PhillyHistory Blog

In 1952, as candidate for vice president during the Korean War, Senator Richard M. Nixon traveled the country stoking fears delivering his anti-communist message. “At a time when millions of young Americans are fighting and dying, fighting Communists overseas, we need a fair, a sane, but an absolutely effective program of dealing with the Communists right here in the United States of America.” In Philadelphia on February 5, Nixon sharpened his message before a live television audience (WFIL – Channel 6) moderated by the team that founded Meet The Press.

The subject: “How Can We Best Fight Communism within the USA?”

In order to wage his fight, Nixon needed like-minded allies in law enforcement. In Philadelphia, that’s where Frank Rizzo would come in. Rizzo was officer responsible for the police motorcade ushering Nixon’s limousine from the airport to Center City. And for a spell, the two men, “America’s foremost anti-Communist politician of the Cold War” and a cop known as “The Cisco Kid” sat talking, and agreeing about the Red Menace.

Sixteen years later, Nixon returned, this time campaigning for President. The Republican candidate asked to meet with the new Police Commissioner. The meeting between candidate and cop, also in a limousine, reportedly lasted five, or even as long as ten minutes. According to Tom Fox, “Frank Rizzo jumped into Richard Nixon’s limousine at the airport that day and he and Richard Nixon had this . . . conversation in whispers. When Frank Rizzo got out of the limousine, the newspaper people wanted to know what he said…”

“Aw,” said Frank Rizzo, “I was just giving him Carmella’s recipe for meatballs and spaghetti.”

Nixon had a more believable explanation: “Rizzo’s record has met with the approval of all law enforcement officers across the United States. He has an effective record. I wanted to get his views. As I see it, other cities could use Rizzo’s ideas.”

S. A. Paolantonio, Rizzo biographer, provides a third explanation: Nixon “approached Rizzo about running for mayor—as a Republican.”

Rizzo would run for mayor in 1971—as a Democrat—and took office in January 1972 facing a massive deficit—about $100 million. For help, Rizzo turned to his friend in the White House. “We did very well indeed,” Rizzo told reporters on the White House lawn, grinning broadly after the 45-minute meeting.

“We want the Bicentennial City to be well taken care of,” assured Nixon. “Philadelphia will get its fair share” of federal aid. Nixon then “winked broadly” and said he’d be making a “nonpolitical visit” to Philadelphia later that year, a visit that happened to be in the midst of Nixon’s re-election campaign.

In return, Nixon would get Rizzo’s support. “I’m a Democrat but I’m very fond of President Nixon, Rizzo said. He is one of the greatest Presidents this country ever had.”

As the election approached, Nixon made another promise, that Philadelphia “would be the exclusive host for the Bicentennial celebration.” In mid-September, Rizzo traveled again to the White House “to find out what I can do to help re-elect the President.”

“Right now he is building a strange new political power base and he is doing it with a foot in both parties,” wrote Tom Fox of the mayor in the Daily News. “I cannot remember a politician making this kind of daring move and landing on his feet, but Frank Rizzo gets away with it because he is a singular man. Amazing.”

Less than three weeks before the election, Nixon did come to Philadelphia to sign the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972 at Independence Hall. The bill, according to Daughen and Binzen, “pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into cities and towns in all fifty states. There were hardly any strings attached… Most of the local jurisdictions used it to pay operating costs, thus holding down taxes.  …Philadelphia got $70,000,000 of this manna from Washington in Rizzo’s first year as mayor. That was nearly 10 percent of the city’s operating budget.” The city actually ended up with a surplus.

As expected, George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for President, carried Philadelphia. According to Paolantonio, “Nixon lost the city by a mere 88,000 votes, despite the Democratic party’s 302,000-voter registration edge. [The president] carried South Philadelphia by a near two-to-one margin” and he won Pennsylvania. In all, it was “a landslide reelection victory.”

“Frank Rizzo had delivered.”

“I was more thrilled by the President’s reelection that I was by even my own victory,” Rizzo told reporters on November 8, “because yesterday’s election meant so much to the people of America. They have rejected the Democratic Party as the party of radicals… The liberals and radicals are out of business…”

Rizzo maintained an unflagging loyalty to Nixon. After the President’s second Watergate speech, August 15, 1973, Rizzo commended the president “for his courage in presenting his case before the American people” and urged Americans to “close ranks behind him and the great office he holds.” But Watergate led to Nixon’s resignation and the funds to make Philadelphia “the exclusive site of the Bicentennial celebration never materialized.”

Rizzo ran for re-election the year following Nixon’s resignation. His campaign slogan: “He held the line on taxes.” Soon after the election, Rizzo faced up to reality and convinced City Council there was no choice, the city’s wage tax needed to be increased as much as 4.31%. That would be among the highest in the nation. More than 250,000 angry citizens signed the recall petition.

In 1986, Rizzo would finally leave the Democratic party and formally declare himself a Republican—again. Actually, Rizzo’s original registration was  Republican. His years with the Democrats was a marriage of convenience.

