Squeegee Machine – Broad and South Streets, June 11, 1914. (PhillyHistory.org)
In the 20th century, people came to love their cars, so long as they could drive them on smooth, flat, clean asphalt. In rush hour traffic, cobblestones quickly lost their charm; Belgian blocks got old fast.
Asphalt, also known as bituminous paving was as flat could be, providing those who laid it kept it clean and in good condition. And in Philadelphia, where the total area of streets was more than 17 million square yards and growing, that took some real effort. On a daily basis, a century ago, Philadelphians cleaned 8.1 million square yards of it.
According to Elements of Highway Engineering, the city’s “broken stone roads are cleaned by brushing coarse dirt into the gutters once a week, once in two weeks, or once a month, dependent upon traffic and location. Pavements are cleaned every day, every other day, every third day, or once a week dependent upon traffic, location, and other local conditions. Smooth bituminous pavements, brick pavements in good condition, and wood block pavements are cleaned by patrolmen with brooms and rotary squeegees.”
The Kindling Machinery Company of Milwaukee had the corner on the horse-drawn squeegee, a chariot-like vehicle holding 500 gallons of water that, with its roller set an oblique angle, cut a seven-foot wide swath of squeaky urban clean. As William H. Connell, Chief, Bureau of Highways and Street Cleaning in Philadelphia explained in 1914: “The operation consists of batteries of two and three squeegee machines preceded by sprinklers” about 200 yards ahead, in order, confirmed the American Highway Engineers’ Handbook, to permit the water “to saturate and loosen up the dirt on the pavement without giving it time to evaporate. … The idea of sprinkling is to soften the surface and enable the squeegee to cleanse the streets of all slime as well as the coarser materials. The squeegees are followed by two men, whom immediately sweep up the windrows of dirt into piles, and a sufficient number of carts follow to remove the dirt from the streets.”
At the dawn of the internal combustion age, especially on streets being cleaned for automobile traffic, there was something anachronistic and even quaint about the horse-drawn squeegee machine. It also came down to dollars and cents. By 1922, the original model was pitted against the new, motor-powered squeegee. The winner, hands down, was the latter, which, on a daily basis, cleaned 80,000 square yards compared with 35,000 square yards squeegeed by the horse-drawn version. The motorized model cost far less to operate. And it wasn’t pulled by horses, which were part of the problem in the first place.
The Second Bank of the United States, 420 Chestnut Street. A photograph from 1859.
Before he locked horns with President Andrew Jackson over the fate of the “many headed monster” (a.k.a. The Second Bank of the United States), banker Nicholas Biddle fancied himself something of a poet and aesthete. Born to wealth and blessed with brilliance, Biddle graduated from Princeton University — at the head of his class — at the tender age of 15. This was only after the University of Pennsylvania refused to grant the Philadelphia wunderkind a bachelors degree a few years before.
The young Nicholas Biddle. Source: Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitalization Project.
Like John Quincy Adams, Biddle (1785-1844) was well-traveled from an early age. In 1804, he accompanied the American minister John Armstrong to France as his personal secretary, and sat in the pews of Notre-Dame as Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France. In England, the dashing and probably cocky Nicholas had the gumption to verbally spar with University of Cambridge dons about the differences between ancient and modern Greek. Biddle’s sojourns were hardly unique. By the early 1800s, scores of Americans had visited Europe either as diplomats or merrymakers on the “Grand Tour.” Another Philadelphian, the late Dr. Benjamin Franklin, was still revered in France, where his bespectacled visage still adorned countless Parisian homes. John Quincy Adams had been as far afield as St. Petersburg, where he served as America’s first minister to Russia.
But Nicholas Biddle was only the second American to visit Greece, the birthplace of modern democracy. In May 1806, the young Philadelphian sailed from the Italian port of Trieste and landed in Zante, Greece. For three months, he roamed through the land which had been “the first brilliant object that met my infancy.” Like many well-educated men of his time, Biddle supported Greece’s struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Another aristocratic man of letters, Lord Byron, died fighting with the Greek army twenty years after Biddle’s visit. Composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote incidental music for August von Kotzebue’s 1811 play The Ruins of Athens for a performance in Budapest. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s engravings of classical ruins were wildly popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and inspired the Americans architects such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Latrobe.
“Lord Byron in Albanian Dress,” an 1813 painting by Thomas Phillips. Source: Wikipedia.
