During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Philadelphia and other cities lacked permanent armories. Militia units such as the First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry, the Second Troop of Light Horse, and the State Fencibles met in hotel rooms and taverns and drilled in public parks and squares, riding schools, and circuses. For drill, these units often rented floors in multistory commercial buildings, including the Union Building at Eighth and Chestnut Streets, the cast-iron Swain Building at 503-7 Chestnut Street, and a restaurant in the Northern Liberties neighborhood known as Military Hall. However, these facilities were not structurally strong enough to support drills by large units or secure enough to protect arms and equipment from theft.

In 1857, Philadelphia became one of the first cities to possess a permanent armory when the Infantry Corps, National Guards, purchased ground opposite Independence Hall and built the three-story National Guards Hall. In addition to quarters, storage, and meeting rooms, the building contained a drill hall on the second floor that could support an entire regiment.

The First Troop constructed its first armory, a two-story structure, in 1863. In 1874, the troop commissioned the architectural firm Furness & Hewitt to design a new armory, to be built at Twenty-First and Ash Streets with funds bequeathed by wealthy members. Frank Furness (1839-1912) designed a compact three-story structure with a drill hall annex in the style of a medieval castle. According to historian Robert Fogelson, the building was one of the nation’s first castellated armories, which were distinctive for their thick walls topped with battlements, narrow windows, and bartizans. Industrialists and National Guard officials favored this style because it provided greater security for personnel and equipment in times of labor unrest. Architects embraced it because it unified form and function.

Armories Privately Funded

In an era of labor unrest, fundraising for armory construction in Philadelphia accelerated as wealthy private donors increasingly came to view the Pennsylvania National Guard as a strikebreaking force. In the wake of the nationwide Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Philadelphia gained new armories for the First Regiment, Second Regiment, and First Troop. James H. Windrim (1840-1919) designed the First Regiment Armory (built in 1884), located at Broad and Cherry Streets until it was demolished in 1979. The Second Regiment Armory (1895-97), designed by the firm Rankin & Kellogg, stood at Broad Street and Susquehanna Avenue. The First Troop’s third armory (1901), at Twenty-Third and Chestnut Streets, replaced the Furness armory, which suffered a collapsed roof in 1899 following a snowstorm. The local firm Newman, Woodman, & Harris designed the new armory, which continued to be used by the First Troop into the twenty-first century. All three castellated armories limited access to the interior with raised windows and single entranceways. As a cavalry armory, the First Troop Armory’s interior contained a spacious central hall with a dirt floor to serve as a riding ring (later paved to accommodate motor vehicles). These buildings received funding almost entirely from private donors. For example, the patrons of the First Regiment Armory included the Pennsylvania Railroad Corporation, merchant John Wanamaker (1838-1922), and Edwin Benson (1804-1909), an ex-National Guard officer and future president of the Union League.

By the end of the century, Philadelphia boasted six permanent armories. In New Jersey, meanwhile, officers of New Jersey’s Sixth Regiment successfully lobbied the state legislature to approve construction of a new armory in Camden to replace the old one at Bridge and West Streets (which remained standing until destroyed by fire in 1906). A Philadelphia contractor completed the new armory in 1897, and it remained in use as an armory, and after 1953 as a convention center, until its demolition in 1977 to create a site for a Veterans Administration hospital. For state officials and guardsmen, protecting the men and stores from attack by a mob was the primary purpose of the armory. Toward that end, architect Charles A. Gifford (1861-1937) designed the Camden Armory on Haddon Avenue to look like a fortress and a line of railroad track was laid alongside the structure to allow for the safe transport of troops out of the city. Gifford’s design for the Second Regiment Armory (1905), in Trenton, likewise retained many of the features of the castellated style. In the early twentieth century, Camden gained an additional armory on Wright Avenue to serve as the headquarters of a field artillery unit.

Unlike Pennsylvania, New Jersey built its armories mostly from public funds. The state legislature passed armory bills—five in the span of a decade—that authorized appropriations and established a state armory board that supervised the construction of new facilities. Pennsylvania followed suit when that state’s legislature created its armory board in 1905. The influx of this new source of funding led to a surge in construction in the Philadelphia suburbs, with armories sprouting in Media (1908), West Chester (1916), Reading City (1919), and Norristown (1928). Delaware also shifted from private to public funding of its armories. Troop B, First Delaware Cavalry, was able to raise money from private sources to build its home at the Wilmington Armory, located on Twelfth and Orange Streets. From 1890 to 1925, this “State Arsenal” served as quarters for all of the city’s National Guard units. When guardsmen complained that the space was too cramped, the Delaware legislature authorized a State Armory Commission to build a new armory and appropriated $250,000 for that purpose.

Military Use Gives Way to Civilian Use

As the perceived threat of a revolution by labor subsided and the federal Militia Act of 1903 transformed state militias from industrial police forces to reserve forces for the regular Army, the purpose and form of armories underwent a marked change. With armories no longer considered targets of attack, federal, state, and city governments hired architects to design new armories with civilian functions in mind and adapted existing armories for public use. Armories in a diversity of architectural styles superseded the fortresses of the late nineteenth century. In Philadelphia, Windrim designed the Third Regiment Armory (1898), Broad and Wharton Streets, in the Romanesque style typical of the day but also included the features of a medieval castle, such as crenellations. The armory became the site for circuses, prizefights, and fraternal club meetings, and was converted into loft apartments in 2003. Philip H. Johnson (1868-1933) designed two armories in the Classical Revival style: a three-story cavalry armory (1916) resembling a railroad station at Thirty-Second and Lancaster, later adapted into a gymnasium by Drexel University, and the two-story General Thomas J. Stewart Memorial Armory (1928) in Norristown. Delaware architect Edward Canby May (1889-?) chose an Egyptian Revival style for his design of the Wilmington Armory (1928), located on Tenth and DuPont Streets. During the 1930s, the armory construction program of the Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration continued this process toward civilian-oriented armory functions and design. To save taxpayer money, economy of design became the watchword, in stark contrast to the monumental privately-funded armories of the nineteenth century. Armories typically followed standardized designs with T-shaped or I-shaped plans in Art Deco or Art Moderne style. The New Deal dramatically increased the amount of federal funds disbursed by the states for armory construction. As a result, armories proliferated across the region, especially in towns and suburbs. Examples include the Hamburg Armory (1937) in Berks County and the Special Troops Armory in the Ogontz neighborhood (1938-39) of Philadelphia and company-sized armories in Milford (c. 1938) and New Castle (c. 1934-35?), Delaware.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a few of these suburban and small town armories were turned over to local communities to use as they saw fit. For example, the Borough of Media donated the Media Armory to the Pennsylvania Veterans Museum and the West Chester Armory was converted into a theater for the performing arts.

National Guard armories in the region developed in tandem with architectural fashion, the mission of the citizen-soldier, and the role of government in the social life of the nation. The ornate castellated armories of Philadelphia, Camden, and Wilmington provide physical evidence of domestic turmoil and close links between the National Guard and their wealthy patrons during the post-Civil War era. Guardsmen’s reliance on private funding for armory construction not only helped turn state militias into a police force for industry, but also enabled local architects to develop a distinctive style for a building type that had never had one. The shift to public funding in the twentieth century armories meant that armories were often the product of pork barrel legislation or took the form of government make-work projects. States responded to the public desire for more civic spaces by expanding construction to small towns and suburban neighborhoods. Architects, in turn, embraced contemporary styles and the armories lost much of their aesthetic distinctiveness.

Jean-Pierre Beugoms is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Temple University. He is working on a dissertation about the logistics of the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Like other major American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, Philadelphia was an epicenter for the exuberant strain of architecture and design activity that came to be known as Art Deco. Fueled by the area’s economic importance and increasingly urban character after the First World War, designers, corporations, and manufacturers all engaged in a broad search for a distinctly American form of design appropriate for the modern age.

Art Deco is generally considered to have its roots in the French moderne style that arose in the early twentieth century. Although the style contained great variety, moderne furniture, decorative objects, and interiors were generally characterized by restrained, simple forms (some inspired by classical or otherwise traditional precedents) rendered with luxurious materials like exotic wood veneers, precious metals, or sharkskin. The 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris celebrated this approach, showcasing the most modern of Europe’s decorative arts. While the United States did not participate in the exhibition, the event was heavily covered in the press and had a palpable impact on the design professions. American Art Deco was also influenced by avant-garde European art styles, particularly Cubism, that attempted to capture the rapid technological, economic, and societal changes of the interwar period.

The larger umbrella of “Art Deco” (a term applied retroactively by later scholars) included a diversity of simultaneous and even contradictory stylistic approaches, from luxurious upscale goods and interiors inspired by the French moderne to the more populist, mass-market products of the machine age that arose after the onset of the Great Depression. But it was precisely this heterogeneity that made Art Deco such an intriguing and widespread vein of design, and the creativity of interwar architects, designers, and manufacturers would leave a lasting legacy on the built environment of Greater Philadelphia.

Philadelphia architect William L. Price (1861–1916) and his firm Price & McLanahan, although best-known for their involvement in the Arts and Crafts movement, signaled some of the directions later Art Deco architecture would take with their 1916 expansion of the Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, into a massive resort complex with an innovative concrete structural system. The hotel combined bold architectural massing, radically modern construction techniques, and a rich decorative program—elements that would come into play in many Art Deco buildings of the 1920s and 1930s.

Iconic Skyscrapers

One of the building types most closely associated with Art Deco was the skyscraper, a triumphant icon of construction technology, American financial might, and the growing cultural power of large cities. One of the earliest Art Deco skyscrapers in Philadelphia proper was the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Armed Forces Building (today a luxury apartment building, The Metropolitan) on Fifteenth Street near Arch Street in Center City. Completed in 1928 and designed by the New York–based architect Louis Jallade (1876–1957), the tower featured distinct zigzag banding on its upper stories and a colorful cornice of modular geometric terra cotta decoration. Other notable examples of similarly adorned high-rise Art Deco buildings in Philadelphia included Ritter and Shay’s Market Street National Bank (1319 Market Street; built 1931); Tilden, Register & Pepper’s Sun Oil Building (1608-1610 Walnut Street; built 1928); and the Architects Building at 121 S. Seventeenth Street, completed around 1930. Designed by the prominent French-born, Philadelphia-based architect Paul Philippe Cret (1876–1945), who in this later phase of his career moved sharply away from the Beaux-Arts style toward the moderne, the Architects Building housed numerous architectural offices and attested to the central role of the profession in shaping the city’s modern landscape.

