The geometries of the service station island and the Art Deco styling of Dave’s Auto Repair at the intersection of 49th and 50th and Haverford Ave. suggest that it was active 20s-30s, while the tires stacked tenderly, the “Cash Only” warning and the hand painted sign tell of recent activity. Dave even saw that the roof was tarred, but by guys on the cheap — maybe a buddy’s side job or guys from the neighborhood — based on the stalactites of asphalt oozing from the parapet.

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The above is from from the mock funeral for the Pennsylvania Life Insurance Company (PLICO) Buildings on North Broad St. organized by the Design Advocacy Group and the Preservation Alliance held today between 12-1.  With tongue firmly planted in cheek, well wishers placed flowers and condolence cards at the fenced-in site of the two buildings being demolished by the Pennsylvania Department of General Services (DGS).

The DGS, on shadowy orders, gutted the power of its sister agency, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and flaunted a 2004 agreement between the Convention Center Authority and the the PHMC to preserve the PLICO complex in exchange for the demolition of the Philadelphia Historical Register-listed Race Street Firhouse and 19 other buildings.

Lawyers for the Convention Authority claim not to know what the other bureaucratic hand is doing and have argued that the Authority is just a measly authority and it is actually the DGS that has any power to contract demolitions, hire workers, and construct the new center.  Oh, and as for the agreement between the Convention Center Authority and the PHMC and other preservation groups, the DGS didn’t sign that.  Oh, and it wasn’t an agreement–it was just a “statement of intent.”

I have all the faith in the world that the state will preserve the gargoyles from the Race Street Firehouse.

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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“Philadelphia used to have a lot of industry. Not so much anymore.” –Harry Hagin, site superintendent, Camden Iron and Metal, 12/19/07

At 7AM on Sunday, demolition charges will echo throughout the refineries and tank farms of South Philadelphia as scrap dealers Camden Iron and Metal implode the headhouse of the last of Philadelphia’s great grain elevators, the Tidewater Grain Elevator at Girard Point. This will leave only the former Reading Company/Tidewater Company elevator at 20th and Shamokin St. to witness to the city’s history as a grain entrepot.

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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.

Mount Moriah Cemetery, in the Kingsessing section, is arguably Philadelphia’s most democratic burial ground. The undiscriminating plot is home to many Masons, U.S. Navy sailors, Civil War Yankees, North Carolinian cavalrymen, Philadelphia Muslims, ethnic Catholics, the young, the old, the powerful, the meek. Though its in rougher shape than any other of Philadelphia’s rural cemeteries, being unkempt it’s surprisingly rustic: more woodland than the Woodlands.

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Sanitarium Playground, better known in the hearts of thousands of Philadelphians and South Jerseyans as Soupy Island, appeared at the end of Red Bank Ave. with its mirth subdued by barbed wire. The compound’s shabbiness belied its significance to scores of young Philadelphians whose lives were spent in the stifling airlessness of Philadelphia’s red brick canyons. Founded in 1877 by an organization called the Sanitarium Association of Philadelphia, the compound is a specimen of the late nineteenth century social hygeine movement bound up in well-meaning upper/middle class paternalism. Though the social philosophy that gave rise to Soupy Island implied that poor immigrants were constitutionally unable to care for their own health, by all accounts Soupy Island was — and continues to be — a much needed outlet for the region’s kids.

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