PhillyHistory Blog

Deep in South Philadelphia in the mid-1920s, Sesquicentennial planners carved up a brand new 68,000 square-foot pavilion beside Edgewater Lake into 48 galleries and dubbed it the Palace of Fine Arts. Along a mile-and- a-quarter of walls, they hung paintings, watercolors and prints. On pedestals they mounted sculptures from all over the world, more than 400 of them from France, Spain, Yugoslavia, Japan and Russia, among other nations. Among “the foremost Americans” represented was Charles Grafly and Albert Laessle, who had dedicated galleries. Paul Manship’s sculptures, including his Diana and Actaeon, both now at the Smithsonian, graced the great entrance hall. Just outside the large arched entrance, in a place of honor, Beatrice Fenton’s Seaweed Fountain greeted visitors.

A half century later, curator of 20^th century art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Anne d’Harnoncourt described Seaweed Fountain as Fenton’s first “ambitious, life-size ornamental sculpture” an example of a genre known as Decorative Realism. An “unidealized treatment of youth,” it represented a “departure from standard academic canons of grace and proportion in the human figure.” This particularly American brand of realism was reminiscent of work by Thomas Eakins, a family friend and early mentor. Eakins painted a portrait of the young Fenton in 1904. He died a decade before the Sesquicentennial but his reputation was on the upswing in the mid-1920s. In stark contrast to the decision not to hang his Gross Clinic at the Centennial in 1876, curators at the Palace of Fine Arts devoted an entire gallery to Eakins, crediting him as “the most potent figure in the art of this country in the last fifty years.”

Fenton’s Seaweed Fountain also echoed the approach of another mentor and teacher, Charles Grafly. An “original adaptation of the realist aspect of Grafly’s teaching,” suggested D’Harnoncourt. “Nothing could be more remote in feeling from the polished simplified and classicizing work of Paul Manship” who, interestingly, had also studied with Grafly.

Manship’s Duck Girl from 1911 won the coveted Widener prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1914. Fenton’s Seaweed Fountain won the same award in 1922.  (See Duck Girl is in Rittenhouse Square, not far from Fenton’s much later Evelyn Taylor Price Memorial Sundial.)

Fenton walked away from the Sesquicentennial with a bronze medal for sculpture, one of 15 winners, 13 of whom were men, including Manship, Alexander Sterling Calder (who Fenton also briefly studied under) and Albert Laessle (another student of Grafly). The only one other woman to win a medal, the younger Katharine Lane Weems from Boston, would become known for her realistic renditions of all kinds of animals, especially elephants and rhinoceroses.

D’Harnoncourt described the making of Fenton’s Seaweed Fountain: Fenton “set about it with characteristic thoroughness. Working in her third-floor studio at 1523 Chestnut Street, she posed a lively six-year-old child…. The child is gawky yet charming, posing in her seaweed festoons, with all the coy bravado of one caught in the act dressing up in her mother’s clothes before a mirror. Her toes grip the turtle’s back, and her stocky torso balances awkwardly atop thin and knock-kneed legs.”

In 1922, Fenton’s first cast was installed in a fountain at the foot of Fairmount Park’s Lemon Hill. Three additional casts are known, in the Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina and private collections. In the early 1960s, the Fairmount Park Art Association commissioned Fenton to create clusters of bronze angelfish to accompany the piece at Lemon Hill. Those were stolen in 1974 and presumedly melted down as scrap. Fearing Seaweed Fountain would have also disappeared, officials moved to the park’s Horticultural Center, where it’s still on view.

Shortly after that re installation, Nessa Forman, the arts editor at The Bulletin, found that Mary Wilson Wallace, the once-upon-a-time model for Seaweed Fountain, was alive and well in nearby Glenolden, Pennsylvania. Then 63, Wallace and the 89-year-old Fenton held a reunion in front of a cast of Seaweed Fountain, part of a centerpiece display at the Flower Show. Wallace and Fenton reminisced about the a six-year-old whose arms were growing tired. But the commitment to realism only went so far. For the sake of posing, Fenton chose to have Wilson’s “precarious perch” be on a box, rather than on the back of a giant turtle. To make her sculpture of the turtle look as real as possible, Fenton convinced the aquarium at the Fairmount Waterworks to lend her one of theirs.

