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For more than a century, Philadelphia’s been playing a game of musical chairs with statues around City Hall. And it’s sure to continue, so long as we continue to ask monumental questions.

Actually, sculptural comings and goings started a century before they cut the ribbon at City Hall. William Rush’s Nymph and Bittern stood for a time as one of the city’s earliest pieces of public art.

We’ve previously written about the monument to Major General Peter Muhlenberg, colonial preacher and Revolutionary War hero. In 1910, a “monster parade” preceded Mulhenberg’s dedication on the south side of City Hall. Everyone thought it would be there forever. While the heroic story didn’t change, location did—twice. Patriots paying respects to the general would have to track him down. For a time, Muhlenberg stood his ground at Reyburn Plaza. Then he trekking out to Fairmount Park, where he can be found today.

The replica Statue of Liberty temporarily occupied a patch of pavement during part of the first World War. For all that fanfare, and there was much, she’s long gone.

So much bronze has been in flux over the years, enough to suggest there’s no shame in being uprooted.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ stoic Puritan, a full-scale likeness of Samuel Chapin, a New England settler who died before Philadelphia was even a sparkle in William Penn’s eye, commanded the concrete at Penn Square from 1905. Maybe Saint-Gaudens’ knew something. His statue looks like he’s about to walk off his pedestal. And in 1920, “The Pilgrim” as Chapin became known, did take a hike, in a manner of speaking, also making his way to Fairmount Park.

Scientist Joseph Leidy came and went, too. If his biography, The Last Man Who Knew Everything, was correct, Leidy should have known enough to secure a permanent place of honor in the center or town. Find him today, still holding the jaw of an Ice Age lion amidst the dinosaurs at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Curiously, there’s one figure, below, that remains. When 21st-century pedestrians even notice “Baldwin,” as the granite pedestal tersely explains, they have to wonder: “Who is this? Why is he here? Why should I care?” Baldwin’s story was good enough to justify his installation in 1902 across from his locomotive factory at Broad and Spring Garden Streets. (That place was something to behold, turning out a finished locomotive every two-and-a-half hours.) When the plant left town in 1928, rather than having its founder stare at the vacant factory, the powers that be moved Baldwin to the north side of City Hall.

And there he stands today.

Maybe it’s time to pose the monumental question in this case, too. Does Baldwin measure up to holding a spot on our most prime civic real estate?

“In just under two years,” John Maass explained in The Glorious Enterprise, his book about the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, “architects Hermann J. Schwarzmann, assistant Hugo Kafka and five engineers transformed 285 acres of fields of West Fairmount Park, mostly “swamps and ravines, into building lots, gardens and landscaped grounds.” Schwarzmann’s team “moved over 500,000 cubic or yards of earth; graded and surface 3 miles of avenues and 17 miles of walks; build a railroad with 5 1/2 miles of double track; corrected 16 bridges; put up 3 miles of fence with 179 stiles and gates; constructed 7 miles of drains, 9 miles of water pipes, 16 fountains, and water works with a daily pumping capacity of 6 million gallons; laid 8 miles of gas pipes; installed three separate telegraph systems with underground cables; planted 153 acres of lawns and flowerbeds, and over 20,000 trees and shrubs. Every one of 249 large and small structures was completed; Schwarzmann had designed 34 of these himself, including the two permanent buildings,” Memorial Hall and Horticultural Hall.

“Horticultural Hall was the smallest of the Centennial’s five principal buildings, but it was the largest conservatory built up to that time, bigger than the famous hothouses in the Botanical Gardens of London and Paris. Schwarzmann begin to prepare plans on April 11, 1874… On June 11, 1874, the Committee on Grounds Plans and Buildings approved his plans. Construction began in December 1874, and the elaborate building was completed on April 1, 1876. The City of Philadelphia bore the cost of $367,073.47.”

According to Schwarzmann, “the design is in the Moresque style of architecture of the twelfth century, the principal materials externally being iron and glass. The length of the building is 383 feet, width 193 feet, and height to the top of the lantern 72 feet.”

“The east and west entrances are approached by flights of blue marble steps from terraces 80 by 20 feet, in the center of each of which stands and open kiosk 20 feet in diameter,” Maass tells us. “The angles of the main conservatory or adorned with eight ornamental fountains. The corridors which connect the conservatory with the surrounding rooms open fine vistas in every direction.”

