PhillyHistory Blog

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?

Advocates of peace and freedom gathered in Philadelphia 175 years ago today. They had come to dedicate Pennsylvania Hall, “the first and only one of its kind in the republic,” according to abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld.

Three days later, this new building “consecrated to Free Discussion and Equal Rights” was reduced to ruins, burnt by an angry, rioting mob.

How could such a thing happen in the City of Brotherly Love?

It’s a question that has puzzled historians ever since—and plagued a few Philadelphians at the time. Days after the riot, the reverend William Henry Furness, agonized from the pulpit of his church: “Similar outrages have been perpetrated… in other parts of our country… but now the evil has come close to us—to our very doors. The whole city has been illuminated by the glare of the incendiary’s torch.” Furness feared Philadelphia was becoming a place where “savage delusions…will rule us with a rod of iron, destroying every feeling of security, and extinguishing among us the last spark of personal freedom.”

For years, the burned-out shell of Pennsylvania Hall remained on 6th Street, south of Race Street, in view of Independence Hall.  How could such a thing happen here, in Philadelphia? What, exactly, riled the crowd to respond with violence?  What, or who, would have been the catalyst for this catastrophe?

We look to Angelina Grimké. The most famous radical woman in America in 1838 was in town to address a packed Pennsylvania Hall. And when she spoke on May 16, the growing anti-abolitionist mob outside the hall reacted. “As the tumult from without increased, and the brickbats fell thick and fast,” recalled William Lloyd Garrison, her “eloquence kindled, her eyes flashed and her cheeks glowed.” This privileged woman of Southern society, who, with her sister Sarah had left behind plantation life and wealth to go on a speaking tour about the evils of slavery, had been energized and eloquent before large audiences throughout Massachusetts.

In Philadelphia, the mob outside the new Pennsylvania Hall interrupted Grimké ’s speech. She acknowledged their presence and challenged them: “What is a mob? What would the breaking of every window be? What would the levelling of this Hall be? …What if the mob should now burst in upon us, break up our meeting and commit violence upon our persons — would this be anything compared with what the slaves endure?”

Grimké ’s reputation as someone willing to question, to speak and to break society’s rules on behalf of her cause came to a head in Philadelphia that week. The very same day the Hall was dedicated, Grimké  and Theodore Dwight Weld, the man who encouraged and trained her to work the abolition lecture circuit, got married in Philadelphia. And because they Grimké  and Weld were both so public, so key to The Movement, the “wedding of the most mobbed-man and the most notorious woman in America” would be anything but a private matter.

“I am told that my abolition friends here are almost offended that I should do such a thing as get married,” Grimké wrote Weld a few weeks earlier. “Some say we were both public property and had no right to enter into such an engagement. Others say that I will now be good for nothing henceforth and forever to the cause…”

Grimké and Weld had sent invitations to more than 80 friends and acquaintances, about half of whom would be in Philadelphia for Pennsylvania Hall’s opening week. The wedding list, a Who’s Who of American Abolitionism, Feminism and Social Progressivism, took place in the home of Angelina’s recently widowed sister, Anna Frost, at 3 Belmont Row, later renumbered 1330 Spruce Street.

William Lloyd Garrison, the “worst of men,” according to Angelina Grimké ‘s mother (who remained in South Carolina) was out of New England, but in his element. His posse: Gerrit Smith, James G. Birney, Henry B. Stanton, and Alvan Stewart, all attended. So did the Chapmans, Fullers, Westons, Philbricks and Tappans. Weld’s former classmates from seminary, known as the Lane Rebels, showed up. No one made more of an impression walking up Spruce Street to the wedding as did Charles C. Burleigh, who grew his beard as long as slavery lasted.

