City Hall Tower-Statue Penn’s Head (PhillyHistory.org)
Back in 2005, the City of Philadelphia Department of Records launched the Photo Archives Website to provide access to historic photographs from the Philadelphia City Archives. A few months afterward, that site became PhillyHistory.org and we launched the PhillyHistory.org Blog to help tell the stories behind the photos. Ten years later, we’re excited to have over 130,000 historic photographs and maps from five organizations available that are viewed and searched by thousands of visitors each month.
We hope you’ll join us for a panel discussion on Wednesday, October 21, at 5pm at City Hall to celebrate ten years of PhillyHistory.org. We’ll explore PhillyHistory’s creation and development, lessons learned from ten years of maintaining a digital history project, and plans for future digitization initiatives. Please follow the RSVP directions at the event announcement if you’re interested in attending.
The “Celebrating PhillyHistory’s 10th Birthday” event is part of Archives Month Philly. Visit their website for a full list of events throughout the month of October!
Just about everyone knows that Pope Francis is scheduled to visit our area this weekend on Saturday September 26th- Sunday September 27th. Security will be tight, bridges will be closed, as will major highways and public transportation via SEPTA will be severely limited as well. Though it will be a major inconvenience for many Philadelphians who live and/or work in the affected area, it is expected to bring in millions of visitors to the city. This isn’t the first time that a Pope has visited us, though. Back in 1979, Pope John Paul II came here right after he was inaugurated.
This was a much quicker visit than what is being planned for Pope Francis next month, though. He arrived mid-day on October 3, 1979 and left at 11 AM the next morning for Des Moines, IA. During the time that he was here, he visited two churches and led a mass at the old Civic Center site and the day before, he led a large mass that attracted 1.5 to 2 million visitors at Logan Circle.
Ten years ago this month, the Live 8 benefit concerts (organized by Live Aid founder Bob Geldof) were held in G8 countries around the world and one of the cities chosen for the concerts was Philadelphia. Here are several photos of Stevie Wonder performing on the Ben Franklin Parkway. In one of the photos, he is joined by Adam Levine of Maroon 5 and Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20. Will Smith and members of Maroon 5 and Matchbox 20, along with Dave Matthews Band, The Kaiser Chiefs, Kanye West and Destiny’s Child were among the other performers featured in Philadelphia.
The G8 concerts were held in conjunction with the UK’s Make Poverty History campaign and the Global Call for Action Against Poverty. The Philadelphia concert was one of ten simultaneous Live 8 concerts that was held on July 2nd, 2005. They were held with the goal that the G8 nations would increase their support for aid to Africa and on July 7th, the G8 nations agreed to double aid from $25 million to $50 million. The concerts were also held approximately 20 years after Live Aid and Philadelphia was one of the first cities chosen to participate since it had been one of the sites of the Live Aid concerts.
36th and Lancaster Avenue, looking south down 36th Street towards the Market Street elevated line station. The line was placed underground in the 1960s. A corner of Lancaster Mews appears on the right — it now the terrace of the Aloosh Hookah Bar. The station stop and Queen Anne homes on the west side of 36th Street were demolished in the 1970s to make way for University City High School, now also under demolition. The “Old Quaker Building” on the left survives as apartments. The intersection of 36th and Market Street was the heart of the so-called “Black Bottom” area. Photograph dated November 17, 1947.
Yet another high rise student housing complex going up, billed as “luxury” apartments? At a community meeting last night, residents of the area expressed their concern at the possible loss of an historic anchor structure at the corner of 36th and Lancaster Avenue. The building entered the spotlight a few weeks ago, when Inga Saffron wrote in her “Changing Skyline” Inquirer column that the 1870s Second Empire building at 3600 Lancaster Avenue may be yet another victim of University City’s “frenzied real estate market.”
The recent demolition of the Boyd Theater near Rittenhouse Square has bothered many Philadelphians — for a city with so much well-preserved building stock, it now seems that anything is for sale.
Powelton’s homeowners are particularly on edge. Despite its wealth of historic Italianate and Queen Anne architecture, the neighborhood is almost completely unprotected by local historic ordinances. Over the past few years, several Victorian row houses and twins have been torn down and replaced by boxy, bland student apartment houses.
According to resident and local property owner Hanley Bodek, 3810 Hamilton Street is the latest house under threat. Over the past three decades, Bodek — along with his business partner John Lindsay — have carefully restored dozens of abandoned Victorian structures in the neighborhood. Until last year, Bodek taught a hands-on class at PennDesign about historic renovation called “Entrepreneurial Inner City Housing Markets,” in which a group of students renovated an abandoned Philadelphia row house and sold it to a low-income family.
Now, there are few vacant lots left in Powelton. Bodek owns 3808 Hamilton, the adjacent twin to the house now under threat. He restored the brick house at a time when “nobody wanted these houses.” Now, there are few vacant lots left in Powelton.
Glamorous, Lancaster Mews definitely is not, but it does have character and its own kind of utility, and houses a variety of local businesses that have thrived catering to students and Powelton Village residents alike: Aloosh hookah bar, Dr. Cycles bike repair, and Lemongrass Thai restaurant. They do not offer the sanitized predictability of the chains that occupy the lower levels of the latest crop of West Philadelphia student high rises, but they do offer character and a sense of place, and they provide a place for local, “basic needs” entrepreneurs.