Biddle, himself possessed of Byronic good looks, was conscious of the influence that Greek philosophers had on American political theorists. “Where are her orators?” he wrote of the Greeks. “Gone forth to enlighten distant nation without a solitary ray for their country. Whilst foreign erudition has lighted its lamp at the flame of their genius, their works are unknown to posterity.”
As Biddle gazed at the ruins of the Acropolis in Athens, he came to believe that this architectural language was best suited to the ideals of new American Republic, which strangely like Greece was heavily based on chattel slavery. To Biddle, the best Greek buildings had an understated majesty. This was a result of their purity of form, use of the “Golden Ratio” of 1 to 1.618, and richness of materials over mere ornamentation.
The Doric Order as used on the Parthenon. The vertically grooved sections of the lintel are called triglyphs, while the blank portion are called metopes. The metopes usually were the backdrop for sculpture. Source: Wikipedia.
The Parthenon, commissioned by Pericles and designed by the architect Iktinos in the 5th century B.C., was built using the most “masculine” of the Greek orders: Doric. In the Doric order, columns were massive and fluted, and topped by smooth flared capitals. The architrave – the stone lintel supported by the columns – was likewise spare, decorated with grooved triglyphs and metopes that mimicked earlier wooden post-and-lintel construction. Because of its austerity, the Doric was the least popular order in neoclassical Western architecture, particularly in the churches and palaces that Biddle saw in France and Rome. The other two orders, Ionic and Corinthian, were more elaborate and romantic in their aesthetic. In the new American capital of Washington, D.C., architect William Thornton used the Corinthian order on the Capitol Building, while James Hoban used Ionic for his “presidential palace,” more popularly known as the White House. But to Biddle, the Doric’s restraint appealed to his purest classical sensibilities, in which less was indeed more. And Doric was not tainted with associations with Imperial Rome and the European absolutist monarchies that followed it.
Piranesi’s drawing of the Ionic order as used on the Roman temple of Portunus. The Ionic order is used on the White House. Source: Wikipedia.The Corinthian order, as used on the Pantheon in Rome. The Corinthian order is used on the U.S. Capitol. Source: Wikipedia.
Biddle might have revered the ancient Greeks, but he was disgusted by the state of Athenian affairs in 1806. He, like many Westerners, blamed Greece’s sorry state on the Turks. The Parthenon was a victim of this long occupation. In 1687, after having stood nearly intact for centuries, the Parthenon, which the Turks were using as an arsenal, was hit by a shell from Venetian guns. Biddle gazed on the crumbling ruins with despair. “Are these few wretches, scarcely superior to the beasts whom they drive heedlessly over the ruins, are these men Athenians?” he wrote. “Where is their freedom? Alas! This is the keenest stab of all. Bowed down by a foul oppression, the spirit of Athens has bent under slavery. The deliberations of her assemblies were once their laws; they now obey the orders of a distant master, and on the citadel itself, the protectress & the asylum of Grecian freedom, now sits a little Turkish despot to terrify & to command.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUPAf7eEo0o&w=480&h=360]
Overture and chorus from “The Ruins of Athens” by Ludwig van Beethoven.
The ruined Parthenon in the 1830s, with a mosque built in the center. Source: Wikipedia.
The “little Turkish despot” Biddle referred to was most likely not a man, but the small mosque that the Turks had built in the middle of the ruined Parthenon.
When Biddle returned to Philadelphia, he must have looked with dismay at the architecture of his own sober Quaker City. Most of its buildings were of plain red brick with white wood trim, various versions of the British-influenced Georgian or the somewhat newer Roman-influenced Federal style. Over the coming years, as Biddle rapidly ascended local and national power structures, Biddle made it his mission to transform the City of Brotherly Love (φιλεω“to love” and αδελφος “brother”) into the Athens of America. He founded and edited Port-Folio, the nation’s first literary magazine. Soon after he married the heiress Jane Craig, Biddle remodeled his country residence “Andalusia” on the Delaware River and his city home on the 700 block of Spruce Street in the Greek style. When appointed as the head of the Second Bank of the United States, Biddle commissioned the architect William Strickland to build an adaptation of the Parthenon as its new home. Completed in 1824, it was made entirely of Pennsylvania blue marble.
The Nicholas Biddle house at 715 Spruce Street, on the left, in February 1959.
Nicholas Biddle House at 715 Spruce Street in 1972, post restoration.
Nicholas Biddle’s mortal struggle with President Andrew Jackson is well-known, as is his hubristic fall from grace. Yet the beautiful Greek-influenced buildings he commissioned in and around Philadelphia still grace his native city, which was once known as the Athens of America.