Large corporate or institutional clients turned to Art Deco in an attempt to project an image of modernity as well as an optimism in technological and cultural progress. Philadelphia’s WCAU Building (1931) at 1622 Chestnut Street, the first radio-station headquarters in the country to be purpose-built, also expressed the excitement of new material treatments for architecture. Architects Gabriel Roth (1893–1960) and Harry Sternfeld (1888–1976) created an unusual façade that incorporated crushed glass and decorative metalwork in brass, copper, and stainless steel. The Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance headquarters by the firm of Zantzinger, Borie & Medary (completed 1928; today the Perelman Building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art), meanwhile, was a lower-rise building whose decoration took inspiration from classical forms, highlighting how interwar designers reworked and simplified historical styles to signal a modern spirit.

A grand example of a civic building in the Art Deco mode was the United States Post Office (built 1931–35 by the firms Rankin & Kellogg and Tilden, Register & Pepper in partnership) at the intersection of Market and Thirtieth Streets. The limestone-clad building was organized much like a factory to accelerate the mail-distribution process, and its rich but selectively applied decoration visually reinforced the ethos of speed and efficiency.

In addition to these large, expensive corporate and civic buildings, a concurrent thread of Art Deco was manifest in smaller-scale, more populist kinds of architecture like theaters, storefronts, and eateries. Business owners who wanted to mark their establishments as up-to-date and stylish deployed moderne decoration and new materials. Architect William Harold Lee (1884–1971) designed several theaters around greater Philadelphia, while Ralph Bencker (1883–1961) designed many of the region’s numerous Horn and Hardart’s automat cafeterias. And despite Art Deco’s close association with big-city life, it was not solely an urban phenomenon: The main streets in smaller communities in surrounding parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware often sprouted “modernistic” buildings as businesses competed for customers’ attention.

Transportation Makeover

American notions of progress were often tethered to transportation as a particular arena of invention. Amid the rise of widespread car ownership, the gradually increasing accessibility of air travel, and the luxurious experience connoted by the great ocean liners—all modes of travel that frequently carried their own Art Deco styling—railways in particular felt a need to project an image of modernity to remain competitive. Railway station architecture was one prominent vehicle for such design activity. The exterior entrances of Suburban Station (built 1930) in Center City Philadelphia appealed to the spirit of the age through exuberant decorative metalwork. Although Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station (built 1929–34 by Chicago firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White) sported an exterior in the Beaux Arts tradition, its grand interiors epitomized the simplified moderne approach to classicism.

In addition to self-consciously modern station architecture, the Pennsylvania Railroad experimented with the design of locomotives and rolling stock to reinforce their connotations of speed and modernity. Locomotives like the iconic S1 Class and the interiors of passenger cars designed by the prominent industrial designer Raymond Loewy (1893–1986) typified the vogue for “streamlining” that emerged with a force in the 1930s. Characterized by smooth contours, rounded forms, and a general horizontality often heightened by bands of “speed lines” (whether the object was meant to be mobile or not), streamlining was one material manifestation of a widely held sense that the modern world was running at a faster pace than in previous periods.

Despite the interwar romance with speed, a primary motivator for the streamlining trend was economic. In the 1930s, companies turned to professional designers to imbue products with expressive qualities without significant factory retooling. Some critics saw these attempts to stimulate consumer desire through novelty as blatantly commercial, or even morally dangerous, but streamlined products and vehicles proved hugely popular in the marketplace. Consumers in greater Philadelphia encountered the products of the young field of industrial design, whether streamlined or in a more minimal “machine” style, in contexts both commercial and cultural. Department stores were a key venue for the dissemination of new ideas in design, while arts institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art played a prominent role with exhibitions like the 1932 Design for the Machine: Contemporary Industrial Art. The museum displayed an array of furniture, appliances, and other home goods designed to take advantage of modern manufacturing techniques, and the installation opened with a mock storefront by noted New York industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague (1883–1960) that echoed the Art Deco architecture appearing across the region.

While many of the most famous firms, designers, and manufacturers featured in these displays were based in New York or Chicago, some production took place around Pennsylvania, capitalizing on its long industrial history and transportation connections. The prominent Westinghouse Company was based in Pittsburgh, while the Stehli Silks Corporation—best-known for its “Americana Prints” collection (manufactured 1925–27), commissioned from artists to capture the “modern spirit” of the country—maintained a large mill in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, until 1975, with operations peaking in the 1920s. On the more exclusive end of the textile spectrum, Philadelphia’s House of Wenger (active 1903­–38) created luxurious clothes responding to the taste for streamlined modern forms in fashion as well as home goods.

Craftsmanship Valued

Mass-produced goods and the growing prominence of the industrial design profession came to dominate the decorative arts under the Art Deco umbrella, but there remained a thread of high-end making that prized individual craftsmanship and traditional techniques while it adapted to twentieth-century sensibilities. Samuel Yellin (1885–1940), a Philadelphia ironworker deeply rooted in the Arts and Crafts tradition, was one such exemplar, producing architectural elements like gates, railings, and grilles in the 1920s and 1930s that complemented the design language of the thoroughly modern buildings for which they were commissioned.

As the Depression marched on and construction and manufacturing slowed ever further, federal involvement in the arts through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Public Works Administration (PWA) supported some later buildings and works in the Art Deco vein. Harry Sternfeld’s post office building at Ninth and Market Streets in Center City (built 1937–41) incorporated relief sculptures by Edmond Amateis (1897–1981) in the moderne style shared by many other WPA-funded artworks. Similarly, the Edward W. Bok Technical High School (built 1935–38) was a PWA-supported project with restrained geometric Art Deco ornament.

However, a number of overlapping factors contributed to the slow decline and eventual end of Art Deco’s fashionability, including compounding economic difficulties in the 1930s and finally the onset of World War II. Stylistically, avant-garde attention in the design professions shifted toward the more strictly rationalist “International Style,” modeled after the progressive theories of European modernism. As a result, Art Deco was increasingly seen as overly decorative and retrogressive. It wasn’t until the 1960s that scholars began to reevaluate the style as a distinct expression of the economic and cultural complexities of the interwar United States. Philadelphia’s own Art Deco legacy reflects this national history in microcosm, from the commercial circumstances that birthed the city’s first skyscrapers, to the rise of radio and other forms of mass entertainment, to the WPA’s attempt to stimulate the Depression economy through art and design.

In the twenty-first century, Philadelphia’s Art Deco buildings remained in somewhat mixed condition: many have been demolished or stripped of their ornamental architectural details. Others, however, retained their characteristic Deco styling, contributing to the distinctive character of many Philadelphia neighborhoods. Accordingly, organizations like the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia continued to actively advocate for Art Deco’s importance to the region’s built heritage.

Colin Fanning is Curatorial Fellow in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He holds an M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The city of Philadelphia was built with bricks, giving it an appearance many neighborhoods retained into the twenty-first century. An abundance of local clay allowed brickmaking to flourish and bricks to become the one of the most important building materials in the region. Because it could be accomplished with just a few rudimentary tools, brickmaking was one of the first industries practiced in colonial America. For two centuries, Philadelphia was America’s preeminent brickmaking city. Though brickmaking declined as clay deposits were depleted and concrete blocks became more economical, locally made bricks, and local brickmakers, made possible the distinctive built environment of Philadelphia and the surrounding region.

“Brickmaking was a poor man’s game, as it required no capital to start with,” noted New York brickmaker James Wood  in 1830. This was especially true early on, when firing bricks required only enough bricks to build a kiln and, most importantly, an abundance of clay. Philadelphia sat atop a bed of high-quality brick clay just below the surface, so extensive that even after two centuries of mining it still provided enough clay to produce more than 200 million bricks a year by the end of the nineteenth century. The best quality brick clay was in the “Neck,” between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. New Jersey had wide-ranging deposits of clay running diagonally across much of the state. Arguably, the best quality was found in Middlesex County, however suitable clay could also be found across the southern portion, particularly along the Delaware River in Burlington County.

Archaeological remains, such as kilns, indicate that brickmaking began almost as soon as settlers arrived in the Philadelphia region. In the area that became Delaware, brickmaking occurred in New Castle, known then as New Amstel, at least as early as 1656 and supported construction of many of the city’s early buildings, such as the courthouse (1732) made with Flemish bond brickwork. Burlington County, New Jersey, with its rich clay deposits, had enough brickmakers by the early 1680s that it appointed two brick inspectors tasked with reporting any violations of a New Jersey law regarding the uniformity of handmade bricks. But the center of brickmaking was Philadelphia. In 1683, William Penn (1644–1718) described “divers brickeries going on.” Merchant Robert Turner (1635–1700), who built the first brick house in Philadelphia, reported to Penn in 1685, “Bricks are exceeding good, and better than when I built: More Makers fallen in, and Bricks cheaper. . . . many brave Brick Houses are going up.” Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–c. 1720), the founder of Germantown, reported a number of brick kilns in the area in 1684, and Turner noted that Pastorius himself intended to begin brickmaking the following year. Brick was also used for public buildings: the courthouse at Second and High Streets, also known as the Guild Hall or the Great Towne House, begun in 1707, became one of the oldest public buildings in the colonies built of brick, and the Pennsylvania State House, one of the city’s most widely recognized structures, was constructed with locally made brick beginning in 1732. By the end of the eighteenth century, 80 percent of Philadelphia’s houses were made of brick. Early Philadelphia brickmakers demonstrated pride in their trade. On July 4, 1788, they marched in the Grand Federal Procession celebrating the ratification of the Constitution wearing aprons and carrying trowels and a green flag featuring a kiln.

