PhillyHistory Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

-Mark Twain, Autobiography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

~

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

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

(Jumping while the rope is turned faster.)

~

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

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

(The jumper then straddles the rope.)

~

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even if the neighborhood name of Camingerly never caught on.

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

Next Time: A Sampling 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Architects of the Renaissance would have expected more for Philadelphia. Oh, they’d have seen some wisdom in the city’s original city plan. Leone Battista Alberti imagined grandiose “public ways” leading to “some Temple, or the Course for Races; or to a Place for Justice.” Andrea Palladio concurred in the importance of creating large, “Broad” streets and “High” streets, “whence the Mind is more agreeably entertained and the city more adorned.”

Upgrade those streets into public avenues and boulevards lined with worthy buildings. Cities should have built-in expressions of “moral” and “political” significance; they should project “public magnificence.”

But in their “green countrie towne,” William Penn and Thomas Holme avoided any kind of unctuous, obsequious expression. Their plan for Philadelphia was quite the opposite: modesty and restraint. That’s the original vision for Philadelphia’s center square, the nucleus where the city’s DNA would propagate.

But then, in the 1870s, they blew the lid off Philadelphia’s planning toolkit. It started with the design for City Hall, which grew more immense and more ornate every year. And, as if this bright white-marble building rising out of a sea of red brick in a style akin to the Louvre wasn’t enough, its designers encrusted the exterior with hundreds of allegorical and historical sculptures. Then they topped it all off with a giant bronze rendition of the founder. Apparently Philadelphians had enough after two centuries of understatement. Now was the time to indulge in full-blown “public magnificence.”

How would this new city be made to look and feel? That was the question for the time.

At first, the answer was to create a “way to the park”—the newly expanded Fairmount Park. Then that concept got an exuberant upgrade. Replicate the axis of Broad Street by cutting a new diagonal swath northwest from City Hall. Make the boulevard a bold starting and ending point for a grand boulevard. Here would be more, much more, than a mere way to the park. Here was a destination in and of itself: The Parkway.

The idea caught on and grew. And in 1911, when 200 city planners gathered in Philadelphia for their conference, the centerpiece in the room where they deliberated (the Mayor’s Reception Room in City Hall itself) was nothing less than a 30-foot model of the vision. This was how public magnificence was going to play out in the 20^th century. A departure and a glorification. A Quaker apotheosis—if such a thing was possible—something big enough and new enough, to play in the same ballpark as City Hall. Who knows, the Parkway might even up the game.

No longer would the 17^th-century grid hold back urbanity. Here, in all of its diagonal glory, severing an entire quarter of Penn-Holme Philadelphia, was a contrary vision of a fresh, new city—a City Beautiful, though still in plaster and papier-mâché.

Charles Mulford Robinson , the man who gave the City Beautiful movement it’s name, came to the conference in 1911 and declared it so.

“America is waking up,” declared W. Templeton Johnson in anticipation of the exhibition. “Conservative Philadelphia is taking a great step forward” in its new priority to turn “away from the checker-board plan, the curse of our American cities.”

“They have planned radial streets after the French manner, but with a constantly increasing width on leaving the center so as to create a great path for fresh country air to come blowing in to the very vitals of a great city.”

“The great purpose of the Philadelphia exhibition is to start a campaign of education, to attract people to the City Hall, and once there to show them graphically and expeditiously by means of plans, beautifully prepared perspectives, and photographs what far-seeing men are doing to make the cities of the world not only more beautiful to look upon, but better places to live in. It is hoped that not only Philadelphians, but people from all parts of the country may come to this exhibition, and with the aid of the competent guides which it is proposed to have, learn the great lesson of good city planning, and spread its propaganda through the city and over the land.”

The model stood at the heart of the “International Exhibition of City Planning” which was “on view free to the public, in the corridors of the City Hall from May 15 to June 15” 1911.  The headlines screamed approval: “Splendid Municipal and Educational Buildings Will Line Sides of Parkway;” “City Planners Loud in Praise of Philadelphia.”

The model is gone, long gone, but we have these and other photographs of it. Eight in all: From the City Hall end of the model there is this one (a detail of which is illustrated, top) and another. There’s a bird’s eye view from Broad Street South. And yet one more from the East. At the Northwest end of the Parkway, there’s this view of Fairmount from across the Schuylkill. And another from further downstream. On axis from the Northwest there’s this view (a detail of which is illustrated above) and other at a similar angle showing more of the park.

You’ll find other historical material as well: William E. Groben’s Bird’s Eye Perspective of Fairmount, the subject of this earlier post. And if this is all a bit of Déjà vu, maybe you read this post back in 2011, which, as we see it, would have been the best time to celebrate the Parkway’s Centennial.

[Sources:  David Brownlee, Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989); W. Templeton Johnson, “The Coming City Planning Exhibition,” in The Survey, April 1911, pp. 183-184; “Nation’s Experts to Inspect New Plan: Splendid Municipal and Educational Buildings Will Line Sides of Parkway,”  The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 28, 1911; and “City Planners Loud in Praise of Philadelphia” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 16, 1911.]