The wedding was designed to demonstrate, challenge and irritate. Grimké  “was getting married in a manner calculated to shock and dismay the pillars of Charleston society, among whom she had been raised,” wrote Gerda Lerner. She meant for it to be “a motley assembly of white and black, high and low.” (Sarah Grimké noted that among the guests were “several colored persons…among them two liberated slaves, who formerly belonged to our father.”) After a brief, homemade, and ad hoc ceremony, during which Weld denounced traditional marriage vows and Grimké refused to include the word “obey,” “a colored Presbyterian minister then prayed…followed by a white one,” possibly Rev. Furness, who lived at 11 Belmont Row. The “certificate was then read by William Lloyd Garrison, and was signed by the company.” Guests then shared good wishes and a wedding cake baked with “free sugar”–grown, harvested and manufactured without slave labor.

Accounts of the iconoclastic wedding spread throughout the streets of Philadelphia and then further, in the nation’s newspapers. Accounts morphed from fact to fiction. Grimké’s commitment to “white and black, high and low” led to rumors that this had been an interracial wedding. And in 1838, even in the city of Brotherly Love, that was enough to spark, and justify, a riot.

The experiment of Pennsylvania Hall failed, but the Grimké -Weld wedding turned out exactly as intended: a spiritual, social bond based on equality and respect—far different than traditional marriage. Those who witnessed the wedding at 1330 Spruce Street on May 14, 1838 were in a culture war, the first of many redefining the meaning of marriage in America.

It’s a shame no one has anything good to say about the drive from Philadelphia International Airport to Center City. It’s a gritty but grand entrance, this ride on PA 291, aka the Penrose Avenue Bridge, aka the Platt Memorial Bridge to US 76, aka the Schuylkill Expressway—a ride punctuated by the usual roadwork, billboards, questionable signage and occasional pothole. Those features are found just about anywhere. What makes this stretch truly special is the rich urban choreography visible from atop the viaduct of concrete pylons rising above the brackish marsh. That scene offers complex and meaningful drama.

I feel sorry for those who go out of their way to avoid Philadelphia’s gritty entrance. They miss the point.

The Platt Memorial Bridge experience is considered an embarrassing nuisance. Hosts of out-of-town guests apologize for it. Hospitality hates it. The Inquirer has called it a “grimy industrial gateway … arching over sprawling oil tanks and… steaming stacks.” Most Philadelphians consider this entrance the worst of our worst, but it may actually be the best of our best.

Arriving via the Platt is a genuine and aesthetic Philadelphia experience. It’s an everyman, everywoman, everyday encounter for those in the 56,000 vehicles that pass over this 1.7-mile, 62-year-old bridge. Sure, as the Inky says, it “begins in weeds and ends by a junkyard” but that’s the beauty and the irony of it. By traversing the bridge in our cars, we’re threading a needle, that fragile zone in time and space between refined gasoline and crushed cars. Our reason for passing through breathes life into the scene and gives it a reason for being.

No, it’s not beautiful in the traditional sense, but we need this stuff. And isn’t Philadelphia at its best when it’s averse to pretense? We’re barreling along, there’s a sewage treatment on our right, an oil refinery on our left—plumes of smoke, gas flares burning effluent high above the natural no man’s land below. This scene is nearly entirely man made, taking place above the loneliest and least welcoming stretch of the meandering Schuylkill, two miles beyond the last bit of green at Bartram’s Gardens. This is about the automobile and its victory in the 20th-century city. As drivers, we’re offered a commanding straight shot to and from the city. Rising over the crest of the Platt Bridge may is among the most dramatic and authentic that Philadelphia ever gets. Why should we allow it to embarrass us? Why would we want to avert our eyes?

Philadelphians opened the bridge in 1951; twenty years after the idea was first proposed and just as the automobile had completed its win over the 19th-century city. (The Penrose Avenue Bridge was among the last works designed by architect Paul Cret.) With a ribbon cutting and a celebratory dinner hosted by AAA, the swing bridge from Philadelphia’s Iron Age had been reduced to fading memory. Sixty years later, in June 2011, PennDOT identified this bridge one of 5,000 in the Commonwealth that are “structurally deficient” and launched a three-year “rehabilitation project.”

