Categories
Historic Sites

Sister Cities: the history of a newly restored piece of Logan Square

A recent aerial view of Sister Cities park.
Photo Credit: Marc Morfei

By Yael Borofsky for PhillyHistory.org

Sister Cities park, reopened this May, is a beautiful homage to urban revitalization, combining the charming with the whimsical in a series of landmarks signifying Philadelphia’s ten sister cities: a cafe, a boat pond, and other small wonders that draw people to Ben Franklin Parkway where the park is situated.

But don’t let the newness or the cuteness distract from the fact that there are a couple of odd things behind Sister Cities park.

For one, no one seems to know exactly why Tel Aviv and Florence became Philadelphia’s first two sister cities — Florence in 1964 and Tel Aviv in 1967.

Nancy Gilboy, president of Sister Cities administrative body, the Philadelphia International Visitors Council (IVC), says that at the time, the induction of Sister Cities was all about relationships.

“It usually comes about when somebody of prominence in each city meets and they see there are synergies between the two cities,” Gilboy explained, adding that program was started in the 1950s by President Eisenhower in an effort to bridge cultural divides.

But Gilboy said she couldn’t be sure who was directly responsible for the relationship with both the Israeli and the Italian city, aside from Mayor James Tate who formally invited both cities to participate in the program.


An aerial view of Sister Cities Plaza from 1972.

This archived news article documenting the designation of Philadelphia and Tel Aviv as Sister Cities on April 24, 1967 suggests that one connection between the two cities is that both were sites of independence:

“The ceremonies were held after Philadelphia Mayor James Tate sent a message to Mordechai Namir, Mayor of Tel Aviv, noting that the declaration was being issued on the eve of Passover, “Feast of Freedom” and pointed out that both cities have been sites of declarations — the U.S. Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, and the Israeli declaration of independence on May 14, 1948 in Tel Aviv.”

One theory commonly put forward is that Philadelphia’s significant Italian and Jewish immigrant populations had something to do with the inter-city connections.

Other oddities about Sister Cities have more to do with the park, before the city had any sisters to honor.

Despite it’s relatively small size — it’s just one tiny chunk of Logan Square — the site has an rich history that includes serving as a grave site for various religious organizations and health institutions, a gallows, and a potter’s field. When Center City District began working to revamp the site, it knew that it and its partners would have to tread lightly, said Vice President of Planning at Center City District Nancy Goldenberg.

Still, when the early stages of park remodeling in 2010 revealed 60 orderly grave sites along the 18th Street border of the park, CCD had to revise many of its plans, including the placement of geothermal wells, in order to avoid disturbing them further.

Goldenburg said that research suggests the graves belonged to the First Reform Church in Old City, who apparently also used the land as burial grounds.

But if bones, hangings, and merchants seem a bizarre mix for a site that now attracts many small children, the location has even older less consistent roots in the Civil War. The spot was used to site the Great Sanitary Fair (or Great Central Fair) of 1864. The multi-week event was designed by the Sanitary Committee, a federal agency, to gather proceeds to fund care and supplies for the Union soldiers, said Goldenberg.

“The fair actually took up all of Logan Square but coincidentally, the fair had a children’s playground area and that was actually located where Sister Cities park is today,” Goldenberg said. “And of course we have a children’s garden in our park so that was really quite ironic.”

The Sanitary Committee, the precursor to the American Red Cross, traveled around the country holding these fairs to drum up wartime support, but Goldenberg says Philadelphia’s Fair was the only one honored by the attendance of President Abraham Lincoln. According to an archived Philadelphia Ledger article from July 1, 1864, the organizers culled about $7,000 in entrance fees, or about $102,000 by today’s standards.

Thanks to the remodeling, the park contains numerous reminders of its sordid past, but as you walk through the modernized form of Sister Cities park it’s worth remembering that things are rarely what they seem.

Categories
Snapshots of History

Looking back to find hope for the future of Philadelphia’s vacant land


A vacant property as seen in Society Hill in 1959.

By Yael Borofsky for the PhillyHistory Blog.

Even with recent forward inertia by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA) and the City of Philadelphia to implement a Landbank of vacant lots and the PRA’s recent release of vacant parcel availability map, the problem can seem sometimes feel intractable considering that there’s an estimated 40,000 vacant parcels in the city.

PRA’s new mapping tool shows about 9,000 city-controlled parcels, which it hopes will help systematize development of those lands. Matched with Google Street View, similarly as we’ve explored in this article, PRA’s vacant parcels map offers a more concrete sense of the neighborhoods that are blighted by these sometimes overgrown, sometimes barren slabs of urban soil.

As a result, in a tangible way, the problem, though vast, doesn’t feel so hopeless. Looking back through time (and the Department of Records’ vast archive), the City and its residents have successfully turned vacant blemishes into thriving businesses, homey residences, historic landmarks, and public parks.