A Family Business

Brickmaking was frequently a family business, spanning generations. Mechanics who worked in the trade became brickyard owners, often in partnership with family members. Intermarriage between brickmaking families cemented business ties. Among Philadelphia’s most prominent early brickmakers were brothers-in-law Daniel Pegg (c. 1660–1702) and Thomas Smith (?–c. 1690) and their relatives, the Coats family and William Rakestraw Jr. (c. 1678–1732). Peter Grim, who was in business by 1814 and who later, in the early 1830s, established a brickyard in Trenton and supplied the bricks for the New Jersey state prison, had many relatives in the business by midcentury. George, Michael, and Christian Lybrant all ran brickyards between 1800 and 1850. Nelson Wanamaker (c. 1812–62), father of department store pioneer John Wanamaker (1838–1922), worked with his father, John S. Wanamaker, in his brickyard in the Neck before John senior moved to Indiana in 1849. Family businesses continued their dominance until at least the mid-nineteenth century.

The process of making bricks changed little from its origins through the mid-nineteenth century. Brickmakers dug the clay, allowed it to weather, tempered it, molded it, let it dry, then burned the bricks in a kiln. Brickmaking began in early winter with the digging of clay, which was left exposed to the weather until the spring, allowing frost and rain to wash away salts and break up the clay. In the spring, brickmakers tempered the clay, mixing it with sand and water to get the right consistency and color and churning it in a “ring pit” with a horse- or oxen-drawn shaft.  After the clay was tempered, a “wheeler” hauled it to the molder, the most experienced member of the brickmaking crew, who filled the wooden brick molds and removed excess clay. The “offbearer,” often a boy, then transported the filled molds to a drying yard and emptied the molds, leaving the bricks to dry in the open for a few days before stacking them in an open-sided shed for further drying. Once ready for burning, brickmakers stacked the bricks in a kiln, where they were “burned” over several days. They then sorted the bricks by firmness and color. Brickyards in the region typically produced about 2,400 bricks per day per crew (one molder and two offbearers).

The most significant costs of brick manufacture were for labor and fuel. Labor accounted for about 60 percent of production costs. Fuel, in the form of cordwood, accounted for another 30 percent. Each kiln burn required about twenty-five cords of wood, the fuel of choice into the late nineteenth century, even as area forests disappeared. By 1850, Philadelphia brickyards consumed about 38,000 cords of wood, or the equivalent of 1,360 acres of forest, a year.

Rapid Expansion

Brickmaking expanded rapidly in the region. In Wilmington, a 1791 list of area manufacturers included several bricklayers and brickmakers. By 1794 the Plan of the City and Suburbs of Philadelphia recorded fourteen brick kilns within city boundaries. Several of the earliest kilns were established in Germantown and Northern Liberties, with the latter the center of the early industry in the area. By 1799 brickmaking employed enough people that workers founded the Bricklayers Company, which persisted well into the twentieth century. In 1811, there were thirty brick kilns in Philadelphia, and by 1857, the city had at least fifty brickyards. A number of yards had also been established in and around Trenton and elsewhere in New Jersey by this time. By 1875, the number of brickmaking companies in Philadelphia peaked at about seventy-eight, and by the final decades of the nineteenth century there were many others in the surrounding region, including in West Chester, Norristown, Landsdowne, Bordentown, Maple Shade, Millville, Camden, Wilmington, and elsewhere.

These brickyards employed a significant number of the region’s laborers. In 1810, at least six hundred men and boys were engaged in the brickmaking business in Philadelphia alone; by 1850, nearly two thousand worked in the industry. In that year, many yards employed about twenty-five men and boys, and six yards employed more than fifty workers each. The numbers continued to grow, so that by 1880 nearly three thousand men worked in the trade before the numbers started to decline at the end of the century. Though the exact numbers of laborers involved in the many smaller brickyards in the rest of the region are not known, the output of bricks suggests that growing numbers of men in southeastern Pennsylvania and in southern New Jersey also entered the brickmaking trade. In the early twentieth century, the Sayre & Fisher Brick Company in Middlesex County, New Jersey, founded in 1850 by James Sayre (1813–1908) of Newark and Peter Fisher (1818–1906) of New York, became the world’s largest brick manufacturer for a period. Sayre & Fisher employed hundreds of workers, especially new immigrants, who made up the bulk of the population of the town, soon renamed Sayreville. Much company housing, some built from the company’s bricks, survived into the twenty-first century. By its one hundredth anniversary, Sayre & Fisher had produced over six billion bricks. The plant operated until 1970. Brickmaking never became very significant in Delaware, however.

During the nineteenth century, the invention of new steam-powered machinery transformed brick production in many regions of the country, but Philadelphia brickmakers were slow to adopt these innovations. All brick had been made by hand until the mid-1830s, when Nathaniel Adams (1797–1862), who came to Philadelphia from the brickmaking region in the Hudson Valley, invented a molding machine; by about 1840 he installed a horse-powered machine in a Philadelphia brickyard. However, workers angry at the prospect of losing pay to a machine destroyed his machinery. A few years later, his brother, Samuel, installed one of his brother’s machines and then was forced to flee the city. Most Philadelphia brickmakers continued to hand mold bricks through the end of the century. The most popular innovation among Philadelphia-area brickmakers was the brick press. Samuel Fox (1777–1870) had one in his yard in 1838, a simple machine that allowed hand-molded brick to be pressed a second time to make a denser and more uniform block. By 1850, several local yards reported having presses, and Philadelphia became the leading producer of pressed bricks, commonly used for front façades and decorative purposes.

At the close of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was producing about 220 million bricks annually. High demand for housing along with the high shipping costs for heavy material meant that it was much more economical to use locally made bricks. In 1903, Pennsylvania, led by Philadelphia, ranked second in the nation as a producer of clay products (behind Ohio), but it ranked first in the manufacture of common bricks and pressed bricks. New Jersey was not far behind, ranking fifth. Delaware, on the other hand, did not have a significant brickmaking industry.

Brickmaking declined in the twentieth century, however, and disappeared from the region by the twenty-first century. The turn of the twentieth century brought competition in the form of concrete and other building materials and new architectural styles. Concrete blocks—one eight-inch-wide concrete block could take the place of twelve bricks—began to displace bricks in foundation walls and as backup for wall facings. Brick usage decreased dramatically after the 1920s. In some areas, clay deposits had been depleted. By the mid-twentieth century, most brick manufacturers in the region had ceased operations. By the twenty-first century the region had many wholesalers that supplied brick and other masonry for construction, but it no longer was home to any active manufacturers, who operated primarily in the South and South Central United States.

Philadelphia’s built environment, however, continued to proclaim the city’s proud history as the nation’s leading brickmaking city into the twenty-first century. Without its many distinctive brick buildings, Philadelphia would lose much of the character its residents and visitors have come to enjoy.

Sarah K. Filik is a graduate of Rutgers College and obtained an M.A. in Art History from the University of Delaware. She has been a board member of the Sayreville (N.J.) Historical Society for several years. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Tamara Gaskell is Public Historian in Residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities and co-editor of The Public Historian. Previously, she was editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and Pennsylvania Legacies, while director of publications at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and an assistant editor of the Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The pace of bridge construction was initially slow compared to that in New England and the South.  This was partly because the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers were themselves useful as highways, and so the need to cross them remained limited throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The Lenni Lenape who first lived in the area marked good crossing locations along rivers, particularly the Delaware and Schuylkill.  These later became sites of ferry crossings, which would eventually foster bridge spans.

In 1660 King Charles II (1630-85) ordered a road, referred to as the King’s Highway, to be built stretching from Boston, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina.  By 1683, however, progress in Pennsylvania had stalled.  Consequently, and at the request of William Penn, that same year the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly passed a law requiring bridges to be built by local inhabitants across all streams and rivers that intersected the highway.  Due to technological limitations, which were just starting to be overcome in New England, these first bridges were not able to span major waterways like the Delaware River.  Instead, they typically kept to tributaries and smaller rivers.  The earliest surviving bridge built along the King’s Highway in the Delaware watershed area, the Pennypack Creek Bridge, was just such a structure.  Completed in 1697, it was stone arch in construction and spanned the Pennypack Creek, located north of Philadelphia where it empties into the Delaware River. Due to the way they facilitated travel, these bridges served as early milestones in the delineation of the region.

Bridges spanning the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in Philadelphia were first constructed in the early nineteenth century, and, almost invariably, these river crossings originated as ferry points.  Swedish colonists operated the earliest ferries in the 1660s and by the 1730s a significant number of modern-day bridge sites had ferries in operation.  On the Schuylkill River these included Gray’s Ferry, the Middle Ferry at Market Street, and the Upper Ferry at Spring Garden Street (all in Philadelphia).  On the Delaware these included ferries at Trenton, New Jersey, and upriver at New Hope-Lambertville and Easton-Phillipsburg. 

Drawbacks of Ferries

Several factors drove the conversion of ferries to bridges.  As early as 1764 timber rafters using the Delaware for transport proved dangerous to ferry passengers.  As late as 1914 there was a collision between a raft and a ferry that caused the deaths of four passengers.  Also, ferries had to stop operation during flooding and freezing.  The greatest impetus, though, was when a ferry could no longer handle the amount of traffic queuing up to cross.  At this point a corporation, typically local residents of the towns on either side of the river, would petition the states for a charter to build a bridge.  They would then finance construction by selling stock in the company, and dividends (and repairs) would be paid from collected tolls.  Thus, privately owned ferries were converted into privately owned toll bridges.

The most heavily trafficked ferries on the Delaware were at Trenton and Easton, which consequently led to the first bridge construction over the river.  The Delaware River Bridge Company commissioned the Easton-Phillipsburg Bridge in 1795.  However, the Lower Trenton Bridge, though commissioned later, was completed nine months before the Easton bridge in January 1806.  New England had achieved greater technical feats in bridge building at the time, and as a result both of these bridges were designed by men whose earlier works were constructed in New York and Massachusetts: the Trenton bridge by Theodore Burr (1771-1822), designer of the first bridge to span the Hudson River, and the Easton bridge by Timothy Palmer (1751-1821), who designed and built the first timber-truss bridge in the United States over the Merrimack River in Massachusetts.  Trenton was an ascending manufacturing center and its bridge helped solidify its importance along the route between New York and Philadelphia.  Easton-Phillipsburg was initially a small agricultural area, but, through influences such as its bridge, it would become a transportation hub for the steel industry and funnel large quantities of anthracite coal to Philadelphia.

