Category: Behind the Scenes

Stephen Girard, the French-born Philadelphia shipping tycoon, was famous for his hard driving work ethic.  He came to America as a teenager, an orphaned cabin boy from the city of Bordeaux, and quickly established himself as a merchant who sent his ships to China and the Caribbean.  Along with John Jacob Astor of New York and Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Boston, he was active in the China trade, speculating in tea and opium. During the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1794, he personally took care of the sick and dying at a private estate that he had transformed into a hospital. Proud of his adopted country, he named his sailing ships after French Enlightenment figures and ideals: Liberty, Montesquieu, Voltaire. He took over the First Bank of the United States after its charter expired. He immodestly named it the Bank of Stephen Girard, and as sole proprietor made millions lending funds to start up new businesses and to fund public improvements such as turnpikes and canals.

He could also avaricious and cruel. When his wife developed mental health problems in the 1780s, he committed her to the insane ward of the Pennsylvania Hospital and took up with a mistress.

He died in 1831, aged 81, with a fortune of $7.5 million (the modern equivalent of $105 billion) making him according to one calculation the fourth richest American in history, adjusted for percentage of national GDP.  This places him behind only John D. Rockefeller (adjusted wealth $336 billion), Cornelius Vanderbilt ($185 billion), and John Jacob Astor ($100 billion).

Yet Girard left no direct or legitimate heirs.  He gave virtually all of his massive fortune to the city of Philadelphia.  His hotly-contested will’s most famous provision was the establishment of a charity school for “white, male orphans” that would become Girard College.  The estate also controlled vast swaths of land in Philadelphia and its suburbs. Among them was a place very dear to Girard’s heart: Gentilhommiere (“A Gentleman’s Home”), a summer retreat he built in the village of Passyunk.

Unlike Germantown, where wealthy Philadelphians such as the Chews built grand summer retreats, Passyunk never became a fashionable summer retreat for the city’s elite.  The land was flat and marshy. The Schuylkill River snaked lazily southward in the distance.   Although similar in style to Benjamin Chew’s Cliveden, Gentilhommiere is hardly baronial in scale. It is low-slung and sparsely ornamented, more a predecessor to the Adirondack camps than the chateaux of Newport.  Girard could have easily afforded a grander place — the Hare’s Powelton mansion in West Philadelphia and Biddle’s Andalusia on the Delaware rivaled the finest English country homes — but he set an early example of reverse snobbery.  Never much of a social animal, the one-eyed old salt enjoyed time away from the cares of commerce, in the company of his mistress and a few close friends.

Girard’s will stipulated that his beloved Gentilhommiere be maintained in perpetuity by the city of Philadelphia as a public park.  It would be as if Bill Gates left his 64,000 square foot Xanadu 2.0 estate outside of Seattle as a house museum, with an endowment left to run it.

By the 1910s, nearly a century after the tycoon’s death, the Girard Estate office decided to develop the former farmland around the mansion with upper-middle class housing, which would then be rented out for additional income.  Architect John Windrim, designer of the titanic Delaware Electric Generating Station and and son of Frank Furness’s most hated rival, laid out plans for blocks of row houses and twins in a variety of period styles: Spanish mission, Tudor, Georgian, and Craftsman Bungalow.  Compared to the squat, plain row houses springing up all over South Philadelphia, the homes of “Girard Estates” were palatial, and their association with the famed financier’s gentlemen’s farm gave added prestige.

Starting in the 1950s, the Girard Estate office began selling off the 481 rental properties to individual homebuyers. The people who lived in these homes were doctors, lawyers, and successful small business owners.  The land immediately around the old Girard mansion remained open as parkland, however.

One mafia don known as “The Chicken Man” made Girard Estates his home, but he never made it out of his home at 2211 W. Porter Street alive. He was Phil Testa, head of  Philadelphia’s Scarfi crime family.  The de facto head of the Philadelphia Mafia fancied himself the Julius Caesar of the Mob.   And like Caesar, this don met his end on the Ides of March, when a nail bomb planted in his home blew the “Chicken Man” to smithereens.  Phil Testa’s death on March 15, 1981 was the opening salvo to the so-called Philadelphia Mafia Wars, which raged for several years afterward.  “Bodies were falling all the time,” said one law enforcement official at the time. “You would be afraid to lay your head down at night for fear the phone would start ringing, calling you out to another one.” Testa’s son Salvatore followed in his father’s footsteps, serving as the Scarfi’s main hit man, until he too was killed — in the back of the Too Sweet candy store in South Philadelphia.

