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Coleman Sellers, Powelton Village, and the Gilded Age (Part II)

 

George Escol Sellers, in a photograph taken shortly before his death in 1899 at age 90. Source: Wikipedia.

The real Colonel Sellers, as I knew him in James Lampton, was a pathetic and beautiful spirit, a manly man, a straight and honorable man, a man with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be loved; and he was loved by all his friends, and by his family worshipped. It is the right word. To them he was but little less than a god. The real Colonel Sellers was never on the stage.

-Mark Twain, Autobiography

Poor George Escol Sellers could never quite match his older brother Coleman Sellers’ fame and success.  Yet what really bothered him was that he served as a literary stand-in for Mark Twain’s cousin James Lampton, a charming fool who was constantly dreaming of riches…and always falling short.

Escol, as his family knew him, had moved to Cincinnati as a young man. where he designed early steam locomotives with Coleman.  In addition to coming up with a process of making paper with vegetable fibers, he also was the author of Improvements in Locomotive Engines, and Railways, published in 1849. Ensconced at the Globe Rolling Mills and Wire Works, he dreamed of expanding the North’s burgeoning railroad system into the agrarian, slave-holding South. Bales of “King Cotton” would no longer travel to the looms of New England or the docks of New York by packet ship or river steamer, but swiftly by rail. He also dreamed of a transcontinental railroad that would one day link California with the rest of the country and earn him and his partners tremendous profits: $14.65 million a year, he estimated.

However, in 1850, Escol rashly sold his patent for a grade-climbing locomotive to an old friend from Philadelphia for $10,000 (about $200,000 today).  He then signed a consulting contract with the Panama Pacific Railroad, which built tracks to span the 50-mile isthmus between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.  When the first two of Escol Sellers’ locomotives arrived, however, his friend had left the company, and the railroad refused to honor the inventor’s patents. His brother Coleman, who also designed locomotives for the Panama Pacific Railroad, was somehow unable to lobby successfully on his brother’s behalf. Escol Sellers sued and lost, but walked away with a $20,000 pay off, a sum that allowed him to live in comfort for the rest of his life. He spent his free time amassing and curating a considerable collection of Native American artifacts.  When the transcontinental railroad was finally finished in 1869, Sellers could only read about the celebrations from afar.

Four years after the golden spoken was driven into place in Utah, the first edition of The Gilded Age rolled off the presses. The plot was focused on the Hawkins family, which tried to get rich selling 75,000 acres of unimproved land in Tennessee. They failed, and so the Hawkins’ adopted daughter Laura moved to Washington.  There, she tried to use her charm and beauty not just to climb the social ladder, but also to convince the federal government to purchase her family’s unwanted property. Although Twain and Warner skewered corrupt big city life and Washington high society, they also poked fun at small town ambition in the person of Colonel Escol Sellers, who appears throughout the book as as the eternal optimist, always in search of riches.

“The Brains,” a cartoon by Thomas Nast, 1871, published in Harper’s Weekly.

After one harsh financial setback, Twain wrote of Colonel Sellers: “It was hard to come down to humdrum ordinary life again after being a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical tar and fathers…He had to bolster up his wife’s spirits every now and then. On one of these occasions he said: ‘It’s all right, my dear, all right; it will all come all right in a little while. There’s $200,000 coming, and that will set things booming again.”

Twain appears to have taken a cruel delight in co-opting the name of the distinguished Philadelphian that his co-author Charles Dudley Warner had briefly met in Cincinnati many years ago.  “We will confiscate his name,” Twain wrote gleefully.  “The name you are using is common, and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand Sellerses bearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but Eschol Sellers is a safe name — it is a rock.”

The novel was a runaway success in 1873. and its title soon became synonymous with the shoddy ethos of post-Civil War American capitalism. Naturally a copy found its way into the hands of George Escol Sellers.  The distinguished inventor was so incensed that he took the train to Hartford, Connecticut and showed up on the doorstep of Warner and Twain’s publisher.

“My name is Escol Sellers,” he huffed. “You have used it in one of your publications. It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule. My people wish me to sue you for $10,000 damages.”

In response to a possible lawsuit, Twain and Warner halted production of the first edition and substituted the name Beriah Sellers for the next print run.  Yet another man named Beriah Sellers vehemently objected to this.

Finally, the two authors settled on the name Mulberry Sellers. But the damage to Escol Sellers’ reputation was done.  Despite his engineering prowess, he was forever branded as the Micawber-ish Colonel Sellers.  Matters were made worse when Twain revived the Colonel Sellers character in the 1892 novel The American Claimant.  And then there was the traveling stage version of The Gilded Age, in which actor John Raymond played Colonel Sellers to hoots and guffaws to audiences throughout the United States.

Escol Sellers died in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1899, comfortable but obscure, unlike his famous brother Coleman, a millionaire industrialist who resided in a sprawling family compound in West Philadelphia.

The Sellers ultimately had the last laugh, as Mark Twain squandered his own substantial fortune (and his wife’s inheritance) in a series of disastrous investments, and “get-rich-quick” schemes. The flamboyant author in a white suit most of his later years on the traveling lecture circuit, scrambling to rebuild his own reputation and riches.

33rd Street, looking north from Baring Street. The twin houses Coleman Sellers II built for his children Jessie and Coleman Jr. are on the left. The family referred to these houses collectively as the “Dove Cote.” Photo dated November 7, 1956.

Sources: 

“410 N. 33rd Street,” PoweltonVillage.org. http://poweltonvillage.org/interactivemap/files/410n33rd.htm

Barbara Schmidt, “We Will Confiscate His Name: The Unfortunate Case of George Escol Sellers,” TwainQuotes.com, n.d., http://www.twainquotes.com/ColonelSellers.html

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1874), p.244.

Dominic Vitiello, Engineering Philadelphia: The Sellers Family and the Industrial Metropolis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), p.54.

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Behind the Scenes Events and People Neighborhoods Snapshots of History

Coleman Sellers, Powelton Village, and The Gilded Age” (Part I)

Coleman Sellers II (1827-1907). Source; Wikipedia.com

While ‘The Gilded Age’ commercial obstacle course touches on many themes as it shifts uncomfortably between melodrama and satire, occasionally verging into burlesque, it always projects a powerful message about the futility and self-destructiveness of chasing after riches.