“No such building and no such horticultural display had been seen in an International Exposition before.  The visitors passed under horseshoe arches of black, cream and red bricks to enter the grand hall, flooded with light and filled with tropical palms, trees and shrubs. Spectacular chandeliers glittered above and in the center played a marble fountain, designed in Rome by the American sculptress Margaret Foley.”

“Horticultural Hall won the praise of professionals and public, of Americans and Europeans alike. The international jury gave Schwarzmann and award for its architectural design.”

“The building was surrounded by flowerbeds and the trees grew up around it. Horticultural Hall was a fine sight in the moonlight, gleaming by its reflecting pool. The interior was magic: Victorian statuary nestled in the moist tropical foliage, the stillness only broken by the drip of water on the floor of patterned grill work. The Park Commission skimped on proper building maintenance; in 1911 its engineers reported that the iron, glass, brick and woodwork were all in a hazardous condition of disrepair, but Horticultural Hall was still standing 43 years later when it was slightly damaged by a hurricane.”

According to some accounts, Hurricane Hazel broke hundreds of glass panes. According to others, the number was only 29. In either case, Hazel’s impact was considered a “death blow” to the meant-to-be-permanent, once-treasured Horticultural Hall.

[Sources: “Hazel Death Death Blow to Horticultural Hall,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 22, 1954; John Maass, The Glorious Enterprise: The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and H. J. Schwarzmann, Architect-in-Chief (American Life Foundation, 1973).]

How did the thousands of Philadelphians wired for telephone service connect with one another? How would they talk with early adopters in other cities? Connectivity for the ever increasing numbers of subscribers was the ongoing challenge. As told recently in a post illustrated with the horse-drawn telephone parade float, Philadelphia’s telephone industry served less than 5,000 in 1895 but would balloon to more than 100,000 a dozen years later.

The American telephone industry needed investment and innovation. In 1901, the world’s total mileage of phone wire stood near five million. Just over a decade later the total stood at more than 29 million miles—half of the world’s total. Americans had poured more than one billion dollars into infrastructure, and it was paying off. By 1912, there were nearly 12.5 million telephones in the world; 67% were in American homes and businesses.

But none were useful without innovations that would enhance connectivity. That’s where Bell Telephone’s building 406-408 Market came in. After alterations by architect Addison Hutton in 1891, this purpose-built, four-story structure would accept 250 underground cables from the surrounding streets. “Believed to be the only large building in the world entirely devoted to telephone purposes,” 406-408 Market was expected “to meet every requirement of the present, and all the possibilities of the future.”

On the top, sun-lit fourth floor Bell installed a new Law switchboard, “the most wonderful of all of the many wonderful appliances for securing prompt and efficient service.” This 80-foot long “Law board” contained 2,500 mile of wire configured for 10,000 circuits allowing as many as 90 operators “to make any desired connection instantly.”

John F. Casey, an inventor from St. Louis, had patented this telephone system in December 1888. “The methods now in vogue,” read Casey’s discussion of his improvement, resulted in “great delay and embarrassment” when subscribers from different central offices want to speak with one another. A subscriber would call their central office and that office would connect with the second central office. Once connected, operators at both central offices would have to call and then reconnect the two subscribers before making the connection between them. Such bottlenecks wasted “a great deal of time” and were “very unsatisfactory.”

Casey’s invention required that central offices had permanent, open circuits with one another so that “both operators that make the connections in each office hear the call at the same time. This obviates the necessity of central office A first making connection with central office B, then calling up central office B and waiting until said central office B makes the connection.”

“By my invention.” claimed Casey, conversations can take place “between subscribers connected with different central offices as expeditiously as between subscribers belonging to the same central office.”

But the success of America’s telephone industry’s would literally be in the hands of an army of efficient operators.

Want ads called for young women “of unquestionable character [with] 12th grade public school education” to apply in person. Fresh hires would “learn long distance telephone operating” at the Market Street facility while being paid. Graduates would be placed in telephone offices “convenient to home.” In 1912, the Bell Telephone bragged of its “enlarged operators’ school, second to none in the country in completeness… receiving more than 1100 students a year.”

With investment, invention, technology and training, American telephony had found its stride. But that didn’t stop company executives from looking for additional ways of to improve service, and the company’s bottom line.

