PhillyHistory Blog

“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.

 

How could David Goodis not have known John T. McIntyre, and envied his accomplishments as a writer?

Goodis was a journalism student at Temple in 1936, shooting for a writing career. McIntyre’s novel, Steps Going Down, published by Farrar and Rinehart that year, landed a top award in the All Nation’s Prize Novel Competition. If Goodis wasn’t contributing to The Owl, Temple’s student magazine, he would be working on his own novel, which would be published in 1939, shortly after his 23^rd birthday. In Retreat from Oblivion, Goodis crafted an international tale of intrigue, love and war—drenched in alcohol. Its publication would propel his writing career from Philadelphia to Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side in New York, then onto Hollywood.

Actually, Goodis never completely left Philadelphia. In Hollywood he’d survive in part by couch surfing; when in Philly he’d return to his childhood bedroom in East Oak Lane. Within a few years, Goodis would come home for good. What drove him back? Goodis didn’t exactly take to California culture. Sure, Hollywood adapted his second novel, Dark Passage for a film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, but ditched his original ending for a happy one. Meanwhile, at home, Goodis’ new wife Elaine filed for divorce. Goodis wrote a revenge novel, Behold This Woman (1947) that was set—where else—in Philadelphia. “The book is raw,” declares davidgoodis.com. “Goodis’ pain is raw. His scars are unhealed. The novel oozes with resentment. Clara [his Elaine character] teases men. She manipulates men. She exploits men.”

Goodis had found his footing—even if he didn’t entirely know it at the time—writing Philadelphia Noir.

After wrapping up obligations out west, Goodis returned to Philadelphia full time in 1950 and makes the seamier side of his native city the subject of a dozen novels, finding inspiration in Philadelphia’s own distinctive noirscape: skid row, the waterfront; working class neighborhoods and dark, frigid, wind-blown streets. Goodis put out as many as 10,000 words per day and took gritty to new levels of literary despair.

Cassidy’s Girl, published by Gold Metal in 1951 (the year of McIntyre’s death) turned out to be Goodis’ proof of concept. This sodden tale of sympathetic losers living and drinking on the Delaware waterfront sold a million copies.

On the river side of Dock Street the big ships rocked gently on the black water like monstrous hens, fat and complacent in their roosts. Their lights twinkled and threw blobs of yellow on the cobbled street bordering the piers. Across Dock Street the stalls of the fish market were shuttered and dark, except for cracks of light from within, where purveyors of Delaware shad and Barnegat crab and clam and Ocean City flounder were preparing their merchandise for the early-morning trade. As Cassidy passed the fish market, a shutter opened and a mess of fish guts came sailing out, aimed at a large rubbish can. The fish guts missed and landed against Cassidy’s leg.

Cassidy moved toward the opened shutter and glowered at the fat, sweaty face above a white apron.

“You,” Cassidy said. “You look where you’re throwin’ things.”

“Aw, shut up,” the fish merchant said. He started to close the shutter. Cassidy grabbed the shutter and held it open. “Who you tellin’ to shut up?”

Another face appeared within the stall. Cassidy saw the two faces as a double-headed monstrosity. The two faces looked at each other and the fat face said, ‘It ain’t nothin’. Just that liquored-up bum, that Cassidy.”  

The next year he put out more novels: Street of the Lost and Of Tender Sin. The year after that Moon in the Gutter and The Burglar, adapted to film starring Dan Duryea and Jane Mansfield.

He turned his back on her, moved to the cashier’s stand. He paid his check, left the restaurant and stood on the corner waiting for a cab. The night air had a thick softness and the smell of stale smoke from factories that had been busy in the day, and the smell of cheap whiskey and dead cigarettes and Philadelphia springtime. Then something else came into it and he breathed it in, and he knew the color of this perfume was tan. 

She stood behind him. “Usually I don’t gamble like this.” He faced her. “Where would you like to go?”

“Maybe someplace for a drink.”

“I don’t feel like a drink.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Are you hard to get along with?”

