Early in the colonial era, poor, infirm, and mentally ill Philadelphians were cared for privately by the community. Churches, trade and ethnic associations, and family members took care of their own. A prime example of this was the Friends Almshouse, built in 1713. Located on Walnut Street between Third and Fourth Streets, this poorhouse run for and by Quakers provided a sanctuary for poor, widowed, and aged Friends.

With an increase in population and a growing influx of immigrants, the Philadelphia public officials soon saw the need for city-run poor relief and established the Overseers of the Poor, an organization made up in large part of Quakers. The Overseers, later renamed the Guardians of the Poor, were to oversee all subsequent almshouses in Philadelphia. These included the Philadelphia City Almshouse, a complex completed in 1732 and encompassing the block between Third and Fourth and Spruce and Pine Streets, previously a rural green meadow. Built and organized like a large domestic house, this almshouse was never meant to accommodate more than forty or fifty people at a time. Only those in dire need such as orphans and the very sick and elderly were supposed to be admitted. For others in need, the city preferred  “out-relief” in the form of small amounts of money, clothing, firewood and food.

The Philadelphia Almshouse and all subsequent almshouses in the city struggled with funding. Mismanagement, corruption, and an ever-growing indigent population created an almost constant need for more money, and poor taxes were never enough to cover expenses. To dispense with the poor while simultaneously raising money, almshouses across the colonies engaged in bonding out children. This involved indenturing children and even young adults to paying members of the community, who in return agreed to teach their charges useful skills and in some cases to educate them to some degree. This system had unlimited potential for abuse and sorrow. Children could easily be forcibly removed from their parents who would never see them again. In fact, almshouse authorities preferred to place children far from their homes to discourage runaways and to keep disgruntled parents from complaining about the condition in which their children were kept.

Reforming and Teaching Skills

As the eighteenth century progressed, attitudes began to change away from just feeding and clothing the poor, toward reforming and teaching them skills. Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) expressed his opinion that poor relief itself (meaning handouts) caused indigence. Almshouses began to employ their tenants in attached workhouses, where they were made to weave cloth, manufacture and repair shoes or linens, make buttons, and other such activities. These tasks were meant to defray the costs of running the almshouse while teaching the inmates morality through labor. Generally, both goals failed. The products of task work proved unprofitable due to a combination of corruption and mismanagement, and inmates resented being made to work for no pay.

After the second quarter of the eighteenth century, admissions to the Philadelphia Almshouse increased steadily as the general population grew. By the 1760s, the almshouse was vastly overcrowded, with a population exceeding 200 persons, and the building proved too small to implement new philosophies regarding poor relief. As the city expanded, the almshouse property also became prime real estate in the neighborhood later known as Society Hill. In 1767, the institution moved to less-expensive land more distant from the city core: a plot bounded by Tenth and Eleventh Streets from Spruce to Pine. Officially known as the Philadelphia Almshouse and House of Employment, the new complex was most often called the Bettering House, with more than a little hint of irony.

The Bettering House was, at the time, the largest building in the American colonies and a source of great pride for Philadelphia. Surrounded by lavish pleasure gardens, the institution was an attraction visited by wealthy Philadelphians and travelers, who reported in their diaries about having dined or taken tea in the gardens. Some, however, were repulsed to be surrounded by such splendor while observing the poor as though they were animals in a zoo.

Unlike the first almshouse, the Bettering House rigorously controlled inmates’ lives. Authorities segregated the population by age, race, gender and even “good” versus “bad” poor, with a goal of reforming the “failed” indigents, who were increasingly seen as criminal. The poor were expected to accept their place in society and taught how to properly fulfill their role once released. Punishment, religious instruction, task work, and, at times, solitary reflection, were employed to this end. Those who were capable were to work six days a week, between eight and ten hours a day, not including a half-hour break for breakfast and an hour for dinner. The overseers complained in daily journals that the population swelled during the tough winter months, and inmates departed in droves once they were clothed, fed, the weather improved, or they were cured of their particular ailments, often to return again the following year. It was not uncommon for prospective inmates to complain of “sore legs” upon entry in order to gain shelter for a few cold months and avoid labor.

Rural Almshouses

While the greatest concentration of those in need tended to center in cities, almshouses or “poor farms,” as they were often called, also opened during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in rural areas, including Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties. Countryside institutions became necessary as cities passed poor laws specifying that the infirm and impoverished seeking aid could only obtain it from the county in which they had legal residence. Although industrialization drew many individuals seeking jobs to cities, those who fell on hard times had to be transported back to their hometowns. Rural almshouses differed somewhat from their urban counterparts by placing greater emphasis on being self-sufficient institutions and assigning work centered on farming and related tasks.

Meanwhile the Bettering House, thought to be the solution to eliminating Philadelphia’s poor population, fell to the same corruption, lack of funding, and overcrowding as the city’s first almshouse and closed in 1835. The same year, its replacement opened. With this next iteration of the Philadelphia Almshouse, founders hoped to succeed by completely institutionalizing the poor. Located in West Philadelphia in an area formerly known as Blockley Township  between Thirty-Fourth Street and Cleveland Avenue (later renamed University Avenue), the new “Blockley Almshouse” had no formal gardens. It looked out over the Schuylkill River, which served as an effective barrier between the city and its poor. A massive complex of four main buildings, Blockley included a traditional poorhouse, insane asylum, infirmary, and orphanage. Showing off industrious paupers was no longer of importance. All activities occurred privately within the compound, including numerous dissections of bodies of deceased inmates by doctors and their anatomy students. With a well-developed infirmary to treat the sick poor, Blockley Almshouse evolved into the Philadelphia General Hospital in 1919.  Similarly, by the 1960s many of the surrounding rural almshouses were converted to nursing homes.

The almshouses’ role as free hospitals for the sick indigent may be their most positive legacy. The first Philadelphia City Almshouse essentially served as the first public hospital in the colonies. Almshouses did not turn away those with ailments viewed as “sinful,” such as venereal diseases or complications from alcoholism. For ailing prostitutes and unwed pregnant mothers, the almshouses were often the only choice available. Many doctors in the Philadelphia area learned their trade from practicing on inmates. That being said, almshouses were institutions of last resort for many who turned to them during difficult times. The use of almshouses and the practice of institutionalizing the poor ended throughout the United States in the mid-twentieth century after three centuries of failed policy.

Mara Kaktins is a historical archaeologist who holds an M.A. from Temple University.  Her graduate work focused on the changing treatment of the poor throughout the colonial period. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Founded in 1908, the association formed as a branch of the New York-based organization named for Civil War General Samuel C. Armstrong (1839-93), who led the 8^th United States Colored Troops. After the war, in 1868, Armstrong founded the Hampton Institute in Virginia as an industrial school for students of color and to produce African American teachers. The Armstrong Association raised funds for the Hampton Institute and for Tuskegee University in Alabama, founded in 1881 by one of Hampton Institute’s most famous graduates, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915).

Philadelphia’s Armstrong Association began after Hampton educator John Thompson Emlen (1878-1955), who was part of the organization in New York, came to Philadelphia intent on bettering the conditions for African Americans. He believed that a branch of the Armstrong Association could supplement existing social institutions to address the needs of a steadily growing population of African Americans migrating from the South (a trend later termed the Great Migration). After a meeting between Emlen and Richard R. Wright Jr. (1878-1967), a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia branch began its work.

Originally, the Armstrong Association consisted primarily of wealthy white philanthropists, but Emlen believed that an interracial board was key to the organization’s success. Each position on the board had two appointees: a white person as well as an African American. Emlen served as the organization’s secretary, and Wright acted as field secretary.

Joining forces with the Philadelphia Housing Association and the Traveler’s Aid Society, the Armstrong Association studied living conditions and overcrowding during the Great Migration as African Americans flocked to northern cities seeking economic opportunities and better social conditions. In 1900, the African American population of Philadelphia was 63,000. By 1910, it had grown to 84,459 and within another ten years it surpassed 134,000.  In addition to a housing shortage, new arrivals found it difficult to find employment, especially in their previous fields. Wright, who earned his doctorate in sociology, noted in his dissertation that many African American migrants to Philadelphia were skilled laborers, but they often faced discrimination from employers and had to take jobs outside their skill sets. In response, the Armstrong Association developed initiatives such as an annual job fair, reports to monitor working conditions of African Americans, and representation in cases of workplace disputes.

Using the Thomas Durham Public School at Sixteenth and Lombard Streets as a case study, the organization created a learning and social center to help African Americans with job placement and skill assessments. The school, named for a former administrator in the Philadelphia School District, was established in 1910 and served a predominantly African American student body.  In a study, the Armstrong Association found that only 53 of the 163 students of working age were able to secure work. Those who did found occupations that required very little skill and no room for advancement and provided a poor living wage. The Armstrong Association determined that providing students with better vocational training would prepare them to enter the workforce.

The association also provided job placement services for African American migrants, documented by oral history interviews conducted in the 1980s by historian Charles Hardy. The association’s industrial secretary, Alexander L. Manly (1866-1944), who joined the organization in 1913, secured more than $35,000 in contracts for African Americans within his first eight months in the position. Despite racial discrimination, the organization succeeded in aiding many newcomers searching for employment.

Emlen spent the remainder of his career in public service with the organization, while Wright left the group in 1909 because he favored self-help over the Armstrong Association’s emphasis on philanthropy. Wright later became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Armstrong Association of Philadelphia went on to affiliate with the National Urban League in a merger that created the Urban League of Philadelphia in 1957. Through its work, the Armstrong Association of Philadelphia helped a generation of African Americans who migrated from the South find housing and employment in their new city.

