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?
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[PUBLISHED IN PHILADELPHIA: GREEN COUNTRY TOWN AND MODERN METROPOLIS BY THE PHILADELPHIA TRANSPORTATION COMPANY IN 1948]
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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]
Peregrine Arts began its much heralded Hidden City program last night, kicking open the doors of the long shuttered Royal Theater at 1524 South Street for the first audience the space has seen in nearly 39 years. Composer Todd Reynolds studied the people, places and history of the old 7th Ward to fashion his Sounds for the New Royality performed by the Network for New Music Ensemble. While the Network performed, film designer Bill Morrison projected onto a wall textured by decay the 1927 tale of class, race and love The Scar of Shame shot on location in the South Street corridor.
Ars Nova’s Jemeel Moondoc interpreted Anri Sala’s film The Long Sorrow with saxophone for the second half as eyes danced over the sodden beauty of the Royal, host once again to appreciative crowds.
Tonight, Ars Nova’s Marshall Allen performs. [hiddencity]
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[THE PENNSYLVANIA TROLLEY LINES CENTERING ON PHILADELPHIA]
Much has been said recently of the importance of Philadelphia’s infrastructural “bones” in weathering an economic crisis that has wrought havoc on newer auto-centric urban agglomerations of the last half century that have known only low gas prices, easy access to water, ample highways and debt driven growth.
That our density and a well developed transit system serves as a buffer on consumer expenses was not lost on planners of the early part of the 20th century who looked at an even more elaborate trolley system as the salvation to high food prices. In this interesting and recently digitized document from 1912 entitled, A Study of Trolley Light Freight Service and Philadelphia Markets, the Wharton analyst Clyde Lyndon King suggests the greater utilization of the region’s interurban trolley network in shipping foodstuffs from the hinterland to Philadelphia. Admitting that average Philadelphians spent nearly 40-50 percent of their income on food, King argues that by connecting farmers to a developed network of city markets and better regulation of those markets (like that at 1810 Ridge Avenue), customers would see an appreciable decline in the cost of their produce. Reductions in freight charges and eliminating middlemen and wholesalers would assure “food secured as cheaply as possible.”
[MAP OF FARMERS MARKETS IN 1912]
Much too has been written about the decline of Philadelphia’s food infrastructure and its influence on public health. The curious paradox, it seems, is that it may have been easier to access fresh foods in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods in 1912 than it is today. Part of this has to do with the way poverty, neighborhood retail trends, food costs, and processed food technology have colluded to create an urban nutritional wasteland. So while we no longer conceive of the problem of moving fresh food to urban markets in purely dollars and cents, planning bodies like DVRPC are rediscovering the means of better connecting the city to more national and international food flows. But while we seek access to national and global food sources, wouldn’t it be the consummate ‘green’ idea to reconnect our food supply network to the good bones of our transit system? Though SEPTA and PATCO are avowedly in the people moving business, think about the prospect of light freight cars attached to existing regional rail cars? Or special light freight sections of cars? Users would pay a freight surcharge and be able to move fresh produce from special depots in Delaware County (Wawa extension?), Montco (Hatfield), and Chester Counties (Mushroom express)? Sure we’ve got good bones but it’s time to start moving them in ways they’ve never moved before.
[RIDGE AVENUE FARMERS MARKET, 1810 RIDGE AVE. HABS]
[1810 RIDGE AVE., 2009]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: environmental, marcellus shale, natural gas, technology, the rage of nature
[GOOGLE MAP OF ACTIVE/PLUGGED WELLS IN NORTHEAST PA AND NEW YORK STATE]
In the last couple years or so, the natural gas industry has approached northeast Pennsylvania landholders with properties atop the great undulating belts of the Marcellus Shale geological formation, asking for mineral rights access to the vast sea of gas that lay beneath it. In what some have called a “modern-day gold rush”, companies are offering seemingly sweet deals to landowners in Pennsylvania and New York in order to expand the port owners have signed over long-term access rights to their properties to allow what gas companies refer to as a minimally invasive exploratory drilling. If geoscientists determine that gas of good quality and content is accessible, the firm engaged will pay the owner for a portion of the extracted gas and will construct a connection to the national system of natural gas pipelines.
[NATURAL GAS NATIONAL PIPELINE SYSTEM]
It’s the process of extraction that folks like Josh Fox concerned. Fox, originally of Milanville, PA has chronicled the public health, social, and environmental hazards of natural gas drilling in his documentary The Rage of Nature, Specifically, the film raises alarm over the standard practice of hydraulic fracturing: “like hitting the side of a soda bottle, the gas just flows to the top” except the “hitting” involves injecting over 247 chemical mixed with water 1000′ feet into the earth. Many if not all of these chemicals are carcinogenic, endocrine disruptors, mutagens, or disrupt other bodily functions. Each time a well is “fracked” 1-5 million gallons of water is needed. While sometimes the water table is below the deposit being “fracked” sometimes it is not and the fracturing solution or gas can make its way into the water table and individual wells. In some places in Pennsylvania it already has. And natural gas companies are trying to deflect the growing doubts. While thousands of wells have been drilled in the sparsely populated west, natural gas companies are looking to expand their output by moving east into the Marcellus Shale region–perhaps the largest untapped district of natural gas in the country. They propose 50,000 gas wells along a 75 mile stretch of the Delaware River. Of course we don’t need to be told what’s downstream of the Delaware.
[MARCELLUS SHALE DEPOSIT]