“No.”

“You think we can get along?”

“No.”

And then Down There, from 1956, begins with a classic Goodis scene of relentless despair and desolation:

There were no street lamps, no lights at all. It was a narrow street in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia. From the nearby Delaware a cold wind came lancing in, telling all alley cats they’d better find a heated cellar. The later November gusts rattled against midnight-darkened window’s, and stabbed at the eyes of the fallen man in the street.

The man was kneeling near the curb, breathing hard and spitting blood and wondering seriously if his skull was fractured. He’d been running blindly, his head down, so of course he hadn’t seen the telephone pole. He’d crashed into it face first, bound away and hit the cobblestones and wanted to call it a night.

But you can’t do that, he told himself. You gotta get up and keep running.

Filmmaker Francois Truffaut picked up Down There and produced Tirez Sur Le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) in 1960.  The setting shifted from Philadelphia to Paris, from Port Richmond to whatever the equivalent French quartier might be.

All good. Truffaut captured the feel—the existential texture—just right. And that’s what mattered most to readers and audiences not familiar with the authentic desperation known in Goodis’ Philadelphia.

[Sources: David Goodis and Robert Polito (editor) David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s (Library of America: 2012); David Goodis, The Burglar, (originally published by Lion, 1953); David Goodis, Cassidy’s Girl, (originally published by Fawcett, 1951); David Goodis, Down There, (originally published by Gold Medal, 1956); David Goodis Internet Movie Database (IMDB); Dennis Miller, “Dark Journeys: The Best of Noir Fiction,” Huffpost, THE BLOG, December 11, 2014, Updated Feb 10, 2015; Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell, Encyclopedia of Film Noir (ABC-CLIO, 2007), pp. 31-33.]

 

The “Philadelphia Gothic” genre enjoyed a major breakthrough in the 1840s thanks to riots, crippling poverty, racial and religious discrimination and the lurid literature of George Lippard and Edgar Allan Poe. But the genre’s debut goes back to the 1790s, when Charles Brockden Brown mongered his brand of Philly-based fear.

As we said in a recent post: Philly Noir has always been with us. So what other literary stopping points are there along that gritty, smoke-veiled alley?

Enter John T. McIntyre, the Northern Liberties native who left school at eleven and graduated “into the streets.” For a time, McIntyre hauled “buckets of cow’s blood from an abattoir across a lot to a tannery” and did “pretty much nothing” until the age of twenty in 1891 when he began a balky writing career for newspapers and theater. His first stab at fiction, The Ragged Edge: A Tale of Ward Life & Politics, appeared in 1902 and begins:

Weary horses dragged ponderous trucks homeward, the drivers drooped upon their high seats and thought of cans of beer; a red sun threw shafts of light along the cross-town streets and between the rows of black warehouses. (3)

“McIntyre’s analytic eye examines the neighborhood drama to its minutest detail,” writes Ron Ebest, “the campaign, the clubs, the bars, the weddings, the wakes—complete with keening mourners—the schools, the churches, the houses and streets down to their dustiest brick.”

They turned into a quiet street leading toward the river. A cellar door opened, and a broad barb of light shot across the sidewalk; from the midst of this rose a pallid, spectral form, and stood looking calmly into the night. But it was only a baker, clad in his spotless working dress, popping out of his overheated basement for a breath of air. A great stack, towering skyward, and vomiting a blazing shower of sparks into the night, showed that they were nearing the mill. The huge, low, shed-like buildings lifted their corrugated walls, like the beginnings of greater structures; a knot of men were gathered about the wide doorway; they had limp, damp towels twisted about their necks and all smoked short pipes. Rows of puddlers, naked to the waist, their bodies glistening with perspiration, stood before the furnaces “balling” the molten metal; from time to time one would drench himself with water, and once more face the Cyclopean eye glaring so angrily upon him. (219-220)

Beyond rich descriptions of the city, Ebest praises McIntyre’s “uncanny ability to replicate speech. So skillfully does he render Irish dialect, Irish-American pidgin, urban slang, and Yiddish-inflected English that complex conversations between multiple speakers can be read and followed without such guidelines as ‘he said’ or ‘she said;’ McIntyre’s people are recognizable by the sound of their voices.”