Sharece Blakney is a graduate student in American History at Rutgers-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The region’s prominence in banking began with the creation of the Bank of North America in 1781, when Philadelphia was the largest and most important city in North America. In February 1781, even as the War for Independence still raged, the Continental Congress appointed as its Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris, a partner in a successful mercantile house and one of the city’s best-known businessmen. Shortly after, and building on both his ideas and those of the precocious Alexander Hamilton, Morris received congressional approval to establish the first commercial bank in the country. At first it was difficult to attract capital, but by early 1782, the Bank of North America was ready to open for business. The BNA loaned money to the federal and state governments as well as to many of the city’s businesses, thereby facilitating commerce among the colonies and between the United States and other countries.

Soon after ratification of the Constitution of the United States in summer 1788, commercial banks sprouted in more than a dozen other cities. The Bank of Pennsylvania (1793) was the second founded in Philadelphia, and the Delaware legislature chartered the Wilmington-based Bank of Delaware in 1795. Meanwhile, in 1791, Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton followed through on one of his long-standing ideas – a national bank whose main purposes would be to collect taxes, hold government funds, and make loans to the government and other worthy borrowers. While it would be a private institution with a twenty-year charter from Congress, the Bank of the United States would be more national than local in scope. Four years after its founding, it moved to Third and Chestnut Streets, where a new Greek revival building with a Roman portico and Corinthian columns suggested solidity and stability.

The first decade of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of several more banks in Philadelphia. Adding to the earlier institutions that largely served the needs of governments, upper class merchants, lawyers, and influential businessmen, the Philadelphia Bank (1803), Farmers and Mechanics Bank (1809), Commercial Bank (1810), and Mechanics Bank (1810) were formed by and for artisans, farmers, mechanics, and manufacturers. In 1810, the leaders of the District of Northern Liberties, just north of Vine Street but not served by the Philadelphia banks, formed the Bank of Northern Liberties. Another innovation occurred in 1816 when a group of businessmen, inspired by the success of savings institutions in England and Scotland, established the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society to cater to small depositors not targeted  by commercial banks. The depositors owned this “mutual” savings bank, and shared in its profits. Long after the bank’s demise, the iconic PSFS sign atop the re-purposed skyscraper at 1200 Market Street continued to light the Center City sky.

Local Banks Arise

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, citizens in Delaware and New Jersey also established banks for their own use. In 1807, Delaware authorized the Farmers Bank of the State of Delaware and established its headquarters in Georgetown, enabling it to serve the farming communities in the state’s southern townships. During the following ten years, the state authorized three more banks in Wilmington. New Jersey established its first banks in Newark and Trenton in 1804. In 1812, it chartered six more banks, including the State Bank at Camden, the first in the southern portion of the state.

Although Philadelphia was no longer the nation’s capital after 1800, the presence of the Bank of the United States kept the city at the center of controversies about the nation’s finances. In 1811, anti-banking forces in Congress refused to extend its charter. Republicans believed the bank was unconstitutional, and that it benefitted only the moneyed class at the expense of all others. Local merchant and trader Stephen Girard acquired its building and fixed assets, and used his own capital to establish the Bank of Stephen Girard as the country’s first private bank, a bank with no publicly traded shares and no mandated service to customers.

Philadelphia became home to a national bank once again in 1816, following the wreckage to the economy caused by the War of 1812 (1812-15) with Great Britain. Congress realized the need for another national bank to help regulate the supply of credit and expedite the financial dealings of the federal government. Philadelphia was still a leading financial center, so it was no surprise when Congress decided to headquarter the Second National Bank of the United States among the other banks on Chestnut Street. The bank operated out of Carpenters’ Hall for five years, and then opened in 1824 in its new Greek Revival structure modeled on the Parthenon, a symbol of strength and permanence.

Banking in Pennsylvania expanded after the Commonwealth’s Omnibus Banking Act of 1814 divided the state into twenty-seven banking districts and approved charters for forty-one banks. Banking was a profitable business; businessmen across the Commonwealth urged the legislature to authorize the formation of more institutions. Citizens quickly organized banks in Bristol, Chester, Germantown, Norristown, and West Chester. The law imposed several new financial requirements on the institutions. One  robbed the banks’ managers of the ability to make loans in any amount, to any worthy borrower, in any location.  That restriction failed to recognize the law of supply and demand for credit. Many new banks freely supplied more credit than was demanded by worthy borrowers, and maintaining that excess supply of money was not sustainable. Within a few years, more than 40 percent of the new banks in Pennsylvania failed.

Stronger Banks’ Role in Commerce

Philadelphia’s long-established banks survived, and they became important cogs in the state’s attempts to battle New York and Baltimore for commercial supremacy during the next two decades. As early as the 1760s, some of the city’s political leaders understood the need to augment Philadelphia’s strong position in overseas commerce with expanded business ties with inland areas to the north and west. In particular, they believed the city needed to build stronger transportation connections with central Pennsylvania and its fertile Susquehanna Valley. State officials finally embarked on a crash program to create those much-needed commercial corridors. Throughout the 1830s, banks seeking the mandated renewals of their charters were compelled by law to loan the state the funds to execute that program.

Although the state got its canals and turnpikes, most were unprofitable because they could not prevent lucrative commercial traffic from using other transportation corridors to the ports of New York and Baltimore. Pennsylvania’s revenue decreased even as its debt level ballooned. Bank creditors forced to finance those construction projects throughout the 1820s and 1830s suffered financially when the state suspended interest payments on its debt in 1841 and then demanded that the banks extend even more loans.

In Philadelphia, meanwhile, the Second Bank of the United States became the flashpoint for the national political conflict known as the “Bank War.” Soon after his election as President in 1828, Andrew Jackson made clear his displeasure with banks in general and the Second Bank of the United States in particular. In his view a large central bank, controlled and operated by the moneyed class, limited the growth of the hundreds of state banks that had sprouted in the previous quarter century. During the closing months of 1831, and in anticipation of the election of 1832, President Jackson tempered his arguments against the Bank. However, Bank President Nicholas Biddle was emboldened by the December 1831 recommendation for re-chartering the Bank by the Secretary of the Treasury. Spurred on by leading Philadelphia businessmen Biddle  unwisely sought to forcefully blunt Jackson’s campaign against his institution by applying for a new charter in 1832, some four years before its first charter expired. Congress passed this re-charter bill, but was unable to override Jackson’s veto. The re-elected President then emasculated the bank by first transferring government funds to other banks, then convincing his allies in Congress to refuse another re-chartering effort. As the bank wound down its affairs, the contraction of loans, discounts, exchanges, and deposits led to severe economic dislocations before the bank closed its doors in 1836. Following that closing, and searching for still more funds to finance internal improvements, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania immediately granted a state charter to a successor bank that promised both to loan the state additional sums and to pay a bonus for the privilege of operating. Working under such onerous restrictions, the new United States Bank of Pennsylvania failed only five years later – and took six other Philadelphia banks with it.

Banks Multiply Despite Panics

Philadelphia’s banks suffered proportionately in the financial panics that gripped the nation in 1837 and 1857. Yet, throughout the period, entrepreneurs continued to establish new banks. Most of the action occurred in outlying districts of the city such as Kensington, Moyamensing, Southwark, and Spring Garden. Before and after the Civil War, political lending became less important as most of the city’s institutions sought to finance a growing number of railroads and manufacturers. After the Panic of 1873, many mergers among the surviving banks enabled those institutions to serve the needs of local and national firms during the manufacturing boom of the industrial revolution.  A handful of these acquisitive institutions evolved into such stalwarts of the twentieth century as Fidelity, Girard, and Provident, joining the successors of the Philadelphia Bank (Philadelphia National) and the Bank of North America (the Pennsylvania Company, later First Pennsylvania) as market leaders. After the turn of the twentieth century, many of the region’s banks further expanded their business with a nationwide clientele. Their appetite for acquisitions remained strong; as a result of merger activity, the number of banks in Philadelphia declined from 1900 to 1914.

During the years immediately after World War I, the banking franchise broadened to involve more businesses and citizens than ever. Corporations (such as Gimbel Brothers), unions (such as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers), and the community leaders of various minority, ethnic, and religious groups established commercial banks, mutual savings banks, and trust companies throughout the region. The largest commercial banks continued their merger and acquisition sprees, and they supplied the capital that funded the growth of utility and industrial companies.

The Great Depression devastated the banking community, particularly in the working-class neighborhoods. One-third of Philadelphia’s banks failed, including such high-profile institutions as Bankers Trust, with more than 100,000 depositors. Institutions in North and South Philadelphia, areas with high percentages of immigrant and working-class customers, collectively lost as much as 45 percent of their deposits. The losses were closer to 15 percent for banks doing business in the Northwest sections of the city or the central business district. One prominent survivor was the Citizens and Southern Bank at Nineteenth and South Streets, founded in 1921 by the civil rights advocate and entrepreneur Richard R. (“Major”) Wright Sr. as the only African American-owned bank in the North. Indeed, his conservative lending policies helped the bank become one of the first in the nation to open after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 bank holiday.  (His successors sold the bank in 1957.) Market leaders such as Fidelity, Girard, and Provident also survived the Depression but made few acquisitions throughout the period. The result was the emergence of a smaller but more stable banking community by the 1940s.

