Posters on this site have left comments about idyllic days spent in pre-redevelopment Eastwick. These are some concrete remains of this anomalously interracial community: a church known recently as the St. Paul AME and a two story single-family home on the opposite sides of now-defunct 86th St. and Bartram Ave. Much of the grid system of pre-1950s Eastwick has been obliterated, the untended roads end abruptly or continue into abandoned lowland fields as rutted paths.

Both are located here:

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[St. Paul AME Church -- in 1942 known as the Eastwick Church, built in 1928 by S.J. Jones]

[Builder's stone, St. Paul's AME]

[8608 Bartram Ave.]

More to come.

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.

Follow the jump to see more pictures.

[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.

For most responsible underwriters, Philadelphia’s firefighting infrastructure was dangerously underdeveloped, making the city susceptible to the kind of cataclysm that bankrupted some 68 of 200 firms insuring property after the great Chicago fire of 1871. Some fire insurance company officers with more vivid imaginations prophesized utter destruction. “If a fire ever gets well started in that risk, when a northwest gale is blowing,” warned Elijah R. Kennedy of the Weed and Kennedy Company, “it will burn for a mile until there is nothing more in its path to destroy.”

[H.P.F.S. PUMPING STATION -- NORTHWEST CORNER]

The city’s problem was not its Fire Department, which Kennedy acceded was “excellent”; nor was the city’s congestion to blame. It was the lack of water to fight fires that worried insurance companies. They maligned the city’s lack of interest in the proposal by local underwriter Henry W. Brown to establish a pumping station on the river which would supply water to the chief business district via a separate main for firefighting purposes. But the New York insurance officers chafed at the two to three years time to design and build such a system.

But Philadelphia did act fast, and one month after the New York Times reported the insurance companies’ discontinuance of service, F.L. Hand, the Chief of the Water Bureau (predecessor to the Philadelphia Water Department) sent design specifications for a “water-supply for extinguishing fires in the congested district of the city” to his superior, William C. Haddock, the head of the Department of Public Works. Initially rejecting plans to convey water from the Roxborough basin, Hand designed a more nuanced version of Brown’s scheme for a “High Pressure Fire Service.” His plan involved constructing pumping stations to supply various districts by a distribution network separate from the regular low pressure water and sewer lines. Hand recommended two stations be built on the city’s principal rivers, which at any given time could deliver no less than 225 pounds per square inch to special hydrants accessible only to the Fire Department. He also strenuously recommended that the mains be constructed of rolled steel pipe rather than the traditional cast iron. “The breaking of a 12-inch pipe in Market, Chesnut, or Walnut St.” he wrote in his recommendations, “under a pressure of 520 feet head, would, before the flow of water could be stopped, cause almost as much damage as a large fire.” All tolled, Hand estimated that the design and construction of two riverside pump houses along with their distribution mains would cost the city $702,539 and $625,975—a fairly large expenditure.

[STANDARD SYSTEM MANHOLE]

Perhaps the most innovative feature of the station constructed at Delaware and Race Sts. between 1902-3 was its employment of natural gas engines instead of a fixed steam engine to operate the suction pumps. Sensing that the station would be activated infrequently and that maintaining constant steam pressure to run the pumps would prove costly, F.L. Hand recommended the purchase of natural gas engines—a larger up-front outlay—in exchange for lower long-term operating and labor costs. While natural gas powered engines were small and largely untested in this ad hoc role, the unveiling of a 300 horsepower natural gas-powered Westinghouse engine at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo immediately attracted the Water Bureau’s attention. Each of the nine Westinghouse gas engines could be brought up to full capacity in less than a minute from receiving the initial alarm and deliver 1400 gallons of Delaware river water per minute to any needed location.

[H.P.F.S. CALL BOX, GERMANTOWN AVE. AND NEW MARKET ST.]

The key to the entire system was the network of telephonic communication boxes dispersed throughout the “conflagration district” and eventually the Kensington mill district. When a call came in from a numbered box, the station force consisting of the engineer and an assistant could bring all units into operation in less than seven minutes and working pressure at the hydrant was available in a minute. Pressure needs were dictated over the phone by the fire chief and more units brought on line if needed. A special High Pressure Fire Service corps of the Fire Department operated the larger diameter hydrants, maintained connection with the pumping station and managed water pressure at the fire site.

