The Church of the Savior, built in 1889, restored after a fire in 1906 The Davis mansion on the left (designed by Willis Hale, also responsible for Peter A.B. Widener’s castle on North Broad Street) was demolished soon after this picture was taken. June 8, 1969.
Although born a Roman Catholic, Drexel migrated to the Episcopal church and helped fund the construction of the Church of the Savior at 38th and Ludlow, today’s Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral. To honor his patronage, a stained glass window was installed in his honor. He purchased and developed vacant land with homes as the streetcar lines spread ever westward.
Finally, he built up his father’s bank to be one of the leading investment firms in the nation. In London, he worked closely with older leading financiers, most notably the Rothschilds and the Vanderbilts, to replace the standard 5-20 call bonds with 4 per cents. He also made successful deals with the Philadelphia & Reading and New York Central railroads. Among Drexel’s proteges was a brilliant but temperamental young man from Connectict named John Pierpont Morgan, who would go on to found the firm Drexel, Morgan & Company in New York, the ancestor of today’s J.P. Morgan Chase. J.P. Morgan himself did not share Drexel’s retiring, gentle demeanor: one observer said that Morgan’s eyes were like the headlights of an onrushing train.
Drexel himself didn’t take the street car to work, even after electrification allowed it to reach the-then dizzying speed of 15 miles per hour. Nor did he take a coach. Rather, he walked to his office at 16th and Walnut Street every day, almost always with his good friend, the Philadelphia Public Ledger publisher George William Childs. “Year in and year out,” noted historian Robert Morris Skaler, “they walked the same round, making themselves well-known personalities in their day.”
In 1891, shortly before his death, he bequeathed $2 million of his fortune (equivalent to over $40 million today) to establish the Drexel Institute of Technology. Located in a terra cotta-encrusted structure at 32nd and Chestnut Street, the Institute’s goal was provide affordable and practical education to the children of families of modest means. It may have been Drexel’s retort to the Gilded Age elitism at his longtime neighbor, the University of Pennsylvania.
Anthony Drexel died on June 30, 1893 while on a European vacation, aged 66. When asked to comment on the death of his friend, George William Childs could barely stop from choking up: “It is a great shock and a great blow to me and us all. We were so far from expecting anything of this kind. I would rather it have been myself that had died–much better I had died than Mr. Drexel.”
Although Anthony had built two other houses on “the Drexel Block” for his son George William Childs Drexel and daughter Frances Katherine Drexel Paul, his descendants rapidly abandoned West Philadelphia for Rittenhouse Square, the Main Line, and Chestnut Hill.
The Drexel mansion itself is long gone, replaced by Penn dormitories. The Wharton School, which has trained generations of Drexel and later Morgan bankers, is located just across 38th Street. Drexel University, his greatest and most long-lasting legacy, continues to thrive north of Market Street.
The Drexel Institute, later Drexel University, at 32nd and Chestnut Street. The main building, designed by the Wilson brothers, as photographed in 1963.
Sources:
“Anthony Drexel is Dead,” The New York Times, July 1, 1893.
Joseph Minardi, Historic Architecture in West Philadelphia, 1789-1930 (Atglen: Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 2011), pp.39, 70, 74, 77.
Robert Morris Skaler, West Philadelphia: University City to 52nd Street (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), p.13.
By the 1920s, American city planners and developers were forced to confront the exploding popularity of the automobile. Automobile ownership tripled from 8 million in 1920 to 23 million by the close of the decade. The price of a Model T had fallen to a mere $260 for an open touring car, or the equivalent of about $10,000 for a comparable machine today. In the mean time, somewhat fancier marques such as Hudson, Nash, and Oldsmobile offered cars with more comfort and style than the “flivver” to a burgeoning postwar middle class. Many of these cars, painted in alluring colors and equipped with powerful straight six or straight eight engines, were sold to consumers by the newly-devised installment plan. This mass-purchase of depreciating assets on credit would lead to dire economic consequences in 1929.
Although the average Philadelphian still took the trolley or rode the Market Street Elevated to work in the mid-1920s, the mass of parked cars on city streets, especially in residential areas, was reaching a crisis point. The very affluent escaped the dirt, noise, and congestion of Philadelphia to the Main Line suburbs, where there was plenty of space to park their Packards and Cadillacs.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkqz3lpUBp0&w=480&h=360] Congestion, chaos, and near-misses in 1920s New York City and Los Angeles, with a cameo of Babe Ruth in a runaway Ford Model T taxicab. Traffic lights and cops were few and far between, leading to complete anarchy.
As a trolley-car based neighborhood, West Philadelphia was not so fortunate. Long the leafier alternative to Center City living for middle-class commuters, this part of town saw its population growth slow and then stagnate. Between 1910 and 1920, West Philadelphia’s population skyrocketed by 110,000 residents, its greatest increase ever. The residents, as Samuel Bass Warner Jr observed in The Private City, were, “Negroes who had achieved a steady living, Jews and Italians, who having prospered a little, moved out of the south Philadelphia ghettos,” as well as “the rest mass of Irish and old-stock Americans who manned the stores and offices of downtown.”
During the 1920s, however, it grew only by 50,000, leveling off at 411,000 (out of a city of 2 million people). Despite the size of its houses and strength of its middle class population, many saw the area as dowdy and dull. Warner himself was quite qualified about the district: “West Philadelphia in the 1920s was not a pretty place, but it offered its residents a narrow range of sold benefits: converted rooms in big old houses, brand-new efficiency apartments, solid twins with bay windows and ample porches, a few blocks of expensive detached houses, and miles upon miles of row-house domesticity.”
Empty land at the intersection of 46th Street and Osage Avenue, looking west, photographed on January 14, 1913. The future site of Garden Court.