Sources:
William Harris, “The Golden Mean,” Humanities and Liberal Arts, Middlebury College. http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Humanities/TheGoldenMean.html#refpoint4
R.A. McNeal, ed. Nicholas Biddle in Greece: The Journals and Letters (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p.50, 219.
You may have heard that the Philadelphia International Records building at 309 South Broad St, which since 1970 had been owned by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, was recently demolished to make room for a condo and hotel development that new owners Dranoff Properties plan to open at 301-309 South Broad St. The loss of this building is devastating from a preservationist point of view, while almost inevitable given that it never recovered from a 2010 arson fire. Not only does it have a plethora of history as a building that Gamble and Huff had owned since 1973, but before that, it was the headquarters of the equally legendary Cameo-Parkway label in the 1950s and 1960s. Each of these eras represent two distinct periods in which the sounds coming out of Philadelphia, and that building specifically, were not only some of the most popular but some of the most moving and important recordings of each respective time period.
The history of the building is impressive, to say the least. Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” a paradigm-shifting song that was a massive hit in 1961, was recorded there during the initial era. And during that time period, other Philadelphia artists like Charlie Gracie, Bobby Rydell, the Dovells, the Orlons, Dee Dee Sharp and The Tymes also recorded there.
The second era saw hits like Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones,” The O’Jays’ “Love Train” and the original versions of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” and “Don’t Leave Me This Way” (both by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, featuring Teddy Pendergrass on lead vocals). Overall, Gamble and Huff (on many occasions assisted by the producer and songwriter Thom Bell) have over 50 Gold and Platinum records and over 50 Top 10 hits.
After the hits dried up by the late ’80s, it became a major tourist attraction that has always been the site of film documentaries, television specials, receptions and events such as one honoring Motown founder Berry Gordy. While we can debate if a museum to honor Philadelphia’s rich musical legacy (such as ones that exist in Memphis, Detroit and in other cities’ legendary recording studios) is necessary and while it’s also understandable why the building was sold, it’s almost certain that 309 South Broad Street would have been a great site for it. Now, unfortunately, we will never know.
Devil’s Pocket – Behind Naval Home. January 28, 1919. (PhillyHistory.org)
“I have seen a pope, I have seen Julius Erving at the top of his game. I have seen a city administration burn down a neighborhood. I watched Randall Cobb slowly realize he would never become a heavyweight champion, of the world. One night I almost saw myself die.”
The night Dexter nearly saw himself die was in 1981, after he wrote a Daily News column about a botched drug deal that resulted in murder. The deceased’s brother, according to Dexter, “bartended in Devil’s Pocket, which has got to be the worst neighborhood in the city—maybe anywhere.” And he was angry. But Dexter “thought he could talk to him and work it out, so I went down there” with Randall “Tex” Cobb. Both Dexter and Cobb nearly saw themselves die that night.
“It has been our good fortune that Pete Dexter did not die at the hands of those heroes with ballbats and tire irons,” wrote Pete Hamill. “He has gone on to write some of the most original, and disturbing, novels in American literature.”
“In an age when words and storytelling were what counted, not bloviated ranting and raving, claimed Buzz Bissinger, Dexter covered “more ground in 900 words than most writers could cover in 9,000.”
“I know the city,” wrote Bissinger, “and nobody has ever captured it the way Dexter has, shining his light on these punks and drunks and cops and hollowed-out men and women just hoping to grab on for one more day. Wherever there is loneliness in the city — and with the withering of its manufacturing and working-class roots, there’s no shortage of loneliness — Dexter seems to find it.”
What Dexter also found was the sense to appropriate Devils Pocket for the setting of his near-death experience. Doc’s, the bar where Dexter and Cobb had their clocks cleaned, was at 24th and Lombard, a place more accurately called Grays Ferry, or Schuylkill, or possibly even (forgive me) the Graduate Hospital Area and a good half-mile away from Devil’s Pocket, which, at Catherine and Taney Streets, is hard by the southwestern wall of the Naval Home.
“The Devil’s Pocket in Philadelphia, January 7, 1911.” (Google Books)
But none of those other neighborhood names fit Dexter’s story as brilliantly as did Devil’s Pocket.
We can forgive the artistic license. After all, if not for Dexter’s storytelling, Devil’s Pocket might have faded into the same gentrified oblivion where other Philadelphia neighborhood names of character have gone. (Who hears of Texas, Smoky Hollow, Beggarstown and Rose of Bath?)