A red-faced, bare-armed woman opened a door in Murphy’s court and threw a pan of garbage into the gutter. Her next door neighbour was walking up and down the narrow strip of sidewalk, hushing the cry of a weazened baby.

“Is Jamsie not well, Mrs. Burns? “inquired the red-faced woman.

“Sorry the bit, Mrs. Nolan; he’s as cross as two sticks. It’s walk up an’ down the floor wid him I’ve been doin’ all the God’s blessed night. Scure till the wink av slape I’ve had since I opened me two eyes at half after foive yisterday mornin’.”

“Poor sowl ! Yez shud git him a rubber ring till cut his teeth on; it’s an illigant t’ing for childer’, I’m towld. (32)

“I am an incurable Philadelphian,” McIntyre liked to say. “I know it. I know the people. I’ve lived with them and they are part of me.”

“Mr. McIntyre’s people are the teamsters, the saloonkeepers, the corner grocer, the secondhand dealer, the undertaker, the sewer builders, the contractors and their gangs, and the families of all these people,” wrote the Chicago Daily Tribune. “The book is written in the language of the tenement house district and the conversation…abounds in the racy and picturesque vernacular of the race-track, the saloon, and the political club.”

The saloon was the only all-night establishment in the neighbourhood. It glittered with clusters of electric lamps and broad, gilt-framed mirrors; a marble- topped bar backed by pyramids of glasses and bottles stood upon one side.

They talked in a desultory way for some time, consuming much beer and many plates of sandwiches. Dawn stretched a grey hand through the window and dimmed the clusters of lights; and when they ranged along the bar for the last drink, the streets were filling with people hurrying toward their work.  (224)

But Ragged didn’t make waves in literary circles. It would be another thirty-four years before McIntyre received major recognition, this time for Steps Going Down, his Depression-fueled novel also embedded in Philadelphia.

“It is the world of the rooming houses that exist handy to the burlesque theatres,” wrote Robert Van Gelder in The New York Times, “a world removed from the established order and largely inhabited by persons who at some time in their lives have developed the habit of trying to live by their wits, but have imperfectly mastered the procedure. The houses are drearily furnished, poorly lighted, damp and cold in Winter, hot and noisy in Summer; the rooms are painted in dirty, sickish green; the air heavy with the odors of slatternly living. … The men play pool, drink beer, find cocaine handy if they can get it and brood a great deal over lost opportunities.”

And the talk, “the sharp-edged talk of the wise guys” according to Van Gelder, is “here more artfully caught than in any book I have ever read…”

Percy Hutchinson, also in The New York Times, applauded McIntyre’s ear for American dialogue. His characters “do not speak so much as volley forth words and phrases as a machine gun spits bullets. A foreigner knowing this book could be excused for concluding that American speech is a continuum of explosive sentences, and conversation a marathon contest in repartee.”

A novel ripe for Hollywood?

According to one of McIntyre’s obituaries in 1951, Hollywood lacked “the nerve to turn a John McIntyre book into celluloid. They were ‘too true to life.’”

[Sources include: John T. McIntyre The Ragged Edge: A Tale of Ward Life & Politics (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1902); “Good First Novel,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 4, 1902; “John T. McIntyre,” Book News: A Monthly Survey of General Literature, November 1902, Vol. 21 No, 243 (John Wanamaker: Philadelphia, New York, Paris); Robert Van Gelder, Books of the Times, The New York Times, September 3, 1936; Percy Hutchinson, “Mr. McIntyre’s Story of the American Underworld: Steps Going Down by John T. McIntyre,” The New York Times, September 6, 1936; “John T. M’Intyre, Novelist, 79, Dies,” The New York Times, May 22, 1951; Ron Ebest, “Uncanny Realist: John T. McIntyre and Steps Going Down (1936),” New Hibernia Review, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2004) pp. 86-99; Kevin Plunkett, “Noir Town; The hard life of John McIntyre, the legendary Philly novelist nobody’s heard of,” by Kevin Plunkett. Philadelphia City Paper, March 16-22, 2006]

The proudest moment for the Philadelphia rowhouse was in Chicago, of all places.

