Author: Steven Ujifusa

Only the discreet letters “RC” on the brass doorplates identify 1811 Walnut Street as the former home of one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious clubs. The Beaux-Arts facade remains, but the building behind it is gone. Paneling from the club still survives in the bar of Rex 1516 restaurant on South Street. The remaining furniture — much of it designed by member Frank Furness — as well as the extensive collection of artwork — was scattered to the winds following the club’s sale of the building in the early 1990s. The lower two floors now house a Barney’s. The upper three floors, with their commanding views of Rittenhouse Square, are part of the 10 Rittenhouse condominium complex. They are vacant, but have most recently been listed at $15 million.

For nearly a century, the view from those bow windows was considered the finest in the city.

At least in the eyes of one famous author.

The Rittenhouse Club was founded in 1874 by a group of Philadelphia gentleman who originally named it the “Social Art Club.”  According to Philadelphia social chronicler Nathaniel Burt, its membership had “more literary and less sporting tastes” than the membership of the older Philadelphia Club.  This trend continued well into the club’s existence. According to one still-living member: “At the Rittenhouse Club, one would find Latin commentary scribbled in the margins of the library’s books. At the Philadelphia Club, the members would be most concerned with the latest racing news from Saratoga.”

 

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was big and rich enough to support two major men’s clubs, plus the distinctly political Union League. The Main Line and Chestnut Hill were still largely weekend and summer retreats — most wealthy families still lived and worked in town. The Rittenhouse Club’s membership eventually purchased the home of Congressman James Harper on the north side of Rittenhouse Square, which by the 1880s was arguably the most fashionable address in Philadelphia.  By 1900, the club raised funds to purchase an adjoining townhouse to create an even larger structure fronting the square.

If the Philadelphia Club was an annex for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Rittenhouse Club served a similar function for faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and the gentlemen architects of the T-Square Club. Here, members of the business elite mixed with architects, clergymen, and professors.  Among the members during the club’s Gilded Age heyday were steamship magnate Clement Griscom, architect Frank Furness, his Shakespeare scholar brother Horace Furness, University of Pennsylvania provost Dr. William Pepper, his nephew Senator George Wharton Pepper, and financier E.T. Stotesbury.

Perhaps the club’s most famous admirer — if not member — was the novelist Henry James, who although born in New York, had moved to London and became a British subject.  In The American Scene, James described his view from a soft leather chair of the Rittenhouse Club as that of “the perfect square.”  His host was the pistol-wielding Dr. J William White, chief surgeon of the First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry and director of athletics at the University of Pennsylvania.

James was an inveterate snob, but he wasn’t the only one content with the view. As Nathaniel Burt quipped, “there do not seem to be many stories of hearts being broken because of a failure to get into the Rittenhouse Club; nonetheless, those that are in it are sufficiently pleased.” To be a member, one had to have the means and the time for leisurely wet lunches.  The cuisine was Edwardian in its richness, the wine list extensive. Membership depended heavily on family, college, and private school connections. Talking business was strictly prohibited.  And like other urban clubs of its type, its membership committee generally excluded those who did not come from the “right” background.

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The opening number to the Disney musical film “The Happiest Millionaire,” set at Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr.’s townhouse at 2014 Walnut Street in the 1910s. “Fortuosity” is sung by an Irish immigrant (played by Tommy Steele) who had just been hired to work as the Biddle family’s butler. Elated, he struts through Rittenhouse Square on his way to meet his new employers. Ultimately, “The Happiest Millionaire” proved less enduring than Walt Disney and the Sherman brothers’ previous collaboration: “Mary Poppins.”

Following World War II, the Rittenhouse Club suffered a long decline, in which the building slid from elegance into genteel decay. Funds ran low, and the membership roster dwindled.  Businesses moved out of town, and the three martini lunch became a relic of the past.  In addition, the federal tax code no longer allowed individuals to write off their club dues on tax returns.  As a result, many of the city’s clubs disbanded. Those that did survive opened up their membership rolls to previously excluded religious and ethnic groups. In the early 1990s, the Rittenhouse Club sold its building and found new quarters in the city.

The building sat vacant for a decade. Finally, the developers of 10 Rittenhouse purchased the structure and demolished everything except the limestone facade, which was restored to its full glory.  Today, anyone can go up to the second story of Barney’s and look through the same bowed windows that Henry James did a century ago.