-R. Kent Rasmussen

Now divided into apartments, 3301 Baring Street is an imposing Italianate style mansion completed in 1857 for John McIlvain, a prominent lumber merchant, and his wife Sarah.  When it was built, the Powelton district of the newly annexed West Philadelphia was a fashionable suburban retreat for the city’s gentry, its street-lined streets worlds away from the smoke and noise of the burgeoning industrial metropolis.  The district was accessible only by horse-drawn streetcar, and its houses boasted spectacular views of the Schuylkill River and the Fairmount Waterworks.

At the end of the Civil War, the McIlvains sold the house to industrialist and inventor Coleman Sellers II and his wife Cornelia. Coleman Sellers was one of the kingpins of Philadelphia’s Quaker establishment. He also had the arts in his blood, as his mother was the daughter of Philadelphia’s famous painter Charles Wilson Peale. Born in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania in 1827, Coleman was trained as an engineer and spent his formative years in Cincinnati, Ohio as the superintendent of a rolling mill operated by his brothers George Escol and Charles.  Yet what really made Sellers’ career was locomotives — by the early 1850s, he had become a master engineer of these new machines that could transport the riches of the heartland to the East Coast at over 30 miles per hour.  Flush with cash, Sellers returned to his native city and built a thriving machinery works in the Spring Garden neighborhood.  As the 19th century continued and blossomed (or devolved) into what satirist Mark Twain called the “Gilded Age,” Sellers expanded his investments into other concerns, such as Midvale Steel in East Falls and the Millbourne Mills in his native Upper Darby.

Socially, Coleman Sellers enjoyed great success as well, joining the ranks of the Saturday Club and the Union League.  Yet his work ethic never flagged.  He designed and built locomotives for William Henry Aspinwall’s Panama-Pacific Railroad (a 50 mile rail line that cut down the travel time between New York and the new state of California from months to weeks), oversaw the construction of the Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant, served as a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, and patented an early motion picture camera that he christened the kinematoscope. His firm also built the shafting to the Corliss engine that powered the 1876 Centennial Exposition.  His true pet project was the Franklin Institute, the scientific powerhouse which he served as vice president and president.

He was also a firm believer that machinery needed no applied ornamentation, as its innate aesthetic beauty lay in its function. Foreshadowing the architecture of functionality later espoused by Louis Sullivan and LeCorbusier, Sellers declared that “we find that a new order of shapes, founded on the uses to which they are to be applied and the nature of the material of which they are made, have been adopted and the flaunting colors the gaudy stripes and glittering gilding has been replaced by this one tint, the color of the iron upon which it is painted.”

The Coleman Sellers II mansion at 3301 Baring Street, December 14, 1962.

Yet Sellers also somehow found the time to live graciously (and in colorful Victorian style) at his home at 33rd and Baring, which he and his wife expanded and lavishly redecorated over their four decades in residence.  According to his grandson Harold Colton in his 1961 book North of Market, Coleman “extended the west side adding a second room for his extensive library and enlarged the dining room making it quite long. The walls he hung with many portraits of the family by his grandfather Charles Wilson Peale. On the second floor the master bedroom over the dining room was lengthened and over the new library a sunny glass-enclosed conservatory was built, where his wife Cora could keep her flowers in the wintertime. Besides the improvements to the west wing he built between the kitchen and dining room a pantry over which were private baths on each floor. On the third floor over the kitchen wing he built an office for himself and a laboratory or shop reached by new back stairs. After the improvements were complete Jessie [Sellers, his daughter] was given the large bedroom on the third floor not only with a private hath but also with a fireplace.”

In fact, the 3300 block of Baring became something of a Sellers family compound.  Siblings and cousins pooled $23,000 to purchase it for their own homes.  In the early 1880s, the patriarch built Queen Anne twin houses at 410 and 412 North 33rd Street for his son Coleman Jr. and daughter Jessie, respectively.

Yet as Coleman Sellers’ star rose, the one of his younger brother and former business partner George Escol Sellers plummeted, in no small part due to a certain fictional character created by authors Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their collaborative 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today: Colonel Mulberry Sellers.

As Twain wrote: “Many persons regarded ‘Colonel Sellers’ as a fiction, an invention, an extravagant impossibility, and did me the honor to call him a “creation”; but they were mistaken. I merely put him on paper as he was; he was not a person who could be exaggerated.”

Sources: 

“3301 Baring Street,” PoweltonVillage.org. http://www.poweltonvillage.org/interactivemap/files/3301baring.htm

“Coleman Sellers (1827-1907), FrankFurness.org, n.d. http://frankfurness.org/profile/biography/influences/design/sellers/

Barbara Schmidt, “We Will Confiscate His Name: The Unfortunate Case of George Escol Sellers,” TwainQuotes.com, n.d., http://www.twainquotes.com/ColonelSellers.html

Dominic Vitiello, Engineering Philadelphia: The Sellers Family and the Industrial Metropolis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), p.177.

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Behind the Scenes Events and People Snapshots of History

Joe Sweeney: Legend of Boathouse Row (Part IV)

Vesper Boat Club, April 8, 2003. The club’s motto is “All together!”

When the Penn AC Olympians came back to Depression-era Philadelphia, they got jobs as builders and beer salesmen. Beer gave them their wages and also their strength.   “These were Depression era guys,” Joe Sweeney said of the men who would become his coaches and had grown up hauling kegs around. “They used to take the trolley from West Philadelphia, bring a lunch bag, row, eat lunch, and then go home.  All  were beer salesmen and worked for beer manufacturers. They’d go around to bars, take orders for beer, had to buy a round for everyone in the bar. I got to like them because I was from their old neighborhood. I got that whole culture thing.”

After he graduated from La Salle University in 1964, Joe Sweeney joined the Penn AC Rowing Association, the rowing club most associated with the “Irish mafia” godfather John B. “Jack” Kelly.  As an up-and-coming rower and building contractor, Kelly had spent his formative years at  the venerable Vesper Boat Club. In the 1920s, he and a group of his Irish-American friends founded the Pennsylvania Athletic Club and built a magnificent clubhouse just off Rittenhouse Square. Sadly, the club was completed just after the stock market crashed in 1929, and Penn AC had to move to more modest quarters.  Still personally flush with cash thanks to New Deal building contracts, the Democratic Party powerbroker and head of “Kelly for Brickwork” approached Vesper with a proposition: in exchange for a name change, Penn AC would give financial support to Vesper’s rowing programs.

Vesper turned Kelly down.