One developer, Clarence Siegel, felt the need to create something truly special in West Philadelphia during this transitional period. He also saw an opportunity to let Philadelphia homebuyers have their cake and eat it too when it came to the car and the row house. In 1919, he purchased a large tract undeveloped land in West Philadelphia and announced plans for a new development called “Garden Court.” The land had previously belonged to heavy hitters Eli Kirk Price and Anthony J. Drexel, and had been largely bypassed by the trolley lines. Garden Court would be bounded by 46th Street to the east, 52th Street to the west, Cedar Avenue to the south, and Spruce Street to the north.
Siegel’s “Garden Court” development had three components: high-rise luxury apartments on its northern edge (Garden Court Apartments and Garden Court Plaza), a varied selection of semi-attached and attached dwellings its core, and several almost mansion-sized detached homes. The apartment towers boasted street-level stores and restaurants, as well as an indoor swimming pool and a garage. The single-family houses, designed by architect John Coneys, reflected a more informal aesthetic than the big, rather gloomy Victorian twins built a decade earlier: Tudor facades, enclosed sunporches in front, and an absence of dark wood paneling and stained glass windows. In the rear of these houses were alleys and discreet individual garages. This final feature gave Garden Court, in the words of architectural historian George Thomas, “the only provision of any urban neighborhood for the car, and were so advertised itself in the period newspapers.”
With its easy access to transportation (Market Street Elevated and the Baltimore Avenue trolley lines), proximity to West Philadelphia High School, garages, and stylish housing for a wide spectrum of incomes, Garden Court became immensely popular for upwardly mobile Philadelphians, and was described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as, “the most exclusive residential locale in West Philadelphia,” providing “modern apartments of magnitude, comfort, and luxury, surrounded by beautiful homes.”
One of the semi-detached homes in Clarence Siegel’s “Garden Court.” Source: Wikipedia.com
The area remained relatively stable during the Great Depression, even as homes in surrounding developments were subdivided or neglected. In his historical nomination form for the Garden Court Historic District, Thomas wrote of Siegel: “few Philadelphia developers dared to provide such variety, but the net effect seems to have been a cause of the long-term success of Garden Court.”
Today, Garden Court remains a highly desirable neighborhood, is racially diverse, and almost completely architecturally intact. It also provides an interesting alternative glimpse of what mass-suburbanization could have been after World War II: absent of ranch houses, expressways, carports, and strip malls.
Sources:
George Thomas, “Garden Court Historic District” (PDF). National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1984.
Samuel Bass Warner Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), p.194.
The present day Penn Alexander School was once the site of one of West Philadelphia’s great estates: Chestnutwold, built by Clarence H. Clark.
In its time, Clark’s banking concern was one of the most powerful in the nation. And like many businesses in Philadelphia, it was a family affair. Clarence Clark was the son of banker Enoch White Clark, founder of the firm. Enoch Clark was a New England transplant to Philadelphia, a native of Providence, Rhode Island who had made his first fortune underwriting and distributing government securities. In the absence of a national bank–the Second Bank of the United States imploded in 1836 after the machinations of President Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle– opportunists like Clark stepped in to fill the gap. The senior Clark was similar to the Austrian immigrant and former portrait painter Francis Martin Drexel, in that he established an American investment house on par with the mighty banks of Europe, such as Rothschild & Company and Baring Brothers. Clark, like Drexel, also put Philadelphia on the map as a center of American finance.
Twin houses fronting Clark Park at 4337-4339 Baltimore Avenue, most likely built by the Clark Estate in the 1890s. Photo dated August 24, 1951.
The house of E.W. Clark & Company thrived in the mid-19th century, establishing branches in other American cities. After Enoch Clark’s death in 1854 due to complications from nicotine poisoning (heavy smoking was a stress relief for financiers then as now), his son Clarence took the reins of E.W. Clark & Company and expanded its financial activities into railroads and real estate. He also was one of the principal backers of the 1876 Centennial Exposition. Naturally, he established the Centennial National Bank (in a handsome Frank Furness designed building) near the railroad station at 30th and Market Street, where millions of fairgoers arrived over the course of several months. According to a January 22, 1876 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the bank’s purpose was to be the “financial agent of the board at the [Centennial] Exhibition, receiving and accounting for daily receipts, changing foreign moneys into current funds, etc.” In this era before ATMs and electronic bank transfers, it was the perfect place for tourists to deposit their cash during their stay in the Quaker City. The building survives as the Paul Peck Student Center at Drexel University.
Centennial National Bank, designed by Frank Furness and commissioned by Clarence H. Clark in 1876. 32nd and Market Street, May 17, 1931.
Like his fellow second generation banking heir Anthony Drexel, Clark eschewed Rittenhouse Square for pastoral but not especially fashionable West Philadelphia. And like Drexel, Clark decided to shape the area around his house by investing in it. He purchased tracts of empty farmland, filling with middle and upper-middle class row houses as the trolley lines expanded westward from Center City. These developments included the distinctive “professors’ row” on St. Mark’s Square and the flamboyant set of Queen Anne houses on the 4200 block of Spruce.
“Chestnutwold,” the estate of Clarence H. Clark at 4200 Locust Street, Philadelphia, c.1900. Source: King’s Views of Philadelphia
In the 1860s, Clarence Clark built his dream house, Chestnutwold, on a walled lot bounded by 42nd, 43rd, Locust, and Spruce streets. The main house, a 34 room brownstone Italianate palace, cost a staggering $300,000, or between $5-7 million in today’s money. Its interior boasted six foot high mahogany paneling in its principal rooms, stained glass windows, and hand-painted Japanese wall paper that was perhaps inspired by what Clark saw at the Japanese Bazaar at the 1876 Centennial. A stained glass window in the 125 foot long library bore a quote by Goethe: “Like a star that maketh not haste, that taketh not rest; be each one fulfilling his God-given hest.”
