PhillyHistory Blog

On a sharp, clear summer evening in 1973, I found myself walking up 10th Street with Louis Kahn, listening to the architect talk about his city. Just before we approached Spruce, Kahn pointed above a one-story Laundromat on the west side of the street. There, a cluster of brick chimneys profiled against the western sky rearranged itself as we walked, accommodating every step with a fresh perspective. Before we passed by the last of these views, Kahn declared: “That is what a city should look like.”

I stared in silence. And every time I’ve passed by since, I stare again. In fact, any time I see a cluster of red-brick chimneys in this city of brick chimneys, I ask myself: What did Kahn mean?

We kept walking north, crossing Spruce, and Kahn’s tone about the city became less complimentary. Tenth Street is not really a street at all, he said, but a road. This time, I had the presence of mind to ask what he meant and Kahn explained: The traffic barreling by was a disconnecting force. Vehicles traveling from one distant, unrelated place to another added nothing to the life of this place, this community. In fact, they diminished it—and our experience there. That, he might have said, is what a city should not look like.

Actually, he did say that. “The street is a room of agreement,” Kahn said in his famous speech two years earlier, when he received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. “The street is dedicated by each house owner to the city in exchange for common services. … Through-streets, since the advent of the automobile, have entirely lost their room quality. I believe,” he continued, “that city planning can start with realization of this loss by directing the drive to reinstate the street where people live, learn, shop and work as the room of the community.”

In his lifetime, Kahn had witnessed how the automobile had nourished, but also had ravaged the city. And now he believed that the very idea of the city street was at risk. “A city is measured by the character of its institutions…the street is one of its first… Today, these institutions are on trial…they have lost the inspirations of their beginning.” To this day, walking along that stretch of storefronts on 10th Street between Spruce and Locust, you can feel the tension; you can sense the loss.

In less than one city block, we had seen the best and worst of the city.

Decades later, the chimneys still appear to be in a silent dance with one another. There’s still as much life above those rooftops as there ever was. Maybe that’s what Kahn was telling me that day. If liveliness above the rooftops isn’t matched by life on the street, the city has failed.

A living city needs both: a dance above and below. It’s about life, movement, form and synchronicity up there, but we also need it down here. That is what a city should look like.

New technology breeds new characters. Space travel, for instance, brought us super pilots who have “the right stuff.” Railroading created the conductor and the hobo. Digital technology gave us garage entrepreneurs and hackers. And when we go back to the origins of the telescope we find discoverers and heretics.

Photography expanded the human repertoire with the ham, the camera hog, or as Woody Allen would later depict it, the Zelig character. In 1839, when news of the daguerreotype’s ability to depict as-is reality arrived from Paris, it wasn’t at all clear what a camera hog should act like, or what this person might look like. In that brief, rare, uncompetitive moment of pre-photographic history, the notion of being the most-photographed held uncertain value. Anyone could step in to seek the uncontested title.

Who would enter this lopsided contest and become Philadelphia’s first camera hog?

The sole-entrant and hands-down winner was John McAlllister, Jr. (1786-1877), a son of Scottish immigrants born in Philadelphia more than half a century before anyone had heard of a daguerreotype. McAllister’s appetite for his own reflection had been whetted when Anna Claypoole Peale painted a miniature in 1817. (You can see it, online, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) By then, McAllister had taken over the family establishment on Chestnut Street, a business that specialized in whips and canes but had made a brilliant strategic segue to spectacles. The McAllisters claimed Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of bi-focals, as their company logo. In time, they’d mount a gilded bust of Franklin over the store entrance and built a solid reputation for quality and innovation.

By the dawn of the photographic age, McAllister also had a deeply cultivated respect for posterity. He had, as John Fanning Watson, wrote, “a strong liking for local antiquities [and] devoted himself to the collections of a library rich in works of all kinds, but particularly… old newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, essays, etc. connected with the history of Philadelphia.” As wonderfully authentic and evocative as these treasures were for McAllister, they paled in comparison with the stark honesty of the daguerreotype. These simply overwhelmed the imagination. History had nothing quite so potent to share.

If the past couldn’t be frozen in time in daguerreotypes, McAllister was bound and determined to make sure the present would be. The present, McAllister knew, would fast become history. And the business was well positioned as suppliers for the growing daguerreotype market. By 1856, Philadelphia would have more than 100 studios; the McAllisters knew them all.

