{"id":6419,"date":"2014-01-15T22:54:56","date_gmt":"2014-01-16T03:54:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=6419"},"modified":"2014-05-01T16:48:08","modified_gmt":"2014-05-01T20:48:08","slug":"frederick-a-poth-red-bricks-and-gold-beer-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2014\/01\/frederick-a-poth-red-bricks-and-gold-beer-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Frederick A. Poth: Red Bricks and Gold Beer (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Construction and surveying work in front of the former Frederick and Helena Poth mansion at 216 N.33rd Street, May 20, 1927. The Roeschs had vacated the house around this time, and it had become a Drexel Institute dormitory supervised by Dean of Women Ruth A.L. Dorsey.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1887, the brewer Frederick A. Poth purchased a large corner lot at N.33rd and Powelton Avenue from Quaker industrialist John Sellers Jr. \u00a0Sellers was one of Philadelphia’s richest men, a manufacturer of machinery and investor in West Philadelphia real estate. \u00a0Along with the lumber merchant John McIlvain<\/a>, Sellers was also a stalwart of West Philadelphia’s Quaker community. \u00a0 The Powelton Quakers tended to be a reserved, insular, and tech-savvy group. They were also usually shrewd business people, and often vocally anti-slavery. True to his faith’s “plainness” doctrine, Sellers lived in a boxy Italianate house at 3300 Arch Street. His cousin and mechanical polymath Coleman Sellers II<\/a> — hydroelectric engineer for Niagra Falls and arguably the inventor of the first moving picture camera (the kinematoscope) — lived a few blocks to the north on Baring Street.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Industrialist and inventor Coleman Sellers II (1827-1907).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As they grew in wealth and prominence during the Industrial Revolution, Philadelphia Quakers struggled to balance their financial success with the trappings of weath. \u00a0The older generation before the Civil War continued to wear gray and black broadcloth, address people in the non-hierarchal “thee” and “thou,” and avoid intoxicating beverages. \u00a0\u00a0The “frivolous” material temptations of the Gilded Age<\/a>, however, proved too great for many members of the Society of Friends after the Civil War.<\/p>\n

Few Philadelphian tycoons could be more quintessentially Gilded Age than the portly brewer Frederick A. Poth. \u00a0When he bought the corner lot from Sellers in 1887, the self-made German immigrant<\/a> was one of the city’s biggest brewers, owner of F.A. Poth & Sons at 31st and Jefferson Street, located in the section of North Philadelphia still known as Brewerytown. \u00a0Poth — who still spoke in the gutteral accent of the “old country” — was many things: a tough businessman, an amateur singer<\/a>\u00a0in German musical societies, gentleman farmer (at his country property in Norristown), dedicated Mason, bon vivant clubman<\/a>, and sharp real estate investor. \u00a0Soon after purchasing the Sellers lot, he immediately\u00a0commissioned the relatively obscure architect Alfred W. Dilks Jr. to build a new family home.<\/p>\n

