Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: boys latin, church of the transfiguration
["IT IS FINISHED"--TEXT AND PHOTOS BY JEREMY QUATTLEBAUM]
On the corner of 56th and Cedar in West Philadelphia stands the last remnants of the Church of the Transfiguration. Vacant since 2000, the church was shut down by the archdiocese along with the school, convent, and rectory complex. When Boy’s Latin purchased the Church of Transfiguration’s school complex, it also purchased the church, which is being demolished to allow the school to expand.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 30th Street Station, Drexel Shaft, Graham Anderson Probst and White, implosion, Modernism, Steam Heat Generating Plant
[SHAFTED]
[REFLECTIONS OF A SHAFT]
Designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White and constructed in 1929, what the architects called the 30th Street Station Steam Heating Plant was more than just an appendage to 30th Street Station, much more than a workaday piece of railroading. It really didn’t provide electricity for the Pennsylvania Railroad and despite what some say it had little to do with the demolition of the Chinese Wall and Broad Street Station–that station was electrified for 24 years before it met the wrecking ball. According to the chronicler of all things Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, Sally A. Kitt Chappel, the plant was integral to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s entry into the urban land development business. Watching with envy how their nemesis New York Central’s Grand Central Station had reinvigorated Park Avenue, the PRR had pushed for a new Philadelphia station since the 1920s. Having through trains back in and out of the stub end Broad Street Station was tedious, plus the Pennsylvania wanted all the land covered by the Wilson Brothers’ behemoth and the Chinese Wall. The Chicago-based Graham, Anderson, Probst and White (the successor to Daniel Burnham’s firm) was to give a gloss and sheen to the Railroad’s new real estate development program, known internally as the Philadelphia Improvements. Less a station than an office building, Suburban Station (1930) was the first attempt to inspire private capital to fill the Railroad’s land. Where once were the elevated tracks of the Chinese Wall, the PRR saw an unbroken line of new modern skyscrapers all along the aptly named Pennsylvania Boulevard. But World War II prevented the railroad from dispensing with the Chinese Wall and Broad Street Station, and the city and state delayed in expanding little old Filbert Street into a grand boulevard, so 30th Street sat (and arguably still sits) at the end of a less than triumphant faux Park Avenue.
[THE ORIGINAL PENN CENTER, AS CONCEIVED BY GRAHAM, ANDERSON, PROBST AND WHITE]
The Steam Heating Plant was designed to provide all the steam heat needed for skyscrapers along the Pennsylvania Boulevard commercial corridor. Thinking big, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White sketched out a flexible modernist facility capable of expanding to four smokestacks depending on the needs of real estate. The one stack that was completed gives an idea of the success of the Railroad’s real estate ventures. By the time Penn Center was developed as a PRR project, buildings no longer needed central steam heat. Steam heat passed via pipes through the suburban track bridge–built at the same time–down to Suburban Station.
[A DREXEL STUDENT'S NIGHTMARE, GAPW STEAM HEATING PLANT PROPOSAL]
The Steam Heating Plant is a logical link between the Art Deco of Suburban and the chaste neoclassicism of 30th Street. Like Paul Cret’s Southwark Generating Plant, the Steam Heating Plant’s facade is dominated by the no-nonsense verticality of its rectangular banks of windows. The octagonal stack is borderline Gothic: ascending like a spire it makes you forget it belched coal smoke. It was fire and power cloaked in white fire-baked brick and terra cotta.
Ironically, buildings become new things in their obsolescence. The last time the inclined straight-tube cross drum boilers were fired up was 1964; since then the structure has become a symbol of institutional frustration and a canvas for taggers and lovers. I would have loved to see the stack illuminated as an icon for West Philly. Or fitted with the same LEDs that bejewel the Cira Center to knit together the rail yard landscape. But despite our love of all things old, it could never have been chic condos, retrofitted offices or a modern art museum. Railroads, however, do develop land occupied by obsolete facilities: something the Steam Heating Plant would have understood.
Filed under: Uncategorized
[PLAYGROUND AT GEORGE NESINGER PUBLIC SCHOOL, 6TH AND CARPENTER STS.]