In the Spring of 1840, when McAllister learned Robert Cornelius was getting ready to open the first portrait studio on Eighth Street, he made certain to be Cornelius’ first customer. Before most Philadelphians sat before a lens one time, McAllister had completed dozens of sittings. Any reason would do. The classic Chestnut Street storefront is being replaced with modern plate-glass? McAllister poses in front of his father’s paned window with top hat and cane. A new shipment of daguerreotype lenses and plates arrives? McAllister’s poses on the roof in a test image. No event, family or business, no new technology would be introduced without McAllister making another appearance before the camera. As his hair grew longer and his sideburns grew wilder (this was not a contest of vanity) McAllister would visit studio after studio. And when he ran out of photographers to visit, he had them come visit him at home, both homes, for that matter.

Fueled by success, the business moved to larger quarters at 728 Chestnut Street, In the last days of 1854, McAllister took one last opportunity to gather family and loyal employees to pose one last time. After the new shop opened, McAllister arranged himself among a collection of globes, astronomical models, and other scientific knickknacks as the centerpiece, the sole human specimen. This collector of historical stuff knew full well that we—the inhabitants of the deep future—would be looking at him, and looking after him for posterity. McAllister bet on what he knew as basic antiquarian logic: the winning collector is the one who is himself collected.

Photography offered McAllister excellent odds. And a century and a half later, we can see he clearly won his bet. McAllister came out ahead at the Library of Congress, at the Library Company of Philadelphia, at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, and, of course, here at PhillyHistory.org.

Forget all you know about gas stations: the self-service pumps, the lifts, bays, stretches of oil-stained concrete, bright signage and bad coffee. Imagine a time before all that, from a century ago, when the widespread sale of gasoline was inevitable but the solution as to how and where was not yet known. In an earlier post, we saw how Gulf Refining Company figured out a way to meet the logistical challenge of filling empty tanks. Gulf succeeded in selling lots of fuel, and it did so with a minimum of flair and imagination.

By the 1910s, the expression of stability, permanence and civic responsibility, aka City-Beautiful Classicism, had been put to work on behalf of railroads, power plants, and movie theaters—so why not put it to work for the oil industry?  At a time of uncertainty, flux and extraordinary profits, why wouldn’t rich companies go on the charm offensive building palaces where sheds would suffice?  Executives at the Atlantic Refining Company knew full well theirs was a dirty business. They had known it back in the 1860s when the company first stored and spilled oil and spun a positive corporate image on the banks of the Schuylkill River. Now, in the new century, the automobile was the big new thing. It seemed this might be as big as the railroad had been in the last century. The automobile would take over and transform the city, for better or worse. If ever there was an need to deploy the full persuasive powers of architecture, this was that time.

Responding to Gulf’s success, the Atlantic Refining Company’s marketing task force turned to the ideas of Charles Mulford Robinson. In his new book, Modern Civic Art: Or, The City Made Beautiful. Robinson considered the urban boulevards and bridges built to accommodate the automobile and wrote: “It is the triumph of modern civic art, to transform these necessary girdles and girders of the structure of the city into ways of pleasure and beauty. Here the whirr of the electric car, there the rush of swiftly passing motor cars—these are elements of the scene that may count not less distinctly in the total power to please than does the verdure.” Really? Millions of cars might offer as much as parkland? The man who inspired the City Beautiful Movement just wouldn’t allow himself to have an ugly thought.

Atlantic seized the opportunity and brought in an architect to leverage these new and positive thoughts about the automobile. Between 1917 and 1922, Joseph F. Kuntz of the Pittsburgh firm W. G. Wilkens and Company designed for Atlantic a handful of gas palaces in Pittsburgh and no less than 16 in Philadelphia. These polychromatic terracotta “temples” appeared like beacons on the boulevards. They flattered and pandered to the new urban driving breed. Atlantic set out to appeal to “automobilists, who find considerable pleasure touring over its smooth and well-kept roadways and bridges.” While Gulf staffed its utilitarian stations with men, Atlantic populated their temples with women outfitted in dark blue woolen uniforms, riding breeches and black leather accessories. With seventeen pumps, Atlantic advertised, “there will be absolutely no waiting” for service.