A two-story “Workingman’s House” was “put up at the Columbian Exposition,” reported Talcott Williams in 1893. And “there’s nothing more wonderful in all that marvelous Exposition than this proof that the laws, the habits, and the business of a city of one million people can be so arranged that even the day labor earning only $8 or $10 a week can own the roof over his head and call no man landlord.”

Williams noted that Philadelphia’s 80,000 rowhouses of the previous six decades had dramatically refashioned the city. “Philadelphia is not a city of palaces for the few, but a city of homes for the many—which is better,” he wrote. “It may not be “magnificent, but it is comfortable.”

Seven out of eight families in Philadelphia lived in “separate houses.” By comparison, in New York “only one family in six lives in a separate house…”

More than a matter of a family enjoying the “daily blessings” of “its own bath-tub, its own yard, its own staircase, and its own door step,” according to Williams, this was nothing less than “one of the world’s great industrial miracles.” He imagined the modest Philadelphia rowhouse as a declaration of independence in brick and mortar, a moral, populist victory that earned the city both domestic and civic superiority.

Philadelphia’s expanses of two-story rowhouses, claimed this oft-cited passage (also from 1893) “typify a higher civilization, as well as a truer idea of American home life, and are better, purer, sweeter than any tenement house systems that ever existed. They are what make Philadelphia a city of homes, and command the attention of visitors from every quarter of the globe.”

But for all the praise, there was a definite downside. Even Williams admitted that “street after street of small-two story brick houses looks rather mean and dingy,” noting that cobblestone pavements were bound to appear “rough and dirty.” But, he concluded, it’s “better to have bath-rooms by the ten thousand in small homes, than to have brilliant fountains playing in beautiful squares.”

No denying the “monotonous architectural effect” caused by endless miles of rowhouses. According to city planning pioneer Andrew Wright Crawford in 1905, the real estate developers were to blame. “In order to build the greatest number of houses on a street, they “want it straight and rectangular. They don’t care for the persons who are to live in these houses afterwards, and still less to they care for the good of the city as a whole.”

“This idea has been carried out with unremitting perseverance,” stated Crawford. All natural undulations had been leveled “throwing [a] severe mantle of unloviness” over the city’s many neighborhoods. “It is too late for Philadelphia to profit much by the broader intelligence of the present time,” admitted Crawford, “but it is possible that other cities and towns may learn something from her misfortune.”

It wasn’t as if Philadelphians hadn’t been warned early and often.

Visiting from industrial London in the 1840s, Charles Dickens described Philadelphia as “a handsome city, but distractingly regular. “After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.”

In the 1830s, Thomas Hamilton visited and noted “the traveler is at first delighted with this Quaker paradise,” but “every street that presents itself seems an exact copy of those which he has left behind.” Hamilton’s patience wore thin and he soon felt “an unusual tendency to relaxation about the region of the mouth, which alternately terminates in a silent but prolonged yawn.”

“Philadelphia is mediocrity personified in brick and mortar,” he wrote. “It is a city laid down by square and rule, a sort of habitable problem,—a mathematical infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity, —a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.”

As early as 1790, none other than Thomas Jefferson advised those contemplating designs for the nation’s next and permanent capital to avoid Philadelphia’s “disgusting monotony”—a complaint that Jefferson claimed was shared by “all persons.”

