PhillyHistory Blog

Contemplating “that vast gray labyrinth” of Philadelphia, with “great Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world,” G. K. Chesterton imagined Philadelphians could “feel the presence of Penn and Franklin” just as his English brethren could “see the ghosts of Alfred or Becket.” But Philadelphians didn’t need to use their imaginations. They could literally see Penn from every quarter of the city, miles from the center, where a giant statue of the founder had been installed 500 feet up, on top of City Hall tower.

Philadelphia’s love affair with the Founding Fathers would persist, but they’d soon turn on their late-19^th century City Hall. By the 1950s, when Lewis Mumford lectured at Penn, City Hall was seen as “an architectural nightmare, a mishmash of uglified Renaissance styles welded into a structure rugged enough to resist and atomic bomb…” It is “woefully obsolete,” wrote Mumford, but “the problem of whether to do away with it…is not an easy one to solve…because wrecking it would wreck the wrecker.”

But for the cost of demolition, City Hall survived. And as long as it had to remain in the center of the plan, city planner Edmund N. Bacon was going to make the most of it. In a new biography, Gregory Heller tells us Bacon “saw the dominance of City Hall tower in the skyline as a critical element to the city’s historical continuity.” Bacon “created an unwritten ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that no building would rise above the statue of William Penn atop City Hall.”

“Developers would periodically meet with Bacon and propose a building taller than City Hall tower,” Heller learned in his interviews. “They would query whether the height limit was legally mandated, to which Bacon would respond: ‘It’s only a gentleman’s agreement. The question is, are you a gentleman?’”

Throughout the 20^th century, gentleman’s agreements were mostly associated with spurious and immoral practices: limiting Japanese immigration, preventing the employment of African Americans or denying real estate to Jews. Legal scholars begin discussions of the practice with this somewhat amusing (or chilling) definition: “A gentlemen’s agreement is an agreement which is not an agreement, made between two persons, neither of whom is a gentleman, whereby each expects the other to be strictly bound without himself being bound at all.”

Bacon used the idea of a gentleman’s agreement to challenge the civility of (and presumably quickly end meetings with) developers audacious enough to bring him proposals for skyscrapers. But was there an actual gentleman’s agreement, or was it just a useful ploy to bury projects that would alter the city’s skyline? Over the years, the origins of the gentleman’s agreement have remained a mystery.

On April 28 1956, seven years into Bacon’s tenure as Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, The New Yorker published the first of Lewis Mumford’s two articles that, interestingly, do not mention Bacon, but do introduce Philadelphia’s “gentleman’s agreement.”  With the “Chinese Wall” coming down, Mumford concludes the city was looking up, although how far up wasn’t open to discussion. “Without legislation and with nothing more solid than a gentleman’s agreement, the tallest of the city office buildings have been piously kept lower than the bronze figure atop” City Hall. “Sentiment and symbolism have made unnecessary—temporarily at any rate—any legislation.”

In 1963, when a developer proposed a sixty-story building, Bacon responded that “for the first time in the history of Philadelphia” a project “would violate the gentleman’s agreement that William Penn will not be topped by private construction.” The Planning Commission responded by approving a “height limit ordinance” of 450 feet that made its way through the Mayor’s office and to City Council, where it eventually died. The gentleman’s agreement remained, though worse for wear, its authority unclear.

The following year, another developer proposed a tower taller than City Hall for 15^th and Market Streets and Bacon found himself at odds with his own Planning Commission. As built, the project came in shorter than proposed, but the challenge now seemed possible. “Not all Philadelphians favor squat skyscrapers,” wrote Glynn D. Mapes in The Wall Street Journal of November 29, 1967.  Philip Klein, vice chairman of the Commission, hankered for a proposal “that would top William Penn.” Said Klein: “It’s time Philadelphia did something like this. I’d fight for it all the way. No city can be a big city without tall buildings.”

Philadelphians loved tradition, something like what Chesterton appreciated and Bacon perpetuated. “It still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did one hundred years ago,” Chesterton had written in 1922, “I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.”

OK, Philadelphia was different from other American cities. But a real challenge to the city’s traditional skyline, gentleman’s agreement or not, was mounting. And in 1984, the question would again be posed: Could Philadelphians maintain an honest love affair with the past if the past didn’t also dominate their city’s skyline?