The gasoline was basically the same as Gulf’s product, but the experience was very different. Atlantic became widely known and admired for its “Greek temple effects.” Architect Kuntz developed a unique design for each new location which he refined in drawings and tested in miniature plaster models. Knowing customers would be buying gasoline day and night, and that they were concerned about the possibility of electric lights igniting fuel, Kuntz concealed electrical lights to outline the buildings and their colonnades. By 1922, sixteen busy Philadelphia intersections had unique gas temples by Kuntz, including 40th and Walnut, Cobbs Creek Parkway and Ludlow Street, Walnut and Fifty-fifth and just a few blocks south of the first success, at Broad and Lycoming.

What would Gulf do to keep its customers happy? They did the only thing a modern gas station could do: they kept their prices competitive and offered road maps and oil changes—for free.

The early twentieth century was the Wild West of the American automotive era.  Hundreds of manufacturers sprung up in cities and towns across the nation. Most failed within a year, usually after producing only a dozen machines.  In 1915, Philadelphia auto enthusiasts opened their magazines to see advertisements trumpeting a new American luxury car.  The car looked suspiciously like a Mercedes-Benz: a sharp, V-shaped radiator; a low-slung chassis; wire-spoked wheels; curved bicycle-style fenders.  Unlike bulky, lumbering American luxury cars in its price-range — such as Packard and Pierce-Arrow — the Biddle was nimble and sporty looking, built on a mere 120 inch wheel base, with step plates instead of running boards.

The company claimed that the Biddle was “neither a studied copy of European models, nor moulded to suit the limitations of American’s quantity production.”

 

The namesake of the car was one Robert Ralston Biddle, who apparently loved cars but contributed little else to the machine’s development other than his storied last name of Second Bank of the United States fame.  According to the 1910 Philadelphia Social Register, Biddle lived with Misses Catherine and Sarah Biddle (presumably his sisters) in a brick townhouse at 1326 Spruce Street.

Philadelphia’s car was attractive but hardly revolutionary. In the judgement of automotive historian Beverley Ray Kimes, “what the Biddle did best was look good.” The Biddle was a so-called “assembled” car.  Rather than making their parts from scratch like Ford or General Motors, the company purchased pre-assembled engines, axles, and other components from outside suppliers and then assembled them into an attractive, sleek package.  Not that the Biddle was a slipshod job.   Its components were all of the highest quality.  The car’s price started at $1,650 for the chassis alone, and a variety of custom Fleetwood bodies could be ordered (limousine, town car, roadster, touring car) for an additional $2,000 to $4,000. In today’s money, a well-outfitted Biddle would cost about $65,000.  By comparison, a Ford Model T cost about $850, or about $18,000 today.

Yet what really made the Biddle stand-out was its four-cylinder engine, manufactured by the Duesenberg brothers of Indianapolis and able to crank out 100 horsepower, five times more than Ford’s Tin Lizzie.  Fred and August Duesenberg were American originals.  They immigrated to America from Germany with their widowed mother in 1885, and grew up tinkering with machinery on the family farm in Iowa.  After racing bicycles for a few years, the brothers started a company that manufactured race car and marine engines. Fred proved to be a mechanical genius, and by 1914 Duesenberg-powered cars were garnering trophies at the Indianapolis 500.

The success of the four-cylinder Duesenberg racing engine attracted the attention of Arthur Maris, president of Biddle, and of Charles Fry, the company engineer.  The year after production started, Biddle removed the original Buda powerplant from its cars and installed the more powerful Duesenberg one instead.

Unfortunately, Biddle arrived on the scene at exactly the wrong time. America’s entry into World War I in 1917 squashed demand for luxury cars, and the brief, post-war recession that followed made matters even worse.  The automotive industry was also undergoing structural changes and consolidation. President Alfred Sloan of General Motors purchased a clutch of independent companies (Chevrolet, Buick, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac) and integrated them into a consortium that could corner all segments of the market.  General Motors also purchased suppliers and integrated their products into an in-house supply chain.  The company purchased Fleetwood, for example, so that the distinguished “carriage trade” body maker could supply custom bodies for the prestigious Cadillac marque, not Biddle and other smaller luxury makes. In the meantime, Henry Ford perfected his assembly line, which could churn out dozens of cars an hour.  As a result, the price of a Model T dropped from $850 in 1908 to a mere $260 by the early 1920s.