By the 1940s, when novelist Jack Dunphy set his tale of the unpleasant life and desperate death of John Fury in working-class South Philadelphia, he employed the city’s endless rows with their familiar, expressive, depressing power. As Fury walked home from yet another hard day on the job as a coal-wagon driver, he crossed “Washington Avenue and walked down Nineteenth Street past Mifflin Street and Snyder Avenue until he came to a narrow side street. The street crushed between bigger streets was a poor affair, similar in width, to an alley. Its houses smothered close together, jammed two stories high, and with small wooden porches hung on their fronts, looked like stony red-faced criminals serving a life sentence. Stuck together and dependent one upon the other, they seemed to live in constant fear that someday and somehow one would be pardoned and leave and so jeopardize the rest of them. They stood then, these square red bricked houses, and there were many of them in Philadelphia, tortured row upon row of them, doing penitence and allowing life with its worn semblance of freedom to crowd within them.”

No coincidence that “Philadelphia noir” became a thing in the 20th century.

Actually, it always was a thing.

[For more posts on the Philadelphia rowhouse, see “The Quintessential Object of Industrial Philadelphia;” “How Philly Got Flat: Piling it on at the Logan Triangle;” and “The Philadelphia Rowhouse: American Dream Revisited.”]

 

“Did you know,” asked the Tribune’s Joe Rainey in July 1931, “that never in the history of theatricals has one playhouse presented to the amusement lover as many stars as the Pearl Theatre…in the past six months?”

“A vaudeville and picture house” at 21^st Street and Ridge Avenue, the Pearl opened Thanksgiving Day, 1927. First up was Lottie Gee, “the scintillating star of ‘Chocolate Dandies,’ ‘Running Wild’ and ‘Shuffle Along.’” Edith Spencer performed her “clever, original and unique song and dance numbers.” The audience enjoyed Sheldon Brooks, the Okeh recording artist, as well as the Taskiana Four, “melodic harmonizers without peers.” Don Heywood and his New York Syncopators were joined by Beano, “The Dancing Phool” and Watts and Ringold provided a comic finale before the “feature picture:” Tom Mix and his horse Tony in “Silver Valley.”

“Come end enjoy vaudeville and photoplays at their best,” promised the Pearl. “Watch our shows each week grow bigger and greater. Nothing in the history of amusements in Philadelphia has even equaled our effort for novelty, variety, comedy, ensemble, beauty and importance.”

The Pearl paired up Wilbur Sweatman, “The Colored King of Jazz with “The Loves of Carmen” starring Delores Del Rio. Soon after came Clara Bow in her Paramount production, “Hula,” directed by Victor Fleming. But not before a live feature with heavyweight pugilist George Godfrey, “The Black Shadow” and Wilbur De Paris with his band.

A seat in the orchestra? Fifty cents in the evening, thirty cents for a matinee. Balcony seats? Thirty five cents in the evening, twenty cents for a matinee.

“Meet your family, your girl or boy friend but do not stand outside or in the lobby. Meet them where you will be comfortable while waiting in our Salon on our Mezzanine Floor.” The ushers—and the Pearl’s want ads said only “light colored” and “good looking” applicants need apply—would welcome you.

“One of the greatest dispensers of rhythm in the land today,” Cab Calloway, stood for a long run, from January to July, 1931. “Night after night, millionaires have been seen rubbing elbows with the colored patrons…when their desires have carried them to this uptown house to see the paramount colored performers of the land under the spotlight. Many have driven from sixty to one hundred miles to see some of the sable actors and actresses who have made history for themselves…”

“Colored people didn’t have to go to a white house to see a stellar attraction.” Instead, “whites had to come to a colored house”—and according the Tribune, “it looked as if they liked it.”

“All races and classes have apparently been willing to form lines sometimes two blocks long just to gain entrance and see the ‘Duke,’ the ‘Cab,’ (and) the ‘Bojangles.” Ethel Waters, Bennie Moten and his band, Nina Mae McKinney (the star of “Hallelujah”) and Earl (Snakehips) Tucker who had recently headlined at the Lincoln downtown at Broad and Lombard. Audiences applauded George Dewey Washington, Eddie Green, Tim Moore, Chick Webb, Miller and Lyles and Butterbeans and Susie.