(Sources: Paintings, Sculpture and Prints in the Department of Fine Arts, Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition [Illustrated Catalogue] (Philadelphia, 1926); E. L. Austin and Odell Hauser, The Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition (Philadelphia: Current Publications, 1929); Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art : Bicentennial Exhibition, April 11-October 10, 1976 (Philadelphia Museum of Art: 1976]; Nessa Forman,” Found: Mary Wilson,” The Philadelphia Bulletin, March 21, 1977; Penny Balkin Bach, Public Art in Philadelphia. (Philadelphia, Temple University Press: 1992); Page Talbot, “The Philadelphia Ten,” (The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, 2017); A Finding Aid to the Beatrice Fenton Papers, 1836-1984, bulk 1890-1978, in the Archives of American Art.)

“The 17‐car accident occurred about 8:20 A.M. on Conrail’s West Chester-Media line, which passes through southwest Philadelphia. The site of the accident, near 53d Street and Baltimore Avenue, is an area of depressed housing, storefront businesses and abandoned automobile chassis situated about two miles from Center City.”

-The New York Times, October 17, 1979

When finished in 1858, the Philadelphia & West Chester Railroad new line connected Center City Philadelphia with farming communities in rural Chester County.  By the late 1880s, as the formerly rural West and Southwest Philadelphia grew more developed, a bridge carried Chester Avenue over the railroad tracks, and a permanent station was constructed at the 49th Street intersection.  By then the Philadelphia Railroad had absorbed the small West Chester line.  Clusters of substantial Queen Anne style twin houses sprung up around the 49th Street station stop, and the formerly peripatetic Belmont Cricket Club moved to a large lot a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks, a set-up mirroring the Merion Cricket Club’s on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line.  Stops along the way to West Chester included the new towns of Philadelphia’s idyllic southwestern “Quaker” suburbs: Swarthmore, Rose Valley, Wallingford and Media.

In 1968, the financially troubled Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central merged into a goliath known as Penn Central.  A decade later, Penn Central collapsed in the nation’s largest bankruptcy in American history, but not before it spun off its commuter operations, as well as some freight-hauling, to form a new entity called Conrail. Conrail’s operational record was spotty due to ancient PRR equipment and years of deferred maintenance.  On October 1, 1979, two freight trains, one consisting of 44 cars and one of 111 cars, collided outside of Philadelphia, killing two crewmembers. Just over two weeks later, on October 16, disaster struck Conrail again, this time in West Philadelphia.  The last two cars of the 7:27am commuter train from Media were not attaching properly to the rest of the train.  The engineer moved all passengers forward, leaving the last two cars on the track.  The next train into Philadelphia, the 7:47 from Media, picked up the two orphaned cars on its way. At 11 cars in length, the 7:47 was now quite ungainly, but the rush hour passengers probably appreciated the extra room.

Near the intersection of 53rd and Baltimore Avenue, the signal blinked “stop,” and the big 7:47 from Media came to a halt.  A small, two-car train, the 7:07 from West Chester, stopped behind it. Onboard were about 1,200 people preparing for their workday. They chatted, read the paper, drank coffee, or dozed in their seats.

But there was another train coming around the bend, the 7:50 from Elwyn, whose engineer ignored the “stop” signal and plowed right into the parked West Chester train at nearly 30 miles an hour.

“Signals gave me the go‐ahead,” the engineer later claimed.  Conrail would counter, “The signaling system was in proper working order.”

Pushed ahead by the force of the collision, the West Chester train then rear-ended the big 7:47 train from Media.

There was a cacophony of crunching sheet metal, shattering glass, and the shrieking of steel wheels on rails. “There was no screaming,” remembered one passenger, “There was a kind of stunned silence.” Hundreds of bloodied passengers stumbled out of the wrecked trains.  No one was killed, but 400 people were hurt, some with broken bones and abdominal injuries.  The city’s emergency services sprung into action, setting up a first aid center at the nearby Avery T. Harrington Public School at 53rd and Baltimore Avenue.  About 80 police cars and ambulances swiftly transferred everyone in need of medical attention to nearby hospitals.