In just a few years, the High Pressure Fire Service had proven itself such a forward-thinking and reliable piece of municipal infrastructure that other cities actively solicited information regarding its operation. In a letter to a Brooklyn official, the Superintendent of the Pumping Station, John W. Weaver reported that “the High Pressure Fire Service has fulfilled every condition imposed on it, and its absolute efficiency has been proved every time it has been put into service.” In its 62 alarms, it had “rendered perfect service.” Just the day before, Weaver reported, the system had been activated for 30 minutes when box 176 at 6^th and Market Sts. was activated. “Along every line,” Weaver reported, “the entire operation was thoroughly successful.”

[MANHOLES WITH HIGH PRESSURE HYDRANT]

Perhaps most importantly for propertied Philadelphia, the New York underwriters were satisfied. The local board of fire underwriters—a very powerful rate-setting organization—heartily endorsed the system. As W.M. Fleming reported in 1910 in the Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the system built at public expense had effected a “material reduction in fire losses in the protected district, large decrease in fire insurance rates and a greater willingness on the part of property owners in the protected section to erect pretentious office buildings.”

[H.P.F.S HYDRANT BEARING WATER BUREAU MARKING]

[excerpted from "A New Look at Public Housing": A Summary of the Report of the Committee on Public Housing Policy, Basic Policies for Public Housing for Low Income Families in Philadelphia, 1957, p. 2]

“New projects should be primarily of row houses rather than elevator buildings in order to provide children with yard space, prepare families for eventual home ownership, and provide more of the four and five bedroom units needed by Philadelphia’s families.  While accepting elevator apartments for single persons and families with no children, the Committee notes that ‘experience in Philadelphia has been that elevator apartments have been used to achieve high densities without undue land coverage but with resulting project and neighborhood congestion’ and goes on to say that ‘it would be preferable to build no public housing projects at all rather than to construct project that increase the density of an already congested area.’ The Committee advocates more flexibility in federal regulations regarding the ratio of land cost to total project to make low density, row house developments possible in cleared areas.” (emphasis added)

[excerpted from Twenty Years of Service: The Story of Public Housing in Philadelphia, 1937-1957, p. 26]

“The large developments made possible a new kind of neighborhood planning, better adapted to the automobile age than the gridiron street system–that is, better for the person living or walking in the neighborhood.  Among the most attractive blocks in Philadelphia are those with almost no through traffic. Large block planning also attempts to have convenient service roads going into the neighborhood.  Through traffic, however, is encouraged to pass by on the outside.  The resulting increase in livability is obvious.  Automobiles are often described as one of the chief villains of blight. As traffic increases, there is a sharp increase in problems of danger, noise and irritation and lack of parking space.  The planning of large blocks, such as at Schuylkill Falls, Wilson Park and Mill Creek all show what can be done to return neighborhoods to their residents.

Medium sized developments have been built on one to several existing city blocks.  It is economical not to change existing street and utility patterns, at least in the short run. Such housing developments have added attractive open space, interior parking, safe small play yards within the existing blocks, and the usual accompaniments of improved housing, safety, adequate light and air, good room sizes and the prevention of overcrowding.  Harrison Plaza, Mill Creek and Hawthorne Square are good examples of fitting the medium sized development into existing street patterns.”

[From "Comparative Drawings of Skyscrapers and Vertical Object," Perspecta, Vol. 18 (1982), pp. 152-169]

This thing of disdain for the new, this “instinct of disparagement” that Philadelphian Owen Wister observed was the hallmark of the Quaker City has reared its head yet again in regard to our new endeavor to build with giantism. The impulse towards negativity, aside from the the boosters who see Philadelphia as a new Klang Valley, is itself disparaged without its fair shake. What is this comforting embrace of “it will never happen”; what is its social function in a city brimming with those not burdened by the yoke of “not” all ready to shake off the poor civic instinct of its inhabitants? And what of this deflection towards the negative causes us to engage in the exasperated pursuit of massivity for our skyline?