At the same time that these Delaware River bridges were enhancing the route between Philadelphia and New York, bridge construction across the Schuylkill was laying the potential for the expansion of Philadelphia’s suburbs, particularly West Philadelphia.  The Schuylkill bridges also generally started as ferry crossings.  Technically, the first span across the river was a floating bridge at Gray’s Ferry, built shortly after the Revolutionary War.  However, the first significant bridge (that did not need to be pulled aside for passing ships) was finished in 1805 and designed by Timothy Palmer (who would then go on to build the Trenton crossing).  It was known as Palmer’s Permanent Bridge at Market Street.  A bridge at Spring Street was completed in 1812 in anticipation of traffic from the growing neighborhood of Mantua.  At its completion, this Wernwag Bridge was the longest single-span bridge in the world at 343 feet.  The ease of access that these bridges provided to neighborhoods that were initially outside the city would be a justification for their inclusion within the city limits set with the 1854 Act of Consolidation.

Railways Played a Role

The need for railway bridges spurred further bridge construction across the Schuylkill River, both in Philadelphia and further upriver.  In 1838 Gray’s Ferry finally got a proper bridge.  Called the Newkirk Viaduct, this was a railway bridge that provided the first direct rail access from Philadelphia to Baltimore.  The Philadelphia and Reading Railway opened in 1842 and its multiple crossings as it stretched from Philadelphia to Reading and into northwest Pennsylvania’s coal region (including a major crossing at Norristown) allowed it to compete with the Schuylkill Navigation Company.  Its terminus was at Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad on the west side of the Schuylkill River from which point cargo would be transported to Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal via the Columbia Railway Bridge in Fairmount Park.

The bridges over these two major waterways would become more technologically advanced with time.  The Pennypack Bridge was a stone arch bridge suitable for modest length bridges over rivers that did not have much down-river traffic.  Bridges built in the area, starting with the Permanent and Lower Trenton Bridges, were wooden covered bridges, the Permanent Bridge being the first completely covered bridge in the United States.  For wide points in a river these bridges could require many spans (the Lower Trenton Bridge had five), which was a hazard during floods and freshets (spring ice thaws), and for timber rafts.  An 1841 flood damaged or destroyed many Delaware River bridges.  By some accounts only the Easton and Trenton bridges remained.

Beginning in the 1870s covered bridges were abandoned for steel bridges.  These were typically suspension bridges but sometimes truss or cantilever bridges.  The last wooden bridge built on the river was the Columbia-Portland bridge (upriver at Knowlton township New Jersey) completed in 1869.  After a particularly bad Delaware River flood in 1903, most of the covered bridges were damaged or destroyed and their respective companies repaired or replaced them with steel constructions.  Steel was typically required for a bridge to be able to handle railroad traffic for any length of time and was consequently used at Trenton (after an initial attempt at modifying the wooden bridge with track).  Other bridges farther upriver on the Delaware were also modified to permit rail traffic, which enhanced access to markets in the northeast, including New York City.

Camden Commuters

Just as development in West Philadelphia required bridges in order to handle the increase in traffic, higher levels of commuter traffic across the Delaware drove plans to connect the city directly to Camden.  To this end, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures created commissions that coalesced as the Delaware River Joint Commission in 1919 (later renamed the Delaware River Port Authority in 1931).  Its purpose was the building and maintaining of links between the two states.  This initially included a single bridge, which was completed in 1926 and named the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge).  This would expand to include three more bridges: the Walt Whitman Bridge in 1955, the Commodore Barry Bridge in 1974, and the Betsy Ross Bridge in 1976; the PATCO Speedline in 1969, a mass transit rail line running between Philadelphia and Camden over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge; and a ferry.  The Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman Bridges are steel suspension bridges, the Commodore Barry Bridge a steel cantilever bridge, and the Betsy Ross a steel truss bridge.

The initial reports conducted by the Delaware River Joint Commission in preparation for the Delaware River Bridge showed that most trans-Delaware traffic crossed using the ferry that ran between Market Street, Camden, and Market Street, Philadelphia.  Furthermore, they stressed that nearly two-thirds of this traffic originated locally in Camden, numbering 24.6 million passengers per year.  Also, a summary of these reports in 1920 showed that the trend was towards an increasing percentage of traffic across the river that was not local.  Therefore, a central conclusion was that, at the time of the construction of the first bridge, it was not economical for the commission to construct an elevated rapid transit system, but that it would be a plan with “attractive features” as traffic patterns shifted in the following decades to higher numbers of long-distance commuters.  The bridge itself would act as a catalyst for these trends.

After the completion of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, demand grew for a connection across the Delaware River between New Jersey and Delaware.  A ferry service started in 1926 to meet this demand almost immediately generated a traffic bottleneck with reported automobile lines of up to four miles long on both sides of the river.  Despite this, it was not until 1940 that the Delaware General Assembly studied the possibility of a bridge.  The project lagged due to World War II, but in 1947 the Delaware River Crossing Division formed and began construction of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.  It was completed in 1951, making it the second bridge across the Delaware in the Philadelphia area.

Washington-New York Corridor

From the Delaware Memorial Bridge’s inception, actual usage far exceeded the estimated projections of traffic (in 1960 it was calculated that traffic was increasing at a 5.7 percent compound growth rate). This was due in part to its strategic location on the north-south route between New York and Washington, as well as its connection to major highways running west.  While the Benjamin Franklin Bridge had made it possible for automobile travelers to reach New York without having to use a ferry, now it was possible to avoid traveling through Philadelphia altogether.  In 1962 the Delaware River and Bay Authority was created to enhance the first span and build a second, making it a twin suspension bridge, which was completed in 1968.

Further development south of Philadelphia was spurred with the opening of the Walt Whitman Bridge in 1957.  It was initially conceived by the Delaware River Port Authority as a way to reduce traffic on the Ben Franklin Bridge and provide an alternative route to South Jersey shore communities.  However, at the thirtieth anniversary ceremony of the bridge’s opening commenters noted that while originally many viewed the bridge as just another route to the shore, its larger consequence was to stimulate growth in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey.  Migrant workers had easier transport between South Philadelphia and southern New Jersey farms, and many ultimately relocated outside of the Philadelphia area.  Furthermore, after its construction, the bridge was connected to the Schuylkill Expressway, opening a major route west of the Delaware.  The bridge also helped spur the establishment of the Food Distribution Center, the South Philadelphia sports complex, and the expanded use of Philadelphia International Airport.

The Delaware River Port Authority and the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC) assumed responsibility for the majority of bridges crossing the Delaware between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Launched as the Commission for Elimination of Toll Bridges, the DRJTBC was created for two reasons.  It would purchase toll bridges along the Delaware River and convert them to free bridge crossings and use equal annual subsidies from both states to maintain the bridges.  From 1920 to 1934 the commission purchased, repaired, and consolidated many bridge crossings on the river.  In 1934 it was replaced with the DRJTBC, with responsibility to maintain a total of twelve toll-free bridges out of joint tax subsidies and maintain eight toll bridges including the Easton-Phillipsburg (U.S. Route 22) Bridge and Trenton-Morrisville (U.S. Route 1) Bridge (Lower Trenton Bridge).  Although many of these and the Schuylkill’s bridges were prompted by need, once completed they had a profound impact in altering patterns of travel and commerce, thus helping establish the distinct character of the region. 

Andrew Slemmon is a graduate student in the Department of History at West Chester University. (Author information current at the time of publication.)

Bridge Construction Types

Arch – A bridge whose substructure is composed of arches.
Truss – The load-bearing structure (truss) is composed of a series of connected elements, typically triangles.
Suspension – The roadway is hung below suspension cables (via vertical supporting cables), which transport tension to towers at either end of the bridge.
Cantilever – Each half of the bridge is a rigid structural element supported at one end only (a cantilever), which extends out over the river.

Bridges

Abbreviations of proprietors:
DRPA – Delaware River Port Authority.
DRJTBC – Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission.
PennDOT – Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Benjamin Franklin Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden, suspension bridge, DRPA, opened 1926.
Walt Whitman Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Gloucester, suspension bridge, DRPA, opened 1957.
Commodore Barry Bridge: Delaware River between Chester and Bridgeport, cantilever bridge, DRPA, opened 1974.
Betsy Ross Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Pennsauken, truss bridge, DRPA, opened 1976.
Delaware Memorial Bridge: Delaware River between New Castle and Deepwater, twin suspension bridge, Delaware River and Bay Authority, opened 1951.
Tacony-Palmyra Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Palmyra, tied-arch bridge, Burlington County Bridge Commission, opened 1929.
Burlington-Bristol Bridge: Delaware River between Bristol Township and Burlington, truss bridge, Burlington County Bridge Commission, opened 1931.
Milford-Montague Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Milford and Montague Township, truss birdge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Delaware Watergap Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Delaware Water Gap and Hardwick Township, steel plate beam bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Portland-Columbia Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Portland and Columbia, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Easton-Phillipsburg Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Easton and Phillipsburg, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1938.
I-78 Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Williams Township and Phillipsburg, twin girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1989.
New Hope-Lambertville Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Solebury Township and Delaware Township, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1971.
Scudder Falls Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Lower Makefield Township and Ewing Township, plate girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1961.
Trenton-Morrisville Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1952.
Portland Columbia Bridge: Delaware River between Portland and Columbia, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1957.
Riverton-Belvidere Bridge: Delaware River between Riverton and Belvidere, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Northampton Street Bridge: Delaware River between Easton and Phillipsburg, cantilever bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1896.
Riegelsville Bridge: Delaware River between Riegelsville and Pohatcong Township, suspension bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Upper Black Eddy-Milford Bridge: Delaware River between Upper Black Eddy and Milford, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1933.
Uhlerstown-Frenchtown Bridge: Delaware River between Uhlerstown and Frenchtown, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1931.
Lumberville-Raven Rock Bridge: Delaware River between Lumberville and Raven Rock, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Center Bridge-Stockton Bridge: Delaware River between Center Bridge and Stockton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1927.
New Hope-Lambertville Bridge: Delaware River between New Hope and Lambertville, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Washington Crossing Bridge: Delaware River between Upper Makesfield Township and Hopewell Township, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Calhoun Street Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1884.
Lower Trenton Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1928.
Market Street Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1932.
Walnut Street Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, truss bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1893.
Spring Garden Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1965.
Gray’s Ferry Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, State Highway Agency, opened 1976.
Girard Avenue Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1972.
Strawberry Mansion Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch truss bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1897.
Vine Street Expressway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, PennDOT, opened 1959.
Schuylkill Expressway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, PennDOT, opened 1956.
Columbia Railway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1920.
Schuylkill River Bridge: Schuylkill River between Swedesburg and Black Horse, girder bridge, Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, opened 1954.