Most Americans of my generation may not recognize this play structure. Most Americans of my parents’ generation–who lived through the space race and its television manifestation of grainy firsts–first dogs in space, then humans, followed by circumnavigations of the Earth, and space walks, and space dockings, (each freighted with political import, done it felt, mere seconds before our Soviet nemeses) know this as the rough shape of the Gemini capsule. By the way, the Soviets were playing on things like this which might explain why they peaked at Laika.
It’s altogether appropriate that the capsule is situated next to that other icon vehicle of “pioneering” Americans, the stagecoach. For American victory culture in the early 1960s, there was a natural connection of the two vehicles. (The more geriatric connection of the two concepts came with 2000’s Space Cowboys.) And the myths and values that supposedly inhabited one were to infuse the other–pluck, daring, perserverence, the pioneer drive, a kind of manifest destiny of the planets. The capsule was also an extension of the new math-infused classroom of the 1950s and 60s: an attempt to close the achievement gap through play. The proximate location of these two vehicles suggests that this was a consciously structured environment–a place where kids could live the thrill of the space race and get a dose of civics by osmosis.
[CAPSULES, HO!]
Clearly this playscape was, by its spatial associations, an opportunity to mine a narrow vein of history in the service of American power projection. The instructive, or didactive nature of play, has been one of chief reasons for existing within American pedagogy. It has been so since the foundation of organizations like the Playground Association of America with their avowed interst in “attract(ing) children into a fun environment so as to teach them lessons in manners, morals, and sportsmanship.” It’s sad, though, that while structured play has lost its preachy quality, there isn’t the emphasis on interesting, constructive design in play equipment. Of course this stuff is expensive but if we concede that kids do learn a thing or two when playing, what are we teaching kids with stuff like this?
Filed under: Uncategorized
[PUBLISHED IN PHILADELPHIA: GREEN COUNTRY TOWN AND MODERN METROPOLIS BY THE PHILADELPHIA TRANSPORTATION COMPANY IN 1948]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Because the DRPA has issued a contract for a feasibility study to reopen the PATCO Franklin Square station, one of the first stations on the old PRT/PTC Bridge Line which opened in 1936, which the above token got you a ride on at one time. The Philadelphia Business Journal reported yesterday that the 750,000 annual visitors to Historic Philadelphia Inc.’s revamped Franklin Square had something to do with the decision. Closed in 1979, the station (which you can tour with WHYY’s Peter Crimmins here) has enjoyed intermittent popularity since it was opened in 1936 as one of the four stations of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company’s Bridge Line.
As expected, the fortune of the Franklin Square Station was inextricably linked to the conditions of a declining vice district adjacent to the park. When Christopher Morley sauntered through the park in search of bohemian anonymity in 1920 he coyly observed the residents of the “theatrical boarding houses”:
…Ladies with very short skirts and silk stockings” showing off their “fuzzy white dogs that just match the soiled white steps.”
The neighborhood, by all accounts, was mixed–bars, brothels, residences, even old German churches and small manufactories lined the park. Yet no one use prevailed over other and the diversity gave the neighborhood and park a vibrancy that’s evident in Morley’s “The Recluse of Franklin Square”.
At some point, however, the area became uniformly disreputable. The arrival of the Delaware River Bridge in 1926, which placed its Paul Cret-designed western approach just to the east of the park presaged the complete strangulation of the park by the Vine Street Expressway in the late 1980s. After World War II, the Philadelphia Transportation Company shuttered the station as the neighborhood to the east of Franklin Square took on the moniker “Skid Row”.
In the recently released Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship, Penn student Benjamin Berman used an 1952 Health and Welfare Council report map of this area to frame the issue of urban renewal and highway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. While clearly there was much to do in the neighborhood, apparently people weren’t talking the subway to get there: a year after the Health and Welfare Report, the Franklin Square station reopened but closed quickly thereafter due to lack of ridership.
