On Market Street, between 5th and 6th Streets and next to the Independence Visitor Center, there are plaques on the sidewalk dedicated to the families, artisans, and businesses who had shops on that very block during the 18th century. However, a mere ten minutes walk from that location, visitors are not only able to get similar historical information, but they’re also able to view the still-standing colonial houses which have been on the same alley since as early as 1728.
Elfreth’s Alley in 1910
Elfreth’s Alley maintains the claim of being the oldest residential street in the United States. It dates back to 1702 when two blacksmiths surrendered portions of their land in order to create an alleyway that led to the river. The current Elfreth’s Alley houses were built between 1728 and 1836. Luckily, census records are able to provide insight into the changing lives of Philadelphia citizens for over 300 years. Through those centuries, the houses have usually held more than one family at once. The residences included dressmakers, silversmiths, ship builders, and more. For instance, in the 19th century Josiah Elfreth, whose grandfather was the alley’s namesake, lived at 137 Elfreth’s Alley for a period of time with his wife and children. Also, in the 18th century, German Adam Clampfer owned both 130 and 132 while he kept a tavern and store on 134 Elfreth’s Alley. According to records previously found on the association’s website, the Clampfer family owned the 132 Elfreth’s Alley property for over a century. With such a complex and long history, it is easy to see why preservation of such a street is important to the City of Philadelphia.
Elfreth’s Alley in 1938.
It is not a surprise then, that preservation efforts for Elfreth’s Alley began in 1934. That was the year that the Elfreth’s Alley Association was founded. At that time, the City of Philadelphia had rebranded Elfreth’s Alley as the 100 block of Cherry Street and it was set to be destroyed. Not only did the organization save the street, but they were also able to turn the 100 block of Cherry Street back into Elfreth’s Alley. It is a credit to the Elfreth’s Alley Association that tourists from all over the country and the world are able to explore the cobblestone street and its history.
Elfreth’s Alley in 1957
However, preserving the street and its buildings are not the only important jobs taken up by the modern, non-profit Elfreth’s Alley Association. They also promote conservation efforts in an attempt to research more about the history of alley’s residents. In 2012 and 2013, archaeological teams headed by Deirdre Kelleher from Temple University were able to dig into the rich history of the street, finding artifacts from both the professional and personal lives on the Elfreth’s Alley residents.
This year, the Elfreth’s Alley Association will receive a PA Historical Marker for their hard work in preservation, research, and education. It will read: “Elfreth’s Alley, Philadelphia County – Impeccably preserved vernacular neighborhood in the heart of Philadelphia – one of the nation’s oldest and a National Historic Landmark. There have been extensive studies of these homes, their owners, and the area’s transformation over its nearly 300 years of existence, shedding light on a very diverse working class community.”
Current view of Elfreth’s Alley – from the Elfreth’s Alley website
The Belmont Cricket Club, which once stood at the intersection of S. 50th Street and Chester Avenue. The Kingsessing Recreational Center, built in 1918, now occupies the site. Source: Wikipedia Commons.
A slice of England in West Philadelphia? There was once a “Sherwood Forest” — a grove of trees that stood at the intersection of 58th Street and Baltimore Avenue. Nearby was the Belmont Cricket Club at the intersection of S. 50th Street and Chester Avenue, which for a few short years competed against the still-extant Germantown, Merion, and Philadelphia clubs.
On hot, hazy summer afternoons in the 1890s, the residents of the surrounding brick twin houses — porches bedecked with striped awnings — would stroll to Belmont Cricket and watch the local and international legend Bart King (1873-1965) play on the crease.
Bart King at bat at the Belmont Cricket Club in 1906. Source: Wikipedia Commons.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the “Gentlemen of Philadelphia” were a juggernaut that mowed down the best teams from England and her colonies. The Associated Clubs of Philadelphia proudly declared that “with the vast improvement made in cricket at Philadelphia (and in fact everywhere in the country) since the last team visited England, there is every reason to expect very different showings this year. Since the last time crossed the Atlantic, the representatives of the Quaker City have laid claim to more than ordinary honors. In 1891, Lord Hawke’s team suffered a defeat at their hands. The following year the Gentlemen of Ireland had to lower their colors when they met the Philadelphians. In 1893, the Australian team of that year lost in Philadelphia. In 1894, Lord Hawke’s team was again beaten. The visiting Cambridge and Oxford teams lost to home players in 1985. ”
Leading the charge during cricket’s brief golden age was Bart King. A star bowler and a hitter, King would later be known as the “Bob Hope” of the cricketing world, for according to one account he, “told his impossible tales with such an air of conviction … that his audiences were always in doubt when to take him seriously. He made their task doubly difficult by sprinkling in a fair mixture of truth with his fiction.” When King died in 1966, his obituary noted that, “his 344 for Belmont v Merion B stand as the North American record: he scored 39 centuries in his career and he topped 1,000 runs in a season six times, in 4 of them also taking over 100 wickets.”