Before the eighteenth century, cast iron was scarce and expensive. This changed with innovations in England beginning in 1709, when Abraham Darby (1676-1717) leased a furnace in Shropshire and produced cast iron with coke, a distillate of pit coal. By 1720, Darby and other iron masters could produce cast iron of such reliable quality and at a reasonable cost that it became a common material for steam engine cylinders. In Pennsylvania, the discovery of vast iron and coal resources in the western part of the state prompted major iron production in places like Hopewell, Cornwall, and Phoenixville.

During the succeeding decades, cast iron opened new structural and aesthetic possibilities for a range of products, including rails, columns, and iron bridges. The first cast iron bridges, built in England, became that nation’s most notable transportation structures. In buildings, cast iron structural columns added a fireproof element to support timber or wrought-iron beams. By the end of the eighteenth century, cast iron became a familiar material for an increasing number of architectural and engineering purposes, including decorative balconies, railings, verandahs, fences, and window grills, both in Europe and the United States. In England and elsewhere in Europe, cast iron was used for domes, train sheds, greenhouses, and libraries. Its ability to replicate shapes and forms inspired new systems of production and design.

Early Cast Iron Buildings of the Pre-Civil War Era

As the nation’s second city and a major center of population and wealth, Philadelphia quickly developed new ways to use such a promising new material. The climate of technological innovation in the city together with the role of the Franklin Institute and its scientific Journal of the Franklin Institute in disseminating these advances helped to spur new uses.

Philadelphia architects and engineers who traveled to England observed the range of uses of cast iron in buildings. In the 1820s, William Strickland (1788-1854) visited England and upon his return used cast iron columns and wrought iron railings in the U.S. Naval Asylum on Gray’s Ferry Avenue. In 1830-31, architect John Haviland (1792-1852) employed flat cast iron plates that resembled ashlar masonry on the façade of the Miners Bank building in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. The international success of the Crystal Palace building to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, followed by a similar building in New York City the next year, provided strong endorsement for the building material in substantial and even monumental buildings.

Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-87) drew from his experience as an architect in Philadelphia when he selected cast iron for the new dome on top of the United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Constructed from 1855 to 1866, the U.S. Capitol dome resembled the wood and stone dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Walter’s design of the dome using cast iron followed his use of decorative cast iron in the design of the portico columns for the Chester County Court House. Thus, the U.S. Capitol dome can be seen as an expression of Philadelphia’s cast iron industry.

Cast iron’s ready availability coincided with Philadelphia’s need to develop a new type of commercial building with large expanses of glass windows to display products and allow more sunlight into the buildings’ interiors. Cast iron structural columns made higher ceilings possible, and, thus, larger display windows. These qualities allowed merchants to be more competitive in a downtown where commercial functions were becoming increasingly separated from residential and industrial uses. Commercial enterprises tended to cluster together in order to benefit from comparison shopping.

Commodius Interior Spaces

The earliest cast iron buildings in Philadelphia, most dating from the late 1840s, had partial cast iron facades at the first floor level or store fronts. Cast iron columns freed interiors from bulky wooden or granite piers and provided commodious interior spaces. This decade also marked expansion for cast iron production. By the late 1840s, Philadelphia’s foundries were disseminating cast iron products beyond the city’s boundaries. In a Southwark foundry, Merrick and Town produced iron rafters for the 1849 Brooklyn Gas House. In Kensington, Reaney, Neafie & Co. manufactured prefabricated iron warehouses in 1849 intended for California.

In the following decade, cast iron reached its full potential in furnishing complete cast iron facades. The iron facades of this decade rose three and four stories, their interior space often supported by cast iron columns and girders, with little visual obstruction. In addition, cast iron was used in pre-cast arches for spanning major interior spaces. For example, architect John Gries (1827-62) used cast iron beams “placed in tension by massive steel cables to span the great banking room” in the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank at 427 Chestnut Street. The great plasticity of cast iron also permitted ornamentation in the form of emblems, shields, medallions, and even sculpture. Architects and builders devoted great effort to make finished façades resemble marble or another stone.

During the 1850s, Philadelphia architects including Samuel Sloan (1815-84), Joseph C. Hoxie (1814-70), and Stephen D. Button (1813-97) designed cast iron buildings, although their practices also included masonry and brick buildings. Some architects, like John Riddell (ca. 1814-73), specialized in designing cast iron buildings during this decade. In addition to columns and lintels in commercial buildings, cast iron was used in flat plates to resemble stone blocks on building exteriors. Cast iron allowed for the addition of lavish ornamentation, including animal heads, ornate window lintels, and rosettes.

The crowning glory of the city’s cast iron buildings of the 1850s was an office building at 503-507 Chestnut Street (since demolished). Designed for client William M. Swain (1809-58), the building by John McArthur, Jr. (1823-90), also architect of Philadelphia’s City Hall, was designed as a general office building to house a variety of organizations and businesses. Its cast iron elements were provided by New York architect and founder James Bogardus of New York City. Four stories high, the top of the building featured sculptures representing historical figures, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Faust, and Johannes Gutenberg. For many years after the building’s demolition, several of these statues stood inside the Free Library of Philadelphia.

The easy replication of cast iron elements allowed similar buildings to be designed for the Sun Building in Baltimore of 1851 and the Harpers Brothers Printing Plant of 1854 in New York City. Bogardus provided the iron for all three buildings, although each was credited to a different architect.

Nationwide and Beyond

By the end of the 1850s, Philadelphia foundries shipped cast iron elements to all parts of the nation and beyond, marking a breakthrough in traditional regional barriers in architecture and decorative arts. The network of designers, founders, and clients presented a complex picture of the diffusion of ideas and designs. The firm of Robert Wood & Company shipped its wares to Caracas, Venezuela. Merrick & Son of the Southwark Foundry sent a cast iron light house to Florida. The firm of H. C. Oram & Co. supplied iron front buildings for New Orleans, Savannah, and Nashville. Stephen Decatur Button designed an iron front building for the Central Bank Building in Montgomery, Alabama. During this period, Philadelphia became a leader in the design and production of cast iron building components.

The Civil War disrupted the city’s industrial economy in the 1860s and halted major architectural projects as factories turned their attention to meeting wartime needs. By the early 1870s, when construction projects resumed, cast iron was no longer a novel building material and it was unlikely that architects would return to the aesthetics of the earlier decades. They continued to use cast iron in building facades, structural elements, and decorative feature, but in modern forms.

Instead of using cast iron to imitate the appearance of stone, designers turned toward cast iron buildings with slender columns in facades, thereby allowing for large expanses of glass, while the buildings remained structurally sound. They experimented with nonmasonry paint colors to highlight cast-iron design elements. In interiors, thin cast iron structural elements allowed for height, light, efficiency, and more floor space. Because of the advent of the elevator in 1857, buildings could rise to even greater heights—five and even six story buildings. Some architectural historians have identified the use of cast iron in buildings of this decade as a precursor to the all-glass curtain walls of the twentieth century.

During the 1870s, two architects dominated the design of these buildings: John McArthur Jr. and Addison Hutton (1834-1916). McArthur designed cast iron facades with narrow cast iron columns that allowed for iron to look like iron. Iron elements were finished buff and gold. For interiors, McArthur arranged tall narrow cast iron columns running along the longitudinal center of the building to allow natural light to stream in. Retail interiors of this type responded to the needs of businesses that offered a wide variety of products. By separating products into sections, designers provided the basic organization of the department store in its infancy. Addison Hutton designed buildings described as “iron offices,” which symbolized the safe conditions for exhibiting and examining imported china, queensware, and other luxuries.

1876: Centennial Exhibition

The Centennial Exhibition, held in Philadelphia in 1876, highlighted Philadelphia’s key role in the nation’s industrial progress with buildings incorporating cast iron. The exposition’s chief architect, Hermann J. Schwarzmann (1846-91), designed Memorial Hall with a granite façade topped with a glass and iron dome. (In 2008, this building became home to Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.) Another exposition building, Horticultural Hall, resembled a gigantic greenhouse, facilitated by an iron and glass roof to provide wide exhibition spaces. This building was demolished in 1955 after being damaged the preceding year during Hurricane Hazel.

During the 1870s, at least five major iron foundries filled Philadelphia’s cast iron requirements. They included Morris, Tasker & Co.’s Pascal Iron Works, John A. Gendell’s Architectural Iron Company, H. C. Oram & Co., Sanson & Farrand, and Samuel J. Creswell & Co. Only Morris, Tasker and Creswell continued after 1879, marking a decline in the use of cast iron in architecture and a turn toward new building materials, including steel and terra cotta. In addition, iron foundries outside of the city, most notably James Bogardus’s New York foundry, supplied ironwork for some of the city’s cast iron buildings and others nationwide. These foundries and others advertised in city newspapers and issued pamphlets, brochures, and catalogues promoting the superiority of their products to building clients, architects, and engineers.

By 1880, a concentration of cast iron buildings stretching from the Delaware River west to Broad Street, built in a matter of 40 years, stood as testament to Philadelphia’s technological innovations and cultural status in the mid-nineteenth century. The experiments that began in Philadelphia in the pre-Civil War era to apply the newly abundant cast iron as shop fronts and structural elements gradually became accepted building practice in Philadelphia and the nation’s other urban centers. Shoppers flocked to the city’s commercial center and peered into display windows as establishments adopted this innovation in building design and clustered in continuous rows of iron fronts along Philadelphia’s major commercial streets. Interior spaces expanded and reached upward to new heights, providing shoppers with a succession of commercial displays and shopping opportunities above the ground floor.