Undaunted, Kelly then set his sights on West Philadelphia Boat Club, which had fallen on hard times and only had about 4 active rowing members.  West Philadelphia happily agreed, and it changed its name to the Penn AC Rowing Association. Over the years, Penn AC became a hub of Catholic high school rowing. From this club, Curran and Dougherty coached generations of students from West Catholic High School, LaSalle High School, Cardinal O’Hara, and St. Joseph’s University.

Belfield, the former Wister mansion and home of the President of La Salle University. 5596 N.20th Street, October 14, 1957.

Patriarch Kelly took a liking to Joe Sweeney, the up-and-coming novice Lasalle rower and Navy vet. Sweeney, although he had never rowed before coming to college, quickly proved to be a skilled and powerful oarsman.  Shortly before his death in 1960, Kelly gave Sweeney a job with the Parks Commission. Kelly’s son John B. Kelly Jr. (known as Kel) carried on his family legacy, both as a rower and coxswain for Penn AC.  Kel had honed his athletic prowess under his father’s tutelage and as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. In the 1947, Kel won the Diamond Sculls Regatta at Henley, the same aristocratic contest that  his father could not enter because, supposedly, he had worked with his hands as a bricklayer.

“I got to know the family and I was of the age where young Jack was competing and I was in some races he was in,” Joe remembered.

He also got to know Jack’s beautiful sister Grace, who occasionally came back to Philadelphia from Hollywood.  When Grace was a girl, Kelly had used his position as president of the Parks Commission to get a playhouse built for her behind Belmont Mansion.  “Grace Kelly used to study her lines and performances in a bar on City Avenue called The Wynnewood,” Joe remembered. “We would stop there while on the rounds with the rowers and coaches who worked as beer salesmen.”

Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly in the 1956 movie High Society, based on the 1940 play The Philadelphia Story

When Kelly came back to Philadelphia after it was announced she would be marrying Prince Rainer II of Monaco, she of course paid a visit to Boathouse Row. As the star of the 1956 film High Society made the rounds with the Philadelphia rowing community, Joe Sweeney served as her chaperone. By the 1980s, Joe Sweeney was Commodore of the Schuylkill Navy, and traveled with Kel to Hong Kong to be the first Westerners to compete in the Crown Colony’s dragonboat races.

On the way to Hong Kong, the twenty men from Philadelphia had a layover in San Francisco.  They used their downtime to train, running up and down the city’s hills. “At the top of one hill, we stopped and rested,” Joe recalled, “and there was a residential brick building being built. Young Jack started to describe how a brick building was like a strong family.

“You have to have strong family connections,” Joe recalled Kel saying. “Each course was a family, each individual brick was a person. Great Irish malarkey.”

The men of Philadelphia won the silver in the Hong Kong dragon boat regatta, the first Western team to win a medal in the race’s history.

When Jack Kelly Jr. died in 1985, Joe served as the usher for the Monaco side of the family at the memorial service.

Grace Kelly (1929-1982), the Academy Award winning actress who became Princess of Monaco, in an MGM publicity photo from 1954.

Joe Sweeney, “History: The Saga of a Philadelphia Rowing Club,” Penn AC. http://pennac.org/about-us/history/, accessed March 27, 2017.

Interview of Joe Sweeney by Steven Ujifusa, November 9, 2016.

 

 

 

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Behind the Scenes Events and People Historic Sites Snapshots of History

Joe Sweeney: Legend of Boathouse Row (Part III)

Boathouse Row lighting ceremony, April 8, 2003.
Boathouse Row lighting ceremony, April 8, 2003.

After that rough introduction the to LaSalle rowing program, Joe Sweeney did come back to Crescent, again and again. He discovered that coaches Joe Dougherty and Tom “Bear” Curran were not just founts of rowing wisdom, but also had some remarkable rowing stories from their younger days.

One of Joe Sweeney’s favorites was the story of the Reich Chancellery theft.

***

The American “Big Eight” that won the gold at Liege, Belgium in 1930 consisted of Charles McIlvaine in bow; Tom Curran, 2; Jack Bratten, 3; John McNichol, 4; Myrlin Janes, 5; Joe Doughert, 6; Dan Barrows, 7; Chet Turner, stroke; and Tom Mack, coxswain.   In the final, the Penn AC “Big Eight” beat Italy by two lengths, and Denmark by six lengths.  During their trial runs, the Philadelphia Irish “Big Eight” made 2,000 meters in an astounding 5 minutes and 18 seconds.  According to Joe Sweeney, “there was considerable speculation that this might be the fastest eight ever seen.”

The Philadelphians of Penn AC teammates tried to repeat their time to enter the 1932 and 1936 Olympics, but they sadly lost to crews from the University of California and the University of Washington crews, respectively.  In 1936, the men of the Penn AC eight went to Berlin to participate in the controversial, high profile Olympic games of that year.  Although they didn’t make the US eight, the Penn AC men rowed in various smaller boats.

There, they faced a few challenges.  The first had to with equipment. The University of Washington crew (of The Boys in the Boat fame) brought their own boat with them: a magnificent cedar-and-mahogany eight handbuilt by the British-born master boatbuilder George Pocock. Yet the other American rowers, including the Penn AC boys, had to make do with quads and pairs loaned to them by the Germans.

The brand new LZ-129 zeppelin "Hindenburg" flying over the Berlin Olympics. Built for the transatlantic run between Frankfurt and Lakehurst, New Jersey, she would make 12 round trips that year. She exploded while landing in Lakehurst the following May. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica.
The brand new LZ-129 zeppelin “Hindenburg” flying over the Berlin Olympics. Built for the transatlantic run between Frankfurt and Lakehurst, New Jersey, she would make 12 round trips that year. The 800 foot long, hydrogen-filled airship would explode while landing in Lakehurst the following May. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica.

The Nazis had their own agenda: proving the athletic superiority of the Aryan race. at the expense of the foreign teams.

“The rowers swear they were sabotaged,” Sweeney said.  Tom Curran and Joe Dougherty, who rowed in the Penn AC pair, didn’t even make it to the finals.

The second problem was that their coach, Frank Mueller of Vesper, was a German national who was terrified of being detained in his native land and being conscripted.  He stayed behind.

The young men of Washington won the gold at the 1936 Olympics in their American boat, running the Langer See course in a mere 6:25.4, beating out Italy at 6:26, and Germany at 6:26.4.  Bringing their own boat across the Atlantic probably made that .4 second difference.