“Such blocks are what make Philadelphia, well, Philadelphia,” Saffron astutely declared. And it was not built to be transient.
At least one local business owner feels threatened by the loss of the building. “Pure evil,” wrote Bodyrock Boot Camp owner Nate McIntyre in a Facebook post. “From the perspective of a small business owner on Lancaster Ave. that’s exactly what I call these plans by an outside developer and the city council woman to tear down this 150 year old historic, and thriving block of business and residences in my neighborhood.”
509 N.40th Street, which housed an automobile repair shop and a tailor’s shop, with apartments on the second and third floors. April 17, 1950.
Not a bad considering that two decades ago, the entire block now known as Lancaster Mews was largely abandoned, as was much of the Lancaster Avenue commercial corridor. After a thorough renovation, it now serves the same purpose as it did in the 1870s.
Lancaster Avenue, which branches out diagonally at the intersection of 30th Street and Market and continues all the way to Lancaster City, is the oldest turnpike in the country, opening for business in 1792. It was the starting point of Lewis and Clark’s journey west. After the Civil War, its right of way was the object of a fierce battle between the trains of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the trolleys of the Philadelphia Traction Company.
Despite its storied history, Lancaster Avenue and the buildings that grew up around it were comparatively hum-drum — most of its structures are mixed-used buildings erected in the second half of the 19th century. Aside from a cluster of grand houses in the Powelton neighborhood, this part of West Philadelphia was never an especially fancy part of town. According to architectural historian Robert Morris Skaler, it was an “economically diverse community,” mostly middle class, comprised of “old stock Americans, as well as more recent immigrants of German, Irish, and Italian descent,” who lived in modest three story row houses located within walking distance of shopping on Lancaster Avenue.
Queen Anne twins dating from c.1890 at 66. N. 36th Street, September 26, 1948. Demolished.
Not that the commercial buildings in the area were completely without flair. The now vanished William Penn Theater at 4063 Lancaster had an auditorium just as glamorous as the (now half demolished) Boyd’s near Rittenhouse Square. It was a favorite gathering place for Penn students, who in the 1920s had no qualms about crossing Market Street (and cutting class) to catch a movie. The curved face Hawthorne Hall, located just up the street from Lancaster Mews at 39th Street, is an Art Nouveau fantasy in red brick, terra cotta, and pressed tin. It once housed a drug store, theater, and other small businesses. A former apothecary shop catty-corner from Lancaster Mews boasts an elaborate pressed tin storefront that is a riot of Louis Sullivanesque plant forms.
Today, such design whimsy is largely confined to the ephemeral images that flash across the screens of our smart phones and tablets.
The street fronts of Lancaster Mews, 3612 Lancaster Avenue, December 12, 1951.
Some of Lancaster’s buildings have been butchered by modern signage or punctured by garage doors. Others are abandoned or in poor repair, with wood trim and cornices stripped. These once viable neighborhoods were victims of multiple forces: the rise of the automobile, redlining by banks and insurance companies, white flight, and government policies that favored new construction versus preservation.
Lancaster Mews, which still has its gingerbread trim and historically appropriate windows, represents a successful blending of historic preservation and redevelopment, in which a building is restored to much of its former appearance while still being viable from an economic standpoint. We have learned a lot since the 1960s, when mass demolition — i.e. Philadelphia’s “Black Bottom” — was rampant in American cities and old buildings were seen as disposable. Trouble still occurs when a neighborhood goes from grassroots historic preservation mode to big money demolition mode — hopefully Powelton Village and the Lancaster Avenue corridor will be revitalized without being sterilized. Philadelphia may rejoice in its economic resurgence, but new construction in a city as historic and well-preserved as this one should should be mindful and measured rather than frenzied.
Hawthorne Hall, built in the 1890s on the site of the former McIlvaine lumberyard. This photograph dates from c.1970. The pressed tin cornice on the second floor has been partially removed, but most of the terra cotta statuary and ornament remains.
Sources:
Inga Saffron, “Changing Skyline, Frenzied Real Estate Market Makes Any Building a Teardown Target,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2015.
Robert Morris Skaler, Images of America: West Philadelphia, University City to 52nd Street (Charleston, SC: The Arcadia Press, 2002), pp. 95,97.
Stephen Girard, in a posthumous portrait by B. Otis. Note his missing eye. Source: Wikipedia.
Stephen Girard, the French-born Philadelphia shipping tycoon, was famous for his hard driving work ethic. He came to America as a teenager, an orphaned cabin boy from the city of Bordeaux, and quickly established himself as a merchant who sent his ships to China and the Caribbean. Along with John Jacob Astor of New York and Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Boston, he was active in the China trade, speculating in tea and opium. During the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1794, he personally took care of the sick and dying at a private estate that he had transformed into a hospital. Proud of his adopted country, he named his sailing ships after French Enlightenment figures and ideals: Liberty, Montesquieu, Voltaire. He took over the First Bank of the United States after its charter expired. He immodestly named it the Bank of Stephen Girard, and as sole proprietor made millions lending funds to start up new businesses and to fund public improvements such as turnpikes and canals.
