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Winning the Game of History: Doug Heller, USHistory and the Truth at Sixth and Market Streets

The Intersection of Sixth and Market Streets, Looking East, 1902.

Until Doug Heller stepped forward about a decade ago, the real meaning of Sixth and Market Streets had been lost to historical background noise. As webmaster of USHistory.org at the Independence Hall Association, a unique perch for building online content and public understanding, Heller learned the story of The President’s House in Philadelphia, which stood at Sixth and Market, and created a dedicated page. Then, over the next decade in a thousand updates, Heller expanded the page into an authoritative, exhaustive encyclopedic account.

Heller rewrote the rules of play and literally changed history, online and on the street.

He restored to public memory the long-lost President’s house, where George Washington and John Adams conducted their presidencies in the 1790s during the nation’s infancy.  He saved from oblivion the stories of Washington’s servants and slaves who worked and toiled in a city that history had wrongly assured us was free of slavery. And once he moved the truth from the abyss of history into the foreground of American consciousness, Heller shed light on the efforts to represent this narrative in brick and mortar. If ever there was a case of the internet bending the arc of the American historical narrative, this was it.

Of course, Heller didn’t do it alone, and that’s the whole point. First came Ed Lawler’s scholarly articles, The President’s House in Philadelphia: The Rediscovery of a Lost Landmark. Then came the advocacy of a group calling itself the ad hoc historians, the debate over the facts with Independence National Historical Park, the introduction of ATAC (Avenge the Ancestors Coalition), and the key role of journalists producing news stories.  Heller posted hundreds upon hundreds of articles, before and after Stephan Salisbury and Inga Saffron’s pivotal, page one account in The Philadelphia Inquirer of Sunday March 24, 2002: Echoes of slavery at Liberty Bell site. What followed, from Boston to Atlanta, Chicago to Los Angeles, NPR to The International Herald Tribune assured that the truth, with all its contradictions and complexities, had finally been embraced.

Heller augmented the site with Lawler’s biographies of Enslaved persons of African Descent, with documentation of the work of INHP archeologists, with anything that might help build the ephemeral into reality.  In his role, from his perch, Heller understood that all of this would add up to something greater, much greater, than their sum of its moving parts. It took the better part of a decade, but Sixth and Market Streets is now reinterpreted, forever reconnected to its deep and complicated past.

Douglas J. Heller died last week. He is remembered and celebrated—see his obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer and a post at The New York Times’s Wordplay blog. Doug Heller, the ultimate puzzle master, took on the real-life puzzle of transformation on the street—and won.

He showed us how to play. Now it’s our move.

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Traitor’s Nest: Mount Pleasant

 

Mount Pleasant, as depicted in a 1761 print.
Mount Pleasant, 1957.

 

The painful crucible of the Revolution transformed George Washington from an land-grabbing, status-obssessed Virginia planter into a charismatic, measured leader of men.  Although a mediocre military strategist, Washington’s strength was his ability to keep his rag-tag army together. He wore down the enemy not by dazzling displays of generalship, but by attrition (The Battle of White Plains) and occasional surprise (The Battle of Trenton).

Like many great leaders, Washington surrounded himself with men of greater abilities than his own, tapping their resources while struggling to maintain their loyalty.  General Nathaniel Greene, who led Cornwallis’s army on a wild goose chase around the American South before cornering it on the Yorktown peninsula, was a brilliant military tactician who remained loyal to Washington through thick and thin.

General Benedict Arnold, a self-made merchant from Connecticut, was another trusted subordinate.  In addition to organizing a heroic but unsuccessful raid on Quebec at the start of the war, Arnold led a fierce charge at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, suffering a bullet wound to the leg which left him crippled for life.   The victory at Saratoga was pivotal in convincing France to pledge her financial and military support to the American colonies.

Yet despite Washington’s praises, Arnold was prickly and embittered after Saratoga, feeling that a lesser military strategist, his superior General Horatio Gates, received all the public glory. Arnold, like Washington, relished living the high life, and the war ravaged his financial interests.  “Having made every sacrifice of fortune and blood and become a cripple in the service of my country,” he snarled to Washington, “I little expected to meet the ungrateful returns I have received from my countrymen.”*

Tragically, Arnold, unlike Washington, never gained control of his darker, selfish side.

After the American victory at Saratoga, Congress finally granted Arnold a promotion to Major General. Washington then appointed Arnold to the plum position of Military Governor of Philadelphia, which had just been evacuated by the British Army.   As soon as he assumed office in 1778, the convalescing general was assiduously courted by the city’s social and political elite.  Many, of course, remained loyal to the British Crown. The battle-soured Arnold must have welcomed such diversions: as social historians Harold Eberlein and Horace Mather Lippincott wrote of the era: “Society was gayer, more polished, and wealthier in Philadelphia than anywhere else this side of the Atlantic…”**

One frequent social caller was 18 year old Margaret “Peggy” Shippen, the daughter of jurist Edward Shippen IV and his wife Margaret Tench Francis.  Young Peggy was not only highly-intelligent and charming, but ravishingly beautiful.  She was also a die-hard Loyalist, and embittered by her father’s refusal to let her attend the infamous “Mischianza” ball organized by fun-maker Major John Andre in honor of British General Sir William Howe.  Following Howe’s departure, Arnold’s house on Market Street became the center of power in Philadelphia, and Peggy had no intention of remaining on the political sidelines.

Arnold and Shippen were married in April 1779. The 37-year-old widower was head-over-heels in love with his beautiful young bride.  She also had everything the deeply-indebted Arnold craved: position in society, beauty, brains, and a big bank account.  By then, the one-time hero of Saratoga felt that independence was a lost cause, and was looking for a way to save his skin in the event of British victory.