“By midday, hours after the accident,” The New York Times reported, “workmen with hand tools were tearing up gouged ties, cranes mounted on flatbed cars were hooking into crumpled stainless steel cars, and the police were barring spectators from the scene. Inside the cars where 1,200 people had been on their way to town, bloodied handkerchiefs and sections of the morning paper were strewn about.”

525 passengers were injured in the accident, and one crewmember died six days later.  Equipment damage totaled nearly $2 million.

In its final report on the disaster, the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the negligence of the engineer of the oncoming train:

The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the engineer of train No. 1718 operating at a speed above that authorized by the block signal indication which did not allow for his stopping the train before it collided with a standing train. Contributing to the accident was the engineer’s improper operation of the train brakes and the failure of a supervisor and train crew personnel in the operating compartment of the locomotive to monitor the train’s operation adequately and to take action to insure that the train’s speed was reduced or that it was stopped when its speed exceeded that authorized for the signal block.

Five years after the collision at 53rd and Baltimore Conrail divested itself of Philadelphia’s commuter rail lines handed the remnants of the once-mighty PRR and Reading lines over to the newly created Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA). Service to West Chester terminated in 1986.

Sources:

Railroad Accident Report: Collision of Conrail Commuter Trains, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 16, 1979 (Report). Washington, D.C.: National Transportation Safety Board. May 12, 1980. NTSB-RAR-80-5.

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/accidentreports/pages/RAR8005.aspx

Bradley Peniston, “A Short History of a Short Street,” Hidden City Philadelphia, February 27, 2013.

A Short History Of A Short Street

Alan Richman, “More Than 400 Hurt in 3-Train Crash in Philadelphia,” The New York Times, October 17, 1979.l

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/17/archives/more-than-400-hurt-in-3train-crash-in-philadelphia-two-trains.html

 

Philanthropic alpha Andrew Carnegie singlehandedly upgraded American attitudes about access to knowledge. He funded the creation of more than 1,600 libraries across the land, more than a century ago, promising a hearty 30 for Philadelphia, as posted previously.

Twenty five were built between 1906 and 1930. It’s quite a collection, these palaces to mass intellect. Individually they made quite an impact. “The feeling you get from these buildings is that you’re somebody,” commented Robert Gangewere, editor of Carnegie Magazine. ”You feel you’re in a temple of learning, a serious place.” Together, they transformed attitudes. After Carnegie, community libraries seemed inevitable, like “a right, not a privilege.”

Despite the persistent belief that Carnegie libraries all look alike, there was great variety among them. As Tom Hine put it in a review of an exhibition of Carnegie’s architectural legacy at the Cooper Hewitt in 1985: “It shows grand Spanish colonial and mission-style buildings in California, little brick Georgian boxes in Wyoming and New Jersey, Romanesque in Maine, arts and crafts in Ohio.” In Philadelphia, noted Hine they “commissioned the best architects in the city to design buildings suitable for each neighborhood.”

Only four of Philadelphia’s 25 Carnegie branches remain unattributed to architects: The Holmesburg/Thomas Holme Branch, The Oak Lane Branch, The Blanche A. Nixon/Cobbs Creek Branch and the Greenwich Branch. We know the 18 architects responsible for the other 21. It’s quite a range of talent, a veritable who’s who of the design profession in the early 20th-century city.

Here are Philly’s 25 Carnegies and their architects (when known) in order of opening:

1 – Walnut Street West/West Philadelphia Branch, 40th & Walnut Street, SE corner, opened June 26, 1906. C. C. Zantzinger, architect.

2 – Frankford Branch, 4634 Frankford Avenue, opened October 2, 1906. Watson & Huckel, architects. No longer extant.

3 – Lillian Marrero/Lehigh Avenue Branch, 6th Street and Lehigh Avenue, opened November 20, 1906. G. W. & W. D. Hewitt architects.

4 – Tacony Branch, 6742 Torresdale Avenue, opened November 27, 1906. Lindley Johnson, architect.