Rowing at the 1936 Summer Olympics on a German stamp. Source: Wikipedia
Rowing at the 1936 Summer Olympics on a German stamp. Source: Wikipedia

After the games were over, Dougherty, Curran, and the Penn AC boys stayed in Berlin for a week to take in the sights of the Germany capital, which on the surface seemed radiant and prosperous, a shining symbol of a renewed Germany.  Little did they know of the concentration camps, the incarceration of political dissidents, and the Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their rights as citizens. The highlight of their week in Berlin was a tour of the Reich Chancellery, recently renovated and expanded by architects Paul Troost and Leonhard Gall in a sleek, somewhat sinister Art Deco style.

While touring Adolf Hitler’s private office, the story went, Tom Curran spied an elegant pen set on the Fuhrer’s desk.  While no one was looking, he swiped it, and took it back to his room at the Olympic village.  That night, a group of men wearing black jackets, swastika armbands, and high jackboots showed up at the Penn AC dormitory, waking the men up.

Hitler's office in the New Reich Chancellery, completed in 1938 and designed by architect Albert Speer. The ceremonial office that the Penn AC crew visited was in the old Reich Chancellery. Source: Wikipedia.
Hitler’s office in the New Reich Chancellery, completed in 1938 and designed by architect Albert Speer. The ceremonial office that the Penn AC crew visited was in the old Reich Chancellery. Source: Wikipedia.

It was the Gestapo.

“The pen set is missing,” the lead Gestapo officer snapped at the Americans. “We want it back.”

Joe Dougherty, who was the captain, took a guess that it was the “bad boy” of the group who committed the crime.  He turned to Tom Curran and ordered him to hand the pen set over to the Gestapo.  Curran went back to his bunk and gave it to Dougherty.   The stern, starchy Philadelphia Penn AC captain then solemnly handed Hitler’s pens back to the Gestapo officer.

He turned to Curran and punched him square in the jaw. Curran fell to the floor, groaning in agony.

Dougherty then said to the Gestapo officer, “Are you satisfied or are you next?”

***

“I’ve heard that story from two or three other people,” Joe Sweeney said of the coaches he got to know twenty years later when he towed at LaSalle. “They were gentlemen. They had their own ethics. Really good guys.”

IMG_0213 (1)
Joe Sweeney being interviewed at the University Barge Club, November 9, 2016. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.

Sources:

Joe Sweeney, “History: The Saga of a Philadelphia Rowing Club,” Penn AC. http://pennac.org/about-us/history/, accessed March 27, 2017.

Interview of Joe Sweeney by Steven Ujifusa, November 9, 2016.

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Behind the Scenes Events and People Historic Sites Snapshots of History

Joe Sweeney: Legend of Boathouse Row (Part II)

Crescent Barge Club (right) and Pennsylvania Barge Club (left), January 3, 1984.
Crescent Boat Club (right) and Pennsylvania Barge Club (left), January 3, 1984.

After spending several years in the Navy, Joe Sweeney came back commercial obstacle course to Philadelphia in the late 1950s to go to college on the GI Bill. His widowed mother continued to work as a nurse, rising to become the head of Student Health Services at the University of Pennsylvania.

The day he started his freshman year at LaSalle University, Joe swung by Boathouse Row, across the Schuylkill River from his old Powelton Village neighborhood. He had shown up on campus dressed in his Navy uniform. The Christian Brothers gave him a suit to change into on that first day of school. Dressed in his new outfit, he was on the way to pick up his mother at Penn, but had an hour or two to kill on the way home. He knew that LaSalle’s rowing program was based out of the Crescent Boat Club, a Tudor-revival structure on the eastern end of the row. He walked into the boathouse and saw a group of young men (he was a decade older than the other Lasalle freshmen) gathered around coaches Joe Dougherty and Tom Curran, both “Boathouse Row gods.” Dougherty, a “straight-laced Irish Catholic” as Sweeney remembered him, had rowed in the American “Big Eight” that set the 2,000 meter record at the 1930 Olympics at Liège, Belgium. They were also part of the “Irish Mafia” that hung out at the neighboring Penn Athletic Club (“Penn AC”) over cards and whiskey: the Kellys, the McIlvaines, and other Irish-American patriarchs were prosperous but couldn’t join any of the elite downtown clubs. Tom Curran, the “bad boy of the group,” had also rowed with Dougherty at Liège.Inflatable Irish pub

John B. “Jack” Kelly, powerful contractor and prominent Democratic kingmaker, was the godfather of the group. He had famously been denied entry at the Henley Regatta’s “Diamond Sculls” because the rules stipulated that which excluded anyone “who is or ever has been … by trade or employment for wages a mechanic, artisan or labourer”. The rejection kindled a competitive fire in Kelly to not only push himself harder as an athlete (he was also an excellent boxer), but also his son Jack Jr, a Penn graduate who won the Henley “Diamond Sculls Challenge” in 1947 and 1949.   Using his enormous bricklaying fortune, Kelly Sr. built up the rowing program at the Pennsylvania Athletic Club.  He also mentored many aspiring young, working class Catholic rowers so they could compete toe-to-toe with the scions of Philadelphia’s Protestant gentry.

When Joe Sweeney entered Crescent that day, he had stumbled into the heart of Boathouse Row’s Catholic community. It was gritty, no-holds-barred competitive.

“Hey kid,” Dougherty shouted at Sweeney as he walked in the Crescent door, “would you like to row?”

One of the LaSalle eights was missing a man. Sweeney had never rowed in his life. He didn’t have a change of clothes, so he jumped into the eight in his Christian Brothers suit.

Sweeney not only had no idea how to row sweep, but he also learned to his horror that Coach Dougherty had his kids row at only one speed. “Full power upriver. Full power down river. No pieces.”

Yet Sweeney didn’t shirk.  “In the Navy, I did what I was told,” he said. “I was so sore, my legs were cut up, Grease all over my pants. I looked up at Tom Curran and I said, ‘you son of a b***h.”

Curran smiled back at Sweeney.  “You’ll be back!” the old Irishman said.

Witchita State men's eight at the 1990 Dad Vail Regatta.
Witchita State men’s eight at the 1990 Dad Vail Regatta.

 

Source: interview of Joe Sweeney by Steven Ujifusa, November 9, 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Behind the Scenes Events and People Snapshots of History

Joe Sweeney: Legend of Boathouse Row (Part I)

Map dated October 7, 1920, showing the grounds of Pennsylvania General Hospital (known as "Blockley") and the adjacent burial grounds for the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic.
Map dated October 7, 1920, showing the grounds of Pennsylvania General Hospital (known as “Blockley”) and the adjacent burial grounds for the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic.