Pictured at top left is 508 South 4th Street in October of 1959.

In the historic photograph are what appears to be a vacant lot with two businesses beside it — one shuttered, the other seemingly alive.

The Historical Commission has ownership records for the lot dating back to 1808 that suggest a printer from Lancaster named William Hamilton and his wife, Juliana, owned a residential home there. It was sold in 1815 to a hatter named Sam Robinson for $1,400.

The lot changed hands a number of times between then and 1954. According to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places the lot — with or without a building in place  — was designated as a historic place on January 22, 1963, not long after the Historical Commission was founded, probably as part of a mass designation of the block or Society Hill neighborhood. But between 1954 and 1963 the Historic Commission contains no additional records on the lot.

To the left, that same property is pictured on Google Street View as of 2009 (508 is the residence on the right with the light brown door). As you can clearly tell, years later, the lot has been transformed into useful residential parking.

As part of the Society Hill Historic District, the property was re-designated to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places in the 1990s. It is currently worth nearly $200,000 according to the Office of Property Assessment.


The vacant lot at 1017 Mount Vernon Street.

Or take this lot, pictured below left, as another example.

This vast tract of empty urban land — located roughly at 1017 Mount Vernon Street — was undoubtedly a source of consternation when this photo was taken. That same desolate space is now a colorful children’s public playground.

According to OPA records, the site is owned by the city and, as far as we can tell, is called the “10th and Lemon” park. The property was sold to the City in 1981 according to OPA.

A brief entry on the blog PhillyPlaygrounds tells us that this particular lot has “a very low playset with a single plastic slide and a chain of monkey bars,” some sort of climbing equipment, swings, a taller slide, and a shallow pool, presumably for summer water activities.

Here’s what 1017 Mount Vernon Street looks like today.

The playground is described as a fun spot for “toddlers and brave older kids” who undoubtedly prefer running around the brightly painted park to a lot full of dead crab grass.

While vacant land policy may continue to evolve over the coming months and years, these two repurposed vacant properties remind us of what we’re hoping to achieve, 40,000 times over.

Categories
Historic Sites

What’s Preserved and What’s Forgotten: The Louis Bergdoll and Sons Brewing Company Grain Elevator

City Park Brewery in 1948, after the brewery shut down,
from Pennsylvania Ave at 29th and Parrish.

The looming brick complex pictured left, situated at 29th and Parrish, is the brainchild of Otto C. Wolf, a Philadelphia staple in brewery architecture. Louis Bergdoll had the complex built to house his City Park Brewery in 1856 and it produced a popular lager for the city until Prohibition in 1920.

“It’s the crowning achievement of Wolf,” said beer historian Rich Wagner of the brilliant buildings located just north of the Art Museum. Today, the complex is known as The Brewery, a condominium named in homage to the Louis Bergdoll and Sons Brewing Company’s City Park Brewery.

Though we’ll never know for sure, City Park Brewery reportedly turned out one of the best tasting beers of its day.

Despite attempts by the Bergdoll family after Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the brewery was never fully operational again. Its demise isn’t unlike the narrative many of the Brewerytown breweries, including those along Philadelphia’s beer-laden Girard Ave., which shuttered for good.

“The brewmaster shot himself in the basement of the brewery,” Wagner says the story goes. “He was the brains of the outfit and when he blew his out that left them with nothing.”

It’s not the only bout of bad luck associated with the Bergdoll name, according to this 1924 Evening Tribune article about the curse associated with the original Bergdoll’s widow and surviving family.

Wagner, who is the author of the book Philadelphia Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in the Cradle of Liberty, (reviewed by Daily News beer columnist Joe Sixpack here) says it is “the most outstanding example of brewery preservation in the state” because it preserves what Wagner says was the “most beautiful brewery complex when it was in business” — as well as the memory of a once dominant brewery.

“Industry buildings can tend to be utilitarian,” Wagner said. “But in this day and age the brewers were bombastic. They wanted to have the biggest castle on the block.”

THE BREWERY TODAY


The grain elevator in 1932 at 29th and Pennsylvania Ave.

The existence of the Brewery Condominium, as its been known since it was revamped in the 1980s — a complex made of three buildings eponymously dubbed The Main House, The Brewery House, and The Ice House — tells only half of the Bergdoll Brewing Company’s story.

The other half can be told by what’s not been preserved: the grain elevator and malt house.

Ironically, the exclusion is emblematic of the fate of Philadelphia’s malting industry, which helped define Philadelphia beer brewing culture in the years before prohibition.

Malting is a process by which barley is turned into malt, a critical ingredient for brewing beer. The process involves allowing large quantities of barley, fresh from the fields, to sprout before being roasted, Wagner explained.

The malting industry in Philadelphia got its start with Anthony Morris in 1687, whose firm, the Perot Malting Co., had an office in Philadelphia into the 1960s, Wagner said. Most other maltsters weren’t so lucky after Prohibition dried up most of their customers.