Over the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, building clients demanded even taller buildings, beyond what cast iron facades and structural elements could withstand. As a granular material, cast iron could become unstable and buckle under stress. In the 1880s, Chicago architects experimented with steel beams and columns as structural elements and masonry cladding on the exteriors, leading to development of the nation’s earliest “skyscrapers.” Architectural innovation from the emerging urban centers of the nation’s Midwest region led to the decline in the use of cast iron in Philadelphia’s commercial architecture and coincidentally to a decline in the city’s reputation for building innovation.

Antoinette J. Lee is an independent historian in Arlington, Virginia. Previously, she worked at the National Park Service, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and as a historic preservation consultant. (Author information current at time of publication.)

A cathedral is the bishop’s church, where he presides, teaches, and conducts worship for the Christian community of his area of ecclesial jurisdiction. Basilicas, according to the 1989 Vatican document Domus Ecclesiae, “stand out as a center of active and pastoral liturgy.” They indicate a special bond of communion with the pope, his concern for the faithful of all nations, and the strengthening of ties between the local and the universal Church.

Philadelphia’s new cathedral acquired its site on Logan Square when Marc Anthony Frenaye (1783-1873), the diocese’s financier and a refugee from the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), purchased the plot from the Farmers’ Life and Trust Co. of New York. Frenaye also purchased the four-story house that originally stood on the site, which subsequently became the cathedral rectory. Philadelphia architect Napoleon LeBrun (1821-1901), whose major work included St. Patrick’s on Rittenhouse Square (1839) and later the Academy of Music (1857), executed initial designs for the Roman-Baroque style church modeled on Rome’s San Carlo al Corso. Scottish-born Philadelphia architect John Notman (1810-65), who later built St. Clement’s (1856-59), contributed its Italian Renaissance Palladian façade.

Cornerstone Laid in 1846

Construction on the imposing sandstone structure was slow, given the challenges of meeting the spiritual, pastoral, and social needs of Philadelphia’s expanding Catholic population and organizing the Philadelphia diocese. During the era of increasing Irish-Catholic immigration and diocesan expansion in the mid to late 1840s, Kenrick juggled lack of funds, debt, and initial opposition from priests and laypeople to the idea of building a new cathedral. Already suffering a shortage of priests and churches, they were concerned about maintaining their own parishes and the cost of rebuilding churches destroyed during the nativist riots that took place in Philadelphia in 1844. Leading up to 1845, some objected that Catholicism’s growth in Philadelphia did not yet warrant building a church exceeding any other church in the city in both cost and physical proportion. Some also considered the proposed site to be too far west from the city center and the bishop’s then-cathedral, St. John the Evangelist on South Thirteenth Street. Nonetheless, eight thousand people witnessed Kenrick lay the cornerstone on September 6, 1846. Laying the cornerstone for a new Catholic church is an elaborate ritual, in which the bishop explains its ecclesial and theological significance while also soliciting the faithful’s financial support. Catholics organized a system of block collections by parish to raise the requisite funds.

After Kenrick became Archbishop of Baltimore in 1851, construction of the church continued under Bishop John Neumann (1811-60) and Archbishop James Frederick Wood (1813-83). It proceeded through most of the Civil War, even while Philadelphia’s industrial importance in the conflict and continuing financial difficulty meant that church officials struggled to retain workers. The interior remained largely unembellished while details filled in slowly. Italian-born “artist of the United States Capitol,” Constantino Brumidi (1805-80), known for his mural The Apotheosis of George Washington (1865), executed five oil paintings for the ceiling dome in 1863: The Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven, and four of the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were in place for the Cathedral’s dedication—and opening for services—on November 20, 1864. Philadelphian Edwin F. Durang (1829-1911) designed a marble high altar, placed in 1883-84 before the church’s consecration in 1890. By the mid-twentieth century, it boasted interior and exterior renovation work by Philadelphia’s Henry Dandurand Dagit (1865-1929), and the firms of Daprato (Chicago) and Eggers and Higgins (New York), among others.

During the building’s construction, the Friends of the Cathedral society saw its potential for evangelization in the surrounding neighborhood, which was becoming both Protestant and wealthy. The cathedral became the base of operations for several Catholic civic organizations, such as the Total Abstinence Society, the Ladies’ Society, and Cadet Societies for boys and girls. During the early twentieth century, construction of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway placed the Cathedral amid a developing museum district. The building merited placement on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 on the basis of the architectural significance of the work by LeBrun, Notman, and Brumidi and the religious/philosophical significance of its roles as “the center of Catholic life of Philadelphia” and longtime church of St. John Neumann—the first canonized U.S. bishop, whose cause for canonization was underway at the time.

The cathedral has continued to play an active role in the lives of Philadelphia’s Catholics. In the summer of 1976, Philadelphia’s celebration of the American Revolution’s bicentennial coincided with the Forty-First International Eucharistic Congress (August 1-8) held in the city. Following the congress, at the request of then-archbishop John Cardinal Krol (1910-96), Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) designated the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul a basilica, solidifying its role as the meeting ground between the Philadelphia archdiocese and the universal Church that Bishop Kenrick had originally intended: during a papal visit in 1979, Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) prayed in the cathedral and celebrated Mass in Logan Circle; in 2015, Pope Francis (b. 1936) publicly celebrated Mass at the cathedral and on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway during the World Meeting of Families. The Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul has remained an architectural focal point for Philadelphia and a major site of worship, devotion, and Catholic identity.

Wendy Wong Schirmer, a historian of Early America and U.S. foreign relations, received her Ph.D. from Temple University. She is working on a book project that examines the relationship between print culture, neutrality in the Early Republic, and the politics of slavery. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Grounded in landscape and European architecture and shaped by the politics of the Progressive Era, the City Beautiful Movement emerged in reaction to the physical decay and social congestion that burdened America’s industrial centers at the turn of the twentieth century. Considered the “mother” of urban planning, its promoters and practitioners sought to reorder the built environment in the cause of “civic uplift.” While expressions of City Beautiful appeared nationwide, cities in Greater Philadelphia also were shaped by the movement. From Camden and Trenton, New Jersey, to Wilmington, Delaware, and especially Philadelphia, from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s the region’s urban areas were graced with new civic spaces and associated monumental buildings designed to improve in public consciousness the very idea of the city.

In the 1880s, rising rates of immigration and industrialization brought high levels of congestion and pollution to urban areas. While early park planners brought some physical relief to city dwellers, a new generation of reformers sought further to instill a sense of pride and belonging to residents, especially immigrants with only tenuous ties to established institutions, by creating wide boulevards, ennobling buildings, and manicured parklands to allow people of all backgrounds spaces for reflection and recreation. Such inspiring spaces, they argued, could uplift city dwellers weighed down by low pay, long hours, and inadequate housing. Influenced by projects in Europe such as Vienna’s Ringstrasse, Baron Haussmann’s (1809-91) redesign of Paris, and Ildefons Cerdá’s (1815-76) work in Barcelona as well as American figures such as landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52), Central Park creator Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), and architect Daniel Burnham (1846-1912), dozens of examples, from museums and municipal buildings to new street grids, were proposed and completed. The movement got its initial boost from Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. Laid out by Olmsted, Burnham, and other leading designers, the fair’s “White City,” a model (comprised of plaster of Paris) of lagoons, fountains, promenades, statues, and neoclassical buildings showcased how comprehensive planning might relieve urban problems. Subsequent fairs at Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), San Francisco (1915), and Philadelphia (1926) similarly formed as grand civic spaces under the influence of the White City.

In the region, Philadelphia contained the most significant projects aligned with City Beautiful. After the Civil War, the city’s population neared seven hundred thousand and its industrial base of factories, refineries, and shipyards polluted the environment. In response, calls emerged for beautification plans and civic improvements. Emerging environmental groups including the City Parks Association, the Fairmount Park Art Association, and the women’s Garden Club of Philadelphia as well as reform-minded citizens such as Peter A.B. Widener (1834-1915) and financier Edward T. Stotesbury (1849-1938) pushed for grand Beaux-Arts architecture, boulevards in North Philadelphia, a citywide playground system, a park along the Schuylkill River’s western bank, and a new plan for South Philadelphia mimicking Washington, D.C’s planned system of radial boulevards. During WWI, local architects Albert Kelsey (1870-1950) and David K. Boyd (1872-1944) proposed the clearing of two square blocks from Chestnut Street north to Ludlow Street so as to increase the visibility of Independence Hall, one of Philadelphia’s most iconic and patriotic structures, though it was not until after WWII when their vision, known as Independence Mall, came to fruition.

Most prominently, a number of Philadelphia’s art and civic groups championed a grand parkway to connect Center City to Fairmount Park. Based on a plan by Jacques Gréber (1882-1962) and Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), work on the Parisian-style project commenced in 1907. Ten years later, Gréber proposed a system of diagonal parkways radiating outward from central Philadelphia’s five squares. While this plan never fully materialized, by 1930 much of the Fairmount Parkway (renamed Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1937), including the Free Library, Rodin Museum, the Municipal Court, Logan Circle, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art was completed or under construction. Across town, Washington Square, graced with new statuary, refurbished fountains (care of the Philadelphia Fountain Society), and two high-rises designed by Edgar Seeler (1867-1929) (the Penn Mutual and Curtis Buildings), reflected City Beautiful sensibilities. In 1933 architect Alfred P. Shaw’s (1895-1970) 30th Street Station, the city’s last “grand depot,” opened for service as a monumental gateway to the city. The Neoclassical/Art Deco station, commissioned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, replaced the company’s Gothic Broad Street Station, which was demolished in 1952.