“Sherwood Forest,” 58th Street and Baltimore Avenue, September 29, 1906. The Sherwood Cricket Club, located at 60th and Baltimore, was Belmont’s more rustic neighbor. For an image of the Sherwood Club, click here.
In those days, watching a cricket match was just as popular a past time as going to a Phillies game. West Philadelphia’s Belmont was the scrappy sibling of Philadelphia’s league. The haughty Pennsylvania Railroad built the Main Line and Chestnut Hill, while Peter Widener’s humbler trolley lines built the more democratic suburbs of West Philadelphia. The Belmont Club, founded in 1874, was prosperous, its grounds and buildings beautiful, but it did not put on aristocratic airs. Neither did Bart King. What John B. Kelly was to rowing, King was to the even more rarified world of cricket Unlike most of his peers, the middle-class King had to work for a living. In those days, a Philadelphia cricketer did not play for money. To support his amateur habit, King worked in his father’s linen business — there were many textile mills in West Philadelphia at this time, which drew their power from Cobb’s Creek. To preserve his status as a “gentleman amateur,” wealthy friends secured him a low-stress job at a Philadelphia insurance company.
By the early 1900s, America lagged behind England when it came to compensating its best players. In fact, King was surprised to learn that British cricketers actually got paid for their sport.
“Hallo Mr. King,” said an English professional who ran into King in London.
“Hallo, call me Bart,” King responded.
“But you’re a gentleman cricketer, sir?” the professional queried.
“Aren’t you a gentleman too?” King asked.
“Oh no sir, I’m a professional,” was the reply.
Despite its aristocratic associations, cricket in America had proletarian origins. English textile workers from Nottingham brought the game to American in the early 19th century, and played six hour matches with gusto on their precious days off. Spectators drank ale and freely placed bets. Many cricketers also tried their hand at baseball, a faster American variant of the game (also with runs and innings) which gained traction during the Civil War. By the 1880s, the well-heeled Wisters of Germantown and the Clarks of West Philadelphia — developers of the Spruce Hill neighborhood — took up the British sport and transformed the game of the millworkers workers into the past-time of the wealthy. The local, blue-collar cricket clubs such as Tioga — which King played for as a young man — and Frankford closed their doors, their creases and clubhouses replaced by blocks of row houses.
Belmont held out longer but succumbed on the eve of World War I. The surrounding neighborhood was populated by comfortable factory managers and small business owners — like King’s family — who could not afford to be “gentleman amateurs” or attend games that lasted three to five days. More importantly, the rise of professional baseball teams — with their big stadiums and open seating — were a more democratic way to spend an afternoon for the industrial city’s growing population. Philadelphia formed its first official baseball team in 1883. Soon, the Phillies attracted bigger crowds. Spectators could cheer from the stadium bleachers when their favorite players scored runs, rather than demurely clap behind ropes at private clubs. The rules of baseball were also much less arcane, and the “seventh inning stretch” replaced leisurely breaks for lunch and tea.
Victorian rowhouses at 52nd and Springfield Avenue, near the site of the Belmont Cricket Club, March 21, 1960.
Belmont Cricket Club closed its doors in 1914, but not before visiting English cricketer C. Percy Hurditch introduced its members to a more fast-paced field sport: soccer. King saw which way the wind was blowing in West Philadelphia, and joined the Philadelphia Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, two years before Belmont went defunct. He continued to play and tour internationally until his death at age 92. The London Times eulogized: “Had he been an Englishman or an Australian, he would have been even more famous than he was.”
The Belmont Cricket Club was torn down in 1918 and was replaced by the fields and buildings of the Kingsessing Recreation Center, which continues to serve the neighborhood’s athletic needs to this day.
The railroad overpass at the intersection of S.49th Street and Chester Avenue, near the site of the Belmont Cricket Club, February 20, 1960.
Footage of the Colin Jodah Trophy Match at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, with a mention of Bart King.
When most people think of professional football in Philadelphia, the topic is usually The Philadelphia Eagles. Fair enough then, as they have been around since 1931 and since the NFL is by far the most prominent professional football league in all of sports. However, it should be noted that between 1984 and 1986, there was another prominent pro football team here. That team would be the Philadelphia Stars of the long-defunct USFL (United States Football League), who won the league championship in two of three seasons in which the league existed and appeared in all three championship games. Technically, though, they were only a Philadelphia-based team for 2 of those 3 seasons as after the 1985 season, they moved to Baltimore. Despite this, they kept their operations here in Philadelphia, though this led to them essentially playing every game on the road.
The Office of the City Representative photo collection at the Philadelphia City Archives includes a few images from the victory parade (see below). The victory parade was held in July 1984 after the Stars beat the Arizona Wranglers in the championship game of the USFL’s second season. The game was held in Tampa, Florida’s Tampa Stadium, which was demolished in 1999.