5 – Germantown Branch, 5818 Germantown Avenue, in Vernon Park. Frank Miles Day & Brother, architects.

6 – Holmesburg/Thomas Holme Branch, 7810 Frankford Avenue, opened June 26, 1907.

7 – Spring Garden Branch, Southwest corner 17th and Spring Garden, opened November 18, 1907. Field and Medary, architects. No longer extant.

8 – Chestnut Hill Branch, 8711 Germantown Avenue, opened in 1909. Cope and Stewardson, architects.

9 – The Wissahickon Branch, Manayunk Avenue & Osborn Street, opened in 1909. Whitfield and King, architects. No longer extant.

10 – The Manayunk Branch, Fleming and Webster Streets, opened February, 1909. Benjamin Rush Stevens, architect. No longer a library.

11 – Richmond Branch,  2987 Almond Street, opened in 1910. Edward L. Tilton, architect.

12 – The Oak Lane Branch, 6614 North 12th Street, opened December 7, 1911.

13 –Charles Santore/Southwark Branch, 1108 South 5th Street, opened November 8, 1912. David Knickerbacker Boyd, architect. No longer a library.

14 – Falls of Schuylkill Branch, 3501 Midvale Avenue, opened November 18, 1913. Rankin, Kellogg, and Crane, architects.

15 – Thomas F. Donatucci, Sr./Passyunk Branch,  1935 W. Shunk Street, opened April 14, 1914. John Torrey Windrim, architect.

16 – South Philadelphia Branch, 2407-2417 South Broad Street, opened in 1914.  Charles Louis Borie, Jr., architect.

17 – Paschalville Branch, 6942 Woodland Avenue, opened in 1915. Henry C. Richards, architect.

18 – The Haddington Branch, 446 North 65th Street, opened on December 3, 1915. Albert Kelsey, architect.

19 – The McPherson Square Branch, 601 East Indiana Avenue, opened in 1917. Wilson Eyre, & McIlvain, architects.

20 –The Nicetown-Tioga Branch, 1715 Hunting Park, opened ca. 1917.  John Torrey Windrim, architect. No longer extant.

21 – Logan Branch, 1333 Wagner Avenue, opened November 16, 1919. John Torrey Windrim, architect.

22 – The Kingsessing Branch, 1201 South 51st Street, opened on November 29, 1919. Philip H. Johnson, architect.

23 – Blanch A. Nixon/Cobbs Creek Branch,, 5800 Cobbs Creek Parkway, opened in 1925.

24 – The Greenwich Branch, 4th and Shunk Streets, opened in 1929. No longer extant.

25 – The Wyoming Branch, 231 East Wyoming Avenue, opened October 29, 1930. Philip H. Johnson, architect.

[Sources: Thomas Hine, “Public Libraries were his gifts to the world,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 25, 1985; Stevenson Swanson, “Carnegie Legacy Built on a Need for Knowledge,” Chicago Tribune, November 25, 1985. Free Library of Philadelphia, Digital Collections, Carnegie Libraries (Institutions).]

“I am in the library manufacturing business,” gloated steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who had been making dozens of grants around the country to build new public libraries. From New Hampshire to Texas, Maine to Montana, groundbreakings were planned or underway. New York had gotten the largest chunk of money, more than $5.2 million. Carnegie made that announcement back in 1899.

As 1903 got off to a chilly start, Philadelphians impatiently waited their turn.

But if Philadelphia was to see any of Carnegie’s wealth, City Council and the Mayor would have to increase their spending on libraries, each and every year. Librarian John Thomson went to Washington, D. C. and met with Carnegie, ready to admit that a city of 1.3 million people couldn’t be adequately served by the city’s current fourteen branch libraries, most of which were in rented, re-purposed houses. With the right level of support, however, Thomson would welcome the idea of an expanded, state-of-the-art, urban library system. But he couldn’t commit funds he didn’t have.

“I am Aladdin,” Carnegie told the librarian at the meeting. “You, Mr. Thomson, and the trustees of the Free Library of Philadelphia are the lamp. I rub the lamp… But you do the work. You devote your time, your brains, your health to the task. I merely supply the polish.”

