{"id":12204,"date":"2018-04-26T17:02:10","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T21:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=12204"},"modified":"2018-04-27T08:45:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-27T12:45:39","slug":"the-autocrat-and-the-engineer-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2018\/04\/the-autocrat-and-the-engineer-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"The Autocrat and the Engineer (Part II)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Joseph Harrison Jr. house at 227. S.18th Street, modeled on the Pavlovsk Palace in St. Petersburg. Photograph dated 1866.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the capital of Imperial Russia, St. Petersburg was a city of many palaces. \u00a0Some belonged to the Romanov family, such as Peterhof, the Winter Palace, the Pavlovsk Palace, the Anichkov Palace, and Tsarskoe Selo. \u00a0Others belonged to wealthy Russian nobles, such as the Yusapov,\u00a0Beloselskiy, and Stroganov clans.\u00a0Many had been constructed in the 18th century, as part of Czar Nicholas I’s ancestor Peter the Great’s initiative to Westernize Russia and have its upper classes adopt the manners of the French and Italian aristocracies. By the mid-19th century, these pastel pink and green confections were filled with malachite tables, gilded candelabras, and Old Master paintings. \u00a0During big parties, their windows glowed with candlelight, magnified many-fold by crystal chandeliers and mirrors.<\/p>\n

The fount of their owners’ wealth were vast tracts of farmland and the unpaid labor of thousands of serfs.<\/p>\n

Writer Ivan Goncharov satirized what he saw as a self-indulgent and indolent aristocracy in his 1859 novel Oblomov<\/em>, in which the title character barely has the energy to rise from his bed. \u00a0Why should he have motivation when money passively streamed in from his country estate?<\/p>\n

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The Stroganov Palace in St. Petersburg, built in the 1760s. Source: Wikipedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWhen you don’t know what you’re living for, you don’t care how you live from one day to the next,\u201d Ilya Ilych Oblomov says in the novel. \u201cYou’re happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep you bury the tedious question of what you lived for that day and what you’re going to live for tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oblomov ultimately dies of his own laziness.<\/p>\n

To Philadelphian Joseph Harrison, the cosmopolitan opulence of St. Petersburg was a stunning contrast to the sober propriety of his native Philadelphia. \u00a0Yet he remained immune to the malady of \u201cOblomovitis.\u201d\u00a0He worked hard (and no doubt played hard) during his many years in Russia. He successfully designed a series of new locomotives for the St. Petersburg to Moscow railroad, as well as new freight and passenger cars. He also constructed a locomotive repair facility on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. His crowning achievement was the replacement of an old pontoon rail bridge over the Neva River with the cast-iron Bridge of the Annunciation. \u00a0 According to Harrison’s biography in Cassier’s Magazine<\/em>, Czar Nicholas I was amazed at the Philadelphian’s creativity and self-discipline, and as a result the monarch bestowed \u201cnumerous \u2028other tokens of the friendship \u2028and esteem\u201d on the American engineer, the most prominent of which was the Order of St. Ann, awarded to those who had performed exceptional feats of civil and military service. \u00a0Its motto was “Amantibus Justitiam, Pietatem, Fidem” (“To those who love justice, piety, and fidelity”).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Bridge of the Annunciation, St. Petersburg. Designed by Joseph Harrison, Stanis\u0142aw Kierbed\u017a, and Alexander Brullov. Source: Wikipedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Greek Hall of Pavlovsk Palace. Source: Wikipedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thanks to Czar Nicholas I\u2019s patronage, Joseph Harrison came back to Philadelphia a very rich man. \u00a0In 1855, during one of his periodic visits home, Harrison commissioned architect Samuel Sloan to build a new city house for his family, on a 75 feet by 198 feet lot fronting the-then mostly undeveloped Rittenhouse Square.<\/p>\n

Sloan had made a name for himself as a designer of picturesque suburban villas and urban townhouses in the Italianate style. Harrison instructed his architect to build an adaptation of the Pavlovsk Palace in St. Petersburg, an 18th century czarist residence he and his wife Sarah had admired during their time abroad. \u00a0Built by Catherine the Great for his son Grand Duke Paul (Czar Nicholas I\u2019s father), Pavlovsk was a jewel of neo-classical design.<\/p>\n