Philadelphia’s banks prospered along with the city in the first two decades after the end of World War II. Competition among the institutions that served Philadelphia and its contiguous counties was constrained; branch banking had long been severely limited, and interstate banking was prohibited. But in the 1970s, firms such as American Express, General Motors, Merrill Lynch, and Sears Roebuck began offering loan and deposit services that made such longstanding banking restrictions less relevant. Regulations governing the banking business were seriously eroded by new technologies and new entrants to the marketplace. Competition became even more intense during the early 1980s, when Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware joined other states in allowing statewide branching and then intra-state mergers. In 1994, Congress passed the Riegle Neal Act, removing all restrictions on inter-state banking. Finally, in 1999 President William Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act; it removed all remaining barriers between commercial banks, savings banks, investment banks, and other types of lending and depository institutions, thus remaking the landscape of the financial services industry.

From 1983 to 1998, seven of the eight largest locally based institutions succumbed to acquisitive initiatives by larger so-called “super-regional” organizations. Those transactions robbed Philadelphia of its place as a headquarters city for prominent commercial banks. Philadelphia National Bank (PNB) emerged as the only locally based super-regional. It adopted the name CoreStates Financial and acquired banks in Lancaster, Reading, Trenton, and Philadelphia. Only the PNB sign atop the building at Broad and Chestnut Streets remained to hint of that institution’s legacy. (In 1998,  Charlotte’s First Union Corporation acquired CoreStates, but a decade later First Union  became part of Wells Fargo, headquartered in San Francisco.)

Among the dozens of institutions providing banking services to consumers and businesses in Greater Philadelphia, by 2010 only WSFS Bank in Wilmington could trace its founding as far back as 1832, when it was established as the Wilmington Savings Fund Society. Philadelphia’s Beneficial Bank, formed as a mutual savings bank, was established  in 1853; and two other institutions headquartered in Philadelphia’s suburbs had legacies dating to the 1870s (Univest and National Penn Bancshares). Some newer organizations (including United Bank of Philadelphia and NOVA Bank ) were reminiscent of the limited-audience banks of the 1920s. However, the number of branch offices and the amount of deposits had become highly concentrated among national and international nameplates. Look carefully beyond those signs on the city’s old banking headquarters buildings, and you just might find the traces of their original tenants and the history of banking in Philadelphia.

Michael A. Martorelli is Director Emeritus at the investment banking firm Fairmount Partners in Radnor, and a frequent contributor to Financial History magazine. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In eighteenth-century Philadelphia, master mechanics customarily boarded apprentices, who received food, lodging, and craft training in exchange for their labor. Farmers in the surrounding rural counties boarded hired hands. Families of all social ranks took in lodgers, accommodating unmarried men and women who had few other housing options. Taverns sheltered both travelers and long-term residents. By the 1780s, however, enterprising proprietors began advertising “genteel” boarding and lodging in the city’s newspapers, sometimes promoting their establishments as superior to taverns. The trend spread rapidly; Robinson’s Philadelphia Register and City Directory for 1799 included nearly one hundred boardinghouses.

By the late nineteenth century these numbers had increased tenfold. Indeed, by accommodating migrants from the surrounding countryside as well as immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Britain, and, later, Italy, Poland, and Russia, boardinghouses helped to make Philadelphia’s rapid economic and population growth possible. Nearby cities experienced similar boardinghouse booms. Wilmington directories listed seven boardinghouses in 1814, forty-three in 1874, and 174 in 1900; the number of boarding places in Camden rose from only eight in the early 1860s to 137 at the turn of the twentieth century.

How Boarding Shaped Urban Life

These statistics vastly underestimate the degree to which boarding shaped urban life. Historians estimate that one in four nineteenth-century Philadelphia households included boarders. These residences ranged from relatively large concerns that resembled small hotels to homes that sheltered a single lodger. Boardinghouses could be remarkably cosmopolitan, bringing together people who otherwise never would have met. More often they reinforced ethnic, racial, class, and occupational distinctions. Boardinghouses near Independence Hall housed middle-class clerks and merchants who worked nearby. Establishments that catered to the elite, such as the boardinghouse on Spruce Street run by Ann Smith, could be found in Society Hill. Working-class families who lived in the alleys off major downtown streets took in boarders; so, too, did the inhabitants of the heavily Irish neighborhoods of Southwark, Kensington, and Moyamensing. Immigrants from other ethnic groups settled into their own boarding places, usually run by a woman from the old country. Sailors’ and stevedores’ boardinghouses clustered near the Delaware River docks. Before the University of Pennsylvania opened its first dormitories in 1900, most of its students lived in the nearby “boarding house colony.” Not all boardinghouses were urban. In rural New Castle County, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company paid its married workers to board bachelor employees.

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in some cases after, public accommodations, even in northern cities, were segregated by race. African American boardinghouse keepers performed a vital function by accommodating people of color, both travelers and permanent residents. And before the Civil War, African American boardinghouses in Philadelphia and Camden occasionally functioned as informal stops on the Underground Railroad by sheltering fugitives from slavery.

If boardinghouses provided food and shelter to transients and newcomers, they also provided women with a means of making a living or supplementing their families’ incomes. In 1880 Margret McNamara (b. c.1840), the wife of a peddler, housed nine boarders, all of them Irish immigrants like herself, in her residence on Mifflin Street in South Philadelphia. McNamara did not describe herself as a boardinghouse keeper, perhaps because doing so might suggest her husband’s income was insufficient to support her. As her experience suggests, much boarding and lodging housekeeping in Greater Philadelphia, as elsewhere, consisted of what economists call hidden market labor. Even when census takers or city directories identified a man as the establishment’s proprietor, women undertook the considerable labor keeping boarders entailed—cooking, cleaning, monitoring comings and goings, collecting rents. When the DuPont Company paid male employees who agreed to house unmarried workers, they paid men for work their wives performed.

Boarding as the Butt of Jokes

Boarders did not always appreciate the fruits of these labors. Philadelphians, like their counterparts elsewhere, participated in a lively, often humorous, anti-boardinghouse discourse. An 1854 issue of the Philadelphia Mercury carried the surely apocryphal story of a boardinghouse keeper who saved money by serving soup made with kittens. Irish longshoremen who labored on Philadelphia’s docks in the early twentieth century recalled a landlady who smeared fat on the faces of sleeping inhabitants to deceive them into thinking they had been fed. In 1881 the Wilmington Morning News poked fun at the less than desirable accouterments, including smelly mattresses and dingy sheets, at a boardinghouse that advertised “meels & login cheep.” Even the social elite were not exempt from the unsavory conditions that supposedly afflicted boardinghouses. In the 1860s one resident of a fashionable Philadelphia establishment complained about an unwelcome nocturnal visitor—a “promenading” rat. Criticisms of this sort no doubt reflected the realities of boardinghouse life. Most landladies could not afford to lavish delicacies on their tenants, nor did they typically command a labor force capable of maintaining exacting standards of cleanliness. By the same token, most boarders could afford to pay only modest rents—more often than not they got what they paid for. But the sheer ubiquity of boardinghouse folklore also revealed a persistent cultural tendency to contrast the deficiencies of boardinghouses with idealized single-family homes.

By the turn of the twentieth century, these complaints had taken a more ominous turn. City officials and social reformers bemoaned the “lodger evil,” especially in Little Italy and the African American neighborhoods clustered along Lombard Street in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. While the authors of various housing studies recognized the importance of boarders and lodgers to working-class family economies, they feared the moral danger paying guests allegedly posed. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), for instance, condemned the “pernicious” influence of lodgers, whom he believed destroyed “the privacy and intimacy of home life.”

Early twentieth-century social reformers believed that lodging houses—more commonly called “furnished room houses”—presented a different kind of moral problem. While nineteenth-century commentators sometimes used “boarding” and “lodging” interchangeably, semantic distinctions became more important as lodging houses rapidly replaced boardinghouses in downtown Philadelphia, Camden, and Wilmington. Lodgers, also called roomers, took their meals at nearby restaurants instead of at a common table. Unlike boarders, they came and went as they pleased. The salesmen, clerks, stenographers, and secretaries who rented furnished rooms enjoyed the greater privacy and social freedom lodging—as opposed to boarding—offered them.

Reformers and social scientists, however, voiced increasing alarm about “the furnished room problem.” The problem was less acute in cities such as Camden, which boasted only a few dozen furnished-room houses, most of them located near the block that became Johnson Park. Philadelphia’s rooming houses numbered close to a thousand. Contemporary observers acknowledged the difficulties of pinpointing the precise boundaries of the city’s constantly changing furnished-room districts, which encompassed portions of Society Hill as well as Frankford, Richmond, and Kensington. They agreed that the most prominent lodging-house neighborhood lay just north of Center City, bordered roughly by Race Street, Girard Avenue, Broad, and Sixth Streets. Reformers lamented roomers’ easy proximity to the saloons, movie theaters, vaudeville shows, and peep shows clustered on Eighth Street; they claimed furnished-room districts attracted crime, vice, and prostitution. Lodging-house critics even succumbed to historical amnesia by extolling the virtues of “the old-fashioned boardinghouse,” which, they argued, had provided a homelike atmosphere and familial supervision.

