“The 5th floor is the top one of 12 N. 3rd Street, one of the HQ buildings for WebLinc. Note the slanted ceilings.” | Technical.ly Philly

• Technical.ly Philly talks to Darren Hill, cofounder and CEO of WebLinc, “an anchor of Old City’s business community before there was a N3rd Street.” Hill explains that his foray into real estate—his staff works in two rehabbed spaces in the neighborhood with another coming to the Franklin Trust Company building at Front & Market—was “a deliberate choice,” in that “it shows ownership, that we’re not going away.” Here is an intimate and energizing “urban campus…colorful, playful and rich with art.” Take a look at the photo tour of WebLinc’s digs.

• Eager “to quell the concerns of those opposed to the demolition of the 150-year-old” historic Italianate mansion at 40^th& Pine, says The Daily Pennsylvanian, Jonathan Weiss, the president of Equinox Management and Construction, is seeking support for a retuned approach to the grad housing proposal that is currently mired down in the Court of Common Pleas. Rather than demolishing the mansion to make room for 122-units, this compromise suggests a smaller offering—99-units—within a five-story building that would flank the existing structure.

• Radnor Property Group and the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral will break ground on December 5 at 38^th& Chestnut for a 276-unit apartment complex (appropriately, “38Chestnut”) catering to graduate students and young professionals. The 287,000-square-foot building will rise in tandem with the new Episcopal Cathedral Center, which will include a three-story office building, a community center, and childcare center. The project is meant to create an income stream for the West Philly Cathedral.

• The Philly History Bloglooks back to Philadelphia’s Iron Age, when the Royer brothers’ foundry at 9th & Montgomery turned out many of the city’s cast iron features, preceded by and perpetuating the confidence of a booming national economy.

New on old, at The Philadelphia School | Photo: Bradley Maule

The Philadelphia School, one of the city’s great private schools, puts adaptive reuse into a very clear context in its leafy Fitler Square enclave. The building the school has called home since 1976 is a remnant of the neighborhood’s industrial history grown from the Schuylkill River.

The lot this building sits on was one of the last to be developed in this neighborhood. Owned by a Thomas Cahill since the 1870s, all the other lots around it were either filled with rowhouses or industrial sites while this location stayed raw until the 20th Century. It wasn’t until about 1905 that this last remaining vacancy was filled with a speculative industrial building that ended up sitting empty for two years after its construction. Though it is unknown who developed the structure, it was most likely the short-lived Lombard and South Street Passenger Railway Company, who maintained a car house and repair shop immediately to the south.

William Thompson, Pie Man | Source: Genealogical History of Hudson and Bergen Counties, New Jersey

It finally got itself an occupant when the New York Baking Company’s Philadelphia branch chose to move in 1907 after cobbling together space in a handful of buildings at the corner of Ninth and Cross Streets since the 1870s. The New York Pie Baking Company was a story upon itself. Despite its name, the first iteration of the company was founded here in Philadelphia on what is now Spring Street in 1850. The company moved its primary operation to its namesake city in 1872 but kept its Philadelphia branch active.

The New York Pie Baking Company became the largest of its kind in the United States by 1900, with branches all over the northeast. The founder, William Thompson, believed pies were a health food that should be spread far and wide, and did his best to convince the public that only factory-made pies were sanitary to eat. His obsession with using pure ingredients to produce pies in a nearly sterile atmosphere was a huge selling point used in their advertising. In an interview, the founder stated:

“In the rigid inspection and examination made by our experts care was taken to thoroughly note the physical environments and conditions of the entire plant and establishment of the company all which were found to be in the highest possible state of cleanliness the added fact of complete compliance with all sanitary requirements.”

So much for all that… in the oft-cited case Carroll v. New York Pie Baking Company, the healthy pie makers were ordered to award a handsome sum to a customer who was poisoned by a pie with cockroaches baked in. The Philadelphia branch also got busted numerous times for selling bad eggs.

Despite those setbacks, the Philadelphia branch of the New York Pie Baking Company still found success. In 1916, only nine years after they moved to 2503 Lombard, the Ballinger & Perrot firm was enlisted by to design two additions to the building. One that extended the building west, filling in some of the remaining vacant land, and one on the north, taking the place of the rowhouses that filled 2506-2512 Waverly Street. In 1920, Ballinger was commissioned once again to integrate a large garage/loading area onto the southeast portion of  the building, facing Lombard Street. The outlines of the garage doors are still visible on the facade.

Slater System making use of a garage door still visible on the Lombard Street façade. | Source: Aramark history

The New York Pie Baking Company stayed at 2503 Lombard until the mid-1930s. By the early 1940s, the C.K. Reid Company, which produced coffee, tea, and their own patented coffee makers, had a brief stay at this space while between headquarters. A more permanent occupant, Slater System Industrial Food Service Incorporated, came along in 1944 and would stay in the building in one form or another until the late 1960s. Slater started out providing cafeteria and food service needs for primarily industrial sites and also did some side work managing fraternity house kitchens. At their Lombard Street headquarters, they ran a public commissary that served the nearby industry along the river. Soon after moving in, they acquired and cleared the former Nice Ball Bearing Company headquarters that faced 25th Street between Lombard and Waverly in order to create a parking lot for their workers. This lot survives today as the Philadelphia School’s playground. They also reduced the three garage doors down to one.

Slater System grew into the largest manual food service in the country and got acquired by their west coast competitor, Automatic Retailers of America, in 1961. ARA turned the building into their east coast office and data operations center. In 1963, they added a four-story, 20,000 square foot addition to the building, making it reach almost all the way to the end of the block. On top of all the other services ARA offered related to food service, they also got into the business of distributing and servicing vending machines. At this location, they serviced Mold-a-rama machines, which are prized collectibles today. After several mergers and name changes, ARA became the internationally ubiquitous Aramark, who claim Philadelphia for their world headquarters, sparkling like the 1980s at 11th and Market.

Before they became Aramark and put their sign between the flags atop the tower at 11th & Market, the food services giant operated out of 25th & Lombard | Photo: Bradley Maule

By the early 1970s, the surrounding neighborhood was already trending toward the semi-affluent, and industry had vacated 2503 Lombard for the offices of an investment firm, Globe Securities, Inc. In 1976, some space in the building was leased to a new miniscule private school that had heretofore rented rooms at the Rodeph Shalom Synagogue. That little institution with only a handful of students operating out of bits of former industrial space grew to inhabit the rest of the building over the next couple of decades, renovating every part while also making a name for itself as one of the best single private schools in the region. And what a name it was: The Philadelphia School. They made their residency official on April, 9th, 1999 by purchasing the building for $1.2 million.

Fancy sign, fancy trellis | Photo: Bradley Maule

The Philadelphia School’s adaptation of the old New York Baking Company from a harsh industrial/commercial stronghold into a benign educational institution has continued all the way into the present. In addition to many recent internal renovations, in 2011 they converted their asphalt and chainlink-fenced playground into a friendly entrance vestibule with trees and plantings designed by local architecture firm Purdy O’Gwynn and constructed by Wolf Scott Associates.

The Philadelphia School’s conversion of Fitler Square industrial sites into neighborhood-friendly new uses continues. Just last year, they converted the former Lombard and South Street Passenger Railway Company’s Car House into the Ellen Schwarz and Jeremy Siegel Early Childhood Development Center, completely transforming a long-term piece of blight into what they call a “country classroom in the city”.

This building really proves how an old industrial space can be integrated into the context of a modern city neighborhood. Remember this place any time you pass one of the many abandoned and forlorn industrial sites in our city of neighborhoods. All of them hold the same potential to live a second life as a useful, modern, and attractive environment.

Out on a Limb: human-sized robin’s nest | Photo: Bradley Maule

When I left Philadelphia to live in Oregon, I knew I’d miss the four seasons—four actual seasons with four distinct conditions and auras—but especially the colors of fall. The autumn palette always kicks in with the orange of jack-o-lanterns, accompanied by the yellow of candy corn, and sprinkled with the reds of pin oaks and sweetgums and red maples. But underlying it all is the range of brown we’re left with until spring green revs up again in March. Auburns and umbers, tans and taupes… come Thanksgiving, the Mid-Atlantic is Brown Town.

One could get buried in the doldrums, but under the right conditions, the browns are the blanket that’ll keep you warm on a walk in the woods. Philadelphia’s woodland showcase, the Morris Arboretum, colors the northwestern edge of the city on the banks of the Wissahickon Creek—even after the leaves have fallen. Works of art like Lorraine Vail’s American Bull and feats of engineering like Metcalfe Architecture & Design’s Tree Adventure reward your efforts in so lazy a season.

These photos were taken last weekend, before the wind vacuumed down the last of the leaves and before the rain made a misery of Thanksgiving travel.

Kensington, deindustrialized and disoriented | Illustration: Joseph G. Brin

The old joke of developing natural lands into towns and cities is that we chop down trees, lay down the asphalt, and then name the street after the trees that used to be there. Growing up in the suburbs, we had the same joke. A developer would by a defunct piece of land that was once in agricultural use, build a bunch of homes and then name the development something depressingly apropos like Spring Meadow Farms or Sweet Valley Orchards. Although people view the historical architecture of Philadelphia as an escape from this profit-driven perversion of our cultural heritage, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of hypocrisy when a new loft development in a defunct factory is named after the industrial activity that used to occupy the building.

After explaining this witty analysis to Philadelphia artist Maria Möller, she just gave a light shrug and said, “Well, we aren’t manufacturing things anymore, so sometimes housing is the only option for these buildings. It’s better than tearing them down.”

Maria is the creator of the Hexamer Redux project, which uses historical fire insurance surveys conducted by the Hexamer Company in the mid to late 19th century to resurvey what the building, or in many cases vacant land, is now being used for. To further dispel my point, Möller explained a project she undertook a few months ago in the Point Breeze neighborhood.

For this project, The House That Was Here, Maria studied Census records and business directories to trace everyone who had ever lived at 2025 Federal Street, now a vacant lot. Once she found the information, she constructed five miniature sculptures of row homes and posted them on the site. On four of the row homes were the names of every family member from the four separate families that occupied the house according to records. Maria then invited residents of Point Breeze to cover the fifth row home sculpture with their thoughts, hopes and visions for the neighborhood. Although the address still has no house or residents, Maria’s intent was to explore the rich history of the people who lived, worked and died on what is now just a vacant lot.