“Courtesy Too Costly” read a New York Times headline in 1907, The Keystone Telephone Company’s top traffic manager in Philadelphia, A. J. Ulrich, insisted on dropping the word “please.” Ulrich had studied the situation and “found that patrons making calls and operators answering them” uttered the word “please” 900,000 times every day. He calculated that Keystone’s 450 “girl operators” and the subscribers they served wasted 7,500 minutes, or 125 hours, each and every day.

The Keystone Company banned use of the word “please.”

Not long after, AT&T attempted to dissuade its employees and customers from using the word “Hello.”

We know how that initiative on behalf of hyper-efficiency worked out.

[Sources: John F. Casey, A New Telephone System, U.S. Patent #394, 832, December 18, 1888. (PDF); Philadelphia and Popular Philadelphians, (Philadelphia, The North American, 1891); Want Ads, The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1905; “Courtesy Too Costly,” The New York Times, September 6, 1907; Telephone Statistics of the World (American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1912);  “A Year in the Bell Telephone Plant Department” (Advertisement) The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 18, 1912.]

Alexander Graham Bell found only fifteen customers in all of Philadelphia the year after he demonstrated his telephonic invention at the Centennial. The question he transmitted: “To be, or not to be?” was still very much unanswered in 1877.

By 1890, the telephone’s prospects were looking somewhat less dire. More than 3,000 Philadelphians had gotten wired up. It looked as if the telephone might be on its way to becoming useful. Indispensable and omnipresent would have to wait.

When the city threw itself a massive, self-congratulatory celebration in 1908, the telephone industry jumped at the chance to brag about their 102,000 early adopters. In three lavish floats, Bell Telephone pitched their services to the hundreds of thousands of holdouts who lined Broad Street from Diamond to Snyder.

“The Founders Week celebration,” sniffed the New York Times, “is the most pretentious undertaking this city has ever attempted.” The daily parades illustrated “progress of the city from its founding…down to the present day.” Re-enactors created 68 scenes from Penn’s Treaty with the Indians to “The City Beautiful.”

Wednesday October 7th was entirely dedicated industry. Organizers had hoped to limit the number of floats to 100 but they ended up with twice that many. “Every phase of industrial activity, labor, agriculture, science, and all the applied arts, weaving, spinning, soap making, transportation, fortune, cigar making, the manufacture of crude and partly finished materials into the finished product, were shown with wonderful reality in the procession which moved down Broad Street between two walls of closely packed humanity.” The Tacony saw manufacturers Henry Disston & Sons had five floats; the city’s lager brewers had four; Baldwin Locomotive Work had two. Bell Telephone had three.

Twenty red and gold-trimmed horses pulled the first and largest, a 46-foot display divided into eight room-like sections. The first presented “a woman in her boudoir using the telephone.” Next came a manufacturer’s office illustrating “the benefits of telephone service;” then a lawyer and a broker’s office, “each showing the convenience of telephone facilities.” On the opposite side of the float we’re four more scenes, “each fitted up in a similar manner to illustrate the uses of the phone.” Above, on the roof of a house portion of the float, were “two boys, talking over the string and tin can methods of voice transmission,” a reminder of the primal, universal appeal of voice communication. “On the ends of the float there will be three young women switchboard telephone operators, showing the system of today.”

Bringing up the rear of the telephone float trio was a horse-drawn bar graph with giant model telephones representing “the rapid rise of adoption.” Bell Telephone proudly celebrated the numbers with increasingly large model telephones from 1883 when there were 3,674 subscribers to 1908, when there were 102,193.

By 1917, Philadelphia would have 175,000.

Comparing Philadelphia with, say, Paris: Philadelphia had lagged behind through the 1890s. But by 1905, the American city had more than double the telephones per capita of its European counterpart. By 1911, Philadelphia had close to three times the phones of Paris.

The American investment in infrastructure had paid off. From 1901 to 1912, the total telephone wire mileage on earth increased from five to 29 million miles. Half had been unspooled in the United States. In 1908, there were four million American telephones in use. By 1912, there would be eight million. Total American telephone conversations topped 14 billion, more than double what the rest of the world could claim.

The American love affair with the telephone—and with winning—was only getting revved up.

[Sources: “Founders Week Industrial Day,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 24, 1908;  “Philadelphia Opens Its’ Founders Week,” The New York Times. October 5, 1908;  “Miles of Float Show Industries’ Progress March – Nearly two hundred displays on wheels delight thousands,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1908; Telephone Statistics of the World (American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1912); David Glassberg, “Public Ritual and Cultural Hierarchy: Philadelphia’s Civic Celebrations at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jul., 1983); “Telephones,” by Lucy Davis in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.]