The 1,400-seat Pearl and the other Ridge Avenue Jazz emporiums are all gone. But there’s no stopping memory. On Saturday May 6^th, Jazz history advocate Faye Anderson will lead a “Ridge Avenue Stroll Through Philly’s Jazz History” starting at the site of the Blue Note at 15^th and Ridge. You’ll spot her holding a sign proclaiming “This Place Matters.”

The 13-stop stroll, organized by PlanPhilly as part of their Jane’s Walk series, will visit and recall the entire set of star-struck sites, from the Nite Cap, the Bird Cage Lounge, Butler’s Paradise Café, Ridge Cotton Club, Checker Café, Mr. Chips Bar, Irene’s Café, and, of course, the Pearl on Ridge.

[Sources: Irvin R. Glazer, Philadelphia Theatres, A-Z (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); The Philadelphia Tribune: “Joe Wood to Manage New Pearl Theatre.” Nov 17, 1927; “Want Ad, November 18, 1927; “Lottie Gee, Edith Spencer and Sheldon Brooks Open The Pearl,” November 24, 1927; “New Million Dollar Colored Theatre,” (Advertisement) December 5, 1927;  “The Pearl Theatre,” December 8, 1927;  “Snappy Show At Pearl,” December 20, 1927; “Where to Go and What to See,” May 14, 1931; “Theatres: Did You Know That?,” by Joe Rainey, July 2, 1931; and “Jules Bledsoe at Pearl,” May 10, 1932.]

In the Spring of 1919, “Marian Dawley and a few other girls of color…went to the movie theater at 59th and Market Streets.” They lined up to buy tickets and were told “all tickets for colored people have been sold.”

They left “disgusted,” according to the Philadelphia Tribune.

Other than The Standard Theatre on the 1100 block of South Street, audiences of color had few options for entertainment. “The white theatres are and have been for some time drawing the color line,” pointed out the Tribune. “We have but one theatre owned and controlled by our race in this city, and when it is full, which is at every performance, there is practically no place for our people to go.”

But change was coming, readers learned. “In a few months the new Dunbar theatre will be completed at the corner of Broad and Lombard Streets.” This theatre, The Dunbar, will be “owned and controlled by citizens of color” to serve the city’s African American theatregoers, which, as a result of the Great Migration, was estimated at 50,000.

“The Quality Amusement Company, of which Mr. E. C. Brown, of the Brown and Stevens, Bankers is the head” soon had “ten Negro Theatres…in cities including Savannah, Richmond, Washington (Howard) New York (Lafayette) and Chicago.” Philadelphia’s promised to be “the finest theatre in the world owned, managed and controlled by colored people.”

“It was a grand spectacle December 29, [1919] to see the thousands of happy souls, men and women, boys and girls, as they wended through the streets of Philadelphia and filled every available space in the new Dunbar Theatre…  The colored citizens of Philadelphia have something really their own,” something “that they will be and are proud of and can boast about” something “wonderful, marvelous, almost inconceivable, yet so true.”

“Within The Law,” starring Cleo Desmond and Andrew Bishop filled the 1600-seat house twice daily for a solid week. And thanks to the Lafayette Players, the productions kept coming.

John T. Gibson, owner of the Standard Theatre responded by cutting his ticket prices. Gibson, according to A History of African American Theatre knew that the Dunbar’s parent company “had overextended itself by building the $500,000 Douglass Theatre in Baltimore, as well as the Renaissance Theatre in Harlem.” And in September 1921, just a few months after the “Shuffle Along” premiered at the Dunbar, Gibson bought the theater.

As the stage of choice, “Gibson’s New Dunbar Theatre” hosted the full array of African American talent: Will Marion Cook’s Internation Orchestra and Entertainers in the Quintessence of Jazz; the Ethiopian Art Theater’s version of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” fresh from its run on Broadway;  The  Lafayette Players productions of “The Shoplifters” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame;” the Manhattan Players’ “Cat and the Canary; “Sunshine Sammy;” “Runnin’ Wild;” “Swanee River Home;” “Struttin’ Time;” “Come Along Mandy;”  Mamie Smith; and “The Chocolate Dandies,” featuring Josephine Baker’s first Philadelphia appearance.