And, as both men knew full well, Philadelphia would be obliged to pay more, much more, for an expanded improved network of libraries. “I do not want to be known for what I give,” Carnegie claimed, “but for what I induce others to give.”

“This is not charity, this is not philanthropy,” he said, “it is the people helping themselves by taxing themselves.”

A few days later, Thomson received the anticipated letter: “After listening to you,” Carnegie wrote, “I beg to say that it would give me great pleasure to do for the city of Philadelphia what I have done for New York, provided always that Philadelphia will do what New York has done for herself.” (Carnegie committed to pay for the construction of what would amount to 67 libraries in New York for a total of more than $5.2 million. The city agreed to cover for the costs for land, books, staffing and ongoing maintenance.)

“You tell me that a complete system of branch libraries for Philadelphia would require thirty of such branches,” Carnegie continued in his letter to Thomson, “and you estimate that twenty to thirty thousand dollars apiece would be sufficient for these, but I do not think this sum would be enough. You should have lecture rooms in these branch libraries and our experience in Pittsburgh is that we have not spent enough upon them. The last branches there cost a great deal most than the first.”

“I think, therefore, it would be well for you to spend fifty thousand dollars apiece for these branch library buildings, and it would give me great pleasure to provide a million and a half of dollars as the same may be needed to erect thirty branch libraries for Philadelphia provided sites be given and the city agree to maintain these branch libraries at a cost of not less than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.”

“The branch libraries are the most popular institutions of all,” observed the steel magnate, “and I think, the most useful. A great central library is, of course, needed. But even before it in usefulness I place the local libraries, which reach the masses of the people.”

Before Carnegie’s offer, library trustees in Philadelphia were actually considering shuttering all but one of their fourteen current branches as “unsuitable.” But with the new offer on the table, they voted to accept it. The decision would be subject to approval by City Council and the mayor.

George McCurdy, president of Common Council, responded cautiously, acknowledging the gift as “handsome,” adding “the city will have to take into consideration the probably expense… it means an outlay of $150,000 a year for maintenance alone, exclusive of our big central library (the plans for which were underway along the Parkway). If the city is obliged to buy a score or more of sites, that also means a big outlay, and we will have to consider the propriety of expending so large a sum at this time.”

McCurdy hoped Carnegie’s “magnanimous offer” might “stimulate some of our own wealthy citizens to make similar gifts, either for a central library or for the purchase of sites. We have men here who could duplicate the gift, and should do it from a spirit of civic pride.” Discussions dragged on for a year before the city officially accepted Carnegie’s offer.

Among the earliest branch designed, bid and built was the “Grecian style” Lehigh Avenue Branch (now the Lillian Marrero Library) designed by architects G. W. & W. D. Hewitt. “When new [it] was one of the biggest libraries in the state,” wrote Inquirer’s Thomas Hine in 1985, “a classical building of immense pretension and grandeur standing on its own little Parnassus in the heart of the industrial city.”

“The cornerstone of the first Carnegie Library of the chain to be erected in this city was laid at Sixth and Lehigh avenue” the afternoon of April 10, 1905. The complete building would be outfitted with granite steps, Corinthian columns and be made of either Indiana limestone or Pennsylvania white marble. Beneath a giant reading room, would be a nearly equally large auditorium. The anticipated cost—about $100,000—was twice what Carnegie originally anticipated, and as much as five times what Thomson originally imagined for a typical branch.

That same year, the West Philadelphia Branch in the French Renaissance style by C.C. Zantzinger also opened. So did the Tacony Branch, designed by Lindley Johnson. Over time, twenty-two more, from Passyunk to Manayink, Cobbs Creek to Kingsessing would follow, joining the 1,689 libraries Carnegie leveraged into existence throughout the United States. “In 30 years,” wrote Hine, Carnegie “spent $56,162,662 and single-handedly increased the number of American public libraries four-fold.”

Carnegie’s grant to Philadelphia was his second largest library grant ever.