[MAP OF SKID ROW, BEN BERMAN, 2008]
Whether the threat of a limited access multi-lane highway was enough to depopulate the area or the Callowhill East Industrial Redevelopment zoned out residents or simply that no one wanted to live in a red light district, by the time the Vine Street Expressway cinched itself around Franklin Square there wasn’t much of a neighborhood left. Of course the transformation of the square is well known: from derelict park and graveyard to homeless encampment to miniature golf and Stephen Starr. The question, of course, is will enough of those 750,000 visitors to Franklin Square use PATCO? Will tourists use PATCO for short trips to and from hotels? Has the neighborhood developed sufficient commercially and residentially to warrant a 24 hour station? Will commuters use it? Does PATCO see the reopening of this station in concert with its Ben Franklin Bridge traffic reduction efforts? A thriving vice district couldn’t keep the station open, can a seemingly thriving heritage tourism district?
[As an aside, these tokens are the same dimensions as present-day SEPTA tokens. I think they're currently in circulation. This explains why I inadvertantly kicked this token while walking at the corner of 12th and Filbert St. near a stop for the 23 bus.]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cartography, error, philadelphia built environment, point breeze park
[??]
Generally Google’s quality control program for its spatial data is beyond reproach. They’ve made provision for user-end correction of erroneous data, creating a feedback loop of constant improvement. This kind of accessibility comes in handy when say you’ve identified that a long defunct 19th century horse trotting and later amusement park at 26th Street and Penrose Ave. is still marked “Point Breeze Park.”
Google informs its helpful correctors that you can contact the eponymous organizer or its third party data vendors like TeleAtlas. Before June 2008, a good deal of Google’s spatial data for Philadelphia seems to come from Sanborn, a company that began producing detailed maps for fire insurance valuation in 1867. After June 2008, TeleAtlas became the single source of Google’s map data, thus responsible for corrections and updates.
[1855]
Though I can’t determine whether the Sanborn fire insurance maps for Philadelphia became the base data layer, what’s clear is that at some point Google’s vendors consulted a pre-1950 map of Philadelphia and took it at face value. While this may cast some doubts about the reliability of Google’s vendors, for a company intent on faithfully mapping the entire globe, this lapse shows just how indispensable Google’s local users are to regulating the system.
[1867]
Errors that persist, of course, point to our lack of intimacy with the fringes of the urban environment and to the handmade quality of maps. As Joe Kincgheloe points out, “when cartographers emply the official mode of geographical representation, they reduce reader cognizance of alternative ways of ‘knowing’ the topography.” In a psychogeographcial sense this city can be said to contain hundreds of acres of blank marginal space, spaces resembling contentless voids (think Eraserhead backdrops) between our nodes of meaning, spaces we are confused by, deterred from, and sometimes scared of. These are what the urban geographer Kevin Lynch calls the “mentally erased” features of our cities. While there may be no way to comprehend the entirety of Philadelphia’s urban form, by getting into these interstices, we are part of the great project for cartographic rectitude.
[1888]
By judging the received truths of prevalent cartographic representation against both our ways of knowing and other representations, we use the abundance of spatial data (historic/official/lived/user created) as a kind of winnowing fan. Sometimes, these corrections come with shrieking vengeance. In 2008 Nokia’s mobile mapping software depicted the disputed region of Kashmir as wholly a part of Pakistan. Irate Indians ransacked Nokia showrooms until the territory was digitally returned to its state of rightful ambiguity.
[1895]
Point Breeze Park, whether real or imagined, has existed in a state of spatial and cartographic limbo since horse racers, gamblers, gentlemen and other species of sports began congregating on a dry patch of sandy scrub just off the road to the Penrose Ferry in 1855. By all accounts, though, the park was the creation of an association of gentlemen wishing to show thoroughbreds, though the marginal location of this driving park and others like Hunting Park and Suffolk Park suggest that these locations were beyond moral reproach. Early maps show an indistinct wedge of “park” between Penrose Ave. and what would become 26th Street, then a skewed road or boundary path. A hotel catering to ferrygoers, the Hamburg, was not far off down the road. On a map from the 1860s, the southern end of the park is undefined and the east branch of a sluggish tidal stream running parallel to Penrose Ave., later identified as Sepeken Creek, wends its way through the southeast corner as it makes its way to the Schuylkill/Delaware confluence.
