{"id":9323,"date":"2015-07-29T07:02:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-29T11:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=9323"},"modified":"2015-08-16T15:59:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-16T19:59:00","slug":"firehouses-acting-out-an-exuberant-stylistic-storm-in-the-1890s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2015\/07\/firehouses-acting-out-an-exuberant-stylistic-storm-in-the-1890s\/","title":{"rendered":"Firehouses Acting Out: An Exuberant, Stylistic Storm in the 1890s"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Engine<\/a>
Engine House #29 – Truck “G”, Chemical Engine #2
North 4th Street and West Girard Avenue, November 17, 1896 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe most intriguing element\u201d on the fa\u00e7ade of Engine #29 on 4th<\/sup> Street near Girard,” Inga Saffron wonders<\/a>, is \u201cthe vaguely Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs embedded between the handsome truck doors and the German-style pattern in the ribbon of flowery tiles just below the cornice.\u00a0Why those motifs?\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, we agree: What the hex?<\/p>\n

Might this be \u201can attempt to reflect the heritage of the German immigrants who worked in the neighborhood’s breweries and mills,\u201d Saffron pondered. Or “was it just the fancy of the architect?\u201d<\/p>\n

Fancy indeed.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia firehouses took off in an exuberant stylistic storm in the 1890s, and John T. Windrim<\/a>, the likely designer of Engine #29, was the creative at its center. We can see the broad eclecticism on 4th<\/sup> Street; it’s one of the factors that led to the building’s listing by the Philadelphia Historical Commission in 1989. We see something similar at Windrim’s Engine #37, on Highland Avenue in Chestnut Hill, completed about the same time. (The Commission recently added that structure, \u201cthe oldest active fire hall in the city\u201d to their list, reported<\/a>\u00a0Newsworks.) Two happy survivors, but many more gems by Windrim got lost along the way.<\/p>\n

Back to our original question: What the Hex? How, in the 1890s, did firehouses become places for expressions of opulence, eclecticism, and outright design rowdyism? Not only did Windrim draw from the German vernacular, he dipped into all kinds of historical and contemporary design sources that added up to a wild ride in architectural design. More than \u201cRichardsonian Romanesque,\u201d the firehouse on 4th<\/sup> Street takes strides toward the even wilder, contemporary work by Frank Furness which Michael Lewis refers to with an apt and revealing subtitle: \u201cArchitecture and the Violent Mind<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

What was it about firehouses at the end of the century that made them so susceptible to architectural expression? Did the culture of rowdyism<\/a>, which played out so vividly in firefighting\u2019s earlier years, somehow become channeled into its architecture? Or, as Rebecca Zurier suggests in The American Firehouse<\/a><\/i>, could it be that there was \u201cno prevailing \u2018proper\u2019 style for a fire station, [so] architects tried nearly all of them.\u201d In firehouses, she wrote, they executed designs \u201cconsidered too outlandish for another type of building.\u201d Zurier, who conducted her own Grand Tour of American\u00a0firehouses concluded: \u201cno one ever complained about a fire station being undignified.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent times, observed historian John Maass<\/a>, \u201cmunicipal officials generally want inconspicuous fire stations lest they be accused of wasting taxpayers’ money.\u201d But in the 1890s, \u201cpolitical bosses used to glory in building the showiest firehouses.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOpulent fire stations,\u201d said Zurier, \u201cconstituted political as well as architectural statements. Responsibility for commissioning a particularly extravagant fire station\u201d was often \u201ctraced directly to the wishes of the mayor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Purposeful extravagance resulted in \u201ca wondrous variety of architectural styles,\u201d wrote Maass, from \u201cGreek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Richardsonian Romanesque\u201d to \u201cFrench Chateauesque, Castellated, Half-timbered Tudor, Prairie Style, Spanish Colonial, Pueblo Adobe, Art Deco, Ugly & Ordinary Venturian.\u201d The American firehouse had become, and would remain, a genre all its own.<\/p>\n

\"caption\"<\/a>
Detail: Engine House #29 \u2013 Truck \u201cG\u201d, Chemical Engine #2.\u00a0North 4th Street and West Girard Avenue, November 17, 1896 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Fire<\/a>
Detail: Fire House #2 – Southwest Corner, Warnock and Berks Streets. March 23, 1931. (PhillyHistory,org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cUp-Town Firemen Move to Better and More Modern Quarters,\u201d reported the Inquirer<\/em> on\u00a0February 28, 1895. Contractor Frederick J. Amweg had turned Engine #29, his project in \u201cterra cotta and Pompeian brick,\u201d costing $39,611, over to the City Department of Public Safety.\u00a0Philadelphia had added yet one more creative interpretation in the firehouse genre to its ever-more exuberant, ever-growing collection.<\/p>\n

But do we really<\/em> know<\/em> that Windrim came up with this particular design? The hex sign offers a possible confirming hint. The very same feature also appears in another, documented example of Windrim\u2019s work: Fire House #2, which opened in 1894 at the southwest corner Warnock and Berks Streets. That building had a similar hex pattern, applied in a similar way, as does the Engine #29 on 4th<\/sup> Street.<\/p>\n

Except that\u00a0Windrim building<\/a> is long<\/em> gone, its site now occupied by Temple University’s mammoth Montgomery Avenue Parking Garage<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe most intriguing element\u201d on the fa\u00e7ade of Engine #29 on 4th Street near Girard,” Inga Saffron wonders, is \u201cthe vaguely Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs embedded between the handsome truck doors and the German-style pattern in the ribbon of flowery tiles just below the cornice.\u00a0Why those motifs?\u201d Yes, we agree: What the hex? Might this […]<\/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-9323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9323","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=9323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}