Shortly after the wedding, Arnold purchased a new home for Peggy: Mount Pleasant, a grand Palladian mansion overlooking the Schuylkill River.  It was built in the early 1760s by Scottish-born sea captain John McPherson, who spared no expense in decoration and furnishings.  Mount Pleasant bore a striking resemblance to Chief Justice Benjamin Chew’s famous Cliveden in Germantown: a symmetrical Georgian composition (most likely based on British pattern books of the era) with two flanking outbuildings.  John Adams, who had mixed feelings about Philadelphians and the finer things in life, described Mount Pleasant as the “most elegant country seat in Pennsylvania.”**

The Arnolds lived at Mount Pleasant for a year, entertaining lavishly.  But the restless Benedict Arnold was still short of cash, and in 1780, Washington offered him command of the strategically-vital fortress at West Point, New York. Anyone who controlled West Point controlled the colonies: its guns made it impossible for British ships to sail unimpeded up and down the Hudson River.

General Henry Clinton, commander of British armed forces in America, reasoned that if he could get his hands on West Point, he could cut the colonies in half and end this stubborn rebellion once and for all.  In an arrangement brokered by Major John Andre and Peggy Arnold, Benedict Arnold would receive a handsome bribe of 20,000 pounds sterling and a commission in the British army in exchange for turning over West Point. Not only would this sum save Arnold from his financial woes, but would allow him to escape the hangman’s noose waiting for Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Greene.

The rest, as everyone knows, is history.  Benedict Arnold’s plot failed when American militiamen captured Major John Andre on September 23, 1780, the plans of West Point’s fortifications in his boot.

Upon finding out that the jig was up, Arnold hightailed it across enemy lines, leaving his wife and young child behind.  When General Washington showed up at West Point, Peggy Arnold feigned ignorance and madness so successfully that he allowed her to slip away.  When he found out that Peggy had used to her guile to hoodwink him, Washington’s rage knew no bounds.  He assumed (quite naively) that a woman of Peggy Shippen Arnold’s breeding could only be a victim of her husband’s treachery, not a willing accomplice in espionage.

Savvy Peggy was well aware of this weakness, and exploited it to the hilt.

For the rest of the war, Washington was obsessed with getting his hands on his former confidante.  After British troops under Arnold’s command sacked Richmond, Virginia, an enraged Washington ordered the Marquis de Lafayette to capture and “execute [him] in the most summary way” to “make a public example of him.”***

The next best thing Washington could do was make an example of Major John Andre. Obsessed with chivalry, Andre pleaded to be executed by firing squad, as befitting an officer. Washington was unmoved.  The man who masterminded the Philadelphia “Mischianza” ball (which Peggy sulked at not being able to attend) was hanged as a spy.

The wily Benedict Arnold evaded Washington’s wrath, and reunited with Peggy in New York.  Following General Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the couple fled to England for their lives.  In London, Arnold never received the warm welcome he expected, and ended up a social outcast.

The exiled former hero of Saratoga and squire of Mount Pleasant died in 1801, a broken and impoverished man.

As for Peggy Arnold, she may have been a Loyalist femme fatale of sorts.  Yet to her credit, she remained “loyal” to her husband to the end.  She died in 1804.

General Benedict Arnold. Source: Wikipedia Commons
Margaret “Peggy” Shippen Arnold, with one of her children by Benedict Arnold.  Source: Wikipedia Commons

*As quoted in Ron Chernow, George Washington: A Life (New York: NY: Penguin Press, 2010), p.380.

**Horace Mather Lippincott and Harold Donaldson Eberlein, The Colonial Homes of Philadelphia and Its Neighborhood (Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1912), p.113.

***Edward Teitelman and Richard W. Longstreth, Architecture in Philadelphia: A Guide (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1974), p. 121., http://www.quondam.com/17/1761.htm

****As quoted in Ron Chernow, George Washington: A Life (New York: NY: Penguin Press, 2010), p.387.

 

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Meriwether Lewis in Philadelphia

Captain Meriwether Lewis, by Charles Willson Peale, 1807.

This time, Thomas Jefferson wasn’t messing around. As POTUS (President of the United States) and POTAPS (President of the American Philosophical Society) in 1803, Jefferson now had the power, the intelligence and the allies to mount a secret missionand finally discover—if one existed—a water route across the American continent. All he needed was “an intelligent officer, with ten or twelve chosen men, fit for the enterprise” to “explore the Missouri river… it’s course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean.”  Along the way, of course, they’d gather all kinds of information that would prove useful and valuable to the new nation.

Jefferson chose Meriwether Lewis for the venture and instructed him to prepare an expedition to the Mississippi River, up the Missouri River and into the uncharted beyond. “You will take careful observations of latitude & longitude, at all remarkeable points;” Jefferson wrote Lewis, you will observe and even collect flora and fauna along the way. And you will “endeavor to make yourself acquainted…with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue.” Learn everything about them: “the names of the nations & their numbers; the extent & limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes of nations; their language, traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, arts, & the implements for these.”  Lewis was to keep a keen eye for “articles of commerce they may need or furnish, & to what extent.”

The President had an expedition in mind here much more ambitious than a search for the North West Passage. A successful Lewis would return with enough new information to publish a veritable Encyclopedia Americana.

In order to prepare, Jefferson sent Lewis to Philadelphia to be tutored by the President’s colleagues at the American Philosophical Society: botanist Benjamin Smith Barton, geographer Robert Patterson, anatomist Caspar Wistar and physician Benjamin Rush. Jefferson had given Rush a heads up that Lewis was on his way and urged him “to prepare some notes of such particulars as may occur in his journey & which you think should draw his attention & enquiry.”