Clarence H. Clark (1833-1906). Source: King’s Views of Philadelphia, 1902.
An inveterate collector, Clark imported the estate’s iron gates from France, and planted a rare Chinese ginkgo biloba tree on the grounds. As an added bonus, Clark opened a portion of his estate to the public for strolling…and admiration. To provide additional green space for his neighbors, Clark donated the land formerly occupied by the Civil War era Satterlee Hospital to the City of Philadelphia as a public park, as well as a bronze statue of author Charles Dickens. A representation of Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop sat by his knee.
The Clarence H. Clark Jr. house at 4200 Spruce, c.1980.
Chestnutwold proved as fleeting as it was magnificent. Clarence Clark died in 1906, leaving the huge house vacant. Although his son Clarence Clark Jr. built a fine house at 4200 Spruce just outside the gates of the compound in the early 1880s, the Clark heirs decamped from West Philadelphia to the more fashionable suburbs of Germantown and Chestnut Hill. Ten years later, wreckers tore the Chestnutwold mansion down. The grounds, however, remained intact. The neo-Gothic structures of the Philadelphia Divinity School, designed by Zantzinger, Borie and Medary, rose on the site in the mid-1920s. After the divinity school closed in the 1970s, the old Clark estate sat mostly vacant until the completion of the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School in 2001. The school thrives to this day, educating a diverse group of children from the neighborhood Clarence Clark developed a over a century ago.
The Philadelphia Divinity School, constructed in the 1920s. 4201-4245 Spruce Street, 1978.
Of the original Chestnutwold, only the pair of French iron gates at the northeast corner of the four square block lot remain today. It is unknown if the original ginkgo tree survives on the grounds of the Penn Alexander School, but this species of tree is now ubiquitous on Philadelphia’s streets, as are its stinky fruits.
Engraving of the ginkgo tree. Source: Pinterest.com
36th and Lancaster Avenue, looking south down 36th Street towards the Market Street elevated line station. The line was placed underground in the 1960s. A corner of Lancaster Mews appears on the right — it now the terrace of the Aloosh Hookah Bar. The station stop and Queen Anne homes on the west side of 36th Street were demolished in the 1970s to make way for University City High School, now also under demolition. The “Old Quaker Building” on the left survives as apartments. The intersection of 36th and Market Street was the heart of the so-called “Black Bottom” area. Photograph dated November 17, 1947.
Yet another high rise student housing complex going up, billed as “luxury” apartments? At a community meeting last night, residents of the area expressed their concern at the possible loss of an historic anchor structure at the corner of 36th and Lancaster Avenue. The building entered the spotlight a few weeks ago, when Inga Saffron wrote in her “Changing Skyline” Inquirer column that the 1870s Second Empire building at 3600 Lancaster Avenue may be yet another victim of University City’s “frenzied real estate market.”
The recent demolition of the Boyd Theater near Rittenhouse Square has bothered many Philadelphians — for a city with so much well-preserved building stock, it now seems that anything is for sale.
Powelton’s homeowners are particularly on edge. Despite its wealth of historic Italianate and Queen Anne architecture, the neighborhood is almost completely unprotected by local historic ordinances. Over the past few years, several Victorian row houses and twins have been torn down and replaced by boxy, bland student apartment houses.
According to resident and local property owner Hanley Bodek, 3810 Hamilton Street is the latest house under threat. Over the past three decades, Bodek — along with his business partner John Lindsay — have carefully restored dozens of abandoned Victorian structures in the neighborhood. Until last year, Bodek taught a hands-on class at PennDesign about historic renovation called “Entrepreneurial Inner City Housing Markets,” in which a group of students renovated an abandoned Philadelphia row house and sold it to a low-income family.
Now, there are few vacant lots left in Powelton. Bodek owns 3808 Hamilton, the adjacent twin to the house now under threat. He restored the brick house at a time when “nobody wanted these houses.” Now, there are few vacant lots left in Powelton.
Glamorous, Lancaster Mews definitely is not, but it does have character and its own kind of utility, and houses a variety of local businesses that have thrived catering to students and Powelton Village residents alike: Aloosh hookah bar, Dr. Cycles bike repair, and Lemongrass Thai restaurant. They do not offer the sanitized predictability of the chains that occupy the lower levels of the latest crop of West Philadelphia student high rises, but they do offer character and a sense of place, and they provide a place for local, “basic needs” entrepreneurs.
“Such blocks are what make Philadelphia, well, Philadelphia,” Saffron astutely declared. And it was not built to be transient.
At least one local business owner feels threatened by the loss of the building. “Pure evil,” wrote Bodyrock Boot Camp owner Nate McIntyre in a Facebook post. “From the perspective of a small business owner on Lancaster Ave. that’s exactly what I call these plans by an outside developer and the city council woman to tear down this 150 year old historic, and thriving block of business and residences in my neighborhood.”
509 N.40th Street, which housed an automobile repair shop and a tailor’s shop, with apartments on the second and third floors. April 17, 1950.
Not a bad considering that two decades ago, the entire block now known as Lancaster Mews was largely abandoned, as was much of the Lancaster Avenue commercial corridor. After a thorough renovation, it now serves the same purpose as it did in the 1870s.
Lancaster Avenue, which branches out diagonally at the intersection of 30th Street and Market and continues all the way to Lancaster City, is the oldest turnpike in the country, opening for business in 1792. It was the starting point of Lewis and Clark’s journey west. After the Civil War, its right of way was the object of a fierce battle between the trains of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the trolleys of the Philadelphia Traction Company.
