“Graffiti exists along nearly every inch of space that is reachable from the trail winding along the hillside of the lower Wissahickon Valley, providing only obvious visible distinction between the bridge today and its original appearance, while adding a splash of local color and urban grit to the tranquil setting.” –[Historic American Engineering Record, Henry Avenue Bridge / Wissahickon Memorial Bridge]
['FREEDOM CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT THE CONCEPT OF ORDER']
The Francis M. Drexel School (1888) at 16th and Moore is coming down, according to the good folks at stresslines.org and thedrexelschool.org. The latter site is a fascinating yet perplexing compendium of Francis M. Drexel School materials–blueprints, overviews, quotes on the value of preservation, Drexel family genealogies, information on historic preservation tax credits, “uptown plans”, addresses by late Drexel University president Constantine Papadakis, and advertisements for Newbold Court, the higher end development to occupy the site. It’s tough to piece it all together–whether or not someone really cared about saving portions of the Queen Anne structure and incorporating it into the new development. It’s all pretty nebulous because I can’t tell who–or what–writes thedrexelschool.org.
The fall of the Drexel School signals that something is going on in “Newbold”–the equally amorphous designation given to a wide swathe of what was formerly Point Breeze. Truly, New?Bold! sounds like a marketing slogan first and a place second. It was named after that captivating 19th century Philadelphian, banker and broker Arthur Emlen Newbold. This isn’t to say that there’s much in a name. I knew the guy personally who invented “G-Ho” who got into scrapes with others who wanted to call this ‘hood Anderson Yards after Marian Anderson. Naming is power and the long section from Washington Ave. to Passyunk Ave. where housing prices creep upward is now a separatist state. While violence has diminished in places like Newbold, skirmishes do still break out between ‘pioneers‘ and more indigenous populations. This particular map shows how South Philly east and west of Broad looks like Metternich’s Europe: a tight network of mutually-reinforcing CDCs, civic associations, and newly minted neighborhoods asserting themselves for the sake of peace and stability.
More photos of the Drexel School from December 2007.
[COMMUNITY CENTER IN THE ROUND]
Walled in by so many New Urbanist trinities complete with finials, dentals, and historic paint schemes, the high modernist Hawthorne Community Center at 13th and Fitzwater seems a strange–almost interplanetary visitor. The remaining vestige of the failed modernist project known as the Hawthorne, later Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Towers, it is slated for demolition by Hunter Roberts Construction Company. Like so many urban renewal efforts of the 1950 and early 1960s, the MLK Towers were freighted with great optimism but suffered from the flawed premise that spatial segregation of the poor and destitute was good for cities. Geometrical and austere, high modernism became the chosen form of this social reengineering effort. But because of the lingering pain of this movement’s failure, the style has not worn well. It’s been argued on these pages that this adverse gut reaction to modernism is o.k.–an position considered anathema to preservationists who believe we can easily divorce the spirit, intent or flawed program of a building from a campaign to save it. I’ve argued elsewhere that the process of deconstruction and salvage is sometimes as revealing as construction or preservation. The demolition of the Hawthorne Community Center says more about the Philadelphia Housing Authority rightfully turning its back on an emblem of failure. Yet it is important to mark this transition.
[JIM TAYOUN'S PLAQUE COMMEMORATING MLK'S VISIT]
The Hawthorne MLK Towers were constructed in the 1950s on the site of substandard housing just south of South Street in the traditionally African American 7th Ward. On his northern turn, representing a departure from his primarily southern and rural focus, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on the steps of the Hawthorne Recreation Center on October 1st 1965. Local publisher Jim Tayoun felt moved to rename the project after MLK and erect a plaque commemorating the event, “hoping the residents would realize the high criminal activity associated with the project would diminish.” The plaque and renaming appears to have had mixed success. The MLK Towers lumbered on until 1999 when they were finally–and mercifully–demolished. In their stead came a project more in the spirit of Dr. King, the mixed-use HOPE VI development sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Philadelphia Housing Authority. The new development is required to have a proportion of rental units, below market value units, and market value units–creating a racially and socioeconomically diverse Hawthorne section.
And the plaque? “I’m supposed to remove it and give it to the Housing Authority,” a representative from Hunter Roberts told me last Friday.
[BLUE-ORIGINAL WATERCOURSE; PURPLE-SEWERIZED WATERCOURSE, COURTESY OF PHILADELPHIA WATER DEPARTMENT, OFFICE OF WATERSHEDS]
This is the Wingohocking “brook thrown deep in a sewer dungeon” to quote Robert Frost. For all things Wingohocking Creek and the the process of sewerizing streams in Philadelphia, there is only one source.
[A survey of the city of Philadelphia and its environs shewing the several works constructed by His Majesty's troops, under the command of Sir William Howe, since their possession of that city 26th. September 1777, comprehending likewise the attacks against Fort Mifflin on Mud Island, and until it's reduction, 16th November 1777. Surveyed & drawn by P. Nicole w/ current GoogleEarth overlay]
Having recently visited Vicksburg, MS I have been thinking a lot about cities under seige or cities whose basic componentry — the streets, buildings, ridges, hollows, defiles and valleys — have become the very syntax of warfare. People tend to forget that Philadelphia was, too, occupied like Vicksburg. And I’ve always wanted to know where the line of British redoubts constructed in 1777 were and how they fit with the protuberances of Lemon Hill, Promontory Rock, Bush Hill, etc. If I can trust the British topographer P. Nicole, then their line of works were placed north of these high grounds–in flagrant opposition to military dogma. Strong places were constructed to cover the upper and middle ferries, and at fording points in the Schuylkill River.