Boardinghouse Era Fades

By the 1950s, if not earlier, white-collar workers had decamped for apartments and rooming houses had become synonymous with skid row. Many of the latter, known in official terminology as single room occupancies (SROs), fell victim to gentrification and urban renewal, processes that left former residents homeless. While some old-style establishments survived into the 1950s and 1960s, by midcentury boardinghouses more commonly sheltered the poor, the elderly, and the mentally ill, often under unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

Nevertheless, boardinghouses—albeit by other names—survived and even flourished in the twenty-first century. During the Great Recession more than a few homeowners stayed afloat by taking in boarders, as suggested by the title of a 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer article: “Rooms for Rent: In a Flashback to Earlier Times, Recession-Pinched Homeowners are Seeking Paying Guests to Share their Space.” And whether they realized it or not, those residents of Greater Philadelphia who embraced alternative living arrangements out of choice rather than necessity also invoked past practices. Collective ventures such as West Philadelphia’s Life Center houses, the Penn Haven Housing Co-op, and the Friends Housing Cooperative owed their origins at least in part to these earlier forms of multifamily housing.

Wendy Gamber is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor in History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of three books: The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America, and The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The nineteenth century experienced a significant increase in urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. The population of Philadelphia tripled between the years 1790 and 1830, and this growth coincided with epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and typhoid fever, which contributed to an abundance of children who were either orphaned or abandoned. As a result of such upheaval or parental neglect, children often roamed the streets, worked as apprentices through indenture, or faced confinement to almshouses, jails, or insane asylums. The combination of crime and abandoned street children presented serious issues that social welfare advocates such as Hinckley, who had previously served as secretary at the Pennsylvania Homeopathic Hospital for Children, could not ignore. In 1883, she successfully pushed for legislation that prohibited the institutionalization of children in asylums designated primarily for adults. In 1884, the Children’s Aid Society reported that it had cared for 681 children annually, a number that grew steadily over the next fifty years.

The Philadelphia-based organization served children throughout the state until 1889, when the Children’s Aid Society of Western Pennsylvania was organized. Since the Children’s Aid Society could not accommodate all children in the region who were in need of homes and services, volunteer committees created local county branches to respond to this need. Although initially created to address an overflow from the central office, county offices became essential to operations by the 1890s. Before the creation of a centralized bureau in 1921, these local agencies reported between half and two-thirds of the cases to the central office, many of whom were children who had been contracted as indentured workers. By the mid-1930s the Children’s Aid Society reported that it provided care and services for 3,030 children annually from both Philadelphia and its neighboring counties.

The Children’s Aid Society was a pioneer in the professionalization of the field of social work during a period when foundations were established to tackle the root causes of poverty. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the field of social work evolved to include more scientific-based understandings of poverty and child development. In response to these developments, in 1908 the Children’s Aid Society began offering career training to its employees, which eventually grew into the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work (later the School of Social Policy and Practice). The society itself also became more professional, with several prominent figures serving in managerial capacities. Edwin D. Solenberger (1876–1964), a social service administrator, served as general secretary from 1907 until 1943. John Prentice Murphy (1881–1936), a pioneer in the literature on the models of intervention and outcome assessment, joined the society in 1908. In the 1920s, Dr. Jessie Taft (1882–1960), an expert in the burgeoning field of mental hygiene, became the director of the Child Study Department, which provided mental examinations to incoming children. These advancements contributed to the agency’s mission by providing holistic care and support to children and their families.

Over the years, several local child welfare agencies merged with the Children’s Aid Society. The Union Temporary Home (1856), an institution that was created specifically for poor white children, officially closed in 1887 due to financial constraints. The Philadelphia Home for Infants (1873), created for children under the age of three, also began struggling financially in the early twentieth century and eventually merged with the Children’s Bureau in 1942. The Children’s Bureau (1907) functioned as a shelter and centralized information bureau to funnel information to the more than sixty agencies that received needy children. During World War II, both the Children’s Bureau and the Children’s Aid Society helped place juvenile refugees from Europe into homes in the Philadelphia area. They merged into one organization in 1944.

From the 1950s through the late 1970s, child welfare services were typically self-contained units that focused on in-home evaluations. From the 1970s onward, local government agencies began operating under federal legislation. Similar in its mission to the Children’s Aid Society, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 aimed to serve children in their own homes, prevent external placement, and facilitate the reunification of families. Despite such reform, the late 1980s and 1990s experienced increases in child neglect and foster placements. In Philadelphia, agencies such as the Philadelphia Task Force for Children at Risk, the Support and Community Outreach Program, and PhillyKids Connection addressed these concerns.

Dedicated to improving and protecting the lives of children, the Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania was a pioneer in child welfare and advocacy. In 2008, it merged with the Philadelphia Society for Services to Children and formed Turning Points for Children, an organization dedicated to reducing child abuse and improving the lives of over nine thousand children and their caregivers. Like its predecessor, Turning Points for Children focused on providing holistic family-center programs in the interest of building community relations in the region.

Holly Caldwell received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Delaware, where she wrote her dissertation on the medicalization of deafness and deaf education reform at Mexico’s Escuela Nacional de Sordomudos (National School for Deaf-Mutes). She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College and has also taught at Susquehanna University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Like many American cities, Philadelphia experienced astonishing growth after the Civil War in terms of population, geographic expanse, and wealth. As the city grew into an industrial powerhouse, every year larger portions of the municipal budget were pledged to infrastructure for the fast-growing metropolis: street paving, gas and water mains, sewers, docks, schools, hospitals, public transportation, and large-scale civic projects. Philadelphia’s expansive spirit was symbolized by the new Public Buildings, or City Hall, at Broad and Market Streets. When its cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1874, Philadelphia City Hall was projected to become the tallest building and most luxurious municipal structure in the world.

This period also saw the emergence in Philadelphia of an omnipotent Republican machine known as the Organization, which controlled nearly every elected and appointed political office. Philadelphia became a one-party city: between 1891 and 1915, the Democratic vote withered from 39 percent to less than 4 percent. The Organization devoted itself to maintaining its power base and enriching its leaders, often at the expense of Philadelphia taxpayers. More than 90 percent of city employees were forced to make illegal “voluntary contributions” to the Organization, adding more than $3 million to its coffers between 1903 and 1913. In 1904, journalist Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) pronounced Philadelphia “the worst-governed city in the country.” While “all our municipal governments are more or less bad,” Steffens conceded, “Philadelphia is simply the most corrupt and the most contented.”

Widespread Graft

Philadelphia’s new seat of government became a symbol of its entrenched corruption and the influence wielded by well-connected contractors. Thanks in part to widespread graft, construction on City Hall dragged on for three decades, while its cost spiraled from $10 million to more than $24 million. When the by then outmoded Second Empire structure was declared complete in 1901, it was dismissed by essayist Agnes Repplier (1855-1950) as “that perfect miracle of ugliness and inconvenience, that really remarkable combination of bulk and insignificance.”

Soon after its inception, the Republican Organization found powerful allies among builders willing to pay for the privilege of participating in big-budget projects like City Hall. In the 1870s, political boss David Martin (1845-1920) began to recruit Irish Catholic contractors into the Republican Party, until then a bastion of Protestantism. Israel W. Durham (1854-1909), one of Martin’s rivals, formed an alliance with John Mack (1852-1915), head of numerous paving companies and later president of the Keystone Telephone Company. Thanks to Durham, Mack’s businesses acquired municipal contracts worth $33 million.

Martin and Charles A. Porter (1839-1907) became two of the first men to straddle the worlds of private enterprise and municipal service as true contractor bosses. During the 1880s and 1890s, while Martin served in various state offices and Porter was a state senator, they joined forces with John Mack to form the “Hog Combine,” so called because “they hogged everything in sight and more.” Martin and Porter’s Vulcanite Paving Company received 888 contracts valued at over $6 million, while other companies controlled by Porter were awarded contracts worth more than $2 million. Among the projects handled by the Hog Combine were the paving of Broad Street and the construction of the East Park and Queen Lane Reservoirs.

By the early twentieth century, two political blocs run by competing “contractor kings” battled to control the Republican Organization. State Senator James P. “Sunny Jim” McNichol (1864-1917), whom historian Dennis Clark (1927-93) called “the first Irish Catholic to become a top Republican potentate in the Philadelphia firmament,” ran the northern half of the city.  McNichol’s interests included the Filbert Paving and Construction Company, which earned $3 million in city contracts between 1903 and 1911, and the Penn Reduction Company, a garbage-collection business with annual contracts in excess of $500,000. His Keystone State Construction Company handled contracts for the Market Street Subway, the Torresdale water filtration plant, and the Northeast Boulevard, Philadelphia’s first major parkway. Later renamed the Roosevelt Boulevard after Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), the parkway’s original straight route was remapped to zigzag through land parcels acquired by Organization members, who sold them to the city at exorbitant markups. After McNichol was awarded a $1.4 million contract to build the boulevard, reform politician Rudolph Blankenburg (1843-1918) dubbed the enterprise the “McNichol Boodle-vard.”

A Trio of Vare Brothers

South of Market Street, the three Vare brothers ruled: George (1859-1908), Edwin (1862-1922), and William (1867-1934).  Born to a poor family in the marshy wasteland known as the “Neck,” the “Dukes of South Philadelphia” developed a lucrative trash collection business, later expanding into street cleaning and contracting. Protégés of First Ward leader Amos Slack (1840-1899), the Vares used their political contacts to collect over $18 million from fifty-eight city contracts between 1888 and 1911.

The Vares invested their profits in building an unstoppable political machine in South Philadelphia, using their clout to win more contracts and earn more money. Their sway increased significantly when voters elected George to the State Legislature in 189o and to the State Senate five years later. When George died suddenly in 1908, Ed assumed his Senate seat. Bill rose from the Philadelphia Select Council to become U.S. congressman for Philadelphia’s First District, which encompassed his home district of South Philadelphia. In the years before World War I, Vare-controlled men headed most of the important City Council committees, including Finance, Highways, and Street Cleaning.