The Louis Bergdoll and Sons Brewing Company, like quite a few other breweries in the city, produced its own malt. But Wagner says that of the approximately 20 malt houses in the city at the time, none operate today, as far as he knows.

This grain elevator (pictured left) marks a point where the barley that would become the malt for City Park Brewery’s beer entered the city, probably from Toronto, Wagner said. It’s also where the extra malted barley that wasn’t used at the brewery was shipped out.

According to the Hexamer map below, the Bergdoll Brewing Co. built the grain elevator in the early 1890s, not long before Louis Bergdoll passed away.

Large shipments of barley would be unloaded off railcars into the building and sent, probably in buckets, Wagner said, via conveyor system to the malting house. Then the brewed beer, high in demand, could make the block and a half trip back to the grain elevator for storage and eventual shipment out to thirsty beer drinkers.

The grain elevator was across the street but connected to the brewery’s campus, almost like a sort of strange external organ pumping barley around the complex and ultimately taking up the final, bubbling product and pushing it out to the world.

Wagner estimates that the grain elevator and malting house could have helped Louis Bergdoll and Sons Brewing Company malt about 200,000 bushels of barley a year.

Why wasn’t this critical and outward facing piece of the brewery’s architecture preserved?

Wagner thinks that between the building materials and its location immediately adjacent to the rail line, the grain elevator may have been too difficult to preserve.

If you look closely at this Hexamer map (close-up below) from 1892, you can see that the building was located directly on the rail tracks and made of cement, brick, corrugated iron, and a metal roof. It had “double flooring boards … with layer of Asbestos between,” according to the itemized account on the map.

Not exactly the ideal foundation and location for a condominium complex, particularly not “compared to those beautiful buildings of the brewery that are built to withstand the weight of tanks and tanks full of beer,” Wagner noted.

Still, the grain elevator’s decay reminds Philadelphia of its beer-drenched roots as much as the beautifully redone brewery residential complex just across 29th Street.

Map courtesy of Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network. It can be seen in greater detail here.

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Uncategorized

When Americans Feared the Crack in the Liberty Bell

Tracing the path of the Liberty Bell’s recently-discovered crack, December 23, 1912.

A crack in the Liberty Bell? No news there. But the discovery of a new, threatening crack through the word “Liberty” on the Liberty Bell? Well, that story resonated throughout the land.

About a century ago, Philadelphia’s itinerant icon of patriotism sprouted a 17-inch hairline crack extending clear across the bell’s crown. Metallurgist Alexander Outerbridge suggested it was so severe that vibrations from Chestnut Street traffic might “carry the crack around the bell and break it in two.” Philadelphians, who long considered the bell an easy come, easy go ambassador for freedom, cried out for a no-travel rule.

The hairline crack might have already been there when the bell made its debut in New Orleans at the World Industrial and Cotton Exposition in 1885. Or it might have appeared during the train ride to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Or when the bell made its way to Atlanta in 1895, Charleston in 1902, Boston in 1903 or Saint Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. Something like a caution prevailed in 1905, when the City turned down the bell’s proposed trip over the Rocky Mountains to Portland for the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905. That’s the year officials had Outerbridge inspect the bell.

The discovery of a new crack resulted in something like fear, for a while anyway. Even when newspaper headlines warned: “Liberty Bell’s Crack Longer,” the idea of one last, cross-country hurrah before the bell’s permanent retirement in Philadelphia resonated in the national imagination. Between 1909, when the new crack was discovered, and 1915, when San Francisco opened its Panama-Pacific Exposition, the Bell stood silently at the center of a battle of expertise, politics and patriotism.

In November 1912, The Washington Post presented an emotional case for travel in an article headlined “500,000 Want Liberty Bell – California School Children Sign Petition Asking Relic for Exposition.” San Franciscans had ushered their children’s two-mile-long scroll out of town with military honors. And when the petition arrived, Philadelphia officials balked in the limelight. “Trip of Liberty Bell Hot Issue,” declared The Boston Globe, “showing at San Francisco Would Do No Harm, Mayor Thinks.” In fact, Rudolph Blankenburg, Philadelphia’s newly-inaugurated reform Mayor, “declared he could see no particular danger in sending the historic relic on another journey… the display of patriotism aroused by the bell … more than overbalanced any danger that might be incurred.” A few weeks later he approved the cross-country swan song, which Gary Nash writes, stood out as “the grand crescendo of the Liberty Bell’s seven road trips.” Many of the San Francisco petitioners agreed.

Of course, the possibility of “Liberty” splitting on their watch instilled a special kind of fear in the City Fathers, a fear that the Foundering Fathers might return to haunt them. So they took a few precautions. First, they would hold onto the bell through July 4, 1915, telephonically transmitting its sound (as good as a wooden mallet might manage it) to the opening ceremonies in San Francisco.  And before the Bell crossed the country for the first time, they installed a six-pronged, “steel spider” inside the bell, hoping that might hold “Liberty” together. As luck, or fate, would have it, the Bell survived in one piece.