He could also avaricious and cruel. When his wife developed mental health problems in the 1780s, he committed her to the insane ward of the Pennsylvania Hospital and took up with a mistress.
He died in 1831, aged 81, with a fortune of $7.5 million (the modern equivalent of $105 billion) making him according to one calculation the fourth richest American in history, adjusted for percentage of national GDP. This places him behind only John D. Rockefeller (adjusted wealth $336 billion), Cornelius Vanderbilt ($185 billion), and John Jacob Astor ($100 billion).
Yet Girard left no direct or legitimate heirs. He gave virtually all of his massive fortune to the city of Philadelphia. His hotly-contested will’s most famous provision was the establishment of a charity school for “white, male orphans” that would become Girard College. The estate also controlled vast swaths of land in Philadelphia and its suburbs. Among them was a place very dear to Girard’s heart: Gentilhommiere (“A Gentleman’s Home”), a summer retreat he built in the village of Passyunk.
Gentilhommiere, the Stephen Girard Mansion at 22nd and Shunk Streets, 1972.
Unlike Germantown, where wealthy Philadelphians such as the Chews built grand summer retreats, Passyunk never became a fashionable summer retreat for the city’s elite. The land was flat and marshy. The Schuylkill River snaked lazily southward in the distance. Although similar in style to Benjamin Chew’s Cliveden, Gentilhommiere is hardly baronial in scale. It is low-slung and sparsely ornamented, more a predecessor to the Adirondack camps than the chateaux of Newport. Girard could have easily afforded a grander place — the Hare’s Powelton mansion in West Philadelphia and Biddle’s Andalusia on the Delaware rivaled the finest English country homes — but he set an early example of reverse snobbery. Never much of a social animal, the one-eyed old salt enjoyed time away from the cares of commerce, in the company of his mistress and a few close friends.
Girard’s will stipulated that his beloved Gentilhommiere be maintained in perpetuity by the city of Philadelphia as a public park. It would be as if Bill Gates left his 64,000 square foot Xanadu 2.0 estate outside of Seattle as a house museum, with an endowment left to run it.
By the 1910s, nearly a century after the tycoon’s death, the Girard Estate office decided to develop the former farmland around the mansion with upper-middle class housing, which would then be rented out for additional income. Architect John Windrim, designer of the titanic Delaware Electric Generating Station and and son of Frank Furness’s most hated rival, laid out plans for blocks of row houses and twins in a variety of period styles: Spanish mission, Tudor, Georgian, and Craftsman Bungalow. Compared to the squat, plain row houses springing up all over South Philadelphia, the homes of “Girard Estates” were palatial, and their association with the famed financier’s gentlemen’s farm gave added prestige.
Starting in the 1950s, the Girard Estate office began selling off the 481 rental properties to individual homebuyers. The people who lived in these homes were doctors, lawyers, and successful small business owners. The land immediately around the old Girard mansion remained open as parkland, however.
One mafia don known as “The Chicken Man” made Girard Estates his home, but he never made it out of his home at 2211 W. Porter Street alive. He was Phil Testa, head of Philadelphia’s Scarfi crime family. The de facto head of the Philadelphia Mafia fancied himself the Julius Caesar of the Mob. And like Caesar, this don met his end on the Ides of March, when a nail bomb planted in his home blew the “Chicken Man” to smithereens. Phil Testa’s death on March 15, 1981 was the opening salvo to the so-called Philadelphia Mafia Wars, which raged for several years afterward. “Bodies were falling all the time,” said one law enforcement official at the time. “You would be afraid to lay your head down at night for fear the phone would start ringing, calling you out to another one.” Testa’s son Salvatore followed in his father’s footsteps, serving as the Scarfi’s main hit man, until he too was killed — in the back of the Too Sweet candy store in South Philadelphia.
The former Testa house, a Craftsman bungalow located right across from Girard’s Gentilhommiere, was restored and is once again a private home.
Mugshot of Phil “Chicken Man” Testa. Source: Wikipedia.2117 W. Porter Street, where Phil Testa met his end in 1981. Source: “2117 W. Porter St, Philadelphia, PA” by Centpacrr at English Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Footage of the last steam trains of the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1954.
For those who regularly ride the Main Line trains: have you ever wondered why there are no stops between 30th Street Station and Overbrook? After Overbrook, however, the train stops nearly every two minutes. There’s an old — and very politically incorrect — mnemonic device for memorizing the towns on the Main Line: “Old Maids Never Wed and Have Babies. Period.” Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr. Paoli.
The bridge spanning the Schuylkill River in 1876, which connected Center City with the now-vanished Baltimore and Ohio station at 24th and Chestnut, designed by Frank Furness.
Thankfully, this phrase has fallen out of popular use. As the Philadelphia Inquirer quipped in a 1988 article that quoted it: “But let’s not forget what the Main Line, at the bottom line, really is. The term is so ingrained in our local patois that we tend to detach it from the real meaning. The Main Line is – well, the main line. Tracks and sidings. Signals and stations. Switches, whistles.”