In theory, the McNichol and Vare blocs agreed to divide the city at Market Street to ensure peace within the “contractor combine.” In practice, the two camps waged a bloody struggle for control of the Republican City Committee, composed of the party leaders of the city’s forty-eight political wards.  The upper hand in the ongoing battle was held by Boies Penrose (1860-1921), who represented Pennsylvania’s corporate interests in the U.S. Senate for twenty-five years. While Penrose usually favored McNichol, he borrowed significant sums from the Vares, paying them back by arranging private contracts with major corporations.

The deaths of McNichol, Penrose, and Edwin Vare between 1917 and 1922 left William S. Vare as the undisputed boss of Philadelphia. During the 1920s, he commanded more political power than any other single Philadelphian before or since. A Senate investigation in 1926 concluded that thanks to Vare’s army of election “watchers,” the average Philadelphia voter had a one-in-eight chance of having his ballot recorded accurately on Election Day. One commentator compared Vare to the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), with the distinction that the citizens of Rome enjoyed clean water, clean streets, and efficient transportation, unlike the citizens of Philadelphia.

Lavish Public Works Program

When Vare’s protégé, Receiver of Taxes W. Freeland Kendrick (1874-1953), took office as mayor in 1924, he launched a lavish program of public works, reversing the austerity measures of his predecessor J. Hampton Moore (1864-1950). Ground was broken for the Broad Street Subway, expanding the city’s mass transit system beyond the Market-Frankford line. Work stepped up on the Delaware River Bridge, the Free Library, and the Museum of Art, projects that had languished under Moore. The city allocated funds to rebuild Philadelphia General Hospital, to construct a new hospital complex at Byberry, and to erect a City Hall Annex. Millions of dollars were devoted to a Sesquicentennial International Exposition to mark the country’s 150^th anniversary in 1926, a dismal failure that attracted half the visitors of the 1876 Centennial.

William Vare benefited directly and indirectly from much of this largesse. The Vare Construction Company received eleven major contracts totaling more than $1.4 million during the Kendrick administration, including work on the Broad Street Subway, the Museum of Art, and the Municipal Stadium. Vare used his influence to have the Sesquicentennial Exposition relocated from Center City to South Philadelphia, effectively bankrupting the fair but ensuring that his constituents would receive millions of dollars’ worth of jobs and infrastructural improvements.

In 1926, William S. Vare ran as the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Pennsylvania, winning by a significant margin. Alarmed by Vare’s reputation as a corrupt urban boss and his plans to modify Prohibition by permitting the sale of beer and wine, the U.S. Senate refused to seat him until it had investigated the conduct and financing of his campaign. Under the stress of the Senate inquiry, in August 1928 Vare suffered a massive stroke that left him partially paralyzed. After deliberating for more than three years, the Senate voted in December 1929 to deny Vare his seat. Although Vare remained the nominal head of the Republican Organization in Philadelphia until shortly before his death in 1934, his political dominance effectively ended with the Senate rejection.

The Great Depression, with its devastating impact on jobs, municipal expenditures, and construction, marked the end of the golden age of the contractor boss. As the Depression abated, a new generation of influential contractors emerged in Philadelphia, but none dominated the political landscape as had McNichol or the Vares. Many of the later contractor bosses were Democratic and Irish Catholic, reflecting the city’s changing demographics: John B. Kelly Sr. (1889–1960), Matthew H. McCloskey (1893–1973), and John McShain (1896–1989).

While the era of the contractor kings had passed, Philadelphia remained in many ways their creation. The expansionist legacy of the contractor bosses remained manifest in such physical landmarks as City Hall, Roosevelt Boulevard, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Market-Frankford Subway-Elevated Line, and Benjamin Franklin Bridge. This durable infrastructure served as a testament to a body of men who bent the political will of a major American city to accommodate their own personal and professional interests.

Thomas H. Keels is a local historian and the author or coauthor of six books on Philadelphia, including Forgotten Philadelphia: Lost Architecture of the Quaker City (Temple University Press, 2007).  His latest work, Sesqui! Greed, Graft, and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926, a study of the ill-fated Sesquicentennial International Exposition, will be published by Temple in early 2017. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Country clubs originated in the 1890s as elite, family-oriented havens usually emphasizing golf, but they have never been just about golf or even sports. Clubs fostered sportsmanship, appropriate deportment, and social development while also providing opportunities for exercise. A “golden age” of country clubs lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the number of clubs grew again in the prosperous decades after World War II and with the continuing suburban boom of the late twentieth century. As clubs proliferated and served a greater variety of members, they reflected the changing culture and economic importance of leisure activities in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The “country club movement,” as social commentators termed it, began in the 1890s as “golf mania” swept the country. During the economic depression that occurred in the 1890s, many privileged men turned to golf as a less expensive alternative to yachting, polo, and hunting. With suburbanization and an increasing emphasis on leisure, sporting activities also gained popularity among the middle class. Some contemporary writers viewed the desire of women to play sports as the most significant factor in the proliferation of country clubs, which, unlike earlier men’s clubs, were family-oriented.

Forerunners of the modern country club included men’s city clubs, union leagues, urban athletic clubs, and resort casinos (clubhouses). In Philadelphia, the big four cricket clubs were the first four country clubs. At one time Philadelphia had as many as one hundred cricket clubs, evidence of the appeal of the sport to all social classes, but members of the Philadelphia (established 1854), Germantown (est. 1864), Merion (est. 1865), and Belmont (1874-1914) cricket clubs enjoyed large clubhouses and spacious lawns. Dining rooms and verandas provided spaces for socializing and for family members to watch matches. The cricket clubs incorporated other sports activities, such as croquet, bowling, and tennis, all played by women as well as men. Members at three of these clubs were also attracted to golf. In 1895, the Philadelphia Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill opened a nine-hole golf course. Golf enthusiasts at the Merion Cricket Club began playing golf the following year and the Aronimink Golf Club (est. 1900), later relocated to Newtown Square, Delaware County, grew out of the Belmont Cricket Club in southwest Philadelphia.

Early Clubs With Golf

Even before members of cricket clubs became golf enthusiasts, several other country clubs included golf. In 1890, socially prominent Philadelphians including John C. Bullitt (1824-1902) and E. T. Stotesbury (1849-1938) founded the first non-cricket-centered country club in the region, the Philadelphia Country Club (est. 1890) on City Avenue. They stressed that members should be able to enjoy “recreation and pleasure without encountering any person or anything which will in the least degree be inconsistent with good behavior or good manners.” Most of the founders were heads of families who desired a conveniently located family club where they, their wives, and children could enjoy respite from the city. Liveried coachmen met trains from Center City to bring members to the club.

Following the pattern of most early clubs, which leased or purchased country estates or farms and adapted existing residences for new uses, the Philadelphia Country Club purchased “Steinberg,” the former country estate of the Duhring family, located within city limits adjacent to Fairmount Park. Initially a club for riding, driving, and polo, two years after its founding the Philadelphia Country Club added a nine-hole golf course, with two holes on land leased from Fairmount Park. The popularity of golf soon meant the course was insufficient and in 1924 the club purchased property on Spring Mill Road in Gladwyne, which could “be reached by automobile in 30 or 35 minutes from City Hall,” the club announced.

After the founding of the Philadelphia Country Club, the vicinity near City Avenue became the location of several more clubs, including the Bala Golf Club (est. 1893) on Belmont Avenue within the city and the Overbrook Golf Club (est. 1900) just outside the city on property that later became the site of Lankenau Hospital. Scores of new country clubs opened throughout the Philadelphia region in the years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. The Harper’s Official Golf Guide of 1901 listed about forty clubs in the Philadelphia area. Many affiliated with the Golf Association of Philadelphia (GAP), which in 1897 became the first regional golf association in the country. Over time, member clubs extended from Lancaster to Scranton in Pennsylvania, from Princeton to Cape May in New Jersey, and to New Castle County, Delaware. By 2015, the GAP had 151 member clubs in the region, which also hosted additional nonmember country clubs. Just four weeks after the founding of the GAP, the Women’s Golf Association of Philadelphia became another first of its kind, testifying to the enthusiasm of many women for sporting activities.

Clubs Outside the City

Although many early country clubs were established within the city of Philadelphia, most eventually moved farther from Center City because landowners would not renew leases, adjacent land could not be obtained for extending golf courses, new roads crossed through the courses, or facilities became overcrowded by expanding membership. Relocating outside the city also reflected suburban migration during the twentieth century. For instance, by the time the Philadelphia Country Club sold its Bala property in the 1950s and enhanced its Gladwyne facilities, the majority of members no longer lived in Philadelphia but in surrounding Main Line suburbs.

Country clubs quickly became popular in counties surrounding Philadelphia as more people took up golf, tennis, and swimming and desired more places to socialize. Often, locals introduced to golf while traveling abroad—particularly to France, Britain, and Bermuda—returned to the United States to establish clubs. Eleanor Reed Butler (1871-1945) saw golf played in France and returned home to Media to help organize the Springhaven Country Club (est. 1896), the first club in Delaware County. Women frequently played golf and helped organize clubs, but Springhaven was unique because a woman, Ida Dixon (1854-1916), contributed to the design of the course.