But we know the truth in this tale: that Liberty is never certain and nearly always threatened—and sometimes even by those charged with its protection.

Categories
Neighborhoods

The Bernsteins Move to Wynnefield

This is a continuation of the story of the Slifkin family, which had settled in Parkside in the early 1900s. 

By the end of the 1920s, many upwardly-mobile Jewish families were leaving Parkside-Girard and moving to the Wynnefield neighborhood, nestled to the south of City Avenue.  Unlike the rambling (and increasingly outdated) Victorian mansions and rowhouses of Parkside, most of Wynnefield’s homes were more compact and easier to maintain. There was also a broad spectrum of housing types, from inexpensive rowhouses to bona fide mansions, such as the one occupied (and modified) by famed Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer.  The newer houses also had rear alleys and garages, a welcome change from increasingly car-congested Parkside, with housing stock that dated from the “horse-and-buggy” era.

Another reason why affluent Jews chose Wynnefield was that many communities along the Main Line had discriminatory housing covenants.*

Among the Jewish families that moved to Wynnefield in the 1930s were Louis and Pauline Bernstein, and their son Albert (known as Sonny).  Pauline’s immigrant father Jacob Slifkin had become rich in garment making and real estate, and had housed his large family in a brooding Flemish revival mansion on Memorial Avenue, just a stone’s throw away from Fairmount Park.  Yet after Jacob’s death, the Slifkin family scattered and the “patriarch’s” house sold.

The back alley of homes of the 5400 block of Woodcrest and Wyndale Avenues.

Sometime in the mid-1930s, Louis and Pauline Bernstein purchased a spacious house on 5638 Wynndale Avenue.  At first, not everyone appreciated the move. Upon seeing the greenery of their new neighborhood, Pauline Bernstein burst into tears and exclaimed, “You’re moving me to the countryside!”

It was here in Wynnefield that their son Sonny (1924-2011) spent most of his childhood.  He graduated from Overbrook High School, which by then was drawing a large contingent of African-American students from Haddington and Lower Overbrook. Shortly after the war, he married Sylvia Weinberg, a native of South Philadelphia, at Har Zion synagogue at 54th and Wynnefield Avenue.

5424 Woodbine Avenue in 1959. These were the sorts of twins popular with upper-middle class families like the Bernsteins.

Wynnefield remained a predominately Jewish community for two decades after the end of World War II. It had strong community organizations, several synagogues, and good public schools.   Louis Bernstein, a former professional boxer and veteran of the First World War, would frequently meet up with members of his extended family at the Jewish War Veterans Association,  located on 54th Street. His son Sonny Bernstein (who worked as a bandleader and jazz pianist) purchased his own spacious house on the 5400 block of Woodbine Avenue after the death of his father, and mother Pauline moved in with him and his wife.  During the 1940s and 50s, Sonny Bernstein would head to Atlantic City during the summer, where he would play at the Traymore and the President.  While in town, he played with society band leader Meyer Davis, and also wrote vocal arrangements for an up-and-coming singer named Bobby Rydell.

Sonny and Sylvia’s son Michael Bernstein remembered that back then, the alleys behind Wynnefield’s houses were fun and safe places to play.  There were pharmacies and candy stores on the corner of almost every numbered street.  One day, Michael found a pair of Victorian bronze statuettes in a trash can and sold them to an antiques store on 52nd and Lancaster for $27.00.  As an adult, he would open his own antiques business on Montgomery Avenue.

A large turn-of-the-century mansion at 54th and Overbrook Avenue, 1953. Some of the homes in Wynnefield were as imposing as those found on the Main Line.

The Bernsteins remained in Wynnefield until 1966, when they moved across City Avenue to a new house in Merion Station.  By then, towns along the Main Line allowed Jews to purchase homes, and as a result a growing number of prosperous Wynnefield families jumped across City Avenue and moved to Merion, Bala Cynwyd, and Wynnewood.  By then, Wynnefield was transforming into an almost-completely African-American neighborhood.  The racial tension was there, although apparently not as strong as in other communities. As one African-American resident recalled at the time, “The Jew did not want to take on the role of oppressor. Being an oppressed people themselves, they did not want that.**

Yet by the 1980s, with the exception of a small Orthodox community, most of the Jewish residents of Wynnefield were gone, and the synagogues moved: Beth David to Gladwyne and Har Zion to Penn Valley.

*David P. Barady, “Wynnefield: Story of a Changing Neighborhood,” Murray Friedman, ed., Philadelphia Jewish Life, 1940-1985 (Ardmore, PA: The Seth Press, 1986), p.167.