“This project was about neighborhood history and neighborhood change. I feel that it’s important to recognize the history of a place even if there isn’t apparent history because that’s really what’s informing what’s going on today, and some of the tensions in a place like Point Breeze that’s sort of getting gentrified by all ends, sometimes in just a blink of an eye, and affecting the residents who have a history in that neighborhood.”

Although there’s always an inherent risk of accuracy and perspective when exploring the history of a place and people, Maria was very pleased with the neighborhood response and the other stories that came out of the project. For her next series of projects, Maria was drawn to Kensington, where there is such a strong sense of history. Maria has long been fascinated by the desire to connect with the history of the neighborhood by the long-time and newer residents alike. In her opinion, people are drawn to the neighborhood for the old buildings and the feeling of something tangible that is born from an industrial past. In her words, it’s that “sheen” that the buildings have that make the place so special.

When asked to describe what she meant by sheen, she explained, “It’s that feeling of the grease, and bricks and the wood. It’s the feeling of use.”

This curiosity of the history and use of buildings led Maria to the Crane Arts building, where she explored the Kensington Riots of 1844 with co-collaborator and Philadelphia artist Jebney Lewis. Before the Crane Company Building was built in 1905, and even before the city’s consolidation in 1854, this was the site of venomous violence against newly immigrated Irish Catholics. Maria and Jebney worked with Palestinian youth from the Arab-American Community Development Corporation to create a six-week installation in which the group used photography, theatre, and sculpture to reclaim and explore the site where the riots occurred, and how similar oppression still takes place around the world.

Aside from the value of the project, and the deepening of Maria’s reverence for the rich history of Kensington, working in Crane building was the genesis for the Hexamer Redux project. It was Jebney who first introduced Maria to the Hexamer Surveys by showing her the survey of the Crane building on the PhilaGeoHistory website. Maria was impressed by the high artistic quality of the survey and the attention to detail, as well as the vast catalog of buildings that the Hexamer Surveys covered. As Maria explained, the surveys may have been created for the functional purpose of assessing fire risk and insurance, but the creator Ernest Hexamer was actually a highly skilled artist from Germany. According to Maria’s research, Hexamer was active in the March Revolution in 1848. After going into exile due to the uprising, he started working for a mapmaker who encouraged him to come to Philadelphia to make maps. After beginning work on surveys, Hexamer incorporated the high artistry and precision of mapmaking, which was common at the time.

Providence Dye Works, the first resurvey | Hexamer Survey map, via MariaMoller.com

It was also impactful to connect with the original layout of the Crane building after working in it for so long. Then one day an idea came to her, like most great ideas do, right after a nap. She decided that she wanted to resurvey the buildings on the PhilaGeoHistory database using the original Hexamer Surveys as a starting point.

After receiving funding from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through a Triple I Award, Maria selected The Providence Dye Works building as her first survey. First built in 1875 at Emerald and York Streets in Kensington by the Firth and Foster Company, the original factory existed on two adjacent lots on opposite sides of the street with a connecting skywalk over Emerald Street. The one lot is now Paretta’s Automotive Repair and the other lot is a vacant mega-lot overgrown with weeds and trash.

A large part of the Hexamer Redux project’s purpose is to not only connect residents and participants with what was once there, but also with what the new sites could be. A few years ago, Maria had taken part in the Murals Arts Program’s project “My North Philly.” While collecting oral histories from residents to be used in murals, Maria met Marietta Wilson, a long time Kensington resident, who as Maria put it, “lived, worked, and died within a few square blocks”. Ms. Wilson briefly worked in a dye works in the neighborhood and told Maria of the horrid conditions of walking over boards where a mixture of water and toxic chemicals would pool beneath her feet. When taking her first site visit, Maria noticed pools of water on the site, but instead of chemicals the water was mixed with the weeds that had taken over the site. Maria knew she wanted to do something with the weeds and the dye, and it made her wonder, “Could you dye with the weeds, and even more, could we survey what the weeds are?”

This question led her to natural dyers Mira Adornetto and Elissa Meyers of BLUEREDYELLOW, a company that uses herbs grown on city lots to make dyes, and botanist Zya S. Levy of the We The Weeds, which connects urban people to herbs through art installations (including Ruins at High Battery at the 2013 Hidden City Festival). Through their collaboration, they organized an art exhibition on October 19th where community members were invited to resurvey the weeds on the site to catalog which plants could produce dye, create dye on site, and then use that dye on fabric and yarn. Aside from learning that Mugwort dye created such a brilliant greenish gold color, Maria was pleased that the exhibition brought together an interesting cross section of people who all wanted to take part in the conversation: those interested in weeds, those interested in history, those interested in urban redevelopment, and those interested in a mixture of all three.

Hexamer Redux in action on site at the former Arrott’s Mill, October 2013 | Image via project web site, Hexamer.tumblr.com

The next exhibition will take place in what was once Arrott’s Mill, and what is now Viking Mills Art Studios in late winter/early spring. After meeting textile artist Andrew Dahlgren during the Hidden City Festival at his Knit Lab project in the Shivtei Yeshuron-Ezras Israel in South Philadelphia, Maria invited Dahlgren to collaborate on the Arrott Mills Survey, which they have appropriately named “Hexamer:Knitlab.” For one day, participants will be invited into the Viking Mills Building to resurvey the building using mechanical knitting machines to reimagine the industry that once existed inside the walls. Maria connects the new Viking Mills to the original Arrott’s Mill by explaining that William Arrott had his business, but he also had other tenants–what Maria calls “the original coworking”, and connects to the coworking that takes place at Viking Mills.

For each exhibition Maria also plans to create her own version of a Hexamer Survey using the original artistic aesthetic and attention to detail of Ernest Hexamer to survey what is on the site now, and what uses were imagined and reimagined for the space. Her summer plans are to take on the Bromley Ingrain Carpet Factory, which led her to say with a grin, “Who knows, maybe they’ll be a big survey canvasing the parking lot of Comely Furniture (a business nearby the Bromley).”

But for now, Maria is proud of the conversation Hexamer Redux has provoked, and she has an expansive vision for the art the project can create. Picking up on my opening point of buildings that once served a tangible use now being turned into lofts, Maria provides this balanced view of the past and present that her project invokes.

“The interesting thing to me about the mega-lots are when you stand on the corner and you begin to think about what this was all like when these were all working factories and what that meant for how many people lived here, and for how many jobs there were, but what it also meant for how much dirt, and smog, and chemicals were everywhere. Being able to visualize that makes you realize that it was really good in so many ways, but so hazardous in another.”

Acknowledging the excitement over Kensington’s present redevelopment, she further explains, “The men who were designing these factories and this equipment were really on the forefront of technology. And for the people around them, even if life was hard and they were just cogs in the wheel, it was still a great time of promise, and knowing that they were part of something really big. So for the people who want the mega-lot where Providence once stood to now be a park or something great for the community, it’s important to know that history.”

Photo: Kimberly Paynter, for NewsWorks

• The opening of a renovated Dilworth Plaza by City Hall has been pushed back a few months, reports NewsWorks, to Labor Day at the earliest. Center City District CEO Paul Levy explains that unforeseen obstacles were encountered during excavation, driving the project 10% over budget.

• Temple News previews what the SmithGroup has planned for the university’s updated master plan. Early notions of Visualize Temple, which won’t be formalized until next year, tell of a plan that will segment the eastern half of campus into distinct nodes of academic areas. To the north, along Norris Street, creative programs will find their home; science and technology will be focused to the east, along 12^th Street; and professional studies such as business, law, and education will be concentrated at the southern end. The west side of North Broad will act as the university’s “face” and “front porch,” behind which athletics will take center stage, with a football stadium to replace the Owls’ use of Lincoln Financial Field.

• The Philadelphia Real Estate Blog poses a familiar question: just how profitable would a second casino be within such an already highly saturated region? Considering that Harrisburg lays claim to 55% of slot revenues, it’s not too difficult to see how the calculus between social cost and municipal benefit could change as much as it has since 2010’s opening of SugarHouse. “The 1,600 slots and 58 table games at Sugar House,” it says, “generated just under $9.3 million for the city and $4.3 million for Philadelphia schools this year.”

• Philadelphia magazine shares a short film that highlights the world of urban exploration, or “urbex.” Streets Dept editor Conrad Benner discusses the genesis and accolades of his blog (from Time and The Guardian), and an apt defense is offered for such guerrilla tourism: “It takes guts to go into any abandoned area—the risk of stepping on broken glass, running into homeless, or getting caught trespassing. But if you’re not up for it, you can always go see the Liberty Bell.” Joel Mathis muses upon the allure of the phenomenon among Philly’s more contemplative millennials.“Today’s young people,” he says, “are taking old places that don’t serve us anymore and recontextualizing them for modern use.” To jump straight to the video, click HERE.

Phase One | Poster by The Heads of State

With a star-studded lineup taking the stage one block from the Reading Viaduct tomorrow evening, the Friends of the Rail Park take a huge step in making its Phase One a reality. And in a strange and bittersweet twist, this beginning marks the probable end (until the inevitable reunion) of co-headliners The Walkmen, who told the Washington Post last week that they have no plans to continue and will focus on other projects.

A cocktail reception and fashion show will begin the evening at 6PM onstage at Union Transfer, the most appropriate venue for this fundraiser. At 1026 Spring Garden, within two blocks of where the former Philadelphia & Reading Railway’s trestle weaves northeasterly through the Eraserhood, Union Transfer’s name comes from the railroad’s luggage company who occupied the building long before Spaghetti Warehouse.

The trestle’s transformation into a green space has been the dream of many a dreamer for years, but the wild popularity of New York’s High Line has perhaps spurred the expedition of these local dreams. Friends of the Rail Park, boosted by the recent merger with the Reading Viaduct Project, has led the charge with a series of events including a rally and an art exhibition by Friends board member Sarah McEneaney at Locks Gallery depicting her colorful paintings of the viaduct. Phase One involves the SEPTA Spur between 13th & Noble to where it meets up with the Reading branch near 11th Street. (See preliminary designs done last year by Studio Bryan Hanes and Urban Engineers, with Center City District, HERE.)

Tomorrow’s concert features co-headliners The Walkmen and the Sun Ra Arkestra, as well as Sharon Van Etten, Spank Rock, Birdie Busch, Light Heat, Chris Ward, Mary Lattimore, and Jeff Zeigler, and will be hosted by XPN’s Michaela Majoun. Tickets to the concert only are $30, and those for the full package (including the fashion show and cocktail reception) are $100, with all proceeds going to Friends of the Rail Park. Both can be purchased via Ticketfly HERE.

