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Thomas Fitzgerald jumped into Philly journalism and never looked back. He liked to write; loved to lead, and insisted on challenging the status quo.

The name of the “racy and spicy” newspaper Fitzgerald started as a weekly in 1847 and soon grew into a daily changed again and again: The City Item, Fitzgerald’s City Item, The Philadelphia City Item, The Evening Item. Everyone always knew it as The Item—and that it stood for the little guy. Fitzgerald promised to be “constantly aggressive in all that relates to the equality of Man before the Law and ever striving to break down barriers of Prejudice and Caste.”

“If a house is burnt in this city, or a store robbed, or an omnibus upset, or a fiddler hissed, or an actor applauded, look for it in The City Item. If a poor fellow goes in two with a railroad car on Market Street, or a gentleman of aldermanic rotundity falls down in his own street in a quiet, comfortable, respectable fit of apoplexy, look for it in The City Item. If a fair maiden is lured from the pathway of peace to the pathway of vice by a fellow with a huge pair of moustaches, look for it in The City Item. If an elopement takes place between one man’s wife and another wife’s husband, look for it in The City Item.”

Fitzgerald, who very much looked the part, had, demanded reforms aimed at improving the common good: removing gates from public squares, reforming the street numbering system, upgrading the police and fire departments with telegraphs, building public baths and establishing a city morgue. He fought to demolish the sheds that ran up the center of Market Street since the 17^th century and to replace them with modern market buildings. He “ridiculed the red-brick monotony of the city’s architecture” and campaigned for music in the schools.

In June 1869, Fitzgerald called for mixed-race baseball. “Such a game would be interesting and well patronized,” he argued, asking “Who will put the ball in motion?” and signing off as “A Lover of the Game.” (A few months later, Fitzgerald got his wish, serving as the umpire of the game—the first of its kind– between the African-American Pythians and the Caucasian Olympics.)

Circulation of The Item grew until it hit its stride in the 1880s “as a crusading penny paper with a press run that sometimes reached 200,000 copies.” By 1890, nearing the age of 70, Fitzgerald retired handing the operation over to his sons. Harrington Fitzgerald became managing editor.

In 1894, Inquirer editor Charles H. Heustis described The Item as a successful afternoon paper with a Sunday edition that “especially reaches the working classes.” He observed that “Item boys are seen in every quarter of the city, and when the Item wagons are drawn up in a line on Seventh Street, at the hour of publication, they form an extended procession.” That procession led to circulation that bypassed Heustis’ own paper.

As we said in an earlier post, no less than a dozen dailies started up in the city between the mid-1830s and 1880, and all were in the same neighborhood. Next door to The Item was The Call. Just across Ranstead was The Evening Star. Diagonally across 7^th Street was The Daily News. The Evening Bulletin, The Public Ledger and the Philadelphia Demokrat, a German-language newspaper were found within a  block to the east. Half a block to the south at Chestnut were The Press, and The North American. (The Press Annex still stands at 7th and Sansom.) Further to the west on Chestnut was The Times Printing House.

Competition was stiff. But by 1901, John Henry Hepp notes, The Item had them all beat every day of the week. The Sunday Item surpassed The Philadelphia Inquirer by more than 17,000 copies with circulation of 184,009.

But winning wasn’t enough for the feisty, fastidious Harrington Fitzgerald. The following year, in a full-page advertisement in N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual Fitzgerald boasted “THE ITEM LEADS; OTHERS FOLLOW” and presented his own, higher circulation numbers for each day of the entire previous year. Fitzgerald challenged his competition to join in on a bet worth as much as $40,000 for the newspaper with the highest circulation in Philadelphia.

By 1911, with the bet still untouched, Fitzgerald increased the stakes to $120,000. Still, no takers came forward.

Behind the bluff, The Item was losing ground. After Thomas Fitzgerald’s departure, the paper gradually lost its spirit, its talent, its focus and its popularity. Circulation plummeted from 200,000 to a paltry 10,000 and in 1914, it folded. Harrington Fitzgerald went from bragging in print to selling at auction. On January 12, The Item’s two buildings, five Hoe presses, 12 linotype machines, its fittings and furniture—all of it went to the highest bidder.

(Additional sources include: American Newspaper Journalists, 1873-1900. Perry J. Ashley, ed. (Gale Research Co., 1983); “Executor’s Sale, Estate of Thomas Fitzgerald, Deceased,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 3, 1914; “Fitzgerald Estate,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 12, 1914.)

In order to succeed in its grand ambitions of City Beautifulism, the Parkway had to overcome a handful of awkward design moments. The first, at the base of City Hall, got the boulevard off on the wrong foot. Instead of elegance and clarity, we see Broad Street Station’s tower poking and jutting into what should have been an open vista. A second awkwardness appeared at Logan Square, where the Parkway sliced through on the diagonal. And the Parkway’s third clumsy challenge was at the rocky base of Fairmount itself.