[Sources: “Tonight, on TV, Keep Posted.” Inquirer, February 5, 1952; Tom Fox, “The Big Bambino Renews an Old Friendship” Inquirer, January 25, 1972; Dan Lynch “’Bicen City Will Be Well Taken Care of,’ Nixon Tells Rizzo in 45-Minute Visit.” Inquirer, January 25, 1972; Jon Katz, “Nixon Assures Rizzo: City Will Get Its Share,” Philadelphia Daily News, January 25, 1972; Tom Fox, “Big Money Talk in the White House” Philadelphia Daily News, September 15, 1972; Donald Janson, “Rizzo Bolstered by Nixon Victory: President Sends ‘Warmest Thanks’ to Democrat,” The New York Times, November 12, 1972; “Rizzo Hails Nixon’s Talk,” Inquirer, August 16, 1973; S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1993, 2003); Joseph R Daughen and Peter Binzen,The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977)]

More PhillyHistory posts on Frank Rizzo here, here and here.

To win re-election in 1967, Mayor James. H. J. Tate figured he needed to send a law and order message. So even before the primary polls closed in the Spring, Tate announced his choice for police commissioner: Frank L. Rizzo.

The day of Rizzo’s swearing in, Joe McGinniss, then a columnist at the Inquirer, described the 46-year-old commissioner walking through the corridors of City Hall.  “It is almost as if he had just been elected Pope” wrote McGinniss, suggesting that in Rizzo’s family “there is less honor in being President than in being commissioner of police.”

“The only thing he thinks more of than a cop is two cops.” noted McGinniss. Rizzo, “quotes J. Edgar Hoover with an much reverence as he does the Bible.”

“It might be said that he believes in speaking loudly and carrying a big stick anyway,” wrote McGinniss of Rizzo’s policing style.

After a lunch of eye roast at the Lit Brothers restaurant, Rizzo walked “quickly and chestily, back to his office. ‘I feel like a movie actor these days. All these pictures. I don’t go in for that posing stuff, but I’m getting pretty good. You see me this morning? Bowing from the waist? How about that?’”

“It is sort of fun, at least for now,” wrote McGinniss, “having Yogi Berra as commissioner of police.”

Rizzo’s “fun” with the Press, or with McGinniss, anyway, would last only a few weeks.

During the summer of 1967, riots in Newark and Detroit left 69 dead, 3,900 injured, and resulted in hundreds of devastating fires. In late July, Mayor Tate ordered, and Philadelphia City Council quickly passed, a proclamation declaring a state of limited emergency prohibiting public gatherings of groups of 12 or more. Those who disobeyed were subject to up to two years imprisonment.

On July 30^th, a demonstration across from the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul resulted in 22 arrests. Rizzo insisted eight were card-carrying Communists, although he refused to confirm their identities and used the occasion to further stoke fear adding that several “agitators” from Newark and Detroit were now doing their worst in Philadelphia.

“I think it is a despicable and cowardly thing Rizzo has done” said Spencer Coxe, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Philadelphia, who was among those arrested.

“The trouble with Frank Rizzo,” wrote McGinniss, “is that he keeps having these delusions that he is really J. Edgar Hoover. “And, operating in that great tradition, he has decided that the best thing to do with his enemies, since he is unable to keep them all in jail, is to stand up and scream that they are Communists. . . . It is a trick that worked for Joe McCarthy until, like a greedy card sharp, he tried it once too often.”

When asked “if he thought Rizzo had the right to make such charges and then refuse to back them up,” Mayor Tate said. “If Rizzo is against Communists, I’m for Rizzo.”

“It is the kind of thing you should expect from Frank Rizzo from time to time,” observed McGinniss. “It is the way he is. Like two weeks ago when he gathered a small audience of reporters in a corridor behind a City Hall courtroom and told them, with great glee, the story of a man he had beaten up. He told how he chased the man, caught him, and finally threw him to the ground.”

“’Then I come down with the old number 12,’ Rizzo said, stomping his foot on the floor, ‘and that guy ain’t walking right today.’ Then Rizzo did an imitation of a man who cannot walk right.”

“It sounds a little gruesome,” wrote McGinniss, “but what the hell. The guy was probably a Communist, anyway.”

In September, the Bulletin published a poll that found Rizzo’s approval rating was 84 percent. “Only 3 percent disapproved of the way he was handling police affairs,” wrote biographer S. A. Paolantonio.

Three years later, when Rizzo resigned to run for Mayor on the law and order and no new taxes platform, Tate claimed he hadn’t “seen anything like this kind of popular support for a candidate since FDR.” Election day in 1971 had a remarkable turnout of 71%. Rizzo’s Republican opponent, Thacher Longstreth, carried 16 of the 17 predominantly African-American wards, but Rizzo beat Longstreth by 48,524 votes.

“He was one of us, said Eleanor Cucci, a housewife in South Philadelphia. “Everybody else in there had forgotten the little people. If he didn’t win, we would have moved out of the city.”

“Above all else,” said a Martha Brennen of Roxborough, “I knew Rizzo was going to look out for us.”

The morning after the election, Rizzo was in the shower at 8224 Provident Street when son Franny answered the telephone. It was President Richard M. Nixon, a longtime Rizzo admirer. The mayor-elect grabbed a towel.

“Frank? President Nixon, congratulations. How are you? . . . I know what you went though. I’ve been through it myself.  . . . You ran a clean campaign. I just wanted to call you and congratulate you.”