Editor’s Note: When Hidden City staff writer Christopher Mote’s series “How to Reuse a Church” was published in May, it included the former St. Agatha Roman Catholic Church among the top ten shining examples of adaptive reuse of former church buildings. Designed by renowned Philadelphia church architect Edwin Forrest Durang, St. Agatha opened in 1878; in 1979, the Archdiocese merged it with St. James the Greater to become the Church of St. Agatha and St. James.

Chris’ series provided a positive alternative to the barrage of news involving the demolition or potential demolition of churches, such as the Church of the Nativity in Poplar, 40th Street Methodist Episcopal in West Philadelphia, St. Bonaventure Roman Catholic Church in North Philadelphia, and of course, Church of the Assumption in Callowhill.

However, the inclusion of St. Agatha in this series did not altogether go over well with Caroline Dunlop Millett, who purchased the church and its grounds from the Archdiocese in 1988, on the condition she would preserve the facility and continue its contribution to the community. She felt that our inclusion of this particular conversion did not tell enough of the story, so she volunteered to tell it herself. Below is Caroline Dunlop Millett’s story, in her own words, from the first-person point of view of buying, converting, and ultimately losing St. Agatha’s church, now The Cloisters.

St. Agatha Roman Catholic Church (Cloisters)/apartments | Photo: Theresa Stigale

In May, Hidden City’s “How to Reuse a Church: Our Top Ten” post named The Cloisters as one of Philadelphia’s most outstanding historic conversions. Ever since reading this survey I’ve been mulling over my own experiences while buying, renovating, and selling this unusual property. Along with extensive fenced in grounds, it included three historic buildings: St Agatha’s church, school, and rectory. The church runs the whole width of the block at 38th and Spring Garden Streets.

Color photo, circa-1970s, of St. Agatha’s Church | Photo: Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Caroline Dunlop Millett’s collection

Since The Cloisters renovation (1988–1992), over 75 more old churches have been threatened with demolition by Philadelphia real estate developers. Why tear down beautiful historic architecture to build uninteresting new structures? The answer is simple and obvious: in ordinary cases, it is more profitable to destroy than to renovate. But the Cloisters was definitely not an ordinary case. The solutions introduced by our architect Frank Weiss combined historic preservation with cost effective new construction. This innovative approach in itself makes it worthwhile to now revisit my own church story—as a potential model for projects today.

To give you a clear picture I’m providing a short history of St. Agatha’s. The whole story is one of extreme ups and downs—great accomplishments and devastating poverty, grandeur repeatedly destroyed by fires and communities working together joyously, despite fierce opposition.

All this begins just before the end of the Civil War when St. Agatha’s parish was established in an area then called Mantua Village, populated largely by Irish-Americans. The church we see today was dedicated in 1878. It was as grand as many cathedrals, boasting superb marble statuary, copious stained glass windows, and a magnificent soaring steeple topped by a cross (until lightning struck).

In the 1940s, St. Agatha’s parish had 2,500 families in its congregation, still mostly of Irish descent. By 1976, they’d dwindled to 400, and both the church and rectory were closed. The West Philadelphia MOVE crisis greatly exacerbated the 1970s decline. In the 1980s the grounds served as a chop shop for stolen cars. The school basement became a literal garbage dump, and the upper floors gave shelter to drug dealers and their clients. The magnificent church, despite a devastating fire, was still semi-furnished with glorious relics, and all this provided a unique meeting place for prostitutes and their pimps.

The church administrators had certainly tried to stem the tide of this appalling urban decay, but to no avail. Without the resources to save their diocese, they did the next best thing: they sold the property to a preservationist developer who lived in the neighborhood and was committed to revitalizing the community. After turning down commercial developers and sundry slumlords, in 1988 the Catholic Archdioceses of Philadelphia sold the entire block of property to me for $500,000 with the clear understanding that I would preserve the integrity of the architecture, and provide residential homes for the surrounding community. The good fathers made all this possible for me by selling the package at a very moderate price, much lower than strictly commercial developers offered.

For two years, I campaigned for community support from various Mantua and Powelton organizations. (St. Agatha’s was in the Powelton Village Historic District and part of the Mantua neighborhood). After much to do, and what seemed endless arguments, both associations and many immediate neighbors provided strong support for the renovation of the school, rectory, and church. Moreover, my Irish emigrate contractors—80 professional athletes who stayed behind to participate in US sports competitions—transformed themselves into a small army. With my encouragement they wisely hired additional construction workers from the immediate neighborhood, and together the workers saw to everyone’s safety. The 16th Police District officers provided additional and very visible support by stopping by on a regular basis for coffee and donuts. Their presence—along with my 24-hour security guards, and one paroled murderer from Mantua who acted as the gatekeeper—fundamentally changed the community atmosphere. People began to feel safe. By 1991 neighboring friends, families, and children were using the grounds for meetings and special events. They were all welcome to have picnics and play sports on our landscaped grounds, where we had planted thousands of plants and trees.

Before the church renovation began, I had designed, renovated, and decorated the school, creating 50 apartments with a basement health club. All the apartments had garden access and private parking. This conversion retained much of the flavor of St. Agatha’s school, and we preserved the façades, immense windows, and basketball court flooring. I completed the project in 1989 and began renting and selling condos in the school.

Next came the vast Victorian rectory. Leaving the exterior preserved intact, the building was divided into a dozen gracious homes, one-of-a-kind and replete with original architectural detail. Millett Design decorated the new model units featuring original architectural interiors and working fireplaces.

Exterior schematic by architect Frank Weiss, circa-1988

We saved the most complicated and exciting conversion for last: St. Agatha’s church. Architect Frank Weiss considered the project his most important accomplishment, after a lifetime of Philadelphia preservation work. It was his extraordinary idea to build a completely new apartment building within the church, soaring up to the original roof pierced by penthouse windows and balconies. His solution was extremely cost effective, and also made it possible to leave almost all of the original exteriors intact.

As Gene Austin of the Philadelphia Inquirer explained, “three levels of the new church building will extend above the church’s roof line but blend with the structure’s Gothic architecture and retain a churchlike exterior. Weiss said ‘the inner building would hardly touch anything there now’, creating an open area to serve as patios and walkways between the walls of the old and new buildings. … Weiss called St. Agatha’s the ‘landmark of Philadelphia’s Irish-Catholic community.’”

In July of 1990, the Preservation Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, West Philadelphia Coalition of Neighbors, and Millett Enterprises hosted a reception for the opening of the church project. Extensively reviewed by the press, and featured on TV, the historic conservation was celebrated as “the most imaginative historic conversion in Philadelphia.”

Shortly thereafter, the federal government shut down Bell Savings Bank and the U.S. Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) called all the banks’ mortgages, including mine. Then Bell’s CEO ended up in jail, and his wife died, along with another high-ranking Bell executive. I sued Bell. It took me two years to win my case, but I was forced to sell the entire property and give all proceeds to the RTC.

Pennrose Properties bought the package, and marketed the The Cloisters as affordable housing. I lost it, but the church was saved.

Photo: Emma Lee, for NewsWorks

• For three hours on Friday (11AM-2PM), visitors to will be offered a sneak peek of Third & Chestnut’s Museum of the American Revolution, with General George Washington’s 23′ by 14′ commander’s tent, carefully propped up by anachronistic metal framework (not unlike the design for the building that will be its home by 2017) . Others have commented on how lacking an object it is to amass an aspirational collection around, yet as collection director Scott Stephenson explains while granting NewsWorks a tour, it’s not long until the visitor is marveling at some very consequential “emotions that were felt right where we’re standing.” The humble, three-chamber tent is said to reveal the republicanism of Washington—slave quarters and all.

• Plan Philly reports that City Council’s Committee of Rules unanimously recommended yesterday First District Councilman Mark Squilla’s bill that would shrink the North Delaware overlay limiting nightlife. Community attorney Paul Boni said the legislation—clearing the way for developer Michael Samschick’s Canal Street North entertainment district—amounted to spot zoning, and would attract crime to the area.

• The Inquirernotes some “enticing hints” dropped by Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT) as to a transformative vision for the Market Street east of Broad, via the overhaul of the Gallery.“We anticipate delivering a project that is a focal point for the City of Philadelphia, drives the transformation of the retail landscape in the city and the evolution of the corridor into a vibrant shopping, entertainment, and dining district,” said CEO Joseph Coradino.

• The Passyunk Postsays South Street’s shuttered Pearl Arts and Crafts store has been purchased by a developer with the intent to transform it back into a place of art by summer 2014.“The plan is for 85 art studios over four floors (including the basement) with a retail/gallery space on the ground floor and a restaurant with sculpture garden on the roof. Studios, which start at $250 a month, will each have a shelf or gallery wall to show artists’ work.

Ice cutting operation. Sand Lake NWR, South Dakota | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Before your time and mine, the iceman delivered hand-cut ice blocks to neighborhoods. Harvested from frozen ponds, the thick blocks lasted through the year in sawdust-insulated storage sheds. That was refrigeration before the dawn of Frigidaire. Today ice is a commodity very much taken for granted, though its utility has expanded to include worldwide sculpture competitions and ice hotels.

Roger Wing and Kirk Rademaker @ (7th) International Ice Sculpture Festival, Poznań, Poland | Photo: Michał Leśniewski, Poland

Roger Wing, an international ice carver and sculptor from Philadelphia’s Powelton Village, is an acquaintance, someone who carved stone, as I did, in Carrara, Italy. We know some of the same sculptor characters from that renowned center of modern stone carving. Mountain peaks in Carrara gleam white in summer, with rubble strewn from centuries of quarrying the prized “bianco statuario,” a warm white marble dating back to Michelangelo’s time there. Sidewalks in the town are paved with random chunks of cheaper “grigio,” gray-veined marble.

Chainsaw powering through solid ice @ ice festival in Poland | Photo: Michał Leśniewski, Poland

Wing alternates between local commissions and overseas ice competitions. “Ice is at times lucrative, but only sporadically. It is one of the most exciting and publicly visible branches of my work,” Wing says. “[But] commissioned work and conservation have been my bread and butter for the last ten years or so.”

Wherever he may be, though, the act of sculpting means humbly wresting flights of imagination from solid, not always opaque, materials. Given the range of materials he works with, though, his heart still belongs to wood carving. Invoking Goldilocks, Wing says, “stone is too hard, ice is too soft, wood is just right.”

On the back-to-the-future nature of carving technology, Wing says, “although I finish my work with hand chisels and wooden mallet I do take advantage of the latest technology. I rough out large forms with chainsaw, including a state-of-the-art Japanese chainsaw designed for carvers.”