When architects first designed the far end of the parkway at Fairmount, the biggest challenge was to make an extravagant project palatable to taxpaying Philadelphians.

In the Spring of 1907, street car magnate and would-be philanthropist Peter A.B. Widener proposed an art museum, acropolis-style, atop Fairmount. As architect Paul P. Cret first designed it, the steps would zigzag upward, emphasizing the verticality of Fairmount and ignoring the sweeping power of the parkway axis. In the Spring of 1911, William E. Groben’s drawings, accompanied by a 30-foot model, would be centerpieces in a month-long exhibition at City Hall. These sold the public on the grand vision for the parkway, but the zigzag steps remained as proposed. It took several more years before architects extended the broad axis of the parkway up to the top of Fairmount. And it would take another six decades for the site to come alive with a narrative powerful enough to have mythical proportions.

Who’d have guessed the parkway’s original references to ancient classicism would, so many decades later, become electrified in the public imagination by an emerging Hollywood action hero? That the parkway’s magic sauce would be in the museum’s steps?

To facilitate this kind of animation, however, the scene would require wide granite steps sweeping upward to a plateau overlooking the city’s skyline. The original design wouldn’t have inspired Sylvester Stallone to write and produce his famous scene. The original steps defied Rocky’s exuberant spirit and the scene’s visual openness. Those steps would have clashed with the sight and sound of Rocky bounding up at dawn, forging, in a cinematic crescendo, a spiritual connection with the film’s protagonist and Philadelphia’s imagination.

As redesigned and built, the steps merge axis and access, providing Stallone and Rocky director John G. Avildsen a place to craft a scene for posterity. In de-industrializing Philadelphia, Rocky brought the city’s faux acropolis to life with a story worthy of ancient legend.

To help pull that off, Avildsen brought in inventor Garrett Brown, who had “developed a harness to wear on his shoulders from which he could suspend a camera” allowing it remain “balanced and stable (and) cushioned…” Brown’s Steadycam enabled him “to move with, and around, his subject while filming with a fluid intimacy.”

For the musical score, Avildsen reached out to Bill Conti, a young graduate of the Juilliard School. Avildsen sat Conti down with a glass of red wine, showed him “a few of the rough cuts of Rocky boxing Apollo Creed” while playing Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

“That’s the kind of sound I want, rather than a rock and roll,” Avildsen told Conti. “This music makes boxing more important, almost more ethereal.”

According to Michael Vitez, in Rocky Stories, “Conti began his fanfare with “a blast of trumpets… That brassy sound is what the Greeks and Romans want you to hear going into battle,” he said. “That is the part that makes guys want to die.”

“’The genius of Rocky,’ film historian Jeanine Basinger once told Philadelphia Inquirer movie critic Carrie Rickey, ’is how it used the Steadicam not merely to create movement, but to get us into Rocky’s shoes and his skin.’”

“It’s a fairy tale,” claimed Avildsen, albeit one tailored to a modern-day attention span. “This is the peak, a pinnacle that is accessible to people,” said Brown, “it’s not like climbing the damn Alps … It can be done in thirty seconds.”

“You can’t borrow Superman’s cape,” agreed Stallone. “You can’t use the Jedi laser sword. But the steps are there. The steps are accessible. And standing up there, you kind of have a piece of the Rocky pie. You are part of what the whole myth is.”

The as-built steps make the scene, they enable the myth. Together, claims Buzz Bissinger, the site and the myth make the steps “one of the great architectural icons of the modern world.”

The architects weren’t the only ones who needed to tweak their original thinking for this to come together. Stallone’s first idea for the scene had Rocky carrying his dog, Butkus, a 120-pound bull mastiff, up the museum’s 72 steps. Just as the architects moved beyond their original zigzag design, Stallone, too, “abandoned” his original idea.

And the Philadelphia story is better off for both changes.

 

[Sources:  David Brownlee, Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989); Laura Holzman, “A Question of Stature: Restoring and Ignoring Rocky,” Public Art Dialogue, October, 2014; Michael Vitez and Tom Gralish, Rocky Stories: Tales of Love, Hope, and Happiness at America’s Most Famous Steps (Paul Dry Books, 2006) .]

“Should nothing be done,” warned engineers after the 1986 Valentine’s Day explosion and fire that destroyed a row of houses in Logan, “catastrophic failure of numerous dwellings is highly probable.”

But doing something would have been the exception to the rule.

A powerful early warning that the neighborhood of Logan was sinking came 27 years earlier, right around the corner from the 1986 incident at 10th Street between Courtland and Wyoming. On the afternoon of Halloween eve—mischief night—a trio of explosions a few hours apart rocked the rowhouses of the 800 block of West Roosevelt Boulevard, causing damage and alarm. Then the 1959 incident conveniently slipped from public memory. Not one of the dozens of news stories from the 1980s and 1990s  recalled what happened in 1959.

After the 1986 explosions, engineers found nearly 1000 houses unstable. As the then Mayor W. Wilson Goode put it, the “residents of Logan came to the city and demanded: ‘Solve this problem.’” The Goode administration responded, creating a corporation “to pool state and federal money to compensate and relocate the homeowners.”