Why Poth selected Dilks is a bit of a mystery, especially when he could have chosen the likes of the colorful Frank Furness (then hard at work on the University of Pennsylvania’s new library<\/a>) or the buttoned-up Theophilus Parsons Chandler Jr. (a distinguished professor at the University and also Dilks’ mentor).\u00a0Just before he started drafting designs for the Poth mansion, Dilks finished a speculative rowhouse development for Poth and his fellow brewer Edward Schmidt<\/a> on the 3300 block of Arch Street. \u00a0The new houses were cheek-by-jowl with the sober John Sellers mansion. The 1985 National Register nomination of the Poth-Schmidt rowhouses sums up Dilks’s design approach: “As a consequence of\u00a0Dilks’ training, and his understanding of contemporary taste, the buildings that he designed for\u00a0Arch Street\u00a0are among\u00a0Philadelphia’s most important examples of the Queen Anne style, showing all of its essential features. Those include the Japanese influenced porch details, which alternate with the\u00a0Mediaevalizing\u00a0knee braces of other porch details; the empathetic use of brick detail to describe architectural weight; and the multiple textures from painted wood to smooth brick, to shadow catching hung tile. The buildings were further enlivened by formal variation within the group that adds to the richness of the ensemble. There are few equals to the\u00a0Dilks\u00a0achievement in the generally plain\u00a0Quaker\u00a0City.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The F.A. Poth and Company brewery at 31st and Jefferson Streets, designed by Otto Wolf. Almost all of these buildings have been demolished. Source: The Hagley Museum and Library. Click on the image to go to the original source.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Definitely not plain, and very un-Quaker, indeed. \u00a0\u00a0And a strange choice of architect for a man a later biographer would eulogize as being “a man of simple tastes.” Yet it was also industrial mechanization that had made the increasingly use of ornament not only possible, but affordable. \u00a0Although Dilks specialized in the so-called Queen Anne style, the house he designed for the Poth family at 216 N. 33rd Street can best be described as German “Beer Baron” baroque, a Rhineland castle transported to the banks of the Schuylkill River. \u00a0Compared to the flat surfaces of the surrounding Italianate \u00a0houses, Poth’s brick mansion is ornate and exuberant. \u00a0To trolley riders and pedestrians, its jagged roofline, protruding turrets, and fiery terra cotta details must have screamed for attention.\u00a0The irony was that all of this historicist ornament in brick, wood, and metal was made possible — and economically feasible — by the mass-production celebrated at the city’s 1876 Centennial Exposition<\/a>. \u00a0Mechanical jigsaws, for example, could churn out intricate gingerbread wood trim in minutes. \u00a0Mechanized presses could transform tin sheets into cornices and bay windows just as quickly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Powelton Club, located on the 3500 block of Powelton Avenue. It was in operation from 1894 until 1906. Poth and many of the neighborhood’s businessmen were members. Here is a description from the Philadelphia Inquirer, dated November 15, 1894:
\u201cThe building is 50 feet front by 100 feet deep, and stands on a plot 89 x 212 feet. It has been entirely renovated and rearranged, so as to insure all the conveniences and comforts of club life. The wide hallway is one of the striking points of the interior arrangements that give the building a quaint and yet pleasant effect. On either side of the hallway are the reception room and library, with accommodation for those who may want to either read or write. In the basement is a fine gymnasium, with all the modern appliances, together with shuffleboard, billiard and pool room and bowling alleys. Close beside these are the bath rooms, lavatories, etc.
\u201cThe second floor rooms are devoted to whist parlors, elegantly furnished. The third story is devoted entirely to apartments of the steward and store rooms. All the rooms have the old style of grate. The lighting throughout is by electricity and the building is heated by steam. The outside grounds will be used in summer for tennis and other sports.” Click on image to go to the original source.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To complete his urban ensemble, Poth commissioned fellow German-native Otto Wolf (the same architect who designed his brewery) to build another set of speculative rowhouses directly across the street from 216 N.33rd Street. \u00a0 He then turned his sights north and west to the old Centennial district of Parkside. Here, he commissioned Willis Hale and other young architects to built a series of enormous, three-story Flemish revival twin homes<\/a> fronting the old fairgrounds.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
3301-11, 3315 Powelton Avenue, built for Frederick A. Poth on speculation by architect Otto Wolf. The houses remained in the Poth family real estate portfolio until the 1950s. Source: University City Historical Society. Click on image to go to original source.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By 1900, the Victorian streetcar suburb of West Philadelphia<\/a> had reached its stylistic and economic peak. \u00a0The houses had evolved from simple suburban Italianate villas into full blown semi-urban mansions. \u00a0The man who had dreamed up the 19th century suburban ideal, the landscape architect Alexander Jackson Downing<\/a> (1815-1852), had warned in his book The Architecture of Country Houses<\/em> against castle architecture: “There is something wonderfully captivating in the idea of a battlemented castle, even to the apparently modest man, who thus shows to the world his unsuspected vein of personal ambition, by trying to make a castle of his country house. But, unless there is something of the castle in the man<\/em>, it is very likely, if it be like a real castle to dwarf him to the stature of a mouse.”<\/p>\n

The italics are Downing’s own.<\/p>\n

Maybe Poth and his wife Helena did feel like a family of “M\u00e4use” in their Powelton “schloss,” for they did not live for long at 216 N. 33rd Street. About only about ten years, they gave their house to their daughter Mathilde and son-in-law George Roesch (a beef wholesaler), and moved to a new city residence in the middle of their Parkside Avenue development, which they called “Brantwood.” \u00a0Here, Frederick Poth died on January 21, 1905. \u00a0His sons inherited F.A. Poth & Sons, which like most of Philadelphia’s beer empires fell victim to the Prohibition in the 1920s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
“The Brantwood” at 4130 Parkside Avenue (October 5, 1945), a series of six large twin houses Poth built in the 1890s on Parkside Avenue. He and his wife Helena moved into one of them after giving their house on North 33rd Street to their daughter and son-in-law. After Poth’s death, the six houses were converted into apartments.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Although no longer conducted on the same scale as a century ago, the ancient art of making beer (ale as well as lager) is undergoing a renaissance in Philadelphia. \u00a0Although the Poth brewery has vanished, most of his residential buildings in Powelton and Parkside have survived, the legacy of a German immigrant<\/a> who wanted to bring a bit of his native Rhine Valley to his adopted home.<\/p>\n

Sources:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n