Samuel Sloan set to work at his drafting table.\u00a0 His Harrison mansion was a symmetrical structure, composed of a three-bay wide center block, flanked by a pair of two story wings.\u00a0 It had not one, but two arched front doorways.\u00a0 No doubt influenced by the sight of all the Old Master paintings cluttering the walls of the Winter Palace, he filled his own home\u2019s cavernous rooms with fashionable art, most notably twenty works from Charles Wilson Peale\u2019s famous museum.\u00a0 His most notable acquisition was Benjamin West\u2019s \u201cChrist Rejected.\u201d The rear windows of the house looked out on a large, enclosed garden. \u00a0There was no pretense of Quaker austerity. This edifice was meant to dazzle and impress, inside and out.<\/p>\n

When Joseph and Sarah Harrison took up residence in their home at 227 S.18th Street in 1857, they were the proud owners of one the largest and most flamboyant homes in the city of Philadelphia. Other members of Philadelphia\u2019s ultra-wealthy, most notably members of the Drexel family, built similarly grand houses around the square in the years to come. \u00a0Flush with cash from his Russian adventures and locomotive patents, Harrison took up intellectual, civic, and cultural pursuits with gusto. He served on the boards of the Fairmount Park Conservancy and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, making a substantial donation toward PAFA\u2019s new Frank Furness-designed home on North Broad Street.\u00a0 He died in 1874.<\/p>\n

The giant house stood until the 1920s, when it was demolished to make way for the Pennsylvania Athletic Club.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Monument to Nicholas I in St. Isaac’s Square, St. Petersburg. Source: Wikipedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Czar Nicholas I ruled until his death in 1855.\u00a0 His son Alexander II took a much more liberal course than his reactionary father, freeing Russia\u2019s serfs in 1862, one year before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. The Romanov dynasty came to a violent end in 1918, when Bolshevik revolutionaries gunned down Czar Nicholas I\u2019s great-grandson Nicholas II and his entire family in Siberia. \u00a0The old Romanov trinity of \u201cOrthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality\u201d had been replaced by Vladimir Lenin\u2019s Communist rallying cry of \u201cPeace, Land, and Bread.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sources:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cJoseph Harrison Jr. A Biographical Sketch,\u201d\u00a0Cassier\u2019s Magazine, An Engineering Monthly<\/em>, Volume XXXVII, November 1909-April 1910,\u00a0http:\/\/himedo.net\/TheHopkinThomasProject\/TimeLine\/Philadelphia\/LocomotiveWorks\/CassierBioJosHarrison.htm<\/a>, accessed April 17, 2018.<\/p>\n

Karen Chernick, \u201cThe Lost Mansions of Rittenhouse Square,\u201d Curbed Philadelphia<\/em>, January 17, 2018, https:\/\/philly.curbed.com\/2018\/1\/17\/16896748\/rittenhouse-square-philadelphia-historic-photos<\/a>, accessed April 26, 2018.<\/p>\n

Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov: A Novel<\/em>(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011). \u00a0https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?isbn=1583229868<\/a>, accessed April 26, 2018.<\/p>\n

Kevin Klever, Saint Mark\u2019s Church, Philadelphia, From 1847<\/em>(Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2015). https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?isbn=1503574806<\/a>, accessed April 26, 2018.<\/p>\n

Joseph Harrison Jr. Papers, MS.024, Hoang Tran, ed., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, January 2016.\u00a0https:\/\/www.pafa.org\/sites\/default\/files\/media-assets\/MS.024_JosephHarrisonJr.pdf<\/a>, accessed April 17, 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the capital of Imperial Russia, St. Petersburg was a city of many palaces. \u00a0Some belonged to the Romanov family, such as Peterhof, the Winter Palace, the Pavlovsk Palace, the Anichkov Palace, and Tsarskoe Selo. \u00a0Others belonged to wealthy Russian nobles, such as the Yusapov,\u00a0Beloselskiy, and Stroganov clans.\u00a0Many had been constructed in the 18th century, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-behind-the-scenes","category-events-and-people","category-historic-sites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12204","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\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}