In this new economic landscape, there was no room for niche companies like Biddle to compete.  At its peak in the late 1910s, Biddle was only building 500 cars a year at its expanded Frankford Avenue plant. Philadelphia’s Biddle Motor Car Company closed its doors in 1922, just as the economy began to take off and America, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, entered “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”  Company president Maris went to Wilmington, Delaware to launch a new car company  backed by E. Paul du Pont. Like the Biddle, the du Pont was also an “assembled car” with a fancy name and glamorous coachwork, but relatively conventional mechanical guts.

Yet Biddle’s choice of engine supported a company that would become the biggest automotive star of the Roaring Twenties.  In early 1929, Fred Duesenberg and his partner E.L. Cord unveiled the Duesenberg Model J: the fastest, most powerful, and costliest production car in the world.  Under the hood was a Duesenberg-designed 6.9 liter straight eight, able to develop 265 horsepower — twice as powerful as the closest European competitor. It had so much torque that it could supposedly do 60 miles per hour in second gear, at a time when a good car topped out at that speed.

Sadly, Fred Duesenberg was one of those unfortunate geniuses killed by his own creation.  He died in 1932 after flipping a supercharged Model J on a slick road near Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

The site of the Biddle Motor Car plant at 1210 Frankford Avenue is now occupied by the Frankford Hall beer garden.

Little is known about the fate of Robert Ralston Biddle.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7XNCRC5wpk?rel=0&w=480&h=360]

In the passenger seat of a 1929 Duesenberg Model J. The car’s straight eight engine developed 265 horsepower, or 325 in the supercharged version, and able to propel the three ton car at up to 115 miles per hour. A much smaller, four-cylinder Duesenberg engine powered the Biddle during its 1917-1921 production run.  A well-equipped, coach-built Duesenberg sedan sold for about $12,000 ($8,500 for the chassis alone), or about $170,000 today.

Sources:

Beverly Rae Kimes and Harry Austin Clark, Jr. The Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1805-1942 (Iola, Wisconsin: Krause Publications, 1989), p. 116-117.

“Duesenberg, Frederick and August,” Des Moines Register, September 20, 2004.

Motor Record (The Ferguson Publishing Company, 1919), p. 44

Social Register, Philadelphia, Including Wilmington (New York, New York: Social Register Association, 1910), p.17.

“The ideal filling station has never been built,” scoffed a big oil executive in 1922. “I don’t think it ever will be built. But we are trying to get it.” Quite an admission from a man whose company (Standard Oil of Indiana) operated 1,400 stations of its own. The idea of the gas station had been around for nearly a decade, but the form was still very much evolving. By 1920, 15,000 had cropped up across America; by 1929 more than 120,000 littered the landscape. Other than dispensing gasoline to a burgeoning number of vehicle owners, no two oil companies could agree what a gas station ought to look like. And with money to be made, there was no time for debate. So, in the name of gasoline sales, and the bottom line, the city’s streets, boulevards and highways became a living laboratory of asphalt, brick, tin and flashing electric signage.

The experiments that ultimately gave us the American Gas Station took many forms: sheds and shacks, pyramids and pagodas, cottages and castles, wigwams and windmills. Some even led to extravagant structures modeled on mosques and temples. Design diversity would be about right, the oil executive would admit. “I would not want them all alike,” he said. “But I would demand of them a family resemblance—a Hapsburg chin, so to speak.” Selling gasoline wouldn’t be about gasoline, so much as consistency, service and branding. The oil exec didn’t know what he wanted his stations to look like, but he did know he wanted them all “recognizable at a distance.”

When did the question of what a gas station might look like first get answered? The year was 1913. That’s when William M. Burton patented his process for the “Manufacture of Gasolene,” acknowledging a “great and growing demand.” That’s the year Henry Ford dropped the price of his Model T to $550 and sold more than 308,000 cars. And that’s the year Gulf Refining Company opened the first of its purpose-built, drive-in gas station in Pittsburgh.

A century ago, fuel-hungry drivers could finally abandon the pharmacy’s ad hoc pail and funnel. Now they could drive past the lines at the tank wagon’s garden hose or the curbside pumps standing like afterthoughts outside grocery and hardware stores. In 1913, for the first time, motorists could pull up to paved stations devoted exclusively to servicing the nation’s new fleets. Gulf’s first station, an octagonal brick kiosk with a cantilevered pagoda-style roof bore the words “Good Gulf Gasoline” spelled out in lights. Need air, water, crankcase service, and tire and tube installation? Just drive up to your nearest Gulf octagon.