Philadelphia’s first bridge over the Schuylkill River, confidently named “the Permanent Bridge,” wasn’t actually. It took only an hour before the bridge was “totally destroyed, consumed by fire and fallen into the river” one Saturday afternoon in November 1875. Only the masonry piers remained.

Gone was Timothy Palmer’s giant span of wooden trusses set in place in the early years of the century. Gone, too, was Owen Biddle’s roofed and gabled covering, painted and sprinkled with marble dust to create the illusion of stone. And gone were two allegorical sculptures by the “masterly chisel” of William Rush, “recumbent figures embodying Agriculture and Commerce” prominent in the pediments over the covered bridge’s entrances.

When installed in 1812, these two elusive sculptures (no images of them survive) completed the bridge. Rush’s figures were far more than ornament, they augmented the functioning bridge, which connected the east and west banks of the Schuylkill, with the symbolism and imagery of the city. Real commerce thrived at the eastern, urban (Center City) side of the bridge. Actual agriculture resided at the western, rural (West Philadelphia) side. Equipped with its allegories, the bridge provided a living link between vision and reality.

From the first, a ship representing commerce and a plow representing agriculture were on the cartouche of the official city seal. More than 120 years after the city’s founding, the actual bridge merged the physical and the symbolic into the real, the here and now. Commerce on the east and Agriculture on the west echoed Philadelphia in theory (as expressed in the city’s coat of arms) and in practice (as played out in the city itself). As citizens utilized the bridge for their livelihoods, they breathed life into the ideal. By joining identity, narrative and urban life, Rush’s sculptures elevated the bridge to a kind of civic theater, a functional version of a meaningful symbol.

Where else have we seen this merger of citizenship, public space and public art? Look to the sculptural program in City Hall’s courtyard (which we wrote about several years ago). In that case, the pedestrian/citizen/symbol is simultaneously representing, witnessing and expressing the meaning of place. The People animate and complete the sculptural program.

After the Rush allegories burnt, the successive Market Street Bridge would never again regain its deep-set sense of sculptural place. Subsequent sculptures would be decorative afterthoughts, punctuation in limestone. The current Market Street bridge, constructed by the Dravo Contracting Company of Pittsburgh at a cost of nearly $4,000,000, opened on a rainy night in November 1932. On it were carved swags, stylized dolphins, ram heads, lion heads, human heads all impressive additions by talented craftsmen, but baubles bereft of narration and any real civic meaning.

[Sources:  Linda Bantel, William Rush, American Sculptor (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1982); New City Span at Market St. is Dedicated, The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 19, 1932.]

 

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

-Mark Twain, Autobiography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources: 

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

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

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

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

Not far from his small rented house on Iseminger Street, Roger Abrahams could hear echoes young girls chanting to the distinctive slap of jump rope on pavement.

Folklorist antenna up, Abrahams recognized the chance to collect what he guessed wouldn’t be around much longer in his gradually gentrifying neighborhood—a community White newcomers called Camingerly. He took out his notebook and tape recorder and got to work documenting the rhymes of his young neighbors.

“I found out early that when I went more than two blocks away from the area in which I was known, I ran into a stone wall. To many Negroes in this section of Philadelphia,” Abrahams wrote in the early 1960s, “a white man is either a policeman, a landlord, or a bill collector.” Most of what he collected was found within the two city blocks around Iseminger and Lombard Streets. “I never went farther east than Twelfth Street, farther north than Pine, farther south than South Street, and farther west than Juniper,” he later wrote.

The games documented in 1958 and 1959 seemed “considerably more complex than those observable in most places elsewhere.” In early 1963, Abrahams published much of what he found in the journal of the Pennsylvania Folklore Society.

“In common with the singing games collected in this neighborhood, there is great emphasis on individuals doing dance steps and other difficult feats: Wiggling, doing the ‘rumba,’ touching your toes, going ‘up and down the ladder’ (jumping toward one end and then toward the other, the return often being backward jumping), ‘pepper’ (jumping while the rope is turned faster), and hopping.” Abrahams noted that as many as three or four girls would jump at the same time until one missed a step. She then would be become the object of “amused abuse.”