Devils Pocket has resonance; it always did. It worked in 1911 with William Paul Dillingham, who focused on Philadelphia’s poor Irish in his study Immigrants in Cities. Dillingham noted the small triangular court called Asylum Place, “popularly known as ‘The Devil’s Pocket.’” He wrote of its ten two-story brick houses “poorly built and in bad repair” overcrowded with a mix of newly arrived and first generation Irish. Residents of Devils Pocket got their jobs at nearby mills, their water from shared hydrants in small back yards where the “dry” toilets were. Just as nearby Gibbons Court, drainage at the Devil’s Pocket ran along the pavement.
Devil’s Pocket had been known as one of those places many Philadelphians heard about, talked about, and avoided. An 1898 bicycle tour (“Trips Awheel,” The Inquirer, February 6, 1898) recommended bypassing this “nest of unnameable lawlessness. The bicyclist/journalist wouldn’t venture west of Grays Ferry Avenue; he heard the stories and gave Devil’s Pocket “a wide berth even in broad daylight.”
But there’d be no wide berth for Pete Dexter. Even if he had to fudge the coordinates of Devil’s Pocket to help make the most of his Philadelphia story.
Grays Ferry Avenue at South Street [and 23rd Street] Looking Southwest, May 22, 1936. Wenzel J. Hess, photographer. (PhillyHistory.org)South Street’s civic temperature – and Philadelphia’s by degree – can be measured by checking in at the triangular intersection at South Street, 23rd Street and Grays Ferry Avenue. This pizza-shaped- piazza continues to change with the times, proving, once again, that what goes around comes around.
About a century ago, Christopher Morley (who resided nearby on too-quiet Pine Street) enviously noted the “uproarious and naïve humours” a few blocks away. “On South Street,” Morley wrote, “the veins of life run close to the surface.” By the 1970s, things had settled down, though not necessarily in a good way. “The street lay like a snake sleeping; dull-dusty, gray-black in the dingy darkness,” wrote David Bradley. “At the three-way intersection of Twenty-Third Street, Grays Ferry Avenue, and South Street a fountain, erected once-upon-a year by a ladies guild in remembrance of some dear departed altruist, stood cracked and dry, full of dead leaves and cigarette butts and bent beer cans, forgotten by the city and the ladies’ guide a minor memorial to how They Won’t Take Care of Nice Things.”
Ah, but given time they will care. If given half a chance.
In 2014, we’ve witnessed a waking up, a coming around to this very “nice thing” along the western end of South Street. Not exactly “uproarious,” and hardly “naïve,” the movement began three years ago with a celebration of the diagonal in a city made up of right angles. And it’s more than saving one of the city’s rare, vintage horse troughs. The Grays Ferry Triangle effort has been a grass-roots project since 2011, one bolstered by arguments that spaces are better, often far better, when reclaimed by and for community. To demonstrate and consolidate support, there’s been an annual Plazapalooza, a spate of social media and a poll showing 98% of near-neighbor support for promoting pedestrianism and banning the can on at least one tiny but potent stretch of Philly byway.
Last Spring, a six month trial street closure started and “an underused South of South space” got a “pedestrian-friendly makeover.” Will this experiment in participatory urban design come to an end? Will South Street once again revert to a place that “Won’t Take Care of Nice Things”? Or has Philadelphia made yet one more turn toward becoming a post-petroleum city, a city whose veins not only “run close to the surface” but pulse with something more organic than gasoline?
23-25 S. 9th Street at Ranstead Street, 3-15-1915, N. M. Rolston, photographer (PhillyHistory.org)
“Weakness is a Crime.” With those four words Bernarr Macfadden launched a media empire built on health. Within a year, his Physical Culture magazine brought its growing readership arguments for fitness and against refined foods; arguments for contraception and against the corset. Macfadden wrote and published books with seductive titles: Virile Powers of Superb Manhood (1900); Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood (1901). His boldly shared opinions on health, sex, exercise, diet and hygiene were famous; his name became a household word. Circulation of Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine topped 150,000 in 1899, the first year of publication. In time, it would reach 500,000.
Mafadden’s ambitions extended beyond publishing. In 1902, he opened a Physical Culture vegetarian restaurant in New York City. Before long, restaurants opened in Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, and Philadelphia—at 25 South 9th Street. By 1911, the year Macfadden published his first Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, his health-food restaurant chain had twenty locations. Macfadden opened Physical Culture sanatoriums, health resorts and planned a Physical Culture City. The man had presidential aspirations.