Shortly after the model proved itself in Pittsburgh, Gulf built another in West Philadelphia, at 33^rd and Chestnut Streets. On a good day, attendants pumped 3,000 gallons from ten 550-gallon underground tanks. “The liberal patronage of our West Philadelphia Service Station… and the number of requests from the North Broad Street District have prompted us to build another service station,” read the advertisement in The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. The new station at Broad Street and Hunting Park Avenue opened April 17, 1916. “Courteous attendants will supply you—cheerfully pump your tires or fill your radiator…free of charge.” Need a road map? They were now free, too. Gulf had found its solution for design and for service—and would stick with this formula for the next decade and a half.

How did the competition respond? The Philadelphia and Pittsburgh-based Atlantic Refining Company formed a committee to brainstorm. How could Atlantic outdo Gulf in a  “new marketing offensive?” The committee toured stations throughout the state, and beyond, and decided this challenge needed the talent of an architect. Joseph F. Kuntz of the Pittsburgh-based W. G. Wilkens and Company got the unusual commission. Gas stations were about to be ramped up to a new level of design—the likes of which had never been seen before—or since.

The battle for Gasadelphia on North Broad Street was about to take off.

NEXT TIME: Round Two

The automobile’s traction in the city started 100 years ago, but this centennial we don’t necessarily want to celebrate.

In 1899, after the first Philadelphian (Junker, Jules Junker) imported his French vehicle, it was a fast uphill ride. By 1907, there were 142,000 motors on American roads. From 1909 to 1910, when Henry Ford’s new factory began producing 1,000 Model Ts each and every day, national car sales jumped more than 4,500%. The invasion had begun.

By the end of the 20^th century’s second decade, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reported that 1,600 cars careened around Philadelphia’s City Hall every hour. That’s 26 per minute. Center City’s rush hour was born.

This scale and pace concerned city planners, even one from Detroit, who fretted in 1916: “When the streets of the cities were laid out it was never contemplated that there would be about two million automobiles operating on the highways of this country.” Yet, “it is estimated that the number of motor vehicles is rapidly going up to five million.” Actually, by the end of that decade, there were more than 6.1 million vehicles on America’s roads.

As the number of cars increased, so did the debate about their impact. Henry Ford assured that everyone who wanted a car might buy one, but a planner from New York believed proliferation was having the opposite effect. “The coming of the private automobile suddenly divided your population practically into two classes…the barons, riding not horseback, but in automobiles, forming a kind of superior stratum, and the other class, the common people, dependent upon the common carriers.”

The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin worried the abundance of cars advanced no purpose in particular. “Automobiles have become an important utility. Soon, we are told, everyone will have a motor. The difficult question remains: What shall he do with it when he gets it?”

In 1916, city planners from around the United States met in Cleveland to consider these questions and how to best help cities welcome  the automobile’s takeover. (By mid-century, Philadelphia’s Edmund Bacon still insisted the car was “an honored guest” in the city.) Planners discussed the ideal width of the urban roadbed, the ideal turning radius of the intersection, and the ever growing problem of city parking.

“The number of private pleasure vehicles left standing on the street is far greater than was the case with horse-drawn vehicles,” said Nelson P. Lewis of New York in his address “The Automobile and the City Plan.” “The motor car needs no hitching and will stay where left and it is not an uncommon sight to see the entire space along the curb occupied by motor cars for hours at a time.  …the number of them so left in the streets is much greater and is increasing at an extraordinary rate.”

Lewis called for “regulations governing the parking of such cars.” He laid out the classic urban parking dilemmas.  “If they stand in a line parallel with the curb and immediately adjacent to it, it is impossible for a particular car to leave its position unless there is sufficient space between them to allow them to turn out. If they are placed at right angles to the curb, the space occupied by them is so great as to seriously decrease roadway capacity.” Lewis identified Philadelphia as an exception: “Where the roadways are sufficiently wide, as in Broad Street…the automobiles are parked in the middle of the roadway in a position at right angles to the curb, thus permitting any vehicles to leave it position without interference.” But not every city had a Broad Street and not every street in Philadelphia was broad.