Wing uses digital photography and online images for source material. He has worked with digital scanners and CNC carvers in wood, stone and ice. “There are useful applications that complement the ancient craft,” he explains. “However, the process I normally pursue is still much the same as it was 2000 years ago or more.”

Portraits in Carrara marble on the porch | Photo: Joseph G. Brin © 2013

Back in Philadelphia, you know when you’ve arrived at Wing’s home neighborhood. “Two of my larger than life woodcarvings and a couple of marble busts watch the block from our front porch,” says Wing, who is a friendly bear of a guy. “‘The guy with the wood people on his porch’ is sometimes how I’m introduced,” he laughs.

Roger Wing and Wood Person on Porch | Photo: Joseph G. Brin © 2013

“I’ve become known to the whole neighborhood since we moved here less than three years ago. I have done presentations at local schools and always greet class trips walking by our house. I always bring my A-game, even to a friendly gathering to carve pumpkins.” Wing is living out his own philosophies of art and life. “I hope to continue promoting the arts locally and teaching by example. Art should be a normal part of our every day, in our schools, in our homes and on our streets. Which is not to say that it should be humdrum. The challenge is to do the same old things in new and surprising ways.”

“The entire neighborhood has deep artistic and architectural roots,” says Wing, who himself lives in a Victorian house of artistic note. Painter Harry Sefarbi lived there for over 50 years and painted in the third story space, reminiscent of a Parisian garret, that is now Wing’s drafting and clay modeling studio. Sefarbi was a direct link to Dr. Albert Barnes, taught at the Barnes Foundation for decades, and probably knew every square inch of those invaluable painted canvases.

Wing in third floor studio he calls his “incubating space” for ideas  | Photo: Joseph G. Brin © 2013

Wing points to Sefarbi’s paint spattered wood floor in the studio, explaining how he is slowly and respectfully adapting Sefarbi’s former studio for his own purposes. He carves wood in the basement and spreads out elsewhere in the house when possible, saying with bemused yet sincere appreciation, “I’m really lucky to have a wife who lets me leave a chainsaw in the dining room.”

Art history is littered with great artists who were miserable people and treated those closest to them miserably. Wing, acknowledging the tension between art and family, made a decision years ago that greatness was a narrow pursuit. He wanted to be a good father who could share with his family his philosophy that art could be “integrated into the larger fabric of life.” Their living room is bedecked with sculptures of various sizes and states of completion. Wing maintains that “living with the sculpture is the final test of it.”

Wing picked up a small basswood carving. Noticing that it was starting to “check” (crack), he reminded himself that it had to be sealed to dry more slowly. In the kitchen, he spotted a translucent plastic bag filled with a cluster of fresh potatoes and tumbled them onto the blue Aboriginal design table cloth. Quickly wrapping the carving in plastic, he hurried out the door to meet with a new ice sculpture client.

Lumpy potatoes accommodating the daily needs of a wood sculpture. Art and life, together at last.

“Raven Bringing Light to the World” by Roger Wing & Martin DeZoete of Switzerland in Svonlinna, Finland, Feb. 2013.  Wing returns to Finland to compete in Feb. 2014 | Photo: Akos Toth, Budapest, Hungary (see panorama)

The Great Bell in its proposed location in the Christ Church garden | Image: Moto Designshop

Perhaps the oldest surviving bell in North America, the Great Bell of Christ Church, will get a new interpretive display in 2014, designed by Moto Designshop of Old City. The 1702 bell, which was cast at Whitechapel Foundry in London (where the Liberty Bell was cast 50 years later) hung from a small belfry at the original wooden Christ Church until it was replaced in 1755. The 350 pound bronze tenor bell ought not be touched, according to metallurgical experts, but can be safely rung. Church officials hope the new display will be ready by July 4. “The point [of the design] was to make it elegant without getting in [the bell's] way–to express the bell simply and openly and allow its ring to be heard,” says Roman Torres, of Moto Designshop. “The bowl at the center is serves to amplify the sound of what should always be a gentle ring.”

The display will mark the end of a long journey for the bell, which was given to St. Peter’s Church in the mid-18th century then hung at the Christ Church Hospital for Indigent Women nearby Christ Church on Cherry Street, and then at at the Kearsley Home until 2011.

The new display allows the bell to be accessible in a public place–the northwest section of the Christ Church garden, near Second and Church Streets, “a tangible and approachable record of history,” according to a press release. And it’s filled with symbolic meaning, connecting the history of the church, the birthplace of the Episcopal Church in America, to the American Revolution and the founding of a new nation based on religious liberty. “We approached the plinth as a metaphorical timeline upon which the Bell expresses influence,” says Torres. “The finish of the marble at one end is rough, to represent the turmoil of pre-war. As it approaches the center of the Bell, the finish and surface become honed to a polish to express the Bell’s role in the birth of a nation. As it moves to the other end, the surface become rough again representing a future unknown.”

From a practical standpoint, the plinth is also designed to allow the bell to be displayed in open air without being touched. Moto’s designers were influential in convincing church officials to display the bell in open air, without the protection of a structure.

The church was founded in 1695 by Anglicans of the Church of England who set up a small wooden place of worship on Second Street. The Great Bell was hung outside the church in the notch of a tree. The existence of the church, allowed for in Quaker William Penn’s charter for Pennsylvania, confirmed that the new colony would be a place of religious liberty. In 1727, officials of the growing church began construction on a new and much more sumptuous building, which was complete in 1744. A superb example of Georgian architecture and a monument to colonial craftsmanship, it’s widely considered one of the great buildings of the 18th century.

Christ Church in stereoview

Church officials began raising money for a steeple, a project taken up by Benjamin Franklin and other leading Philadelphians, who ran two lotteries in support of what would be the tallest tower in North America. The slim white tower was built by Robert Smith and finished in 1755, when bells from Great Britain were installed. It pierced the sky at 196 feet high and was the tallest structure in North America for almost one hundred years. John Adams wrote in his diary of climbing the tower’s ladders to gaze upon the new nation in 1776.

View of the bell and plinth | Image: Moto Designshop

The Revolution cut Christ Church’s ties with Britain and the Anglican Church and forced the creation of the Episcopal Church in America. “The idea of religious liberty is very much intertwined with the design,” says Torres. “The dual history of this artifact really came together for us when we started to think about what the Bell represented to both sides: tolerance, liberty and unbridled optimism for a future unknown. We felt it important to embody these ideals and display the bell as openly and freely as possible.”

The Central Northeast | Map: Philadelphia City Planning Commission

The Philadelphia City Planning Commission has workshopped and forumed and charretted and massaged the Central Northeast District Plan over the past six months. Now that it’s almost ready for prime time, the commission put it on display for critics to review at Northeast High School on Tuesday night.

Recommendations for each of the plan’s three focus areas–Fox Chase, Five Points, and the Cottman Avenue corridor from Roosevelt Boulevard to Castor Avenue–were displayed on easels in the high school lobby, as were the main recommendations for district-wide transportation, development and neighborhood connections and desired zoning changes for the district.

At each easel, Planning Commission staff engaged with area residents who had things to say about the ideas–or had recommendations of their own–duly jotting their comments and criticisms on large notepads by each easel.

“We’ve gotten some good suggestions,” Commission planning director Rick Redding said of comments made by residents attending the open house for the draft final plan.

Residents’ main concerns with the focus area plans centered on pedestrian safety and changes that would increase traffic in the commercial districts. In general, residents were supportive of proposed changes in Fox Chase that would cluster the bus routes that end there next to the Regional Rail station and reconfigure station parking to promote a more pedestrian-friendly, village atmosphere.

The commission’s interest in preserving and upgrading Midcentury Modern storefronts along Rising Sun Avenue from Five Points to Lawncrest was echoed by at least one resident who called the street “an eyesore” in need of improvement. Others also commented on the difficulties pedestrians faced in crossing the streets that converge at Five Points, one of the areas the plan seeks to improve.

The proposals to create a pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use commercial hub around Cottman and Bustleton avenues (and the subject of a previous story of mine, HERE) drew raspberries from one particularly vocal critic at the meeting. Nancy Ostroff, who lives not far from Cottman and Bustleton, remarked that people were not moving into the area as it is and that more buildings in the area would not change the dynamic of homeowners moving out and renters moving in. What would, she said, is increased attention to the area’s public schools. “Give the schools what they need before you talk about building more buildings,” she said.

Cottman and Castor Avenues | Photo: Sandy Smith

There were others, however, who did like the idea of transforming Cottman Avenue into a more urbane thoroughfare. “Some people did want to ‘bring some of that downtown vibe to the Northeast’,” Redding said. As the largest commercial district in the Northeast and the site of a number of regional public services, including a city health clinic and the Northeast Regional branch of the Free Library, the Cottman corrridor would be a logical place to do this.

Most of the zoning changes proposed under the draft plan are minor; the two most significant ones merely ratify existing uses that were allowed on their sites under the old zoning code classifications but now under the new ones. Those two would reclassify the sites of Jeanes Hospital/Fox Chase Cancer Center and Nazareth Hospital as light industrial.

Transportation improvements were not a major topic of comment, even though another review of transit options in the Roosevelt Boulevard corridor is in the works. One commenter, however, did voice support for the long-planned, twice-stillborn Roosevelt Boulevard subway, which has reportedly been removed from the list of alternatives the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission is studying in an ongoing review.

Not an art gallery, but the lobby of Northeast High School, was the setting for this installation featuring the draft Central Northeast District Plan | Photo: Sandy Smith

The open house drew a crowd of more than 100 (in this reporter’s estimate), including a number of Northeast civic and business community leaders. Most of these, presumably, endorsed the sentiment of one commenter who said, “It’s great to see some infrastructure planning for Northeast Philadelphia!”

The draft plan will be officially released in January, and the final plan will be published in February or March.

Boyd Theater auditorium, 2013 | Photo: Chandra Lampreich

The advocacy group Friends of the Boyd turns to the public once more in the long fight to save Center City’s last movie palace, the Boyd Theater at 19th and Chestnut Streets. As Hidden City’s Christopher Mote reported in October, a Florida-based theater chain, iPic Entertainment, in partnership with Philadelphia developer Neal Rodin, has proposed to bring a multiplex luxury cinema to the Boyd, a plan that would restore the art deco façade but destroy the sumptuous auditorium. The rally will take place at the Boyd, 1910 Chestnut Street, Tuesday, December 10, 11:30AM-1PM.