Gray, lanky, and serene-faced, Joe Sweeney is now 80 years old.  The former Commodore of the Schuylkill Navy grew up in the Powelton Village section of West Philadelphia. His father was a prominent physician at Pennsylvania General Hospital, his mother a nurse.  His mother, born into a well-to-do North Carolina family, converted to her husband’s Roman Catholic faith, not just out of love, but out of a remarkable thing she saw during the 1918 flu epidemic.

“There were lines of people people on 34th Street trying to get into the hospital,” Joe said.  “The people who died at the hospital were buried across the street, where the Civic Center was.  The seminarians from St. Charles dug the graves.  Mom and Dad had horrible experiences, but she was inspired by what she saw.”

Young Joe came up through Philadelphia’s parochial school system, living in a big Victorian house at 38th and Spring Garden and attending St. Agatha’s Parish. Yet he never got the chance to row in high school: his father died when he was only ten years old.  Even though his father was a highly-paid physician, the Sweeneys did not have enough in savings to maintain their previous lifestyle.   “My mom put the older boys through parochial school,” he said, “but she couldn’t afford to keep everyone at home.”  To earn extra money, Joe would run errands for the local Pennsylvania Railroad employees.  During the 1940s, the PRR was in slow decline, but it was still one of the biggest employers in Philadelphia.  Thousands of brakeman, signalmen, locomotive engineers, and repairmen worked long and hard shifts at the Powelton yards adjacent to 30th Street Station, “In the afternoons, the clerks would give you an address to a train man to let him known when and where to report,” Joe remembered. “The PRR would give you a quarter to deliver the slip to the man at his home.”

3417 Baring Street, located one block south of Joe Sweeney's childhoold home, December 14, 1962.
3417 Baring Street, located one block south of Joe Sweeney’s childhoold home, December 14, 1962.

Running errands for the railroad also gave young Joe his first taste of alcohol.  As the dusk approached, he would stop by the houses on Brandywine Street, just north of Powelton Village, where the wives of the railroad workers were making dinner. “The mother would give you a metal pot, and you’d go to the nearest bar, where there would be a blackboard with the names of the guys.”

The bartender would fill up the pot with beer, and then give Joe a shotglass full of beer.

31st and Mantua avenue 4.20.55.ashx

“That was his pay to you,” Joe remembered.  “I remember being so small that I had to reach up to the bar to get that little shotglass full of beer.  It was the culture.  Teach you how to drink.”  Yet despite the heavy drinking, the clergy made sure that their flock would turn off the spigot in time for Sunday communion.   Monsignor Mellon of St. Agatha’s would stride into Deemer’s bar, fully dressed in his robes, and announce, “Alright men, It’s Sunday!”  And everyone would scatter and the bar would close.

When he turned 17, Joe left home and enlisted in the Navy.  He came back to Philadelphia in the late 1950s and enrolled at Lasalle University. It was there that he discovered rowing, which would turn into a lifelong passion.  It was also on Boathouse Row that he discovered the so-called “Irish Mafia,” headed by the legendary Kelly clan.

To be continued…

Source:

Interview of Joe Sweeney by Steven Ujifusa, November 9, 2016.

 

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West Philadelphia’s Satterlee Hospital (Part II)

Continued from Part I: 

1869 map showing the Satterlee Hospital site divided into lots for future real estate development. Source: Wikipedia.
1869 map showing the Satterlee Hospital site divided into lots for future real estate development. Source: Wikipedia.

The hard work of Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes and the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity paid off when the fighting finally stopped in the spring of 1865 and the Union emerged victorious from the Civil War.  Out of the 60,000 patients who passed through Satterlee Hospital, only 260 died of battle wounds and disease.  Sadly, countless veterans who survived American hospitals fell victim to another affliction: opiod addiction.  Faced with limited pain treatment options, Victorian physicians freely injected their patients with morphine to alleviate pain.   Wrote one Union veteran who survived the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville:  “No tongue or pen will ever describe…the depths of horror in which my life was plunged at this time; the days of humiliation and anguish, nights of terror and agony, through which I dragged my wretched being.” According to Horace Day’s estimate in 1868, between 80,000 and 100,000 Americans (north and south) were in the deadly clutches of the poppy-derived morphine molecule.

The Home of the Merciful Savior of Crippled Children, May 25, 1951. 45th and Chester Avenue, on the site of the former Satterlee Hospital.
The Home of the Merciful Savior of Crippled Children, May 25, 1951. 45th and Chester Avenue, on the site of the former Satterlee Hospital.

 

“When bachelor dens cast over waking hours a loneliness so deep,” c. 1904. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
“When bachelor dens cast over waking hours a loneliness so deep,” c. 1904. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

After the war, crews came in and demolished all of the structures on the Satterlee grounds, and the land slowly reverted back to meadow.  Mill Creek continued to rush through the site, draining into a large pond that had once supplied fresh water to the patients.  A few large twin houses sprung up along Baltimore and Chester Avenues during the next two decades, but it wasn’t until the electric trolleys arrived on Baltimore Avenue in the 1890s that the area around Satterlee began to become more densely developed.  The caring religious presence didn’t desert the area after the nuns departed, however.  The Home of the Merciful Savior for Crippled Children, erected at 45th Street and Baltimore Avenue, was organized by a local Episcopal minster and his wife for “the care, support and maintenance of children crippled by disease, accident or in other way.”

To preserve open space in the increasingly crowded streetcar suburb, the Clark family purchased 9 acres of the former Satterlee site from the city for $103,000 and turned into a verdant neighborhood park.    Yet even with the buildings gone, the memory of Satterlee did not fade. In 1916, residents of the area purchased a large stone from the Devil’s Den part of the Gettysburg Battlefield and placed it on the northern edge of Clark Park as a permanent commemoration of the work of Dr. Hayes, his medical staff, and the Sisters of Charity.  Artifacts such as bullets and uniform buttons still occassionally turn up in the dirt.