Philadelphia Stars victory parade circa 1984.
The Stars had future NFL stars like Bart Oates and Sean Landeta (both future New York Giants player who won 5 Super Bowl rings between them) as part of the championship crew and others like Sam Mills, a future All-Pro for the New Orleans Saints were also on the roster. Their coach for all 3 seasons was Jim Mora, who later went on to successful NFL coaching career with The New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts. Though largely forgotten now, a movie about the team and its role in the development of the USFL is currently in development.
Two weeks ago, I received a phone call from Don Fisher, who graduated from Penn in 1975 and was sort of a Tommy Lee Jones type: as an undergraduate, he balanced working on the Mask and Wig crew/ business staff with breaking through the opposing football team’s defensive line at Franklin Field. The former president of Mask and Wig’s graduate club, he had read my piece “Echoes from the Mask and Wig,” and told me that he had more information about my step-grandfather Joe Follmann, who was pianist and music director for the collegiate song-and-dance troupe in the late 1920s.
“I believe Grandpa Joe was a scholarship student,” I told him. “And I know that today, the audition process for Mask and Wig is extremely difficult.”
“The Club was a lot harder to get into in those days,” Fisher told me. “And I will tell you this: he must have beenhot stuff in his time.”
The undergraduate members of the Mask and Wig Club, Joseph F. Follmann Jr. is in the center of the third row. The University of Pennsylvania Record, 1930. The Mask and Wig Club Archives.
Here’s what I did know: my grandfather was an excellent pianist, equally at home playing Beethoven and jazz standards His parents were working class German-Americans from West Philadelphia — according to my mother (his step-daughter) his mother was a Bavarian Catholic and his father a Prussian Protestant who may have worked as a coal miner in his youth. There’s a photograph in my parents’ house showing him around the age of 10, with long blonde hair and dressed in a sailor’s suit. He is standing at the knee of a grizzled looking old man reading a book — most likely his own grandfather.
Grandpa Joe’s obsession with economy — served up with stereotypical Teutonic severity — continued into his adulthood, even after he had achieved financial stability.
Leaving the lights on in an empty room was a pet peeve.
Many of his fellow students at the Wharton School were being groomed for leadership in tightly-held businesses. In those days, there were many such family concerns in Philadelphia, from manufacturers (Disston and Baldwin) to magazines (Curtis) to banks (Philadelphia Savings Fund Society) to railroads (the Pennsylvania). In those heady years just before the stock market crash, Grandpa had no desk at a family business waiting for him after graduation. Studying finance was a practical route; what he really wanted was to be a professional musician. Perhaps Grandpa was dreaming of following in the footsteps of Ted Weems, who had also graduated from West Philadelphia High and Penn seven years ahead of him and had cut a big figure in the American “collegiate” hot jazz scene during the booming Roaring Twenties.
University of Pennsylvania quadrangle dormitories, designed by Cope and Stewardson, showing the Mask and Wig wing. 36th and Spruce Streets. undated.
The Mask and Wig — which so was so prosperous that it had donated money to build a quadrangle dormitory — was a particular preserve of the “Old Philadelphia” elite, who had the time and the funds to indulge in such musical skylarking. Their show program books were chock full of advertisements from prominent — and now largely vanished — Philadelphia businesses. The clubhouse, a converted church a long trolley ride from campus, had been lavishly renovated by Philadelphia architect Wilson Eyre Jr. in the 1890s, and its first-floor bar adorned with murals by celebrated artist Maxfield Parrish. In those days, one did not formally join the Mask and Wig Club until senior year, after a year or two of working as a choral alternate…little more than a grunt. According to the show programs, Grandpa was listed as a choral alternate his sophomore and junior years, and he was not formally elected to full membership until his senior year.
Grandpa’s eagerness comes across in the photograph of The Mask and Wig undergraduate club in the 1930 University of Pennsylvania Record — amidst his stone-faced, bolt-upright compatriots, a fresh-faced Grandpa Joe looks alert as he leans jauntily to one side, his eyes sparkling. His ears stick out from his head, just the way I remember them when he was older. He had made it, his hard work at the piano and at his composer’s desk had paid off, and he was proud. He had been the music director and co-writer of that year’s show JohnFaust, Ph.D, a comic spoof on the German legend popularized by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The program cover for “John Faust, Ph.D,” 1930. The Mask and Wig Club Archives.