[Sources: In The Philadelphia Inquirer – “Carnegie Will Endow Thirty Free Libraries,” January 7, 1903; “Mr. Carnegie’s Gift to Philadelphia,” (Editorial) January 7, 1903; “Carnegie Gift to Camden; Opening at Washington,” January 8, 1903; “Councils Must Decide on the Carnegie Offer,” January 8, 1903; “Library Trustees Will Meet Today,” January 9, 1903; “Trustees To Accept Mr. Carnegie’s Gift,” January 10, 1903; “Library Bill Signed, January 12, 1904; “Will Bid Upon Two Carnegie Branches,” October 1, 1904: “Corner Stone for Carnegie Library,” April 11, 1905; “To Dedicate New Carnegie Library – Lehigh Avenue Branch,” November 18, 1906 and Thomas Hine, “Public Libraries Were his Gifts to the World,” July 25, 1985. Also, Theodore Wesley Koch, A Book of Carnegie Libraries. (H.W. Wilson company, 1917).]

“The academy never stood apart from American slavery,” argues Craig Steven Wilder in his book Ebony and Ivy. “In fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”

“The American college is largely the story of the rise of the slave economy in the Atlantic world,” Wilder noted.

Producers of the the podcast Shackled Legacy: Universities and the Slave Trade agree.“Profits from slavery and related industries helped fund some of the most prestigious schools in the Northeast, including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Yale.” Wealth from “slavery built several schools in the North. And in many southern states enslaved people built college campuses and served faculty and students.”

A few years ago, Georgetown University In Washington, D.C. admitted slavery’s role in their founding. Educators “orchestrated the sale of 272 men, women and children for $115,000 – $3.3 million in today’s dollars – to pay off the school’s debts.”

At first, the University of Pennsylvania denied “any direct involvement between Penn and the slave trade.” Then a group of students and faculty calling themselves The Penn Slavery Project released revealing research. “Seventy-five of the school’s early trustees, including over twenty of the founding trustees” were either owners of slaves or had financial ties to the slave trade.

The more we look, the more we see: in 18^th and 19^th-century America, education, philanthropy and the slave trade were woven into a massive tangle of moral compromise that generally was kept secret.

But not always.  In one prominent Philadelphia case, not only did folks know it, you might say they even owned it.

Consider the Institute for Colored Youth (later Cheney University) the nation’s earliest institution of higher learning for African Americans, founded in 1837 and still standing at 915 Bainbridge Street.  The ICY was made possible with funds from Richard Humphreys, a Caucasian silversmith who left a $10,000 bequest (more than $260,000 in today’s dollars) to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in order to establish a school for “…instructing the descendants of the African Race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanical arts and trades and in Agriculture…in order to prepare and fit and qualify them to act as teachers in such of those branches of useful business…”

Thing was, Humphreys’ fortune originated in the coffee and sugar plantations of Tortola, the Caribbean Island where his parents, members of the Society of Friends, held and benefited from the labor of hundreds of enslaved Africans. At the time of Humphreys’ birth in 1750, his parents were among about 100 British colonists on the island who owned 10,000 Africans brought there to toil and die. The Quakers on Tortola were said to be “self-conscious about their plantations being cultivated by slave labor.” But the Humphreys continued to hold slaves, and accumulate wealth, so long as they lived on the Island.

When Octavius V. Catto (himself an ICY alum) delivered a commencement address more than a year after the Emancipation Proclamation, he acknowledged Humphreys and the Quakers for their “proverbial sympathy and charity for the oppressed,” and their “consistent opposition to ignorance, intemperance, war, and slavery.” This, said Catto, made Humphreys’ name “inseparable from our heartfelt gratitude and respect.” Instead of focusing on the source of the funds, Catto turned his listeners’ attention to the overwhelming need for education of the formerly enslaved, “those millions of human beings now scattered through the Southern country…”

Education, declared Catto, would be their continued path “to come forth into the sunlight of Freedom . . .”

