{"id":11356,"date":"2017-05-11T21:52:06","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T01:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=11356"},"modified":"2017-05-11T21:52:06","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T01:52:06","slug":"the-rowhouse-boom-populist-victory-or-philadelphia-noir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2017\/05\/the-rowhouse-boom-populist-victory-or-philadelphia-noir\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rowhouse Boom: Populist Victory or Philadelphia Noir?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Looking West on McKean Street from Front Street, July 20, 1901. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The proudest moment for the Philadelphia rowhouse was in Chicago, of all places.<\/p>\n

A two-story \u201cWorkingman\u2019s House\u201d was \u201cput up at the Columbian Exposition,\u201d reported Talcott Williams in 1893<\/a>. And \u201cthere’s nothing more wonderful in all that marvelous Exposition than this proof that the laws, the habits, and the business of a city of one million people can be so arranged that even the day labor earning only $8 or $10 a week can own the roof over his head and call no man landlord.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams noted that Philadelphia\u2019s 80,000 rowhouses of the previous six decades had dramatically refashioned the city. \u201cPhiladelphia is not a city of palaces for the few, but a city of homes for the many\u2014which is better,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt may not be \u201cmagnificent, but it is comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seven out of eight families in Philadelphia lived in \u201cseparate houses.\u201d By comparison, in New York \u201conly one family in six lives in a separate house\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

More than a matter of a family enjoying the \u201cdaily blessings\u201d of \u201cits own bath-tub, its own yard, its own staircase, and its own door step,\u201d according to Williams, this was nothing less than \u201cone of the world\u2019s great industrial miracles.\u201d He imagined the modest Philadelphia rowhouse as a declaration of independence in brick and mortar, a moral, populist victory that earned the city both domestic and civic superiority.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia\u2019s expanses of two-story rowhouses, claimed this\u00a0oft-cited passage<\/a> (also from 1893) \u201ctypify a higher civilization, as well as a truer idea of American home life, and are better, purer, sweeter than any tenement house systems that ever existed. They are what make Philadelphia a city of homes, and command the attention of visitors from every quarter of the globe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Looking East on McKean Street from 2nd Street, July 20, 1901. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Southeast Corner, 25th and Kimball Streets, May 11, 1916 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But for all the praise, there was a definite downside. Even Williams admitted that \u201cstreet after street of small-two story brick houses looks rather mean and dingy,\u201d noting that cobblestone pavements were bound to appear \u201crough and dirty.\u201d But, he concluded, it\u2019s \u201cbetter to have bath-rooms by the ten thousand in small homes, than to have brilliant fountains playing in beautiful squares.\u201d<\/p>\n

No denying the \u201cmonotonous architectural effect\u201d caused by endless miles of rowhouses. According to city planning pioneer Andrew Wright Crawford<\/a> in 1905, the real estate developers were to blame. \u201cIn order to build the greatest number of houses on a street, they \u201cwant it straight and rectangular. They don\u2019t care for the persons who are to live in these houses afterwards, and still less to they care for the good of the city as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis idea has been carried out with unremitting perseverance,\u201d stated Crawford. All natural undulations had been leveled \u201cthrowing [a] severe mantle of unloviness\u201d over the city\u2019s many neighborhoods. \u201cIt is too late for Philadelphia to profit much by the broader intelligence of the present time,\u201d admitted Crawford, \u201cbut it is possible that other cities and towns may learn something from her misfortune.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
2400 North Bancroft Street, November 12, 1959. (PhillyHistory,org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It wasn\u2019t as if Philadelphians hadn\u2019t been warned early and often.<\/p>\n

Visiting from industrial London in the 1840s,\u00a0Charles Dickens described Philadelphia<\/a> as \u201ca handsome city, but distractingly regular. \u201cAfter walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1830s, Thomas Hamilton visited and noted<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe traveler is at first delighted with this Quaker paradise,\u201d but \u201cevery street that presents itself seems an exact copy of those which he has left behind.” Hamilton\u2019s patience wore thin and he soon felt \u201can unusual tendency to relaxation about the region of the mouth, which alternately terminates in a silent but prolonged yawn.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPhiladelphia is mediocrity personified in brick and mortar,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt is a city laid down by square and rule, a sort of habitable problem,\u2014a mathematical infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity, \u2014a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.\u201d<\/p>\n

As early as 1790, none other than Thomas Jefferson advised<\/a>\u00a0those contemplating designs for the nation\u2019s next and permanent capital to avoid Philadelphia\u2019s \u201cdisgusting monotony\u201d\u2014a complaint that Jefferson claimed was shared by \u201call persons.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the 1940s, when novelist Jack Dunphy set his tale<\/a> of the unpleasant life and desperate death of John Fury in working-class South Philadelphia, he employed the city\u2019s endless rows with their familiar, expressive, depressing power. As Fury walked home from yet another hard day on the job as a coal-wagon driver, he crossed \u201cWashington Avenue and walked down Nineteenth Street past Mifflin Street and Snyder Avenue until he came to a narrow side street. The street crushed between bigger streets was a poor affair, similar in width, to an alley. Its houses smothered close together, jammed two stories high, and with small wooden porches hung on their fronts, looked like stony red-faced criminals serving a life sentence. Stuck together and dependent one upon the other, they seemed to live in constant fear that someday and somehow one would be pardoned and leave and so jeopardize the rest of them. They stood then, these square red bricked houses, and there were many of them in Philadelphia, tortured row upon row of them, doing penitence and allowing life with its worn semblance of freedom to crowd within them.\u201d<\/p>\n

No coincidence that \u201cPhiladelphia noir\u201d became a thing in the 20th century.<\/p>\n

Actually, it always was a thing.<\/p>\n

[For more posts on the Philadelphia rowhouse, see \u201cThe Quintessential Object of Industrial Philadelphia<\/a>;\u201d \u201cHow Philly Got Flat: Piling it on at the Logan Triangle<\/a>;\u201d and \u201cThe Philadelphia Rowhouse: American Dream Revisited<\/a>.\u201d]<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The proudest moment for the Philadelphia rowhouse was in Chicago, of all places. A two-story \u201cWorkingman\u2019s House\u201d was \u201cput up at the Columbian Exposition,\u201d reported Talcott Williams in 1893. And \u201cthere’s nothing more wonderful in all that marvelous Exposition than this proof that the laws, the habits, and the business of a city of one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}