There’s structural integrity and then there’s experiential integrity. What wakes up both citizen and visitor and puts them in the true Philadelphia frame of mind, what completes the whole Platt experience is the car shredder at the base of the bridge. But SPC Corporation which operates this Godzilla grinder, this Rockosauraus of rust, is planning to leave town. After abandoning a plan to relocate to Eddystone, Pennsylvania, SPC’s parent company, Camden Iron & Metal announced a plan to move back to the city of its namesake. They’re behind schedule a year or so, but “sooner or later” the company confirms, “we’re going to move.”

What a pity. Just as we’ve grown accustomed to Philadelphia’s most apocalyptic and ironic vision, just as we’ve become fully conscious of this 20th-century expression of unsustainability, we’re about to lose its most dramatic expression. As the song goes: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” and then it says something about a parking lot. Exactly.

Peter Cock couldn’t have picked a more off-the-beaten track location for his farmhouse. In the 1680s, and for a long time after, nobody coveted the swampy rise that broke the horizon near the Schuylkill as it meandered to the Delaware. Why would they? With so much rich, dry land in every direction and with William Penn’s ambitious “green Country Town” drawing folks six miles upstream, these brackish bogs were, literally, a Swedish-settler’s happy backwater. But the site proved good for farming, and provided well enough for the next owner to expand the farmhouse. That brick house stood quiet and alone for the better part of the 18th century.

Then all hell broke loose on the lower Schuylkill.

With the American Revolution in high gear and the British occupation of Philadelphia underway, control of the city’s port meant that the British would need to take the American-controlled fort built downriver at Mud Island, just below the mouth of the Schuylkill. At Fort Mifflin, as the installation would become known, several hundred American troops were garrisoned. And for weeks they foiled British attempts to reach the city by river. In a siege that would be the largest the largest bombardment of the Revolutionary War, six British ships bristling with 209 cannon would overwhelm the American’s ten. Over five days with an estimated 10,000 cannonballs flying, the fens of the Schuylkill were quiet no more.

Nor were they safe. On November 11th, at the start of the siege, a cannonball entered the rear wall of the old farmhouse, passed through and exited the front wall. From that day forward, old Swedish farmhouse would carry a new name: the Cannonball House.

And for the next 219 years, the Cannonball House, a survivor that would eventually come to be considered the oldest house in Philadelphia, would be treated with veneration, deference, and respect. Artists would sketch it; antiquarians would photograph it; and the Historic American Buildings Survey would document it.

By the start of the 20th century, as the city’s population expanded and its farmland shrunk, the now city-owned Cannonball House served as a “model farm” until the demand for sewage treatment overwhelmed the need for demonstrative agriculture. And the Cannonball House quietly accommodated as the Southwest Treatment Plant enveloped it. When operations started in December 1954, 100 million gallons of sludge passed through each and every day.

As the bicentennials of the battle of Fort Mifflin and the birth of the nation approached (and the 1950s sewage plant grew creaky) Philadelphia’s oldest house became its newest problem. Expansion demanded more land. “I wish the British had done a better job,” the Water Commissioner confided to a reporter.

In 1974, the Philadelphia Historical Commission decided that the Cannonball House wasn’t important enough to be listed on the National Register. But it was too important to be demolished. The Commission urged it be moved to a new site across from the entrance to Fort Mifflin. And in 1975, the main section of the Cannonball House was lifted from its foundations and wheeled slowly down the road. The Environmental Protection Agency, expecting local follow through to finish the job, picked up the $168,000 tab. And for next 21 years, the Cannonball House was a house without a home in preservation purgatory. And Fort Mifflin had a historic headache in its would-be parking lot.

In this uprooted state, deteriorated and on temporary cribbing, the orphaned Cannonball House was unable to charm its way into even the preservation-inclined heart of Inquirer’s architecture critic, Thomas Hine, who put it in December 1981: the “Cannon Ball Farm House has little claim to our minds and hearts…it requires some bravery to choose to forget it.”

Forgetting would take place, but it wouldn’t be brave. One day, in November 1996, what the British didn’t do, what sewage engineers wouldn’t do, the city, in violation of its own review requirements, did do. They demolished the Cannonball House. Raw sewage got treated; historic preservation got mistreated; and Fort Mifflin got its parking lot.