[Sources: Joe McGinniss. “The Passing Scene—A Loud Voice and a Big Stick,” Inquirer, May 22, 1967; “A Proclamation,” Philadelphia Daily News, July 28, 1967; Francis M. Lordan, “8 Card-Carrying Reds In Group That Defied Tate Ban, Rizzo Says,” Inquirer, August 16, 1967; Joe McGinniss, “The Passing Scene—The Techniques of Frank Rizzo,” Inquirer, August 18, 1967; “Rizzo Resigns to Run for Mayor of Philadelphia,” The New York Times, February 3, 1971; Don McDonough and Leonard J. McAdams, “Winner’s First Day: Nixon Call Catches Rizzo in Shower,” Inquirer, November 4, 1971; S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Camino Books, 1993, 2003).]

More PhillyHistory posts on Frank Rizzo here, here and here.

By transferring Captain Frank Rizzo, a/k/a “The Cisco Kid,” from the station house at 39th and Lancaster to 12^th and Pine in May 1952, Police Commissioner Thomas J. Gibbons hoped to solve two problems. He increased law enforcement in Center City and saved Rizzo from himself in racially charged West Philadelphia.

On Pine Street, the gung-ho Rizzo immediately got to work with a campaign of raids on Locust Street strip joints. And more. He ordered “a 24-hour raiding spree . . . of vagrants and panhandlers,” throughout Center City, sweeping more than 50 men off the streets. (Rizzo knew this “anti-mugger operation” would appeal to many law-abiding citizens.) His raiders turned eastward to Society Hill. “Police Seize 10 In Reefer Raid, last night at 2^nd and Pine,” read a headline. Then he doubled down on his favorite targets: after-hours clubs, this time venturing beyond the Locust strip.

According to biographer S. A. Paolantonio, Rizzo not only became “the frontline commander for the Center City officials who wanted Center City cleaned up,” he also became “an intriguing and hotly debated political figure in his own right.”

Rizzo’s raids sent a law and order message to the public, to law enforcement, to City Hall and to the media. Occasionally, his shenanigans backfired. In 1955, Rizzo and another officer chased down and arrested five carousing sailors. Then, back at the 12^th and Pine Street station, they beat them with nightsticks. “Navy asks full probe of brutality,” read a headline.” Warrants were served on both Rizzo and the other officer, Robert O’Brien, charging aggravated assault and battery. Meanwhile, the sailors were fined $10 each and released.

The charges were soon dropped, but Commissioner Gibson knew full well Rizzo had beaten those sailors “for no reason.”

Rizzo’s ire then turned to the coffee houses of Center City, popular gathering spots for gays, interracial couples, artists, intellectuals and “followers of jazz music.” “’Beatnik’ Center Raided by Police” read a headline the day after police descended on the Humoresque Coffee Shop at 2036 Sansom Street. Patrons “in traditional garb of chinos and sweaters” were were charged with breach of peace and “released after brief interrogation.”

Other targets included the Proscenium Coffee Shop and Experimental Theater at 2204 Chestnut Street, the Gilded Cage at 21^st and Rittenhouse Streets, the Artists’s Hut at 2006 Walnut Street, but Rizzo seemed to have a special interest in the Humoresque, which, according to the Inquirer, was considered to be a “‘gathering place’ for drug addicts” and a destination for “sex deviates” openly “flaunting . . . their sexual immorality.”

In the midst of one raid in February 1959, Rizzo stood before the gathering crowd, many of whom supported his actions, pointed to the Humoresque’s young owner, Mel Heifetz, and shouted: “Are you going to allow that creep to operate that den of iniquity?”

Rizzo threatened Heifetz: “If you defy me, I’ll hang you from the chandelier.”

Heifetz, who much later would make a $16 million gift to The Philadelphia Foundation to support LGBTQ-serving organizations, sued Rizzo and lost, but not before the captain was transferred again, this time to a new station in the Northeast, far from Sansom Street.

Stewart Klein of the Daily News (and later a prominent film, theater and television critic) felt sufficiently inspired to write a poem celebrating the occasion of Rizzo’s departure from Center City.  “Better than anything at the time” Paolantonio observed, An Espresso of Sad Parting, captured “how much Frank Rizzo had become a folk figure—hero to some, feared by others.” Here’s an excerpt:

In the Locust Street coffee parlors
Through the doors he often tore
Say it softly no one hollers:
“He don’t live here anymore.”
Down Mole, Ranstead, Quince
The streets the days of yore;
Sly smiles instead of winces:
“He don’t live here anymore.”
Somewhere the hoods are crying,
Somewhere the dips are sore
But expressoed lips are sighing
“He don’t live here anymore.”

Ten years after he took the helm at the 12th and Pine, “Rizzo was at the forefront of the national debate over law enforcement. He recognized the political power of fear.”

According to Paolantonio, Rizzo had become “the biggest of the big men in the Philadelphia Police Department – a big cop for all America.”

“It was only a matter of time before he had the title to go with it.”

[Sources: Joseph Daughen, “Center-City Booze Bistros Have Lost Their A-peal,” Bulletin June 14 1962; “Drive on ‘Muggers’ Ordered by Captain,” The Philadelphia Tribune, September 2, 1952; “Police Seize 10 In Reefer Raid, last night at 2^nd and Pine.” Inquirer, October 4, 1952; “5 Sailors Accuse Rizzo of ‘Vicious’ Beating With Stick in Station,” Inquirer, August 24, 1955; “‘Beatnik Place Raided by Police,” Inquirer, February 14, 1959; “2 City Departments, State Agency Probe 4 Midtown Coffee Shops,” Inquirer, February 19, 1959; “Neighbors’ Suit To Ask Closing of Coffee Shop,” Inquirer, February 25, 1959; “Coffee Figure Charges Rizzo Threatened Him,” Inquirer, February 27, 1959; S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Camino Books, 1993, 2003).]