As for Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes, he did not rest on his laurels after his grueling Civil War work.  Rather, he returned to the frigid polar seas and continued his surveying and mapping work. In 1869, he made a third exploration voyage to the Arctic, cruising around Greenland aboard the brig Panther.  He wrote down his memories of this expedition in his book The Land of Desolation, and lectured frequently about his travels, but not so much about his Civil War record.   Like many men of his generation, he probably wanted to put all of the horrible things he had seen and heard behind him.  He moved to New York and served as a Republican in the New York State Assembly, and was an active member of the American Geographical Society of New York. He died in 1881, aged only 49. He never married.

Sources: 

Anon, Opium Eating: An Autobiographical Sketch by An Habituate (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1876), p.67.

Dillon J. Carroll, “Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction in the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Civil War Era, November 22, 2016.

“Friends of Clark Park.” http://www.friendsofclarkpark.org/about-clark-park/, accessed January 26, 2017.

“Satterlee Artifacts Unearthed,” http://www.friendsofclarkpark.org/category/clark-park/gettysburg-stone/, accessed January 26, 2017.

Hayes, Isaac Israel, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume XI (1881-1890), http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/hayes_isaac_israel_11E.html, accessed January 26, 2017.

“History — The HMS School,” http://hmsschool.org/about/history/, accessed January 26, 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Events and People Historic Sites Neighborhoods

West Philadelphia’s Satterlee Hospital (Part I)

The site of Satterlee Hospital, 43rd and Chester Avenue, May 15, 1956.
The site of Satterlee Hospital, 43rd and Chester Avenue, May 15, 1956.

Excerpt from “The Wound-Dresser” by Walt Whitman

Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.

Nowadays, it is the Saturday farmers’ market draws crowds to verdant Clark Park, the heart of West Philadelphia’s Spruce Hill neighborhood.  Yet only a few short steps from the stands displaying pink heirloom tomatoes and canned Amish chowchow is a large chunk of rock pulled from the Gettysburg battlefield.

It is the only reminder of what stood here a century-and-a-half ago: America’s largest Civil War military hospital. During the worst years of fighting, over 5,000 wounded soliders lived here, many suffering from debilitating, horrendous injuries.

According to the late historian Shelby Foote, the reason for the high casualties during the Civil War was that the cutting-edge weapons of industrial warfare were far ahead of the generals’ Napoleonic tactics.  Massed infantry charges met with very accurate, withering fire from the newfangled rifled musket and heavy artillery. When using a rifled musket when paired with the conical Minie ball, a soldier could kill an enemy at half-a-mile.  After a major battle, the statistics printed in Northern and Southern newspapers were so vast as to be almost minded numbing.  At the 1862 Battle of Antietam, for example, an estimated 87,000 Union soldiers under the leadership of Philadelphia-born General George B. McClellan faced off against 37,000 Confederates under the command of General Robert E. Lee.  September 17, 1862 remains the bloodiest day in American military history: 3,600 men killed, 17,000 wounded, and 1,800 captured or missing on the banks of a creek in rural Maryland.

The Battle of Gettysburg, which took place 10 months after Antietam, ended with a decisive Union victory, but there were over 50,000 casualties on both sides over three hot July days.  At the same time, General U.S. Grant captured the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, opening up the Mississippi River to Union naval traffic and cutting the Confederacy in two. Yet many Northerners did not herald General U.S. Grant as a hero.  First Lady Mary Lincoln derided him as “Butcher Grant.” In response, President Lincoln said, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”

Where did these thousands of “wounded” men go?  Some recovered from relatively minor injuries, and then donned their uniforms again to fight another day.  But then there were the amputees, whose shattered legs and arms were sawn off in makeshift battlefield hospitals.  In the days before sterilization, Army surgeons would reuse the same blood-soaked saws again and again.  For the poor patient, the only anesthesia was a slug of whiskey. Infection ran rampant. And then there were men whose faces had been gruesomely disfigured.  They were missing eyes, ears, even parts of their jaws.  Many of them ended up addicted to the opium-based drugs that doctors freely distributed to them to alleviate their intense physical and psychological pain.

Philadelphia in the mid-19th century was arguably the preeminent American medical city.  The University of Pennsylvania, still located at 8th and Chestnut, was more famous for its medical school and teaching hospital than its undergraduate programs. Due to its relatively close proximity to the killing fields of Virginia, not to mention its large and well-trained medical community, Philadelphia was a logical place for a new hospital for convalescing veterans.   In 1862, Surgeon-General William Alexander Hammond appointed Philadelphia physician Isaac Israel Hayes to construct a new Army hospital on 15 acres in then-rural West Philadelphia.  The setting was woodsy and pastoral, and Washington’s Army brass hoped that the clean country air of the Philadelphia suburbs would not only hasten the soldiers’ recovery, but also uplift their spirits.

Hayes was a natural choice. Not only was he an esteemed physician, but a brilliant planner.  After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1853, the young Quaker signed on as ship’s surgeon in one of many expeditions in search of lost British explorer Sir John Franklin, and on a later Arctic expedition allegedly became the first European to tread the shores of Ellesmere Island.   The logistics of planning a 4,500-bed hospital from scratch, and in a hurry, dwarfed even those of planning a multi-year Arctic expedition, but Hayes was not deterred.  He put pen to paper and laid out a temporary city of canvas tents and wood structures on the site.  It was later calculated that that at its peak, Satterlee consumed 800,000 pounds of bread, 16,000 pounds of butter and 334,000 quarts of milk per year, all of which had to be brought in by horse-and-wagon on muddy, rutted Baltimore Pike.

Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes. Source: Wikipedia.
Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes. Source: Wikipedia.
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Birdseye view of Satterlee Hospital. Image from Pinterest.

For Hayes, who had just returned from the Arctic, being thrown into the bloody cauldron of the Civil War was a rude awakening, as he had been away from America for so much of his adult life.  His years of sailing through fields of icebergs in search of Franklin and the Northwest Passage were as if “set down in a dream.”

To augment the ranks of professional physicians, Hayes partnered with the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity, who would live in an adjacent convent.   Twenty or so nuns would change the bed sheets, empty the chamber pots, dress festering wounds, and most importantly, offer emotional solace to those lonely men in agony, far from home and loved ones.  According to biographer Douglas W. Wamsley, Dr. Hayes instructed the medical staff to do whatever it took to avoid amputations, thus keeping the soldiers’ bodies whole.  Given the lack of sterilization, this policy might have actually prevented deaths from infection.

Walt Whitman’s poem: “The Wound-Dresser.” Whitman served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War.