Jacques Gréber brilliantly addressed the last two awkward moments. His solution at Fairmount employed a giant set of steps to extend the Parkway’s axis to the entrance of the “Greek Garage.” At Logan Square, Gréber introduced an off-center traffic circle disguised as a Beaux-Arts fountain.

And so two of the Parkway’s design problems were solved.

The remaining problem at the base of City Hall, was at the site with the greatest demands and conflicting responsibilities. As early as 1911, a proposed plaza design for the start of the Parkway got loaded up with a host of additional functions in as many new buildings: a headquarters for the Free Library, a Franklin Institute, and a massive court house. Fortunately, these projects were soon moved to Logan Circle. But by 1920, the expanse at the start of the Parkway still felt and looked unfinished, a pleasant jumble, as depicted by Salvatore Pinto, of cars, towers and citizens.

Enter Edmund N. Bacon, who spent at least some of his adolescence wondering what this awkward space could become. Bacon worked on the problem for his architecture thesis at Cornell in 1932 and his plans, which introduced a giant, circular terminus for the Parkway vista would simmer for another three decades.

According to Greg Heller, as head of the City Planning Commission, Bacon worked with Vincent Kling to advance a version of his earlier idea for a plaza. In the Spring of 1962, the aged Gréber even gave the idea his thumbs up. The soon to be named JFK Plaza featured a giant, 90-foot wide fountain, large and symmetrical enough, on this burdened, little square, to strongly punctuate the beginning (or the end) of the Parkway.

Aspirations called for something more for JFK Plaza than the giant geyser fountain we’ve come to accept. But a design competition turned up nothing winnable, not even Robert Venturi’s proposed giant, seemingly NASA-inspired fountain that would provide much-needed scale,  dimension (and wit) to the Bacon/Kling idea. As Venturi explained his solution in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: “The form is big and bold so that it will read against its background of big buildings and amorphous space and also from the relatively long distance up the Parkway. Its plastic shape, curving silhouette, and plain surface also contrast boldly with the intricate patterns of the buildings around….  This fountain is big and little in scale, sculptural and architectural in structure, analogous and contrasting in its context, directional and nondirectional, curvilinear and angular in its form, it was designed from the inside out and the outside in.” Venturi recognized what the site demanded: a hyperlegible feature, a bold solution.

Which brings us to the recently announced redesign for JFK Plaza, aka LOVE Park. Hargreaves Associates and Kieran Timberlake allowed competing demands to have their way with the space. It has become many things to many interests, at the expense of being big and bold (in spite of one review claiming the contrary). The fountain survives, though shrunken; the beloved Visitor Center is offered a new life; a greensward dominates as it might in a suburban office park. A century later, we find ourselves rediscovering the plaza’s original awkward complexity.

LOVE Park is again bereft of much needed boldness, or as Bacon would put it, a powerful “design idea.” Unless LOVE is enough to carry the day.

Maybe, just maybe, the relatively small (but big-hearted and extraordinarily popular) LOVE statue can save the square? Long ago, William Penn urged: “Let us try what love will do… Force may subdue but love gains.” Penn was talking about his policy of peace with Native Americans. More than 330 years later, we’d like to think that we, too, believe in the power of love to solve all kinds of problems, maybe even our most demanding design challenges.

So, taking Penn’s lead: “Let us try what Love will do.” Maybe, by some miracle, love is all we need at LOVE Park.

A lot of folks have given a lot of thought as to who The Thinker is and what he’s thinking about. Not everyone agrees on a single interpretation, not even the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who imagined many and wouldn’t say for sure which one he intended. Anyway, Rodin believed works of art should speak for themselves.

So everyone else got to have their thoughts about The Thinker, which made it very, very popular—and gave it its staying power.

That power is why this cast of the Thinker migrated from Paris and landed temporarily on Logan Square in 1927, awaiting completion of Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum. The Thinker had spoken, as it were, to Philadelphia motion picture magnate and philanthropist Jules Mastbaum, who went on a Rodin buying binge in 1925 and 1926. Mastbaum returned home from Paris with a cache of 106 Rodin bronzes. The Thinker would have the place of honor; he’d be the first to welcome visitors. All the more important to know what he was thinking.

Since Rodin first modeled the figure in 1880 as a central element for his monumental, complex Gates of Hell, it made some sense that The Thinker might be the artist himself. Or, possibly it could be Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy, which inspired the sculpture. But by 1904, Rodin freed The Thinker from his Gates project and “conceived another thinker, a naked man, seated upon a rock, his feet drawn under him, his fist against his teeth” …dreaming.

This larger, muscular stand-alone Thinker did more than dream, explained Rodin. “The fertile thought slowly elaborated itself within his brain.” He is “no longer a dreamer, he is a creator.” A romantic idea, and a popular one.