Despite its storied history, Lancaster Avenue and the buildings that grew up around it were comparatively hum-drum — most of its structures are mixed-used buildings erected in the second half of the 19th century. Aside from a cluster of grand houses in the Powelton neighborhood, this part of West Philadelphia was never an especially fancy part of town. According to architectural historian Robert Morris Skaler, it was an “economically diverse community,” mostly middle class, comprised of “old stock Americans, as well as more recent immigrants of German, Irish, and Italian descent,” who lived in modest three story row houses located within walking distance of shopping on Lancaster Avenue.
Queen Anne twins dating from c.1890 at 66. N. 36th Street, September 26, 1948. Demolished.
Not that the commercial buildings in the area were completely without flair. The now vanished William Penn Theater at 4063 Lancaster had an auditorium just as glamorous as the (now half demolished) Boyd’s near Rittenhouse Square. It was a favorite gathering place for Penn students, who in the 1920s had no qualms about crossing Market Street (and cutting class) to catch a movie. The curved face Hawthorne Hall, located just up the street from Lancaster Mews at 39th Street, is an Art Nouveau fantasy in red brick, terra cotta, and pressed tin. It once housed a drug store, theater, and other small businesses. A former apothecary shop catty-corner from Lancaster Mews boasts an elaborate pressed tin storefront that is a riot of Louis Sullivanesque plant forms.
Today, such design whimsy is largely confined to the ephemeral images that flash across the screens of our smart phones and tablets.
The street fronts of Lancaster Mews, 3612 Lancaster Avenue, December 12, 1951.
Some of Lancaster’s buildings have been butchered by modern signage or punctured by garage doors. Others are abandoned or in poor repair, with wood trim and cornices stripped. These once viable neighborhoods were victims of multiple forces: the rise of the automobile, redlining by banks and insurance companies, white flight, and government policies that favored new construction versus preservation.
Lancaster Mews, which still has its gingerbread trim and historically appropriate windows, represents a successful blending of historic preservation and redevelopment, in which a building is restored to much of its former appearance while still being viable from an economic standpoint. We have learned a lot since the 1960s, when mass demolition — i.e. Philadelphia’s “Black Bottom” — was rampant in American cities and old buildings were seen as disposable. Trouble still occurs when a neighborhood goes from grassroots historic preservation mode to big money demolition mode — hopefully Powelton Village and the Lancaster Avenue corridor will be revitalized without being sterilized. Philadelphia may rejoice in its economic resurgence, but new construction in a city as historic and well-preserved as this one should should be mindful and measured rather than frenzied.
Hawthorne Hall, built in the 1890s on the site of the former McIlvaine lumberyard. This photograph dates from c.1970. The pressed tin cornice on the second floor has been partially removed, but most of the terra cotta statuary and ornament remains.
Sources:
Inga Saffron, “Changing Skyline, Frenzied Real Estate Market Makes Any Building a Teardown Target,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2015.
Robert Morris Skaler, Images of America: West Philadelphia, University City to 52nd Street (Charleston, SC: The Arcadia Press, 2002), pp. 95,97.
Stephen Girard, in a posthumous portrait by B. Otis. Note his missing eye. Source: Wikipedia.
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.
Gentilhommiere, the Stephen Girard Mansion at 22nd and Shunk Streets, 1972.
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.
Mugshot of Phil “Chicken Man” Testa. Source: Wikipedia.2117 W. Porter Street, where Phil Testa met his end in 1981. Source: “2117 W. Porter St, Philadelphia, PA” by Centpacrr at English Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Footage of the last steam trains of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1954.
For those who regularly ride the Main Line trains: have you ever wondered why there are no stops between 30th Street Station and Overbrook? After Overbrook, however, the train stops nearly every two minutes. There’s an old — and very politically incorrect — mnemonic device for memorizing the towns on the Main Line: “Old Maids Never Wed and Have Babies. Period.” Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr. Paoli.
The bridge spanning the Schuylkill River in 1876, which connected Center City with the now-vanished Baltimore and Ohio station at 24th and Chestnut, designed by Frank Furness.
Thankfully, this phrase has fallen out of popular use. As the Philadelphia Inquirer quipped in a 1988 article that quoted it: “But let’s not forget what the Main Line, at the bottom line, really is. The term is so ingrained in our local patois that we tend to detach it from the real meaning. The Main Line is – well, the main line. Tracks and sidings. Signals and stations. Switches, whistles.”
The demolished Baltimore & Ohio station at 24th and Chestnut, designed by Frank Furness. Source: HABS/HAERThe 44th and Parkside ballpark, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA. Source: Wikipedia.
The Pennsylvania Railroad’s development of its right-of-way was a shrewd real estate deal. Rather than haggle with Philadelphia city government and acquire parcels piecemeal, they could buy up huge swaths of farmland outside of the city limits and develop it as they saw fit. Until the turn of the twentieth century, there were two other stops before the Main Line trains chugged from 30th Street, through West Philadelphia, and across City Avenue: Powelton Village and Parkside. According to architectural historian Robert Morris Skaler, Powelton became a popular residence for executives of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Baldwin Locomotive Works, and “even had a special railroad stop at Powelton Avenue for the Pennsylvania Railroad’s executives to travel by train to their offices.” The Pennsylvania Railroad also had a stop at 52nd Street and Lancaster Avenue, labeled as the Hestonville Depot in an 1872 map. This stop later grew into a sprawling rail yard that cast a sooty, noisy pall over much of the adjacent Parkside neighborhood. Nearby was the 44th and Parkside ballpark, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA in 1903 and home of the African-American league Philadelphia Stars.
The intersection of Lancaster Avenue and 52nd Street, the location of the now-closed 52nd Street depot and passenger stop. Photograph taken February 21, 1949.
Therefore, it could be argued in fact that Powelton Village was the first stop on the Main Line, the stretch of track connecting Philadelphia with Pittsburgh.