The comfy leather chairs are gone, as is the rich wood paneling on the library walls, but the view is still the same, and the square is still as close to perfect as an urban space can be.

To see a menu from a March 1903 luncheon at the Rittenhouse Club, click here. 

Sources: 

Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999),, p.264.

Nancy Heinzen, Perfect Square: A History of Rittenhouse Square (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009), p.95.

Liz Spikol, “Comcast CEO Brian Roberts Buys at 10 Rittenhouse,” CurbedPhilly, October 19, 2012.  http://philly.curbed.com/archives/2012/10/19/comcast-ceo-brian-roberts-buys-part-of-10-rittenhouse.php

In 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had the audacity — some might say hubris — to crown himself Emperor of France, just as his uncle had done half a century earlier.  He took the title of Napoleon III.

French progressives such as author Victor Hugo despaired.  They had just overthrown another king — this time the bumbling, pear-shaped Louis-Philippe of the House of Orleans.  In the monarchy’s place, they had installed a republican style of government, and Louis-Napleon had successfully won the presidential campaign in 1848.  But Louis-Napoleon had no intention of remaining a mere elected official.  His lifelong dream was to reestablish the Bonaparte dynasty, and supposedly finish the work that his family had began during the French Revolution. To do that, he had to be not president, not king, but emperor.  So only three years after his election, Louis-Napoleon engineered a coup d’etat to overthrow the Second Republic.  After much bloodshed and rioting in the streets of Paris, Louis-Napoleon and his partisans won the day.  The Bonaparte family was back in power.

Victor Hugo himself was forced into exile, where he wrote three damning indictments of the new regime: Napoleon Le Petit (Napoleon the Small), Histoire d’un crime (A History of a Crime), and his poetry collection Les Châtiments (The Punishments).

Victor Hugo, "Imperial Reveles" from Les Châtiments, 1852

     Cheer, courtiers! round the banquet spread—
       The board that groans with shame and plate,
     Still fawning to the sham-crowned head
       That hopes front brazen turneth fate!
     Drink till the comer last is full,
     And never hear in revels' lull,
     Grim Vengeance forging arrows fleet,
           Whilst I gnaw at the crust
           Of Exile in the dust—
     But Honor makes it sweet!

     Ye cheaters in the tricksters' fane,
       Who dupe yourself and trickster-chief,
     In blazing cafés spend the gain,
       But draw the blind, lest at his thief
     Some fresh-made beggar gives a glance
     And interrupts with steel the dance!
     But let him toilsomely tramp by,
           As I myself afar
           Follow no gilded car
     In ways of Honesty.

     Ye troopers who shot mothers down,
       And marshals whose brave cannonade
     Broke infant arms and split the stone
       Where slumbered age and guileless maid—
     Though blood is in the cup you fill,
     Pretend it "rosy" wine, and still
     Hail Cannon "King!" and Steel the "Queen!"
           But I prefer to sup
           From Philip Sidney's cup—
     True soldier's draught serene.

     Oh, workmen, seen by me sublime,
       When from the tyrant wrenched ye peace,
     Can you be dazed by tinselled crime,
       And spy no wolf beneath the fleece?
     Build palaces where Fortunes feast,
     And bear your loads like well-trained beast,
     Though once such masters you made flee!
           But then, like me, you ate
           Food of a blessed fête—
     The bread of Liberty!

 

Why did the new emperor take the title Napoleon III? The reason was that Napoleon I’s infant son by Marie-Louise of Austria — his only legitimate heir — had technically reigned as Emperor of France for a few days after his father abdicated in 1814.  After his father’s defeat at Waterloo, little Napoleon Jr. was sent to live with his mother at Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna.  He died at 21.  He never saw his father again.

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“Le Grand Galopp de chemin de fer” by Emile Waldteufel (1837-1915), a popular dance music composer during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III. A celebration of the railroads connecting Paris to the rest of the country. Translation: “The Railroad Galop”

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“Minuit” (Midnight) by Emile Waldteufel. The chimes supposedly represent the clocks in the Tuileries ballroom striking midnight.