The former Testa house, a Craftsman bungalow located right across from Girard’s Gentilhommiere, was restored and is once again a private home.

Sources:

Tom Nickels, “Where Stephen Girard Called Home,” The Philadelphia Weekly Press, June 3, 2009. http://weeklypress.com/where-stephen-girard-called-home-p1340-1.htm

“The Top Ten Richest of All Time,” New York Daily News, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/top-10-richest-people-time-gallery-1.1186737

Toni Locy, “The Mob Shoots It Out,” The Philadelphia Daily News, April 27, 1989.  http://articles.philly.com/1989-04-27/news/26145174_1_mob-boss-philadelphia-south-jersey-nicodemo-little-nicky-scarfo

Brian Warner, “The 30 Richest Americans of All Time,” Celebrity Net Worth, March 21, 2014. http://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/30-richest-americans-time-inflation-adjusted/#!/6-stephen-girard-net-worth-105-billion_751/

Note: this is the second part of “Walking West Philly with Joe Washington.”  To read part one, click here. 

When Joe Washington was a young man in the 1970s, Hawthorne Hall was a gathering place for Powelton and Mantua.  Its second floor auditorium hosted dance parties and boxing matches. Now, the orange brickwork is battered. Chunks of the terracotta cornice have fallen to the pavement.  A few of its pressed tin oriel windows are painted hot pink.  Two nude figures — one male (Orpheus with his lyre) and one female (presumably Venus)– still adorn the facade.

Shabby, yes, but also potentially bohemian Victorian chic today. Unlike other large corner buildings in the area, like the old banks and movie palaces, it will not be replaced by a pharmacy or gas station. Owned by the People’s Emergency Center,  it still is partially occupied by shops and apartments.  Curtains hang at crazy angles in some of the windows. One has a bathroom scene painted in black and white.  Others are boarded up. The street level doors are plastered with stickers. Inside, the plaster is falling from the ceiling, exposing wood lathe. Last year, it was the site of a Hidden City art installation. Visitors walked through a set of rooms that were a surreal interpretation of a secret society, one of many which met in the building during the early twentieth century.

Across the street from Hawthorne Hall was the “Fake House,” an old industrial building that housed makeshift apartments for artists and counterculture activists.  In the 1980s, it was the site of many punk parties.  The Fake House was demolished last Christmas, and it is  being replaced by 22 luxury apartments. The residents had no lease. As the building came down, someone scrawled “F*k gentrification” on one of the exposed party walls.

***

As a young man in the 1960s, Joe saw an entire West Philadelphia neighborhood get destroyed. The Black Bottom was centered around 36th and Market.  The spidery frame of the Market Street Elevated cast a dark shadow over the shops and tenements.  Trains rattled by at all hours. When Joe was growing up  in Mantua, there was a notorious gang that took the name of the heart of the Black Bottom: 36th and Market.

“If you didn’t know those cats, there would be trouble,” he declared.

We walked down Lancaster Avenue in the rain, from Hawthorne Hall to the former crossroads of the Black Bottom. Joe waves his hand at the sleek office buildings at the intersection.   “All of these were once houses,” he said.  “All the people were displaced.” By the time replacement housing was built, most of the 15,000 or so former residents of the area had scattered to other neighborhoods. Southwest Philadelphia. Yeadon. Or New Jersey. Or they moved “up the way,” north of Market and further west to Haddington.

A wall mural on nearby Warren Street memorializes the Black Bottom. “Gone but not forgotten,” reads the lettering on a painted red heart. Each year, the Black Bottom Association hosts a reunion picnic in Fairmount Park, across from the Please Touch Museum. According to the Association, between 5,000 and 10,000 former residents and their descendants attend every August.  “Although poor in an economic sense,” states the event pamphlet, “the community was rich in mind, body, and spirit.”