**Newsletter, Wynnefield Residents Association), November 1969, p.3, as quoted by David P. Barady, “Wynnefield: Story of a Changing Neighborhood,” Murray Friedman, ed., Philadelphia Jewish Life, 1940-1985 (Ardmore, PA: The Seth Press, 1986), p.168.

*** Interviews and email correspondence with Matthew Marcucci, Michael Bernstein, Bonnie Bernstein, and Louis Bernstein, June 20-29, 2012.

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Uncategorized

More Hamburger History: When White Tower #1 Became Blue

White Tower #1. East side of Germantown Avenue between Allegheny Avenue and Roy Street, 1961

After burger battles flared in courtrooms and White Tower lost to White Castle, the struggle returned to the streets. In only a few years, both chains had successfully dispensed burgers from ubiquitous crenellated cubes. But now, in the midst of the Great Depression, the White Tower chain had been forced to abandon its crenellated design in more than a hundred restaurants.

Finding fresh architectural ideas would be the least of their problems. In November 1935, as Hirshorn and Izenour tell us, “White Tower advertised for an architect in the New York newspapers.” Here was not only the promise of design work, but the opportunity to reinvigorate an expanding national restaurant chain with locations in dozens of American cities. The menu would remain the same, but the package—White Tower’s restaurants—needed complete transformation.  Architects Charles L. Johnson and Barnett Sumner Gruzen were among those who answered the call.

“White Tower energetically experimented with reflective sheet materials – Vitrolite and porcelain enamel, writes Phillip Langdon. “Roofline crenellations disappeared. Leaded glass no longer appeared in the windows. Buttresses along the walls assumed an expression more Art Deco than medieval. … In 1935, B. Sumner Gruzen of New York produced a curving restaurant in the streamlined Art Moderne style. Others tried designs that combined the flowing lines of Moderne and the ziggurat effects of Art Deco. … Considerable experimentation was still going on in 1937, but by then … the Tower had left the Middle Ages and landed confidently in the Modern World.”

White Tower embraced the Modern World through design—and by seeking out the busiest sites in Philadelphia. Between 1930 and 1954, seven of the city’s White Towers had opened at stops along the Broad Street Subway. Commuters bought burgers at a third of the 19 stops (not half, as has been repeatedly claimed by hamburger historians). But the principle was clear and consistent: from the first location on Germantown Avenue near Allegheny Avenue in 1930 to the seventeenth at Broad and Hunting Park Avenue in 1954, every one of Philadelphia’s White Towers would be situated along public transportation lines in centers of high employment.

Philadelphia’s First White Tower, as is in 2012. Photograph by Betsy Manning.

Philadelphia #1 lit up a trolley stop near factories and mills that processed everything from milk to coal and produced everything from lace to steel tubing. White Tower had its go-to-solution, its multi-pronged formula: consistent, inexpensive, fast food; locations convenient to public transportation; proximity to workplaces; and 24/7 access. And it worked whether across from the Tasty Baking Company, atop the subway stairs at Broad and Race, under the Frankford El at Margaret Street, or opposite the Reading Terminal.

The formula worked when hamburgers were dispensed from crenellated restaurants and it worked even better after the restaurants were re-designed. In 1939, only nine years after Philadelphia’s #1 White Tower first appeared, architects re-cast it in sleek porcelain steel and Vitreolite.  They replaced battlements with an Art Deco clock tower—a premature Postmodern wink to the workers from nearby factories which had their own, dominating, dead-serious clock towers.

By the 1950s, the day of the urban burger had passed. Manufacturing declined or migrated away. Workers turned to the automobile. Fast food got faster, bigger, and moved beyond the city limits. And as for the architecture of fast food—White Towers gave way to Golden Arches—and Philadelphia’s #1, a barely-remembered survivor, turned blue.

Categories
Neighborhoods

Parkside Revisited: The Slifkin Family

42nd and Parkside Avenue, April 26, 1954.
The Brantwood Apartments (4130 Parkside Avenue), October 4, 1945.

To see my original article on the development of Parkside, click here.

During the early 1900s, Parkside-Girard evolved from being an upper-class German and Protestant neighborhood to a middle-class Eastern European Jewish one.   The neighborhood’s first synagogue opened in 1907 at 3940 Girard Avenue.* Many of the Jewish families who purchased the large Victorian twin homes fronting Parkside Avenue, as well as the smaller ones on Viola Street and Memorial Avenue, were originally from the immigrant neighborhoods of Northern Liberties and South Philadelphia. They often owned hat and dressmaking shops. Those in the garment trade described themselves as being in the “schmatte” business, Yiddish for “rag.”

Parkside was definitely an upgrade from stifling, congested old neighborhoods on the other side of the Schuylkill River — the ornate Victorian houses were big and roomy, offering plenty of space for large families, boarders, and servants for those who could afford them.  The verdant lawns and groves of West Fairmount Park offered plenty of green space for picnicking, baseball games, and sledding. For those seeking cultural attractions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was housed in Memorial Hall, a glass-domed behemoth that was the last surviving major building of the 1876 Centennial Exposition.  Until the museum moved to its new home in Fairmount in 1929, the world-class collection of Old Masters was within walking distance of the stoops of Parkside’s residents.