More PhillyHistory posts on Frank Rizzo here, here and here.

When reformers took over City Hall in 1952, Thomas J. Gibbons, the newly appointed police commissioner named Frank Rizzo to his first command.  The 30-year-old Rizzo had recently passed the civil service exam for sergeant and was considered a good match for a tough section of West Philadelphia. Rizzo’s propensity for raids on numbers parlors, brothels and speakeasies were sure to get results.

Rizzo’s aggressive style would also get criticism from the predominantly African-American community around the station house at 39^th Street and Lancaster Avenue.

“The crime rate in West Philadelphia is the worst in the city and I am determined to clear up these conditions,” Captain Frank Rizzo told a contingent of citizens complaining about warrantless raids on private homes. A nine-person committee, which also met with Commissioner Gibbons, raised issues of “police brutality, illegal arrests, intimidation of prisoners under arrest, assignment of Negro police to “Red” cars, and the general relation of the police to the community.”

“I am interested in good government,” responded Rizzo. “I am not racially prejudiced. I do not run roughshod over the citizens in the district.” He showed off “a stack of warrants” and confiscated liquor stored as evidence in the basement of the station house.

Rizzo’s tactics at 39^th and Lancaster made headlines that kept coming: “Worst In The City;” “Capt. Rizzo Refuses To Stop Arrests.” And more.

“Out in West Philadelphia, the district cops and the neighborhood kids have a nickname for Acting Capt. Frank Rizzo, who commands the 39^th Street and Lancaster Avenue police station,” wrote Frank Brookhouser. “They call him ‘The Cisco Kid.’”

“Rizzo, who could become one of the legendary figures on the force, is a good officer, earnest, serious and efficient,” continued Brookhouser.  But he is also something of a General Patton type—flashy, aggressive, a strict disciplinarian.”

“The Cisco Kid” nickname—a readymade from popular culture—would stick.

(William Sydney Porter, a/ka O. Henry, invented “The Cisco Kid” in “The Caballero’s Way,” a short story published in 1907. The young, handsome, Mexican-American Robin Hood “killed for the love of it or any other reason that came to mind.” With his speckled roan horse, “The Cisco Kid” rode from the printed page into the American popular imagination via 27 films, 1914 to 1950; 600 radio episodes, 1947 to 1956; 156 television episodes starting in 1950; and 41 Dell comics, 1950-1958.)

But Brookhouser, who noted that Rizzo’s nickname garnered fan mail, soon stepped back from Rizzo’s rising legend. “The overly zealous actions of Acting Captain Frank Rizzo, who has become known as ‘The Cisco Kid’ since his promotion from sergeant, have been causing a furor in West Philadelphia. There have been complaints from civic leaders, and it has reached the point where the DA’s office just doesn’t know what to do about him.  Rizzo …has been making raids indiscriminately, according to the complaints. In one case he found two people sharing four bottles of beer in a home, charged them with operating a speakeasy. Raiding another house, he made arrests because there was dancing. After another arrest, he jammed a large group of people in two cells for hours. … There is such a thing as trying too hard, Captain.”

Rizzo wouldn’t last long much longer at 39^th and Lancaster. Two months later, Commissioner Gibbons, looking to “strengthen control” in Center City, transferred Rizzo to the 19^th District Station at 12^th and Pine Streets.

You could sense a collective sigh of relief in West Philadelphia.

Ed R. Harris at the Philadelphia Tribune sounded downright gleeful: “That wasn’t an earthquake that hit Center City the other day. Just the reaction of the smart money boys when they learned that the ‘Cisco Kid’ was being transferred to 12th and Pine…Now we’ll really see what kind of raiding Capt. Rizzo can do.”

[Sources: “Worst In The City,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 29, 1952: “Group Protest Of Warrantless Raid In W. Phila.” Philadelphia Tribune, March 18,1952; “Capt. Rizzo Refuses To Stop Arrests,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 25, 1952; Frank Brookhouser, “It’s Happening Here,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 5, 1952, March 26, 1952 and June 30, 1952; “Gibbons Makes Midcity Shakeup, The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 27, 1952; Ed Harris, On the Town, Philadelphia Tribune, May 31, 1952: S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Camino Books, 1993, 2003).]

More PhillyHistory posts on Frank Rizzo here, here and here.

Of course, Sloan’s Philadelphia saloon would have to offer something like McSorley’s, a place, as Dennison put it, where “a man could feel that he was the master of his own fate. …”a place where the world seems shut out, where there is no time, no turmoil. . .” A place with an owner and keeper who, according to Travis Hoke, was “considerably more than the mere proprietor” someone who is “one of the biggest figures in the neighborhood…a bartender, [a] counsellor in all the ways of life, [a] recipient of confidences, disburser of advice, arbiter of disputes, authority every subject.”

Hoping for clues, we turn to Sloan’s diaries and find mention of a return visit to his family home in December 1906. “Arrived in Phila. at 5 o’clock or thereabouts. The City (uptown) where I left the train looked so small I felt as tho’ I should be able to look in the second story windows of the houses — yet this is the neighborhood in which I grew up from 7 years old to 30 years about.”