[Sources: Octavius V. Catto,”An Address Delivered at Concert Hall on the Occasion of the Twelfth Annual Commencement of the Institute for Colored Youth,” May 10th, 1864, ExplorePaHistory.com; “Richard Humphreys (1750-1832)” in Philadelphia, Three Centuries of American Art (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976), pp. 128-132; Jennifer Schuessler, “Dirty Antebellum Secrets in Ivory Towers,” The New York Times, October 18, 2013; Sheila Simmons, “UPenn Claims No Traces of Slavery in its DNA,” The Philadelphia Tribune, September 9, 2016; “Shackled Legacy: Universities and the Slave Trade,” American Public Media podcast, September 4, 2017; Madeleine Ngo, “Penn has acknowledged its ties to slavery, but student researchers say their work is far from over,” The Daily Pennsylvanian, August 24, 2018.]

Slavers kidnapped a frail, 7-year-old girl in West Africa. They forced her aboard The Phillis, transported her to Boston, and sold her to John Wheatley, a tailor, and his wife, Susanna. Phillis Wheatley (named for the ship) quickly mastered English, became versed in the Bible and learned Greek and Latin. A creative genius, her first poem appeared in print in 1770. Wheatley was lauded as a new, distinctively American poet, a star of the rising anti-slavery movement and a trans-Atlantic literary celebrity. Six cities, including Philadelphia, printed her work. Wheatley’s collected poems were published in London in 1773.

A century and a half later, the name Phillis (sometimes spelled Phyllis) Wheatley would be considered an inspiring choice for African-American organizations from South Carolina to Minnesota. Equity Hall in Philadelphia’s “Black 7^th Ward” had been serving as a destination since 1894 for banquets, meetings, protests, funerals, balls, boxing matches, concerts and political rallies. In 1922, The Negro Year Book listed the building at 1024 Lombard as the Phyllis Wheatley Social Center.

When Mayor Hampton Moore confirmed his plan to renovate the hall and build a new playground on the block between 10^th, 11th, Lombard and Rodman Streets, it made perfect sense to name it for the poet. “I suggest the name of one who stands for the colored race,” declared the mayor, “a slave child brought to the country and kept here in slavery, who, despite all obstacles became an educated woman—a writer and a poet, a woman who wrote of her people and who sang their songs.” At a dedication ceremony on July 12, 1921, Mayor Moore noted before a crowd of 2,000 that a place previously known as “Hell’s Half Acre” was about to be renamed “the Phyllis Wheatley Recreation Centre.” This choice, he later noted, met the approval of several religious and civic leaders in Philadelphia’s African American community.

But Mayor Moore had earned himself a few political enemies. Immediately after his election in 1919, Moore unfurled a banner across Market Street proclaiming: “No boss shall rule this town.” He derailed the political ambitions of Vare loyalist, City Councilman Charles B. Hall, whose district included the playground. And Moore commissioned a study, conducted by sociologist Richard R. Wright Jr., that concluded the 1000 block of Lombard Street was “one of the worst pest holes in Philadelphia… due largely [to the] influence and protection” of an unnamed politician. Wright’s report claimed that city-owned buildings there were being “used for profitable, but illegal practices, including banditry, dope, prostitution, gambling and a series of other crimes too numerous to mention.”

Hall, the area’s ward leader, looked like the guilty party. He threatened to sue the Mayor for libel—and more, he proposed using what power he did have in City Council to swap out Wheatley’s name with someone who had a direct connection with the 7^th Ward, the recently deceased City Councilman (and Hall’s predecessor and mentor) Charles Seger.  A fireman turned saloon owner machine politician, Seger was the epitome of political bossism.

Moore called Hall “a “baby” and a “bluffer,” and reiterated the accusation that Hall was “largely responsible for vice conditions in the section of the city where he is in political control.”

“It’s a usurpation of power which belongs to Council,” claimed Hall of Moore’s proposal for the Wheatley name. “I want that place named Charles Seger Park and I’m going to see that it is named that.” A few members of the city’s African-American press took Hall’s side and interpreted the mayor’s proposal as crass pandering. “The most regrettable occurrence,” wrote the author of an article entitled “Phyliss Wheatley’s Name in Wrong Hands,” “has been the flippant and disgusting manner in which the mayor of Philadelphia and a few of his colored followers have dragged into the mire of the filthy politics of the city the name of that illustrious Negro woman…” Others in the city’s African-American community disagreed: “Numerous colored churches … vigorously denounced Councilman Hall for his attempt to name the new playground at 10^th and Lombard streets after the late Charles Seger.”