“There is going to come a time when this congestion of motor vehicles will be so much more serious than it is now,” warned a Boston planner, “there will be no practicable way of controlling it, except by encroaching upon existing parks and parkways.” Others at the conference bubbled with comments and ideas, hoping for “the designation of certain streets for the exclusive use of automobiles… the designation of certain streets for fast and slow automobile traffic … The establishment by the city of open spaces where automobiles may be left for the day.” One planner suggested “the city establish subway parking stations under public open spaces…” Another imagined “manufacturers producing a car that could be telescoped or at least stood on end in order that it may occupy less space when left in the public streets.”

Philadelphian Andrew Wright Crawford of the City Parks Association attended the proceedings and added his two cents as to what might come and what should: “The automobile in its best result is causing the diffusion of population.” But, “the motors must, in the center of the city be made to fit the city plan that is in existence, rather than the city plan should fit the motors.”

Sage and impossible advice from a tireless advocate of The City Beautiful.

When the wild-haired Leopold Stokowski took command of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1912, his theatricality was greatly at odds with his proper Philadelphia patrons.  Tall, dapper, charming with the ladies, and more than a little vain, he was the epitome of European cosmopolitanism.  The London-born son of a Polish father and an Irish mother, Stokowski received his education at Britain’s Royal College of Music and Queen’s College, Oxford, where he had the good fortune to study under Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, respectively.  Spurning the traditional baton, Stokowski used his hands alone to lead the orchestra.  He also used them to grab Philadelphia by the scruff of its neck and drag its musical taste into the twentieth century.

Since its founding in 1900, the Philadelphia’s Orchestra specialized in the classicism of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Beethoven, with occasional forays into the chromaticism of Wagner.  The Quaker City’s elite dutifully listened from their plush seats.  Or at least some did.  Many prattled or even knitted.  Fritz Scheel, the Orchestra’s first conductor, went apoplectic when one patron suggested that he should add a Strauss waltz to sweeten his solemn, Teutonic programs.  Scheel eventually suffered a nervous breakdown and died in a sanitarium.  His successor, Karl Pohlig, lasted only a year before resigning under the cloud of a sex scandal.

Stokowski was not only a superb musician, but also fearless confronting this lack of respect from the audience, especially from those who left early. During Friday matinees, some left their seats in middle of the concert to catch the 4:00pm train back to the Main Line.   One Friday, Stokowski was fed up.  Just before conducting the opening bars “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, he heard the typical chatter and the rustling of shopping bags.

Stokowski turned around, faced the audience, and intoned:

Try as hard as we can, we cannot make a divine music amid so much untranquility. There is constant walking in and out. You know you cannot live the material life alone. You must have something else. All the rest of the week you are immersed in your worldly affairs. On Friday you come here. Will you not say to yourselves: ‘I will give to the other side of life the two hours or less that the music requires?’ You will gain enormously, and so shall we.

Some welcomed Stokowski’s standing up to his own audience. Others thought him extremely impertinent and disrespectful. Yet Stokowski was not intimidated.  He had the support of many members of the Orchestra’s board, including the powerful and very wealthy Alexander van Rensselaer. A frequent traveler, Stokowski was entranced by the revolutionary music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, and Claude Debussy.  He also created his own  lush, unashamedly Romantic orchestrations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ works.

Only three years into his tenure, Stokowski decided to really shock his audience by introducing one of Europe’s most progressive composers to the American stage.   He asked the Orchestra board to front $140,000 for the production of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony #8, popularly known as the “Symphony of a Thousand.”  An Austrian Jew who had converted to Catholicism, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) had been famous as the conductor of the Vienna Opera, but his compositions languished in relative obscurity.  Stokowski, who had heard the Eighth Symphony’s premiere in Munich, proclaimed it was “one of the greatest compositions of the twentieth century.”  He also assured the skittish board that Philadelphians would passionately embrace Mahler’s music if they gave it a chance.

On March 2 , 1916, over 2,000 people packed the sold-out Academy of Music, anxiously awaiting what promised to be the greatest musical event in the city’s history.  Among the luminaries in the audience were pianist Josef Hoffmann. According to The Public Ledger: “The scenes at the Academy set the nerves tingling…The curtains rose and the audience gasped. The 958 singers filled the great stage from footlights to roof and the orchestra was upon the an apron which had been built into the house. The first twelve rows of singers were women, dressed in white. Above them were twelves rows of men, with a gardenia-like spot of girls, members of the children’s chorus, pinned, it seemed in their midst.”