Much of the grand residential architecture that survives in Powelton today is a harbinger of the grand suburban development that grew up around the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line tracks in the 1890s and early 1900s. Powelton is a hybrid of streetcar and railroad suburban development: for the second half of the nineteenth century, it was serviced by both horse drawn (later electric) streetcars and by Main Line trains. The surviving freestanding mansions on Powelton Avenue, Baring Street, and Hamilton Street are large and ornate, yet they are set within walking distance of each other rather than being secluded on larger lots as they were on the Main Line. They are also located within a few minutes walk of the former Powelton Avenue stop. Unlike the Main Line developments, there are also a significant number of twin houses and row house blocks intermingled with the free-standing houses.
The Henry Cochran mansion at 36th and Baring Street, built in the 1890s by architect Wilson Eyre Jr. Photograph dated December 12, 1962
Several well-known Philadelphia architects got in on the act of building up Powelton. Wilson Eyre Jr., designer of many large houses in Rittenhouse Square and the Philadelphia suburbs, also worked on at least two houses in Powelton Village. One was a substantial freestanding mansion for wine merchant Henry Cochran, located on the corner of 36th and Baring Streets. Another was a renovation of a narrow twin house on the 3500 block of Hamilton Street. In both of these projects, Eyre displayed his characteristic sense of whimsy and invention, much of it medieval in inspiration. He also avoided the gaudy grandeur that characterized so much late Victorian architecture. Among other commissions, Eyre was responsible for the University Museum, the Mask & Wig clubhouse, and suburban estates such as Horatio Gates Lloyd’s “Allgates” mansion in Haverford. In the words of the Historic Commission’s Diana Marcelo: “Eyre detested an overload of ornamentation. He had a feeling of proportion, and a tendency toward extended horizontal planes. His buildings had crisp lines and much expression, achieved by a careful blend of varying materials.” The Cochran house bears more than a passing resemblance to the early residential work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In many ways, Eyre’s Powelton and Wright’s Oak Park were similar suburban communities.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (now St. Andrew and St. Monica’s Episcopal Church) at 36th and Baring Streets. This was the location of Max Riebenack’s funeral in September 1903. Photograph dated December 14, 1962.
The neighborhood prospered for a few decades thanks to the station stop and the infusion of railroad money. From the 1870s until the early 1900s, because of its proximity to the old 30th Street depot, Powelton Village was a neighborhood of choice for Pennsylvania Railroad executives. Max Riebenack was perhaps the most prominent of the PRR executives who lived in West Philadelphia. Riebenack was an American success story: a German immigrant whose parents brought him to America as a six year old boy in 1850. By 1895, he had risen to the position of comptroller of the Pennsylvania Railroad, working alongside executives like Alexander Cassatt, mastermind of New York’s Pennsylvania Station and its tunnels. Yet rather than move to Rittenhouse Square or the Main Line, Riebenack preferred to live “North of Market” in West Philadelphia, close to fellow German immigrants such as brewer Frederick Augustus Poth. With his newfound wealth, Riebenack purchased a plot of land for $14,000 (the equivalent of about $300,000 today) at the corner of 34th and Powelton Avenue. He then commissioned architect Thomas Preston Lonsdale to build a spiky roofed Queen Anne style mansion that rose high above the street.
As a high-ranking executive of one of the largest corporations in the world, Max clearly liked living large, joining many clubs during his time on North 34th Street, both in town (the Union League) and in the suburbs (the Merion Cricket Club). The house, now Drexel University’s Ross Commons, was built for grand entertaining. The Philadelphia Inquirer breathlessly described the Riebenack’s silver wedding anniversary as follows:
“A largely attended reception was given last night at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Max Riebenack, at Thirty-fourth and Powelton avenue, on the occasion of the silver anniversary of their wedding. The house was handsomely decorated and an orchestra furnished music in the spacious hallway from behind a fern-covered nook. The house was lighted up throughout with electric lights and crowded with guests. Mr. and Mrs. Riebenack were assisted in receiving their guests by Mrs. Conrad T. Clothier. Many of the presents were handsome and valuable.”
Max Riebenack, Comptroller for the Pennsylvania Railroad and builder of the mansion that now serves as Drexel University’s Ross Commons. Source: Findagrave.com
Unfortunately, Max and Eleanor Riebenack suffered two terrible personal tragedies. In 1903, their thirty year old son Max Jr. died of typhoid fever in the family home on Powelton Avenue. Five years later, another son, Henry – an inventor and former track star at the University of Pennsylvania — also died of disease, this time at the family’s beach house in Atlantic City, New Jersey. By the time Max Riebenack himself died in 1910, the neighborhood’s most fashionable days had past. When the Powelton Avenue stop closed, the neighborhood became much less accessible to Center City and the PRR’s offices at Broad Street Station. Many of those with money moved to the Main Line towns past City Avenue, and the large mansions they left behind were converted into boarding houses.
So ended Powelton’s short reign as the “first stop” on the Main Line.
Sources:
Robert Morris Skaler, Images of America: West Philadelphia – University City to 52nd Street (Charleston, South Carolina: The Arcadia Press, 2002), p.77.
“West Philadelphia: The Basic History, Chapter 2: A Streetcar Suburb in the City: West Philadelphia, 1854-1907,” West Philadelphia Community History Center. http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/wphila/history/history2.html
“227. N. 34th Street, Philadelphia,” http://poweltonvillage.org/interactivemap/files/227n34th.htm
Sally Downey, “Tracking the Main Line from Overbrook to Paoli: The World from the 17 Stops of the R5 Local,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 5, 1988. http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-05/entertainment/26241651_1_train-station-signals-and-stations-bottom-line
Diana Marcelo, “National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form: Wilson Eyre Home” (Philadelphia, PA: The Philadelphia Historical Commission, April 1976.) https://www.dot7.state.pa.us/ce_imagery/phmc_scans/H001363_01H.pdf
When Americans are asked about the Sears Tower, they normally call to mind the recently renamed Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois. However, if asked about a Sears Tower when in Philadelphia, you’re likely to get a different answer. In Northeast Philadelphia, where Adams Avenue meets Roosevelt Boulevard, the 14-story Sears clock tower stood for over 70 years.