Rodin cast and re-cast his thinkers in monumental forms—dozens of times. They proliferated in public places from Paris to Louisville, Dresden to Detroit, guaranteeing The Thinker unfortunate fate as a visual cliché, but also assuring that thinking about The Thinker was anyone’s game.

“With his worn body and face of a primitive man,” The Thinker is, speculated critic Octave Mirbeau, the image of a cave man, looking at the unfolding below of the crimes and passions of his descendants.” He is “austere nudity, in his pensive force.” He is “the same as a wild Adam, implacable Dante, and merciful Virgil…but he is above all The Ancestor, the first man, naïve and without conscience, bending over that which he will engender.”

Cast in monumental scale, made of bronze to endure the ages and installed in civic settings, The Thinker became everyman for everyone, nearly everywhere.

Our public art, our memorials and our monuments are part of a civic cultural collective, or they should be. They should be ours to help us consider, recognize and remember, ours to help us organize the past and shape future memory.

It didn’t work that way in the 1920s. For all of his generosity, Jules Mastbaum usurped civic power acquiring Rodins for exhibition at the Sesquicentennial Exposition and as a subsequent gift for the City. It’s hard to fault Mastbaum for his philanthropy, but we could fault him for his presumptions. Mastbaum crossed a line thinking The Thinker was an appropriate idea of a monument for the 20^th century city.

What would other Philadelphians in Mastbaum’s time rather have seen cast in bronze and displayed in public? They weren’t consulted.

Nearly a century later, the tables are turned. Now, thanks to Monument Lab, an innovative project taking place in Philadelphia between May 15 and June 7, 2015, we all have a shot at becoming Mastbaums. We get to propose monuments appropriate for the 21^st century city. We get to say what they are, what we expect of them, and where they’d have the most meaning.

When imagination is at work, there are no limits.  So what will it be?

Visit Monument Lab in City Hall courtyard and submit your ideas, your inspirations.

Construction delays scuttled the original plan to open the Centennial in April 1876, in time for the 100th anniversary of the battles at Lexington and Concord. Just as well. The nation’s first world’s fair wasn’t looking to the past so much as the American present and, even more, its future.

On May 10, 1876—139 years ago yesterday—the bell at Independence Hall signaled the opening of the Centennial. Four miles from the city’s historic center more than 186,000 gathered for a heady celebration of stuff in a temporary Centennial City in West Fairmount Park. In all, more than 9.8 million visitors would visit over the summer months to celebrate the growth of America from idea to flourishing nation.

At its symbolic and ceremonial center, Centennial planners built a place where America would be represented by the nation’s artists. Inside, surrounded by an array of other galleries filled with art from around the world, was America’s “Grand Salon,” aka “Gallery C,” the place for the nation’s artists to be and be seen. Here would be the best of the best in American art, works expressive of what this nation had become, or as Kimberly Orcutt put it: “…the first officially sanctioned, full-scale reckoning of the nation’s art.”

It wouldn’t be easy to present what the organizers hoped for: “a unified ‘American school.’” As it turned out, by the 1870s, America’s artists were more divided than united. New York landscapists conflicted with European-trained cosmopolitans from Philadelphia and Boston. And Philadelphia artist John Sartain, appointed chief of the Art Advisory Committee only eight months before opening day, created a top-heavy bureaucracy, a Committee on Selection and a Committee on Arrangement, to “help.” The ever-political Sartain, Orcutt writes, “was careful not to place himself on the Committee on Selection” but after the committee reviewed more than 1,000 works of art in early April, rejecting some interesting newcomers like the still-young and little-known Thomas Eakins and others who also trained abroad, Sartain carried out a notorious series of end runs around his committees, soliciting works he thought merited display, particularly from artists who were longtime friends and allies, including Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran.

In all, Sartain and his committee assembled far more than could possibly fit in Gallery C. Americans would be hung in the long, narrow  connecting gallery at Memorial Hall as well as in a handful of small, square  rooms in the one-story, wooden annex built directly behind Memorial Hall to accommodate overflow.

Installed, “Gallery C” spoke more to the contested state of American art than anything like a hoped-for American School. In the center stood two sculptures by P.F. Connelly’s, Ophelia and Death and Honor and another by Howard Roberts Le Premier Pose, now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Visitors witnessed John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, now at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Albert Bierstadt’s Entrance into Monterey (The Settlement of California, Bay of Monterey, 1777), now in the U. S. House of Representatives. They saw Eastman Johnson, Catching the Bee, 1872  and Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip. They took in Peter Rothermel’s gigantic (16’ x 32’), bloodless, Battle of Gettysburg, and Thomas Eakins’ Portrait of Dr. Rand, now the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Of course, they didn’t see Eakins’ very bloody Portrait of Dr. Samuel Gross which the Selection Committee passed on. That refusée made an appearance in the far-flung Army Medical Department Exhibition.