In 1967, when the late Roger Ebert was named film critic for The Chicago Tribune, he imagined rather large shoes to fill. After all—as he related the story in his 2011 autobiography, Life Itself: A Memoir—everyone at The Tribune and in Chicago, for that matter, knew reviews had been published under the byline Mae Tinee since 1915.

In 1915, when Hollywood released The Sea Hawk, the silent film directed by Frank Lloyd and based on an adventure novel by Raphael Sabatini, Mae Tinee had been on the beat for nearly a decade. By the time Ebert had been on the job that long, he had won a Pulitzer. Was it thumbs up for The Sea Hawk from his seasoned predecessor?

“The Sea Hawk is more than just a motion picture!,” Tinee declared in a review of July 1, 1924. “It is the dream of the tired business man; it is the fiery secret ambition of romantic youth. It carries the wistful passion that, carefully concealed, lives in most of us—to be gorgeous, spectacular, abused, talked about with baited breath—a creature dominating a world of winds and waters and clothes that never, never came from the shops of “what men wear.” (Or women, either.)” It’s a “love story” of “a noble brother; weakling half-brother; pirate ships, duels, intrigue” presented “in kaleidoscopic fashion to the sway of music that warms the blood….”

“You may work at a regular job for a living,” added Mae Tinee, “but once inside this little theater you get aboard a Spanish galleon or a Moorish vessel or an English ship. Your mission, for a brief time, becomes either pirating or revenge. Jagged cliffs, Moorish castles, and the fair countryside of old England furnish you with picturesque background.”

America loved this expensive extravaganza that included a cast of thousands led by Milton Sills, Enid Bennett and Wallace Beery. They loved The Sea Hawk’s four, full-sized ships created just for this production. And they especially loved that no expense, no sentiment—nothing whatsoever—was spared.

The Sea Hawk “Sailed right into the heart of Los Angeles! And anchored there!” bragged a July 3rd advertisement in The Los Angeles Daily Times after the Hollywood premier. “Thousands! Thousands! Thousands!” reveled “in the glamour of the settings!” and were “swept away by the immensity!”

That same issue featured a review by Edwin Schallert: “The grand old swashbuckling days are with us once again. The Sea Hawk visions them with rip roaring spirit of adventure. The picture is one of the ablest achievements in this history of the screen and in the current season it shines forth as a magnificent flare among a host of flickers. The premier … the first big gala…this season… took place at [Los Angeles’] Criterion Theater,” a classic movie palace on Grand Avenue which had opened in 1917 at the Kinema Theater. The “Criterion Audience Gives Enthusiastic Approval” for the cast of thousands declared yet another critic who called the lavish 12-reeler “brilliant.”

Frank Lloyd was well on his way to directing scores of films (IMDb lists 134) including Les Misérables (1917), Oliver Twist (1922), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and The Last Command (1955). In The Sea Hawk, Lloyd fully embraced Sabatini’s spirit in ships, scale, and sentiment.

The film had staying power.Five weeks after the premier, The Los Angeles Times headline reported “Action thrills and adventure on the high seas continue to please large audiences at the Criterion” under the headline: “Sea Hawk Packs ‘Em In.”

Philadelphians had been reading copies of the best-selling The Sea Hawk since the Washington Square publisher J.P. Lippincott introduced the first American edition in 1915. And Philadelphia movie-goers who had been looking forward to the film adaptation kept it in the theaters when it finally arrived in the summer of 1924. The following spring, The Sea Hawk was still up and running at the Great Northern Theater on north Broad Street.

The Sea Hawk was nothing less than a great Hollywood production. But Mae Tinee, it turned out, was something less than a great critic. In fact, she wasn’t a critic at all. Or even a reporter. Mae Tinee was a long-standing, all-purpose byline for reporters assigned, on slow news days, to spend their afternoons at matinees. And every once in a while, as in the case of The Sea Hawk, the diversion was worthwhile.