The demolished Baltimore & Ohio station at 24th and Chestnut, designed by Frank Furness. Source: HABS/HAERThe 44th and Parkside ballpark, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA. Source: Wikipedia.
The Pennsylvania Railroad’s development of its right-of-way was a shrewd real estate deal. Rather than haggle with Philadelphia city government and acquire parcels piecemeal, they could buy up huge swaths of farmland outside of the city limits and develop it as they saw fit. Until the turn of the twentieth century, there were two other stops before the Main Line trains chugged from 30th Street, through West Philadelphia, and across City Avenue: Powelton Village and Parkside. According to architectural historian Robert Morris Skaler, Powelton became a popular residence for executives of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Baldwin Locomotive Works, and “even had a special railroad stop at Powelton Avenue for the Pennsylvania Railroad’s executives to travel by train to their offices.” The Pennsylvania Railroad also had a stop at 52nd Street and Lancaster Avenue, labeled as the Hestonville Depot in an 1872 map. This stop later grew into a sprawling rail yard that cast a sooty, noisy pall over much of the adjacent Parkside neighborhood. Nearby was the 44th and Parkside ballpark, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA in 1903 and home of the African-American league Philadelphia Stars.
The intersection of Lancaster Avenue and 52nd Street, the location of the now-closed 52nd Street depot and passenger stop. Photograph taken February 21, 1949.
Therefore, it could be argued in fact that Powelton Village was the first stop on the Main Line, the stretch of track connecting Philadelphia with Pittsburgh.
Much of the grand residential architecture that survives in Powelton today is a harbinger of the grand suburban development that grew up around the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line tracks in the 1890s and early 1900s. Powelton is a hybrid of streetcar and railroad suburban development: for the second half of the nineteenth century, it was serviced by both horse drawn (later electric) streetcars and by Main Line trains. The surviving freestanding mansions on Powelton Avenue, Baring Street, and Hamilton Street are large and ornate, yet they are set within walking distance of each other rather than being secluded on larger lots as they were on the Main Line. They are also located within a few minutes walk of the former Powelton Avenue stop. Unlike the Main Line developments, there are also a significant number of twin houses and row house blocks intermingled with the free-standing houses.
The Henry Cochran mansion at 36th and Baring Street, built in the 1890s by architect Wilson Eyre Jr. Photograph dated December 12, 1962
Several well-known Philadelphia architects got in on the act of building up Powelton. Wilson Eyre Jr., designer of many large houses in Rittenhouse Square and the Philadelphia suburbs, also worked on at least two houses in Powelton Village. One was a substantial freestanding mansion for wine merchant Henry Cochran, located on the corner of 36th and Baring Streets. Another was a renovation of a narrow twin house on the 3500 block of Hamilton Street. In both of these projects, Eyre displayed his characteristic sense of whimsy and invention, much of it medieval in inspiration. He also avoided the gaudy grandeur that characterized so much late Victorian architecture. Among other commissions, Eyre was responsible for the University Museum, the Mask & Wig clubhouse, and suburban estates such as Horatio Gates Lloyd’s “Allgates” mansion in Haverford. In the words of the Historic Commission’s Diana Marcelo: “Eyre detested an overload of ornamentation. He had a feeling of proportion, and a tendency toward extended horizontal planes. His buildings had crisp lines and much expression, achieved by a careful blend of varying materials.” The Cochran house bears more than a passing resemblance to the early residential work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In many ways, Eyre’s Powelton and Wright’s Oak Park were similar suburban communities.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (now St. Andrew and St. Monica’s Episcopal Church) at 36th and Baring Streets. This was the location of Max Riebenack’s funeral in September 1903. Photograph dated December 14, 1962.
The neighborhood prospered for a few decades thanks to the station stop and the infusion of railroad money. From the 1870s until the early 1900s, because of its proximity to the old 30th Street depot, Powelton Village was a neighborhood of choice for Pennsylvania Railroad executives. Max Riebenack was perhaps the most prominent of the PRR executives who lived in West Philadelphia. Riebenack was an American success story: a German immigrant whose parents brought him to America as a six year old boy in 1850. By 1895, he had risen to the position of comptroller of the Pennsylvania Railroad, working alongside executives like Alexander Cassatt, mastermind of New York’s Pennsylvania Station and its tunnels. Yet rather than move to Rittenhouse Square or the Main Line, Riebenack preferred to live “North of Market” in West Philadelphia, close to fellow German immigrants such as brewer Frederick Augustus Poth. With his newfound wealth, Riebenack purchased a plot of land for $14,000 (the equivalent of about $300,000 today) at the corner of 34th and Powelton Avenue. He then commissioned architect Thomas Preston Lonsdale to build a spiky roofed Queen Anne style mansion that rose high above the street.
As a high-ranking executive of one of the largest corporations in the world, Max clearly liked living large, joining many clubs during his time on North 34th Street, both in town (the Union League) and in the suburbs (the Merion Cricket Club). The house, now Drexel University’s Ross Commons, was built for grand entertaining. The Philadelphia Inquirer breathlessly described the Riebenack’s silver wedding anniversary as follows:
“A largely attended reception was given last night at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Max Riebenack, at Thirty-fourth and Powelton avenue, on the occasion of the silver anniversary of their wedding. The house was handsomely decorated and an orchestra furnished music in the spacious hallway from behind a fern-covered nook. The house was lighted up throughout with electric lights and crowded with guests. Mr. and Mrs. Riebenack were assisted in receiving their guests by Mrs. Conrad T. Clothier. Many of the presents were handsome and valuable.”