Sources: 

Faith Charlton, “1832 Cholera Outbreak in Philadelphia and Duffy’s Cut,” PAHRC, Sisters of Charity, http://www.pahrc.net/tag/sisters-of-charity/, accessed November 1, 2016.

Albin J. Kowalewski, “The Civil War’s Rip Van Winkle,” The New York Times, April 29, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/albin-j-kowalewski/, accessed November 1, 2012.

“U.S. Grant (transcript),” The American Experience, WGBH, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/grant-transcript/?flavour=mobile, accessed November 1, 2016.

“The Civil War’s Satterlee Hospital,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 25, 2013. http://www.philly.com/philly/video/inquirer/20130625_NDN_INQUIRER_Civil_War_s_Satterlee_Hospital.html, accessed November 1, 2016.

“U.S. Grant,” The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/ulyssessgrant, accessed November 1, 2016.

Categories
Historic Sites Neighborhoods Snapshots of History

Campo’s Delicatessen and Our Lady of Loreto (Part II)

Campo butcher shop 1954.ashx
Campo’s Butcher Shop, intersection of Carpenter and 9th Street, August 3, 1954.

To read Part I, click here

In the 1930s, Ferdinando’s son young Ambrose went to work at his uncle’s butcher’s shop in South Philadelphia, which he would eventually take over. Because few families owned cars during the lean years of the Great Depression, most Philadelphians still shopped for food in their neighborhoods, bringing home only what they could carry. Meat was expensive. Housewives would usually pick out a live turkey, chicken, or goose, have the butcher do the slaughtering, and then take the carcass home to pluck and dress themselves. “The animals were our pets all year,” remembered Ferdinando’s grandson Michael Sr. “Well, until Eastertime.”

In 1947, joining the postwar exodus of second and third generation Italians out of South Philly, Ambrose Campo set up a new establishment at 2401 S.62nd Street in a squat, two-story brick building decorated with pressed-tin bay windows and cornices. Like countless Philadelphia business owners, the Campos ran their butcher shop on the first floor and lived in an apartment on the second floor. Everyone in the family was expected to help out, whether it was mixing meatballs, manning the cash register, or sweeping up at closing time.

By the 1970s, as supermarkets squeezed family butcher shops out of business, Ambrose’s son Frank decided to remake Campo’s as a delicatessen. The delicatessen was originally a German concept: it served sandwiches and other prepared meals to sit-down customers, and also catered meals for family events and local fraternal organizations. Jewish delicatessens served only kosher meats (pastrami, corned beef, brisket) and sold no dairy products, while Italian and German ones served plenty of pork products (salami, prosciutto, soppresata) and specialty cheeses such as provolone. “Butcher shops were becoming a thing of the past,” said 33-year old Frank Campo, grandson of Ambrose, “and after some years of decreased sales my father started making sandwiches with the shop’s steaks and sausages.”

Campo's Deli at 62nd and Grays Avenue,
Campo’s Deli at 62nd and Grays Avenue,
Ambrose Campo holding a slaughtered calf, 1956. Image courtesy of Michael Campo.
Ambrose Campo holding a slaughtered calf, 1956. Image courtesy of Michael Campo.

Yet despite this adaptation, the old Italian-American community in Southwest Philadelphia that had sustained Campo’s Deli continued to disperse. Many of the residents moved to newly constructed automobile suburbs in South Jersey and Delaware County, a pattern followed in other mostly-Catholic neighborhoods such as Grays Ferry. In 2001, Campo’s Deli closed its 62nd Street location and moved to a new site at 214 Market Street in Old City, and also opened concession stands in Citizens Bank Ballpark. Not long after that, the Philadelphia Archdiocese announced that Our Lady of Loreto parish was to be shuttered. “Yes the area has become somewhat economically depressed and church attendance has declined,” wrote Damian D’Orsaneo to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003, “but is that any reason to close a church? I’m not a biblical scholar, but one thing I remember from 12 years of Catholic schooling is that Jesus’ followers were, for the most part, the poor and downtrodden. If this church provides peace and comfort to even a few, isn’t that a good enough reason to keep its doors open?”

The church thankfully did not meet the wrecking ball, and continues to serve local worshipers as Grace Christian Fellowship. Its colorful murals and Art Deco facade still attract the attention of airport-bound motorists hoping to avoid traffic on I-76.

Sources:

Campo family history provided to Steven Ujifusa by Michael Campo, June 23, 2016.

Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, June 23, 2016.

Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, October 18, 2016.

Anna Maria Chupa, “St. Joseph’s Day Altars,” Louisiana Project, Houston Institute for Culture, http://www.houstonculture.org/laproject/stjo.html, accessed October 16, 2016.

Damian D’Orsaneo, “The Sad Fate of Our Lady of Loreto,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 27, 2003, http://articles.philly.com/2003-05-27/news/25459497_1_church-attendance-final-mass-parish-school, accessed October 14, 2016.

Interview of Ron Donatucci by Steven Ujifusa, January 26, 2016.

Natalie Hardwick, “Top 10 Foods to Try in Sicily,” BBC Good Food, http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/top-10-foods-try-sicily, accessed October 14, 2016.

David Rosengarten, “The Cuisine of Abruzzo: Easy to Love, Not So Easy to Describe,” The Huffington Post, August 6, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rosengarten/the-cuisine-of-abruzzo_b_5651554.html, accessed October 14, 2016.

Inga Saffron, “Good Eye: This Catholic Church Celebrates the Miracle of Flight Two Ways,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 14, 2016, http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/inga_saffron/20161016_Good_Eye__This_Catholic_church_celebrates_the_miracle_of_flight_two_ways.html?photo_3, accessed October 15, 2016.

“Puglia,” Rustico Cooking, http://www.rusticocooking.com/puglia.htm, accessed October 14, 2016.

“The Best Food of Calabria,” Walks of Italy, https://www.walksofitaly.com/blog/food-and-wine/food-of-calabria, accessed October 20, 2016.

 

Categories
Behind the Scenes Historic Sites Neighborhoods

Campo’s and Our Lady of Loreto (Part I)

The oldest surviving cookbook, De re coquinaria (On Cookery), was compiled by Marcus Gavius Apicius in the first century A.D., the high water mark of the Roman Empire.  Each region of Italy has been reveling in its own favorites ever since: “pane con la milza” (open-faced pork spleen sandwich) from Sicily, coretello (minced lamb and lamb innards) from Abruzzo, ‘Nduja (spreadable sausage) from Calabria, and penne with arugula and tomatoes from Puglia.