What neighborhood was that?

The Sloans lived at 1921 North Camac Street, a rowhouse between 12th and 13th, Norris and Berks Streets. Back home in 1906 he savored some powerful memories, like making ice cream. “When I was a boy I had to twist the freezer handle 35 minutes down cellar.  . . .with the jam shelf swinging overhead. I can bring the whole thing back: the old damp piece of red carpet, ingrain, that I used to cover over the finished job.  The twist in the wooden stairs going down cellar. The heaving ruggedness of the earth floor, the joists overhead where, toward the front end opposite the round furnace, I had a trapeze. Out there the gas meter that I so longed to take apart. The hole of mystery under the marble steps [in] front.”

Interesting memories of this long-ago demolished house that stood north of where the belltower on Temple University’s main campus is now. But no mention of a visit to the local saloon.

Was there one? Of course there was.

On September 25, 1900, John McDermott sold to Patrick Rogan the building at the Northeast corner of 9th and Berks Streets. Sloan would have been 29 years old and only three blocks away when Patrick Rogan opened his etched-glass double doors and tapped his first kegs. We’re fortunate to have a photograph of it from 1903.

But, alas, Rogan’s saloon is long gone.

[Sources: Mariea Caudill Dennison, “McSorley’s: John Sloan’s Visual Commentary on Male Bonding, Prohibition, and the Working Class,” American Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 23-38; Hutchins Hapgood, “McSorley’s Saloon,” Harpers Weekly, Vol 58, October 25, 1913; Travis Hoke, Corner Saloon. The American Mercury, March 1931, pp. 311-322; Grant Holcomb, “John Sloan and ‘McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon,’” The American Art Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 4-20; Bruce St. John,”John Sloan in Philadelphia, 1888-1904” The American Art Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 80-87; John Sloan, The Gist of Art (New York, American Artists Group, Inc. 1939); John Sloan’s Diaries, 1906-1913, The Delaware Art Museum; John Butler Yeats, “The work of John Sloan,” Harper’s Weekly, November 22, 1913; Real Estate Transfers, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept 28, 1900]

August 6, 1901. “With an appalling roar that made buildings quake a quarter of a mile away, an explosion demolished five houses on Locust street between Tenth and Eleventh, last night. The extent of the death and disaster spread by the catastrophe could not be estimated—probably twenty were killed, and the burned and maimed reach scores.”

“Residents of the neighborhood…say that the first flash emanated from MacClemmy’s store, at 1014. The block stretching from Alder street to Warnock comprises six brick houses, all three stories in height, with dormer windows. Following the first flash came an all-pervading roar, a burst of flame from other shops and the whole block, all but the two dwellings at the Alder street corner fell a mass of brick and mortar. Houses on the opposite side of Locust street had windows and doors blown in.”

The massive explosion occurred just as the city was settling down for the summer evening. The cause: a tank of gasoline stored in the basement of MacClemmy’s grocery store.  “In an instant the block of buildings was in flames. So great was the force that two woman’s bodies were blown clear across the street, and the dormer window of 1018 Locust was thrown upon the opposite roof. Telegraph and trolley wires were destroyed and windows were broken as far away as Ninth street and Eleventh street.”

“Locust street . . . was instantly a mass of flaming debris, and men and women ran screaming hither and thither, entirely unable to control themselves. Mothers were calling their children, wives for their husbands, husbands for their wives. None seems to know, and everybody fears that some near and dear one was among the injured—or dead.”

Twenty injured survivors were taken to the nearby Jefferson Hospital and at least eleven more to Pennsylvania Hospital. Among them: Lizzie Watkins, who rescuers dug out from the debris nearly five hours after the incident.

“It seemed as if the world had come to an end,” Watkins told an Inquirer reporter from her hospital bed. “I went upstairs to my room in the rear of the third floor over Gale‘s restaurant, at 1012 Locust St., about 9 o’clock. It did not take me long to get to bed, and when the explosion came I was sound asleep.

“The first I knew I saw blinding flash of light and then the walls of my room begin caving in. In an instant I felt myself falling, falling, and could see bricks and broken glass flying all around me. All it wants I came to a stop in my flight downward. But the bricks and timbers, which I could see plainly, did not stop, and not knowing what else to do, I threw up my arms to protect myself. Whether or not this did any good I don’t know. All I know is that while the lower part of my body felt as the lower part of my body felt as if it was being crushed by the bricks and other things, my head and shoulders were free from weight.

“I laid in the position for a year, it seemed . . .when I heard voices above me. Then I heard a sound as if axes were chopping at timbers.  I kept looking up, and all at once I could see sky. The next thing I heard a voice asking me if I did not want something to drink.

“I replied that all I wanted was to do was get out of where I was. I have hardly gotten the words out of my mouth when a class of liquor was handed down to me, with instructions to drink it. I did as I was told, and then laid back, waiting for them to take me out.

“Blind? No, thank God. I can see. I am badly burned on the right side of my face, and the lower part of my body is sore and bruised. But I guess I will pull through all right. Lucky? Well, I guess I am. . .

Indeed. Early on the morning of August 15, Lizzie Watkins was well enough to make her way to Broad Street Station to board the chartered charity train reserved for 400 city children and 75 mothers hosted at the Seaside Home at Cape May, courtesy of the charity Children’s Country Week Association.