The Great Depression forced the sale of Gibson’s Dunbar to new (white) owners, who added a giant marquee, dubbed it The Lincoln and continued to bring in the talent including Duke Ellington and his Orchestra and Cab Callaway, “the Heidi Ho King and his original Cotton Club Orchestra,” who brought “Mini the Moocher” back to life once more. The Lincoln stage saw “Fats” Waller, Louis Armstrong, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Earl Hines, Ethel Waters, as well as other headliners.

From the beginning, the theater played a critical role in addition to serving as the city’s most desirable stage for African American performers. The Lincoln was often dedicated to race relations, human rights and political protest.

In 1920, the Bramhall Players, an interracial troupe, presented Butler Davenport ‘s “Justice,” described as a “race drama.” Where “Uncle Tom’s Cabin “went far to free the Negro’s body from bondage” “Justice,” claimed one review, “will go far to liberate the white man’s mind from prejudice.”

Three years later, more than 3,500 packed a mass meeting in the theater to protest “The Shame of America” and support passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill.

And in December 1938, The Lincoln hosted a public meeting denouncing “Nazi Germany’s persecutions of racial and religious minorities” warning that “such actions are sympathetically received in some quarters in this country.” About 500 attended the event, sponsored by the United Committee Against Racial and Religious Persecutions. It began with a march up South Street, from 5^th to 15^th and then to The Lincoln, where “an effigy of Adolf Hitler, replete in brown shirt swastika and mustache…in front of the theatre…was publicly burned.”

Such was Broad and Lombard’s well-earned niche, once-upon-a-time.

[Sources include: “All Seats For Colored People Are Sold Out,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 8, 1919; Philadelphia to Soon Have a New Colored Play House, Philadelphia Tribune, November  8, 1919; “The Dunbar Theatre has Swung Open its Doors to the Public,” Philadelphia Tribune, January 3, 1920; “Phila. Has “Something New Under the Sun,” by Anny Boddy, Philadelphia Tribune, January 3, 1920; The Crisis, 1920, vols. 21-22, Advertisement for  “Justice;” “Anti-Lynching Bill Support Asked,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 1923; “Hitler’s Effigy Burned by Crowd,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 6. 1938; and Advertisements for The Dunbar and The Lincoln, 1920-1936 in The Philadelphia Inquirer. ]

“Fourteen Thousand Negro Actors in This Country Now Performing,” read a headline at the start of the 1922 theatrical season. “In vaudeville alone there are more than six hundred acts, of which are about sixty are now in Europe. There are twenty-two Negro minstrel shows touring the south.” According to Billboard, “368 theaters in the United States [are] devoted entirely to the colored race.” Among them, in Philadelphia: the Standard near 11th and South Streets, the Royal near 15th and South and the Nixon on 52nd Street. Plus the only theater built, owned and operated by African Americans: the Dunbar at Broad and Lombard.

From the moment it opened at the Dunbar on April 11, 1921, Eubie Blake’s “Shuffle Along” demonstrated the power of the African American Jazz Sensation. “A ball of merriment rolling at aero-plane speed,” “Shuffle Along” would complete its run on Broad in Philly and return again before opening on Broadway in New York where critics raved. “The biggest hit New York has witnessed in years… a breeze of super-jazz blown up from Dixie” that would, over the next 60 weeks, establish a 500-performance legacy before going on tour.

“Whether you like jazz or not,” admitted the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Leopold Stowkowski in 1924, “it is a modern featurization of our hectic times and it is with us to stay.” Eubie Blake suggested that jazz’s “flash and fire” generated “flamboyant effectiveness” both artistically and commercially. It offers up “ingredients of freshness in a world where there must be freshness constantly.”