No matter that New York’s Empire State Building, which opened in 1931, was more than two-and-a-half times taller than Philadelphia’s PSFS Building. The Quaker City’s skyscraper was many times more modern. Philadelphia had “gone Gershwin” with an architecture “slick and sheer and shining…alive to the tempo of the day.” So refreshing compared with “the frumpy, bastioned City Hall” a few blocks to the west. The PSFS embraced modernism not for its own sake, but because it offered solutions that were, above all, functional. As urban planner Frederick Gutheim later gushed, “When functionalism in the United States was raw, red and steamy new it found few more devoted followers than Howe and Lescaze.”

”The sleek, streamlined bank and a 27-story slab of glass-walled office space by architects George Howe and William Lescaze turned out to be “the biggest and proudest thing in Philadelphia.” Known for its commanding role in the skyline with four, 27-foot-tall letters in red neon, PSFS provided an even more innovative achievement closer to the ground. There, its architects solved the difficult question of how a skyscraper might relate to, and make the most of, a busy urban intersection.

That design question fascinated bank president James M. Willcox, who wasn’t interested in style per se, but was committed to where and how to most effectively, practically, and aesthetically design and build. Willcox balked at Howe’s traditional-looking, first proposal in 1926 and instead had him put up a temporary, ground level bank to test customer demand. Meanwhile, Willcox commissioned Howe to design a set of neighborhood branches, two identical pairs that started historical and wound up modern. Then, in 1928, Howe left his longtime firm (Mellor, Meigs & Howe) and he left historicism for modernism.

For the 12^thand Market Street site, diagonally across from the Reading Terminal, Willcox had an ambitious array of demands. He wanted a bank, commercial space, hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space, and, for a time, he even demanded five stories of above-ground parking. By late 1929, when Howe and his new partner, the young, progressive Swiss architect William Lescaze got to work on the revived project, the biggest question was how to acceptably address Willcox’s complex program for the street level. He distrusted “ultra-Modern.” What he wanted, Willcox later explained, was “ultra-Practical.” It was the architects job to prove that modern and practical were one and the same.

If some savvy Gatsby type had whispered a single word to guide the architects to a smart, elegant and ultimately “ultra-practical” design, that word would have been “steel.” Even though Howe was not used to, or comfortable with the material, the PSFS commission obliged Howe “to face the problem of steel construction.”

And steel’s possibilities “startled” Howe. He wasn’t used to such “novelty,” such “frank interpretation of modern functions,” and soon realized he was now free to get at “the underlying principles governing architectural design.” Lescaze showed the way, with drawings envisioning something complex, elegant and modern, a building like no one had seen in America. According to William Jordy, Lescaze’s street level promised a building “bathed in a mysterious luminescence… weightless as it rises effortlessly in the night above its scrubby competition.”

The weight of the office tower would be supported by rows of steel columns. And a giant steel truss would bridge the banking floor with a 63-foot span. Howe and Lescaze delineated their 2^nd-story banking hall with a giant, sweeping band of windows, leaving “the ground floor free for…the kind of shopping traffic from which the bank drew its clientele.” Above, three more floors of bank offices served as a transition from the base to a boldly-cantilevered, 27-story office tower. Then came the great, groundbreaking neon sign.

Before Howe started the project, he and his partners used architecture to help clients avoid reality, and in particular, the realities of the city. “The critical weakness of the romantic architect,” Lewis Mumford criticized Howe in 1925,” is that he is employed in creating an environment into which people may escape from a sordid workaday world.” By the end of the decade, with the encouragement of an enlightened patron and the vision of a creative partner, Howe managed to make a complete aesthetic conversion. In the PSFS building, Howe and Lescaze addressed the purpose of architecture: “to remake the workaday world so that people will not wish to escape from it.”

The PSFS building turned out to be “much more than a superb marriage of function and technological innovation,” wrote Robert A. M. Stern. “It is a superbly crafted object, refined in its every detail…that rarest of phenomena of our time, a working monument.” And its style wasn’t one more in a long line of styles; the PSFS showed the way to live in the world, and a way to make the most of it.

This might have been called many things. In 1931 they called it Modernism.

