[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]
Filed under: Uncategorized
[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]
Filed under: Bridges, Infrastructure, adaptive reuse, built environment | Tags: place, Reading Viaduct
[PERHAPS?, APRIL 2009]
It’s clear people are still thinking about the Reading Viaduct. Though a kind of vestigial organ of a vanished transportational body, the Viaduct is becoming to the neighborhoods it oversees. Artists are beginning to climb into its musty folds and call it their own and far from being a haunting piece of industrial detritus, the structure revels in transition and permanence. A new public art installation set in a crevasse of the old trestle and a conceptual drawing tacked to the remains of the massive elevated structure facing Vine Street reflect this growing conversation. What first struck me was the delightfully perfect placement of the rendering against the faux-stolid stonework of the 1951 abutment. But even more fascinating, upon closer inspection, is the future the rendering holds.
[A VERY SUBTLE SUGGESTION]
People pass it not knowing that it shows a place in time, in exactitude, as it could be. While the authors are still unknown, we’re fast on the case. It could be the work of the Reading Viaduct Project folks, it could be the musing of a citizen, or it could be a student project. Basically, it depicts what could be the very inviting southern trailhead of the Reading Viaduct–four flights of steps and an inclined walkway. In what appears a very honest and natural depiction a real possibility: a couple lounges on the broad Art Museum like steps, a family ambles by while a jogger ascends the series of inclined planes.
[NEW READING RR BRIDGE OVER VINE ST., 1951, LOOKING WEST]
The good folks at the Asian Arts Initiative, who themselves have sponsored an amazing sculptural project using the viaduct as a backdrop, are looking into the mysterious rendering. Just a block down from the futural sketch, Jonathan and Kimberly Stemler’s the little red string consists of a series of tiny Chinese lanterns strung along the ceiling of the Carlton Street portal of the viaduct. Even in the white hot heat of last Sunday afternoon, the tiny Baby’s Bottom lanterns shone bright against the ochre-hued blackness of the dank tunnel. If you follow the sinuous electrical cables you’ll find that the tiny bulbs are illuminated by power from the Shelly Electric Company, a seemingly longtime neighbor of the trestle. If you pass through the tunnel to the west, a placard affixed to the Shelly Company’s wall orients you to the piece. the little red string is one of four public art pieces sponsored by the Asian Arts Initiative as a part of their Futurescapes–Chinatown in Flux project, a sculptural telling of how Chinese-American Philadelphians grapple with and ultimately populate austere cityscapes emptied of their personal content.
[THE LITTLE RED STRING, JONATHAN AND KIMBERLY STEMLER, 2009]
Projects like these amount to something of a response to my earlier suggestion that the Viaduct Project fundamentally lacked support on the ground. To be sure, the obstacles to developing the viaduct into Philadelphia’s High Line still exist. But both these projects show a desire to reconnect the Reading Viaduct to a living city, to reconnect it to the people it was meant to serve, albeit in a different form.
[VIADUCT, OLD SPRING GARDEN ST. STATION, JULY 2007]
And if we believe things have an essential and constant nature: the thing that once ferried so many will again be remade and in turn, remake.
Filed under: Uncategorized
[DPW, BUREAU OF STREET CLEANING WAGON SHOP FROM 25TH ST. VIADUCT]
In 1885 an enterprising Philadelphia lawyer named John C. Bullitt authored a bill in the state legislature entitled, generically, “For the Better Government of Cities of the First Class”. Clearly, though, the bill aimed to improve one city of the first class. Attempting to whittle away at the petty departmental fiefdoms that patronage and boss rule had allowed to fester in Philadelphia, the Bullitt Bill set the mayor in charge of large swathes of city government and gave a bloated and squabbling City Council only nominal power. Parallel to some of the Nutter administration’s deputates, the Bullitt Bill established the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Public Works, the Department of the Receiver of Taxes, the Department of Law, the Department of Education, etc. The aim was, in the words of a commentator in 1902:
To improve the government of the city, to introduce business methods in the conduct of the several departments, and to bring about the greater efficiency as well as the curtailment of the police and fire service. It was wrought out by Mr. Bullitt as a labor of love, without fee or reward of any kind. That it has not been altogether successful in the object sought is due to errors of administration. The Bullitt act concentrates the power of municipal rule in the hands of the Mayor.”
Visible only from the elevated 25th Street Viaduct, the painted facade of this former DPW Bureau of Street Cleaning Wagon Shop is an artifact of this era of reform and efficiency. Before the construction of the viaduct in 1926-28, this sign had a radical publicality–it announced to the neighborhood the presence of responsive, efficient, modern government. Inverting the wisdom that urban things get lost as they recede below the surface of the earth, this sign’s import and significance was lost as something rose up to occlude it. Now it has an almost heightened legibility to the odd denizens of the high line than it ever had to the pavement pounders.
Filed under: 16353017, Environmentalism, Infrastructure, built environment, drosscape, maps/geography, petroleum refining
[POINT BREEZE, 1935]
Much of the tidal Schuylkill is scarred by the the remains of an overbuilt petroleum distribution system whose scale is evidenced by the above photograph from National Geographic in 1935. Perhaps ’scarred’ isn’t the apt verb to describe the subterrenean impact of this petroleum drosscape: much of the damage affects soil and groundwater. In retrospect, the calamitous Depression that created these vast sinuous tank centipedes portended the more sustained slowdown that would eventually render virtually all of this Fordist oil-moving infrastructure obsolete.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Maybe it was the slate-hued sky or the bone dampening chill but there was something terminal about Sunset Beach this Saturday in February. Here, and about here, were ruins and remains of technological systems in various states of decay all eroded by the elements and circumvented by time. Tired fathers in Volvo wagons, in perhaps their only hours of freedom, peered out on the horizon to watch three long tankers sluggishly inch across the horizon. A teenager slinked around with a metal detector, occasionally slinging change out of his scoop. And all the while the breakers broke on the back of the Concrete Ship, Atlantus. Ill fated, moribund, epitome of all progress — it was nevertheless a fixture of Sunset Point. The tired comedian always on the bill. Here could have been some craggy point of Atlantus; with the husks of our civilization all around us, the Army Corps pumps working ceaselessly to forestall the rising tides, far off ships ignorant to our plight.