Then there was the Richard Smith Civil War Memorial, completed in 1912 and adorned with bronze statues of Generals Meade, McClellan, and Hancock. Its twin columns guarded the entrance to West Fairmount Park. Sunday strollers discovered that if they sat on benches on one side of the memorial, they could hear conversations from people on the other side. These seats became known as the “Whispering Benches.”

Memorial Hall, 1960. After the Philadelphia Museum of Art left in 1929, it became a community gymnasium, then a police station. It has recently been renovated as the new home for the “Please Touch” Museum.

Parkside was one of a few comfortable Philadelphia neighborhoods for Eastern European Jews who had transitioned to a more suburban lifestyle. Those who really achieved the American dream migrated from Parkside to Wynnefield, a nearby West Philadelphia neighborhood that boasted Tudor and Georgian houses as grand as those on the Main Line.

One such Jewish immigrant was Jacob Slifkin, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1885 from Dvinsk in modern day Latvia and eventually settled at 900 N. Marshall Street in Northern Liberties.   By the early 1910s, Slifkin had done well enough in the needle trade to purchase a seven bedroom, Flemish Revival home at 1726 Memorial Avenue, located just off Parkside Avenue between 41st and 42nd Streets.  The house was large enough not just to house daughters Anna, Pauline, Ida (and their respective husbands and children), but also Slifkin’s second wife’s parents, a set of live-in servants, and a family of borders.

During the Roaring Twenties, Slifkin invested his earnings from garment making in real estate, purchasing additional properties in West Philadelphia.  The man who had arrived in America with only a few dollars in his pocket was now a well-to-do businessman, the “patriarch” of a big family ensconced in a fine home.  Yet not all was idyllic in Parkside.  One summer evening young Sonny Bernstein, the son of Slifkin’s daughter Pauline, lay tossing and turning his bed, fighting the intense Philadelphia heat.  As he glanced out the window, a luxury car purred up the street and parked near the Slifkin home. Sonny remembered two sharply-dressed gangster types entering the house across the street. Two gunshots sounded, the men ran out, and the car screeched off into the night.

The Great Depression, triggered by the stock market crash of 1929, proved devastating to many of Parkside’s prosperous families. The Slifkins weathered the Great Depression better than most, but by the 1930s Jacob’s children moved out of their father’s house on Memorial Avenue to their own places in Wynnefield.

In the 1990s, Sonny Bernstein would take his grandson Matthew Marcucci to the “whispering benches” of the Smith Civil War Memorial, just as his parents Louis and Pauline Bernstein had before him.

“That might be Parkside’s only real legacy in my family,” Marcucci remembered.

1726 Memorial Avenue (center, with green trim), a c.1900 Flemish Revival house probably designed by architect H.E. Flower for brewer-developer Frederich Poth. During the 1920s, it was the home to three generations of the Slifkin family. Photograph: Steven B. Ujifusa

Eastern European Jewish families like the Slifkins often welcomed a “Landsman” family (Yiddish for a fellow Jew from the same village or province) as boarders in their houses. Sometimes husbands felt like boarders in their own homes. Listen to legendary Jewish entertainer Fyvush Finkel complain about this situation (in Yiddish) in this vintage recording. To listen, click HERE.

*Robert Morris Skaler, Images of America: West Philadelphia – University City to 52nd Street (Charleston, South Carolina: The Arcadia Press, 2002), p.117.

**Phone interviews and email correspondence with Matthew Marcucci, June 15-18, 2012.

Special thanks to Matthew Marcucci and members of the Bernstein family for making this article possible.

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Uncategorized

How White Tower Restaurants Lost Their Crenellation and Joined the Modern City

Southeast Corner of Broad and Race Sts., January 10, 1944. Photograph by Wenzel J. Hess.

White Tower opened its ninth location at Broad and Race Streets in 1932, only two years after expanding into Philadelphia. The Milwaukee-based company founded in 1926 by the father-son team John E. and Thomas E. Saxe produced restaurants at a fast-food pace. By the middle of the 1930s, the griddles of more than 120 White Tower restaurants in eleven American cities had forever changed the American foodscape. Day or night, so long as there was a nickel in your pocket, you were never far from a “pure beef” hamburger.

White Tower built their business model copying that of White Castle, a chain launched out of Wichita, Kansas in 1921. No detail went unnoticed as the Saxes studied and then replicated restaurants. They adopted the name, menu and pricing. The Saxes lured away White Castle staff to replicate operations. They even the co-opted the slogan: White Castle urged customers to “Buy ’em by the sack;” White Tower told  theirs to “Take home a bagful.” From Boston to Norfolk, Minneapolis to Philadelphia, both companies populated intersections with whitewashed crenelated clones—or, in the case of White Tower, clones of clones.