So your client the bank president has done his due diligence, his “sober deliberation,” and insists on opening two branch offices. This bank has always been a headquarters-only operation, but the depositors have spread out across the city. As architect, you’re not sure what new bank buildings should look like in the far-flung neighborhoods of North and South Philly, but one thing you do know are your marching orders: these banks must “invoke…a degree of awe mixed with reassurance,” similar to “the venerable main office at Seventh and Walnut.”

You’ve had banker-clients before and they like what you’ve done for them. But high-end country houses, faux-farms with fore courts, paneled libraries and goose ponds aren’t anything like this new project. What is called for here? Something stone and urban; something with gravitas. You search for inspiration and find it, along with the desirable dose of the “venerable,” in the palaces of the rich and powerful Medici. Yes, if this look spoke to the citizens of Renaissance Florence, it certainly could also be a convincing choice for burgeoning Philadelphia. So you design a pair of palazzo banks, one at 11th and Lehigh and another at Broad and McKean. Your boss is pleased and business is good.

Then comes the commission for two more branches, and you begin to get a little queasy about your descision. The idea of putting up one, maybe two 15^th-century palaces on city streets seemed OK, but littering the city with cookie-cutter Renaissance replicas is beginning to feel a bit silly. And now, your boss is demanding you wire them up with blazing lights—so uncharacteristic of the Medici. “How inappropriate,” you respond.

Then you consider: it’s the 1920s, and electricity isn’t anachronistic—but maybe you are. So you make your “first concession to the machine age,” turn your back on historical ornamentation, simplify your lines and mount rows of lights on your new facades. And much to your surprise, your two new neighborhood branches in West Philadelphia and Logan don’t look so bad. In each case, a “great block of stone, flooded in strong white light, dominates” the shopping strip (.pdf) and business is “phenomenal.” Later, an architectural historian suggests this second pair of branches might have been a breakthrough, one that predicts your “imminent conversion to modern architecture.”

But you are not a modernist—not quite yet. In one more year, (1928) you will remove your name, the last in the firm of Mellor, Meigs & Howe, and sigh with great relief: “I delivered my last Jumbo, Anti-economy Romantic Country House Package.” Then you will really begin to explore the possibilities of how design might be used to “acknowledge contemporary conditions of modern life.” And for that adventure your boss has in store for you the challenge of a lifetime: the commission for a new Philadelphia Saving Funds Society building in Center City, at 12^th and Market Streets.

If you’re in Center City on Wednesday, June 12, at lunch time, you may want to stop by the office buildings at Commerce Square to catch a glimpse of images from PhillyHistory.org in an unexpected place. Located on Market Street between 20th and 21st Streets, the two office towers that make up Commerce Square are separated by an open courtyard that includes a 16×22 foot media wall featuring a rotating display of artwork and images.

Thanks to a kind invite from Thomas Realty Partners at Commerce Square, the media wall will be showcasing historic images from the collection of the Philadelphia City Archives this Wednesday from 12-2pm, including this great photo of a pier on the Delaware River in 1931. From images of  City Hall to the Parkway to former theaters, the images highlight the rich history of Philadelphia. If you have the time, stop by and check out some PhillyHistory.org photos on the big screen. And, as always, visit our full collection of over 100,000 historic photographs and maps at PhillyHistory.org.

Busy on Wednesday? Images from PhillyHistory will be popping up on the media wall a couple more times this summer. Follow us on Twitter and we’ll let you know when they will be visible next.

Long before he designed the icon of American Democracy—the dome of the U. S. Capital—Thomas Ustick Walter was certain about the power of architecture. In the 1830s, after finishing Moyamensing Prison and while at work on Girard College, Walter bemoaned the public’s general ignorance. “If the mass of the people were generally well informed on the subject of architecture,” he wrote “nations would look to their Architects… for the means of handing down to ages yet unborn the story of their power and greatness.”

At the same time, the two-decade old Philadelphia Saving Fund Society launched a search for just that kind of certainty. What should their first permanent home look like? They wanted to get some of Walter’s certainty in stone.

Walter had already designed a couple of banks, though none in Philadelphia, and liked the language of the Greek Revival. He had proven his hand with this 1836 façade in West Chester and confirmed there once again what sophisticated urbanites knew: classicism meant stability and strength. Sure, churches adopting the style had to worry they were adopting the temples of pagans, but the only barrier for a bank, as they fell under the spell of classical design, was expense. Schools, too, hoped to echo ancient Greece in their buildings, but unless they had the fortunes of a Girard College, they had to do with less. With the wealth and trust of its depositors, the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society had no reason not to go classical.