Here are a few from Abrahams’ collection, starting with a vestige of popular culture from the 1890s, including references to local features (the Delaware River and the Daily News,) and concluding with a parody of Dream Lover, Bobby Darin’s Rock and Roll hit recorded in April 1959:

Teddy bear, teddy bear, show your shoe, shoe.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, I love you.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, touch the ground, ground, ground.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn all around.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, one and two, two.
Teddy bear, teddy bear, I love you.

~

Acka-backa, soda cracker.
Does your father chew tobacco?
Yes. No. Maybe so.
Yes. No. Maybe so.

(Girls who missed on “yes” and “maybe so” were laughed at.)

~

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Children, too.
There’s a little white girl
Going looking for you.
Hands up, torch-a-torch.
Two years old, going on three.
Wear my dresses upon my knee.
Sister has a boyfriend,
Comes every night,
-Walks in the parlor
And turns out the lights.

Peep through the keyhole,
What did I see?
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,
Put your arms around me.
Girls, girls, ready for a fight.
Here comes the girl with the skirt all tight.
She can wiggle, she can friggle,
She can do that stuff.
But I bet she can’t do this.

(Jumping while the rope is turned faster.)

~

Postman, postman, do your duty
Here comes Susie just like a beauty.
She can rumba, she can tango,
She can do the strip.
She can wear her dress above her hips.

Policeman, policeman, do your duty.
Here comes Adelaide the American beauty.
She can wiggle, she can waggle,
But she sure can do the split, split, split.

(The jumper then straddles the rope.)

~

Blondie and Dagwood went downtown.
Blondie bought an evening gown.
Cookie bought a Daily News,
And this is what I say to you
Close your eyes and count to ten.
If you miss, you take the end.
1, 2, 3, etc.
Ice cream soda, Delaware punch,
Tell me the name of your honeybunch.
A, B, C, etc.

~

Dream lover, where are you?
Upstairs on the toilet stool.
Whatcha doing way up there?
Washing out my underwear.
How’d you get them so clean?
With a bottle of Listerine.
Where’d you get the Listerine?
From a can of pork and beans.
Where’d you get the pork and beans?
In the City of New Orleans.
How’ d you get way down there?
‘Cause I killed a polar bear.
Why’d you kill the polar bear?
Cause he dirtied my underwear.
I want a dream lover,
Never have to dream alone.

[Sources: Roger D. Abrahams, “Some Jump-Rope Rimes from South Philadelphia,” Keystone Folklore Quarterly, Spring, 1963 and Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970,) 2nd edition.]

The neighborhood called Camingerly doesn’t exist. What’s more, according to the list of nearly 400 Philadelphia neighborhood names, current and defunct, it never did. But thanks to the fieldwork of the late folklorist Roger Abrahams, Camingerly survives in scholarly literature, if not in the hearts and minds of would be Camingerlites.

Abrahams explained his work of more than a half-century ago: “Camingerly was really just us white folks name for what the [African-American] men called the 12^th Street neighborhood, the place the old Twelfth Street gang used to rule until they got old enough to have jobs, ‘old ladies’ and to get thrown down by circumstances. ‘Camingerly’ was our abbreviation of Camac, Iseminger, and Waverly between Twelfth and Thirteenth, Pine and Lombard.” If not for his living at 421 South Iseminger Street in the late 1950s, Abrahams wouldn’t have done the work that led him to initiate University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Folklore & Ethnography.

So what’s the deal with the neighborhood a few called Camingerly?

“These old row houses built as servants’ quarters as satellites to the square and townhouses on the larger thoroughfares,” wrote Abrahams. We called them ‘Father-Son-Holy-Ghost Houses,’ as did some of our neighbors, because they each had three rooms, one on top of the other. Some of them, in fact most of them, had a lean to kitchen appended to the first floor; and some of them had indoor plumbing. All the houses on our street were electrified, but not those two blocks to the south of us. The local hardware stores carry the stock of the country store, because in many ways the city life hadn’t reached these parts completely.”

Abrahams continued: “This was not the heart of black Philadelphia, though it was only a block from one of its main centers of activity, South Street. It was a little too far north, too close to the high-priced townhouses and stores. It was pimp country. Alice’s Playhouse [an African-American bar at 522 South 13^th Street] barbecued-chicken-on-the-corner country, but just one block north was Pine Street with all its antique stores and its police station (run by Frank Rizzo…”

By 1970, Abrahams noted, the neighborhood had “become all white.” And even as he lived there in the late 1950s, gentrification was beginning to take hold.  “Camingerly already had a number of invaders from Center City,” he wrote. “Miss Haines, had lived there for years, a Quaker nurse of great sensibility who was home wherever she found herself. And there were four or five others, more recently come, attracted by the closeness to downtown Philly.”