A different fate awaited grocer George M. MacClemmy, the man whose actions paved the way to the fatal explosion. The city coroner charged MacClemmy with “criminal negligence in the storage of gasoline in his store, 1014 Locust street.” Only four months earlier, City Council had criminalized the unregulated storage of gasoline in quantities more than a gallon.

Officials put the injured MacClemmy, who wasn’t expected to fully recover, under house arrest in his home near 46th Street and Baltimore Avenue.

[Sources: “Ordinance Prohibits Storage of Gasoline,” Inquirer, August 7, 1901; “Many Killed and Injured in Locust Street Explosion,” Inquirer, August 6, 1901; “Lizzie Watkins Tells of Her Experience,” Inquirer; August 7, 1901; “Mc’Clemmy Put Under Arrest,” Inquirer, August 14, 1901]

“Every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great democracy, but its betrayer” declared President Woodrow Wilson in his denunciation of lynching one hundred years ago this week. Wilson called on all Americans to “actively and watchfully . . . make an end of this disgraceful evil.”

Philadelphia wasn’t listening.

White residents of Fitler Square “stoned the home of Mrs. T. Lytle” an African-American living at 2504 Pine Street in June. The same mob “burned two wagon loads of furniture owned by other colored tenants who were moving into houses at 2524-26 Pine.” Lytle would have initiated criminal proceedings—she knew the woman who led the mob—but chose silence after being told her house would be torched on Independence Day, if she filed charges.

Editors of The Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s African-American newspaper, drew a line in the sand: “We favor peace but we say to the colored people of the Pine Street warzone, stand your ground . . . . if you are law abiding you need not fear . . . if you are attacked defend yourself like American citizens.  . . . when they tread upon your rights fight them to the bitter end.”

Something like a bitter end would come a mile away the very same day Wilson delivered his anti-mob speech. (You might have previously encountered our posts about the South Philadelphia race riots of 1918 here, here, here, here and here.) This week marks the 100th anniversary of the events. It seems appropriate to sketch a chronology:

July, 24 1918: Adella Bond, a probation officer of the Municipal Court, moves into 2936 Ellsworth Street. “The second time I went down that street, I was stoned,” she told a reporter. “When movers arrived with her furniture . . . [Bond] appeared in her doorway armed with a revolver. Her white neighbors claimed that by this action, she had invited conflict.”

July 26-27, 1918: Friday night to Saturday morning. “About 100 white men and boys gathered in front of my house,” Bond said. “I heard them talk about having guns, and I saw the guns and cartridges.  . . . a man came along with a baby in his arms. He handed the baby to a woman, took a rock and threw it. The rock went through my parlor window. I didn’t know what the mob would do next, and I fired my revolver from my upper window to call the police. A policeman came, but he wouldn’t try to cope with that mob alone, so he turned it into a riot call.” Joseph Kelly, 23, had been shot in leg.

July 27, 1918. Saturday night. Hugh Lavery, 42, shot and instantly killed by Jesse Butler, 18, on 26th Street between Annin Street and Oakford Street.

July 28, 1918. Sunday. A mob at 27th and Titan Streets gives chase to Henry Huff, 23, (who lives near 28th and Titan). Huff runs into a house and soon shoots and kills plainclothes police officer Thomas McVey, 24 (who lives at 28th and Oakford Streets). Detective Thomas Myers and civilian Frank Donohue are also shot and wounded.

Rioting erupts. “In a series of street battles waged for twenty-four hours . . . by more than five thousand white and colored men in a downtown section covering about two square miles,” reported The Inquirer, “scores were seriously injured in the most terrific and bitter race riot that has ever taken place in this city. Half a hundred men were placed under arrest.” Rioting “grew in intensity throughout the day with individual fights and mobs engaged in gun fire on nearly every other corner of a section bounded by Washington Avenue, Dickinson Street, 23rd and 30th Streets.”

July 29, 1918. Monday. Police officers Robert Ramsey and John Schneider severely beat Preston Lewis who is then hospitalized. Schneider attacks Lewis again as he lays semi-conscious on a stretcher in the accident ward. Later that day, the same two officers apprehend and beat Riley Bullock at the corner of Titan Street and Point Breeze avenue. Moments after arriving with in the 17th District Station House at 20th and Federal Streets, Ramsay shoots Bullock in the back at point blank range.

Also: A mob “many of them neighbors and friends” of [the murdered Thomas McVey] swarms into Titan Street “armed with clubs knives bricks and revolvers” and attacks the home of his alleged murderer, Henry Huff, at 2743 Titan Street.

July 30, 1918. Tuesday. Leaders of the city’s African American community call upon the mayor and director of public safety charging “failure of the police to protect the homes in persons of colored citizens” deploring “that [the] police have not been able to protect our citizens from mob violence.”

July 31, 1918. Wednesday. Saloons are closed. McVey’s funeral mass at St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic church, 24th & Grays Ferry avenue. Two hundred additional police are assigned to the burial procession, “30 to a block.” Mounted policemen, Marines and guards from the Navy Yard, as well as members of the Home Defense Reserves, continue to aid the police.

Of course, the story stretches well past the end of July 1918. Riley Bullock’s family and friends bury him on August 2nd. Saloons, closed for days, reopen August 3rd. Services for Frank Donohue are held at St. Gabriel’s Church, 30th and Dickinson. On the 8th, “white hoodlums” somehow get past police assigned to “guard” Adella Bond’s home on Ellsworth Street, steal her valuables and destroy her furniture.