Now the leader of the Second Empire and ensconced in the grandeur of the Tuillieries Palace (the former Paris home of star-crossed predecessors Napoleon I and Louis XVI), Emperor Napoleon III started to refashion the old city of Paris into a modern, imperial city.  He hired city planner Baron George-Eugene Haussmann to lay out grand boulevards and oversee the construction of beautiful new apartment buildings to line them.  To accomplish this, Haussmann demolished huge swaths of the cramped medieval city, displacing thousands of residents.  He also built several new lavish railway stations, which connected Paris to the rest of the country.  Architect Hector-Martin Lefuel renovated both the royal residence at the Tuileries Palace and the Louvre museum, added grand new apartments in a neo-Baroque style. The crowning achievement of Napoleon III’s building program was the new opera house. Designed by Charles Garnier, the Paris Opera could seat 2,000 patrons in marbled, gilded splendor. The “Exposition Universelle de 1867” was arguably the high-water mark of the Second Empire — the world’s fair attracted nearly 10 million visitors from around the world.  Although its purpose was to allow nations to exhibit their artistic and industrial achievements, its real goal was to showcase Paris as the cultural capital of the world.Its success inspired a group of Philadelphia businessmen to mount a similar grand world’s fair in Fairmount Park nine years later.

Napoleon III might have had superb taste in architecture, but he did not possess his uncle’s military genius.  In 1870, he made the mistake of underestimating Otto von Bismarck, Minister President of Prussia.  The Franco-Prussian War was sparked by disputes by succession to the Spanish throne and control of the Southern German states. This ill-advised war caused the Second Empire to collapse like a house of cards.  German troops captured Emperor Napoleon II at the Battle of Sedan, and besieged the city of Paris itself, starving the residents into submission.  In the mayhem that followed, Communard mobs burned down the Tuileries Palace, Hotel de Ville, and other symbols of imperial power. The Louvre itself almost burned down when flames spread from the adjoining Tuileries Palace. The incomplete Opera House was spared.

France’s humiliation at the hands of Prussia and Bismarck sowed the seeds of another, deadlier conflict — one that would engulf all of Europe — forty years later. As for the former Napoleon III: he was released from captivity and exiled to England, where he died a few years later. The Bonapartes were gone for good.

Despite the Second Empire’s wretched end, its grand aesthetic fascinated American architects and designers. Richard Morris Hunt, who studied at at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Lefuel in the 1840s, brought French formalism back to his American practice. The primary mentor of the young Frank Furness, Hunt designed mansions for wealthy Americans families such as the Vanderbilts — most notably the Breakers for Cornelius Vanderbilt II — as well as grand public buildings such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  During Napoleon III’s reign, Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) trained an entire generation of American architects artists whose work would transform American culture: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Chester Holmes Aldrich, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Alexander Stirling Calder (son of the sculptor of the William Penn statue atop City Hall), and Thomas Hastings, to name a few. Paul Philippe Cret, a distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania and designer of the Parisian-style Benjamin Franklin Parkway, was also a Beaux-Arts graduate.

In the decade following the Civil War, Gilded Age Philadelphia threw Quaker modesty out the window. The city was richer than ever, with fortunes made in railroads, manufacturing, and (in the case of future streetcar plutocrat Peter Widener) provisioning the Union Army. The Union League, designed by John Fraser and completed in 1865, was perhaps the first large-scale Second Empire structure in the city. Housing developers caught the French bug, as well.  Starting in the 1870s, row houses in Philadelphia adopted the mansard roof, a favorite architectural device of Second Empire architects.  The term “mansard” was a corruption of Jules-Hardouin Mansart, a baroque architect who popularized the hipped gambrel roof during the reign of Louis XIV.  This architectural device became  a French trademark. It was not only used on royal palaces, but also on the apartment blocks built by Baron Haussmann in Paris during the 1850s and 60s. A wood-and-slate “mansard roof” not only made a house look more imposing on the outside, but also made the attic story  habitable while minimizing construction costs. Because a mansard roof is set back from the cornice line, it use also allowed builders to comply with setback restrictions while maximizing rents.

The grandest testament to the Second Empire style’s cultural impact in Philadelphia is City Hall.  In 1871, the same year as the fall of Napoleon III’s regime, Scottish-born architect John McArthur Jr. began construction of this grandiose and expensive essay in the Second Empire style.  Modeled heavily on the Lefuel’s additions to the Louvre in Paris and smothered in allegorical statues, the stone structure took thirty years to complete, by which time it was out-of-step with the cleaner lines of the neoclassical style.

Although the largest municipal building in the world at the time of its opening in 1901, critics did not herald it as an American Louvre. Rather, it was greeted as a monument to hubris, corruption, and expensive bad taste.