While in Philadelphia, Lewis outfitted for the expedition. With the help of Israel Whelan, who served as a guide through scores of specialty shops, Lewis went on a shopping spree the likes of which had never been seen before or since. Lewis spent more than $2,100 on everything from “calico ruffled shirts” and “strong wine” to “tomahawks” and “jews harps.” From Thomas Parker, 31 South Third Street he bought a gold chronometer; from Thomas Leiper’s, 726 Market Street, he bought 63 pounds of “pigtail tobacco.” At François Baillet’s, 21 N. 9th, Lewis bought 193 pounds of “portable soup;” in Christian H. Denchla’s, 114 North Third, Lewis scooped up 73 dozen “colored beads, small mirrors, burning glasses, pin cases, earrings, tapes and ribbons, tassels and small bells”—gifts for Native Americans. Of the 27 Philadelphia shops Whelan and Lewis visited more than 200 years ago, not one remains intact.

On June 10, 1803, a Conestoga wagon packed with Lewis’ 3,500-pound haul trundled across the floating bridge at Gray’s Ferry for points west.  And nine days later, Lewis had made his way back to Washington, D.C. and wrote his old friend William Clark, informing him of the still secret mission, and proposed that Clark share equally in its leadership. “President Thomas Jefferson and the congress of the United States wish to explore the western rivers which may run all the way across North America to the western ocean, and they have asked me to conduct the passage. The aims are to meet and begin trading with Indian tribes, to discover new plants and animals and to make new maps. My friend, could you join me to lead this enterprise with all its dangers, its fatigues and its honors?”

Next Time: Clark’s Response and more Philadelphia connections.

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What’s Wrong With Philadelphia’s “Museum Mile”?

Carroll, Grisdale and Van Allen’s Youth Study Center, 20th and Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with Waldemar Raemisch’s “The Great Mother.” Dick Gouldey, Photographer, 1984.

The Renaissance masters understood cities; they knew how to imagine them.

Important cities must have wide streets. “Broad Streets are more lightsome,” declared Andrea Palladio in 1570. When “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.”

William Penn borrowed both the idea and the name for his own Broad Street.

The masters knew that cities thrive when their wide streets host a variety of public activity. Leone Battista Alberti advised that  “public ways, which may not improperly be called High Streets” should be “designed for some certain Purpose, especially a public one; as for instance those which lead to some Temple or the Course for the Races; or to a Place for Justice.”

Again, Penn borrowed the idea and the name for Philadelphia’s High Street, home to the city’s markets. Eventually, this led to an outright name change from High Street to Market Street.

Through the 18th and 19th centuries, Market and Broad evolved as the city’s public armature, an accommodating home for the public institutions that literally made the city. From market stall to City Hall, all kinds of civic buildings found their places along Philadelphia’s public avenues: churches, clubs, theaters, opera houses, hotels, hospitals, horticultural halls, even opulent mansions and iconic eateries. If a place was meant to contribute to Philadelphia’s public life, it had a place along the city’s civic avenues.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Philadelphians became enamored with the automobile and an urban-planning movement that called itself “The City Beautiful” and decided they had outgrown their older public avenues. Planning a mile-long, multi-lane, landscaped highway connecting City Hall to Fairmount Park, they would build a grand, new public avenue to redefine and update the city.

This 20th century version of the Renaissance idea for a “lightsome,” “public way” would serve an expanded Philadelphia. Along it, all types of institutions would enhance and enrich public purpose. Anchored in the original Penn plan with Philadelphia City Hall, planners envisioned the Parkway cutting across the city’s northwest quadrant to accommodate schools, hospitals, libraries, museums, cathedrals, courthouses, administrative headquarters for schools and agencies, and even a hall for conventions. If it served the public, it belonged on the Parkway.

Until now. In recent years, civic institutions along the Parkway have been made out to be interlopers, placeholders for real estate to support a rising tourist economy. At the start of the 21st century, we’re witnessing a tilt away from the Renaissance and City Beautiful principles that shaped the city and in favor of a newer, less complex notion: “The Museum Mile.”

The Benjamin Franklin Parkway, D. Alonzo Biggard, Photographer, May 5, 1936.

Philadelphia leaders began using the term “Museum Mile” with frequency in 2005 and 2006, soon after the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened a new annex in the Fidelity Mutual Building. Of course, there already was the Rodin Museum, the Franklin Institute and the Academy of Natural Sciences and would-have-been but since failed Calder Museum. And at Logan Square, the cultural footprint of the Free Library of Philadelphia, then planning an expansion, was joined by Moore College of Art. The latest installment in this constellation, the Barnes Foundation, replaced the 1952 building of the Youth Study Center by architects Carroll, Grisdale and Van Allen.

The “Museum Mile” is an ambitious idea, but it’s a two-dimensional vision, considering that museums, no how well-stocked or well-appointed, do not a great city make. “No one spends two hours in a museum, then goes down the street to spend two hours in another,” urbanist Witold Rybczynski recently told the Inquirer. “I don’t think it’s a great idea to have three museums lined up in a row or three stadiums next to each other—there’s no synergy in that.”

Albert Barnes would have heartily agreed. His institution—and he went out of his way to avoid calling it a museum—would “replace the sentimentalism, the antiquarianism” and the “emotional irrelevancy” he found in museums. Appreciation of art, Barnes wrote, “can no more be absorbed by aimless wandering in galleries than can surgery be learned by casual visits to a hospital.”

Of course, visits to a hospital or other civic institution for that matter, are increasingly impossible along the Parkway, Philadelphia’s new Art Theme Park.

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William H. Shoemaker Junior High School

William H. Shoemaker Junior High School under construction, 7/1/1926.
William H. Shoemaker Junior High School under construction, 8/3/1926.
William H. Shoemaker Junior High School under construction, 12/2/1926.
William H. Shoemaker Junior High School under construction, 12/29/1926.
William H. Shoemaker Junior High School completed, 6/28/1927.

“A school system that is not costing a great deal these days is not worth a great deal.”

– The Centennial Anniversary of the Public Schools of Philadelphia: A Recapitulation, March 1918.