Eakins’ Gross Clinic, according to Sylvan Schendler, had been been dumped for a cow painting entitled The Return of the Herd by Peter Moran, Thomas Moran’s younger brother. (In a twist of history, the Peter Moran recently sold for sum of $38,025, minuscule compared to the $68,000,000 sale price for The Gross Clinic in 2006.)

In 1914, nearly four decades after doing his best to define an American art, the mature Eakins, who embodied the best of the conflicting approaches, reflected on the American art dilemma that had shaped his entire career: “If America is to produce great painters and if young artists wish to assume a place in the history of the art of their country, their first desire should be to remain in America to peer deeper into the heart of American life, rather than spend their time abroad obtaining a superficial view of the art of the Old World.”

When Eakins was in his early 30s in 1875 and painted The Gross Clinic, American artists were  nowhere near ready to speak in one clear, creative voice that might be considered an “American School.” Many decades later, the dust still hadn’t settled. If anything, the international influences on American art were stirred up even more by the Armory Show in 1913 and collector Albert Barnes, who focused intensely  on what made good art, rather than what made good American art.

It could be the impossible search for a pure, distinctive and exclusively American art is what stymied success at the Centennial’s “Gallery C.”

Note: this article is Part II of a series.  Click here for Part I. 

 Two months ago, as we stood in front of St. Monica’s Roman Catholic Church, Frank DeSimone recalled one of his fondest childhood memories: the annual visit of the Joseph A. Ferko String Band.

In the 1950s, Philadelphia was defined not by neighborhoods, but by parishes, and the local string band was a parish’s pride and joy.

“In those days, there would be a million and half people along North Broad Street,” Frank said.  “It was HUGE!”

And every New Year’s Day, the populace of St. Monica’s Parish was serenaded by 85 very honored guests.

The Mummers Parade, which formally began in 1895, was initially a kind of subversive institution, an assertion of Roman Catholic identity in a largely Protestant city.  The Quaker founders, who strove for simplicity in life and worship, were particularly suspect of “popery.”  Like the Puritans of New England, Quakers viewed liturgical feasts such as Christmas as excuses for public revelry and mischief rather than quiet devotion.  In 1733, the city leadership grew concerned that the Jesuits had arrived in Philadelphia. The Provincial Council of Pennsylvania noted that it was: “no small concern to hear that a House lately built in Walnut Street.was sett apart for the Exercise of the Roman Catholick Religion and it is commonly called the Romish Chappell . where Mass [is] openly celebrated by a Popish priest, contrary to the Laws of England.”  Remarkably, the Council determined that Philadelphia’s fledgling Roman Catholic population was protected by William Penn’s Charter of Privileges, which guaranteed religious freedom for all.  The “Romish Chappell” in question became Old Joseph’s Church, which still stands in Society Hill. Yet the hostility continued.  In 1808, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a bill declared that “masquerades, masquerade balls, and masked processions were public nuisances”  Some of this animus against dressing up was no doubt fueled by anti-Catholic sentiment, which grew to a fever pitch during the “Know Nothing” Philadelphia riots of the 1830s, in which Protestant rioters torched Roman Catholic churches, homes, and businesses.

By the late 19th century, a huge influx of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Germany tipped the balance of political power in Philadelphia in favor of the Roman Catholic electorate.  Inspired by the religious pageants from their native lands, as well as celebrations of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the city’s burgeoning working class — whose toil in the factories and mills supported the lifestyles of Philadelphia’s Gilded Age elite — decided to put on their own annual fete.  In 1923, a new string band joined the ranks of revelers parading up Broad Street at the start of every year: the Joseph A. Ferko String Band. Its clubhouse was located near the Delaware River on 2nd Street.  The band’s founder Joseph Ferko was a pharmacist from North Philadelphia, who for nearly fifty years led the group up Broad Street, and on to twenty first place finishes.

St. Monica’s Parish — centered around the church at 17th and Ritner — was located relatively close to the parade’s starting point at Broad Street and Oregon Avenue.   So every New Year’s Day, the Ferko String Band would arrive at St. Monica’s basement and change into their elaborate customs.  At 10am, Frank recalled, the 85 men of the Ferko String Band would walk out in all their colorful finery and serenade the 35 nuns on the convent steps with their renditions of “Alabama Jubilee,” “You Are My Sunshine,” and other popular songs.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDbn3QtWJbA&w=480&h=360]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0bLGEDY2NA&w=480&h=360]

Then, the priest of St. Monica’s Church would bless the men of Ferko, and off they would strut to the parade route.

“I wouldn’t go to the parade until I saw Ferko!” Frank said.

And the performance pleased the nuns who taught Frank and his friends at the parish school. “If you spoke out of turn in class,” he said, “you were a ‘bold, brazen article!’  The last thing you wanted was for your parents to receive a note from Sister.”