“Shuffle Along” would become the gold standard for American musical theater and for the Dunbar. Time and time again, managers would mount jazz and vaudeville productions hoping for another hit. They promoted “Liza” as the “musical thrill that won’t let your feet behave,” the “logical successor to ‘Shuffle Along.’” They opened “Carolina Nights” with choreography by Charlie Davis, the “dancing cop” from “Shuffle Along.”

In the first half of the 1920s, Dunbar audiences would enjoy “Creole Follies,” “Harlem Follies,” “Ebony Follies” and “Charleston Fricassee.” They came out for “Come Along Mandy;”  “Runnin’ Wild;” “Banville Dandies Revue;” Jimmie Cooper’s All Colored Revue “Hotsy Totsy” and Mamie Smith and her “Syncopators’ Revue Cyclonic Jazz Band.” None took off quite like “Shuffle Along.”

“There is no color line in the theater” proclaimed one Inquirer critic, claiming the broad and sustained appeal of “Shuffle Along” as proof. Yet there was a color line, possibly even several. Racial discrimination by mainstream theaters was one of the reasons the African American community built the Dunbar in the first place. And as quickly as the blockbuster “Shuffle Along” found a home at the Dunbar, after the extended Broadway run, it would return, but to greener pastures on Broad Street. In May 1923, “Shuffle Along” opened for a four-week run not at the Dunbar, but at the Forrest Theatre, then at Broad and Sansom Streets, a mainstream venue with a much larger stage and, more to the point, 400 additional seats for eager ticket buyers. Ironically, the success of African American productions would undercut the success of the Dunbar.

And this time, “Shuffle Along” came to Philadelphia with the 16-year-old Josephine Baker on its chorus line.

“When the best part of a capacity house singles out one little girl in the chorus and gives her attention every time she appears,” raved a critic, “it shows the recognition of qualities as stars are made of. There is a girl like this in the all-colored musical success, ‘Shuffle Along,’ at the Forrest Theatre. She is a sturdy youngster with a winning way and comedy that asserts itself in everything she does. She is one of the happy-honeysuckles and her name is Josephine Baker. Jolly as she seems to be in her work, the stage romping is serious business with Josephine. … Miss Baker has been in the professional only a short time but she has done much during that period. She knows how to make people laugh and how to sing and dance.”

Would Josephine Baker ever debut at the Dunbar?

She would. In November 1924, Baker performed in “Chocolate Dandies,” another Eubie Blake show. “With snap and zest and to the tune of much musical melody, ‘The Chocolate Dandies’ ‘strutted their stuff’ into Philadelphia… The lid was off and it was a race all evening” and the double-jointed “Josephine Baker carries off the honors.”

When “Chocolate Dandies” closed, it was Baker’s last appearance at the Dunbar and her next to the last appearance on Broad Street. In February 1928, after Baker had relocated to Paris and performed at the Folies Bergèr, a clip of her famous “banana skirt” dance made its way into a film travelogue, “Paris by Night,” being shown at the Academy of Music at Broad and Locust Streets. No matter that the film had been “viewed by more than 150,000 people and 15 cities without creating criticism on its alleged impropriety.” One Philadelphia “patron” had lodged her complaint about Baker’s “lack of garb” and the censors deleted Baker’s performance from all subsequent screenings.

It wouldn’t be the last time official censors would have their way with African-American artists and their work on stage in Philadelphia.

[Sources include: “Dunbar Theatre To Open Monday, December 29th ,” The Philadelphia Tribune, December 27, 1919; “Shuffle Along,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 12, 1921; “Shuffle Along: Biggest New York Hit,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 11, 1921; “There are Many Colored Thespians,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 17, 1922; “’Shuffle Along:’ Breezy Musical Show Scores a Big Hit at the Forrest,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 8, 1923; “She Is a Real Comedy Chorus Girl,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 20, 1923; “How a Jazzer Views Such Music,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 23, 1924; “Chocolate Dandies Score at Dunbar,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 25, 1924; “Paris Night Life Scene Cut From Travel Film,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 19, 1928.]