Philadelphians also established clubs in New Jersey. The Burlington County town of Riverton, founded in the 1850s by a group of Philadelphia merchants as a summer retreat, by the end of the century had a growing number of year-round residents who desired to play golf. The Riverton Country Club (est. 1900) became the first in New Jersey to join the Golf Association of Philadelphia. Philadelphians looking for a course offering a better climate for  winter golf but tired of taking the train to play at the Country Club of Atlantic City when snow was on the ground in Philadelphia founded the Pine Valley Golf Club (est. 1913) in Camden County, hoping that weather conditions would provide more opportunity for winter play. Some of Philadelphia’s sporting aristocracy, including Connie Mack (1862-1956), became early members. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the club maintained an elite, all-male membership and a course ranked by some authorities as the best in the world.

Blue Laws vs. Sunday Golf

Social customs and laws sometimes restricted club activities in early years. Blue laws in many states forbade sports on Sundays. In New Jersey, as in other states, though, such restrictions became unpopular and not all communities enforced these laws locally. When members of the Haddon Country Club (est. 1896) in Haddonfield became frustrated with strict local enforcement of blue laws there, a group founded the Tavistock Country Club (est. 1920) in what became the new Borough of Tavistock, which did not intend to enforce a ban on Sunday golf and sports. The Haddon Club folded two years later.

Even before 1920s prohibition of alcohol, some clubs, such as the Riverton Country Club, banned drinking for religious reasons and many others did so to preserve the family atmosphere that made these clubs different from men’s clubs or even many single-sport clubs, such as cricket, polo, or hunt clubs. Membership categories even in the earliest years included both individual and family categories, and some clubs offered junior as well as social-only memberships. Where women could join as members, they typically paid lower entrance or annual fees (and their playing times often were limited to times when working men would not be using the facilities). In return for required fees, country clubs offered variety of sporting facilities; in early years croquet, bowling, archery, billiards, trapshooting, and even basketball and baseball were typical sports played at country clubs. Most added swimming pools, tennis courts, and squash courts for members.

As the social membership categories suggests, country clubs also provided spaces for socializing and entertainment. Theaters, ballrooms, dining rooms, men’s grille rooms, ladies’ parlors and tea rooms, a variety of sitting rooms, porches, and verandas offered ample opportunity for members to socialize and display their mastery of the club’s standards of etiquette.

Varieties of Clubs

Not all golfers liked the “country club atmosphere” of families, swimming pools, and tennis courts. Some organized golf-only clubs, such as the Sunnybrook Golf Club formed in 1914 by six members who left the Philadelphia Cricket Club. Conversely, not all country clubs offered golf. The Philadelphia Aviation Country Club in Blue Bell was founded after the 1927 trans-Atlantic flight by Charles Lindbergh (1902-74), when the idea for a chain of such country clubs across the country briefly engaged aviation enthusiasts. By 2015, only the Philadelphia club survived.

Some country clubs became the focal points of residential communities. In Montgomery County, when the Huntingdon Valley Country Club (est. 1897) moved to Upper Moreland and Abington Townships in the 1920s, the club also intended to subdivide some of the property into lots of two to five acres for members and other “desirable people.” Radley Run in Chester County, built in the 1960s, is a typical mid-century country club community. Residential communities centered on a country club continued to be popular in the early twenty-first century. One newer tract, French Creek Village in Elverson, Chester County, described itself as “the ultimate golf club community.”

While some country clubs remained havens for the elite, a handful crossed class lines to offer leisure activities to blue-collar as well as white-collar workers. The Philadelphia Electric Company baseball field in Upper Darby, Delaware County, became the McCall Field Country Club (est. 1919) when golf became more popular. The DuPont Country Club (est. 1920) in Wilmington, another successor to an earlier employee recreational facility, became a preeminent example of a country club designed to “promote social intercourse” between management and workers. In 1945, the Insurance Company of America reopened the Roxborough Country Club (est. 1925) as the Eagle Lodge Country Club. The Chester Valley Golf Club in Malvern grew out of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s employee country club (est. 1930). This club, along with another company club, the Hercules Country Club (est. 1937) in Wilmington, were the only two in the region founded during the Depression. Men’s fraternal organizations and religious groups also established country clubs that enhanced their collegiality and provided facilities for those excluded from other clubs. A group of Shriners organized the LuLu Temple Country Club (est. 1909), and Catholics dominated Torresdale-Frankford.

Exclusion and Change

Country clubs also formed in response to exclusion. Successful Jewish families, including the Gimbel and Lit families, who migrated to Oak Lane, Elkins Park, and Jenkintown in the early twentieth century established the Philmont Country Club in 1906. In the 1920s, the American Hebrew magazine listed fifty-eight country clubs in the United States owned and operated by Jewish memberships, although most of these excluded the new immigrant generation of Russian Jews. The world of sports, leisure, and social activities of most country and golf clubs remained closed to many. Country clubs reflected the racial and gender attitudes and practices of their early years, but many gradually became more inclusive.

African Americans, who long struggled to gain entrance to country clubs, played golf at public courses. Caddying at country clubs provided an avenue for learning the sport, and some clubs had a specified weekly time for caddies to play the course. This was the case with John Shippen Jr. (1879-1968), an African American/Native American, who served as the Aronimink Golf Club pro for a time in the 1890s. For his first U.S. Open in 1896, the year that the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the standard of “separate but equal” for public accommodations, Shippen had to sign up as Native American in order to play.

The 1920s, a decade of explosive growth in the number of country clubs, saw some advances for African Americans. By 1930, middle-class Black golfers had established fourteen golf clubs in the country, including the Fairview Golf Club in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s first Black golf club. In the early 1990s, the Professional Golf Association (PGA), which had barred African Americans from membership until 1961, announced that none of its tournaments would be held at country clubs that denied membership on the basis of race, religion or gender. The Aronimink Golf Club could not hold the 1993 PGA Championship because it still had an all-white membership. Since then, formerly all-white clubs such as Aronimink, Merion, and the Philadelphia Cricket Club, among others, recruited more diverse memberships.

Although women were founders and members at many clubs from the beginning, in the early twenty-first century they frequently remained barred from voting, sitting on boards of directors, holding equity interest in clubs, or eating in “men’s grille rooms.” Some clubs continued to ban female membership: In 2015, Pine Valley in New Jersey allowed women to play only at restricted times if accompanied by a male member. The practice of banning golf carts at some clubs also created barriers to access for disabled and elderly players. In other ways, however, some country clubs became forerunners in providing access to physically challenged players, for example by opening courses for outings and tournaments for blind players.

The increasing number of country and golf clubs over the twentieth century paralleled the growing importance of sport, fitness, and leisure in American life, as well as an embrace of suburban rather than urban living. Clubs provided a range of part-time and full-time employment and contributed to the region’s tourist economy by hosting tournaments. By the early decades of the twenty-first century, many more people who desired to belong to such institutions gained entrance. Because of the practice of vetting members and charging entrance and annual fees, however, early claims that country clubs represented an expanding democracy were perhaps overstated.

Anne E. Krulikowski is an Assistant Professor of History at West Chester University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia, as a seaport and the largest city in the North American colonies, hosted seamen, laborers, runaway servants, and transients, the footloose men most likely to be involved in crime and to patronize the vice trades. Taverns, brothels, and gambling dens dotted the walking city that relied on night watchmen to look out for fire more than public safety. In the absence of what would be recognized as a police force, thieves pilfered purses from the unwary and burgled goods from warehouses and docks, and feared only the “hue and cry” that might lead a posse of pursuers to stop and beat them. Those caught and brought to trial faced a penal code that had eliminated English practices of whipping, branding, cropping body parts, and hanging for most crimes, but Pennsylvania’s penal code reverted to these punishments in 1718, and they remained in effect until the adoption of a new state constitution after the Revolution in a largely futile attempt to stem crime and disorder.

Violence (as reflected in indictments for murder, the most reliably counted form of crime) remained rare in Philadelphia until the middle of the eighteenth century. When people killed, they murdered intimates—neighbors and friends—a pattern that holds true into the present. Men killed women amid allegations of infidelity or in response to challenges to patriarchal authority. Irritations with friends or neighbors sometimes took a violent turn, especially when fueled by drink, and an unlucky thrust with a knife or baling hook might send one man to the grave, the other to the gallows. Masters killed their servants or apprentices as murder extended downward in the social order, but rarely the reverse.  Men committed about 90 percent of murders, in a pattern that characterizes modern societies as well.

Among women, infanticide was the most common form of homicide as women had few ways to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Charges were rare, but those charged faced significant legal hurdles. Unlike those accused of murder, who were presumed innocent until proven otherwise, women charged with infanticide faced the presumption that an infant was born alive and a defense of stillbirth had to be supported by at least one witness. Nonetheless, few women were convicted as juries were loathe to find desperate young women guilty.

Violence increased in Philadelphia in the decade or so before the American Revolution, before subsiding again in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Loss of faith in the king, a government unwilling to redress grievances, sharp fractures in the ruling elite, and an increasingly diverse society disrupted the political and social hierarchy that had tamped down violence. Murder climbed steadily—indictments for murder more than doubled from 3 per 100,000 during the 1750s to 7 per 100,000 in the 1760s—and remained high in the Revolutionary era. While some acts were clearly political attacks on supposed loyalists or Tories, most followed the usual pattern of neighborhood and family strife. Criminal justice proceedings were temporarily disrupted during the Revolution, and it is likely that the pervasive political violence loosened normal constraints on behavior.