Sources: 

Interview with Frank DeSimone, March 22, 2015.

“The Joseph A. Ferko String Band,” accessed May 6, 2015. http://www.ferko.com/pages/jandband.htm

“Old St. Joseph’s in the 18th Century,” accessed May 6, 2015. http://oldstjoseph.org/blog/about-osj/history/18th-century/

 

 

At the 5.9-mile point, Broad Street runners round City Hall turning at South Penn Square. It wasn’t always like a canyon. The place had a downright downscaled feel in the first half of the 19^th century, when Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Pump House sat central in the Square and Napoleon LeBrun’s stone steps spilled onto the sidewalk from the classical portico of his 7^th Presbyterian Church. But by the 1890s, when Will Decker’s 14-story Betz Building rose on the site of the church and Furness and Evans’ West End Trust topped out at the same height directly across Broad, City Hall had formidable company and Scrappletown had its own brand of wanna-be-skyscrapers.

Of course, that’s all gone today, demolished and replaced. Every structure pictured or linked in this special-edition pair of blog posts was demolished to make way for the city we know and sometimes love, the Philadelphia celebrated by the Broad Street Run. Last time we focused on the northern portion of the course, where runners enjoyed the gentle slope from Logan’s heady elevation at 170-feet above sea level to Penn Square’s humble 49 feet. From here on down to the Navy Yard? That’s the harder part. So, to help you with that final stretch, PhillyHistory is pleased to provide a distraction to help runners imagine what the last four miles of this course once looked like.

Just past 6.0 miles at Broad and Chestnut Streets: On your left at Broad and Sansom:  Another classical temple, this one from the 1830s, the First Independent Presbyterian Church (aka Chambers’ Church).  On your right: the Academy of Natural Sciences, a hotel topped by a giant wooden eagle (La Pierre House).

6.1 miles – Broad and Walnut: On the left, still another classical portico, this time at the Dundas-Lippincott Mansion and just past the Bellevue on the right, the Art Club, which survived into the 1970s.

6.15 miles – Broad and Locust: architect Theophilus Parsons Chandler, Jr.’s Walton Hotel, which made it as far as the 1960s, survived thirty years longer than did Kiralfy’s Alhambra Palace (aka the Broad Street Theatre), not visible on the left. Horticultural Hall, formerly on the right, and previously posted about, lasted only 21 years.

6.2 miles – Broad and Spruce: Hotel Stenton from the 1890s, also on the east side. Just south of Spruce, on the left, stood the Romanesque-style First Reformed Presbyterian Church (aka Wylie Memorial Church).

6.4 miles – Broad and Lombard: Where the threatened blue-brick District Health Center No. 1 sits, once stood the Darley Residence, first designed by Furness & Hewitt in the 1870s then redone by C. M. Burns.

6.5 miles – Broad and South: At the southeast corner, you won’t see another Burns building the Southwestern National Bank from 1900, which barely made it to middle age.

6.8 miles – Broad and Carpenter: A railroad freight depot on the southwest corner, now parking on blacktop behind a vintage chain link fence.

6.9 miles – Broad and Washington: Another freight depot, on the northwest corner, this one of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

7.0 miles – Broad and Federal: Holland Memorial Presbyterian Church where a Pep Boys now stands.

7.9 miles – Broad and Jackson: The Southern Manual Training School, by architect Titus Lloyd, diagonally across from St. Luke’s Church.

7.1 miles – Broad and Wharton: Third Regiment Armory, demolished just two years ago.

7.8 miles – Broad and Snyder: Where a Walgreens  is today the Broadway Theatre opened in 1913.

8.3 miles – Broad and Oregon:  The entrance to the sprawling Sesquicentennial Exposition in 1926, featuring the long-lost portent of Pop: a giant, electrified Liberty Bell.

8.4 to 9.1 miles – From Broad and Bigler to Broad and Hartranft, was the landscaped promenade called Forum of Founders. It lead to the Municipal Stadium, a venue later joined by Veterans Stadium and the Spectrum, all of which, of course, are gone.

At 10 miles – at the blunt, wet end of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, stood another icon of power and strength, “Old Hammerhead,” “the World’s Largest Crane,” which proved its mettle as a worthy monument by holding up “350 Tons of Guns.”

So many didn’t make it.

But congratulations!

You did.

In 1876, as Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition was in full swing, the Pennsylvania Railroad quietly bought up the trolley rights on Lancaster Avenue from 52nd Street to the western city limits.  The PRR shrewdly sought to control as much development as possible along its Main Line to Pittsburgh, which paralleled Lancaster Avenue — also known as US 30.  The lack of trolley cars — seen as a noisy but necessary nuisance by many residents of West Philadelphia — allowed developers to create build larger houses on more spacious lots.  One property ripe for development was the 165 acre John M. George farm, which in the 1890s had not yet been developed by traction magnate Peter Widener and his cronies.  A consortium lead by the PRR and Drexel & Company then transformed the George farm from bucolic fields to upscale housing development.

