PGW_From_Passyunk_Ave_Bridge

Taken with a Nikon L35 AF and developed via GIMP.

See this earlier post for more on the Philadelphia Gas Works at Point Breeze.

[H.P.F.S. PUMPING STATION -- DELAWARE AVE. AND RACE ST.]

On March 17, 1900 Philadelphia’s center city business elites balked at the news that two New York fire insurance companies, the Home Insurance Company of New York and the Williamsburg City Insurance Company were instructing their underwriters to stop issuing fire insurance policies to Philadelphia businesses situated in an ominously named “conflagration district”: the area from Broad to the Delaware, Arch to Chestnut Sts. It was usual for late nineteenth century fire insurance companies trying to limit unnecessary exposure and most firms acted collaboratively and shared information about known risk while setting rigid rates which were seldom undersold. Thus, the Home Insurance and Williamsburg City Insurance companies were emboldened by the Weed and Kennedy Company’s attempt to discontinue policies in the “conflagration district.” But its Philadelphia agents mutinied, refused to cut off its clients, and severed ties to the New York office.

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I’ve always wondered what these large cast iron posts are and I imagine you have too. In the case of the above, someone has beautified the vestiges of what was Philadelphia’s early 20th century police and fire communication system. Judging by the height, on the top of this post would have sat a police telegraph box. I would have never known what these posts were if I hadn’t come across Citizenship in Philadelphia (1919), a wonderful book that credits city achievements in the way of urban health and welfare while calling for all sorts of municipal improvements in the Progressive vein.

While modern commentary seems to suggest that Philadelphia lagged behind other cities who more avidly embraced the nascent health and welfare movements or implemented City Beautiful projects, the presence of these “street corner friends” in many parts revealed that the city did value a baseline level of civic security. Police and fire boxes, which in places like New York are still ubiquitious and functional parts of everyday life, were the necessary eyes and ears of the city’s command and control apparatus. Philadelphia was, and continues to be, a city dedicated to the preservation of life, liberty, and property–with a keen emphasis on the last of this series. Though fire had never ravaged the city like San Francisco (1906) or our neighbor to the south Baltimore in their often overlooked inferno of 1904, the prospect of a cataclysmic fire was not improbable. And if we wanted to interpret these boxes as means of social control, the possibility of large scale urban revolt was never out of the question, either. Old-timers could recall the urban unrest in 1877 and even before that the ghosts of the riots of 1844 still lingered.

On a more pedestrian level, however, these devices on streetcorners constituted more than an electronic panopticon but instead cast a kind of technological blanket of security across the city. Silent and almost robotic, they bespoke modernity to a city that had only known corruption, police somnolence, and general backwardness. They represent Philadelphia’s first attempt to become “wired” though their abandonment also reflects the hazards of making huge outlays for telecommuncations systems that are almost perpetual obsolete.

JPC has completed the wingwalls for the outfall at Dobson’s Run in East Falls. Another company, Jaydee Contractors of Michigan is constructing the drainage tunnel from Scotts Lane down Allegheny Ave. and under Laurel Hill Cemetery to the outfall below the ex-Reading Railroad bridges at East Falls. Apparently, early projections that the tunneling through mica schist would be slow going have proven false. Down at the Schuylkill, to build the forms for the concrete walls below river level, the Blackwood, NJ-based general contractor had go above and beyond the normal sheetpile coffer dam and build an earthen dam reinforced with vertical steel piles. A series of pumps keep the work area relatively dry though the foreman on the site remarked that during heavy flow, the work area is allowed to flood and then water is pumped out.

Follow the jump for more images.

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Nature is slowly enveloping the various components of this switch and signal apparatus on the eastern approach of the Grays Ferry Swing Bridge. Portions of the electro-mechanical device alerted the bridge tender that a train was present and the bridge could not be moved. Conversely if the bridge was open, trackmen could throw this switch and bar trains from moving across the bridge.The now-defunct Bethlehem Steel did brisk business in railroad “safety” switches in the early part of the 20th century. US Switch and Signal was (and is) also a major producer of railroad gates and signals.

On the surface of these components are raised company names, trademarks and operating instuctions (”depress here to apply padlock”) — creating a strange island of legibility amid the underbrush. While we understand or can conjecture the function of some parts, with others we lack the lived experience to gather meaning. And so this old century’s bit of modernity is being swallowed up both physically and conceptually.

Anyone hungry for some maritime ruins should head over to Phillyhistory.org where I’ve elaborated on an early post about the growth of the city’s docks, wharves, and ferries in the early 20th century. While you’re there buy a photo and help fix a pothole.

[KELLY DRIVE DRAINAGE IMPROVEMENTS]

Last week, when the Inquirer ran a story about a surprisingly massive ($38 million) drainage improvement project that will snarl traffic just below the East Falls bridges, the region let out a collective groan. For something like six months, Kelly Drive will be reduced to two lanes — severely crimping one of the city’s major arteries. What was lost in the hubbub over traffic was an explanation as to why the Scotts Lane/Allegheny Ave. basin needs better drainage and how new impervious surfaces, development, and insufficient stormwater systems built in the early 20th century make this need acute.

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These are Fairmount Park WPA-era maps altered by Park engineers in the mid-1950s to show the prospective course of the Schuylkill Expressway through Park lands. If you look below the whitewash you can see springs, monuments, and whole watersheds soon covered by bands of steel and concrete. This is near the Montgomery Ave. exit south of the Horticultural Center.

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Although Charles Wilson Peale had been using coal gas to light his museum of oddities in Independence Hall as early as 1816 and the Chestnut Street Theater had gas lighting by 1822, city leaders rejected the idea of leaky gas tanks and were cold the the idea of a municipal gas works in the early 19th century. That was until Samuel Merrick, a fire engine builder and founder of the Franklin Institute decided to get himself elected to council vowing to bring the city into the 19th century. By 1835 the ambitous Merrick had erected a facility at 24th and Chestnut Sts. on the model of London’s Regency Park Gas Works and a year later the ornately detailed facility was producing enough gas to light 2nd Street from South to Vine Sts.

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