Max Riebenack, Comptroller for the Pennsylvania Railroad and builder of the mansion that now serves as Drexel University’s Ross Commons. Source: Findagrave.com
Unfortunately, Max and Eleanor Riebenack suffered two terrible personal tragedies. In 1903, their thirty year old son Max Jr. died of typhoid fever in the family home on Powelton Avenue. Five years later, another son, Henry – an inventor and former track star at the University of Pennsylvania — also died of disease, this time at the family’s beach house in Atlantic City, New Jersey. By the time Max Riebenack himself died in 1910, the neighborhood’s most fashionable days had past. When the Powelton Avenue stop closed, the neighborhood became much less accessible to Center City and the PRR’s offices at Broad Street Station. Many of those with money moved to the Main Line towns past City Avenue, and the large mansions they left behind were converted into boarding houses.
So ended Powelton’s short reign as the “first stop” on the Main Line.
Sources:
Robert Morris Skaler, Images of America: West Philadelphia – University City to 52nd Street (Charleston, South Carolina: The Arcadia Press, 2002), p.77.
“West Philadelphia: The Basic History, Chapter 2: A Streetcar Suburb in the City: West Philadelphia, 1854-1907,” West Philadelphia Community History Center. http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/wphila/history/history2.html
“227. N. 34th Street, Philadelphia,” http://poweltonvillage.org/interactivemap/files/227n34th.htm
Sally Downey, “Tracking the Main Line from Overbrook to Paoli: The World from the 17 Stops of the R5 Local,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 5, 1988. http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-05/entertainment/26241651_1_train-station-signals-and-stations-bottom-line
Diana Marcelo, “National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form: Wilson Eyre Home” (Philadelphia, PA: The Philadelphia Historical Commission, April 1976.) https://www.dot7.state.pa.us/ce_imagery/phmc_scans/H001363_01H.pdf
A three masted lumber schooner docked at Race Street and Delaware Avenue, January 17, 1900.
On December 9, 1909, the lumber schooner Governor Ames set sail from Brunswick, Georgia on a routine coasting voyage to New York. Onboard were 14 souls, including Captain King and his wife. Lashed onto her upper deck was a cargo of freshly cut railroad ties, most likely headed for the New York Central Railroad’s supply yard.
Captain King was in command of a unique vessel. When launched in 1888, the Governor Ames (named after Massachusetts governor Oliver Ames) was the only five masted schooner in the world, and one of the largest cargo vessels afloat, grossing 1,600 tons and stretching 252 feet in length. She was also an expensive ship, costing $75,000. Her owners, the Atlantic Shipping Company of Somerset, Massachusetts, had built the Ames for short cargo runs up and down the Eastern Seaboard, as well as longer runs to South America. She was also swift, with a reputation of being “speedy and a good sea boat.”
Yet the Governor Ames got off to a bad start on her maiden voyage from Boston to Baltimore. In December 1888, she was dismasted off Cape Cod and ran aground on Georges Bank. As the wrecked ship groaned and wallowed in the Atlantic, the wet and shivering crew prayed for help before the Ames broke up. “Here we remained clearing up and waiting for assistance,” recounted J.F. Davis, the brother of the Ames’s captain. “Up to Sunday we saw but few vessels, and they passed at a distance. Sunday, the fishing schooner Ethel Maude of Gloucester ran up to us, and we made a bargain for a passage for myself and the two extra carpenters to Gloucester. The extent of the damage at the time I left the vessel was about $10,000 due to loss of spars.”
Miraculously, no lives were lost, and the maimed Ames did not break up. Help arrived, and she was re-floated and repaired by February of the following year. She departed New Haven, Connecticut for Buenos Aires, Argentina carrying 2,000,000 board feet of lumber, expected to sell for $15.50 per square foot. Three months later, she departed Portland, Maine, carrying a similar sized cargo of spruce, valued at nearly $30,000 and according to The New York Times, “the largest cargo, perhaps with one exception, ever taken by an American vessel.” Ill-luck continued to dog the Ames. She ran aground again in 1899, this time in the warm waters off Key West while en route from Philadelphia to Galveston. To refloat her, the crew had to throw 200 tons of coal overboard. This time, she suffered minimal damage.
Governor Oliver Ames of Massachusetts (1831-1895), namesake of the schooner Governor Ames. Source: Wikipedia.com
After the Key West grounding, the curse on the Ames lifted. When Captain King guided his vessel up the stormy Atlantic Coast in December 1909, the Ames and been accident-free for almost a decade. She had even survived a few brutal trips around stormy Cape Horn, hauling New England lumber to Australia. Although the air was frigid and the iron seas menacing, this run to New York would be a routine trip by comparison to battling Cape Horn westerlies. The Governor Ames was a twenty year old veteran.