Pretty much anything might be found, past or present, at the Sesquicentennial International Exposition, the lesser of Philadelphia’s two World’s Fairs.  Mounted at the bottom of Broad Street in 1926, visitors passed under the giant, electrified Liberty Bell, famously lit with 26,000 light bulbs and plunged into a world that was familiar, but also oddly uncertain.

The “Tower of Light,” led through to a “Gladway” and scores of exhibit buildings, rides and restaurants. A recreated “High Street 1776” connected a giant new stadium to “Treasure Island” amidst a landscape of lagoons, a Japanese tea house and a Military Camp. At the southernmost end of the grounds, just before the exhibits gave way to the Navy Yard, stood the largest exhibit building of all, the “U.S. Government, Transportation, Machinery, Mines & Metallurgy” building, aka the Palace of Manufactures and Industries. At 11.5 acres, this building didn’t seem like an afterthought, but in mid-June, weeks after opening day, it was still only framed out in steel.

When the Palace of Manufactures and Industries finally did open, this 1,800-foot-long, V-shaped building was packed with everything from the “World’s Mightiest Electric Locomotive,” from the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, to Pullman cars, trolley cars, electric cars, gasoline cars, tractors, locomotives and fire engines. Wedged between exhibits of General Electric and the Miners Association of Bolivia, the Atlantic Refining Company fabricated a pavilion made by the Fine Arts Papier Mache Corporation of New York. Here would be a full-size facsimile of the classical gas station Atlantic Refining had opened with fanfare are Broad Street and the Boulevard nearly a decade earlier.

Its architect, Joseph Franklin Kuntz, of the Pittsburgh firm W. G. Wilkens and Company, had reason to believe his vision joining past and present in gas station design might still catch on. Since the middle of the last decade, Kuntz had designed temples to the gasoline gods, high-end, Greek-Revival stations. In 1923, in a vote of confidence, Atlantic Refining awarded Kuntz the commission for a classically-inclined headquarters at Broad and Spruce Streets.

In a 1922 article, “Greek Architecture and Gasoline Service Stations” Kuntz made the case that bad gas station design was bound to happen, but could be avoided. “In an infant industry that grew to gigantic proportions almost over night, certain makeshift arrangements were inevitable in preparing to cater to a constantly expanding volume of trade. In consequence, our automobile highways have been dotted by nondescript buildings which offended the eye of the beholder, and possessed but one solitary attribute as a justification for their existence—utility. Like the bill-boards, these structures threatened to become a permanent blot upon the landscape.”

But Kuntz believed bad gas station design wasn’t inevitable. “The Atlantic Refining Company,” he wrote, “decided to make a radical departure from established precedent and erect a series of ornamental service stations that would minister to the needs of its customers and at the same time served as an advertising medium for its product, combining the function of service and the quality of beauty in approximately equal proportions. Situated at various points in the cities and villages along the principal highways of Pennsylvania and New England, these beautiful little edifices delight the eye as well as they serve the public. … Constructed of terra cotta, in white or colors…and ornamental plaster in harmonizing shades, they afford a wide variety of types and sizes, with special designs to suit individual locations and space requirements.”

Kuntz was particularly proud of his “dainty little edifice” at 40^th and Walnut Streets, “a reproduction, on an enlarged scale of the monument to Lysycraties, in Athens.” This gas station’s “perfect proportions will linger long in the memory,” Kuntz wrote, “striking contrast to the great majority of buildings erected for the purpose of supplying the wants of modern charioteers.” A didactic approach to “practical city beautification,” Kuntz believed, was the “only effectual method of preventing architectural monstrosities;” the only way of “applying esthetic interest to natural human needs in the building up of cities and towns.”

He was wrong, of course. As the papier-mâché dried at the Sesquicentennial, this anachronistic, historical-esoterical interpretation of the American gas station was about to be replaced by a thoroughly modern idea, that superior gas station design could be sleek, bright and contemporary. That gas stations could convey cleanliness, speed and be of this world. Within another decade or so, the modern gas station replaced Kuntz’s designs, would take over the service station industry—and, eventually, the American cityscape.