“But,” Abrahams observed, “in 1958 the place was unmistakably black.” And, for an emerging folklorist, full of possibilities.

Abrahams’ story as to how he arrived: “I was a graduate student in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania and I needed quarters close to transportation to Penn. …I had a friend, a roommate from college, living just a block away, and he was willing to take me to his landlord and to help me strike the same kind of bargain he had been able to make—reduced rent if improvements were made by the tenant. … So I moved to 421 S. Iseminger and began the never ending job of fixing the place up.”

“One of the reasons why moving into the area was exciting was that a couple of years before, my wife-to-be and I had been driving through the area and had seen an old man sitting on a doorstep playing his five-strong banjo. I was a folksinger then, just beginning to collect songs and singers, and so we leapt out of the car and had a delightful hour with “Old Banjo,” as he called himself. So in moving to Camingerly I had hopes of collecting oldtime songs, survivals of the trip north by immigrant singers. However, after I moved I soon found that “Old Banjo” had been dead a year and that not only were there no old bluesmen in the area, but that kind of ‘down-home’ music was scorned by my neighbors. So I quickly gave up hope of finding a store of folkloric material.

“Ultimately, it was not vestiges of the past traditions that exploded in my folkloric imagination, but the oral traditions that were largely the product of the urban experience—the performances of ‘sounds,’ the openly heroic, wildly imaginative, coercive, often violent stories and epic poems manufactured and performed by the young men.”

According to anthropologist and collaborator John F. Szwed, Abrahams rejected the “argument that black Americans suffered not only from poverty but from a deficient culture.” What Abrahams found in Camingerly was “a portrait of a highly verbal, articulate people whose daily lives are charged with the importance of wit, metaphor, and subtlety in a thousand ways.” Abrahams took what he observed from his base at Iseminger Street and “redefined what folklore was, in every sense. He moved it from the written text toward performance, and put the material into a political and cultural framework.”

Abrahams described meeting Bobby Lewis who performed his material and introduced others. “Fortunately for me,” wrote Abrahams, “a number of good performers from the neighborhood liked the idea of getting their entire repertoire down on tape (and listening to it played back). … John H. ‘Kid’ Mike was the first of the great talkers to come by, and he soon agreed to tell me his stories and toasts. He recorded a few of them—‘Shine,’ ‘Stackolee’ and one of the ‘Signifying Monkey’ toasts—and I immediately made transcriptions. Being a graduate student in folklore, I brought the texts to my professors, MacEdward Leach and Tristam Coffin. They both became excited about the stories and their performance and encouraged me to write about them in a term paper.”

Abrahams did more than a paper. He completed his dissertation “Negro Folklore From South Philadelphia” in 1962 and published a book one year later. “Abrahams described a new and vibrant verbal world, exuberant, profane and endlessly inventive” wrote William Grimes in The New York Times’ obituary.  “He explained the fine points of the dozens — a street-corner battle of wits in which participants traded insults — and analyzed traditional poems like “The Signifying Monkey,” whose opening line provided Professor Abrahams with the title of his book.”

Szwed and others described that book, Deep Down in the Jungle, as an “underground classic.” Twenty more books and scores of chapters and scholarly articles by Abrahams would follow. And much of it transformed the field of American urban folklore.

Even if the neighborhood name of Camingerly never caught on.

[Sources: Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970,) 2nd edition; John F. Szwed, “Review of Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Sep., 1971), pp. 392-394; William Grimes, “Roger D. Abrahams, Folklorist Who Studied African-American Language, Dies at 84,: The New York Times, June 29, 2017; Bonnie L. Cook, “Roger D. Abrahams, 84, Penn folklorist, writer, and performer,” Philly.com, July 7, 2017.]

Next Time: A Sampling 

After six years and 200 posts here at PhillyHistory, I have a handle on what’s in the archives, at least the portion of it that’s online. So now’s a good a time as any to take a moment to reflect on what it means to delve into thousands upon thousands of images and write the better part of 175,000 words. To consider what’s next and what’s likely to never be the subject of posts.

Yes… I’m asking, what’s it all mean? For what earthy reason do I persist in researching and writing? And why do you continue reading?