Macfaddens Physical Culture Restaurant, 25 South 9th Street, March 15, 1915. N. M. Rolston, photographer, detail. (PhillyHistory.org)
“We need stronger, more capable men; healthy superior women, wrote Macfadden in 1915, introducing Vitality Supreme, another of his popular books. “The great prizes of life come only to those who are efficient. … The body must be developed completely, splendidly. The buoyancy, vivacity, energy, enthusiasm and ambition ordinarily associated with youth can be maintained through middle age and in some cases even to old age. … Why not throb with superior vitality! Why not possess the physical energy of a young lion? For then you will compel success. You will stand like a wall if need be, or rush with the force of a charging bison toward the desired achievements. … Adherence to the principles laid down herein will add to the characteristics that insure special achievements. They will increase the power of your body and mind and soul. They will help each human entity to become a live personality. They will enable you to live fully, joyously. They will help you to feel, enjoy, suffer every moment of every day. It is only when you are thus thrilled with the eternal force of life that you reach the highest pinnacle of attainable capacities and powers. Hidden forces, sometimes marvelous and mysterious, lie within nearly every human soul. Develop, expand and bring out these latent powers. Make your body splendid, your mind supreme; for then you become your real self, you possess all your attainable powers. … It will be worth infinitely more than money. … Adhere to the principles set forth and a munificent harvest of physical, mental and spiritual attainments will surely be yours.”
Whatever were they serving at Macfadden’s Physical Culture Restaurants? Foods “in their natural condition.” Macfadden believed “the process of ‘refining’ is the great food crime of the age.” He believed conventional methods of food preparation had “a destructive effect” upon their “nutritive value.” He pointed out the evils of “white bread” where “the best part of the wheat has been eliminated in the process of milling.” Likewise, he noted, nutritional value is “removed from our vegetables in the process of boiling” and from rice, in the process of polishing. “Trying to secure adequate nourishment,” he observed, many Americans consumed “an excessive amount of the refined defective foods.” Bread is “supposed to be the ‘staff of life,’” wrote Macfadden, but “it might reasonably be termed to be the ‘staff of death’.”
Macfadden urged his followers “to select only natural foods” arguing that “unquestionably, a perfect diet is furnished by nuts and fruits.” In their raw state, “foods…possess a tremendous amount of vitality-building elements,” he wrote. Macfadden relied on salads of “celery, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, water-cress, parsley, cucumbers” with spinach and dandelion, dressed in olive oil and lemon juice. Macfadden woudn’t serve vinegar “partly because it is seldom pure, and one can never tell what combination of chemicals it contains.”
Bernard Adolphus Macfadden (he changed his first name to Bernarr for effect) barely survived a miserable childhood to become America’s first public bodybuilder/empire builder. He survived four marriages, founded his own religion—Cosmotarianism—made and lost fortunes and planned to live to the age of 125. Judging from his confidence and physique in middle age, Macfadden might have actually believed he could.
But Macfadden didn’t achieve that ultimate goal. In 1955, The Washington Post and Times Herald summarized the accomplishments of his 87 years. Macfadden’s “proudly avowed aim” was “to rescue sex from the stuffy and unhealthy atmosphere of the smoking room and the honky-tonk into the clean sunlit world of outdoors, and also perhaps to dignify it as a subject of serious and high minded conversation in physical culture restaurants over a nut-and-spinach ragout and a magnum of chilled carrot juice.”
In the end, Bernarr Macfadden got credited for what he was most of all: a 20th-century American life-style pioneer.
Ask Jacques Lipchitz to share his views on art. His response is curious. “You can’t verbalize art. I think when you start to do that you lose exactly your impact, because art is born from darkness, and if you start to clarify it, it goes away.”
Ask The Master about “freedom of expression” and he takes us down another interesting rabbit hole: “The important thing, you see, is to acquire some kind of a freedom in expression. And if you know something it becomes very difficult. Freedom is not given to us. We have to conquer it, we have to conquer it by fighting, by working, very hard, and then a little bit more freedom comes every time. You know you are more free… and you have to learn how to be free. You have to let everything what is unknown, because what we know is very little… So these unknown forces you have to let them work for you. And, first of all, you have to be able to catch them. You know that’s the technique you learn. Things are coming, coming, you don’t know what it is, but you have to have a net to catch them. Then you have is see what it is, what you can use. You understand? That’s freedom for an artist. Because he works with things which are absolutely mysterious for him, unknown. What he knows is very little.”