Sears visible from Roosevelt Boulevard.Side of Sears building with the bottom section of tower visible.
In the 1900s, the Sears, Roebuck & Co. was still growing rapidly in the United States. With the company’s need to expand eastward from Chicago, Philadelphia was highlighted as a possible location for one of their mail-order houses and plants. With the city’s important railroad access, the Northeast Philadelphia section, along Roosevelt Boulevard was chosen as a location.
From 1919 to 1920, Sears, Roebuck & Co. constructed a large complex that consisted of a large 9-story building that included a 14-story clock tower. The neo-Gothic brick building was designed by George C. Nimmons, a Chicago-area architect who had worked for Sears, Roebuck & Co. previously, even designing the company president’s home.
The building opened October 18, 1920 even though parts of it were still unfinished. This was just one of the companies allowing the Northeast section of Philadelphia to grow. However, even with the success of the Roosevelt Boulevard building, the overall decline of mail-order shopping prompted the company to open up a nearby retail store there just a few years later, in 1925. It wouldn’t be the company’s only expansion as Sears would also add on an administration building and a power plant. They even paid for a miniature of their building, with its famous clock tower, to be constructed as a firehouse on a nearby block.
Engine Company Number 70 on 4800 Langdon Street.
Through most of the 20th century, the Sears complex was a popular and well-known landmark in Northeast Philadelphia, It employed thousands of workers from the surrounding neighborhoods. In the 1960s, the area, still a popular hub, even had a subway station constructed. Although it was meant to be connected to the Broad Street Line, the plan never went through. Unfortunately, in the 1980s and 1990s, sales decreased and the building with its iconic tower was sold in 1993.
On October 31, 1994, the Sears Tower was imploded. It barely took 7 seconds for the building to go down, as seen in the 6ABC news broadcast from that day.
With a 14-story tower and over 25 million square feet, the implosion was set to be the largest of its time. Hundreds of Philadelphia residents came to watch as over 70 years of history was brought down in 7 seconds.
Today, the area is home to a shopping center full of different chain stores. However, it is also still home to the Sears power plant, which was visible in the above video and not imploded. Currently, the power plant building is not being utilized other than Home Depot advertising its logo on the smokestack. The power plant and the aforementioned firehouse are the only Sears buildings remaining in the area.
The Belmont Cricket Club, which once stood at the intersection of S. 50th Street and Chester Avenue. The Kingsessing Recreational Center, built in 1918, now occupies the site. Source: Wikipedia Commons.
A slice of England in West Philadelphia? There was once a “Sherwood Forest” — a grove of trees that stood at the intersection of 58th Street and Baltimore Avenue. Nearby was the Belmont Cricket Club at the intersection of S. 50th Street and Chester Avenue, which for a few short years competed against the still-extant Germantown, Merion, and Philadelphia clubs.
On hot, hazy summer afternoons in the 1890s, the residents of the surrounding brick twin houses — porches bedecked with striped awnings — would stroll to Belmont Cricket and watch the local and international legend Bart King (1873-1965) play on the crease.
Bart King at bat at the Belmont Cricket Club in 1906. Source: Wikipedia Commons.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the “Gentlemen of Philadelphia” were a juggernaut that mowed down the best teams from England and her colonies. The Associated Clubs of Philadelphia proudly declared that “with the vast improvement made in cricket at Philadelphia (and in fact everywhere in the country) since the last team visited England, there is every reason to expect very different showings this year. Since the last time crossed the Atlantic, the representatives of the Quaker City have laid claim to more than ordinary honors. In 1891, Lord Hawke’s team suffered a defeat at their hands. The following year the Gentlemen of Ireland had to lower their colors when they met the Philadelphians. In 1893, the Australian team of that year lost in Philadelphia. In 1894, Lord Hawke’s team was again beaten. The visiting Cambridge and Oxford teams lost to home players in 1985. ”
Leading the charge during cricket’s brief golden age was Bart King. A star bowler and a hitter, King would later be known as the “Bob Hope” of the cricketing world, for according to one account he, “told his impossible tales with such an air of conviction … that his audiences were always in doubt when to take him seriously. He made their task doubly difficult by sprinkling in a fair mixture of truth with his fiction.” When King died in 1966, his obituary noted that, “his 344 for Belmont v Merion B stand as the North American record: he scored 39 centuries in his career and he topped 1,000 runs in a season six times, in 4 of them also taking over 100 wickets.”
“Sherwood Forest,” 58th Street and Baltimore Avenue, September 29, 1906. The Sherwood Cricket Club, located at 60th and Baltimore, was Belmont’s more rustic neighbor. For an image of the Sherwood Club, click here.
In those days, watching a cricket match was just as popular a past time as going to a Phillies game. West Philadelphia’s Belmont was the scrappy sibling of Philadelphia’s league. The haughty Pennsylvania Railroad built the Main Line and Chestnut Hill, while Peter Widener’s humbler trolley lines built the more democratic suburbs of West Philadelphia. The Belmont Club, founded in 1874, was prosperous, its grounds and buildings beautiful, but it did not put on aristocratic airs. Neither did Bart King. What John B. Kelly was to rowing, King was to the even more rarified world of cricket Unlike most of his peers, the middle-class King had to work for a living. In those days, a Philadelphia cricketer did not play for money. To support his amateur habit, King worked in his father’s linen business — there were many textile mills in West Philadelphia at this time, which drew their power from Cobb’s Creek. To preserve his status as a “gentleman amateur,” wealthy friends secured him a low-stress job at a Philadelphia insurance company.