Stokowski stepped onto the stage, bowed, and flung his arms. The string basses growled, a mighty organ chord sounded, followed by the chorus singing “Veni, Creator Spiritus!” fortissimo, and then a mighty blast of the brass section.

For the next hour, Stokowski bathed his audience in waves of sound they had never heard before: gripping, transcendent, awe-inspiring, tender enough to draw tears from even the most hardened listener.  Nearly a century later after that memorable night, Joseph Horowitz of The New York Times compared the orchestra under Stokowski to a great pipe organ: “its soft-edged attacks and majestic swells and recessions, its smooth textures and lavish colors were all derivative of the Romantic organ of Stokowski’s youth. Its ‘rolled’ chords (at different speeds!) even fabricated a reverberant cathedral acoustic.”

There was no talking, knitting, or rushing out to catch the next Paoli local. So transfixed was the audience by Mahler’s music.

When the last chords died away in the Academy of Music that evening, a new age for the Philadelphia Orchestra had dawned.

 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSulGXYkn08?rel=0&w=480&h=360]
An historic recording of Leopold Stokowski conducting the first movement of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.”

Sources:

Marc Geelhoed, “A Thoroughly Modern Orchestra,” Great Performances: Carnegie Hall Opening Night, 2004. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/shows/carnegie04/essay1.html

Marjorie Hassen, “American Premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (‘Symphony of a Thousand’) Leopold Stokowski Conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, Academy of Music, Philadelphia 2 March 1916.” Leopold Stokowski: Making Music Matter. Otto E. Albrecht Music Library, University of Pennsylvania. http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/stokowski/mahler.html

Joseph Horowitz, “Spring Music/Orchestras: A Window on Stokowski’s Greatness,” The New York Times, March 5, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/05/arts/spring-music-orchestras-a-window-on-stokowski-s-greatness.html?ref=leopoldstokowski

Joseph Kupferberg, Those Fabulous Philadelphians: The Life and Times of a Great Orchestra. (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969). pp. 20, 31, 25 ,42-44, 54.

 

It’s more than fair to say that, once again, the Royal Theater is not in line for a Preservation Achievement Award. (Nominations for 2013 are due this week to the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.) At this stage of the game, after languishing for 43 years, pretty much only wreckage remains behind the façade of the South Street institution that opened in 1920 and closed in 1970.

The entire South Street corridor had fallen victim to the proposed Crosstown Expressway. That ill-conceived and controversial project would eventually be removed from the city plan. But while blocks of South Street nearest the neighborhoods of Society Hill and Washington Square benefited from their proximity to revival and investment, those nearer to Broad Street would continue to decline. For the Royal Theater, high hopes wouldn’t be enough to overcome decade after decade of false starts, neglect and vandalism.

Today, what remains of the Royal Theater’s exterior is a handsome façade that’s little more than a canvas for murals echoing fifty years of faded memory. From the 1920s through the 40s, the Royal called itself “America’s Finest Colored Photoplay House” and hosted live performances with Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Pearl Bailey and Count Basie. That was then. What remains inside now is damaged almost beyond recognition, a hardhat site for even the most hopeful displays of hipster creative culture.

Decades of optimism, good will, vision and nostalgia have kept a dream alive, though they haven’t added up to enough to wake the Royal Theater from its longtime coma. Money might have made a difference. And great sums were lined up to arrive for the Royal revival at the end of Rendell’s second term as Governor. Just a few years ago, this project promised a haul of $31 million from Harrisburg for music producer-turned developer Kenny Gamble to create the “Royal Theater and Universal Commercial Complex.”

Funding can do a lot, but in the end, money is not fungible with well-earned, authentic preservation success. We sometimes convince ourselves to the contrary, but money is no substitute for community.

Community is what made the Royal an original and enviable success. Three-quarters of a century ago, when photographer Wenzel J. Hess visited 15th and South Streets, the Royal Theater stood at the heart of a vibrant, thriving community. The glue that worked for the Royal Theater was the same glue that held together all of the other enterprises on that stretch of South Street: drug stores, hardware stores, pawnshops, diners and Chop Suey joints, dentists, tailors, barbers, bicycle shops and bars. It was about life—the lives of the folks who made  this community and the places they lived them. People and community made South Street. And when  community declined, so did the possibility of preservation success for the Royal Theater.