Overbrook Farms, like Chestnut Hill on the other side of the Schuylkill, was a carefully planned community of suburban-style houses built within walking distance of a train stop.  The Drexels were no strangers to development in West Philadelphia — Anthony Drexel, who died the year after his bank purchased the George farm, was responsible for much of the trolley car housing development around his family’s compound at 39th and Locust.  In Overbrook, however, commercial enterprises were banished from residential streets, confined to a circumscribed shopping area near the railroad station, rather than strung out along main trolley car routes such as Baltimore Avenue to the south.

Small wonder the real estate promoters unabashedly advertised Overbrook Farms as a “suburb deluxe.”  Compare the freestanding and twin houses of Overbrook Farms with the streetcar developments built elsewhere in West Philadelphia at the same time.  These 500 or so homes — many designed by noted architects such as William Price, Angus Wade and Horace Trumbauer — are ancestors of the suburban houses that Americans take for granted today but were so novel at the end of the 19th century.  A typical detached house in Overbrook Farms contains over 2,000 square feet per floor, and cost anywhere from $12,500 to $35,000 in the 1890s, making them the modern equivalent of million dollar plus homes. The Overbrook homes are free from the constraints of traditional row house lots, the largest of which were typically 21 feet wide and 100 feet deep.  The twin homes  Church Road, Drexel Road, and Woodbine Avenue are massive, almost mansion like in scale.  They are also more richly decorated than their boxier counterparts in West Philadelphia’s trolley car suburbs of Cedar Park and Spruce Hill, which were built at almost exactly the same time.  Rooflines are more playful and varied, and walls are ornamented with Tudor half-timbering, Spanish stucco, and Colonial Revival windows.

Another advantage of larger lots was room for on-site carriage houses, which within a few decades would be transformed into garages.  On Woodcrest Avenue, just to the south of the original Overbrook Farms development, rowhouses and twins constructed after the First World War had alleys built in the rear for parking.

Originally located outside the western boundary of Philadelphia in the 1890s, Overbrook Farms was eventually annexed by the city, making it distinct from neighboring Merion and Wynnewood, which were also developed by the PRR.  It became popular with wealthy Philadelphians such as real estate mogul Albert Greenfield and chemist/art collector Albert Barnes, who were put off by the Main Line’s exclusivity but were attracted by the high quality housing stock.

Although Overbrook shares some qualities with Chestnut Hill — a fashionable suburb located in the city limits — it never had a Henry Howard Houston or George Woodward-type landlord who carefully curated its insular, exclusive mystique by building churches like St. Martins-in-the-Fields or clubs like Philadelphia Cricket.  Churches of various denominations were sponsored by individual congregations, most notably St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Philadelphia’s city’s oldest historically African-American Episcopal congregation, which before its move to Overbrook was located at 52nd and Parrish.  Rather than the firm hand of the Houston-Woodward clan, control of neighborhood aesthetics was overseen by a more democratic entity: the Overbrook Farms Club, the oldest continuously operating neighborhood association in the United States.

The result was that Overbrook Farms abounds in character and beautiful period architecture, but it never for a second feels like an English village.  Its tree-lined streets are thoroughly American in feel and layout.  Overbrook Farms was also a taste of things to come in American suburban development, which would boom in the 1920s and 50s, coinciding with middle class prosperity and the rise of the automobile.

Thanks to the hard work of the Overbrook Farms Club, this distinct neighborhood has survived remarkably intact, despite widespread abandonment and subdivision only a few blocks away. Most of Overbrook Farms’ historic homes are still single family residences.

 

“History: Overbrook Farms Club,” accessed April 29, 2015. http://www.overbrookfarmsclub.org/?page_id=213

Edith Willoughby, “Overbrook Farms,” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Form, 1985, p.7.  https://www.dot7.state.pa.us/ce_imagery/phmc_scans/H082616_01H.pdf

 

 

What ran up and down Broad Street a century ago? Buildings did. According to Poor Richard’s Dictionary of Philadelphia, nearly fifty of the city’s public structures: hospitals, schools, institutes, hotels, sacred places, museums, theatres, opera houses, government buildings, clubs and railroad stations were sited along the 10-mile plus length of Broad Street. As discussed last time, this plan was long in the making. William Penn, who almost certainly found inspiration in the urban visions of Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio in giving Broad Street its plain, forthright name in the 1680s, intended exactly that. It took a while—two centuries— to fully catch on, but in the fullness of time, Broad Street became Philadelphia’s Public Avenue, the venue for civic life.

But things change, and many of the buildings that once lined Broad Street are now gone. In this, the first of two posts dedicated to the expected 30,000 participants in the 2015 Broad Street Run, we link to what’s lost on Broad, some of the buildings no longer seen along this 10-mile course.