“Our prior Save the Boyd rallies got the attention of City officials and played a key role in convincing a prior owner of the Boyd to not demolish our last movie palace,” says Howard Haas, president of the Friends group. “Friends of the Boyd needs now to send a message to iPic that many people will be upset if they insist on destroying our historic movie palace, and a message to the City officials that we need their help!”

The exterior of the Boyd and the structure that contains the auditorium are protected under the City’s historic preservation statute. iPic will need a hardship exemption–a ruling from the Historical Commission that says it’s economically impossible to develop the Boyd without demolishing the auditorium–in order to proceed with its plan.

Haas will be joined at the rally by Caroline Boyce, executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. Boyce will unveil the Alliance’s 2013 Endangered Properties List, which will include the Boyd.

Photo: David Swanson, for The Inquirer

• The Nutter administration is making “modest but measurable gains in the collection of taxes, chipping away at a delinquency epidemic that is among the worst of any big city in the nation,” reports Plan Philly. Targets are being met, says City Revenue Commissioner Clarena Tolson, leading to an increased collection rate that will largely be dedicated to the School District. More sheriff sales per month and a standardized payment process explain much of this relatively impressive turnaround, and the legislation signed by Governor Corbett just last week allowing Philadelphia to lien out-of-county properties of delinquent owners will surely contribute.

• The Friends of the Wissahickon held a public meeting last week celebrating the accomplishments reached over the past few years in the Sustainable Trails Initiative (STI), which has extended the gorge’s trail network by 10 miles. Executive director Maura McCarthy then discussed the three-pronged approach that will guide the 1,600-member stewardship organization moving forward: continuing of STI, improving water quality, and a more robust regional (and even national) branding scheme for the sylvan haven.

• Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) crews unearthed at least six pine coffins yesterday at the William Dick Elementary School at 24th & Diamond Streets, says The Inquirer. It is supposed that the human remains were mistakenly left at the old Odd Fellows Cemetery (1849—1950) when the crews were making way for the Raymond Rosen public housing project, itself demolished in 1995. The PWD greening project will be delayed for an indefinite period of time as historians and archeologists look into the manner.

• Inga Saffron suggests a few possible solutions that would alleviate the parking woes of many in the city, while complying with the new zoning code’s goal of building up density. For one, the Parking Authority could increase parking stickers even more than it has (to $100 per car). In restaurant and entertainment neighborhoods, reserved parking could improve access; parking policy Donald Shoup argues that the PPA should switch to a “targeted parking system that uses airline-style pricing to nudge people to give up their cars. His approach would free up space for those who can’t exist without them, such as reverse commuter and the disabled.”

Photo: Peter Woodall

The last days on any job are usually bittersweet, especially when the company you work for has closed up shop, and you’re part of the skeleton crew that’s cleaning out the factory. All things considered, though, the four men dismantling the equipment at a metal fabricating firm on Palmer and Tulip streets were pretty chipper. I thought of them the other day when I read that Domani Developers plans to turn that cluster of former mill buildings just east of Frankford Avenue into a 57-unit apartment complex with a City Fitness gym on the ground floor.

I met the men cleaning out the property back in 2010 on Philly Photo Day. I had been walking around Fishtown looking for something interesting to shoot, and was taking some unpromising photos of a short cobblestone driveway that dead-ended at the loading dock of a vacant factory, when a minivan pulled up.

The man who invited me to see the factory | Photo: Peter Woodall

“Hey there,” a voice called out.

I braced myself, figuring someone was about to take exception with what I was doing, as people occasionally will when you’re photographing vacant buildings.

“You like taking pictures of old factories?”

“Sure,” I said, walking over to the van.

“Well,” said the guy, “I’m cleaning out an even bigger one around the corner. I’ll take you over there.”

I paused for a moment and pondered his miraculous offer. It seemed too unlikely to be anything but in earnest, so I hopped in.

The man–I don’t remember his name–said the buildings had originally housed the Brownhill & Kramer textile mill. The company he worked for, Musal Corp., moved into the complex in the early 1960s. Although it did a wide range of metal fabricating, the company mainly built metal cases for transporting missiles, ammunition and other supplies. Business boomed during the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, but the military had recently phased out metal in favor of plastic, and the company folded soon after.

Musal wasn’t mentioned in any of the articles about Domani’s plans for the buildings, which isn’t surprising. Most stories in the local media–though not all of them–call any older factory or mill building a “warehouse” no matter how recently it has been used for manufacturing.

Photo: Peter Woodall

The mistake might be chalked up to a lack of understanding, and of precision; after all, Philadelphia hasn’t been called the Workshop of the World for a very long time. Yet when we don’t call a building by its proper name, it makes it easier to forget the lives of the people who worked in these places, the men, women and children who created the wealth that built much of the city we know today.

Photo: Peter Woodall

Mostly, though, confusing warehouses with factories is merely symptomatic of how little attention is paid to the city’s industrial and labor history. Even the history of Brownhill & Kramer, one of hundreds of more or less anonymous late 19th and early 20th century textile firms in Philadelphia, is not without interest.  In 1937, workers occupied the mill to try to prevent the company from moving outside the city, a novel use of the sit-down strike that was ultimately unsuccessful.

Most of the equipment had already been taken apart and removed from the building, but there were a few things left behind: a lathe, a Toledo scale, a massive metal stamping machine, a few cluttered desks and a porcelain tub the men used to wash their hands that will probably be sold for a small fortune at an architectural antiques shop. Yet even when nearly everything is gone in a factory, and all the machinery has been cleared out, suggestive images are frequently left behind.

Often, there are photos of naked women clipped from Penthouse or Playboy still taped inside lockers. This isn’t so surprising, perhaps, but more curious are the posters and calendars showing pretty landscapes, forests, sunsets, animals, as if the grim surroundings made the workers hungry for a scrap of beauty.

Carlos is at right, next to his paintings of Jesus Christ and Hurricane Katrina |Photo: Peter Woodall

And almost always, there is artwork created by the workers themselves–self portraits, humorous sketches, even small murals. Indeed, this was what Carlos, the worker showing me around, was most eager for me to see: his paintings of Jesus Christ and Hurricane Katrina inside an oven that was used to dry paint quickly.

Taken together, the three types of images hint at the subterranean currents, the dream life of a factory.

click any image to launch gallery.

Rendering by Interface Studio Architects

• The Philadelphia Real Estate Blog looks at an impressive example of a developer acknowledging his project’s weaknesses while playing to its strengths. Peter Crawford received variances last week that will allow him to construct a four-story, 6-unit building beneath the El between Master & Thompson Streets. Without the prospect of significant foot traffic anytime soon, the first two floors will be office space. Regardless of the temporary blight and the ceaseless din above, the project is sure to attract with its “original building design, the perception of safety (it looks like a fortress), and proximity to Kensington’s cachet of industrial chic—Kung Fu Necktie, Johnny Brenda’s and Frankford Hall are blocks away, and warehouses with artist spaces abound.”

• A quarter century of Philadelphia’s visual history (1986-2012)—from the most trivial of human-interest stories, to the collective introspection after the MOVE bombing—will not remain hidden for long, reports The Inquirer. When Marion Stokes, 83, passed away one year ago, she left behind 35 years worth of news footage (24/7 national and local) that she had diligently recorded in her Rittenhouse Square home. The California-based Internet Archive library will spend the next few years digitizing the collection that Stokes knew would one day provide a trove of important historical information.

• The Schuylkill River Development Corporation was awarded its first grant last week towards the reuse of the Grays Ferry rail swing bridge, which will hopefully connect the Grays Ferry Crescent trail with Bartram’s Mile just as the latter is completed in 2016. The state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ $300,000 will help finalize the project’s design and some of its initial construction, says Eyes on the Street.

• Two months after purchasing the nine-story Dow Chemical building just west of Independence Mall, holders Keystone Property Group, Mack-Cali Realty Corp., and Parkway Corp. relate their plans for the space to the Philadelphia Business Journal. The basement will become a car garage with 120-130 spots. “A dynamic outdoor space” is envisioned along 6th Street, complete with a restaurant at Sixth and Market Streets.

Legendary Blue Horizon | photo: Bradley Maule

Faced with a developer’s plan to demolish the art deco interior of the Boyd Theater, the long shuttered movie palace has been named one of 36 endangered buildings and one historic district by the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. The annual list will be publicly released tomorrow at a rally to save the threatened Boyd, but it’s available on the Alliance’s website, HERE.

Alliance staff compiled the list based on community feedback and their own analysis. The Blue Horizon boxing ring, Robinson’s store on Market Street, 19th Street Baptist Church, Engine 46 Firehouse, and Shawmont Station are key vulnerable properties on the list. Alliance staff also included the turn-of-the-century Haddington National Historic District in West Philadelphia, where the buildings were mostly designed by a single architect, E. Allen Wilson, and 30 shuttered public schools. Look for our story on the Shawmont Station tomorrow.

The 2013 list also acknowledges three key buildings listed in previous years that are still vulnerable–the Royal Theater, Church of the Assumption, and Gretz Brewery–two that have been lost this year–St. Bonaventure Church and Ortlieb’s Brewery–and two that have been saved–St. Peter’s Church in Germantown and the Nugent Home for Baptists.

Cheers, mate: McGlinchey’s feelgood parallelograms | Photo: Bradley Maule

Oh, McGlinchey’s. So many fond memories of this place dating back to my first days as a Philadelphian. Whenever I mention this fine establishment to anyone, I instantly get negative comments about it being a “dive bar,” or the cigarette smoke, or the notoriously surly staff, or the heavily-tagged bathroom. To me, that’s what a bar is supposed to be. From that first night in 2003, when a rock flew by my head, having just been hurled through the front window from the outside, I knew that this was my kind of place. Even today, I look at the featureless, translucent white, parellelogram-shaped window pane that replaced the colored textured one that had been broken that night, and have warm feelings.

1922 Ad for the Lionel Friedman Company | Source: Library of Congress

The building McGlinchey’s has inhabited in one form or another for the last 76 years, 259-261 South 15th Street, was the brainchild of one Lionel Friedman. The Lionel Friedman Company was a major real estate broker in the early 20th Century whose first office was located in a long gone rowhouse at 251 South 15th Street. A few doors down the same row, at 259 and 261 South 15th Street, stood two dilapidated houses that had been unoccupied for the previous two decades. Their latest occupants were the home and office of obstetrician Dr. Stricker Coles.