 

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, Philadelphia’s Quaker schools (Friends Select), and its Protestant church schools (Episcopal Academy) provided rigorous education for the sons and daughters of the well-to-do.  In the meantime, the Roman Catholic archdiocese set up an extensive network of parochial schools. Sectarian private schools not only provided community and opportunity, but also reinforced cultural and class identity.

Although the city’s ethnic and religious communities were very good at taking care of “their own,” public education for all proved an uphill struggle for civic leaders. Girard College, a private institution, did provide education to the disadvantaged, provided they were “poor, white, male orphans.” Central High School, founded in 1836 and known as the “People’s College,” provided quality, non-sectarian secondary education for those who met the admission requirements. Some students, like future artist Thomas Eakins, were from middle class families.  Others, such as future pharmaceutical magnate Dr. Albert Barnes, came from abject poverty.  Girls High School, formed along similar lines, followed in 1848.

Although the Philadelphia School Board was formalized in 1818 (with Roberts Vaux as its first superintendent), it was not until the early twentieth century that the city implemented the comprehensive K-12 public education system we know today. By 1918, Philadelphia’s public school system boasted 230,000 pupils taught by 6,300 teachers, housed in over 300 educational structures.*   That same year, school superintendent Garber chastised those who held the view that “there are two classes of society, a higher and a lower, and that it is a mistake to endeavor to break down the barrier between the two.”** Education, leaders like Garber argued, was the great leveler of American society, allowing those born in modest circumstances to rise into the ranks of the middle class and beyond. Philadelphia’s public school system, he concluded, should be the “inveterate foe of ignorance, poverty, disease, crime, and all forms of human waste and neglect…”***

During the booming 1920s, the School Board shifted into high-gear and built two co-ed high schools in West Philadelphia: West Philadelphia High School and Overbrook High School. The School District also started a revolutionary, three-year junior high school program that prepared grammar school graduates for the rigors of secondary education.   Among these new schools was William H. Shoemaker Junior High School, located at 5301 Media Street in the Haddington-Carroll Park section of West Philadelphia. In contrast to adjacent, affluent Overbrook, this was a middle and working class district which grew up along the Lancaster Avenue trolley tracks.  Originally a sleepy country village, Haddington exploded following construction of the Market Street Elevated rail line to the south. The majority of Haddington-Carroll Park’s residents lived in modest, two-story brick rowhouses.  Family stores and manufacturing operations sprouted up along Lancaster Avenue. According to Margaret S. Marsh’s study of the area’s early twentieth century demographics, the mostly-white residents of Haddington-Carroll Park were clerks, bookkeepers, teachers, and small businessmen.  As in neighboring Parkside, there was also a significant Jewish population. The proliferation of clubs and fraternal organizations created, as Marsh wrote, “‘instant’ community for the thousands of newcomers,” and “assured potential members of association with people of similar background.”**** At the same time, a growing number of African-Americans from the Deep South migrated to Haddington in search of work and opportunity. Not surprisingly, they often faced hostility and discrimination from neighbors and employers.*****

As a counterweight to social and racial segregation, schools like William H. Shoemaker Junior High (named for a prominent judge) provided a forum where various ethnic and religious groups could come together for the common purpose of education. Construction began in 1925 and was completed two years later.  It was most likely the work of Irwin T. Catharine, principal architect for the Philadelphia School system between 1918 and 1937.******   Architecturally, it bore a strong resemblance to West Philadelphia and Overbrook High, with its neo-Gothic detailing, pointed-arch windows, and spire-topped towers.  Inside, the school boasted a tiled grand staircase and a two story Georgian auditorium. Hallways were wide and spacious, classrooms steam-heated and lit by large windows. Shoemaker’s appearance may have been an homage to the “collegiate Gothic” of nearby Penn and Princeton, thus giving the middle and working class children of Haddington-Carroll Park a taste of the grandeur previously reserved for the privileged.

A photograph of the first graduating class of William H. Shoemaker Junior High School (1929) gives a rare glimpse into Haddington-Carroll Park’s past.  The children are all in uniform: coats and ties for boys and blouses for girls. Not surprisingly, most of the children are white, but there are a few African-Americans standing in the rows. Looking at the area demographics at the time, it is clear that Shoemaker Junior High was sandwiched between two increasingly segregated neighborhoods. In 1930, Southern Haddington was over 43% non-white, a trend that would accelerate during the Great Depression.  Upper Haddington-Lower Overbrook, by contrast, was only 7.5% nonwhite.*******

First graduating class of William H. Shoemaker Junior High School. Courtesy of Shoemaker Campus — Mastery Charter Schools.

After World War II, institutionalized “red-lining” by insurance companies and “block-busting” by realtors, compounded by the departure of industry, transformed the area around Shoemaker into a segregated slum, with few economic opportunities for its almost entirely African-American population.  Family businesses on Lancaster Avenue were shuttered and houses destroyed by neglect or arson, a trend repeated in urban areas throughout the nation. By the 1980s, a drug epidemic turned the streets surrounding the school into a war zone.   The structure itself crumbled from deferred maintenance, and the Philadelphia Inquirer rated it as the second most dangerous junior high school in the city.********

In 2006, Mastery Charter Schools took over management of the school. Renamed Mastery – Shoemaker Campus, the school has staged a remarkable turnaround. According to Mastery’s website, violent crime has dropped 90%, and 100% of its graduates have been accepted to institutions of higher learning.*********  Most of the building has been completely renovated and modernized, and is now completely air conditioned.

The un-renovated part of the school, about 30% of the building according to director of operations Dan Bell, is sealed off.  Plaster dust coats chairs and desks. An old piano sits in the deserted music room. Mountains of old books cascade out of a storage closet. Mean-spirited graffiti is scrawled on the plaster walls.