From Broad Street and Somerville Avenue, heading south:

1.0 miles – Broad, just south of Blavis Street: Saint Luke’s Hospital.

1.2 miles – Broad and the Roosevelt Boulevard: The first of many gas stations. This one designed for the Atlantic Refining Company.

1.8 miles – Broad and Erie: The Greek Revival temple of the North Central Trust Company, on the southeast corner, directly across from the now-closed Bowlorama and its time-keeping billboard.

2.1 miles – Broad and Ontario: Samaritan Hospital and the recently demolished Temple University Medical School.

2.4 miles – Broad and Allegheny: Philadelphia original Convention Hall, inside and out.

3.4 miles – Broad and Susquehanna: Our Lady of Mercy Roman Catholic Church.

3.5 miles –Broad, north of Diamond: The first Armory.

3.8 miles –Broad and Berks: Gatehouse of Monument Cemetery.

4 miles – Broad and Cecil B. Moore: Keneseth Israel Synagogue (before and after the fire), Columbia Club and Columbia Avenue Saving Fund, Safe Deposit, Title and Trust Company.

4.1 miles – Broad below Oxford : The Mercantile Club.

4.5 miles – Broad and Girard: Reid Hotel, Widener Mansion and the Majestic Hotel.

5.0 miles – Broad and Green: the first and second versions of Central High School there.

5.1 miles – Broad and Spring Garden: Odd Fellows Hall.

5.3 miles – Broad and Callowhill: Another Armory.

5.6 miles – Broad and Vine: Hahnemann Hospital.

5.6 miles – Broad and Race: Scottish Rite Temple.

5.9 miles – Broad and Market: City Hall, of course, survives. Broad Street Station illustrated above, did not.

Next time: What you won’t see as you run the final 4.1 miles down Broad, from City Hall to the Navy Yard.

Philadelphia’s past and future always collided at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets. From the conception of Center Square in the 1680s to the laying of the corner stone for City Hall in 1874 it was a tentative, slow-motion collision. After that, things sped up quite a bit. By the end of the 19^th-century, Broad and Market Streets had become the official center of Center City.

“It is the only place where a building of suitable dignity can stand to display its parts in all the beauty of their architectural effect,” speechified Benjamin Harris Brewster at the July 4^th corner stone laying ceremony. City Hall “will adorn…the highways at whose intersection it is placed, and it will give an air of majesty and grandeur to those long and broad avenues. It…stands out in bold and high relief, commanding admiration. It is placed, as other and great structures are, as the center of human concourse from which all things radiate and to which all things converge. It is surrounded by a grand avenue 135 feet wide, on the southern and eastern and western fronts, and 205 feet wide on the northern front.”

After nearly two centuries, the Philadelphia envisioned by William Penn and his surveyor, Thomas Holme was finally coming together. Here was the city that “will never be burnt, and always be wholesome,” declared Penn, who insisted avoiding  a re-creation of the London he had left behind. That city had been poised for conflagration, its wooden “rickety, slapdash buildings” leaning “against one another like drunks clutching each other for support,” writes Edward Dolnick, “an endless labyrinth of shops, tenements, and taverns with barely a gap to stop the flames.” London’s four-day fire of September 1666 left 100,000 of its citizens homeless, stunned amidst smoldering ruins.

Nothing like this would ever happen in Philadelphia, pledged Penn, who turned to the old Renaissance masters for fresh design ideas—ideas potent enough to eventually, centuries later, come to fruition in the center of Philadelphia.

“There are another Kind of public ways,” wrote Leon Battista Alberti in the 15th century, these “may not improperly be called High Streets.” They are “designed for some certain Purpose, especially a public one; as for instance those which lead to some Temple, or the Course for Races; or to a Place for Justice.” Alberti imagined these grand “public ways” radiating and converging, lined with public buildings of many sorts.

These public avenues, argued Andrea Palladio, would be complex, active and spacious centers of civic life. “Broad Streets are more lightsome,” he wrote, noting “that one side of such a Street is … less eclipsed by the opposite Side. The Beauty of Churches and Palaces must needs be seen to the Greater advantage in large than narrow Streets, whence the Mind is more agreeably entertained and the city more adorned.”

Adorned indeed, and exquisitely right for civic life. The English translators of Alberti and Palladio called their public avenues “High Street” and “Broad Street.” So did Penn, who, in the 1680s, envisioned for “our intended Metropolis” something like the view up Broad Street in the 1890s: a bright, welcoming, urban center, a place that would “never be burnt, and always be wholesome.”

It’s a classic story. Behind a noble and refined façade, (thanks to the designs of Frank Miles Day and Louis Comfort Tiffany) Horticultural Hall on Broad Street was really a house of cards, a palace built on credit.