In 1921, Friedman purchased the abandoned properties, demolished them, and commissioned the firm of Hoffman-Henon (who would design the Boyd Theatre later that decade) to design a speculative three-story, 5,000 square foot, $25,000 office building for the 32′ x 60′ plot of land. By the end of 1922, work by the Kober Construction Company was complete. For an office building no larger than the two rowhouses that it replaced, the façade is quite exhilarating. Each one of the 10 windows facing 15th Street is topped with fancy brickwork and a keystone. The second floor windows each have an arch with medallions in between. Both doorways are embellished with intricate mini-porticos and the fine cornice up top really pulls it all together.

The building’s first tenant, and the only one to make use of the entire building, was the Allen-Sherman-Hoff Company, an industrial concern which developed and manufactured ash handling systems, equipment, and parts. Formed in 1921, the last names of the Frank Allen, Max Sherman, and Leigh Hoff formed a convenient acronym centered around their business: ASH. In fact, their slogan was “Our Name Is Our Business.” From 259-261 South 15th Street, Allen-Sherman-Hoff managed their manufacturing plant in Hamburg, PA and invented new ash handling devices like the Hydro-Seal and the Hydrovac.

Allen-Sherman-Hoff Logo with McGlinchey’s address, 1925 | Source: The American City, Volume 32

While Allen-Sherman-Hoff stayed in the building until moving to Wynnewood in the early 1950s, they ceded the ground floor and second floor spaces to commercial use and consolidated themselves into the third floor around 1934. (This may have had something to do with Lionel Friedman wanting to take advantage of the end of prohibition.) By that point, they also had offices in the building next door (now Latimer Deli). Allen-Sherman-Hoff is still in business as the ash-handling subsidiary of Diamond Power International and is now based in Exton.

On October 1st, 1935, the ground floor space received its first tenant: the Odd Book Shop. Little is known about this business beyond, probably, some odd books. They later changed their name to the Odd Shop and expanded their products to include porcelains, glass, prints, paintings, and decorations.

By 1937, Lionel Friedman’s real estate company had grown to immense proportions. His office now in the Lewis Tower (today Aria Condo), and having developed and built most of the buildings on this stretch of 15th Street, Friedman pursued the greener pastures of suburban strip malls and sold 259-261 South 15th Street. Friedman would grow his company even further and become a philanthropist focused on Jewish causes: he organized the Philadelphia chapter of the American Council for Judaism, was President of the Board of Trustees of both Rodeph Shalom Synagogue and the Jewish Seaside Home for Invalids, Vice-President of the Jewish Publication Society of America, and was a founding member of what is now called the Jewish Employment and Vocational Service. His real estate company, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, still lives on as the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (whose offices are a block away on Broad Street).

McGlinchey’s Restaurant on a 1949 list of Catholic-friendly establishments | Source: American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia

The new owner, a Mr. McGlinchey, let the Odd Shop stick around on the ground floor space while opening an eating establishment on the second floor called McGlinchey’s Restaurant. Though the Odd Shop moved to 1721 Chestnut in 1940 (only to move back to 15th Street a decade later), McGlinchey’s Restaurant stayed on the second floor until at least 1949. However, by the 1950s, the bar we all know and love was definitely inhabiting the first floor space while Mr. McGlinchey and his family resided on the second and third floor, which they had converted into an apartment. The McGlincheys lived up there until 1968, when one Henry Sokol purchased both the building and the establishment. His descendants still own the building and manage the bar to this day.

“1922? I thought the building was a lot older than that!” exclaims Henry’s son, Sheldon, one of the current owners of McGlinchey’s, when I showed him the building’s construction announcement from Volume 28 of the American Contractor. He explained to me how contractors working in the basement of the building had told him that the beams and other structural features of the basement had to pre-date the Civil War. Could Lionel Friedman have re-used the foundation of the circa 1830s rowhouses that once stood here?

McGlinchey’s with neighbors, 1960 | Source: PhillyHistory.org

Mr. Sokol also went on to explain how some parts of the building still carry clues toward its history. A dumbwaiter still exists behind one of the mirrors along the bar’s southern wall. Remains of doors that lead to the building next door (Jose Pistola’s) are still visible on the unused third floor. He thinks they may have been used by an old laundry service. Though the bar has changed little since the ’60s, the Sokols have made adjustments along the way to follow the changing times. In 1976, the second floor space was converted back into commercial use, opening as a dining room called Top’s Bar. It became a disco in the late 70s and moved on to hosting live music acts in the 1980s. Poetry readings also became a common use of the Top’s Bar until moving to the recently-lost Robin’s Book Store. Today, Top’s lives as an extension of McGlinchey’s itself.

Among McGlinchey’s many unique features, the one thing that gets mentioned most to me about this bar is the large, faded mural on the northern wall depicting a hunter placing a duck decoy. Why is it there? Where did it come from? What the hell does this image have to do with this bar?

Mr. Sokol explained to me that McGlinchey’s was once the lunchtime hotspot for workers of the Atlantic-Richfield Company, whose East Coast operations were based at the Atlantic Building at Broad and Spuce nearby. These employees would exit through the back door of their building and walk along the 1400 block of Manning Street (now Bach Place), take a right in the alley behind the 15th Street corridor and enter McGlinchey’s through the back door. These workers were so appreciative of McGlinchey’s service to their company over those years that they gave them two of their billboards from an advertising campaign.

McGlinchey’s faded ARCO mural | Photo: Bradley Maule

This campaign, meant to be displayed in the densest parts of cities, depicted bucolic outdoor scenes at Atlantic Richfield (a.k.a. ARCO) gas stations, encouraging the viewer to drive out to these types of places using their gasoline. The two billboards given to McGlinchey’s depicted a hunter on one and a fisherman on the other. The fisherman billboard was once on the eastern section on the northern wall, while the hunter billboard still survives on the western section.

“I’ve tried to get it restored, but it’s too far gone,” lamented Mr. Sokol when I inquired about it. These thin paper billboards were meant to be pasted up on outdoor walls and were never meant to be displayed for more than 6 months at a time. Five decades of wear, tear, and cigarette smoke have reduced the hunter billboard to an orange-brown shadow of its former self that is barely visible when the lights are dimmed in the bar at night. It’s possible that it’s the last Atlantic-Richfield hunter billboard in existence, or at least on display.

McGlinchey’s lives today not only as the agent of preservation of a 1920s office building, but more importantly as the agent of preservation of the kind of establishments Center City once had in abundance. Few peers resemble the type of bar that used to inhabit big city downtowns across America before the influences of a less rugged, more effete patron prettied up the world of bars and restaurants. Truly, McGlinchey’s is an American treasure.

Check out Google’s 360-degree “Inside Street View” of the bar from February 2013 here.

Image: Interface Studio Architects

• Flying Kite looks at Francisville’s Folsom Powerhouse, the latest Redevelopment Authority project, which broke ground in late October. In eighteen months, 10 rentals and 17 condominiums will be ready to house a mixed-income community (so as “to mitigate some of the displacement and price spikes that often accompany gentrification”). Brian Phillips’ (of Interface Studio Architects) design is an archetypal example of “ecological urbanism,” with its gutters leading toward “curbside rain gardens, green roofs, rear yards with pervious paving and ample tree pits” and façades constructed with recycled bricks. “The Powerhouse name,” explains Chad Ludeman of Postgreen Homes, “is indicative of our commitment to extreme energy efficiency, giving residents the power to live with community and environmental consciousness in mind.”

• Naked Philly reports that work is finally underway on a 15-duplex project at Corinthian & Girard in Francisville. It’s been two years since the old St. Clare’s Monastery was demolished, but “it’s been pretty much radio silence ever since.” Part of the façade of the monastery has been retained, and will be incorporated into the new structure.

• An informal shrine to the late and great Nelson Mandela has emerged beneath a mural of the civil rights leader at 16th & Fitzwater.The Inquirer spoke with Ram Krishnan, who commissioned London-based artist Ben Slow to paint the piece on his modern, three-story home. “The mural, in dominant shades of red and black, is not a smiling Mandela, but ‘shows him deep in thought. With lines on his forehead,’ Krishnan said. ‘Showing the weight of his responsibility.’”

• Efforts to revitalize 52nd Street as “West Philly’s Main Street” have gotten a boost with the hiring of Akeem Dixon as a full-time Commercial Corridor Manager, who will oversee the street’s cleaning contract in addition to acting as a liaison between residents, store owners, and The Enterprise Center’s Community Development Corporation. West Philly Local discusses the “glory days” of yesteryear, and the challenges ahead for the corridor, namely navigating the fine line between necessary improvements and the fear of gentrification.

Philadelphia’s front door: Paul Santoleri’s cheery 1999 mural for Sunoco and the Mural Arts Program greets visitors to Philadelphia from the airport at the eastern base of the Platt Bridge—in the middle of a refinery that’s been on the Schuylkill for nearly 150 years | Photo: Bradley Maule

Alf Larsen promised Mary just one more trip at sea before he could take on the cushy job of night watchman at Cramp’s Shipyard. Often the Norwegian paramour of Christopher Morley’s poem “Penn Treaty Park” would idle around the park with his love, Mary “of Wildey St.” planning for an amorous future. On his long absences, she would console herself by visiting their pecking bench, believing the inscription below the Founder, “Unbroken Faith” to be a testament to their bond. Just one more trip, and all their plans would be set in motion.

It was not to be. Wrote Morley in 1920 of the scene at the Atlantic Refining Company’s wharfs:

Thus the name: Point Breeze Avenue, viewed from Center City, leads to Point Breeze on the Schuylkill River, where refineries have resided since the 1860s | Photo: Bradley Maule

The Roald Amundsen was Larsen’s ship.
She lay at the refinery, Point Breeze,
Taking on oil for Liverpool. The day
She was to sail, somehow she caught on fire.
A petaled rose of hell, she roared in flame—
The burning liquid overflowed her decks,
The dock and oil-scummed river blazing, too.
Her men had little chance. They leaped for life
Into the river, but the paraffin
Blazing along the surface, hemmed them in.
They either burned or drowned, and Alf was one.

By cruel irony, the city hauled the burned out hulk of the Amundsun to its wharf at Penn Treaty, seemingly to haunt young Mary who could no longer “bear to see / The sunset sheet the river oe’r with flame.”

While the pitiful Alf and Mary were poetic contrivances, the fate of the Roald Amundsun was not; she and two other craft burned at the Passyunk Avenue docks in winter 1919 where according to the Nautical Gazette the river “is always coated with oil.” While some escaped the immolation by jumping into the frigid January waters, others like Nelson Anderson succumbed to his burns. The ship’s captain Omdell went missing and was presumed dead. Nine others were seriously injured. The Roald Amundsun was eventually restored and served until 1936, the city’s fire tugs saving the craft from total destruction.

