{"id":6244,"date":"2014-01-07T00:10:38","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T05:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=6244"},"modified":"2014-01-07T10:03:40","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T15:03:40","slug":"aesthetics-in-the-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2014\/01\/aesthetics-in-the-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"Aesthetics in the Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Water Main Break at Spring Garden Station, December 1895 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The massive water main break<\/a> at Frankford and Torresdale Avenues last month inspired yet another one of our fishing expeditions at PhillyHistory. And one photographic treasure we hooked offers a bit of perspective on the 23 million lost gallons\u2014and then some.<\/p>\n

A December 1895 monster break<\/a> between the Spring Garden Water Works<\/a> and Brewerytown washed out a swath 18 feet wide and 11 feet deep. It obstructed the Reading Railroad tracks with debris and pushed tons of gravel where it wasn\u2019t welcome.<\/p>\n

But this water main from 1895 was only half<\/em> the diameter of the one that broke last December. That<\/em> broken 60-inch pipe allowed water to gush across neighborhoods, affecting residents in eight zip codes. To emphasize how much water 23 million gallons is, newsfolk reported<\/a> it was the equivalent of 34 Olympic sized swimming pools.<\/p>\n

Olympic swimming pools? Sorry, that\u2019s too obtuse a reference for this sedentary city dweller. And translating it into 920 suburban pools isn\u2019t much better. What we need is an illustration that\u2019s more down to earth.<\/p>\n

Like bathtubs. At 36 gallons per bath, we calculate that the 23 million gallons of water that cascaded through city streets might have meant a good scrub up for 638,889 people\u2014or 41% of the city\u2019s population.<\/p>\n

Reminds us of the cartoon<\/a> by Jerry Doyle<\/a> from 1937, when The Philadelphia Record<\/em> editorialized against the city\u2019s recent purchase of Paul Cezanne\u2019s painting, The Bathers<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> A proud William Penn, descended from his City Hall pedestal, steps across the threshold of a squalid tenement and shows off his new Cezanne to a poor, single mom. \u201cLookit!\u201d declares the smiling Penn, \u201cI bought you a pretty picture.\u201d<\/p>\n

The $110,000 price for the Cezanne, which has hung in the Philadelphia Museum of Art ever since, was enough, The Record<\/em> editors pointed out, to install bathtubs in half of the 40,000 Philadelphia homes that lacked proper plumbing.<\/p>\n

PhillyHistory\u2019s men-at-work photograph, which dates five years before the Cezanne, is a powerful and telling composition in its own right. And it represents a compelling new idea about modern beauty. Nothing against Cezanne, mind you. He has a place in the history of art, at Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Barnes Foundation (where another version<\/a> of The Bathers<\/em> resides).<\/p>\n

Not too many decades before the 1890s, \u201ca gentle brook purled\u201d and the \u201cdogwood-tree bloomed most abundant\u201d where the Spring Garden Waterworks stood.\u00a0 Historians Scharf and Westcott<\/a> noted that industry had \u201cobliterated\u201d this \u201ccharming little valley\u201d and those searching for its “wild beauties” would “wander in vain amid the ponderous and immense buildings of Brewerytown<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

What would<\/em> they find there? An entirely new species of wild beauty, an urban<\/em> aesthetic, a reality made of iron, mud and men. It echoed neither the natural past nor the classical past. This<\/em> gritty beauty was derived from and thrived on the industrial city\u2014an appreciation of the here and now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The massive water main break at Frankford and Torresdale Avenues last month inspired yet another one of our fishing expeditions at PhillyHistory. And one photographic treasure we hooked offers a bit of perspective on the 23 million lost gallons\u2014and then some. A December 1895 monster break between the Spring Garden Water Works and Brewerytown washed […]<\/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-6244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6244","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=6244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}