And when an artist does know something? “Rodin was telling that you have to know anatomy, but when you are working you have to forget about it. It’s not easy to forget. If you learn it, it’s with you. But relative freedom can be conquered; that comes only with age. So as soon as you have freedom, everything changes for you. All your views are changed.”
At the end of his life, Lipchitz created a few monumental artworks. “Government of the People” is one of them, just across from City Hall.
“It was the architect Kling from Philadelphia who came to me and proposed to me this job. You know In Philadelphia I was very well known because the museum had a lot of pieces of mine, the Barnes collection, etc. and so I was somehow…the chosen son…I was the pet sculptor of Philadelphia. And so they came to me and of course I was very happy to do the job, because it’s a very responsible job. Kling built an annex to the municipal building, a modern…with a big plaza and he wanted to have me to make this sculpture for the plaza. It’s a very difficult thing because so many styles of arch are around. You know, the Municipal building of Philadelphia…is very interesting architecture, end of 19th century French architecture, a mixture of all these styles. And beside this you have this church with a steeple. And then you have a kind of a Masonic Temple, which is a mixture of all kinds of styles. It’s very different styles all around…”
Lipchitz died three years before the installation of “Government of the People” in 1976. But his recorded voice, Penny Bach tells us, echoed through the plaza at its dedication. “I believe in the capacities and potentialities of the human being,” proclaimed the sculptor, “and I would like the exalt them in every one of my works.”
Today, that and any of Lipchitz’s many other quips, quotes, anecdotes and advice can be heard, thanks to the internet. But what we’d really like to hear are the sculptor’s words bouncing, once again, off the facades of Center City, when and where they will really mean something. As luck would have it, the opportunity isn’t very far off. In a few months, when the new conservation project to clean and wax the “Government of the People” is complete, why not invite Lipchitz to its re-dedication? He never was at a loss for words worth listening to. And more than forty years after his death, he still isn’t.
Jacques Lipchitz, Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 1953. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, (PhillyHistory.org)
“If Jacques Lipchitz is not the most overrated sculptor of the twentieth century,” sniped art historian Barbara Rose, “he is certainly in the running.” It was 1972 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective,Jacques Lipchitz: His Life in Sculptureseemed “to go on endlessly,” for Rose. Like so many “miles of stuffed kishka,” all the sculptor’s “bulges, lumps, nodules and protrusions” left her with “a bad case of esthetic indigestion.”
There had been a time when such words would have devastated Lipchitz. But the elder artist—Lipchitz turned 80 the year before—had learned long before even the most damning critical reviews had value. When starting out in Paris, another critic had written: “We have a newcomer by the name of Jacques Lipchitz, who is very promising, but [his artwork] looks too much like that of [Charles] Despiau.” Lipchitz hadn’t studied with Despiau and, in fact, had never even seen his work. Telling an older friend of this “injustice,” Lipchitz heard back: “My boy if you get such criticism every day for a year’s time, you will be famous.”
And so it was. By 1972, even through her indigestion, Rose admitted Lipchitz was “widely considered a major artist.” His role in the development of modernism had been undeniable. Lipchitz had seen the salons of Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. He had forged the avant garde with friends and acquaintances including Constantin Brancusi, Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, André Derain, Ernest Hemingway, Max Jacob, Le Corbusier, James Joyce, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine. He socialized with and sculpted Gertrude Stein. He sold his art to Albert Barnes.
To television producer Bruce Bassett, who had met the artist in 1967, Lipchitz’ life was a heck of a story, one worth telling in a documentary, but even more. “I wanted to share him with the future,” wrote Bassett in an unpublished essay, My Life with Jacques Lipchitz. “And since I was in media, I began to think of a way of doing it. One way was to do a film [Portrait of an Artist: Jacques Lipchitz] which ran on PBS. But what about the rest of the material? Another 400 hours was going to go on the shelf, and no one would see it.” Bassett envisioned “a machine,” a computer, that would allow Lipchitz to interact “with future audiences about his work, his ideas…”
He talked over the project with the artist. “There is a new machine coming,” said Bassett. “It is not here yet, Jacques, but it will be. I am conceiving your life as a mosaic of experiences. Each chip might represent a sculpture you created, pieces you collected, your relationships with your fellow artists, the tension in Europe that you survived, changes in the direction of your work, et cetera. Our new machine would instantaneously match people’s questions to the appropriate chips of your story. Our machine would make it possible for people to talk to our mosaic of your life.”