By the time bags of burgers started flying out of Broad and Race, White Tower and White Castle were three years into a lengthy court battle that would determine which company had the right to do what, and where they could do it. Two years later, the decision from a Michigan Court came down: White Tower’s copying would have to come to an end. In Detroit, where the chain had 46 restaurants, White Tower had to “change its name, architecture and slogan.”

Emboldened by this win, the founder of White Castle offered White Tower conditions for a settlement. According to David Gerard Hogan in Selling ‘em by the Sack, White Tower could continue using the name if the Saxes would pay a sizable lump sum, but they had to lose the crenellated, castle-like battlements.  The Saxes’ agreed to an immediate payment of $65,000 plus a subsequent payment of $17,000 – a total worth more than $1.3 million in today’s dollars. Plus, they would document their compliance in photographs.

In its transformation, White Tower abandoned its attachment to the ancient building style. Crenellations didn’t particularly say much about purity and service, anyway. But what would?

As Paul Hirshorn and Steven Izenour observed in their book, White Towers, this corporate quandary called for a “strong architectural idea.” And, as it turned out, the 1930s offered up potent choices. American architects and their corporate clients were in the midst of experimentation with the sleek, streamlined Art Deco and the newly-arrived International Style. Perfect. Without missing a beat, White Tower turned the American urban intersection into a proving ground for its reinvigorated image of cleanliness, consistency and modern service. One by one, the crenellated White Towers, including the one at Broad and Race, were replaced with moderne towers and clean cubes of white porcelain enamel, pristine billboards lit with goose-necked lamps deftly announcing that “hamburgers” were to be had.

So far as White Tower was concerned, the American embrace of its modernized hamburger was complete. By the 1950s, the chain had expanded to 230 restaurants, including seventeen in Philadelphia.

Next Week: More Philadelphia White Towers.

Southeast Corner of Broad and Race Sts., Oct. 23, 1951. Photograph by Francis Balionis.

 

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June 11, 1923: Fiery Destruction at Broad Street Station

The Conflagration at Broad Street Station, 15th and Market Streets, June 11, 1923.

Legend has it that a hapless Bulletin reporter overslept the Monday morning of June 11, 1923 and telephoned his editor from home. The conversation went something like this:

“Just got into Broad Street Station. The train was late. I’ll be in as soon as I’ve grabbed a cup of coffee.”

“You’re in Broad Street Station, huh,” said The Bulletin’s city editor as he glanced out of the newsroom window at the smoky chaos across Penn Square. “Well, I’ll tell you something – you’re going to have the hottest damn cup of coffee you’ve ever tasted.

The fire at Broad Street Station that started in the wee hours that morning would continue for nearly three days. It would interrupt the flow of more than half a million daily commuters destroy the icon of Philadelphia’s Iron Age.

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s first, relatively modest, 160-foot-wide shed had been surpassed in 1891 by the Reading Railroad’s, 256-foot structure at 12th and Market. Not to be outdone, and to meet the needs of their expanding ridership, the Pennsy hired the same engineers, Wilson Brothers & Co., to provide a new shed as massive as their busy site would allow. This 300-foot-8-inch-wide, 589-foot-2-inch-long, 108-foot-tall, 7,000,000 pound structure (but who’s counting) earned the title of the world’s largest single-span—and held it for decades. Broad Street’s shed rose as a symbol of the most extensive transportation infrastructure known—until, and even beyond, the fire of June 11, 1923.

Temples fall and icons fail, but they can then also thrive in the imagination. “Among the cloudy memories of early childhood it stands solidly, a home of thunders and shouting, of giant engines with the fiery droppings of coals and sudden jets of steam,” wrote Christopher Morley. Broad Street Station “was a place in which a delighted sense of adventure was closely mixed with fear.” Morley found Joseph Pennell’s rendering from 1919 a “perfect record of Broad Street’s lights and tones that linger in the eye—the hurling network of girders, the pattering of passengers, the upward eddies of smoke.” The shed linked regional and national, suburban and urban power for Philadelphians and visitors who felt in it an excitement akin to that of a world’s fair. In fact, the station, a symbol and anchor of the entire consolidated system, resonated with the worship of industry expressed at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876.

Morley was completely serious in his Elegy in A Railroad Station of 1952. “I preserve in pure imagination my memory of Broad Street Station,” he wrote, as the last of the place was knocked down to make way for Penn Center.

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Woodland Terrace and the Natchez Connection

S 41st St & Woodland Ave, 1963.
Houses on Woodland Terrace, 1963.

In light of the impending demolition by the University of Pennsylvania of the David Porter Leas mansion at 40th and Pine, it is a good time to revisit the life and work the man who designed it….