Maybe it’s because we’re civilians but we rarely try and rate the defensibility of our urban spaces. For others living in our city, interior spaces and other enclosed structures are seen as defensive “positions” and assessed as hard targets and safe zones. Most times, interior spaces are never as safe as they feel. Perhaps we don’t need to look at texts like these in order to imagine a militarized cityscape. For some Philadelphia “civilians”, just intellectualizing about urban space as a battlefield is a luxury.
[DATESTONE OF THE OLD NEWTOWN ROAD BRIDGE]
Remains of rural neighborhoods can be found in the city’s shallow valleys and watersheds, often on account of their location with the Fairmount Park system. While the city ruthlessly demolished many of the old mills, tanneries, dyeing works that lined the Wissahickon and Pennypack creeks, remnants of these neighborhoods encased by parkland have been insulated from the passage of time.
[LAGRANGE NEIGHBORHOOD ACCORDING TO ELLET'S 1843 MAP, RED DOT INDICATES OLD NEWTOWN RD. BRIDGE]
We see this phenomenon is the case of the Old Newtown Road Bridge pictured above, the span once integral to the functioning of the LaGrange print works and neighborhood, located roughly where Bustleton Pike crossed the Pennypack Creek. A wide and commodious bridge, the builder’s stone testifies that it was constructed by “Philadelphia County” — that legal nullity that existed before the city and county were fused in 1854. While not as impressive as the Bustleton Ave. Bridge which crossed the creek south of the present highway bridge, the Old Newtown Road Bridge was probably built at the behest of the print works industrialists looking for a good outlet for their products.The bridge probably saw its share of wagons creaking with fabrics dyed and printed with a variety of inks on their way down the Bustleton and Smithfield Turnpike to Frankford for shipment by rail.
["IT IS FINISHED"--TEXT AND PHOTOS BY JEREMY QUATTLEBAUM]
On the corner of 56th and Cedar in West Philadelphia stands the last remnants of the Church of the Transfiguration. Vacant since 2000, the church was shut down by the archdiocese along with the school, convent, and rectory complex. When Boy’s Latin purchased the Church of Transfiguration’s school complex, it also purchased the church, which is being demolished to allow the school to expand.
[FROM 2400 CHESTNUT ST.]
[SHAFTED]
[REFLECTIONS OF A SHAFT]
Designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White and constructed in 1929, what the architects called the 30th Street Station Steam Heating Plant was more than just an appendage to 30th Street Station, much more than a workaday piece of railroading. It really didn’t provide electricity for the Pennsylvania Railroad and despite what some say it had little to do with the demolition of the Chinese Wall and Broad Street Station–that station was electrified for 24 years before it met the wrecking ball. According to the chronicler of all things Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, Sally A. Kitt Chappel, the plant was integral to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s entry into the urban land development business. Watching with envy how their nemesis New York Central’s Grand Central Station had reinvigorated Park Avenue, the PRR had pushed for a new Philadelphia station since the 1920s. Having through trains back in and out of the stub end Broad Street Station was tedious, plus the Pennsylvania wanted all the land covered by the Wilson Brothers’ behemoth and the Chinese Wall. The Chicago-based Graham, Anderson, Probst and White (the successor to Daniel Burnham’s firm) was to give a gloss and sheen to the Railroad’s new real estate development program, known internally as the Philadelphia Improvements. Less a station than an office building, Suburban Station (1930) was the first attempt to inspire private capital to fill the Railroad’s land. Where once were the elevated tracks of the Chinese Wall, the PRR saw an unbroken line of new modern skyscrapers all along the aptly named Pennsylvania Boulevard. But World War II prevented the railroad from dispensing with the Chinese Wall and Broad Street Station, and the city and state delayed in expanding little old Filbert Street into a grand boulevard, so 30th Street sat (and arguably still sits) at the end of a less than triumphant faux Park Avenue.
[THE ORIGINAL PENN CENTER, AS CONCEIVED BY GRAHAM, ANDERSON, PROBST AND WHITE]
The Steam Heating Plant was designed to provide all the steam heat needed for skyscrapers along the Pennsylvania Boulevard commercial corridor. Thinking big, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White sketched out a flexible modernist facility capable of expanding to four smokestacks depending on the needs of real estate. The one stack that was completed gives an idea of the success of the Railroad’s real estate ventures. By the time Penn Center was developed as a PRR project, buildings no longer needed central steam heat. Steam heat passed via pipes through the suburban track bridge–built at the same time–down to Suburban Station.
[A DREXEL STUDENT'S NIGHTMARE, GAPW STEAM HEATING PLANT PROPOSAL]
The Steam Heating Plant is a logical link between the Art Deco of Suburban and the chaste neoclassicism of 30th Street. Like Paul Cret’s Southwark Generating Plant, the Steam Heating Plant’s facade is dominated by the no-nonsense verticality of its rectangular banks of windows. The octagonal stack is borderline Gothic: ascending like a spire it makes you forget it belched coal smoke. It was fire and power cloaked in white fire-baked brick and terra cotta.
Ironically, buildings become new things in their obsolescence. The last time the inclined straight-tube cross drum boilers were fired up was 1964; since then the structure has become a symbol of institutional frustration and a canvas for taggers and lovers. I would have loved to see the stack illuminated as an icon for West Philly. Or fitted with the same LEDs that bejewel the Cira Center to knit together the rail yard landscape. But despite our love of all things old, it could never have been chic condos, retrofitted offices or a modern art museum. Railroads, however, do develop land occupied by obsolete facilities: something the Steam Heating Plant would have understood.
[PART I]
[PART II]
|