Every last one of the police in the 17th District Station House at 20th and Federal are transferred. The police department receives a judicial rebuke for “looseness in the investigation of the death of Riley Bullock.”

Murder charges against Ramsey and Schneider make their way through the courts. Ramsey admits the shooting was an accident, claiming “his gun went off when he slipped on the steps.” In December 1920, a jury finds Ramsey and Schneider “not guilty” after only a half hour of deliberation.

A century passes. And for the most part, both Philadelphians and makers of public memory do their level best to forget the entire story.

[See sources in the previous PhillyHistory posts: here, here, here, here and here.]

“Sloughing against the bar with one foot on the rail would have been unthinkable behavior for most ‘decent’ women, let along spitting into the cuspidors or allowing their skirts to trail in the beer-soaked sawdust,” wrote Madelon Powers.

“For some women even entering a bar is a fearful prospect,” agreed Mary Jane Lupton in Feminist Studies. “They might get bothered or insulted or embarrassed. Part of this apprehension is based on a realistic appraisal of male behavior. Part has to do with the rather intimidating architecture of the neighborhood barroom, with its L-shaped front bar and its lineup of stools . . . The L provides a defensive line; to break into that, to disrupt the pattern, is to place oneself in a vulnerable position.”

Yet, Powers claimed, “saloongoers were not totally anti-woman . . .  Many bar songs and stories portrayed females as merciful and decent and were surprisingly sentimental about mothers, wives, and women friends. Moreover, male customers accepted and indeed welcomed a female presence in certain areas of the saloon under well-defined circumstances. Though bargoers jealously guarded their male prerogatives and commiserated over male-female conflicts, there is no indication that these men as a group reviled or hated the women in their lives. Sexists and chauvinists they were, but not complete misogynists.”

“The only circumstance in which respectable women might legitimately linger unescorted” in saloons would be “in order to consume the saloon’s famous free lunch.” To access to this lunch, “free with the purchase of a five-cent drink,” women would bypass “the male-dominated ‘barroom proper’” by entering a side door marked “ladies’ entrance.”

This entrance, according to Powers, served a threefold purpose. “First, it permitted women to enter inconspicuously and minimize public scrutiny of their comings and goings… Second, women’s entry through the side door eliminated the necessity of their running the gauntlet through the establishment front room . . . undisputed male territory.  . . .  Finally, the side door afforded women quick and convenient access both to the far end of the bar, where they could purchase carry-out alcohol and to a second chamber known as the ‘back room,’ where they could feast on free lunches or attend social events hosted there.”

And so the “ladies’ entrance” to bars and saloons became universal protocol. Except for one notable case, the most traditional of saloons: McSorley’s Old Ale House in lower Manhattan. Philadelphia artist John Sloan, who moved to New York in 1904, famously and repeatedly painted scenes of its interior.

John McSorley “believed it impossible for men to drink with tranquility in the presence of women” though drinkers tolerated, and were even amused by, young boys running in and out of the back room, snatching “handfuls of cheese and slices of onion, before dashing out, “slamming the door.”  Where many saloons welcomed women, albeit with conditions and limitations, McSorley’s made its message clear with a sign: “NOTICE. NO BACK ROOM IN HERE FOR LADIES.”

McSorley’s motto? “Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies.” When a female entered, Joseph Mitchell told in The New Yorker, “Old John would hurry forward, make a bow, and say, ‘Madam, I’m sorry, but we don’t serve ladies.’ If a woman insisted, Old John would take her by the elbow, head her toward the door, and say, ‘Madam, please don’t provoke me. Make haste and get yourself off the premises, or I’ll be obliged to forget you’re a lady.’”

Sloan considered McSorley’s back room “like a sacristy,” a place where “old John McSorley would sit greeting old friends and philosophizing. Women were never served,” added Sloan, “indeed the dingy walls and woodwork looked as if women had set neither hand nor foot in the place.”

Until June 25, 1970, that is, when, by court order, McSorley’s opened its doors to women. Shortly after Mayor John Lindsay signed the order, Lucy Komisar, a vice president of the National Organization for Women, approached “the old‐fashioned wooden doors” wearing, The New York Times felt compelled to inform its readers, “a purple jumpsuit, sandals and sunglasses.”

A waiter demanded Komisar produce her birth certificate.” The 28-year old Komisar offered her driver’s license. The waiter refused to accept the license as proof she was at least 18 (then the legal drinking age). Komisar attempted to push her way in. The two engaged in “a short wrestling match” before the manager allowed Komisar inside, “to a chorus of boos from some of the regular patrons.”

“Shortly afterward,” observed the Times reporter, “Miss Komisar was involved in an argument with “some young men who were drinking ale in their undershirts.” When “one tall, unidentified man showed her an obscene poem he had scrawled on a piece of paper, [Komisar] tried to snatch it out of his hand.”

“Why, you little ——–,” he shouted, dumping a stein of ale over her head.”

“’You can’t do that!’ she shrieked, lunging at him.” Again the manager intervened, escorting the protesting, undershirted poet to the sidewalk.

They’re really boorish, horrible men” commented Komisar, “drenched but smiling . . . as she sipped an ale at the bar.” They “have a lot of problems with their masculinity.”