After an earlier hall on the same site burned in 1893, insurance kicked in $25,000 for a new building. At the start of 1894, according to the History of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, only $26.25 was in the bank.  But Society president, Clarence H. Clark (whose mansion at 42^nd and Locust cost $300,000 two decades before) didn’t see a problem; he saw an opportunity. Clark, a banker, engineered a fix in the form of a $200,000 mortgage.

And so with borrowed money “a fine example of Italian Renaissance architecture” as we told last time, rose on Broad Street. Its bronze gates welcomed, its emerald glass awed, its “deep overhanging eaves” impressed. Above those eaves were the finest Spanish tiles. Below them was to be a pièce de résistance of public art, a giant, wraparound mural—one of the largest ever.

The last thing on muralist Joseph Lindon Smith’s mind was his client’s staggering debt. As he planned the job, Smith, faced his own daunting challenges. The up-and-coming artist had recently finished a modest mural in an alcove of the Boston Public Library, and had never taken on a commission this massive—308 feet long and 6 feet high. Nor had Smith ever taken on anything this risky. “It will be executed directly upon plaster and it will be out-of-doors,” worried an art critic at the Inquirer, on April 19, 1896, “two conditions seldom met with in modern wall-painting.”

Plus, Smith wasn’t entirely certain what he wanted to paint. In an interview in the Spring of 1896, he admitted “working upon his design for nearly a year” and still unclear how his mural would play out. There’d be “allegorical and mythological characters, the months, or the seasons and the signs of the zodiac, all having some bearing…upon the building and its use.” There’d be a decorative scheme featuring “the harvest gods, Ceres and Bacchus” and “an almost endless use of garlands” and wreaths. But how would it all come together?

As Smith sat at his drawing board feeling the panic rise, he learned the plaster below the eaves wouldn’t be ready for his brush until Fall. What a relief! More time to think! Smith could go on “a special trip to Italy during the summer to renew his acquaintance with the works of the early Italian fresco painters.”

Ah, the life of a struggling artist (with a commission).

Smith did master the challenge and depicted in his own frescoes “the evolution of the vegetable kingdom through four seasons” as Asa M. Steele related in Harper’s Weekly a few years later. “A great scroll also appears in the centre of the main façade, bearing the words “Horticulture” and “Agriculture,” “Sylviculture,” “Viticulture,” and Floriculture.” Between the many small windows “he painted…small panels depicting boys with agricultural tools, and conventional wreaths, and groupings of fruits, flowers, nuts, evergreens and holly.” Smith’s “principal groups depict twelve women typifying the months of the year, each holding in her lap the appropriate sign of the zodiac and accompanied by the patron deity of the season, and arrangements of foliage, fruits and flowers.”

Starting on the south side of the building, Smith’s figures for January and February were accompanied by Janus, the god of new starts, “who received the prayers and husbandmen at the beginning of seed time.” Then came Triptolemus, the demi-god of agriculture, “in his winged chariot drawn by serpents, rides through an awakening landscape, scattering his barley seed on either hand.” March arrived “in wind-tossed draperies;” April “in the tender hues of early spring, carried an inverted vase to symbolize the descent of rain upon the earth.” In between was the figure of Proserpina, daughter of Ceres.

Steele continued: “May is decked in vivid green, against a background of blossoms. June sits wreathed in roses and the bloom of early summer, with garlands strewn about. Flora, the deity of horticulture, and Amor, with drawn bow, formed the remainder of the group. In the center of the front façade Phoebus Apollo sits enthroned in a glory of golden sunbeams, a lyre in his hands. July and August, arrayed in the gorgeous hues of midsummer, and surrounded by fruits and flowers, have Ceres as protectress. The goddess is robed in crimson and gold, and holds a sheaf of wheat. September and October, with Pomona, goddess of fruits, enthroned between them, are surrounded with the rich browns, reds, and yellows of autumn, with a bearing fruit tree in the background, and garlands of corn and grapes. The next panel depicts Bacchus, holding the thyrsus with a wreath of ivy on his head. In the background is the sea, with a marble screen of vines and grapes. The adjacent sky shines with Ariadne’s crown of seven stars; a satyr dances in the foreground. November, looking back toward her system months, and December, lingering in desolation with bowed head, and Boreas [the god of the north wind] blowing winter blasts, complete the series.”

As great a work as it may have been, Smith’s giant mural seemed unphotographable. And for all its wall power, for all its ability for to provide civic ulplift for paraders and boulevardiers on Broad Street, it represented a giant, crushing debt for the directors of the Horticultural Society that wasn’t going away.

So in 1909, three years after the death of Clarence Clark, when a cash offer of “at least $500,000” came in over the transom, the directors saw the light at the end of the tunnel. This offer appeared more appealing than anything designed, built or painted. The buyer would demolish the building but no matter. Finally, the debt would be retired.