For Italian immigrant families who came to the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, village recipes were crucial parts ties to their familial and regional pasts, and they died hard in the American urban melting pot.  The Philly cheese steak, supposedly “invented” by brothers Pat and Harry Olivieri, did not come along until the 1930s, and originally called for an Italian roll and provolone cheese, not the Americanized orange cheese product.

To Ronald Donatucci, the current registrar of wills and native of the Girard Estates neighborhood, the Jews and the Italian-Americans of Philadelphia shared many common cultural traits, among them a love of food, a focus on education, and (more often than not), a strong mother figure. “They’re so similar,” Donatucci recalled. “My father instilled education in myself and my siblings.” Like the Jews, with whom they often coexisted in tightly-packed rowhouse blocks, Italian immigrants quickly applied the trades they learned back in the old country to the streets of Philadelphia, especially in culinary and the building trades.  And they kept these businesses in the family. Bakeries, cheese shops, and confectionaries flourished in Italian neighborhoods. Older women in various neighborhoods would go to the early Sunday Mass at their local parish church, then do their grocery shopping for the week.  Young boys were expected to help them with their bags.

Food was not just central to regular family gatherings, but also to the myriad feast days and festivals of the Roman Catholic calendar year.  Each village had its own patron saint.  One of the biggest, of course, was the Festa di San Giuseppe (Feast of St. Joseph, patron saint of Sicily), celebrated every March 19 with limes, wine, fava beans, cookies, breadcrumbs (representing the sawdust from Joseph’s carpenter shop), and zeppole cakes.

1106-1114 South Street 5.3.1930ashx
Campo Butcher Shop on the 1100 block of South Street, May 3, 1930.

One such culinary family was the Campo clan–friends of the Donatuccis–who settled in Southwest Philadelphia in the parish of Our Lady of Loreto.   In 1905, the three Campo brothers (Fernando, Francesco, and Venerando) arrived in Philadelphia on the Red Star liner SS Friesland.  They were natives of the Sicilian village of Cesaro. According to Ferdinando’s great-grandson Michael Campo, the family had been butchers for generation: there were at least seven men named Campo operating butcher shops in Sicily in the early 1900s.   Most likely through family help and local Italian-American banks, Venerando raised enough capital to open his own butcher shop at the intersection of Carpenter and South 9th Street in Philadelphia. In the meantime, his brother Ferdinando opened a similar establishment in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Eventually, Ferdinando’s son Ambrose opened another butcher’s shop, this one at 62nd and Grays Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia, and joined a brand new parish that had opened its doors in the neighborhood.  The church, finished in 1938, was the anchor of a neighborhood of tidy brick rowhouses surrounding the main thoroughfare leading from West Philadelphia to the new Philadelphia Municipal Airport.  When aviator Charles Lindbergh dedicated the airport shortly after his epic 1927 transatlantic flight, Philadelphia’s city fathers named this arterial street in his honor. Designed in the fashionable Art Deco style by local architect Frank L. Petrillo, Our Lady of Loreto was a radical departure from the baroque and Byzantine revival popular with church architects such as Henry Dagit and Edward F. Durang.  Inside and out, Our Lady of Loreto (the patron saint of air travel) looked more like a 1930s airport terminal than a church.  According to Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron, “Petrillo’s design cleverly links that story with the great technical advance of the 1930s: commercial air travel. Because streamline moderne’s strong, horizontal lines evoked speed, it was a favorite architectural choice for new airports’ terminals.” The airplane theme didn’t stop with the building envelope.  According to church teaching, on May 10, 1291, a flock of angels flew the house where the Virgin Mary was born from the Holy Land to the comparative safety of the Italian village of Loreto.

The mural on the church’s facade depicted this miracle as propeller-driven planes swoop around the heavy-lifting angels.

Feast of St. Anthony, c.1985. Image courtesy of Michael Campo.
Feast of St. Anthony, c.1985. Image courtesy of Michael Campo/Our Lady of Loreto Facebook group.

The modern style of the church reflected the forward-looking aspirations of the 1,200 or so families who belonged to the parish,  They saw Southwest Philadelphia as a step up from cluttered old South Philadelphia.  For the members of this parish, the most important festival was the feast of St. Anthony, which took place on the first week of June. “I remember being a kid and my parents giving me a dollar to pin on the St. Anthony statue, for which I would get a blessed roll,” remembered Michael Campo. “The roll was from Mattera’s Bakery, which was the neighborhood bakery, and located on the same intersection of 62nd and Grays Avenue, as the Church and Campo’s.”  Following the parade was a carnival, complete with fireworks and a dunk-the-clown contest.  “Looking back on it, it was probably a couple roman candles,” Campo said of the fireworks dislay, “but when I was 10, It felt like I was at Disney World.”

Sources: 

Campo family history provided to Steven Ujifusa by Michael Campo, June 23, 2016.

Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, June 23, 2016.

Email correspondence, Michael Campo to Steven Ujifusa, October 18, 2016.

Anna Maria Chupa, “St. Joseph’s Day Altars,” Louisiana Project, Houston Institute for Culture, http://www.houstonculture.org/laproject/stjo.html, accessed October 16, 2016.

Damian D’Orsaneo, “The Sad Fate of Our Lady of Loreto,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 27, 2003, http://articles.philly.com/2003-05-27/news/25459497_1_church-attendance-final-mass-parish-school, accessed October 14, 2016.

Interview of Ron Donatucci by Steven Ujifusa, January 26, 2016.

Natalie Hardwick, “Top 10 Foods to Try in Sicily,” BBC Good Food, http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/top-10-foods-try-sicily, accessed October 14, 2016.

David Rosengarten, “The Cuisine of Abruzzo: Easy to Love, Not So Easy to Describe,” The Huffington Post, August 6, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rosengarten/the-cuisine-of-abruzzo_b_5651554.html, accessed October 14, 2016.

Inga Saffron, “Good Eye: This Catholic Church Celebrates the Miracle of Flight Two Ways,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 14, 2016, http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/inga_saffron/20161016_Good_Eye__This_Catholic_church_celebrates_the_miracle_of_flight_two_ways.html?photo_3, accessed October 15, 2016.

“Puglia,” Rustico Cooking, http://www.rusticocooking.com/puglia.htm, accessed October 14, 2016.

“The Best Food of Calabria,” Walks of Italy, https://www.walksofitaly.com/blog/food-and-wine/food-of-calabria, accessed October 20, 2016.