In 1913, Cret received a commission to redesign Rittenhouse Square. Influenced by Paris’ Parc Monceau, his Beaux-Arts plan for Philadelphia’s wealthiest neighborhood included diagonal walkways, new sculptures and fountains, and tree plantings. Prior to the completion of Cret’s Delaware River (renamed Benjamin Franklin) Bridge, which linked Philadelphia with Camden, New Jersey, architect Charles Wellford Leavitt (1871-1928) conceived in 1925 a system of parklands and thoroughfares to remake central Camden as the gateway to South Jersey. Echoing Gréber’s Philadelphia street plan, much of Leavitt’s blueprint was never built. Yet the city’s Admiral Wilson Boulevard, running from the bridge into the suburbs to the east, opened in 1926 and became Camden’s main traffic artery, later attracting the Sears and Roebuck Company to erect a new store in the neoclassical tradition.

In 1888 the city of Trenton, New Jersey, began accumulating land for a grand park, a process aided considerably three years later through a donation of seven additional acres from lawyer John L. Cadwalader (1836-1914). With Olmsted as chief designer, Cadwalader Park (Trenton’s largest and Olmsted’s only one in New Jersey) included a restaurant, amusement midway, concert gazebo, and a zoological garden with lions, deer, monkeys, and black bears. Gracing the park were circular foot paths, picnic areas, ornate entryways, and statues of George Washington (1732-99) and John A. Roebling (1806-69). To offer a counterweight to urban congestion, the city submerged the Pennsylvania Railroad’s track along the park’s eastern edge. John H. Duncan (1855-1929) designed the Trenton Battle Monument, a towering Roman-Doric column graced with bas-reliefs and a surrounding plaza, which opened in 1893 and commemorating the Continental Army’s 1776 victory.

To the south, Wilmington, Delaware, also initiated projects shaped by the City Beautiful Movement. With the city growing into a mercantile and chemical manufacturing center, the DuPont Company in 1905 began construction of its new twelve-story downtown headquarters. To complement the building, in 1917 vice president Pierre S. DuPont (1870-1954), who had personally financed road improvements between Wilmington and Chester County, retained architect John Jacob Raskob (1879-1950) to redesign the one-and-a-half-acre green space across the street. Completed in 1921, the new Rodney Square included paved walkways, cast stone stairs and balustrades, and a gleaming bronze statue of Caesar Rodney (1728-84), the state’s signer of the Declaration of Independence. Further committed to the Progressive ethos of the City Beautiful, DuPont in the late 1920s opened to the public the gardens and grounds of his Longwood estate in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Amidst changes brought by industrialization, population growth, and environmental concerns, the City Beautiful Movement provided for greater Philadelphia’s residents and visitors new spaces for work, recreation, and reflection. From industrial riverfronts to cramped older neighborhoods, many urban areas were demolished to promote arts and culture as well as entertainment and consumption. Yet the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s spelled the end of the movement as the regional economy adapted to financial collapse and high rates of unemployment. And while many local cities underwent large-scale renewal programs in the decades after World War II, nearly all of the projects shaped by the City Beautiful Movement remained intact well into the twenty-first century, attesting to their enduring importance.

Stephen Nepa teaches history at Temple University, Moore College of Art and Design, and the Pennsylvania State University-Abington. A contributor to numerous books and journals, he is currently at work on a project about the history of Puerto Rico’s Levittown community. He received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The massive masonry structure owes much to the consolidation of city and county in 1854. In doubling the city’s population to 565,000 people, consolidation required the expansion of services that outstripped the capacity of the two-story building at Fifth and Chestnut Streets, designated in 1791 as the city’s second city hall. As early as 1838 the Pennsylvania legislature recognized the need for new municipal offices, but disagreements focusing largely on the location of the new structure prevented action until the 1870s. In 1871 the question of location was put to popular vote, with the result favoring Penn Square to the west, where the city was expanding, over Washington Square at the heart of the city’s early commercial center.

The grand scale of the new structure reflected the city’s aspirations—futile in the end—to reassert its position at the top of the American urban hierarchy. Seeking to attract a leading architect for the project, the city sponsored several competitions, ultimately awarding the commission to 39-year-old Scottish-born John McArthur (1823-90), whose buildings in the city had included the Wagner Free Institute of Science (1859) and the Public Ledger (1866). It did not hurt that he received coaching from Thomas U. Walter (1804-1887), architect of the U.S. Capitol from 1851 until 1865, with whom McArthur had trained. Walter subsequently served as a paid consultant to the project.

Second Empire Style

Cast in the fashionable French Second Empire style—the same style simultaneously embraced for the structure later known as the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C.—City Hall mixed thick masonry construction, up to 22 feet in some places, with elaborate ornamentation inside and out. Intended to be the highest building in the world, with its bell tower topping at 548 feet, by the time the building was completed in 1901, it had been surpassed by the Washington Monument and the Eiffel Tower. Still, it could claim to be the world’s largest occupied structure until it was surpassed by New York City’s Mutual Life building in 1909. By gentlemen’s agreement, no other building role above City Hall in Philadelphia until 1987 with construction of One Liberty Place.

In line with the city’s ambition, no expense was spared in the building’s construction. Most striking was the statue of William Penn placed atop the clock tower. Cast by Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923), Penn’s likeness was accompanied by 250 additional relief and free-standing Calder sculptures throughout the building, many of them conveying high-minded allegories about the nation and the city.

Patronage

There were other, less commendable reasons for the expense, however.  The public buildings commission formed to oversee construction proved a major source of patronage for an increasingly entrenched Republican political machine. A primary force behind the effort was a previously obscure politician, William Stokley (1823-1902), who after his role in the City Hall site selection dominated local politics for nearly than a decade as mayor from 1872 to 1881. In addition to directing contracts for marble and brick to political allies, Stokley’s role in securing a decision to build a single structure at the intersection of the four quadrants that constituted Penn Square at Broad and Market streets solidified relationships with street rail magnates investing in the Union Line. They used the building commission’s decision to force the rival West Philadelphia Company to share its lucrative right away along Market Street in return for permission to lay its tracks around the new structure.

By the time City Hall was complete, its architecture was already considered out of fashion and thus became the object of some ridicule. Objecting to the building’s disruption of traffic as well as its style, city government explored the possibility of demolition in the mid-1950s. When cost estimates came in equal to those for construction and when members of the American Institute of Architects objected to the building’s loss, the city relented. Recent efforts to restore the building have well exceeded the projected cost of its demolition, but the building’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places and its inclusion in a national survey as among the 150 most important buildings in the United States assures its place in Philadelphia for a long time to come.

Howard Gillette is Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University-Camden and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Before 1750 the majority of clockmakers in the colonies were trained in England. However, Pennsylvania in particular became noted for the influence of German designs on its clock production. Although English Quakers dominated Philadelphia, William Penn’s “holy experiment” attracted tens of thousands of settlers from Germany, Switzerland, and Ireland. These immigrants included many skilled artisans from northern Europe, including clockmakers, making Pennsylvania a prime site for producing high-quality clocks.

One of the earliest clocks to make its way to the Philadelphia region was the “Dial of Ahaz,” named after the King of Judah who supposedly invented the sundial in the eighth century B.C.E. The Ahaz sundial was made by Christopher Schissler (ca. 1531-1608) in Germany in 1578 and arrived some time before 1700 with a mystical religious group known as the Pietists or the Hermits of the Ridge. This group, dissatisfied with Protestant and Catholic ritual and led by Johannes Kelpius (1667-1708), came to Pennsylvania in 1694 and settled in Germantown. The group’s interests in mathematics and the astronomy used to calculate the time of the millennium made them prime candidates for clockmaking.

The Eminent Christopher Witt

An entire school of clockmakers trained under another Pietist, Christopher Witt (1675-1765), who arrived in Germantown in 1704 and began making clocks as early as 1706. It is believed that Witt gave the Dial of Ahaz to Benjamin Franklin as a gift. Witt went on to apprentice another important clockmaker in the German tradition, Christopher Sauer (1695-1758). A brass dial, tall-case clock made by Sauer around 1735 became the earliest American-made clock in the collections of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania clock production was set apart from New England by the high quality and individual construction of the tall case clock, a design that consisted of parts often made separately in England, France, and America. These included a case, dial, and mechanism and required collaborative work among cabinetmakers, iron founders, engravers, braziers, ornamental painters, and mathematicians. The weight-and-pendulum design housed in a tall case became known as a “grandfather clock,” the name of which can be traced to a Philadelphia songwriter. In 1876, Henry Clay Work (1832-84) wrote these lyrics: “My grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf so it stood twenty years on the floor.” In Pennsylvania, clocks were a symbol of family and stability, often passed down as important heirlooms through generations.

Businesses and government relied on clocks to facilitate meeting times and to regulate working hours. As business and trade increased, the variability of watches necessitated the construction of a public clock. The first of these in Philadelphia was housed in the old courthouse built in 1710 at Market and Second Streets. Made by English clockmaker Peter Stretch (1670-1746), the device told time aurally by ringing a bell.

As the city grew and the center of town shifted farther west, Philadelphia needed a new public clock. According to legend, Benjamin Franklin asked his friend Edward Duffield to make a clock for public display after growing tired of being constantly stopped by workmen on the street wishing to know the time. At this time, personal watches were still a luxury item. Duffield’s clock hung outside his shop at Second and Arch Streets from the 1740s until the Revolutionary War. In 1753, a new public clock was installed at the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall). The clock faces on the building’s east and west gable ends were made by Peter Stretch’s son, Thomas (1697-1765). It was not until 1828 that a clock designed and constructed by Isaiah Lukens (1779-1846) and Joseph Saxton (1799-1873) was installed in a new tower, built to replace the long-demolished original.

David Rittenhouse

When David Rittenhouse moved from Germantown to Philadelphia in 1770, clock making continued to be his chief source of income. Rittenhouse made approximately seventy-five clocks in his lifetime and, in a distinctly Pennsylvania tradition, each was unique. Thomas Jefferson described one Rittenhouse orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, as “a machine far surpassing in ingenuity of contrivance, accuracy, and utility, anything of the kind ever before constructed. …He has indeed made a world, but by imitation approached nearer its Maker than many man who has lived from the creation to this day.” The orrery’s clockwork mechanism represented a view of an orderly, clockwork universe, something essential to the values and ideals of the new republic.