Yet for Atlantic and its numerous successor companies and fellow petrochemical giants, fire in the lower Schuylkill and Delaware refinery districts is a continuous cost of doing business. The threat remains, as Will Bunch reported today in the Daily News, and the transport of crude oil by rail to refineries on the Lower Schuylkill is increasing rapidly. A deadly accident earlier this year in Quebec confirmed the enduring danger.

Early technologies of oil extraction, processing, and storage utilizing wood, flammable materials, and containing an iron-on-iron ignition source possessed the three legs of the “fire triangle.” Yet throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, opposition to the explosive refinery was muted; it was largely considered a necessary nuisance, a kind of quiet menace that defied public understanding or scrutiny. Like the Sphinx of antiquity, these odd-looking industries dared the public to pass through their domains.

Officials offered little promise of public safety and those who chose to enter the odd rainbow-colored waters were sometimes subjected to the works’ malevolent wrath. So ubiquitous were the known water hazards in and around oil works that in 1892 the New York Times criticized three Philadelphia boaters who set off a fire when one’s “thoughtless act” of tossing his match into Schuylkill ignited the “thin scum of oil from the adjacent oil works.” Unfortunately for the casualties William Miller, Albert Krumbach, and Warren Hilt, their terror was compounded by the recent “oil fire there on Sunday…” which left “more than the usual quantity floating on the surface.”

The visual paradox of refineries is that their sprawling complexity is hidden in plain sight. We only tend to see them when they fail spectacularly. As Mayor Michael Nutter said at the official launch of the Sunoco-successor Philadelphia Energy Solutions in October, “You see it all the time from the highway, having no real idea of what takes place here.” While post-9/11 security regulations and private security have further shrouded refineries from photographers and videographers, even the Federal agency charged with investigating refinery mishaps, the Chemical Safety Board, has difficulty showing video of catastrophic failures. At one time this location of Philadelphia’s oil works was peripheral to the urban center. When fires did occur they were often sensationally reported in the press, yet refineries’ relative isolation limited human casualty and insulated Philadelphia’s refiners from public opprobrium.

But as the city swelled, neighborhoods pressed up against the giant refineries.

And the people who lived in them wanted wanted oil to power their cars. More Americans grew accustomed to driving after World War I and again after World War II. Embracing the automotive freedom oil companies seemed to offer, Americans accepted the occasional calamity. In the Philadelphia region, where nearly ten percent of its total employment worked in petroleum in the 1950s, refineries buttress entire communities along the Delaware River.

Opened in 1951, the George C. Platt Memorial Bridge carries 56,000 cars a day over the Schuylkill River and between oil refineries | Photo: Bradley Maule

Oil and water: the geography of refining in Philadelphia

Fundamentally, the mixing of oil and water was, and continues to be, the whole point. Philadelphia’s location on the tidewater primed it as the chief entrepot of refined crude during Pennsylvania’s first energy boom of the 1850s-60s. While Pittsburgh had 58 refineries by 1867 and traded oil globally, it also had no capacity for international export. Thus on November 19, 1861, only two years after oil was discovered in Titusville, Pa., the 229-ton Camden, NJ brig Elizabeth Watts sailed for England with barrels of “rock oil” in her hold. She left from a dock on the Schuylkill River owned jointly by Pittsburghers Charles Lockhart and William Frew and Philadelphian William G. Warden, whose company would later formalize their holdings at Point Breeze as the Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company, later the Atlantic Refining Company.

The oil network that materialized in Pennsylvania in the 1860s-70s was perhaps something akin to contemporary Saudi Arabia: at one end of the state Warden, Frew & Co. sat squarely on a reliable source of oil while at the other were refining, storage and tidewater shipping opportunities to a growing export market. Easily linking the two sides of the state was the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), the moving pipeline. For Charles Lockhart, securing preferential shipping rates through the PRR was as easy as chatting with his East End Pittsburgh neighbor, Thomas Scott, then president of the railroad. Soon, all of this Keystone-state collusion forced the arch-monopolist John D. Rockefeller to strongarm most of the Pennsylvanians under the Standard Oil big tent, an arrangement that lasted until 1911 when the Justice Department forced its dismemberment.

Beginning in 1866, Atlantic began purchasing vast tracts of former farmland just below Passyunk Avenue on the river. According to an 1872 Hexamer survey, the works occupied about 25 acres of river frontage and included refining stills, barrell-making shops, warehouses, docks and a novel urban form: tanks in a row. It was a form which would dominate the lower Schuylkill landscape for nearly 150 years.

“Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company for refined oil. Empire stores for crude oil. Warehouse: Point Breeze. Office: 115 Walnut Street, Philadelphia.” Surveyed & drawn by E. Hexamer | Lithograph used with permission of The Library Company of Philadelphia

An 1866 advertising lithograph situates the works against a verdant river’s edge, schooners await their export casks in staggeringly blue water while boaters and horse drivers wend their way through the transitioning landscape. It shows a place of quiet coexistence: a tidy prosperous machine in the garden. Soon, however, occurrences in and around the refinery suggested that this novel industry was not without its challenges.

Quickly, the city sensed the refinery’s impact on its air and water. An 1880 cartoon criticizing the reek of the Standard Oil Company’s Hunters Point works shows a oft-favored octopus spreading “poverty, disease, and death.” Panels show demure Victorian women holding their noses, children weeping into their mothers dresses, beautiful villas sitting idle all while the stills belch forth black smoke. And despite the company’s desire to capture even the “odor of petroleum” for sale, oil did escape from the company’s tanks, ships and pipes.

During an 1896 negligence suit brought against Atlantic by an exporter whose ship caught fire at Point Breeze, a gas works engineer testified that that floating oil “would be all over the river, and sometimes it would be close in along the wharf, according to which way the wind was blowing.” The ground, another gas works employee testified, was mainly “clinker and debris, and oil will come through it just like a sponge.” At issue was whether the oil on the banks of the river that had allowed the fire to consume the bark was caused by a faulty pipe. In a curious defense of Atlantic’s right of usufruct, the court ruled that despite the presence of oil in the river which caught fire, it had not come from a defective pipe but was “naturally” deposited by the wind and tides. Thus, suit dismissed; the classic legal outcome in the private city.

Noxious and annoying as these odors and property losses were, it was the refinery’s consistent habit of exploding into a cataclysmic hellscape that signaled the dangers of the rapidly expanding Schuylkill energy district. The first reported plantwide fire occurred on June 11, 1879 when lightning (a recurring trigger) struck the pumphouse and ignited buildings, tanks, 10,000 barrels of oil, five ships, the cooper’s shop and the superintendent’s house and offices. “The burning oil,” the New York Times reported, “was running in all directions, and the long line of wharf property was soon one continuous sheet of flame.”

The barely-rebuilt complex was soon rocked again in 1881 when a tank filled with 6,000 barrels of oil exploded with a report that could be heard in Chester. In 1884 another lightning strike blew up a crude oil tank and in May of that year a tremendous fire again put the entire works in jeopardy. William Elkins, owner of the nearby Belmont Oil Works, made a request to the state militia to fire artillery rounds at his tanks to draw down their contents and prevent the fire’s migration to the Gas Works.

Just as routinely as lightning struck the plant, the main stills often exploded, usually casting up huge eruptions of flaming oil. Two stills exploded in succession in 1887, severely burning five men. In 1901, a burning tank collapsed, sending great quantities of burning oil and “fiery spray” onto the 100 spectators gathered on Passyunk Avenue. Eleven years later, Philadelphia firefighters battled another still explosion and fire for 14 hours.

In 1921, Atlantic’s deadliest fire resulted when a high pressure naptha still exploded, emitting a torrent of blazing naptha 200 feet in the air. “The descending oil fell upon and ignited the clothing of various workmen…. They ran screaming through the plant until they were thrown down and the blazing clothing extinguished.” Ten men caught in a small passageway below the still were burned to death by the exploding hydrocarbon vapor. So frequent were fires that Atlantic employees learned to read the long and short whistle codes to determine the location and severity of these conflagrations.

Sunset over Sunoco, circa-2011 | Photo: Bradley Maule

The revolving door: global oil and the uncertain fate of northeast tidewater refineries

Behind the image of almost ceaseless petroleum production in the lower Schuylkill is the far more volatile global macroeconomy of oil, a reality which is constantly shifting the utility and marketability of fixed assets like refinery infrastructure. Since the arrival of oil refining on the Schuylkill, these massive conglomerations of capital have been sliced, diced, and reformed as their owners have struggled with slackening domestic demand, rising costs of crude imports, plant inefficiencies, and aggressive consolidation among oil producers.

For a time in the 1980s, it seemed like the fate of the Philadelphia tidewater refinery was sealed. In the face of a worldwide glut of refined products and weakening demand, Philadelphia’s refineries became revolving doors. A rebranded Atlantic spun off from the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) in 1985, operating the old Point Breeze facility until Sunoco snapped up both this and Gulf’s former Girard Point (then Chevron-owned) plant in 1988. Across the river Texaco’s Eagle Point refinery was sold at a bargain basement price to Coastal who promptly fired all 485 union employees. By the mid-1980s, the region’s share of employment in the refining sector leveled out at 6.4 percent down from a robust 9 percent in the 1950s. It appeared more of the same when news of Sunoco’s departure from the refining industry altogether reverberated through the region in 2011. Coupled with the loss of ConocoPhillips’ Trainer facility, a grim pall descended over business and labor communities. As the region seemed poised on the precipice to enter a post-petroleum era, questions of cleanup costs, possible new land uses, options for displaced employees fed smoldering anxieties.

Tankscape | Photo: Christopher R. Dougherty

Then came Bakken: inexpensive “sweet” (having less that 42 percent sulfur) crude fracked from the Bakken formation in North Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan that could, on paper, be shipped to the east cheaply via rail since costly pipeline infrastructure was years out. Industry experts believed Bakken via rail could undersell the price of Brent crude, the industry standard coming out of the North Sea.

Suddenly, the region’s underused refining capacity created a buyers market with a dizzying rate of transactions. Delta Airlines bought the Trainer refinery (with $30 million in state subsidies) for the cost of a new Boeing 777. PBF Energy Inc., cobbled together a small refining empire by purchasing the Delaware City refinery from Petroplus, as well as a Toledo, Ohio refinery from Sunoco, and the Paulsboro, NJ refinery from Valero in 2010. Yet it’s been the aggressive reorganization of the Commonwealth’s third-largest corporation, Sunoco, which may assure the permanence of hydrocarbon refining along the Schuylkill’s banks for another century.