Mayor Moore wasn’t about to back down, even after City Council overwhelmingly voted (15-4) to name the playground for Charles Seger in late July, 1921. He vetoed the bill and presented a plaque of Phyllis Wheatley to hang in the Lombard Street building. A week later, Moore opened the Mayor’s Reception Room in City Hall to 250 citizens interested in maintaining the Wheatley name. “The masks usually worn by the colored population had been stripped off,” declared the Rev. W.H. Moses of the Zion Baptist Church, “and no matter what Council did the name of the playground to the Negroes always would be the Phillis Wheatley Center.”

City Council did override the Mayor’s veto. And soon after, Council proposed to demolish Equity Hall, aka the Phyllis Wheatley Social Center. What would take its place? Councilman Hall had at the ready an ordinance to fund “a modern community and social service house to be named after Fanny Jackson Coppin, a slave girl who rose to be a profound Greek and Latin scholar and the greatest of all Negro educators of all time.” Coppin did have strong ties to the neighborhood. Starting in 1865, she ran the Institute for Colored Youth only a few blocks away near 9th and Bainbridge Streets.

But today, the Coppin building is long gone. And, of course, Wheatley’s name is nowhere to be found. What remains is once-contested public space that goes by the name of Seger.

Sometimes, long-forgotten history forces us to pose a question. In this case, we must ask: Should Seger’s name remain?

[Sources: [Dedication of Equity Hall], December 11, 1894 (Inquirer); “Colored Odd Fellows’ lodges in Philadelphia, 1896,” New York Public Library Digital Collections;  “Republicans Hold a Rousing Meeting in Equity Hall,” October 26, 1912 (Tribune); “Seger Dies at 71,” November 8, 1919 (Inquirer); “Moore Clamps Lid Tightly on Cabinet,” Nov. 8, 1919 (Inquirer); “’Hell’s Half Acre’ to get New Name,” July 13, 1921 (Tribune); “From Sproul Down, Vare Rule is Over, Notice From Moore,” Dec. 24, 1919 (Inquirer); “Mayor Answers Threats of Hall,” July 9, 1920 (Inquirer); “Mayor Should Clean Up Vice, Declares Hall,” Aug. 25, 1920 (Inquirer); “Hall Threatens Mayor, Dares Moore to Charge Him with Vice Conditions,” Aug. 28, 1920 (Tribune); “Mayor Threatened By Hall With Suit,” Nov. 27, 1920 (Inquirer); “Mayor Threatened By Hall With Suit,” Nov. 27, 1920 (Inquirer); “To Build Playground,” Oct. 23 1920 (Bulletin); “Mayor Moore Would ‘Clean-Up’ Seventh Ward Section to Establish His Own Political Headquarters,” Oct. 30, 1920 (Tribune); “Hell’s Half Acre Is Passing Away,” Jan. 4, 1921 (Inquirer); “Bill for New Playground,” June 2 1921 (Bulletin); “Hell’s Half Acre” to get New Name,” July 13, 1921 (Inquirer); “Wheatley Pa’K How Come?” July 16, 1921 (Bulletin); “Phyllis Wheatley’s Name in Wrong Hands,” July 16 1921 (Tribune); “Mayor Moore Opens New Play Ground…Phyllis Wheatley its Name,” July 16, 1921 (Tribune); “Hall Defies the Mayor to Veto ‘Seger’ Centre,” July 22, 1921 (Bulletin);  “Bold Attempt to Use Our Churches in City Politics,” July 23, 1921 (Tribune);  “Phillis Wheatley Name To ‘Stick,’” July 23, 1921 (Inquirer); “Negroes Announce Break with Hall over Playground,” Aug. 4, 1921 (Bulletin); “Colored Residents Demand Park Be Named for Poetess,” Aug. 4, 1921 (Bulletin); “The Mayor Hears Arguments on Play Ground Naming,” Aug. 6, 1921 (Tribune). Marcus Anthony Hunter, Black Citymakers: How The Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (Oxford University Press; 2015)].