This was a time when songs from Mask and Wig and other collegiate groups became national hits, covered by the likes of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Frank Sinatra. Perhaps Grandpa hoped that one of his songs would hit the big time. Grandpa continued to contribute to the club well after graduation. In fact, he contributed songs to Mask and Wig shows for the next two decades — most notably in the 1937 production Fifty/Fifty — and culminating in the show Doctor, Dear Doctor! of 1951. By then, the Club’s roster of undergraduate members had diversified considerably from the blue-blooded old days. Grandpa conceived the book and produced the show, basing it it on Jean-Baptiste Moliere’s 1666 play Le Médecin malgré lui(A Physician in Spite of Himself). A photograph from the show’s program shows Grandpa Joe — looking a bit more as I knew him, balding and with more pronounced jowls — smiling with delight as he pours over a set of scenery mock ups with a colleague.
“You know those ancient bronze busts of Roman senators?” my grandmother once said. “Well, he looks just like them.”
If you’ve only been up to Manayunk to see the Philly Cycling Classic, it may seem a little too apt that people believe the name of the place is derived from a Lenape word for “a place to drink,” but that’s the story. Originally known as Flat Rock, after a rock alongside one of the bridges, Manayunk received its modern name in 1824, an anglicized version of the word “manaiung,” which is believed to mean, “where we go to drink”—referring to the Schuylkill River as a source of water.
#7 Green Lane Over Schuylkill River – Schuylkill Navigation Canal and Reading Railroad – Looking Northwest From Canal Bank.
The name of the town is important, because for a while, during the years when Philadelphia was known as “The Workshop of the World,” the denizens of Manayunk were there own breed of people. There are still some left, but once upon a time it was a blue collar community with a distinctive character. People from Manayunk were called “Yunkers.” Odds are, you just read that word wrong. If you were from there, you’d know “Yunker” is pronounced “yoonker” and “Manayunk” is pronounced “Manayoonk” to its old timers.
Leverington Avenue Bridge-Looking Southwest from Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Bridge. Simister Mills Company.
The original Lenape word could also mean “raging waters.” According to Deborah Del Collo’s Roxborough, the Schuylkill was, in those days, a raging river. It’s hard to imagine the ambling water way that way now, but it had to be calmed down. The story of Manayunk’s development is dependent on navigable waters.
Manayunk was a sparsely populated, bucolic farming settlement of only a few dozen people until the the Schuylkill Navigation Company began selling waterpower in 1818 or 1819 (accountsdiffer). From the beginning of power from the dam, however, things began to change rapidly in the area and the town began to grow as quickly. The first census of the area was conducted by a local pastor in 1827. He found 1,098 people living in the town, most of them working for textile mills.
The growth would continue. If you think of the textile industry before the Civil War at all, you probably think of the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. In Workshop of the World—A Selective Guide to the Industrial Archeology of Philadelphia, the writers argue that Manayunk differed from Lowell in that its various mills were all privately held by families. This gave the families much more leeway in how to conduct their business, so that the Mananyunk mills were making a greater diversity of cloths, dyes and patterns. They were also ploughing much of their profits back into the business, so that in time the mills would dominate the banks of the Manayunk Canals.
Leverington Avenue Bridge-Down Stream View. S. Keely and Sons Lumber and Millwork. 1929. This photo tells a little more of a story than it may immediately appear to. By 1929, the canals were all but completely out of use. In 1870, the canal industry had been defeated by the railroads and had sold the Philadelphia and Reading Railroads 110 year leases to their property.
At first, Manayunk’s mill owners were more inclined to invest in their plants than in housing for workers. Workers had to find their own places to live or build their own homes. As the 19th century wore on, that would change. More and more mill owners owned real estate and began to build cheap tenement housing further up the hill, away from the homes of the more prosperous nearer the mills and the rivers.
Stairway Connecting Upper and Lower Levels of Dupont Street at Silverwood Street. 1932.
In 1854, the township would be annexed into Philadelphia and officially be part of the city forever more.
The town would have three industrial cycles. Shipping on the canal would peak in 1859 and end in 1917. At the end of the Civil War, Manayunk would be recognized as a major textile center, but that would unravel with the Great Depression. However, Manayunk would remain important as an industrial center, primarily by way of paper mills, up through the 70s to early 80s. Then it would go into a period of decline.
In the 2000s, Manayunk started to come back, but primarily as a residential area. Today, Main Street Manayunk is a social and shopping destination and a gathering place for the new denizens of the neighborhood. There’s been some tension in the neighborhood as longtime residents grapple with gentrification. Even as the Bike Race and the Manayunk Arts Festival bring a decidedly different sort of traffic to what has become something of a bedroom community within the dense Southeast Pennsylvania region, some vestiges of an older Manayunk hang on, such as the Hi-Spot Lanes bowling alley on Hermit Street.
We’re excited to announce that select materials from PhillyHistory will now be accessible from your smartphone through the Field Trip app developed by NianticLabs at Google. Field Trip is designed to help you find and explore interesting locations in the world. With information on historical places and events, architecture, art and museums, and much more, Field Trip serves as a guide to the hidden history and culture all around us.
