bereaved.  Opened in 1836 on the banks of the Schuylkill, this burial ground was a departure from the crammed, bleak urban cemeteries of the past.

Samuel Sloan, one of the city’s most prolific architects of the so-called “Picturesque style,” was best known for his suburban villas and country homes.  His charming Italianate residences can be found all over West Philadelphia, most notably on Woodland Terrace.   These homes radiated Victorian propriety, yet also had a splashes of whimsy: gingerbread porches, glass cupolas, and Tuscan eaves. Yet Sloan’s largest surviving commission in Philadelphia is not a mansion, but rather the sprawling Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disease, completed in 1859. Also known as Kirkbride’s Hospital, it originally occupied a vast swath of land bounded by 46th Street to the east, 50th Street to the west, Market Street to the south, and Haverford Avenue to the north.

The original Samuel Sloan building for the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital, c.1860. Source: Wikipedia

The institute was founded by Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, a physician at the Pennsylvania Hospital who treated  the mentally ill in an age before depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder were medical mysteries, not diagnosed conditions. As a young medical student, Kirkbride saw the mentally ill treated (and punished) like convicts. As he built his own practice, Kirkbride theorized that in order to find the root cause of insanity, “we would have to go back to a defective early education the want of proper parental discipline,’ in which…(his) mind was always linked to parental affection.”  For him, the best treatment was compassion.  “It is only by a constant remembrance of the principles of an enlightened religion, and by untiring efforts to elevate, in every rational mode, and character of all these institutions, and by leaving nothing undone to extend and improve their facilities for treatment, that we shall be found practically to adopt that golden maxim which should be seen, or it not seen, at least practices in hospitals for the insane everywhere, ”all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even to them.”

Kirkbride’s plan for mental hospitals set the standard for over half a century.  Hospitals built according to the “Kirkbride Plan” had a so-called “batwing” floor plate.  The central administration block was located at the center of the structure, and was usually topped by a dome or tower.  The patient dormitories radiated out from this main block.  The more independent patients of the institution would be in the wings closer to the center of the structure.  The less independent ones would be placed in the more remote wings.  Each wing had its own parlor and restrooms, as well as dumbwaiters and speaking tubes to ensure smooth communication between the wards.

Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809-1883). Source: Wikipedia

The resulting structure resembled a British stately home more than a traditional mental institution. The buildings were surrounded by 130 acres of lawns and trees. Inmates could stroll, work in the kitchen garden, or go for carriage rides.  Dr. Kirkbride also set up lecture series for the edification of the residents.

Yet there was one grim reminder of the complex’s purpose: a stone wall encircling the entire site, keeping the residents in and curiosity seekers out.

A Beaux-Arts addition to the original Samuel Sloan campus of the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital, 49th and Market Streets, September 11, 1931.

Ultimately, grand architecture and beautiful gardens did not make up for the lack of scientific knowledge of the mentally ill . Despite Kirkbride’s best intentions, abuse and maltreatment ran rampant in even the most beautifully designed mental institutions, most notably at the infamous Pennhurst State School in Spring City, Pennsylvania. By the late 20th century, most of the grand asylums built according to the “Kirkbride Plan” were shuttered, their inmates given medications that, state officials hoped, would allow them to better integrate into greater society.

After the arrival of the Market Street Elevated in 1907, much of the acreage was sold off and developed into rowhouses.  Yet Samuel Sloan’s administration building survives largely intact. It still serves its original purpose: housing the Kirkbride Center, a 250-bed privately-owned treatment center for mental illness and addiction.

Sources:

Richard S. Greenwood, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory — Nomination Form, Kirkbride’s Hospital, Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital,” United States Department of the Interior, 1958.

Robert Morris Skaler, West Philadelphia: University City to 52nd Street (Charleston, Arcadia Publishing, 2002), p.7.

“Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride,” Kirkbride Buildings. http://www.kirkbridebuildings.com/about/kirkbride.html, accessed September 13, 2017.