***
The sailing ship did not die out with the coming of the deep water steamer in the mid-19th century. Well into the 1900s, soaring masts were a common sight along the Delaware River. Big, steam-powered craft did wipe out the clipper ships and North Atlantic packets on the ocean routes, but the versatile schooner remained popular for hauling basic, low-cost bulk cargoes such as coal, timber, gravel, railroad ties, and ice, especially to and from smaller ports that did not have railroad access.
The name of this three-masted schooner depicted at Race Street and Delaware Avenue hast been lost to history. There was little concept of tall ship “romance” when this photograph was taken. People took these ships for granted. It was only after the schooners vanished — supplanted first by the railroad and the Mack truck — did people lament their disappearance. As singer-songwriter Stan Rogers said about the Nova Scotian schooner Bluenose, she “knew hard work in her time. Hard work in every line.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWUD_r6E4U8&w=480&h=360] 1930s footage of the Nova Scotia schooner “Bluenose” racing against her Gloucester, Massachusetts rival “Gertrude L. Thibault.” Set to the music of Stan Rogers.
A schooner has two or more masts, all of which are rigged with “fore-and-aft” sails. The triangular sails allowed captains to sail their ships close to the wind, something that square riggers could not do. They could also tack easily, making them maneuverable in coastal waters and remote ports. Most importantly, their lack of yards — with exception of topsail schooners, which had one or two square sails on their foremasts — meant that the crew did not have to climb aloft to make or trim sail except in an emergency. On a schooner, a crew almost always remained on deck to hoist and lower sail. By the late 19th century, steam-powered donkey engines on deck assisted the crews with the heavy-lifting on bigger schooners.
For the shipowner, the smaller crew drastically cut reduced a vessel’s operating cost. For example: the big, square-rigged California clipper ships of the 1850s — the most famous of which was the Flying Cloud — needed about 60 crew members to operate efficiently. A comparably sized five masted schooner such as the Governor Ames of 1888, built for the lumber trade, required only 12 men to sail. Not having to buy and store coal for fuel also saved money, and freed up space for cargo.
For two centuries, the schooner was the served as the humble workhorse of the American mercantile marine, a common sight in big harbors and small ports all along the Eastern Seaboard. They were relatively cheap to build out of abundant native timber, especially in Maine. According to naval historian Howard Chappelle, “in spite of the fact that ships and square riggers have monopolized certain important trades, such as the packet and East Indian, and though they handled large and valued cargoes individually, the total tonnage and value of such cargoes were small compared to that carried by the schooners engaged in the coasting and foreign trades.”
***
On December 25, 1909, as Philadelphians gathered in warm, pine-festooned churches to celebrate Christmas, a battered, badly-shaken Joseph Speering arrived in Philadelphia on the steamship Shawmut. He was the sole survivor of the Governor Ames, which had sunk off North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras in a gale twelve days earlier. He told the press that everyone else onboard had either been drowned or crushed to death by collapsing masts, including the captain’s wife, who the crew had lashed to the rigging in an attempt to protect her from the boiling seas crashing over the schooner’s bulwarks. As the Ames’s wooden keel bounced up and down against the rocky shoals, Speering jumped overboard and clung to a floating hatch cover. He then watched the Governor Ames break up and sink.
All alone, Speering clung to the hatch cover for over twelve hours before the crew of the passing Shawmut lowered a lifeboat and plucked him from the frigid seas.
Launch of the five masted schooner Governor Ames in Waldeboro. Source: Wikipedia.comThe Governor Ames under sail. Source: Wikipedia.com.
Sources:
“A Big Lumber Schooner,” The New York Times, February 15, 1889.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F05E0D6153AE033A25755C1A9649C94689FD7CF
“The Five Masted Schooner Missing,” The Philadelphia North American, March 3, 1895.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9905E3D61139E033A25750C0A9659C94649ED7CF
“A Large Cargo of Lumber,” The New York Times, April 30, 1889.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9901E6D8123AE033A25752C0A9639C94689FD7CF
“An Unlucky Voyage: The New Schooner Governor Ames Badly Wrecked,” The New York Times, December 18, 1888.
Howard Irving Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York, NY: Bonanza Books, 1935), p. 219.
The Second Bank of the United States, 420 Chestnut Street. A photograph from 1859.
Before he locked horns with President Andrew Jackson over the fate of the “many headed monster” (a.k.a. The Second Bank of the United States), banker Nicholas Biddle fancied himself something of a poet and aesthete. Born to wealth and blessed with brilliance, Biddle graduated from Princeton University — at the head of his class — at the tender age of 15. This was only after the University of Pennsylvania refused to grant the Philadelphia wunderkind a bachelors degree a few years before.
The young Nicholas Biddle. Source: Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitalization Project.
Like John Quincy Adams, Biddle (1785-1844) was well-traveled from an early age. In 1804, he accompanied the American minister John Armstrong to France as his personal secretary, and sat in the pews of Notre-Dame as Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France. In England, the dashing and probably cocky Nicholas had the gumption to verbally spar with University of Cambridge dons about the differences between ancient and modern Greek. Biddle’s sojourns were hardly unique. By the early 1800s, scores of Americans had visited Europe either as diplomats or merrymakers on the “Grand Tour.” Another Philadelphian, the late Dr. Benjamin Franklin, was still revered in France, where his bespectacled visage still adorned countless Parisian homes. John Quincy Adams had been as far afield as St. Petersburg, where he served as America’s first minister to Russia.