Much like the excesses of Napoleon III’s regime three decades earlier. In the 1950s, city planner Edmund Bacon proposed tearing the vast edifice down, sparing only the clock tower, which was crowned by Alexander Stirling Calder’s statue of William Penn. Only the cost of demolition saved City Hall from destruction.

Sources:

Jean-Bertrand Barrère, “Victor Hugo,” Encyclopedia Britannica, November 12, 2014.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/274974/Victor-Hugo/3353/Exile-1851-70

“The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems, by Victor Hugo”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8775/8775-h/8775-h.htm#link2H_4_0106

According to The Architectural Review of 1870, an Italianate home was a friendly structure, an anti-castle of sorts: “The Italian style is well adapted to many parts of our country, and is known by the absence of acute gables, buttresses, embattlements, and clustered columns. Instead of these are found: the hip-roof; in place of the gable or pediment; the pilaster, instead of the buttress; the balustrade instead of the battlement; the semicircular arch instead of the square head.”

The Italianate style proliferated throughout West Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill, and other Philadelphia streetcar suburban communities in the 1850s. It was romantic and whimsical, yet at the same time practical for family use, especially in the hot summer months. An Italianate villa was little more than a big box, with walls of stone or stucco-covered brick, and topped with projecting eaves and often a wood-and-glass cupola perched atop of the hipped roof. Twin houses often had a tower at the middle of the facade.

Samuel Sloan, a Philadelphia architect and protégé of influential designer Andrew Jackson Downing, had a hand in many developments on the eve of the Civil War. Like Downing, Sloan had an entrepreneurial, even self-promotional streak. He supplemented his architecture practice by writing articles and creating designs for publications such as Godey’s Lady’s Book. His influence can be seen on Baring Street in Powelton Village and on Woodland Terrace near the intersection of Baltimore Avenue and 40th Street. For Sloan, homeownership was a Republican virtue, one that strengthened not just the city, but the nation as a whole:

The man who has a home feels a love for it, a thankfulness for its possession and a proportionate determination to uphold and defend it against all invading influences. Such a man is, of necessity . . . a good citizen; for he has a stake in society.

The detached or semi-detached suburban home — as opposed to the urban townhouse (for the rich) and the rowhouse (for the middle and working classes) — not only gave its owners a sense of privacy, but also the architects a chance to experiment with stylistic variety. Rowhouses, no matter how big, had uniform facades, with only a dash of Greek Revival or Roman-inspired trim around the front door or windows. During the 1850s and early 1860s, the American suburban home came into its own as a distinct type, neither townhouse nor country retreat nor farmhouse. Thanks to the horse-drawn streetcar, an office worker could live several miles away from his place of business in the city center. Any hints of commerce were banished as soon as he crossed the threshhold. There were also supposed health benefits — anyone who could afford it could move away from the disease and congestion of Center City, especially during the summer months.

And what better style to evoke a bucolic getaway than an Italianate villa, inspired by the ancient stone castles of sunny Tuscany? Some Italianate homes grew to mansion proportions, such as the Allison home at 42nd and Walnut (now home to the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College) and the now-vanished Anthony J. Drexel compound at 38th and Locust. But most were built on speculation for middle-class Philadelphians seeking an upgrade from a cramped rowhouse: lawyers, doctors, and small business owners. Much of the ornamentation was hackwork by historical standards, but faithfulness to Italian Renaissance models was less important than charm. By the 1850s, the classically inspired Federal style had given way to a “picturesque” romanticism. Homes were supposed to fit into their natural settings rather than be imposed upon them.

The Civil War changed drastically changed the Philadelphia streetscape. Samuel Sloan’s architecture practice collapsed. His most ambitious project, Longwood mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, was halted in mid-construction. Gone were the simple, the sincere, and the picturesque. Philadelphia’s prosperous citizens, many of whom had grown rich from supplying the Union Army, demanded more ornate, impoosing residential architecture, with stricter reliance on European models, and adorned with more glitter and gold than mere stucco and wood could offer.

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A tour of the “Loch Aerie” mansion in Chester County, PA, built in 1865 by Philadelphia architect Addison Hutton for businessman William E. Lockwood.

[1] The Architecture Review, 1870, as quoted in Willard S. Detweiler, Jr., Chestnut Hill: An Architectural History (Philadelphia: Chestnut Hill Historical Society, 1969), p. 26.