Poverty and Crime

A pattern of declining murder rates during periods of political consensus and faith in government (and rising rates when these conditions changed) appeared early in the nation’s history. The fellow-feeling engendered by the formation of a new, more democratic government, a revised criminal code that limited corporal punishments, and the ratification of the Constitution sent murder rates plunging in post-Revolutionary Philadelphia, with fewer than 1 indictment per 100,000 in the 1780s and 1790s. However, rising inequality in the city meant other forms of crime persisted: The combination of wealthy travelers and a countryside in which to hide provided an ideal combination for robbery, which plagued the country roads near Philadelphia, while growing affluence provided an incentive for larceny and burglary.

African Americans and Irish-born immigrants each comprised about a third of those charged with crime in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The overrepresentation of Black and Irish people indicated both prejudice—the expectation that these groups would fill the jail and the poorhouse—as well as the activities of very poor people. The most common crimes, the theft of clothing, food, or household items pilfered by servants, were clearly the acts of individuals scrabbling for survival.

In the early nineteenth century, the invention of new technologies, especially the power loom that mechanized the work of artisans in Britain, forced households into poverty and sent streams of immigrants across the ocean to Philadelphia, where they faced ruinous competition and neighborhood strife. In the 1830s and 1840s battles between Irish Catholics and Protestant Orangemen, immigrants and nativists, workers and employers, or between rival volunteer fire companies, saw buildings and churches set ablaze while streets reverberated with the sounds of musketry and even cannon fire. Only poor marksmanship and unfamiliarity with weapons kept casualties low. The Philadelphia sheriff called on citizen posses to suppress disorder, but on a number of occasions only the militia managed to restore peace to the city.

Gangs such as the Rats, the Killers, and the Flayers reigned in Moyamensing and Southwark, just across South Street and outside of Philadelphia’s borders. While these gangs included petty criminals, their principal goals were more social than economic. Gang members supported volunteer fire companies, supplying the manpower to pull engines through the streets and to battle rival companies for access to water supplies. On election day, gangs provided strong-arm support for getting out the vote or preventing others from voting, services that gained them income and some immunity from criminal prosecution. And on a day-to-day basis, they patrolled neighborhood boundaries against outsiders, particularly African Americans. In the five major race riots that occurred between 1829 and 1849, gangs led white rioters in attacking African Americans and looting and burning Black residences.

Some long-lived gangs, such as the Schuylkill Rangers (c. 25 years), drawn from an Irish immigrant community on the banks of the Schuylkill River, began by resisting nativist and anti-Catholic attackers, but evolved into a more organized form of criminality. They became river pirates, demanding a tax from barges heading to the city, robbing the trade carried across the river at nearby Gray’s Ferry, and raiding wharfs and warehouses.

Responding to Crime

Philadelphians responded by organizing new mechanisms of social control. Eastern State Penitentiary (1829), the nation’s first, loomed ominously above the city as a warning that miscreants could count on years of solitary confinement. Patrolmen and inspectors were added to the constables and night watch (1833), although criminals could still escape arrest by crossing a street to another township. The consolidation of Philadelphia’s political boundaries, the expansion of the police, and charter reform (all in 1854) replaced the different township jurisdictions and the ineffectual committee structures dependent on citizen volunteers. Finally, centralized control (1855) over fire companies (and professionalization in 1871) eliminated the disorder involved in firefighting.

Better policing and new institutions found their match, however, in more organized crime. Burglars raided shops and warehouses with sets of skeleton keys designed to pick different types of locks and then disposed of their booty to fences, who specialized in specific types of goods.  Safecrackers had a variety of drills for iron and eventually steel-plated safes. Counterfeiters and forgers enjoyed the most lucrative returns in an age of international trade and no exclusive national currency, copying different states’ bank notes and merchants’ letters of credit, while con men advertised in newspapers to sell counterfeit currency to gullible businessmen, who received a package of green cut paper (hence the “green goods swindle”) instead. Gamblers introduced English bookmaking and assumed control over betting on (and fixing) sports.  Meanwhile, corrupt police detectives developed a scheme of recovering stolen goods and then splitting a reward from their owner with a cooperating thief.

Despite riots and disorder, homicides remained relatively rare in the city until the 1850s. The collapse of political consensus over westward expansion and slavery and continued ethnic tensions drove murders upward, while the introduction of Samuel Colt’s concealable revolver made murder easier than before. Indictments for murder in 1853-59 climbed to 4 per 100,000, the highest rate since the founding of the nation. Revolvers continued to proliferate after the Civil War, and the proportion of homicides committed with handguns increased. Overall, however, homicide indictments declined in the late nineteenth century, staying below 3 per 100,000 in the 1880s and 1890s even as depressions and labor strife disrupted society.

The decline in homicide does not reflect the large number of infant killings each year for which no one was ever charged. Between 1861 and 1901 an average of 55 infants were found dead outdoors or drowned in outhouses each year, while physicians and public authorities estimated several hundred more died of neglect or abuse, but with no definitive sign of foul play.  Single mothers seeking to hide a birth and parents unable to manage another child resorted to infanticide, abandonment, and depositing newborns at “baby farms,” where death rates were high but intent to kill impossible to prove.

The Vice Trade

Prostitution remained an important source of employment for women whose wages as seamstresses, waitresses, domestics, and even department store clerks were rarely enough to support them. While some women had “friends” who helped support them, others relied exclusively on prostitution. Vice districts were a lucrative and well-advertised component of the city’s mainstream economy and employed many hundreds of women. By the 1890s, two sizable vice districts had emerged to bracket Philadelphia’s downtown, one along South Street, the other north of Market Street, between Ninth and Eleventh Streets.

The area north of Market, known as the “tenderloin,” was the city’s primary entertainment district with cabarets, theaters, dance halls, and opium dens. White, native-born women served an upper-class clientele of businessmen and revelers from the entertainment spots nearby who used published visitors’ guides that evaluated the quality of sex services. There were an estimated 300 brothels in the tenderloin in addition to houses of assignation (where women could take the men they met on the street or in a dance hall), as landlords broke up the large houses in the neighborhood into single rooms that catered to transients—and their guests.

Brothels operated openly by bribing the police, who in turn paid off the ward leaders responsible for their appointment to the force. Despite occasional clean-up efforts, Philadelphia’s tenderloin only came under sustained enforcement pressure during World War I, when prostitution was outlawed within a five-mile radius of a military training camp, and municipal authorities across the nation were pressed to close down open vice districts.  Some commercial sex migrated to Market Street, where women trolled for soldiers and sailors on the street.  Since Market Street hosted movie theaters, restaurants, and most of the city’s department stores, it was a less sexualized commercial zone than the tenderloin, and streetwalkers blended more easily into the flow of pedestrians.

The city’s second vice district ran along South Street and coincided with the major area of African American settlement, to the consternation of W.E.B. Du Bois, who in The Philadelphia Negro (1899) deplored its demoralizing association with the neighborhood. African American prostitutes catered to the transient merchant seamen and dockworkers from the nearby commercial wharves. In Philadelphia’s Black population, women outnumbered men—the reverse of the immigrant white communities that supplied their customers. Enforcement pressures were fewer than in the tenderloin, since the area was less obviously a commercial center, and because white reformers, unlike Du Bois, were indifferent to the presence of vice in a Black neighborhood.

The most obvious social cost of coexisting with the vice trade was the violence associated with it. The homicide rate among African Americans ranged from 6.4 indictments per 100,000 in the 1860s to 11.4 in the 1890s, about five times the city rate. Illegal entrepreneurs required some means of protection, since they could not rely on police, but also the history of white attacks on African Americans may have been an incentive for young men to carry weapons. As a result, the commonplace disagreements that whites settled with fists and clubs took on a more deadly tone among armed African Americans.

Crime as Big Business

The same technologies that supported business, real estate, and industrial development in the city and surrounding region, and allowed the rapid transmission of information, also meant that professional criminals could better organize their trade. Railroads and intercity streetcar service spread settlement into the Main Line and beyond, as wealthy Philadelphians escaped the tenements and factories that crowded the city.  They found to their dismay that, while other crimes were rare, rings of professional burglars followed the money. Con men could employ a dozen or more individuals working fake wire services and purporting to share tips on stock transactions. And prostitutes moved from city to city as part of a circuit similar to the ones followed by entertainers and vaudeville performers. But it was Prohibition that really turned organized crime into big business.

The scope of illegal enterprise changed with the managerial tasks of making, importing, and distributing illegal liquor. In Philadelphia and South Jersey, Jews (with Italians as secondary partners) dominated the bootlegging trade and vertically integrated their industry from supply to retail while forging alliances with other gangsters both nationally and internationally. Oceangoing vessels brought Canadian whiskey into Atlantic City from where it was distributed up and down the East Coast, and beer from South Jersey breweries quenched thirsts throughout the mid-Atlantic region. These same international trade routes and associations formed the basis for the eventual importation and distribution of heroin.

The partnership between Jews and Italians continued well after the end of Prohibition. When Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver brought his investigatory committee to Philadelphia in 1950-51, he found the familiar pattern of gambling, loan-sharking, labor racketeering, and police payoffs. Kefauver’s committee focused on Jewish organized crime, but the aging gangsters dragged reluctantly before the television cameras were well on their way to retirement, prison, or death. It was Angelo Bruno (1910-80), the “Quiet Don,” who would become the face of a new generation of mobsters.