[BIKE MAP, 1897]
The park seems to have achieved a degree of notoriety in pop culture between 1870-1890s when the New York Times would regularly report on finishes and lithographers produced prints of historic races. A Point Breeze Park Schottische (slower polka) of unknown popularity was also released in the 1870s–undoubtedly conjuring up the brisk excitement of a day at the races. By the 1890s, maps indicate that it had become the Philadelphia Driving Park, appealing more to the genteel sunday driver than the jockey. From an 1897 citywide bicycle map it also appear that the hard surface of the driving course used as a sort of velodrome. The last reference to the driving park comes in an 1901 map, though (as we have seen) this map may be a reprint and not coincide with the actual demise of the track. For a while in the 1910s and 1920s, the grounds were host to an amusement park which also bore the name “Point Breeze Park” and featured a Dentzel Carousel. By 1928, aerial photos show no vestige of the Park. By then, new railroad lines and the growth of petroleum refining was turning this district into the recognizable South Philadelphia of today.
[1870 LITHOGRAPH OF TROTTERS AT POINT BREEZE]
[CRAMP SHIPBUILDING COMPANY, TURRET SHOP, 6.20.09]
PennDot plans for the improved Girard Avenue Interchange show the turret shop of the venerable Cramps Ship and Engine Building Company sitting amid a viper pit of sinuous new ramps, feeders and new arterial city streets. Roads like the super-wide Richmond Ave. uncozily sidle up next to the rectangular redbrick structure and the new northern on and offramps strike clean through it. Of course, the turret shop will witness none of this, its demolition amply preceding any of construction.
[PENNDOT PLANS FOR THE GIRARD AVE. INTERCHANGE]
Thus it was a rare treat to tour the great navelike turret shop last Saturday with the Oliver Evans chapter of the Society for Industrial Archaeology (OESIA) and to move through a space that was at once massively stolid and airy, possessing the “almost nothingness” that intrigued Ludvig Mies van der Rohe about the supremely utilitarian wartime structures of Albert Kahn. Mies, who admired the employ of steel, concrete and glass to create utterly dematerialized and functionally free spaces would have appreciated the turret shop with its window walls and butterfly trusses allowing in copious light.
As OESIA member and Fishtown built environment expert Torben Jenk pointed out on the tour, light was a tool to the industrial machinist. Paradoxically, while new mechanical sashes and butterfly trusses controlling airflow created a more regulated shopfloor environment in the early 20th century, the provision of air was and light was seen as a humane effort at bettering performance. And more light allowed machinists to perform their idiosyncratic craft. While we associate factory work with the rote mechanic performance of a single task, at most shops in Philadelphia in the 19th and 20th centuries skilled metal workers still enjoyed a craft-like, artisanal existence free to exercise their tactile knowledge. At the Disston Saw Works in Tacony, home to Carolyn Healy and John Phillips’ “Running True” installation as a part of the Hidden City project, Master Smith Mark Ward and the don of Northeast history Harry Silcox demonstrated how machinists used light to identify minor deflections, divots, and curves in steel saws—and to perfect them.
[HARRY SILCOX DEMONSTRATING AT A WORKER'S BENCH]
[THE POND/BUTTERFLY/M TRUSS, DAVID LUPTON'S AND SONS COMPANY]
One Philadelphia firm that excelled in the design and installation of windows, sashes and trusses for the modern factory was the David Lupton’s Sons Company, based at Allegheny and Tulip Sts. A Lupton engineer, Clarke P. Pond, developed patents for mechanically operated top-hung continuous sashes which became an industry standard. In the first decade of the 20th century, Pond also developed the “butterfly” or M truss which also bore his name and improved circulation of air even in poor weather. One of the most prominent features of the Cramp turret shop is its Pond butterfly truss which, though difficult to drain, still provides ample light. Lupton’s and Sons tied its suite of sashes, windows, trusses and monitors to shop productivity in publications like Air, Light and Efficiency.
[CRAMP TURRET SHOP WITH POND TRUSS]