Longwood Plantation in Natchez, Mississippi sits just as it did in 1861, when scores of carpenters laid down their tools and fled to their homes up  North.  The largest and grandest of this summer colony’s mansions, Longwood is a bizarre blend of styles: an octagonal Italianan Renaissance palazzo crowned by a Byzantine onion dome.   The houses’s owner, cotton planter Dr. Haller Nutt, died one year before the Civil War ended, and his impoverished family moved into the basement.  Right out of a William Faulkner novel, it was known simply as “Nutt’s Folly.”

The career of Longwood’s designer followed a similar trajectory: astonishing success and extravagance followed by decline and neglect. Samuel Sloan (1815-1884) was not a Southerner, but a Philadelphian.  A native of Chester County, Sloan was trained as a carpenter, a common vocation for up-and-coming architects before formalized training was available in the United States.  Sloan was an artist to a certain extent, but he was also a very practical and aggressive businessman, described by a biographer as, “brash, opportunistic, inventive, a quick learner and a driving worker who was hungry for success and who had, throughout his life, an abiding belief in America’s destiny.”*

During his peak in the 1850s, Sloan specialized in speculative suburban twin homes for the upper-middle class and mansions for the wealthy.  Sloan’s blue ribbon commission was Bartram Hall, a veritable castle for railroad baron Andrew Eastick that included the grounds of the old John Bartram estate. It was probably the Eastwick palace that attracted the attention of the eccentric Dr. Haller Nutt, who probably instructed Sloan to outdo his Philadelphia counterpart.

Bartram Hall is long gone, but his residential designs are still extent in the Philadelphia “Streetcar Suburbs” of Germantown, Chestnut Hill, and West Philadelphia. Perhaps his most famous surviving commission  is Woodland Terrace, erected in the early 1860s for developer Charles M.S. Leslie.  Woodland Terrace occupies a small side street near the intersection of 40th and Baltimore Avenues (immediately to the north of scenic Woodlands Cemetery)  and consists of several four-story Italianate twins and detached houses.  This gem of a development is one of the last expressions of the “picturesque” suburban movement that reached its height before the Civil War.

Sloan’s signature Italianate style is a romantic interpretation of the Tuscan villas of the Renaissance.  According to James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell, the Italinate style was “every bit as romantic as the Gothic Revival but infinitely better adapted to the freer (and more family-oriented) lifestyle of an increasingly large and prosperous middle class.”* It is defined by flat roofs, large overhanging cornices supported by elaborate brackets, and as well as whimsical features such as campanile towers, conservatories, and cupolas.  Cross ventilation was important in Philadelphia’s humid summers: these houses boasted large floor-to-ceiling windows and generous porches overlooking tree-shaded streets.  The exterior walls were either exposed random-cut ashlar or stuccoed.

During the late nineteenth century, most of the big twin houses on Woodland Terrace were owned by Center City merchants who commuted to work on the horse-drawn trolleys.*** Because of its proximity to the University of Pennsylvania, Woodland Terrace and the immediate area also became a favorite address for faculty and for the city’s early twentieth century “creative” class.  Paul-Phillipe Cret (professor of architecture and designer of Rittenhouse Square, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Rodin Museum, and the original Barnes Foundation) lived with his wife in a large twin at 516 Woodland Terrace and frequently hosted dinners for students in true French fashion.  Just to the north, artist Adolph Borie occupied a Sloan-designed villa at 4000 Pine Street, which included a walled garden and a modern studio addition. During the 1920s, the Bories hosted salon-style parties where artists, writers and the city’s moneyed elite could freely mingle.****

After the Civil War, Sloan’s picturesque but relatively restrained style fell out of favor, and was replaced by the “baroque” grandeur of the Second Empire a and the cool classicism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  The once-prosperous Sloan fell on hard times, and supported himself by publishing a series of architecture books and a magazine entitled The Architectural Review.  He died forgotten in 1884.

David Leas Porter mansion. Designed by Samuel Sloan in the 1860s, it is now heavily-altered and slated for demolition.
The Adolph and Edith Borie mansion, 4000 Pine Street, 1963.
Andrew Eastwick’s “Bartram Hall.” Designed by Samuel Sloan. Source: University of Pennsylvania Archives (click on image to be directed to the original site).
Longwood, Natchez, Mississippi, designed by Samuel Sloan. Often known as “Nutt’s Folly.” Construction halted in 1861 and the interior of the upper floors were never completed. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

*Samuel Sloan (1815-1882), Architect, Philadelphia Architects and Buildings.  http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm?ArchitectId=A1287

**James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell, “Architectural Styles: Italianate,” Olde House Journal, http://www.oldhousejournal.com/architectural_styles_italianate/magazine/1565

***WEST PHILADELPHIA: THE BASIC HISTORY, Chapter 2: A Streetcar Suburb in the City: West Philadelphia, 1854-1907. http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/wphila/history/history2.html

****Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 339.