As soon as she entered office in 2008, Sunoco CEO Lynn Elsenhans understood that the least profitable aspect of selling refined products was actually refining products; soon Sunoco became less a refiner and more a retail, storage and energy logistics company. The brutal campaign shuttered refineries in Philadelphia, Marcus Hook, and Toledo and engendered enmity from Rep. Bob Brady (D-Philadelphia) who found Elsenhans an aloof “wicked witch” detached from the process of finding a new operator for the state’s refineries. Yet, Elsenhans gussied up Sunoco sufficiently for it to merit a sale to the amorphous Energy Trading Partners, L.P. (ETP), a Houston-based pipeline and logistics company that moves vast quantities of oil and gas around the country via a stealthy latticework of pipes. Crucial to the attractiveness of the sale was Sunoco Logistics Partners, LP once the infrastructural veins of Sunoco, now part of the massive system that funnels oil and gas from production fields to Gulf and East Coast refiners. In a clear statement of Energy Trading Partners’ new priorities, in May of this year Sunoco Logistics purchased the shuttered Marcus Hook plant to process and export natural gas liquids from the Marcellus and Utica Shale formations.

Arguably the most significant prize in Sunoco’s tactical divestment has been the South Philadelphia refinery: a 330,000 barrels-per-day producing juggernaut, oldest and largest on the East Coast with excellent rail and tidewater connections via the Schuylkill River and Hog Island terminals. With cheap Bakken (in early October you could ship the crude to Delaware City for $12.00 a barrel), the South Philly refinery was no longer boxed in by high-priced West African crude sources. On paper it looked good: a standalone refinery lacking corporate overhead with diverse sources of feedstock. Thus to the relief of Philadelphia’s business and labor communities, Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) was born in July 2012 a joint project of the massive “alternative” asset and venture capital manager The Carlyle Group and Sunoco (ETP).

Aerial photos of the Atlantic Refining Company by Aero Service Corporation, circa 1926, used with permission of The Library Company of Philadelphia

“Human torches”: increased output, heightened risk

Just a year before Atlantic’s 1921 fire, Gulf Refining Company constructed a relatively modest 31,000 barrels-per-day refinery at Girard Point, just above Penrose Ferry Avenue. Gulf built additional storage and terminal facilities at Gibson’s Point on the west bank of the Schuylkill, roughly across from Atlantic’s refinery. Buoyed by Americans’ postwar automobile wanderlust, Gulf began pouring nearly $50 million into modernizing the facility in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The centerpiece of the overhaul was the then-world’s largest catalytic cracker which boosted the plant to an 125,000 barrels-per-day output.

With this increase in cracking and storage capacity, however, came greater risk. Sixteen storage tanks exploded in 1960 at a cost of $1 million and huge blazes erupted in 1967 and 1969. In August 1975, Gulf Oil Corporation’s Girard Point refinery was host to arguably the city’s most vicious urban inferno, one which took the lives of eight firefighters. During this catastrophe, firefighters successfully suppressed flames emanating from tank 231, roughly where the current stack is now visible north of the Platt Bridge. During the course of their operations, a massive quantity of oily foam began to overwhelm the refinery’s sewage system and accumulate in tank dikes and along the major thoroughfares where most of the fire apparatuses were assembled. Just before 5PM, this material flashed, capturing men and machines amid white hot sheets of flame. Four entire firetrucks and their crews melted before the department’s officers.

Left three photos: Philadelphia Evening Bulletin photos of the August 1975 fire at the Gulf refinery which claimed the lives of eight firefighters; at right, an aerial photo of another blaze in 1977 in which a barge sunk, releasing oil which caught fire in the river | Images used with permission of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA. See also: This map by Christopher R. Dougherty of the inferno.

“The flames just engulfed them,” said Fire Commissioner Joseph Rizzo, with characteristic bluntness. “They were trying to get under the foam, but to no avail. They were human torches.” Rizzo’s forces retreated and regrouped, while allowing the fire in tank 231 to weaken before counterattacking. Six men were killed outright; two later died of their burns. Gulf, posting $4.17 billion in revenue in the last quarter of 1975, quietly donated $25,000 to two regional burn centers in honor of the firefighters.

Soon, Gulf itself would be consumed. The Philadelphia fire was but one of the spectacular infrastructural failures which rocked the overbuilt corporation in the 1970s. In less than a decade after the Philadelphia immolation, its stock price was nosing below the value of a fire sale of its assets, and corporate raiders began circling the ailing behemoth.

Philadelphia: the “Cushing” of the East?

Coming and going: Bakken oil trains viewed from the pedestrian/bicycle Schuylkill River Parks Connector Bridge | Photo: Bradley Maule

The abundance of cheap Bakken crude has compelled massive investments in rail, offloading and storage infrastructure as Philadelphia seeks to link itself to the large network of oil production fields and storage depots throughout the country. Yet as extensive as these capital outlays appear, construction of rail terminals in the Bakken and at refining points are but a fraction of what it would take to enhance pipeline infrastructure to move the massive quantities of oil and gas coming out of North Dakota. Energy analysts suggest this underdevelopment of pipelines has led to a “pig in the python” bottleneck. Lack of pipelines and a glutted natural gas market mean oil producers burn off, or “flare” enough natural gas in the Bakken to be seen from space. Moreover, pipelines are usually built and operated by a consortium of interested parties who expect to make back their vast capital investments by keeping the pipeline at maximum flow. Often end users are bound by extensive tariffs, linefill requirements and take-or-pay contract provisions requiring end users to pay for a prescribed amount of crude, regardless of whether these deliveries are taken.

In the case of PES’s South Philadelphia operation, where crude can hail from a variety of domestic and foreign “basins,” handcuffing the plant to fixed pipeline quantities and prices was seen as risky inflexibility. Thus in early October of this year, PES announced an expansion of its North Yard near 35th and Moore Streets, adding another track to accommodate a third 120-car crude train a day. When hydraulic pump gear is installed in the yard, it will boost the already massive 160,000 barrels per day capacity.

This means two unit trains of 120 tank cars will pass through the city each day, seven days a week. In the Philadelphia region, these trains are often led by Burlington Northern Santa Fe engines running the Bakken Express service.

On the site of the former PECO station in Eddystone, Pa. the Canadian-based energy logistics company Enbridge Inc. plans to construct a new rail receiving facility with a capacity of 80,000 barrels per day by early 2014. With nearly 700,000 barrels per day refining capacity within six miles of Eddystone, promoters of the project and industry observers are beginning to envision the region as a Cushing, Oklahoma of the East: a major oil and gas entrepot feeding refineries up and down the Delaware River.

Bakken oil trains in Center City and Fairmount Park, photos by Bradley Maule

In spite of all the advances, the core technology of this new landscape of oil transportation is nothing new: the lowly tank car, often known as the DOT-111A type car. It is an effective workhorse comprising roughly 70 percent of tank rolling stock in the United States. Yet despite their ubiquity on our rails, a mounting body of data suggests that moving flammable materials in DOT-111A cars is exceedingly risky. As early as 1991, the National Transportation Safety Board study found that “DOT-111A tank cars often have been unable to withstand the forces of an accident, even when the train was traveling at slow speeds.”

Researchers have found that in collisions, the highly rigid thin skins of the tank rupture easily. It was 74 DOT-111 cars laden with Bakken crude which rocketed into the sleepy Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic in the early morning of June 6, 2013. The ensuing fireball consumed nearly 15 acres of the downtown, vaporizing 42 people. Five additional missing are presumed dead.

Locally, it was the same type of cars which derailed in East Park near Fountain Green Drive in January 2011, in Paulsboro in November 2012 and again in September of this year near PBF’s Paulsboro refinery. Compounding the dangers is the recent discovery that Bakken crude can contain other volatile or corrosive chemicals left over from the hydraulic fracturing processes. Researchers have noted the increasing presence of the highly toxic and flammable hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas in Bakken crude warning that less desirable “sour” crude prematurely wears out pipeline and well infrastructure.

Early this spring, Enbridge threatened to shut down its crude loading railyard in North Dakota if suppliers could not reduce the amount of H2S gas in its crude. At 200 parts per million (ppm) exposure to H2S gas can cause respiratory failure in just a few inhalations. Enbridge found 1,200 ppm in one of its storage tanks. Experts wonder whether Bakken crude, once thought to be a relatively safe, Class 3 hazardous material, should be categorized as a Class 1 explosive material. In response to these concerns, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) inaugurated a “Bakken Blitz” round of tank car inspections this fall.

Regulators have been “laser focused on the energy boom epicenter” at rail and terminal facilities in the Bakken, ensuring that crude products containing hazardous additives be labeled as explosives. Additionally, the FRA has tasked its special Rail Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC) to evaluate a host of policies and regulations governing the movement of hazardous material by rail. In advance of RSAC’s April 2014 findings, it appears that the FRA places faith in multiple person crews as the first line of defense against mishaps.

Still, in the last ten years, train accidents are down 43 percent with more and more railways opting for “engineer-only” operations: seemingly a testament to labor-saving computerized train control. However, in our region, tiny train gaffes seem to be mounting. A New York-bound Amtrak train traveling the busiest passenger rail line in the country recently ended up in Bala Cynwyd. A freight train keeled over on a curve in Nicetown. Should we take comfort in the reality that 99.99 percent of freight shipments occur without incident or be concerned about the higher stakes for freight safety in our dense urban core or in our train-choked rail corridors? As we build more crude on-and-offloading facilities, the question arises whether we’ve spent concomitantly on the infrastructure and technologies that assure safe passage of dangerous cargo through a dense network of passenger and freight roads.

In the region, oil shippers, first responders, and refiners are unfazed by the volume of product already moving through our communities. When asked about responses to hazards, coolness prevails. CSX never comments on specific shipments, end users have committed to reevaluating their safe offloading practices, emergency managers and fire departments have scenarios in place. This air of confident reassurance pervading the attitudes of Bakken users reflects a continuous almost begrudging tolerance for risk in the refining districts of this city and region. But Bakken is different: it’s everywhere. It’s in the leafy defiles of East Park, it snuggles up to the Art Museum and Center City along Schuylkill Banks, it’s sitting 1,700 feet from the brand new Universal Audenreid Charter High.

It’s a curious irony: freeing ourselves from foreign oil, cozying up to it in our own city.

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Petroleum Refining Complexes of the Delaware & Schuylkill Rivers; map by Christopher R. Dougherty.
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