First a little background. This blog was underway long before I got here. It started in 2006, May 30^th to be exact, a year after the launch of its parent site, PhillyHistory.org. I was working then as head of WHYY’s Arts & Culture Service. About the same time, web manager Rich Baniewicz urged me to start a blog about the city’s creative culture. An opportunity soon presented itself with the 45-day deadline to keep (or lose) Thomas Eakins’ painting, The Gross Clinic. On November 16^th I published the first in a series entitled “Eakins Countdown” in an effort to help keep the painting in Philadelphia.

I liked to think the name of that blog, The Sixth Square. was resonant in a city with five original, physical squares. The stated upfront purpose: to “serve as a convener of ideas, a framer of issues, and a source of facts relevant to this important civic conversation.” A few others agreed with this mission. When I left for Temple University in 2008, WHYY kept The Sixth Square alive—for a time.

In 2010, Jonathan Butler invited me to write a weekly column at the Philadelphia clone of his successful Brownstoner Blog in Brooklyn, New York. Thirty-four columns later that project came to an end, but proved again that we had more than enough material, and sufficient interest, to share discoveries about Philadelphia.

Then the folks at Azavea offered me this gig. I jumped right in and got to know many of the city photographers. Some were identified only by partial names: Thum, Primavera, Madill in the 1920s. A few others: D. Alonzo Biggard, Andrew D. Warden and Julius Rosenberg (also in the 1920s). Wenzel J. Hess in the 1930s, Francis Balionis and Atheniasis Mallis in the 1950s. I got to know and appreciate work by Haag, Ebba, Cuneo, and Abuhove. And then there’s the unnamed and immensely talented photographers whose identities may be lost to history. I’m partial to the anonymous master worked on North 7th Street (and elsewhere) in the first decade of the 20th century, producing images that always stand out. The “Row of Houses” illustrated above is more than a document, it’s a testament to architecture, to the poetry of frontality and symmetry.

I got hooked. There’s a rich, wonderful and still untold history to those photographers and their fantastic work. Someday they’ll get their due.

The images are more than illustrations. I’d be adrift without the photographs, just as I’d be lost without the foothold of historical research. Where the books and articles help me grasp what I’m looking at, the images offer an aesthetic connection more emotional than informational. When the photographer made a connection with time and place, we get to “feel” the scene, the moment, the time and the place. The images ground the stories, making them readable beyond the words. They enable us to connect place, space and story with an emotional grasp; they are the glue that morphs information into meaning. From my point of view, experiencing that burst of discovery again and again makes the search all the more exciting. When a connection is made, when a nugget of visual realization joins historical narrative, we’ve accomplished something special.

There’s nothing like the combined power of images and narratives.

Which is why blogging has worked (mostly, I think) for a couple of hundred times—and why Rutgers University Press will publish 95 in a book to be entitled Insight Philadelphia. (More on that another day.)

What’s next for me during year seven here at the PhillyHistory Blog? I’ve kept a running list of ideas, a list that I started with every intention of ticking off the topics, and shrinking the list, one by one. But darn if it doesn’t grows longer every time I look at it. And then there are image files I’ve compiled. They grow, too. There are hundreds awaiting research. I have no doubt, if I was so fortunate to write another 200 posts here, or even 400, that there’d still be a long and promising list for the future. That’s the kind of collection the City Archives is. That’s the kind of city Philadelphia is.

I am looking forward to publishing posts on subjects from displacing the pig farmers of South Philadelphia to the manufacturing of subway cars and the evolution of street games. And then there are those images that don’t easily attach themselves to any narrative. Those images can be powerful in what they project, yet weak in that not much can be found out about them. These I keep in a growing file entitled “Too Good To Ignore.” It includes the “Row of Houses” of 1904 (illustrated) and others by the same photographer. And then there’s another file entitled “Word on the Street,” my compilation of signage, painted walls, etc. Pictures just too good to let go of. “West side of 7^th Street,” also by the 1904 photographer (illustrated above) is a stellar example. Call it urban visual vernacular. Call it worth the effort.

Turning to the “VOID” photograph (below) as metaphor, I’m pleased to report there’s much more out there in the void. Only some of it is in hand, other of it is yet to be found. But when it is uncovered, I am absolutely certain, there’ll be no shortage of images and stories to reconnect.

That’s the kind of collection the City Archives is. That’s the kind of city Philadelphia is.