Taking it all in nearby, “an old-timer in an open collar shirt shook his head sorrowfully. ‘That woman is trouble. All women are trouble. This is what happens when you let them in here.’”

Apparently, everyone had more work to do.

[Sources: Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920 (The University of Chicago Press, 1998); Mary Jane Lupton, “Ladies’ Entrance: Women and Bars,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3, (Autumn, 1979); Joseph Mitchell, “The Old House at Home,” The New Yorker, April 13, 1940; John Sloan, The Gist of Art (New York, American Artists Group, Inc. 1939); Grace Lichtenstein, “McSorley’s Admits. Women Under a New City Law, The New York Times, August 11, 1970.]

“I didn’t know anything about girls,” Jack London wrote, “I had been too busy being a man.”

For London, as well as millions of other American men of similar vintage, the saloon was ground zero for “being a man” where the “test of true manhood,” as Madelon Powers put it, “was peer recognition for being a reliable ally and comrade in the volatile street culture of urban America.”

“Drinking was a man’s sport,” reminisced Travis Hoke a decade into prohibition. “And women not only loathed the saloon for its intrinsic evils but, quite naturally, because men often sought each others’ company there and excluded women. Safe in his saloon, a man boasted of marital independence, complained of marital injustice, gained strength to defy the dominant sex. There he could play at being devil-may-care and independent and generous and brave and debonair, at being manly—and there no woman dared invade him with drab truths. The saloon was for men only. It was their last stronghold in a world of women…”

“One breasted the bar, downed a drink, and became a man among men.”

According to Powers, “men who did each other the honor of drinking together were also expected to celebrate and reinforce their special bond through the swapping of drinks, favors, small loans, or other gestures of mutual assistance and friendship. . . . .by vying with one another in friendly contests of drinking, pool-playing, wagering, storytelling and the like, their displayed their ability and stamina to one another and reaffirmed their worth as clubmates. . . . rivalries were resolved through conventional forms of barroom interaction.”

America’s saloons, were men-only affairs where alcohol “was prized as a commodity of exchange, a thing intrinsically valuable that could function like money and all manner of transactions among men. When politicians, businessman, employers, union recruiters, or others wished to curry favor or reward jobs well done, they often did so not with cash, but with drink. Cash was valuable but crass; drink was both valuable and pleasurable” in the sacred space of a saloon that, we know from the noir novels of John T. McIntyre, “glittered with clusters of electric lamps and broad, gilt-framed mirrors,” its “marble-topped bar backed by pyramids of glasses and bottles.”

“The typical workingman’s saloon was readily recognizable by its swinging shuttered doors and wrought iron windows cluttered with potted ferns, posters and bottles of colored water,” writes Jon Kingsdale. “Inside was a counter running almost the length of the room, paralleled by a brass foot- rail. The floor was covered with sawdust. Across from the bar were perhaps a few tables and chairs backed up by a piano, pool table or rear stalls. Behind the bar and over an assortment of lemons, glasses and unopened magnums of muscatel, port and champagne hung a large plate-glass mirror.”

Men would revel in shared memories of the saloon as a unique and welcoming refuge. James Stevens was impressed by “the great mirror shown gloriously” above sparkling glasses and stacked labeled bottles. “Never before have I seen such an array of glasses, or such vivid colors, or such a vast mirror, or such huge carved and polished pillars and beams, or such enormous vessels of brass as the spittoons… . . The bar-room was strange and wonderful to look at, and even the smells were curious and pleasant to breathe.” John Powers “remembered vividly the strange beer smells, the sawdust on the floor, and the big men slouching against the bar with one foot on the rail.”

By 1888, Philadelphia had 5,773 licensed saloons. If “set side by side,” calculated the Inquirer, they’d “form a line nearly twenty-two miles long…” By 1915, New York would have more than 10,000, or one for every 515 persons; Chicago had one licensed saloon for every 335 residents; …  “A survey of Chicago found that on an average day the number of saloon customers equaled half the city’s total population.”

In saloons, according to Hoke, “millions of American men spent a sixth of their time and almost as much of their wages.” Saloons “had more influence on more men than all the colleges from Harvard to Stanford.” They “affected profoundly politics, religion, the lives of families, the destiny of the nation…”

“Half the Democratic captains of Chicago’s first ward at the beginning of the 20th century were saloon proprietors,” Kingsdale tells us. “One-third of Milwaukee’s 46 city councilmen in 1902 were saloon-keepers, as were about a third of Detroit’s aldermen at the end of the 19th century. Tweed’s ‘Boodle Board’ of aldermen was composed in half of saloon-keepers or ex-saloon-keepers; in 1884 nearly two-thirds of the political conventions and primaries in New York City were held in saloons; and in 1890 eleven of New York City’s 24 aldermen were saloon-keepers.”

Unfortunately, Kingsdale didn’t delve into saloon politics in Philadelphia. We’ll have to leave that story to future research, or, if we like, our florid historical imagination.

[Sources: Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920 (The University of Chicago Press, 1998); Travis Hoke, Corner Saloon. The American Mercury, March 1931, pp. 311-322; Jon M. Kingsdale, “Social Functions of the Urban Working-Class Saloon,” American Quarterly, vol. 25, No. 4. (Oct., 1973); “Comparative Saloon Table,” The Inquirer, May 28, 1888, p. 4.]