While most of the school bustles with life, energy, and the promise of the future, these silent spaces bear silent witness to the grandeur, optimism, sadness, and pain of Shoemaker’s past.

Special thanks to Robert S. Richard (City Year) and Daniel Bell (Shoemaker Campus — Mastery Charter Schools) for making this article possible. 

The old cafeteria. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa.
The auditorium, in use since 1927. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa.
A piano sits in the former music room. Photograph by Steven B. Ujifusa

*John P. Garber, The Centennial Anniversary of the Public Schools of Philadelphia: A Recapitulation (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Trades School, March 1918), p.15. Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Cities P53-562-b.

**John P. Garber, The Centennial Anniversary of the Public Schools of Philadelphia: A Recapitulation (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Trades School, March 1918), pp.8-9. Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Cities P53-562-b.

***John P. Garber, The Centennial Anniversary of the Public Schools of Philadelphia: A Recapitulation (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Trades School, March 1918), p.16. Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Cities P53-562-b.

****”Philadelphia Public Schools Thematic Resources,” National Register for Historic Places Inventory — Nomination Form. December 4, 1986.

*****Margaret S. Marsh, “The Impact of the Market Street ‘El’ on Northern West Philadelphia: Environmental Change and Social Transformation, 1900-1930,” from William W. Cutler III and Howard Gillette Jr., The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Hartford, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 174.

******Margaret S. Marsh, “The Impact of the Market Street ‘El’ on Northern West Philadelphia: Environmental Change and Social Transformation, 1900-1930,” from William W. Cutler III and Howard Gillette Jr., The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Hartford, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 182.

******* Margaret S. Marsh, “The Impact of the Market Street ‘El’ on Northern West Philadelphia: Environmental Change and Social Transformation, 1900-1930,” from William W. Cutler III and Howard Gillette Jr., The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Hartford, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 184.

********Shoemaker Campus Information, http://www.masterycharter.org/schools/shoemaker-campus/about-shoemaker.html

*********Shoemaker Campus Information, http://www.masterycharter.org/schools/shoemaker-campus/about-shoemaker.html

 

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Bucknell the Gas King

William Bucknell mansion on the northwest corner of 17th and Walnut, 1900. It was demolished in 1907 and replaced by the Latham Hotel.

William Bucknell was born in Marcus Hook in 1811, the son of English immigrants, and had very intermittent schooling.  Trained as a woodcarver, he married Margaret Crozer, daughter of John P. Crozer, owner of the Mattson Paper Mills and a generous donor to the Upland Baptist Church. Leveraging his connections, Bucknell invested his savings in laying gas lines in the city of Chester, founding the Chester Gas Company in 1856.

Natural gas was one of the byproducts from coal mining, and by the mid-nineteenth century its flickering light illuminated private homes and streets all over Europe and America.  Along with kerosene, a byproduct of oil, “coal-gas” was a cheaper and more efficient lighting fuel than labor-intensive whale oil.

Bucknell was one of many entrepreneurs who got rich from Pennsylvania’s so-called Iron Triangle, a robust economic engine built on iron ore, coal, and railroads.* During the mid-nineteenth century, men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, and Bucknell exploited central Pennsylvania’s rich treasure trove of natural resources.  Coal of course had been used to heat homes and power engines for generations.  In 1859, the first commercially successful oil “gusher” shot into the air in Titusville, Pennsylvania.  Railroad companies such as the Pennsylvania rushed into the area to build freight lines. Trains transported the crude oil to refineries in Cleveland and Philadelphia, as well as iron ore to the steel mills of Pittsburgh. Ports like Philadelphia and Chester became the funnels through which the riches of central Pennsylvania flowed to the rest of the country and the world.   Many families who had made fortunes in coal and oil settled around Philadelphia’s genteel Rittenhouse Square. Their employees toiled in tough mining towns such as Hazleton and Johnstown, which were frequently rocked by labor riots organized by the famed “Molly Maguires.”

After conquering Chester, Bucknell moved on to Philadelphia, competing with the likes of fellow robber barons Peter Widener and William Warren Gibbs, both directors of the immensely successful and notoriously corrupt United Gas Improvement Company.  Like his Cleveland counterpart John D. Rockefeller Sr., Bucknell was a devout Baptist who gave liberally to his church and to charities.  One of his greatest beneficiaries was the First Baptist Church, which in the 1890s lofted an enormous sandstone building at 17th and Sansom, directly behind Bucknell’s Italianate mansion on Walnut Street.

Yet like Rockefeller, a founder of the University of Chicago, Bucknell was interested in forwarding higher education, and served on the Board of Trustees of the Baptist-affiliated University at Lewisburg, located near the source of his coal and gas wealth.  In 1881, Bucknell saved the school from financial ruin by donating $50,000 to the University.

In gratitude, the trustees renamed the school Bucknell University.

*Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 187.

William Bucknell (1811-1890). Source: Bucknell University

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When Philadelphia’s “Earth Mother” Bit The Dust

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets. Detail: Statue of Demeter over entrance. Photograph by Madill, May 19, 1925.

Broad Street once had its very own Greek Goddess, a two millennia-old statue of Demeter, aka Ceres, aka the Fertility Goddess. Zeus’s mate and Persephone’s mother had presided for decades under a spreading Hawthorn tree in the courtyard of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at 10th and Chestnut Streets. Then, in the 1870s, architects Furness and Hewitt had a Eureka moment as they composed the new building’s polychromatic façade of red brick, brownstone, sandstone and granite. Furness and Hewitt completed their composition with the Greek original over the entrance at Broad and Cherry, proving there was still some juice left to Philadelphia’s old claim as “The Athens of America.”