[2]Alexander von Hoffman, “Home Values Are Down, and Not Just at the Bank, The Washington Post, July 20, 2008.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071802559.html

By 1900, Peter Arrell Brown Widener was worth over $100 million, making him the richest man in Philadelphia and putting him in the same class of plutocrats as New York’s Astors and Vanderbilts. His son George Dunton Widener, who had married Eleanor Elkins (daughter of William Lukens Elkins) shifted the family’s real estate focus to the heart of downtown Philadelphia.  His three grandest commissions were all the work of architect Horace Trumbauer: the Widener Building at 12th and Chestnut, the Racquet Club at 16th and Locust, and finally the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Walnut and South Broad Streets.

In the spring of 1912, as the Ritz was in under construction, George, Eleanor, and their book collecting son Harry (a close friend and protege of Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach) left town for a European vacation.  They booked their return passage on the RMS Titanic.  Only Eleanor returned to Philadelphia. She promptly commissioned the family’s favorite architect Horace Trumbauer to build a new library at Harvard, dedicated to her son’s memory.  Peter Widener, who had been an investor in the White Star Line’s parent company, died rich but heartbroken three years later in his cavernous Elkins Park mansion.

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The city’s growth proved unsustainable, indeed. In the years that followed Widener’s death, the city’s population contracted and its economy de-industrialized. The trolleys could not compete with buses and automobiles.  Many of the comfortable neighborhoods surrounding the old trolley routes succumbed to decay and abandonment, in part because they were ill-suited to the demands of the automobile.  Today, much of the former Widener trolley empire has been absorbed by SEPTA.  The former Ritz-Carlton Hotel serves as classroom space for the University of the Arts.  Further to the west, the one surviving West Philadelphia trolley shed is the studio of artist Jordan Griska, creator of the “Grumman Greenhouse” sculpture on Lenfest Plaza at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

This is the final article in the series “Echoes from the Mask and Wig.” Click to read Part I and Part II.  

Doctor, Dear Doctor! premiered at Philadelphia’s Shubert Theater in November 1951. Grandpa and his fellow scriptwriters apparently left Moliere’s original plot alone, as the gags about the dimwitted, dissolute woodchopper Sganarelle turned doctor proved just as funny then as they were during the “Grand Siecle.”  The show received a glowing review from Henry T. Murdock in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 21: “This reviewer wasn’t around in 1889 when Lurline launched the Wiggers’ history,” he wrote, “nor for a few years after that, but taking the standard of the last 25 years, few shows have been so attractively staged, so colorfully staged, or so swiftly danced as the current enterprise at the Shubert.”

Glancing through the program book, I found a big surprise: among those in the show’s cast are a senior named Sydney T. Fisher and a sophomore named Barry E. Knerr, both of whom I would one day sing with in the Orpheus Club of Philadelphia.

That was the last year Grandpa contributed songs and his time as a rehearsal pianist to the Mask and Wig Club.   Perhaps, by then, he had realized that, despite his prodigious musical talent, making it big in show business was not in the cards for him.  By then, his career as an insurance executive was taking up more and more of his time. Despite the fine reviews, Doctor, Dear Doctor! was his last hurrah, and he knew it.  Within a few years, he had moved to New York, was widowed, married his second wife — my grandmother — and adopted her two small children — my uncle and mother.  He enthusiastically supported my mother’s studies as a classical violinist — the two of them spent many hours playing piano and violin sonatas in their Manhattan living room.

Yet my guess is that despite the local success of Doctor, Dear Doctor?, Grandpa then realized that American musical theater was destined to be his pastime rather than his livelihood.  He continued to attend shows and remain active in the Graduate Club — my  New York-born grandmother said that back then, there was no where to eat in Philadelphia except Bookbinders (of course) — but it seems that he cut back on his musical contributions.

Grandpa Joe died in 1989, aged 81. I was ten at the time.I now live in West Philadelphia, not far from where he grew up and only a few blocks from the University.  It is only now that I am asking questions that I wish my ten-year-old self could as he gleefully played the theme from “Peter and the Wolf” for my brother and me.  But for now, I must be content with these old images and what others remember of him, as well as the whoosh-clang of the Lancaster Avenue trolley that runs along the line that probably once took Granda Joe to college and a better life.

It’s not just “Peter and the Wolf” that I associate with Grandpa, but a wistful Mask and Wig tune from the 1937 show Fifty/Fifty that for so long sat unplayed in my family’s record collection: “I Live the Life I Love.”