The groundwork had already been laid by Benjamin Henry Latrobe in his Bank of Pennsylvania and William Strickland in his Second Bank. Both were based on temple designs in Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens.  The final volume of that four-part classic on classicism had been published in 1816, the same year the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society was founded. By 1839, there was no remaining doubt: if you wanted a great institution, you had to make an entrance on marble steps, between authentic columns and capitals. Banks had to look like Greek Temples—even if they had to be wedged into a row on busy Walnut Street.

Times changed and so do styles. By 1869, when the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society needed a new and larger building, they commissioned Addison Hutton to design something fire-proof and burglar-proof, something “calculated to inspire the entire community with implicit faith in the solidity of the Institution.” (.pdf). A portico would have been dated then, but granite stolidity spoke loud and clear, and the new design worked.

Thanks to the availability of jobs and loans, Philadelphia’s bank of choice soon found itself facing a dilemma. As the 19^th-century turned into the 20^th, depositors lived and worked farther and farther away from the bank. By 1924, president James Willcox considered the wisdom of building branch banks, an as-yet unproven amenity. He turned to the architectural firm of Mellor, Meigs & Howe where George Howe had become the bank executives’ favorite designer of grand suburban homes (later jokingly called the “Wall Street Pastoral” style). Howe delivered a pair of identical “polite, quiet little buildings, unobtrusive and tasteful,” a “North Office” at 11th Street and Lehigh Avenue (illustrated) and a “South Office” at Broad and McKean. As architectural historian William Jordy later put it, the firm’s “characteristic suavity” helped the Italian Renaissance look as natural as it could in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods.  With rusticated walls and nail-studded oak doors, Howe succeeded in creating a “magnified strongbox,” but his generous windows also suggested a work space inside. Most of all, wrote Howe’s biographer Robert A. M. Stern, “the design conforms to ‘accepted tradition’ for banking architecture.”

But “accepted tradition” no longer meant as much as it once did. Two years after the new branch banks were up and running, Willcox asked Howe to add electric signs. At first the architect protested “the inappropriateness of such an anachronistic feature.” The boss responded: “If my business will benefit by it, shouldn’t I have it?” Howe reconsidered, and saw the light. In the next few years, both men would leave the past behind and go completely electric.

Larry Magid didn’t need to go to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City to hear The Crew Cuts in July 1960.  He knew their six-year-old hit Sh Boom and preferred the original version by The Chords. Back in 1954, the 12-year-old Magid and his West Philly buddies heard the difference between the two—loud and clear.

“It was kind of a moral outrage,” Magid later recalled to the Inquirer’s Dan DeLuca. “It just didn’t seem fair. Because the Chords‘ version was a better song. And that was not just for me, but for many kids.”

The Chords, an African-American group from the Bronx, had written Sh Boom in the back seat of a Buick and they had put on the map. But with marketing guidance from executives at the Mercury label, four white boys from Toronto who didn’t even like the song were transformed from The Canadaires into The Crew Cuts and sold more than five million copies. Sh Boom became a #1 record – one of the first examples of doo-wop on the record charts. It won Downbeat’s poll as the best rhythm and blues song of the year. And with Mercury on their side, the formula of turning Black hits (Oop-Shoop, Earth Angel, Ko Ko Mo, Don’t Be Angry) into “safe-sounding harmonies” for White audiences became the Crew Cuts’ calling card.

Their success was about music, but it was also about hair. With white-bread sound and looks to match, the Crew Cuts launched a line of hair products making in-store promotional appearances for Collegiate Hair Cream. They recorded a jingle version of their hit for Sh-Boom Shampoo.

In the summer of 1960, the Crew Cuts, appeared at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier with Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma whose recording of Paper Roses had peaked at #5 on the Billboard Pop chart. Later as spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission, Bryant became even better known for her appearance in television commercials singing “Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree” and her delivery of the tagline: “Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.” In 1977, Bryant came out as an anti-gay rights activist.

The Crew Cuts remained together for 12 years, breaking up about the time young audiences took up with Rock and Roll.  A few years after that, Larry Magid opened The Electric Factory at 22^nd and Arch Streets, a former tire-warehouse where he booked groups including Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. They filled the place with audiences of 5,000—not once, but as many as two or three times a night. By then, the Crew Cuts were long out of style, and so were crew cuts. It wasn’t about hair, although hair played its part. It was about the rise of an American Counterculture.

