Docks, Wharves, Ferries and the “Port of Pennsylvania”

Last post we mentioned the efforts of Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg (1911-1916) to modernize the city’s infrastructure.  Part of his plan involved the hiring of talented department heads like A. Merritt Taylor and Morris Cooke.  Blankenburg also hired George W. Norris to head up the newly created Department of Wharves, Docks, and Ferries.  Norris embarked on an ambitious “finger pier” construction program — some of which exist today, like Municipal Pier No. 9.

The Moving Walkways of Chestnut Street

This Sunday Mark Bowden wrote about how chronic underfunding and suburban neglect prevents SEPTA from expanding its system to meet coming energy crisis.  Though he dances around the reasons why SEPTA is expected to pay its own way, I think his point that yearly funding crises interrupt plans to prepare for a post-oil world is correct.  This is a point I have made my own studies of SEPTA.  As early as the 1970s, when the Authority was just beginning to integrate its predecessor private companies, the state expected SEPTA to tighten its belt and solve its own fiscal problems like a private corporation.  Except SEPTA had to deal with a fragmented patchwork of companies, labor agreements, and operating systems, not to mention competition from cars.  From 1968-1983 was a crucial period for SEPTA and massive infusions of cash could have created a more versatile system, a more multi-directional system, a less spokes-on-a-wheel type system.  If you want to read more about these missed opportunities click here.

“The decaying bodies of the dead may securely moulder into kindred dust”: The Woodlands Cemetery Tour

Imagine yourself a 19th century Philadelphian and a close member of your family has just died, perhaps a child—which was very common. Chances were that before the establishment of rural cemeteries, your loved one would be interred in one of the city’s notoriously sodden burial grounds or bone yards. As the itinerant Scottish observer Basil Hall commented, these yards where “mourners sink ankle deep in rank and offensive mould and fragments of coffins” offended 19th century Romantics’ new sense of funereal propriety.

Watering of a City (Part II): Defunct George’s Hill (24th Ward) Reservoir

For much of its history, Pennsylvania has been a practical place. Its land and cities places of productive industrial activity. Yet in either urban or rural contexts, the dogged drive to release stores of energy, to accumulate capital, and secure raw materials has gravely threatened public health. Whether to prioritize the rights of capital over public health is one of the quandaries municipal governments faced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most cities, lacking progressive rationale for improvements in public health, accepted seasonal epidemics only until they threatened the peace and stability of a capitalist order.