But Nicholas Biddle was only the second American to visit Greece, the birthplace of modern democracy. In May 1806, the young Philadelphian sailed from the Italian port of Trieste and landed in Zante, Greece. For three months, he roamed through the land which had been “the first brilliant object that met my infancy.” Like many well-educated men of his time, Biddle supported Greece’s struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Another aristocratic man of letters, Lord Byron, died fighting with the Greek army twenty years after Biddle’s visit. Composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote incidental music for August von Kotzebue’s 1811 play The Ruins of Athens for a performance in Budapest. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s engravings of classical ruins were wildly popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and inspired the Americans architects such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Latrobe.
“Lord Byron in Albanian Dress,” an 1813 painting by Thomas Phillips. Source: Wikipedia.
Biddle, himself possessed of Byronic good looks, was conscious of the influence that Greek philosophers had on American political theorists. “Where are her orators?” he wrote of the Greeks. “Gone forth to enlighten distant nation without a solitary ray for their country. Whilst foreign erudition has lighted its lamp at the flame of their genius, their works are unknown to posterity.”
As Biddle gazed at the ruins of the Acropolis in Athens, he came to believe that this architectural language was best suited to the ideals of new American Republic, which strangely like Greece was heavily based on chattel slavery. To Biddle, the best Greek buildings had an understated majesty. This was a result of their purity of form, use of the “Golden Ratio” of 1 to 1.618, and richness of materials over mere ornamentation.
The Doric Order as used on the Parthenon. The vertically grooved sections of the lintel are called triglyphs, while the blank portion are called metopes. The metopes usually were the backdrop for sculpture. Source: Wikipedia.
The Parthenon, commissioned by Pericles and designed by the architect Iktinos in the 5th century B.C., was built using the most “masculine” of the Greek orders: Doric. In the Doric order, columns were massive and fluted, and topped by smooth flared capitals. The architrave – the stone lintel supported by the columns – was likewise spare, decorated with grooved triglyphs and metopes that mimicked earlier wooden post-and-lintel construction. Because of its austerity, the Doric was the least popular order in neoclassical Western architecture, particularly in the churches and palaces that Biddle saw in France and Rome. The other two orders, Ionic and Corinthian, were more elaborate and romantic in their aesthetic. In the new American capital of Washington, D.C., architect William Thornton used the Corinthian order on the Capitol Building, while James Hoban used Ionic for his “presidential palace,” more popularly known as the White House. But to Biddle, the Doric’s restraint appealed to his purest classical sensibilities, in which less was indeed more. And Doric was not tainted with associations with Imperial Rome and the European absolutist monarchies that followed it.
Piranesi’s drawing of the Ionic order as used on the Roman temple of Portunus. The Ionic order is used on the White House. Source: Wikipedia.The Corinthian order, as used on the Pantheon in Rome. The Corinthian order is used on the U.S. Capitol. Source: Wikipedia.
Biddle might have revered the ancient Greeks, but he was disgusted by the state of Athenian affairs in 1806. He, like many Westerners, blamed Greece’s sorry state on the Turks. The Parthenon was a victim of this long occupation. In 1687, after having stood nearly intact for centuries, the Parthenon, which the Turks were using as an arsenal, was hit by a shell from Venetian guns. Biddle gazed on the crumbling ruins with despair. “Are these few wretches, scarcely superior to the beasts whom they drive heedlessly over the ruins, are these men Athenians?” he wrote. “Where is their freedom? Alas! This is the keenest stab of all. Bowed down by a foul oppression, the spirit of Athens has bent under slavery. The deliberations of her assemblies were once their laws; they now obey the orders of a distant master, and on the citadel itself, the protectress & the asylum of Grecian freedom, now sits a little Turkish despot to terrify & to command.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUPAf7eEo0o&w=480&h=360]
Overture and chorus from “The Ruins of Athens” by Ludwig van Beethoven.
The ruined Parthenon in the 1830s, with a mosque built in the center. Source: Wikipedia.
The “little Turkish despot” Biddle referred to was most likely not a man, but the small mosque that the Turks had built in the middle of the ruined Parthenon.
When Biddle returned to Philadelphia, he must have looked with dismay at the architecture of his own sober Quaker City. Most of its buildings were of plain red brick with white wood trim, various versions of the British-influenced Georgian or the somewhat newer Roman-influenced Federal style. Over the coming years, as Biddle rapidly ascended local and national power structures, Biddle made it his mission to transform the City of Brotherly Love (φιλεω“to love” and αδελφος “brother”) into the Athens of America. He founded and edited Port-Folio, the nation’s first literary magazine. Soon after he married the heiress Jane Craig, Biddle remodeled his country residence “Andalusia” on the Delaware River and his city home on the 700 block of Spruce Street in the Greek style. When appointed as the head of the Second Bank of the United States, Biddle commissioned the architect William Strickland to build an adaptation of the Parthenon as its new home. Completed in 1824, it was made entirely of Pennsylvania blue marble.