Joe’s old neighborhood of Powelton-Mantua – a few blocks to the north of the Black Bottom — was largely spared from the mass-demolition. As he grew up, Joe realized that he had to look beyond employment in his old neighborhood to get ahead.  The factories were closing one by one.  Restaurants and other businesses, including his mother’s grocery store,  followed suit.  He got married in 1984 to his girlfriend Laura, who he had met as a 10th grader at West Philadelphia High School.  They moved to a new house at 142 North Wanamaker Street.  He worked at a warehouse in Trenton and as a bartender at the L&M Pub in Montgomery County.   By the early 1980s, as Joe remembered, West Philadelphia went from being rough to dangerous.  The culprit was crack-cocaine, which swept inner city neighborhoods with devastating force.  Not only would people do anything to get high — assault, prostitution, larceny — but the old street gangs such as the “36th and Market” went from wielding fists and knives to firing guns.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 finally outlawed redlining and blockbusting, but the damage was done.  Between 1970 and 1990, the city’s population plummeted from 2 million to 1.5 million, the greatest decline in its history. Housing stock — much of it dating to the late-19th century — was deteriorating. Industrial jobs were disappearing.  Many of the children and grandchildren of the Great Migration pioneers who arrived from Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia got swept up in the addiction and the violence.  More houses went vacant, left behind by residents who had passed away, moved back South (where federal laws aimed at dismantling Jim Crow were finally taking effect), or were serving time in jail. Abandoned houses became dens for criminal activity.  It wasn’t just people in the community who bought dope, Joe remembered. Middle class and wealthy whites drove in from the suburbs to get their fix, too. Gun shots rang out at night.  Drug dealers loafed on Joe’s stoop, and refused to move.

“Arm yourself if you need to,” Joe said of the situation.

In the late 1970s, Joe got a break for a job in Center City. He got a call from his wife’s aunt Gloria Shannon, who was working on the staff of the Orpheus Club near Rittenhouse Square. Before long, Joe was tending bar at Monday night rehearsals of the oldest mens’ singing group in America.  Club president Geoffrey Dougherty brought Joe to his house in Valley Forge to tend bar, and he quickly became close with his wife Nancy and children Win, Lydia, Bromley, and Ted.  He also helped get Joe bartending jobs at his old Penn fraternity, Saint Anthony Hall,  and at the Fourth Street Club at 15th and Latimer.

Joe Washington has worked at Orpheus for thirty years and tends bar at private parties all over town. He now lives with his wife at 61st and Vine, a few blocks north of the Market Street Elevated.  “Up the way” from the old neighborhood, as the former residents would say.  Joe believes the worst years of drugs and violence have passed.  “This new generation seems to have grown up,” he said. “They are more rooted in the community and are applying themselves, and there is less underage pregnancy.”  Starting in the 1990s, the city seized abandoned houses for back taxes, either selling them or tearing them down. After years of decline, new people are now moving into his neighborhood: immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and South America, as well as more caucasian college students and young professionals.

Joe welcomes the influx of new arrivals. “West Philly hasn’t lost its soul,” he said with a smile as we parted at the intersection of 36th and Market. “It’s still a melting pot. It’s had its share of ups and downs. New people from all over are bringing a new vitality to it.”

“West Philly hasn’t lost its soul. It’s still a melting pot. It’s had its share of ups and downs. New people from all over are bringing a new vitality to it.”

Joe Washington and I met for lunch at the Hamilton Restaurant on the last day of winter.  It’s a narrow, old-fashioned diner at 40th and Market with formica counters, brown-stained paneling, and cracked vinyl stools.  A neighborhood fixture for decades, it is run by Asian immigrants.  The Market Street subway rumbles underneath.

Joe Washington has worked as the bartender of the Orpheus Club since the late 1970s.  He has also tended bar at a University of Pennsylvania fraternity, and as a young man worked in construction. He and his wife now life at 61st and Arch, a few blocks north of the Market Street El.

I asked if he could tell me the story of his life in West Philly.

Like many African-Americans in the city, his grandparents moved to the city from the rural South during the early twentieth century.   Joe’s maternal grandmother Myrtle Tucker came from from Lynchburg in Southside Virginia.  She purchased a few Victorian homes on the 4100 block of Parkside Avenue, which she ran as rooming houses for single men.  Her daughter Marion helped with the cooking and the cleaning.  Myrtle also made some extra cash running a basement speakeasy. In the 1950s, she sold her rooming houses and returned to the “Possum Hollow” farm she had purchased back in Virginia.