Want to learn more about the many historical events that have occurred in Philadelphia? Curious about the history of the buildings and places that you walk by every day? The tens of thousands of images on PhillyHistory.org have long provided a view into the city’s past with the stories behind the images told through posts on the PhillyHistory Blog. The Field Trip app includes selected images and articles from the PhillyHistory Blog that are connected to specific locations throughout the city. If you have the Field Trip app on your phone, you can read content from the PhillyHistory Blog about the history of locations near you. If you have notifications and location services turned on, you’ll even receive alerts when you pass a building or intersection connected to a story on PhillyHistory.
The Field Trip app is available for both iPhones and Android devices at no cost. After downloading the app, users can select from several fields of interest and view stories and images connected to that topic by clicking on the markers on the map. PhillyHistory falls under the “Historic Places & Events” category which are shown as pale orange square markers on the map. Click on a marker to see an overview of the story of that location and then click the top bar to view the full article and images. If you’d like to read more from the PhillyHistory Blog, click the “Full Article” button at the bottom of the page to view more info on the blog or click “PhillyHistory” to visit the website.
We hope you’ll explore PhillyHistory on the Field Trip app and discover the amazing history surrounding us here in Philadelphia!
Although I have lived in the West Philadelphia neighborhood of Cedar Park since 2006, I have not really given too much thought to the history of the Charles Dickens statue in the “Park A” part of Clark Park at 43rd Street and Baltimore Avenue. In fact, the statue is of not only Dickens but his character “Little Nell” (i.e. Nell Trent, a character from his 1841 novel The Old Curiosity Shop). I had heard that it is the world’s only statue of Dickens, but this is technically not true, as there is another one in Sydney, Australia and a very recently erected statue of his likeness in his birth city of Portsmouth. Still, I found it quite odd that of all the places on earth where a statue of Dickens could possibly exist, one was here in Philadelphia and not in London, which at least in theory would make much more sense. Thus, I decided to do some investigating.
Photo of statue of Charles Dickens and Little Nell in 1910.
As it turns out, the statue was commissioned in 1890 by Washington Post founder Stilson Hutchins to be completed by New York City-based artist Francis Edwin Elwell. Initially, the idea was that it would indeed be placed in London. When Hutchins backed out of the deal, Elwell finished it anyway. The statue was then shipped to London and put on display with the hope of finding a buyer. However, this was unsuccessful namely because Dickens expressed a strong desire to not be depicted in such form. In fact, his will does not allow any “monument, memorial or testimonial, whatever. I rest my claims to remembrance on my published works and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experiences of me.”
The statue of Charles Dickens and Little Nell in Clark Park circa 1959.
Then in 1896, the organization that became the Association for Public Art (back then it was called the Fairmount Park Art Association) negotiated to keep the work in Philadelphia. In 1900, the FPAA purchased it for $7,500 (about $213,000 today) and in 1901, it was placed in its current location and it has stayed there since then despite numerous failed requests to move it to a more prominent location. In November 1989, the sculpture was vandalized but ultimately fully restored.
The entrance to Clark Park circa 1927.
Every year in February, Dickens’ birthday is celebrated in Clark Park. In 2013, the celebration included Morris dancing, sampling of Victorian-era desserts, readings from his books and other events.
The statue of Dickens and Little Nell is the only statue that is placed in Clark Park and while we’re not exactly sure of how it got there in the first place, the likely answer is due to Clark Park’s namesake Clarence H. Clark himself. Clark was a wealthy financier and developer who sat on the artworks committee of the FPAA committee. Thus, it was purchased by the FPAA in 1900 and placed at 43rd and Chester in 1901.
In addition to the statue of Dickens and Little Nell, the park also contains a large stone from an area called Devil’s Den in the Gettysburg Battlefield during the Civil War. The stone was placed in the park in June of 1916 and was set up there to remember Union soldiers who were treated at the site, which was once Satterlee Hospital, and “services of the patriotic men and women” who cared for them.
Another example of public art in Clark Park is an initiative set up by the University City District called Heart and Soul. Last summer, 4 decorated pianos were set up all over the park with the goal being spontaneous, random piano performances by whoever wandered by and sat down to play.
In the Manayunk section of Philadelphia, between the Schuylkill River and the canal, there is a small patch of land, under two miles long, referred to as Venice Island. With the exception of a new apartment building, it has been somewhat of an eyesore for the neighborhood in recent decades, with leftover buildings and equipment from when the canal was still in use as late as the 1940s. However, the Philadelphia Water Department, along with the city’s Parks and Recreation Department and the Manayunk Development Corporation, have spent the last few years planning and fighting the elements in order to make the lower part of Venice Island something more than a parking lot used when grabbing brunch on Main Street.
In preparation for the upcoming Lower Venice Island Park and Performance Center’s grand opening, coming later this year, here is a look back at the area and its evolution from being part of a working canal in an industrial neighborhood.