The Nicholas Biddle house at 715 Spruce Street, on the left, in February 1959.
Nicholas Biddle House at 715 Spruce Street in 1972, post restoration.
Nicholas Biddle’s mortal struggle with President Andrew Jackson is well-known, as is his hubristic fall from grace. Yet the beautiful Greek-influenced buildings he commissioned in and around Philadelphia still grace his native city, which was once known as the Athens of America.
Sources:
William Harris, “The Golden Mean,” Humanities and Liberal Arts, Middlebury College. http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Humanities/TheGoldenMean.html#refpoint4
R.A. McNeal, ed. Nicholas Biddle in Greece: The Journals and Letters (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p.50, 219.
You may have heard that the Philadelphia International Records building at 309 South Broad St, which since 1970 had been owned by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, was recently demolished to make room for a condo and hotel development that new owners Dranoff Properties plan to open at 301-309 South Broad St. The loss of this building is devastating from a preservationist point of view, while almost inevitable given that it never recovered from a 2010 arson fire. Not only does it have a plethora of history as a building that Gamble and Huff had owned since 1973, but before that, it was the headquarters of the equally legendary Cameo-Parkway label in the 1950s and 1960s. Each of these eras represent two distinct periods in which the sounds coming out of Philadelphia, and that building specifically, were not only some of the most popular but some of the most moving and important recordings of each respective time period.
The history of the building is impressive, to say the least. Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” a paradigm-shifting song that was a massive hit in 1961, was recorded there during the initial era. And during that time period, other Philadelphia artists like Charlie Gracie, Bobby Rydell, the Dovells, the Orlons, Dee Dee Sharp and The Tymes also recorded there.
The second era saw hits like Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones,” The O’Jays’ “Love Train” and the original versions of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” and “Don’t Leave Me This Way” (both by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, featuring Teddy Pendergrass on lead vocals). Overall, Gamble and Huff (on many occasions assisted by the producer and songwriter Thom Bell) have over 50 Gold and Platinum records and over 50 Top 10 hits.
After the hits dried up by the late ’80s, it became a major tourist attraction that has always been the site of film documentaries, television specials, receptions and events such as one honoring Motown founder Berry Gordy. While we can debate if a museum to honor Philadelphia’s rich musical legacy (such as ones that exist in Memphis, Detroit and in other cities’ legendary recording studios) is necessary and while it’s also understandable why the building was sold, it’s almost certain that 309 South Broad Street would have been a great site for it. Now, unfortunately, we will never know.
When Americans are asked about the Sears Tower, they normally call to mind the recently renamed Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois. However, if asked about a Sears Tower when in Philadelphia, you’re likely to get a different answer. In Northeast Philadelphia, where Adams Avenue meets Roosevelt Boulevard, the 14-story Sears clock tower stood for over 70 years.
Sears visible from Roosevelt Boulevard.Side of Sears building with the bottom section of tower visible.
In the 1900s, the Sears, Roebuck & Co. was still growing rapidly in the United States. With the company’s need to expand eastward from Chicago, Philadelphia was highlighted as a possible location for one of their mail-order houses and plants. With the city’s important railroad access, the Northeast Philadelphia section, along Roosevelt Boulevard was chosen as a location.
From 1919 to 1920, Sears, Roebuck & Co. constructed a large complex that consisted of a large 9-story building that included a 14-story clock tower. The neo-Gothic brick building was designed by George C. Nimmons, a Chicago-area architect who had worked for Sears, Roebuck & Co. previously, even designing the company president’s home.
The building opened October 18, 1920 even though parts of it were still unfinished. This was just one of the companies allowing the Northeast section of Philadelphia to grow. However, even with the success of the Roosevelt Boulevard building, the overall decline of mail-order shopping prompted the company to open up a nearby retail store there just a few years later, in 1925. It wouldn’t be the company’s only expansion as Sears would also add on an administration building and a power plant. They even paid for a miniature of their building, with its famous clock tower, to be constructed as a firehouse on a nearby block.
Engine Company Number 70 on 4800 Langdon Street.
Through most of the 20th century, the Sears complex was a popular and well-known landmark in Northeast Philadelphia, It employed thousands of workers from the surrounding neighborhoods. In the 1960s, the area, still a popular hub, even had a subway station constructed. Although it was meant to be connected to the Broad Street Line, the plan never went through. Unfortunately, in the 1980s and 1990s, sales decreased and the building with its iconic tower was sold in 1993.
On October 31, 1994, the Sears Tower was imploded. It barely took 7 seconds for the building to go down, as seen in the 6ABC news broadcast from that day.
With a 14-story tower and over 25 million square feet, the implosion was set to be the largest of its time. Hundreds of Philadelphia residents came to watch as over 70 years of history was brought down in 7 seconds.
Today, the area is home to a shopping center full of different chain stores. However, it is also still home to the Sears power plant, which was visible in the above video and not imploded. Currently, the power plant building is not being utilized other than Home Depot advertising its logo on the smokestack. The power plant and the aforementioned firehouse are the only Sears buildings remaining in the area.