How did Philadelphia get its Greek Goddess? As Columbia University archeologist William B. Dinsmoor told it, Commodore Daniel Todd Patterson took advantage of his authority, his wealth and his presence in the Mediterranean in the 1820s. Patterson’s and his ship, the USS Constitution, were on a military mission that doubled as a treasure hunt. First Patterson and his crew visited the ruins of Carthage and made off with some large mosaics. Then, at the catacombs of Melos and Aegina they managed to buy collections of glass and terracotta. From Sunium they took pieces of the temple. And while near Athens in 1827, the Constitution anchored close enough to Megara to find the prize of the entire expedition: statues of Demeter and her daughter Persephone.

A small group of “emaciated” Greeks led Patterson and his crew three miles inland to the buried statues. And where the Commodore didn’t know exactly what they were, he knew they were very ancient and very good. Claiming his purchase an act of charity to feed their families, Patterson bought the less “mutilated” of the two statues and assigned 25 of his men the job of getting his treasure to the Constitution. Patterson also did his best to acquire a key missing part. “I was unable to procure the Head ‘tho I offered a high price,” he apologized in the letter dated July 16, 1828, presenting the statue to the Academy.

More than a century later, while conducting research for his article “Early American Studies of Mediterranean Archaeology,” Dinsmoor homed in on Patterson’s exploits and concluded that this haul was indeed remarkable. Not only was the figure sculpted by the same expert hand as the Persephone Patterson left behind, Dinsmoor concluded that Philadelphia’s Demeter was “the largest piece of ancient sculpture brought to this country before the Civil War.”

Patterson also realized his scholarly efforts were too little, too late.

In the summer of 1937, fearing that the now cracked Earth Mother would kill passersby, Academy officials priced out its removal. As the discussions went on and the estimates came in, the idea of removal and restoration gave way to outright demolition. Sculptor Louis Milione claimed he could “demolish the figure for the sum of $250.”—one quarter of the estimate of bringing Demeter to earth in one piece. Academy officials quickly accepted Milione’s bid and, as The Philadelphia Inquirer soon reported, the statue was “knocked apart with maul and sledge and pneumatic drill and ignominiously hauled off.”

“The fate of the Demeter is somewhat embarrassing to consider,” wrote Dinsmoor during the depths of the Second World War, “in view of the fact that the events occurred only recently and in our own enlightened environment, rather than in Nazi terrorized Europe.”

Philadelphia’s Greek tragedy also played out as an American irony. In the 1940s, Charles Rudy recycled two chunks of Demeter’s debris and sculpted Pekin Drake and Two Hearts that Beat as One. Today, both are in the Academy’s collection.

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William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company

On a cold, drizzly morning in November 1894, 25,000 men, women, and children surged through the gates of Philadelphia’s Cramp shipyard to witness the launching of the largest liner yet built in the United States.  She was the SS St. Louis, the 11,000 gross ton flagship of the American Line, owned by Philadelphia shipping tycoon Clement Griscom.  Attending the launching were President Grover Cleveland, shipyard president Charles Cramp, and First Lady Frances Cleveland, who would be the ship’s godmother.

The liner St. Louis was the crowning achievement of William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company. She was America’s entry into the heated transatlantic liner competition of the late nineteenth century.   Built of steel and nearly two football fields long. St. Louis would be powered by two steam reciprocating engines able to propel her through the Atlantic at 20 knots.   It was hoped that St. Louis and her identical sister St. Paul would capture the transatlantic record from the Cunard liners Campania and Lucania.  Shipyard president Charles Cramp (son of founder William Cramp) boasted that, “each successive ‘lowering of the record’ marks a triumph for the designer and builder, a fame world-wide, and substantial benefits to mankind.”**

After her successful launch on November 12, 1894 by First Lady Frances Cleveland, St. Louis would spend another year in the fitting out basin, where hundreds of workers would turn the empty hull into a floating village.  Giant floating cranes, including one fittingly named Altas, could handle boilers and machinery weighing up to seventy tons. When complete, St. Louis could carry 1,200 passengers in three classes, most of who would be crammed into lower deck steerage berthes.  She would boast electric lights (only a few years earlier, steamships were lit by flickering oil lamps), flush toilets, and steam heating in her public rooms. Her luxurious first class interiors were designed by architect Frank Furness, who had also built Griscom’s “Dolobran estate” on the Main Line.  The first class dining room was 55 feet wide and three decks high, capped barrel-vaulted stained glass skylight.  At dinner, passengers could enjoy the melodious strains of a full-sized pipe organ.

Unfortunately, despite her owner’s best efforts, the St. Louis and St. Paul were unable to capture the Blue Riband of the Atlantic when they debuted in 1895.  They could only make 19.5 knots as opposed to the 21 knots of the two Cunard ships. The St. Paul made history in November 1899 when she carried a famous passenger, Guglielmo Marconi, who had installed his new wireless telegraph system aboard the liner.

As the St. Paul approached the English coast, Marconi powered up his transmitter and continued to send out a message in Morse code announcing the liner’s impending arrival.

Finally, when the ship was fifty miles away from her destination, Marconi got the response he was waiting for:

“Is that you, St. Paul?”  the shore station operator asked.

“Yes,” Marconi tapped back.

“Where are you?”

“Sixty-six nautical miles away.”

Thus, the St. Paul became the first ship to have her arrival radioed to shore by wireless.**

By the early 1900s, a new generation of four-funneled superliners from Britain and Germany had completely outclassed the St. Louis, and the American government failed to provide her owners with the subsidies needed to construct new vessels that could compete in terms of size, speed, and luxury.  After serving as a merchant cruiser and troop transport in both the Spanish-American War and World War I, St. Louis was destroyed by fire in 1920 and sent to the scrappers. St. Paul was broken up a few years later.

Not until the early 1950s, with the advent of the Virginia-built SS United States, would an American shipyard construct a passenger ship of comparable international prestige.