By the 1820s clocks ceased to be a luxury item and became so common that they were considered just another piece of household furniture. Around 1835, the Pennsylvania tall clock began to be supplanted by the cheaper, mass-produced New England shelf clock. Consequently, the definition of “clockmaker” began to shift. Various individuals who had no part in the final construction of a clock and who had no knowledge of its mechanisms could separately manufacture individual parts. Under this division of labor, a clockmaker referred primarily to a tradesman who polished a clock’s teeth and steel parts and adjusted the mechanism to maintain accurate timekeeping.

While mass production of clocks flourished in New England, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware remained known for a tradition of artisanal clocks of the highest quality and individual character. In Delaware, between 1740 and 1840, forty-five clock and cabinetmakers had establishments in Wilmington alone. In New Jersey, notable clockmakers included Isaac Brokaw (1746-1826) in Elizabethtown and Aaron Dodd Crane (1804-1860) in Newark. Brokaw was known for his handcrafted clock pieces, down to the hand hammering of brass dials. Crane published several patents for improving clock mechanisms and the market for his clocks extended as far as New York and Boston. These tall case clocks illustrated and reflected the diverse and collaborate nature of the wider Philadelphia region’s artisanal and scientific communities.

Influence of Mass Production

With the proliferations of mass-produced clocks and smaller, inexpensive watches at the beginning of the twentieth century, artisanal clock production slowed. However, public clocks continued to play an important role in shaping the landscape of Philadelphia. The synchronization of time became necessary to coordinate and regularize the flow of rail travel, leading to the 1893 implementation of Standard Railway Time across the United States. Public clocks in Philadelphia could be seen at its many transportation hubs, including the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station built in 1881. In 1892, a twenty-one-foot Victorian-style clock stood at Broad and Chestnut Streets in front of the ticket office for the Reading and Baltimore & Ohio Railroads. After being moved to Twelfth and Chestnut Streets in 1901, the timepiece was nicknamed “Lover’s Clock” since it was used as a meeting place for couples on dates.

Public clocks dramatically shaped the iconography of Philadelphia’s skyline. The city’s most iconic timepiece, the fifty-ton clock at City Hall, 362 feet above Broad and Market Streets, was the largest and highest in the world when installed and put to service at midnight December 31, 1898. Time could be determined from approximately a mile away, allowing citizens to adjust their home clocks to official Philadelphia time. The 150 incandescent light bulbs that illuminated the clock were originally bright white. By the 1940s, the plate glass of the clock faces were yellowed by sulfurous coal smoke, producing the now-iconic amber glow of the City Hall clock. In 1963, the city officially changed the cleaned bulbs to a tinted yellow color, creating the most recognizable fixture of the Philadelphia skyline. Several blocks north on Broad Street, the four-faced clock atop the Inquirer Building, the tallest building north of City Hall when constructed in 1924, could be seen from miles away. Even after cheap wristwatches and cell phones replaced the need for the manufacture of clocks, the public clocks of Philadelphia continued to define the city’s landscape and iconography.

Michelle Smiley is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her dissertation considers the history of photography and its technological development in the United States. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Centennial Exhibition featured exhibits of American technological advances alongside vignettes from the Colonial era. “The New England farm-house,” for example, presented a picture of domestic industry, complete with tools for traditional arts like candle making and an “old flax wheel from Plymouth.” The state of New Jersey highlighted its revolutionary history by reconstructing the Ford Mansion, the Morristown headquarters of George Washington (1732-99). These exhibits encouraged Americans to grasp a shared past, but the past they presented did not reflect colonial America’s diversity; instead, Anglo-American contributions dominated the conversation.

Although the Centennial Exhibition ended after six months, interest in romanticized, Anglicized versions of early-American architecture, landscapes, and decorative arts continued and evolved through the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Philadelphia became a geographic touchstone in the Colonial Revival movement as collectors like Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969) turned their attention toward American decorative arts and furniture. At the same time, writers like Harold Eberlein (1875-1965), Anne Hollingsworth Wharton (1845-1928), and Robert (1860-1923) and Elizabeth (1871-1936) Shackleton produced hundred of books on the decorative arts and architecture, feeding the national obsession with all things “colonial.”

Architectural Characteristics

As the Colonial Revival gained momentum, nineteenth- and twentieth-century architects studied the Delaware Valley’s early English, German, Dutch, and Swedish buildings, focusing on their common elements to create a distinct Colonial Revival architectural style. Those elements included double-hung windows with shutters; hipped, gable, or gambrel roofs; and local building materials, such as stone. These features dotted the landscape of the Philadelphia area through the work of architects like Richardson Brognard Okie (1875-1945). Born in Camden, New Jersey, Okie completed his studies in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania during the first wave of the Colonial Revival movement. His designs of private residences, such as the H.B. Du Pont house in-Wilmington, Delaware, featuring stone exteriors, prominent chimneys, wide floorboards, and hand-wrought nails—hallmarks of his Pennsylvania farmhouse style. Another Philadelphia architect, Charles Barton Keen (1868-1931), designed Colonial Revival houses for wealthy Philadelphians then extended his practice along the East Coast.

While some architects employed vernacular building techniques, others paid homage to high-style Georgian architecture, with its symmetrical brick facades, central cupolas, and entrances with pediments. Architects Frank Miles Day (1861-1918) and Charles Z. Klauder (1872-1938) opted for stately Georgian grandeur when they designed “The Green” for the University of Delaware in 1917, giving an architectural nod to Delaware’s status as the first state. Whether they were going for the quaint charm of vernacular architecture or the classical elegance of Georgian architecture, Colonial Revival architects featured common eighteenth-century characteristics to give an impression of the past, rather than reproduce it.

The National Preservation Movement and the Colonial Revival

In the first decades of the twentieth century, architects who spearheaded the Colonial Revival style also participated in an emerging national preservation movement, working with new organizations like Colonial Williamsburg and the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities to bring Colonial buildings back to their former glory. Philadelphia was also an epicenter of historic preservation projects: Fiske Kimball (1888-1955), director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, led the restoration of Fairmount Park’s eighteenth-century mansions. The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America installed a Colonial Revival garden on the grounds of Stenton, the home of James Logan (1674-1751). For his part, Okie took on the restoration of the Betsy Ross House. The Women’s Committee of the Sesquicentennial International Exposition (1926) also selected Okie to head the reconstruction of Philadelphia’s Colonial High Street.

While these projects drew praise and adoration by many, they frustrated ethnic groups that had been steamrolled by the Anglocentric narrative of the preservation movement. Determined to showcase their contributions to American history, ethnic heritage groups organized their own celebrations and projects. In 1913, African Americans in Philadelphia and other cities across the country celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1926, Dr. Amandus Johnson (1877-1974) founded the American Swedish Historical Museum in South Philadelphia to honor the contributions of America’s early Swedes. Despite these and other efforts, nativist sentiments persisted in Philadelphia, and the historical narrative remained relatively unchanged.

Historians also voiced concerns as some preservation projects favored aesthetics over historical accuracy. In the 1930s, Okie headed the reconstruction of Pennsbury Manor, the country estate of William Penn (1644-1718) in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. University of Pennsylvania historian Albert Cook Myers (1874-1960) withdrew his support from the project when he determined it reflected Okie’s personal taste rather than the archaeological and historical evidence. Myers went so far as to call the project a “monstrosity of vicious error.” Despite criticism from Myers and others, the reconstructed estate opened to the public in 1939. While the reconstruction of Pennsbury Manor and other historic preservation projects inspired public interest in the Colonial era, they also blurred the lines between historical and stylized impressions of the past.

The New Deal and Public Architecture

The Colonial Revival movement maintained popularity in the 1930s as a new crisis, the Great Depression, gripped the nation. Colonial Revival architecture continued in the form of new public buildings through the New Deal initiatives of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). Programs including the Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration funded the construction and improvement of libraries, post offices, and public schools, such as the Pierre S. Du Pont High School building (later the Pierre S. Du Pont Middle School) in Wilmington, Delaware, and Jenkintown Elementary School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Government funds also went toward the improvement of existing Colonial structures, including Independence Hall; the Trent House in Trenton, New Jersey; and the Vernon-Wister House in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia.

Buildings with brick facades and central cupolas offered a familiar, comfortable aesthetic as an alternative to the sleek, modern Art Deco architecture of the 1920s. Once again, the Colonial Revival movement served as a distraction from the hardships of modern life and encouraged Euro-Americans to look to a romantic version of the past for hope.

Beyond World War II

After the Second World War, suburban neighborhoods inspired a new wave of Colonial Revival architecture—one that was more economical and accessible to the growing middle class. The two Levittown suburbs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey advertised the 1957 “Colonial” as one of six house models. The two-story home offered traditional appeal with room for modern amenities, including a garage. While mass-produced “neocolonial” homes lacked the decorative elements of earlier Colonial Revival homes, they provided buyers with a simplified version using cost-effective materials. Families could continue the theme into the interior living spaces with midcentury versions of Colonial Revival furniture and color palettes. Once again, ideas of peaceful, colonial domesticity hit a chord with post-war, white Americans. However, as before, the Colonial Revival served as a figurative as well as literal façade, this time masking anxiety over suburban housing integration. The same year the “Colonial” debuted, the first African American family moved into a Levittown, Pennsylvania, home. The severe harassment they faced showed their neighbors did not mean to extend “American dream” (and the dream home) to all Americans.

While modernism dominated aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s, the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976 resurrected Colonial Revival style and placed Philadelphia in the spotlight once more. Interest in Colonial history ebbed and flowed through the rest of the twentieth century, but the Colonial Revival remained in the country’s national consciousness. It peaked during times of social unrest, national crises, and historical milestone anniversary celebrations—moments when white Americans looked for common virtues and ways to maintain familiar social orders. Once maligned for its historical inaccuracies, in the late twentieth century the Colonial Revival became a subject of study and interest among historians. As a physical representation of American virtues and a hub of Colonial history and lore, Philadelphia remained at the fore of the Colonial Revival movement.

Danielle Lehr Schagrin is the former Education Program Coordinator at Pennsbury Manor, the reconstruction of William Penn’s country estate. She completed an internship with the Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Institute and holds an M.A. in History with a concentration in public history from Lehigh University. (Author information current at time of publication.)