In the Spring of 1969, when a drunken Jim Morrison of The Doors allegedly exposed himself on stage in Miami, Anita Bryant and more than 30,000 others gathered soon after at Miami’s Orange Bowl in a “Rally for Decency.” The next day, Pat Buchanan, a young speechwriter in the Nixon White House seized the opportunity to publicly mention the rally and “the pollution of young minds.”

The Culture Wars had officially begun.

Bare rock makes a mute memorial. When a boulder loses a plaque once carried, it instantly loses voice, power, and a good measure of its dignity.

What to make of the boulder at Germantown Avenue and Sedgwick Street in front of the Lovett Memorial Library? It’s been missing two plaques for forty years. There it stands, mouth open, as it were, ready to say something that must be important, but no words come. They are long gone, stolen, sold for scrap and melted down.

Thank goodness for archives, where images of bronze have no scrap value whatever. A photograph “restores” the words from both missing plaques and gives the boulder back something of its long-lost voice.  We learn it was brought from Valley Forge and suddenly the situation has an extra dose of authority—or is it pretense? Whichever, the Valley Forge connection offers meaning to the main event: a list of local World War I casualties. The patriotic rock suggests the sacrifice of “THE BOYS OF MOUNT AIRY WHO FELL IN HEROIC SERVICE FOR THEIR COUNTRY AND HUMANITY” may indeed have been part of greater things.

With the singing of “America” and a prayer, this boulder with its plaque bearing 35 names, in a park of red oaks and dogwoods, was unveiled on Memorial Day weekend, 1924. No American neighborhood was without its own list to mourn and honor. This “Great War,” the first one to offer all the benefits of industrialization, would be the nation’s second bloodiest: 16 million deaths, an estimated 10 million of which were men in service. The numbers are staggering. Germany lost nearly 1.8 million soldiers; Russia 1.7; France 1.3; the British Empire lost more than 900,000. The list of American “boys” is 116,516 names long.

From one count, 1,448 were from the neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Of these, 34 called Mount Airy home. Each left behind family, and memories that faded over time, and faster after the plaques disappeared. But again, archives tells us more than we knew.

Listed sixth is Mortimer P. Crane, baptized on July 1, 1894 at the church on McCallum and Tulpehocken Streets. The Cranes lived at 6440 Greene Street. Mortimer struggled to get into Yale, later found work at one of his father’s mining companies and when war and the rush of patriotic fervor came, Crane enlisted.

While flying in formation during a maneuver on May 15, 1918, Crane’s airplane crashed near Amesbury, Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge. He died instantly of a fractured neck. If we know it, so did those who dedicated this monument six years later: a Court of Inquiry found that Crane’s own “error in judgment” caused the accident. He turned, clipped another plane, tore away a part of his own wing, and crashed.

We know about Crane because he was an officer, and from a rich family. But each of these men had families, memories and stories. We don’t know much, but now we know their names:

Stanley H. Berry; Albert R. Bolay; John Breidenfield; George M. Brooks; Anthony Cimino; George A. Dawson; Herbert K. Dewees; James Duffy; Thomas B. Durrick; Frank C. Erb; George William Esher; Jacques A. Fiechter; Edward Fisher; William Fleming, Jr.; Earl S. Horsey; Charles Joseph Houston; Clement Cresson Kite; Harrison Knox; Harry Linaka; Edward Joseph Malone; Robert Joseph McCamman; William J. Merkle; Ralph Thurman Mills; Clark B. Nichol; John Potts; Alfred L. Quintaro; Herman P. Saylor; George P. Shepherdson; Harold J. Sheppard; William Sibel; Gerald G. Speck; George G. Whitson; and Jacob Zaun III.

The blank boulder echoes the spirit of their sacrifice.

And the archival photograph tells us more. The long-gone plaque also spoke of “MARCIA MAXWELL BARTLE, U.S.M.C., FIRST WOMAN TO ENLIST IN PHILADELPHIA.” Bartle’s skills as an experienced switchboard operator were needed at the Philadelphia Marine Quartermaster’s Depot.

Good thing the planners for the renovated Lovett Park won’t be casting away this historic stone.

Or will they?