By the early 1900s, America lagged behind England when it came to compensating its best players. In fact, King was surprised to learn that British cricketers actually got paid for their sport.
“Hallo Mr. King,” said an English professional who ran into King in London.
“Hallo, call me Bart,” King responded.
“But you’re a gentleman cricketer, sir?” the professional queried.
“Aren’t you a gentleman too?” King asked.
“Oh no sir, I’m a professional,” was the reply.
Despite its aristocratic associations, cricket in America had proletarian origins. English textile workers from Nottingham brought the game to American in the early 19th century, and played six hour matches with gusto on their precious days off. Spectators drank ale and freely placed bets. Many cricketers also tried their hand at baseball, a faster American variant of the game (also with runs and innings) which gained traction during the Civil War. By the 1880s, the well-heeled Wisters of Germantown and the Clarks of West Philadelphia — developers of the Spruce Hill neighborhood — took up the British sport and transformed the game of the millworkers workers into the past-time of the wealthy. The local, blue-collar cricket clubs such as Tioga — which King played for as a young man — and Frankford closed their doors, their creases and clubhouses replaced by blocks of row houses.
Belmont held out longer but succumbed on the eve of World War I. The surrounding neighborhood was populated by comfortable factory managers and small business owners — like King’s family — who could not afford to be “gentleman amateurs” or attend games that lasted three to five days. More importantly, the rise of professional baseball teams — with their big stadiums and open seating — were a more democratic way to spend an afternoon for the industrial city’s growing population. Philadelphia formed its first official baseball team in 1883. Soon, the Phillies attracted bigger crowds. Spectators could cheer from the stadium bleachers when their favorite players scored runs, rather than demurely clap behind ropes at private clubs. The rules of baseball were also much less arcane, and the “seventh inning stretch” replaced leisurely breaks for lunch and tea.
Victorian rowhouses at 52nd and Springfield Avenue, near the site of the Belmont Cricket Club, March 21, 1960.
Belmont Cricket Club closed its doors in 1914, but not before visiting English cricketer C. Percy Hurditch introduced its members to a more fast-paced field sport: soccer. King saw which way the wind was blowing in West Philadelphia, and joined the Philadelphia Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, two years before Belmont went defunct. He continued to play and tour internationally until his death at age 92. The London Times eulogized: “Had he been an Englishman or an Australian, he would have been even more famous than he was.”
The Belmont Cricket Club was torn down in 1918 and was replaced by the fields and buildings of the Kingsessing Recreation Center, which continues to serve the neighborhood’s athletic needs to this day.
The railroad overpass at the intersection of S.49th Street and Chester Avenue, near the site of the Belmont Cricket Club, February 20, 1960.
Footage of the Colin Jodah Trophy Match at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, with a mention of Bart King.
Two weeks ago, I received a phone call from Don Fisher, who graduated from Penn in 1975 and was sort of a Tommy Lee Jones type: as an undergraduate, he balanced working on the Mask and Wig crew/ business staff with breaking through the opposing football team’s defensive line at Franklin Field. The former president of Mask and Wig’s graduate club, he had read my piece “Echoes from the Mask and Wig,” and told me that he had more information about my step-grandfather Joe Follmann, who was pianist and music director for the collegiate song-and-dance troupe in the late 1920s.
“I believe Grandpa Joe was a scholarship student,” I told him. “And I know that today, the audition process for Mask and Wig is extremely difficult.”
“The Club was a lot harder to get into in those days,” Fisher told me. “And I will tell you this: he must have beenhot stuff in his time.”
The undergraduate members of the Mask and Wig Club, Joseph F. Follmann Jr. is in the center of the third row. The University of Pennsylvania Record, 1930. The Mask and Wig Club Archives.
Here’s what I did know: my grandfather was an excellent pianist, equally at home playing Beethoven and jazz standards His parents were working class German-Americans from West Philadelphia — according to my mother (his step-daughter) his mother was a Bavarian Catholic and his father a Prussian Protestant who may have worked as a coal miner in his youth. There’s a photograph in my parents’ house showing him around the age of 10, with long blonde hair and dressed in a sailor’s suit. He is standing at the knee of a grizzled looking old man reading a book — most likely his own grandfather.
Grandpa Joe’s obsession with economy — served up with stereotypical Teutonic severity — continued into his adulthood, even after he had achieved financial stability.
Leaving the lights on in an empty room was a pet peeve.
Many of his fellow students at the Wharton School were being groomed for leadership in tightly-held businesses. In those days, there were many such family concerns in Philadelphia, from manufacturers (Disston and Baldwin) to magazines (Curtis) to banks (Philadelphia Savings Fund Society) to railroads (the Pennsylvania). In those heady years just before the stock market crash, Grandpa had no desk at a family business waiting for him after graduation. Studying finance was a practical route; what he really wanted was to be a professional musician. Perhaps Grandpa was dreaming of following in the footsteps of Ted Weems, who had also graduated from West Philadelphia High and Penn seven years ahead of him and had cut a big figure in the American “collegiate” hot jazz scene during the booming Roaring Twenties.
University of Pennsylvania quadrangle dormitories, designed by Cope and Stewardson, showing the Mask and Wig wing. 36th and Spruce Streets. undated.
The Mask and Wig — which so was so prosperous that it had donated money to build a quadrangle dormitory — was a particular preserve of the “Old Philadelphia” elite, who had the time and the funds to indulge in such musical skylarking. Their show program books were chock full of advertisements from prominent — and now largely vanished — Philadelphia businesses. The clubhouse, a converted church a long trolley ride from campus, had been lavishly renovated by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre Jr. in the 1890s, and its first-floor bar adorned with murals by celebrated artist Maxfield Parrish. In those days, one did not formally join the Mask and Wig Club until senior year, after a year or two of working as a choral alternate…little more than a grunt. According to the show programs, Grandpa was listed as a choral alternate his sophomore and junior years, and he was not formally elected to full membership until his senior year.