William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company, known to Philadelphians simply as  “Cramps”, was once one of the great shipyards of the world, on par with Harland & Wolff in Northern Ireland (builders of the Titanic) and John Brown & Company in Scotland (builders of the Lusitania and the original Queen Mary). The enterprise was started by William Cramp, the son of German immigrants, who founded a small yard at the foot of present-day East Susquehanna Avenue in 1830.

At its peak in the 1890s, Cramps employed five thousand men, most of whom lived in the surrounding Kensington neighborhood. It built not only passenger ships, but also cargo vessels, battleships, cruisers, and other craft for the “new”  U.S. Navy, which was in the 1890s was undergoing a massive expansion.  Rising on the stocks alongside the ocean liner St. Louis in 1894 was another revolutionary vessel: the USS Indiana, the first true battleship in the United States Navy. So well-regarded was Cramps’ workmanship that in 1899 the Imperial Russian Navy commissioned a state-of-the-art heavy cruiser, the Varyag, from the American shipyard.

In its heyday, Cramps was a landscape of vigor, energy, and gritty  beauty. In 1902, the principal buildings included a massive 1,200 foot-by-72 foot main structure (housing facilities for plate bending, piping-cutting, and joinery), as well as a boiler shop, machine shop, and blacksmith shop.*** Enormous slipways, where hulls of great ships were constructed before their launch into the churning Delaware, were topped by iron-lattice gantries.  Smokestacks soared high above Kensington’s rowhouses and church spires, spewing black coal smoke into the air.

After World War I, Cramps rapidly fell upon hard times, largely due to the Washington Treaty of 1923 which severely limited the size and construction of new warships.  After finishing the Matson liner SS Malolo in 1927, Cramps went bankrupt and ceased operations.  After a brief revival during World War II, in which the yard built submarines, the boilers went cold and the machine shops went dark for the last time.

In early 2011, the last remaining building of the William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company met the wrecker’s ball, to make way for a new I95-Girard Avenue interchange.  All that remains of one of Philadelphia’s great industrial enterprises are a few rotting piers and a massive, weed-choked lot on the banks of the Delaware River.

William Cramp and Sons Ship and Engine Building Company, gantries as seen from the Delaware River, 1917.

 

A warship on the ways at Cramps’ shipyard, 1914.
Lithograph of William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company, 1895
The SS “St. Louis” off New York. When completed in 1895, she was the largest passenger ship yet built in the United States. Her interiors were designed by Frank Furness. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

*Cramp’s Shipyard founded by William Cramp, 1830 (Philadelphia: William Cramp and Sons Ship & Engine Building Company), 1902, p.4-5.

**Degna Marconi, My Father, Marconi (Montreal, Canada: Guernica Editions, 1996), pp. 71-72.

*** Charles Cramp, as quoted by Cramp’s Shipyard founded by William Cramp, 1830 (Philadelphia: The William Cramp and Sons Ship and Engine Building Company) 1902, p.128.

 

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Poor Richard in a Roman Toga

The Library Company of Philadelphia’s original building on 5th Street, by Frederick DeBourg Richards, 1859.

Benjamin Franklin lived in the here and now; he wasn’t so much the toga type. Early on, Franklin and friends formed what they called the “Leather Apron Society” and cultivated their image as well-read, regular fellows. It wasn’t beyond Franklin to slice up a rattlesnake (or an image of one, anyway) to make the point that the colonies should “Join or Die.” While in London, Franklin depicted Britannia herself as a quadriplegic to make another political point. In Paris, he shunned wigs and frills and put on his fur hat and a neck cloth only a little finer than burlap. Franklin generated more than his share of charisma and the French loved their rustic guest. They imagined him the charming, clever woodsman, the real thing when compared with their own plain-dressing philosophers. Little did they know, or care, that Franklin dressed down for his French fans.

Franklin couldn’t have appeared more human—more capable of conversation—than he did in Jean-Antoine Houdon’s marble bust from 1779 (see it at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). But this was no mere mortal. Houdon knew it and we know it. The French praised Franklin the inventor and revolutionary for having “seized lightning from the heavens and the scepter from tyrants.” They depicted him in classical robes protected by the Goddess Minerva as he directed the scimitar-swinging Mars to smite Avarice and Tyranny. (See the image by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.) No fur cap would do. Fragonard dressed Franklin for the part in a classic, classical toga—and it seemed about right.

George Washington had been dead for decades when, at the 100th anniversary of his birth, Americans witnessed the deification of the Father of His Country as an enthroned, bare-chested, 30-ton Zeus. When artists depicted Franklin as a God, he was very much alive and still walking the streets.

Franklin by Lazzarini, 1791 (The Library Company of Philadelphia)

So it couldn’t have come as too much of a surprise when the directors of the Library Company of Philadelphia (which Franklin had been instrumental in launching sixty years earlier) asked the aged Franklin if he’d mind terribly being depicted once again in a classical dress. This time, it would be a larger-than-life, full-length statue of white Carrara marble. In his right hand, extending from an arm supported by a symbolic stack of books. This Franklin would hold a scepter, inverted to represent his opposition to monarchy; this Franklin would preside over Independence Square when Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital. Of course, the living, breathing Franklin agreed to play the part—and got to again tweak modest Quaker Philadelphia with its first piece of public art. Italian sculptor Francesco Lazzarini got right to work. But Franklin died in April 1790, nine months before the opening of the library and two years before the installation of the statue.

Over the years, the marble Franklin lost a few parts along the way. In the late 1870s, the Library Company moved from 5th Street to Juniper and Locust and hired Frank Furness to design a new building that replicated the spirit of the original. Furness designed a new niche for Lazzarini’s Franklin. A decade later, and directly across the street, the Episcopal Academy opened its doors. Episcopal’s student body grew and so did its building. As a former student once confessed, when his classmates could, they escaped with slingshots to the school’s fourth floor balcony, which looked directly across at Franklin. But the students weren’t there to admire Lazzarini’s work. They had one thing in mind: to make Poor Richard a little poorer.