Lock Number 68’s sluice house
In the early 19th century, coal usage was rising in the United States. With regions towards the middle of Pennsylvania having large coal reserves, easy transport was needed in order to get the coal to the major cities. As a result, the Schuylkill Navigation system came about: a 108-mile system of locks and dams that carried thousands of ships from the coal-mining cities of Pennsylvania, starting with Port Carbon, down to Philadelphia and further. The Schuylkill Navigation Company allowed areas along the route to purchase the energy thanks to water through turbines or similar equipment. This includes Manayunk, which saw a rise in its textile industry and neighborhood population during the 19th century as mills began to build along the canal.
Finished in 1819, the Manayunk section of the Schuylkill Navigation system contained three locks: 68, 69, and 70. Lock Number 68 was found on the upper section of Venice Island and pictured here.
With the rising use of railroads to transport coal, use of the canal dwindled and it eventually closed to commercial and recreational boats in the 1940s, leaving equipment abandoned on Venice Island. These photographs taken on the lower side of Venice Island provide a look into the Manayunk daily life in the 1950s, around a decade after the canal was no longer in use. It was purchased by the City of Philadelphia and incorporated into the Fairmount Parks Systems.
Lock tender’s house on the side of the mainland (left) with the sluice house (right).Close up on the canal Lock 68.
Recreational areas have been a popular aspect of Venice Island and the surrounding area. There were playgrounds there as early as the 1950s (seen below) and the tow path on the Manayunk side of the canal is currently part of the Schuylkill River Trail that extends ten miles. Luckily, the new plans for the space also include such public areas like basketball courts and a children’s area! For more information on the Lower Venice Island Park and Performance Center, head to the project’s official page on the Philadelphia Water Department website.
The Mask & Wig Club, 310 S. Quince Street, October 5, 1958..
Many years ago, when I was helping my grandmother decide which records to donate to the New York Public Library from her extensive collection, I found a set of fragile shellac discs protected by brown paper sleeves. They were old dance records from the 1920s that had belonged to my grandfather Joseph Follmann Jr., who passed away in 1989.
The record of the 1927 production of “Hoot Mon.” Ujifusa family.A recording by the Mask & Wig pit orchestra of “I Live the Life I Love,” probably with my grandfather conducting. Note the record label: the Pennsylvania Athletic Club Building is now the Parc Rittenhouse on the east side of Rittenhouse Square. Ujifusa family.
These were 78s, and thus could fit only one song on a side. The songs included “Say That You Love Me” by Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians and “Old Man River” by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. All were recorded at the Victor Studios in Camden, New Jersey. Among them were two discs of songs from old Mask & Wig productions.
My grandmother had a 78 setting on her record player — or as she called it, a “victrola.” We put on a record of “Gems from ‘Hoot Mon,'” from the 39th annual production of the Mask & Wig Club, which included the foxtrot “We’ll Paddle Our Canoe” recorded by Nat Shilkret and the Victor Orchestra and the Mask & Wig Glee Chorus. Then there was “I Live the Life I Love” from a record labeled “50/50,” the name of the 1937 show. According to alumnus Don Fisher, my grandfather was credited as the conductor and rehearsal pianist — he loved the Club so much he came back seven years after graduation to assist with the show.
The sound was scratchy and thin, the voices high pitched and nasal.
We saved the records.
I was only ten when Grandpa died, yet I knew that he loved the Mask & Wig Club, that legendary theatrical troupe started by a group of University of Pennsylvania students in 1889 and whose song-and-dance antics have been delighting Philadelphia (and American) audiences ever since. Among the group’s notable alumni was Bobby Troup, who composed the jazz standard “Route 66.”
Among the pictures in my parents’ home is a photograph of Grandpa Joe seated with the West Philadelphia High School orchestra. He was a pianist, so unlike the other members who are proudly holding their flutes, violins, and trumpets, he is sitting hands folded next to the portly, mustachioed conductor. There is also a framed certificate of his election to the Club dated May 1, 1929, and his Club rosette sits in an old Penn shot glass. “Made in France,” the rosette’s brass clasp reads.
West Philadelphia High School, 48th and Walnut Streets, from an architectural rendering dated December 1910.
Grandpa served as music director of the Club his senior year, composing many of the songs and the pit band. In those days, the Club toured around the country in a special Pullman train, graciously provided by the Pennsylvania Railroad. He graduated from the Wharton School in 1930 with hopes of becoming a professional musician. According to family lore, he even played piano at the Folies Begere in Paris and recorded with dance bands such as Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, whose most famous song was “Collegiate,” a hot jazz riff on the carelessness of Roaring Twenties college life: “trousers, baggy, all our clothes look raggy, but we’re rough-and-ready. Yay. Rah Rah. Very, very, very, seldom in a hurry. Real collegiate are we.”