Since Philadelphia was birthed, the deference to a lowly anti-establishment Quaker tradition has been maligned as the signal cause of our backwardness–as if this impulse persists through time without corruption or dilution. True, we no longer wear the dour brown brims of our Quaker ancestors, but we’ve had their disdain for the world solidified by deindustrialization, crime, population loss and the Billy King-era Sixers. All this is to say is that there’s a tremendous weight of disappointment that blankets this city; whether it has its origins in the Welcome or in the catastrophes of the 20th is beyond my ability to tell. But by all accounts the “cloistered and oystered”, sometimes repressive and anti-intellectual City of Philadelphia was sui generis if frozen in amber: the city having no equal in the aspirational history of the country at large.

The city was especially deficient in its vertical aspirations. For most of the 20th c., this was partly accountably to the absolute lack of need for centralized commercial office space. The dispersion of Philadelphia’s industrial might over a wide area, [despite the textile industry which united at the Bourse] meant that business didn’t need to rely on a coordinated, technologically-connected white collar management sector. Outside of a few major firms, business could be conducted at the firm with the communication technology available. Structures like the Jayne Building at 238 Chestnut Street, which topped out at eight stories, sufficed for Philadelphia. Commercial firms like Wanamaker’s and Gimbels grew tall–but only so tall to draw patrons and supply their needs quickly. And of course there was City Hall, a building whose patron looked down beneficently on the most mismanaged city in the Union for most of its institutional life.

At the turn of the 20th century Philadelphia, with its wide industrial dispersion was a vertically challenged city, but not ashamed. As the chronicler of high Philadelphia Nathaniel Burt exclaimed upon viewing his home from a train on the connecting railroad bridge, “Thar she blows, a fresh water whale wedged up on the silt between two dirty rivers, America’s most inland (and second largest) seaport, at first glance forbidding, perhaps, but scarcely anything as romantic as a Forbidden City — still America’s fourth largest, a huge, sprawling dirty Industrial Fact that would seem to have nothing to do with shining princesses and magic towers.”

But Philadelphia would have something to do with magic towers in the teens and effervescent 20s: the Gothic Robert Morris Building in 1914-15; in 1928 The Drake poke its sun-drenched terra-cotta opulence above the heads of proper Philadelphia and in 1932 Howe and Lescaze implanted their experiment in the International Style at 12th and Market. Yet for 30 years, while other cities built in the depths of the Depression, Philadelphia chose, contentedly, to leave the PSFS as its signature.

This, of course, led to the sad skyline that Burt observed from a grimy rail car:

Certainly the first impact is not anything slim, tall or shining: rather the exact opposite, a wide flat dinginess, for above all Philadelphia is big and flat and drab.

Much of the obsession with finding the origins of the “Gentleman’s Agreement” seeks to blame someone for this repression. There’s another story that says Edmund Bacon had much to do with it. All of this starts with the premise, however, that Philadelphia was bucking to show its worth, to compete with the world in the cosmetic contest and prove its importance as a deindustrializing city on the make and someone held us back until 1987. All of this ignores that without anything binding anyone, the city neither needed nor wanted the kind of generic grandiosity that has made the city’s skyline no different than the blandest facsimilies of any upstart city with something to prove. There’s a lot to be said for what tall buildings mean to business, and for what municipal governments think business prefers about a skyscraper-strewn skyline. Some of the best analysis in explaining the meaning and allure of tall corporate office buildings has yielded that these structures try to drape corporate culture in “a false history, an authenticity linked to notions of authorship and authority.”

For a city that has never needed skyscrapers nor a need to falsely historicize itself, the coming of the tall building in Philadelphia meant that auslander designers could imprint anything on the grid and hence the arrival of One Liberty Place: an attempt to class-up Philadelphia with a diluted postmodern copy of the Chrysler Building. A creation of the world-traveled Helmut Jahn, the New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger called it “less a new kind of skyscraper than it is a homage, in up-to-the-minute materials, to the most beloved tower of the most exuberant period of the American skyscraper.”