Marion stayed in Philadelphia, where she worked as a seamstress and cook.  She married ironworker George Washington — yes, Joe said kids teased his dad a lot about his name  — whose family had come from Macon, Georgia. George Washington made good money with Delaney Construction, but suffered from vertigo as he grew older.  So did many other ironworkers.  Joe thinks his dad may have gotten sick from the construction site fumes.   George then took a job at ground-level as a steamroller driver.  On one school trip to the Philadelphia Airport, young Joe — born in 1956 at the Presbyterian Hospital — recalled proudly pointing out his old man to his classmates, driving his steamroller along the freshly-paved tarmac.

The Washingtons moved to a house at 736 Brooklyn Street, just south of Lancaster Avenue.  In the 1950s and 60s, there were scores of factories nearby that employed entire neighborhoods: Bond Bakery (bread), Fels-Naptha (soap), and the garment center at 57th and Chestnut.  Eateries such as the Hamilton Restaurant served hot meals to workers at the beginning and end of their shifts.  Yet as the 1960s continued, the factories either closed down or moved to where the labor was cheaper and taxes lower.

After we finished our cheeseburgers at Hamilton, Joe and I then walked north up 40th Street into Powelton, towards his childhood home on Brooklyn Street.  The neighborhood is a maze of small streets and trapezoidal lots.  Some houses are worn and grungy, missing porches, stoops, and mansard roofs.  A few are still abandoned, their windows and doors boarded up with moldy plywood.  Most of the homes however have been renovated recently, with crisply painted doors and repointed brickwork.  New residences are popping up in the once-weedy gaps.  The naked steel frame of a new addition to Penn Presbyterian Hospital looms above the rooftops.

Joe remembers how he played on these stoops with other children. “It was fun and vibrant,” he recalled. “People cared and watched each others kids.”  I ask him about the high rise housing projects, bordered by Lee Park several blocks to the west.  “I prefer living in a house,” he said. “Sometimes the elevator in one of those towers wouldn’t work.  As a kid, I carried bags up 18 floors to help out this one lady.”

In the 1960s, this part of West Philadelphia was changing from an ethnic white area (German, Irish, and Jewish) to predominately African-American.  The city’s banks, working hand-in-glove with federal Homeowners Loan Corporation, had declared most of the housing stock north of Market Street to be “hazardous.”  This policy, known as “redlining,” meant that getting a mortgage or homeowners’ insurance was either impossible or exorbitant.  The result was “white flight” to tract-home suburbs such as Levittown.  In addition, the city was seizing large tracts of land for urban renewal by eminent domain.  One of the biggest redevelopment projects in Philadelphia was centered at 36th and Market, the heart of the so-called “Black Bottom” neighborhood.  And the city’s population was declining, falling from a peak of over 2 million in 1950 to 1.8 million by 1970.  According to Joe, it was not just white people leaving town.  Many African-American residents moved back down south or died off, leaving behind vacant houses that no one seemed to want.

Joe’s parents separated in the late 1960s. Marion Washington opened a grocery store at 42nd and Aspen. She rented  the space for “Miss Marion’s Store” from the Johnson family, who owned a supermarket just up Lancaster Avenue.  She made enough money to put her son Joe through St. Ignatius Catholic Elementary School. On Fridays and Saturdays, teenage Joe served up platters of BBQ ribs, chicken, cabbage, and string beans, which were a hit with the Powelton residents.  “We made $1,000 one day selling platters!” Joe said proudly.

Yet he also remembered that the Johnsons were jealous of his mother’s success. A fire ripped through the store in the early 70s, soon after the landlords had installed newfangled aluminum wiring in the building. Joe’s mother opted not to rebuild.

We then walked north towards Lancaster Avenue and the hulking, curved brick facade of Hawthorne Hall.  Zara’s Bar and “Mighty Writers” occupy the first floor.  The upper stories, which include apartments and an auditorium, are partially abandoned.

“This building is in the Gray Area,” a sign hanging above the main entrance declares. “Gray Area is an experiment and public dialogue to encourage new ways of thinking about old buildings in Philadelphia and beyond. ”

“Oh, there were some great parties there back in the day!” Joe said.