Collegiate. Members of the Mask & Wig Club rehearsing at 310 S. Quince Street in 1930, my grandfather’s senior year. Source: Wikipedia.
Yet the life of a professional musician is always tough, and during the Depression it was nearly impossible to be “seldom in a hurry” to make ends meet. He went into the insurance business and married a stage actress, dividing his time between New York and Philadelphia. He became close friends with a number of people in the Philadelphia arts scene through his involvement with the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, befriending actors such as Richard Basehart (who played Ishmael in the classic movie Moby Dick, starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab) and Eleanor “Siddy” Wilson (an actress and artistic polymath from the Wetherill paint family, who created abstract canvases well into her 90s).
Grandpa Joe lost his first wife to cancer in the 1950s, and took a cruise on the Holland-America linerMaasdam. It was onboard this ship that he met my grandmother, tragically widowed at a young age with two children — my uncle and mother. The two were married shortly afterward, and Grandpa Joe moved permanently to New Rochelle, New York. Grandpa retired from his job as an insurance executive in the 1960s, taught as an adjunct at NYU’s Stern School of Business, wrote a few business books, and continued to play the piano, both jazz and classical.
My brother Andrew and I spent a lot of time as young children at our grandparents’ Upper East Side apartment. The piano was at the center of the living room, a 1926 Steinway that Grandma and Grandpa had purchased together. A two foot high statue of Beethoven, painted to look like bronze, sat on the piano case, along with two brass candlesticks. Grandpa loved playing the Peter’s theme from Serge Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” for my brother and me, and we could not get enough of it. Sometimes, he would put my hands over his as he ran his fingers over the keys.
I never learned how to play. I tried the oboe instead. “That’s one difficult instrument,” Grandpa scoffed. He was right. After I had braces put on, I got lazy, stopped practicing, and that was the end of that.
In his early 80s, Grandpa Joe began suffering from memory problems. One day, he sat down at the Steinway and started to play a piece he had composed many years ago, according to my grandmother a short “filler” piece for the Philadelphia Orchestra. Yet he could not remember it. My grandmother said he closed the piano, walked away, and never opened it again. He died soon after from a heart attack.
The Mask & Wig records are now at my parents house, locked away in a case along with other records from Grandpa Joe’s extensive classical library that did not get donated to the New York Public Library. Yet there is no turntable to play them now, either at 33 or 78 RPM.
Beethoven is there too, standing with his arms folded amidst a forest of houseplants. He did, after all, like taking afternoon walks in the Vienna woods.
Grandpa Joe’s caricature at the Mask and Wig Club house, directly behind the piano in the ratskeller. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
Note: the author has previously covered Parkside in “After the Fair” and “The Slifkin Family.” A walk-through of the house with the author and University of Pennsylvania lecturer Hanley Bodek will be featured on an upcoming segment of WHYY’s Friday Arts.
The 4200 block of Parkside Avenue, May 27, 1954.
On the outside, the houses on the 4200 block of Parkside Avenue are grand indeed, a brick parade that marches proudly along West Fairmount Park. Their roofs are a jumble of scalloped and stepped gables topped by terra cotta urns and copper cornices. Their yellow Roman brick facades boast bow-front windows, latticed dormers, and terra cotta angel faces. Alleyways are secured with high scrolled iron gates, possibly made by the workshop of Samuel Yellin.
Built in the 1880s and 1890s by brewer/developer Frederick August Poth, they were pitched towards Gilded Ages executives and factory managers, as well as prosperous business owners and professionals. Some were probably occupied by the top leadership of F.A. Poth & Sons, who could commute to the brewery by taking the eastbound trolley across the Girard Avenue bridge. These homes were meant to impress and dazzle passers-by on foot, trolley, or coach. Less was not more in those days. And why not? Philadelphia was one of the richest cities in the world in the 1890s, and many of the architectural, mechanical, and decorative features were made right here, in the self-proclaimed workshop of the world. And these homes were located across the street from the site of the 1876 Centennial Expositions, one of the crowning events in Philadelphia’s history.
Poth must have taken a special interest in his Parkside development. He sold his freestanding mansion at 33rd and Powelton to his daughter Mathilde and son-in-law Joseph Roesch, and moved with his wife into a brand-new mansion at 4130-40 Parkside Avenue. He died there in 1905.
During the early 20th century, Parkside changed from an upper-class German-American neighborhood to a middle class Eastern European Jewish one. During the Depression, most of these big twin homes were divided into efficiency apartments and rooming houses, and lost most of their interior fixtures. Yet at least one of these homes survives with its original floor plate and some of its interior detailing intact: 4230 Parkside Avenue, situated directly across from the Centennial Exposition’s Memorial Hall (now the Please Touch Museum).