But our ersatz Chrysler Building was better than the myth of a unified skyline under Billy’s brim since a public building offering hope was preferable to a City Hall bankrupt of all its high-mindedness. For a city late to the skyscraper game, there is little but exuberance guiding our upward thrust. From a bland Comcast Center that offers nothing but a focal point for our homeward eye to the new American Commerce Center that seeks to compete with our unseen foes in Kuala Lumpur, Taiwan, Dubai, and New York, Philadelphia seems to be competing for the sake of competing. When brownfield sites choke the city like so many weeds and population evaporates across our borders and social chaos further whittles away our neighborhoods, building vertical office pods for a hesitant market seems ill-advised at best and at worst contributing to the growing stratification of the city.

But up until the day we break ground at 18th and Arch Sts., some will continue to fetishize the image of a skyline befitting an emirate or lust after a sense of status already ours. But if skylines do tell of making it, Philadelphia is not an arriviste city with anything to prove. There’s a sense of knowing this that goes beyond what a collection of inaccessible spaces can say. To malign those who disparage this enterprise as “Negadelphian” is to disparage what Philadelphians already know about their city. It’s the difference between depth and superficiality which this city can discern. It’s a discernment that enables us to see through the skyscraper developers’ perversion of Oscar Wilde’s witty observation that “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”

Aside from the Caleb Pusey House, the demolished Slate House, the recreated Pennsbury Manor, there are few artifacts of the built environment that have associations to William Penn. One of the most pedestrian relics bearing the imprint of the Proprietor is the Wood Street Steps, located between Front and Water Streets, on the border between Old City and the Northern Liberties.

Penn knew how his utopian religious experiment was inextricably linked to the commercial health of the City and in the late 17th century decreed that a set of steps be built on every east-west street fronting the wharfs on the Delaware. While the Wood Street Steps are not original [the Historical Commission believes they may date from the 1730s to 1780s] these are the last remaining steps of their kind in Philadelphia.

Want to find out why the eastern abutment of the uninspiring Chestnut Street Bridge looks like a cathedral? Check out my post at Phillyhistory.org here. Above is a pretty shoddy overlay of a 1958 HAER photo onto a relatively picture of the bridge taken last April when Penndot was doing a structural investigation of the bridge. Interestingly enough, concrete from of the “new” 1956-59 bridge was failing with chunks falling on the Schuylkill Banks path. The 1866 abutment seemed to be holding up.

[DEMOLITION OF KNEASS'S 1866 BRIDGE, 1957-58 FROM HABS]

One of the issues that I wanted to clarify in the Phillyhistory.org piece was that the Expressway and increased traffic both conspired against Kneass’s bridge and led to its demise. According to a Streets Department publication, Paving the Way from 1956-59, that while most of the bridge rehab projects “were directly connected with expressway construction”… “considerable emphasis was given to the replacement of existing spans unable to handle today’s traffic volumes. Structures like those on Chestnut St…..”

Follow the jump for photos of the Penndot bridge inspection and the offending concrete.

The demolition of the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church has been ongoing for the past several months and has been well covered in this photo stream [http://www.flickr.com/photos/lblanchard/] and here: [http://www.flickr.com/groups/swcc/].

Designed by Hazelhurst and Huckel, a firm with expertise in country houses and churches, the Fourth Reformed Unitarian Church was constructed in 1889. The once sacred space was worthy enough to deserve inclusion in a photographic survey of all Presbyterian churches in the city in a volume entitled: The Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, A Camera and Pen Sketch of Each Presbyterian Church and Institution in the City. eds. White, William P., and William H. Scott, Philadelphia: Allen Lane & Scott, 1895). If you can get your hands on this book, take a look at page 226 where the structure is featured.

At what point the Fourth Reformed Unitarian Church became the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church is unclear though the church undoubtedly served the needs of the black population of the old 7th ward. What happened to this congregation (I do remember there being a notice tacked on the door of the church indicating a move) is unclear though the L&I notice indicated severe structural problems. Named for the first Bishop of the the AME Zion Church, A. James Varick, the church has effectively been effaced from the landscape of Philadelphia, to be replaced by condos. Below is a picture of the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church in relatively happier days, in Spring 2007.