Jacques Lipchitz, The Spirit of Enterprise, 1960. The Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial, Kelly Drive, July 3, 1961. (PhillyHistory.org)
The idea “intrigued” Lipchitz, who, in his day, was no stranger to the cutting edge. “When we first came to Paris early in the century,” he responded to Bassett,” we looked around to see what was…happening in other fields. It was the machine age. Man was flying. … God did not give man wings on which he could fly, but man through his imagination found a way. … So we artists had to create monsters. But we had to create them so well that if Mother Nature looked over our shoulder to see what we were doing, she could say, ‘Look what man had gone off and done! He is cutting himself from my apron-strings to assume his own special adolescence.'”
The interviews, hundreds of hours of them, were completed not long after Lipchitz’s 80th birthday in 1971, just in time to include in the Metropolitan retrospective. The museum created “a special educational installation that makes use of the most up-to-date audio visual techniques.” Sculptures were “accompanied by Mr. Lipchitz’s own words, telling the story behind their creation, their place in the evolution of his style, and the ideas that inspired them.”
Critic Barbara Rose found the mix of artwork and video far from inspiring. As she saw it, the Met had concocted “some ghastly media experiment, ill-advisedly funded by IBM,” where “television sets with The Master in living color expounding on his art” littered the galleries. Rose found “the voice of Lipchitz resounding thought the show…an idiotic distraction.”
Lipchitz died the following May and Bassett spent the rest of his own life—he died in 2009—searching for a museum or a broadcaster to embrace his and Lipchitz’s creation. As computing evolved and the Internet grew up, the project seemed less futuristic and more plausible. Finally, in 2012, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, with its own collection of 153 Lipchitz sculptures, mounted what Bassett and Lipchitz had envisioned more than four decades before.
John Moran, photographer. “Nos. 114 & 116 N. Water St., 1868,” (PhillyHistory.org/Free Library of Philadelphia)
Despite John Moran’s best efforts, Mary Panzer told us, his “photographs were never considered art. His audience believed that art was historical and made by hand, whereas photography was scientific and made by machines. In 1903, the year Moran died, Alfred Steiglitz won the battle to establish photography as a fine art, but by that time, Moran’s work was long forgotten, shelved as topography by the same audience who believed Moby Dick was a book about whales.”
What did they say about Moran, the photographer in a family of painters? His brief New York Times obituary confirmed Moran’s role as “one of the pioneer photographers of this country” but instead of crediting him with American art photography, it noted his role as chief photographer in “the work of the Coast Survey” and his having “made the first pictures of the original route of the Panama Canal” in 1871. It mentioned his participation in the federal expedition to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. And it mentioned his abandonment of photography and his turn, late in life, to landscape painting.
In 1865, when Alfred Steiglitz was in still in diapers, Moran had connected the ideas of photography and art. In February of that year, he addressed the Philadelphia Photographic Society on “The Relation of Photography to the Fine Arts,” declaring that photography “speaks the same language, and addresses the same sentiments.” Moran noted the need for the photographer’s “perceiving mind to note and feel the relative degrees of importance in the various aspects which nature presents.” Without that, “nothing worthy of the name of pictures can be produced.”
Moran had collected his small landscapes made in and around Philadelphia in the early 1860s and became known as “a young Nature artist.” In fact, he would make aesthetic choices with everything he touched. During the Civil War, Moran’s photographs of the Mower General Hospital were more than a record, they were expressive, lush and rich. By the end of the decade, images he and brother Thomas made in the Wissahickon Valley helped inspire the city of Philadelphia to add it to the expanding Fairmount Park.
In the late 1860s, Moran put his ideas of to work on the streets of historic Philadelphia. He searched for scenes that re-framed the past as an aesthetic, not merely as anecdote. At a time of great growth, massive industrialization and diminishing history, Moran relished the textures and sensibilities of the city’s oldest streets and alleys. Between 1867 and 1870, he and his 6-by-9-inch wet-plate camera and wooden tripod were picture-making fixtures. Again and again, Moran blocked out the modern and focused in on the past, offering it renewed life. The results were compelling. Moran mounted 78 of his prints in an album entitled A Collection of Photographic Views in Philadelphia & its Vicinity and sold it to the Library Company of Philadelphia. Their accession book confirms the purchase from “John Moran, artist.”
John Moran, photographer, “Water St. below Vine, 1868” (PhillyHistory.org/Free Library of Philadelphia)
There’s a goodly stash of Moran prints from this series at the Free Library Print Department and at PhillyHistory.org. The two gems illustrated here are only a tip of the iceberg. In one small part of town now-long obliterated by I-95 Moran photographed Queen Street, Swanson Street at Christian and the “Ship Joiner” shop at 757 Swanson.