The 4200 block of Parkside Avenue, May 27, 1954.4230 Parkside Avenue. Note the polished granite columns. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
I recently got a look inside the house, thanks to the current owner. It has been vacant for over a decade. The inside of the house is cavernous and musty, with soaring ten foot ceilings. The walls, once wainscoted with dark stained paneling, are painted white or gray. After passing through the front hallway, I marveled at the massive grand staircase, which rose three stories up through the center of the house. The newel post was probably once topped with a finial, or even a bronze statue light fixture. The dining room, filled with wood scraps and other debris, can easily hold a table set for a dozen. The second floor library, which faces the park, still has its original shelves topped by carved cornices. The bay window once had curved glass panes and sashes, now replaced by standard flat ones. Almost all of the massive wood mantelpieces, save the one in the basement butler’s pantry, had been yanked out years ago, leaving their outlines behind. The brass fireplace grates and polychrome tiles remain, giving a hint of the fine craftsmanship that once graced these Parkside homes. A pencil diagram, probably drawn by the carpenters who built the house 120 years ago, is still extant in the dining room.
The main staircase of 4230 Parkside Avenue. It rises three stories. There are two other service staircases in the house, one of which has been floored over. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.Pencil sketches once hidden by a mantelpiece (now stolen probably left by the construction crew that built this house in the late 1880s or early 1890s. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.The dining room. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
The house’s layout is not completely intact. A previous owner had attempted to convert the mansion into a boarding house, adding shoddily-built bathrooms and partitions. A piece of plywood covers over the archway between the foyer and the parlor, which originally was separated by sliding pocket doors. A large, twisted chunk of pressed copper lies in the kitchen. It originally came from the rear window bay, torn off by thieves scavenging the vacant house for scrap metal. Squatters once stored drugs underneath floorboards and behind radiators.
Tile fireplace surround and brass grate in the dining room. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
At 5,300 square feet, this was a house built for a very large family. There are six bedrooms, located on the second and third floors. The built-in armoires remain in place, as is some of the decorative plasterwork. The window of the third floor front bedroom perfectly frames the Please Touch Museum. A large cedar closet, located off the master bedroom, could have stored many wool suits with room to spare.
View from the third floor front bedroom, towards Memorial Hall, once the main building of the 1876 Centennial Exposition, later the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and now the Please Touch MuseumBuilt-in armoire in the master bedroom. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa
When Frederick Augustus Poth built 4320 Parkside Avenue, it was at the cutting edge of Victorian domestic technology. One expert who has renovated many large homes in Fairmount described the house as equivalent to today’s Toll Brothers mansions, built for an aspirational and demanding clientele. Although equipped with several gas fireplaces, the house was originally heated by steam radiators, powered by a hand-stoked coal boiler in the basement. The house may have originally been piped for gas lighting, as electricity did not become widespread in American homes until the early 1900s. With its flickering pale glow, gas lighting was an improvement over pre-Civil War whale oil candles. But houses such as 4230 Parkside were almost invariably dark and gloomy, with their stained paneling, overstuffed furniture, heavy drapery, and piles of curios and knick-knacks. Dust must have been a problem, especially for anyone with allergies.
Plaster molding in the second floor library. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.The front parlor, full of debris. The window looks out on Parkside Avenue. Note the Delft-style tiles.
In their fleeting glory days, these Parkside Avenue homes were Downton Abbey in miniature. In Victorian Philadelphia, immigrant servant labor, usually Irish, was inexpensive and plentiful. A house like 4230 Parkside would have a staff consisting of a cook, laundress, maid, governess, maybe even a butler. They worked long hours, received only one weekday evening plus every other Sunday off, and received an average salary of $3.50 per week (about $45.00 today), well below the modern minimum wage.* They were quartered downstairs. The butler’s pantry, accessed by a separate back staircase that is now floored over by a later bathroom addition, survives almost intact. The kitchen, located at the rear of the first story, has lost all of its original fixtures except for the china cabinet and the lower half of its wall tiles. The cook toiled over a mammoth coal fired iron range, which lacked the temperature controls we take for granted today. The iceman would make frequent deliveries to restock the icebox.
The butler’s pantry/servants’ dining room, located in the basement. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.China cabinets in the kitchen, located in the rear of the house on the first floor. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.
The future of the house remains in question. Two doors down, however, the owner of a nearly-identical house has recently completed a total restoration. The copper trim has all been renewed, the brick scrubbed, a new balastrade added to the front porch. He has even replaced the curved sashes and panes in the second floor bay windows. The view of the park and the newly-restored Please Touch Museum from the new roofdeck must be spectacular.
Roof details. Note the stepped Dutch gables and the terra cotta corbel. Photograph by Steven Ujifusa.Memorial Hall, built for the 1876 Centennial Exposition and now the Please Touch Museum. Photographed on March 22, 1924, when it housed the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