Grandpa’s eagerness comes across in the photograph of The Mask and Wig undergraduate club in the 1930 University of Pennsylvania Record — amidst his stone-faced, bolt-upright compatriots, a fresh-faced Grandpa Joe looks alert as he leans jauntily to one side, his eyes sparkling. His ears stick out from his head, just the way I remember them when he was older. He had made it, his hard work at the piano and at his composer’s desk had paid off, and he was proud. He had been the music director and co-writer of that year’s show JohnFaust, Ph.D, a comic spoof on the German legend popularized by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The program cover for “John Faust, Ph.D,” 1930. The Mask and Wig Club Archives.
This was a time when songs from Mask and Wig and other collegiate groups became national hits, covered by the likes of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Frank Sinatra. Perhaps Grandpa hoped that one of his songs would hit the big time. Grandpa continued to contribute to the club well after graduation. In fact, he contributed songs to Mask and Wig shows for the next two decades — most notably in the 1937 production Fifty/Fifty — and culminating in the show Doctor, Dear Doctor! of 1951. By then, the Club’s roster of undergraduate members had diversified considerably from the blue-blooded old days. Grandpa conceived the book and produced the show, basing it it on Jean-Baptiste Moliere’s 1666 play Le Médecin malgré lui(A Physician in Spite of Himself). A photograph from the show’s program shows Grandpa Joe — looking a bit more as I knew him, balding and with more pronounced jowls — smiling with delight as he pours over a set of scenery mock ups with a colleague.
“You know those ancient bronze busts of Roman senators?” my grandmother once said. “Well, he looks just like them.”
If you’ve only been up to Manayunk to see the Philly Cycling Classic, it may seem a little too apt that people believe the name of the place is derived from a Lenape word for “a place to drink,” but that’s the story. Originally known as Flat Rock, after a rock alongside one of the bridges, Manayunk received its modern name in 1824, an anglicized version of the word “manaiung,” which is believed to mean, “where we go to drink”—referring to the Schuylkill River as a source of water.
#7 Green Lane Over Schuylkill River – Schuylkill Navigation Canal and Reading Railroad – Looking Northwest From Canal Bank.
The name of the town is important, because for a while, during the years when Philadelphia was known as “The Workshop of the World,” the denizens of Manayunk were there own breed of people. There are still some left, but once upon a time it was a blue collar community with a distinctive character. People from Manayunk were called “Yunkers.” Odds are, you just read that word wrong. If you were from there, you’d know “Yunker” is pronounced “yoonker” and “Manayunk” is pronounced “Manayoonk” to its old timers.
Leverington Avenue Bridge-Looking Southwest from Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Bridge. Simister Mills Company.
The original Lenape word could also mean “raging waters.” According to Deborah Del Collo’s Roxborough, the Schuylkill was, in those days, a raging river. It’s hard to imagine the ambling water way that way now, but it had to be calmed down. The story of Manayunk’s development is dependent on navigable waters.
Manayunk was a sparsely populated, bucolic farming settlement of only a few dozen people until the the Schuylkill Navigation Company began selling waterpower in 1818 or 1819 (accountsdiffer). From the beginning of power from the dam, however, things began to change rapidly in the area and the town began to grow as quickly. The first census of the area was conducted by a local pastor in 1827. He found 1,098 people living in the town, most of them working for textile mills.
The growth would continue. If you think of the textile industry before the Civil War at all, you probably think of the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. In Workshop of the World—A Selective Guide to the Industrial Archeology of Philadelphia, the writers argue that Manayunk differed from Lowell in that its various mills were all privately held by families. This gave the families much more leeway in how to conduct their business, so that the Mananyunk mills were making a greater diversity of cloths, dyes and patterns. They were also ploughing much of their profits back into the business, so that in time the mills would dominate the banks of the Manayunk Canals.
Leverington Avenue Bridge-Down Stream View. S. Keely and Sons Lumber and Millwork. 1929. This photo tells a little more of a story than it may immediately appear to. By 1929, the canals were all but completely out of use. In 1870, the canal industry had been defeated by the railroads and had sold the Philadelphia and Reading Railroads 110 year leases to their property.
At first, Manayunk’s mill owners were more inclined to invest in their plants than in housing for workers. Workers had to find their own places to live or build their own homes. As the 19th century wore on, that would change. More and more mill owners owned real estate and began to build cheap tenement housing further up the hill, away from the homes of the more prosperous nearer the mills and the rivers.
Stairway Connecting Upper and Lower Levels of Dupont Street at Silverwood Street. 1932.
In 1854, the township would be annexed into Philadelphia and officially be part of the city forever more.
The town would have three industrial cycles. Shipping on the canal would peak in 1859 and end in 1917. At the end of the Civil War, Manayunk would be recognized as a major textile center, but that would unravel with the Great Depression. However, Manayunk would remain important as an industrial center, primarily by way of paper mills, up through the 70s to early 80s. Then it would go into a period of decline.
In the 2000s, Manayunk started to come back, but primarily as a residential area. Today, Main Street Manayunk is a social and shopping destination and a gathering place for the new denizens of the neighborhood. There’s been some tension in the neighborhood as longtime residents grapple with gentrification. Even as the Bike Race and the Manayunk Arts Festival bring a decidedly different sort of traffic to what has become something of a bedroom community within the dense Southeast Pennsylvania region, some vestiges of an older Manayunk hang on, such as the Hi-Spot Lanes bowling alley on Hermit Street.