The lost 30-foot model of the Parkway from 1911 was hardly the first time Philadelphia’s professional, public and political following was wowed in 3-D. In April 1875, Philadelphians enthused over a 40 by 20-foot model of Fairmount Park complete with the Centennial buildings exhibited at the Masonic Temple. And in 1947, the Better Philadelphia Exhibition featured a gigantic, rotating model of the entirety of Center City.

The big idea about the Parkway in 1911? It wasn’t the grand diagonal boulevard. That notion had been around since 1884. (See this image at the Free Library.) New here was the plan “advocated by the Fairmount Park Art Association in 1907 and … formally accepted and approved by the city government in an ordinance by councils, approved September 20, 1909.”  This plan promoted a Parkway, lined, end-to-end, with civic, religious, and cultural institutions, the latter clustering on and at the foot of Fairmount itself.

It was hardly a given that this grandiose, extravagant idea would be widely accepted. And so the opportunity to sell it arrived in the Spring of 1911 when Philadelphia hosted city planners from around the world.

As the Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art) put it in 1912: “Very satisfactory progress has been made by the movement for improved City Planning, to the promotion of which the energies of the Association have been largely devoted in recent years. The movement is now thoroughly organized on national and even international lines and the Third National Conference on City Planning, which was held in Philadelphia on May 15, 16, and 17, 1911, was much the most important and successful event of this kind that has ever occurred. The conference was held under the joint auspices of the City Government, the Fairmount park Art Association, and the City Parks Association. His Honor Mayor Reyburn gave the conference his cordial and active support and its sessions were held in the Mayor’s Reception Room at City Hall. Out of the fifty cities having a population of over 100,000 in the United States more than forty were represented, a very large and instructive exhibition of the projected improvements planned by the different cities forming one of the most impressive features of the conference. It was the first exhibition of this kind, arranged on any such lines as these, to be held in America and the expressions of appreciation and approval which were elicited from all who attended it were extremely gratifying. Some 900 exhibits were brought together, showing plans for the betterment; partly it is true, on economic and sanitary, but very largely, after all, on artistic, lines of more than one hundred cities of this country, Canada, South America, and Europe. They bore eloquent testimony to the strength and vitality of a great movement in which the Fairmount Park Art Association was one of the first, if not the very first, to lead.”

“The central feature of the exhibition at City Hall was a large model of the Fairmount Parkway constructed in the Bureau of Surveys.” Demolition had been underway since 1907, but this model made it clear that the improvement was not merely about creating a street, or even a boulevard, but a civic and cultural district populated by, according to the model, 18 public buildings of various types stretching from Logan Circle to Fairmount. One would be the Free Library. Another, dominating the Parkway atop Fairmount itself, would be the “Municipal Art Gallery” – a/k/a the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

At the time, only two institutions, the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Roman Catholic Cathedral, were in place. Over the next several years, no less than 22 institutions several would at least consider relocating to the Parkway. The comprehensive array included the American Catholic Union; American Philosophical Society; Architecture Department of the University of Pennsylvania; Art Club; Boy Scout Headquarters; Cathedral (Episcopal); Central Manual Training School; Convention Hall; Franklin Institute; Free Library of Philadelphia; Johnson Collection; Medico-Chirurgical Hospital; Museum of Commerce and Industry; Pennsylvania Museum’s School of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Philadelphia College of Pharmacy; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Post Office; Rodin Museum; School Administration Building; Temple University; Wills Eye Institute.

The city built the Parkway, though only six institutions of the 22 listed above (those in bold) came.

At the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, the notion of a cultural cluster of Parkway-based cultural destinations had a revival. A contingent led by Mayor Ed Rendell attempted to persuade the estate of sculptor Alexander Calder to relocate its collections in a promised new museum on the Parkway. That idea failed. And in 2002, 95 years after the idea of the cultural cluster first surfaced, Rebecca W. Rimel, president of Pew Charitable Trusts, claimed that if the way could be cleared to move the Barnes Foundation to the Parkway from Merion, “Philadelphia will have a “magic museum mile.” The Barnes opened at 19th Street and the Parkway in 2012, 101 years after the big idea was first promoted.

[Sources:  David Brownlee, Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989); Fairmount Art Association, Fortieth Annual Report of the Board of Trustees, (Philadelphia, 1912); Patricia Horn and Patrick Kerkstra, “Barnes Wants to Move Art Collection to Philadelphia,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 25, 2002; Edward Sozanski, “Rendell Courting Museum of Alexander Calder Works,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 29, 1999.]