The inevitable has been coming, if in slow motion. Twenty-one years ago (1992) The Philadelphia Inquirer reports the Royal’s owner is seeking a demolition permit. Five years later (1997) the city Law Department sets out to sue that same owner for code violations that allowed the building to deteriorate. The following year (1998) the Preservation Alliance acquires the building to buy more time but sells the building two years later with no preservation guarantees. And two years ago, the Alliance puts the Royal Theater on its “Endangered Properties List” as the owner considers demolition and then, last year, possible sale.

How long are the statutes of limitations for wishful thinking? If this slow-motion slipping into oblivion continues for another seven years, the Royal Theater will have been empty and abandoned as long as it was open and thriving. Maybe that’s long enough to find a new reality.

Jean-Pierre Blanchard wanted to make a splash, figuratively, not literally. He arrived  from France, 220 years ago, planning a display of showmanship that would, if successful, be the first balloon ascension in America—and his 45th.

On January 9, 1793, the French aeronaut and inventor readied his balloon in the prison yard at 6th and Walnut Streets, accepted best wishes from President George Washington and other luminaries, and floated skyward. Blanchard metaphorically lived his motto: Sic itur ad astra—to the stars. More precisely, he went to Deptford, New Jersey.

If not made useful, such feats of technology, skill, daring and luck were of little value. Blanchard made use of his time aloft conducting a variety of measurements and experiments, the results of which were recorded in a small book published in Philadelphia with a pleasant illustration of his balloon. Engravings were all they had in Blanchard’s time; it would be nearly half a century before photography allowed aeronauts to dream of returning to earth with “you-are-there” documentation.

“The first successful aerial photographs in America,” taken above Boston in 1860, were made from Samuel A. King’s balloon, the “Queen of the Air.” And President Lincoln’s war machine soon put aerial photography to work against Confederate troops. But King didn’t much care for sharing his basket with photographers. Another three decades passed before he went aloft with Philadelphia photographer William Nicholson Jennings.

In the early 1890s, King, brought the “Eagle Eyrie” up from his home in Tinicum to Fairmount Park for annual July 4th ascensions. In 1934, Jennings reminisced about their partnership in “Snapshots from Cloudland,” published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute.

As King prepped, Jennings found a moment to approach “the genial aeronaut to make a bid for a place in the basket for the purpose of making aerial snapshots.” King stared back “with an eye blue as the sky he loved to sail in; stroked his long beard, fleecy as any cloud he had passed through, and remarked: ‘My charge for a passenger is fifty dollars; but if you expect to make good photographs on your first balloon trip … you will be wasting your time and money.’” A first-time passenger would succumb to nerves and produce double exposures, blurred images, use erroneous settings, and on top of all of that, the summer’s “blue haze between balloon and landscape” would result in “thin,” “washy” negatives. Plus, King added, “escaping coal gas from the balloon would create a chemical fog.”

Undeterred, Jennings conducted experiments from the top of the Washington, Monument and devised a combination of orthochromatic plates and a light yellow lens filters and got him “bright, snappy” negatives. He made a “gas-tight” camera, and showed both to King.

On the Fourth of July, 1893, as “the Municipal Band struck up ‘My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon,’ all Jennings had to do was to “forget nerves, wait until the desired section of landscape came into view” hold his breath and press the button.” He “made several exposures while passing over Philadelphia at the height of about a mile…securing sharp, crisp, clear-cut negatives, from which I afterward made a number of 40” x 50” enlargements for exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London.”

King and Jennings would continue to collaborate, but their demise (King in 1914; Jennings in 1946) would hardly mark the end of the Philadelphia balloon story.

In 1956, when Hollywood adapted Jules Verne’s 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, producer Mike Todd lined up an all-star cast including David Niven and the young Shirley McLaine. The film, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture, also featured appearances by Noel Coward, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre, Red Skelton, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra. For the all-important role of the balloon, Todd turned to his friend; the self-described Philadelphia “balloonatic” Constance Wolf, who lent  her beloved “La Coquette.” The first woman to cross the Alps in a balloon, Wolf would promote the film by piloting “La Coquette” over London and Paris after its release. No surprise that, in 1959, she would replicate Blanchard’s first American ascension, and would inflate “La Coquette” again for another re-enactment, seen here, in January 1968.