After the 1959 incident? PGW repaired its cracked gas main and life went on; the truth buried, the inevitable ignored.

Visit that block today and you’ll see the catastrophe that played out, albeit in the slow motion of government bureaucracy. A few months after the 1986 incident, residents of 23 homes were told to move out … because they were in “imminent danger of collapse.” … An additional 56 were found to be in “dangerous” condition.” Two years later, eleven houses on the 800 block of Roosevelt Boulevard were the first to be demolished. By 2000, more than 950 more would be vacated and pulled down.

Today, the 800 block of West Roosevelt Boulevard is a small, anonymous edge of a 35-acre, no-man, no house zone, a monument to a century of greed, ineptitude and failure, the likes of which is unprecedented in urban history.

Here’s how it all started in 1959:

Six-and-a-half feet under the east side of 9th Street, a 30-inch gas main developed a crack. Gas seeped into underground pockets and went undetected until five homes about 25 feet away: 819, 821, 823, 825, and 827 West Roosevelt Boulevard were racked by three explosions that shook the neighborhood and set fire to the houses. The blasts commenced at 3:05 P.M. Friday, October 30th.

At 819, windows at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Wallman and their two children were blown out, also ripping out their Venetian blinds. Lee Bamberger, 97 and his wife Anne, 87, were resting in their living room at 817 until “driven to the street” by the smoke.

Next door to the Wallmans at 821, Ella Coleman lived with her invalid grandmother. Coleman arrived home from work just in time for the third and most intense explosion. Just as she entered her house Coleman was about knocked down. Dazed, seeing that her kitchen was on fire, she managed to get her grandmother to the street.

At 823, smoke and fire drove out Dr. M. M. Mandel from his basement office and his mother, Mary Manuel, from her second-floor apartment. G. S. Yaros escaped his first floor apartment. Everyone ran to the street, “shaken by the blasts.”

“I never heard anything like it before,” Mary Mandel told a reporter, adding she saw flames coming from the cellar window of Snyder’s home” at 825.

There, Evelyn Snyder was “hurled to the floor” by the explosions. “One of her two daughters, Sharon, 13, had just returned home from Olney high school.” Both escaped, though the Snyder required medical attention at nearby Einstein Medical Center.

According to newspaper accounts, the force of the explosions “ripped joists and bulged brick walls in several of the homes. Debris was found half a block away.”

Only a few decades before, the entire Wingohocking Valley had been filled in and remade into flat, fake, developable land. When the United States Geological Survey studied samples of what lay below the surface, they confirmed that the 800 block of Roosevelt Boulevard had been built on top of 30 to 48 feet of unstable coal ash. An estimated 500,000 cubic yards of the stuff had been hauled from Center City on specially modified trolley cars in a years-long project to raise the level of the landscape.

“It took decades for the inadequacy of the ash to be revealed, explains Adam Levine. Over time, “large pockets of the fill had compacted and washed away, as evidenced by an epidemic in the neighborhood of sagging porches, cracking foundations, and warped floors…” Not to mention the occasional explosion and fire.

The Army Corps of Engineers would estimate “site improvements including soil compaction” that would cost $48,500,000, the majority of which would be for “new structural fill.” And the problem wasn’t limited to the shifting, so-called “land.”

Logan, a/k/a a dump disguised as a neighborhood, is toxic. The average urban soil background lead level is about 735 parts per million (ppm). In 2000, the EPA tested 30 acres and found that more than nine acres has lead levels of 800 to 5,000 ppm. One sample topped out at 22,300. (A level of 400 ppm is enough to trigger remedial action.)

Today, at the no-man’s land known as Logan Triangle, doing nothing may be the only reasonable option.

[Sources: “3 Mysterious Blasts Rock Boulevard area; 5 Homes Ignited,” Inquirer, October 31, 1959; “Boulevard Explosions Traced to Main Break,” Inquirer, November 1, 1959; Introduction by Adam Levine to Harold Cox, “Filling Low Land:A story of ash-dumping in the Wingohocking Creek Watershed,” (excerpt from Utility Cars of Philadelphia, 1971); Ann W. O’Neill and Gene Seymour; “The Logan Motion,” The Philadelphia Daily News, March 26, 1986; William K. Stevens, Sinking Homes Shock Neighborhood,” The New York Times, November 2, 1986; Linda Loyd, “Logan Houses Start Coming Down,” Inquirer, February 19, 1988; Larry Copeland, “A Lift from Sinking Homes Red Tape Delayed One Family’s Exodus from Logan,” Inquirer, June 14, 1994; Maria Panaritis, “Logan Residents, Saying Their Homes are Sinking, Seek Aid,” Inquirer, August 13, 1999; Mark Jaffe, “Up To $2 Million to go Toward Lead Removal Testing Found ‘Unacceptable,’” Inquirer, January 11, 2000; Logan Triangle (Urban Land Institute Philadelphia Technical Assistance Program), September 10, 2009; Thomas J. Walsh, “Redevelopment Hopes Sinking for Logan Triangle,” PlanPhilly, January 23, 2010];

Also see the PhillyHistory post: How Philly Got Flat: Piling it on at the Logan Triangle.