In all, Moran probably made as many as 100 views of the city in the late 1860s. But that was it. He would soon be drawn into the life of an expedition photographer for the federal government. By the time he returned to Philadelphia, Moran’s ideas about art had been tested and his confidence was even more firm. In June and again in October of 1875, Moran shared with his colleagues at the Photographic Society his “Thoughts on Art Nature and Photography” and his “Reflections on Art.”
The photographer has “the power to see the beautiful,” declared Moran (his remarks appeared in The Philadelphia Photographer) but “good work cannot be produced unless the workman has the instincts, feelings and education akin to those of the artist.” The best photographs are “quickened to life by their own spirit and intelligence…speaking the universal language of art.” As “a realistic art” photography “is a translator…and we, the translators, ought to look to it that we take noble themes, not false and artificial subjects…” Moran observed: “art in all its forms if the form of thought, and the photographic work that rises to this plane, is the expression of the photographer.”
So, how is Moran’s “discovery” of expression in photography accounted for today? One measure, of course, is the art marketplace. A few years ago, Christie’s auction house sold a Moran of the Bank of Pennsylvania. Never mind that the cataloger misidentified the scene as construction (it’s a demolition). The sale, $32,000, broke the record for a Moran.
How does this compare with Stieglitz? At recent Christie’s sales, six Stieglitz prints fetched more than $200,000 each. The priciest of these, was a view from the back window of the 291 gallery, the place where Stieglitz successfully promoted photography as art. That print brought $363,750, more than ten times what Moran’s did, but hardly a record. “Top Stieglitz photographs have sold for more than $1 million,” shrugged The Wall Street Journal.
Looks like it’ll be a while before the books of photographic history get balanced properly.
When Americans are asked about the Sears Tower, they normally call to mind the recently renamed Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois. However, if asked about a Sears Tower when in Philadelphia, you’re likely to get a different answer. In Northeast Philadelphia, where Adams Avenue meets Roosevelt Boulevard, the 14-story Sears clock tower stood for over 70 years.
Sears visible from Roosevelt Boulevard.Side of Sears building with the bottom section of tower visible.
In the 1900s, the Sears, Roebuck & Co. was still growing rapidly in the United States. With the company’s need to expand eastward from Chicago, Philadelphia was highlighted as a possible location for one of their mail-order houses and plants. With the city’s important railroad access, the Northeast Philadelphia section, along Roosevelt Boulevard was chosen as a location.
From 1919 to 1920, Sears, Roebuck & Co. constructed a large complex that consisted of a large 9-story building that included a 14-story clock tower. The neo-Gothic brick building was designed by George C. Nimmons, a Chicago-area architect who had worked for Sears, Roebuck & Co. previously, even designing the company president’s home.
The building opened October 18, 1920 even though parts of it were still unfinished. This was just one of the companies allowing the Northeast section of Philadelphia to grow. However, even with the success of the Roosevelt Boulevard building, the overall decline of mail-order shopping prompted the company to open up a nearby retail store there just a few years later, in 1925. It wouldn’t be the company’s only expansion as Sears would also add on an administration building and a power plant. They even paid for a miniature of their building, with its famous clock tower, to be constructed as a firehouse on a nearby block.
Engine Company Number 70 on 4800 Langdon Street.
Through most of the 20th century, the Sears complex was a popular and well-known landmark in Northeast Philadelphia, It employed thousands of workers from the surrounding neighborhoods. In the 1960s, the area, still a popular hub, even had a subway station constructed. Although it was meant to be connected to the Broad Street Line, the plan never went through. Unfortunately, in the 1980s and 1990s, sales decreased and the building with its iconic tower was sold in 1993.
On October 31, 1994, the Sears Tower was imploded. It barely took 7 seconds for the building to go down, as seen in the 6ABC news broadcast from that day.
With a 14-story tower and over 25 million square feet, the implosion was set to be the largest of its time. Hundreds of Philadelphia residents came to watch as over 70 years of history was brought down in 7 seconds.
Today, the area is home to a shopping center full of different chain stores. However, it is also still home to the Sears power plant, which was visible in the above video and not imploded. Currently, the power plant building is not being utilized other than Home Depot advertising its logo on the smokestack. The power plant and the aforementioned firehouse are the only Sears buildings remaining in the area.