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Reverend William Henry Furness: A Philadelphia Unitarian

1426-1434 Pine Street, 1961. The Reverend William Henry Furness house is the furthest on the left. These homes were the quintessence of the “Quaker style” Furness so disliked. This was the childhood home of architect Frank Furness, and it still stands today.

Born in Boston and educated at Harvard, Reverend William Henry Furness (1802-1896) came to Philadelphia at the tender age of 22 to nurture the city’s small Unitarian community, which had been founded by scientist and British immigrant Joseph Priestly in the 1790s.

Like Quakerism, which holds that the light of God is in all of us, Unitarianism was considered revolutionary, even dangerous, by traditional Protestant theologians.  Unitarianism holds that God is not triune (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), but a single being, and that Jesus Christ was a great teacher and major historical figure, but not necessarily divine.  In his groundbreaking A History of Jesus, Furness rejected the Immaculate Conception and other miracles, arguing that, “these stories may have been pure fictions, generated by the marvelleous [sic] which the great life of Jesus did much to inflame. Or they were exaggerations of certain simple and very natural incidents, magnified by wonder.”*

To the scientifically-inclined urbanites of the Early American Republic, this was a theological breath of fresh air.  To Methodist revivalists under the sway of the Second Great Awakening, this was complete and utter heresy!

As a Boston transplant to Philadelphia, Furness was a liberal, open-minded humanist, and a devoted friend of the New England philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who preached individuality and self-reliance over conformity.  In his 1836 speech “Nature,” published by The American Scholar, Emerson argued that education should not be geared towards material gain and the practical sciences, but towards self-improvement and enlightenment:

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. … Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

The Emersonian spirit pervaded the Furness family home. Reverend William Henry Furness raised his children in a modest brick rowhouse at 1426 Pine Street, in which according to Frank Furness biographer Michael J. Lewis, “judgments about art were formulated with Puritan zeal  and in witty, forceful, literate language.”**   Furness and his wife Annis had four children, all of whom went on to pursue intellectual and artistic careers: William Henry Jr. became a portrait painter, Horace a renowned Shakespeare scholar and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Annis a German translator. Finally, there was ill-tempered, school-hating Frank, who went on to become Philadelphia’s most celebrated architect.

As prominent and educated minister, Furness’s place in society was secure, but he always felt aloof, different, a bit of a misfit in Philadelphia.  He longed for the rich intellectual ferment of Boston, and as a man of strong opinions he grew bored with polite drawing room prattle.  Despite Reverend Furness’s groundbreaking preaching and social activism on behalf of African-Americans (or perhaps because of it), Unitarianism never gained a strong foothold in Philadelphia. Most of Philadelphia’s upper class had blood or economic ties to the slave-holding South, and Furness frequently found himself shunned or verbally abused on the streets of the Quaker City. Yet Furness held his ground.  He hosted a convalescencing Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner at his Philadelphia home after he was brutally beaten by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, and personally protected abolitionist Frederick Douglass from an angry mob in New York City.***  Reverend Furness also found an intellectual soul mate in the actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, unhappily married to the slave-owning, Southern-sympathizing Philadelphia playboy Pierce Butler.****

Furness fostered ecumenical outreach with the city’s Jewish community. In the late 1860s, his son Frank Furness, who had gallantly served the Union as a cavalry officer, designed a new, Moorish-revival shul for Rodelph Shalom.  Following the dedication of this splendid structure in 1870, Furness declared to Rodeph Shalom’s Rabbi Morris Jastrow that the two congregations should have an annual joint Thanksgiving service.***** In an era when Philadelphia’s historically well-integrated Jewish community was facing increasing discrimination, this was a bold gesture.   In his own writings, Furness was sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish people in the Russian Empire.  “The Hebrew race is a great race,” he declared in his A History of Jesus. “With no civil order, no country, its remnants have been now scattered for centuries over the world, maintaining a national existence without any national institutions. What a vitality does this fact disclose!”******

Even though his children married into Philadelphia’s social establishment, Reverend Furness grew increasingly bitter with what he saw as his adopted city’s conservative, prudish, anti-intellectual climate. At an 1870 meeting of the American Institute of Architects, Reverend Furness had the gall to bite the hand that fed him. Deriding what he saw as dull Philadelphia taste, he argued that American architects must liberate themselves from the “Quaker style, marble steps, and wooden shutters.”*******

Furness retired from the leadership of the First Unitarian Church in 1875, and devoted himself to scholarship and cultural criticism.  Yet in 1886, the old minister must have felt vindicated, when new home for the congregation was consecrated at 21st and Chestnut Street.  It was a bold, craggy limestone pile, bristling with towers and adorned with colorful tiles.

This new home for the First Unitarian Church was designed by his son Frank Furness, who had followed his father’s (and Emerson’s) advice to build his own world. Like Frank Furness’s residential commissions, it stood out in bold relief against the subdued rowhouses and churches of the Quaker City.  As Reverend Furness had defied orthodoxy and convention from his pulpit, his son Frank did so with his draftsman’s pen.

The old man must have been proud, indeed.

William Henry Furness. Source: www.harvardsquarelibrary.org

 

“Build, therefore, your own world.” The First Unitarian Church, 2121 Chestnut Street, designed by Frank Furness, 1893. The tower and port-cochere have been demolished.

*Reverend William Henry Furness, A History of Jesus (Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Company, 1853), p.19.

**Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 12.

***Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 13.

****Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 81.

*****E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston, Quaker Philadelphia (New York: The Free Press, 1979), p.302.

******Reverend William Henry Furness, A History of Jesus (Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Company, 1853), p.9.

*******James F. O’Gorman, The Architecture of Frank Furness (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), p.15.