Not the first Mafia don in Philadelphia but perhaps the most significant, Bruno became the head of the Philadelphia-South Jersey mob in 1959 and managed the ascent of Italian-dominated organized crime.  Under Bruno, loan-sharking and gambling remained central money-making enterprises, and the opening of casino gambling in Atlantic City in the late 1970s offered additional revenue through mob control of key construction and hotel services unions. However, Philadelphia’s Mafia quickly burned itself out.  Battles over Atlantic City revenue and impatience with Bruno’s conservative leadership led to his assassination in 1980. Chaos followed as murderous, but largely incompetent, mob bosses left a trail of bodies, with lengthy prison terms for the survivors.

Internecine warfare among Italian mobsters provided openings for others. The Black Mafia, organized by former members of the Twentieth and Carpenter Street Gang, began by extorting criminals in its South Philadelphia neighborhood. By the early 1970s, the group had expanded into heroin dealing throughout the city, with connections to New York importer Frank “Black Caesar” Matthews, and eventually became the extortion wing of the Nation of Islam’s Mosque 12. Younger gangsters formed the Junior Black Mafia, and gangs with roots in Jamaica opened new drug-importing routes, while Asian and Russian groups followed the time-honored tradition of extorting and robbing their fellow immigrants.

Murder in the Twentieth-Century City

The homicide rate remained relatively low in the middle decades of the twentieth century. During the Great Depression everyone shared in a common misery and hoped that Franklin Roosevelt would save American capitalism, while during World War II, the populace united behind the war effort and the military absorbed the young men most likely to commit murder (and other crime). The homicide rate spiked immediately after the war, as war-damaged young men returned home, but the increase was only temporary. A strong economy, spurred by Cold War-related defense spending and government subsidies for the new, predominantly white suburbs, meant high wages while an increase in marriage and family formation kept young men from street corners and taverns. Homicide among whites hovered around 2 per 100,000 in Philadelphia into the early 1960s. Other forms of crime (excluding the prostitution, gambling, and loan-sharking promoted by organized crime) also remained fairly low during this period.

African Americans, for all intents and purposes, lived in a different city. The homicide rate for African Americans in the early 1950s was 22.5 per 100,000. African Americans from the South flooded into a city that was more segregated than at any point in the past, and migrants brought with them a well-founded mistrust of police and criminal justice. People hustled to make up for inadequate incomes and high city prices, and these activities, without the police protection provided to white organized crime, exposed African American illegal entrepreneurs to the predation of stick-up men. As in the nineteenth century, African Americans venturing into public spaces carried weapons for self-protection, and murders among acquaintances were the most common form of homicide.

The worlds of white and Black Philadelphia slowly converged during the late 1960s, as a collapsing economy and growing heroin use destroyed working-class neighborhoods. Heroin users fueled a dramatic increase in burglary, larceny, and robbery, which largely unskilled and uneducated young men used to support their habits. White flight, already apparent in the 1950s in response to African American migration and the lure of the suburbs, accelerated in the 1960s as the crime rate rose and abandoned factories drained the value out of nearby row houses. Philadelphia’s homicide rate increased by 300 percent between 1965 and 1974, the same decade the city lost about 40 percent of its industrial jobs. Racial tension, job loss, and increased gun ownership resulted in frayed personal relations and a spiraling homicide rate.  As in previous decades, these tensions were internalized: Black people murdered Black people and whites murdered whites with most victims the closest at hand—friends and family.

These trends were not limited to Philadelphia. In nearby Camden, New York Shipbuilding, Campbell Soup, and RCA all closed or decamped for locales with cheaper, nonunionized labor, and the city lost about half of its industrial base between 1960 and 1970. Corporate board decisions to gut Camden’s economy trapped African Americans in place, while those whites who were able moved to burgeoning suburban Camden County. The change in the homicide rate was startling; a modest 3.4 homicides per 100,000 in 1960 became 26.3 in 1970 and 31.9 in 1980 as the underground economy replaced the world of legitimate work.

The Underground Economy

With a virtual collapse of the job market for unskilled labor, the underground economy became the only economy in sections of Philadelphia, Camden, and Chester. Shifts in the drug trade meant the Philadelphia region had some of the purest heroin and least expensive cocaine in the nation. The arrival of crack cocaine during the 1980s and disputes over drug-selling turf settled with increasingly powerful semiautomatic weapons sent murder to new heights. Camden (an average of 50.3 homicides per 100,000) and Chester (an average of 51.3) had among the nation’s highest homicide rates during most of the 2000s, and Philadelphia started the new century as the city with the highest homicide rate (22.5 per 100,000) among the nation’s ten largest cities. Not only do the poorest cities have the highest homicide rates, but the poorest neighborhoods within these cities concentrate the effects of poverty and the violence associated with the underground economy.

Since its founding, Philadelphia has been a source for illegal, but highly desirable, goods and services for the region.  Their provision rested on the exploitation of the poor—women who worked as prostitutes, and men who organized gambling and sold illegal liquor and drugs to wealthier consumers.  However, for most of the region’s history, trends in murder moved along a separate trajectory from trends in vice, other crime, and disorder.  In the late twentieth century, these trends merged as the underground economy became more central to the economic fortunes of the inner city, the inner city itself became more isolated from the mainstream economy, and new, high-powered weapons proliferated.  One thing is clear from this history:  The evolution of crime and violence has paralleled developments in the urban economy over three centuries, and solving these problems depends on a larger resurrection of urban economic fortunes.

Eric C. Schneider, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, has written three books on American urban history and is currently working on a history of murder in Philadelphia since 1940. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Like the English assemblies it mimicked, Philadelphia’s eighteenth-century assemblies included both formal dances like the minuet and more boisterous “country dances.” Early assemblies also provided entertainment for those inclined not to dance, in the form of card games, and served light fare and drinks, including alcoholic punch. In the first season, the Assemblies were held at Hamilton’s Store or Warehouse on the wharf at Water Street. This location was symbolically fitting and convenient, near the area between Pine and Market Streets where Philadelphia’s leading citizens then lived. It was also near the Delaware River, Philadelphia’s connection to the Atlantic World and the epicenter of the port city’s enviable commercial success.

From the beginning, to attend one either had to be a subscriber (a person invited to be a member who paid a fee for the privilege of attending) or sponsored by a subscriber. The first year each of the fifty-nine subscribers paid a mere forty shillings for the privilege. Despite this initial low cost, it was an extremely elite institution. Early subscribers included members of the Burd, Chew, Hamilton, Inglis, McCall, Mifflin, Penn, Peters, Plumsted, Powel, Shippen, Tilghman, Wallace, and Willing families. Although prominent Jewish families like the Franks and Levys also attended—reflecting Philadelphia’s religious diversity—the Society of Friends frowned on dancing, so leading Quaker families like the Logans, Morrises, Norrises, and Pembertons did not.

Sponsored Guests Only

Regardless of one’s wealth or social standing, it was never possible simply to appear at the Assemblies unsponsored. At times the invited guests were outsiders to the local social scene, however. In 1755, a group of Mohawk Indians joined the Assembly and performed a “scalping dance”; in 1768 the presence of the British Duchess of Gordon (Jane Gordon, c. 1748-1812) caused a stir. For outsiders and locals alike, the Assembly remained a “by invitation only” event throughout its history. At times, this exclusivity invited derision. For example, French refugee Moreau de St. Méry (1750-1819), no doubt chagrined at his own inability to secure an invitation in 1795, observed that there was considerable “snobbery in Philadelphia, where classes are sharply divided. This is particularly noticeable at balls.”

Once Philadelphia’s City Tavern was constructed at Second and Walnut Streets in 1773, the Assemblies were held there. Later, the event moved to Oeller’s Hotel, built at Sixth and Walnut Streets in 1791. At both sites, by day men met to talk business and politics. On the nights when Assemblies were held, however, women played important roles as dancers and arbiters of taste and behavior as they flaunted their genteel knowledge of formal dancing, their clothing and jewels, and, in some cases, their marriage potential.

Despite the importance of women at these events, from its beginnings, the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly operated under the aegis of a group of elite men, first called “directors” and later “managers.” These men (no doubt with the input of their wives, mothers, and sisters) laid down strict rules for the institution. In the eighteenth century, the Assemblies consisted of a series of balls held weekly throughout an entire winter social season, January through May.

The Politics of Dancing

During the American Revolution and again in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was temporarily the capital of the young United States of America, the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly took on a political cast. Loyalists (and some of uncertain political leaning) who visibly supported the British during the occupation of Philadelphia in 1777-78 found their politics made them pointedly excluded from later Assemblies. As a notice in a local newspaper announced in 1780: “Such characters are either too detestable or too insignificant for Whig society. The company of those who were so insensible of the rights of mankind and of personal honour, as to join the enemies of their county in the most gloomy moment of the Revolution, cannot be admitted.” In the 1790s, when Philadelphia was the capital, President George Washington (1732-99) was a regular at the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly, which became the place for regular celebrations of Washington’s Birthday and one of the central gathering places of the “Republican Court” (as the political and social elites who attended George and Martha Washington’s presidential levees became known in the nineteenth century).

Dancing assemblies in other cities followed the model of Philadelphia but functioned more like debutante balls. The Baltimore Bachelors Cotillion began in 1796. In Boston, an Assembly had its heyday in the 1840s, and in New York, the Patriarch’s Ball formed in 1872 and had a female equivalent in the Ladies’ Assemblies, a series of winter balls run by a committee of women.

Philadelphia’s Assemblies were temporarily halted during the Civil War, but they resumed at war’s end in another of Philadelphia’s great cultural institutions: the Academy of Music, built in 1857 at Broad and Locust Streets. Dancing classes and clubs appeared in the nineteenth century to prepare young men and women for the Assembly. Dancing classes—held fortnightly—became their own kind of ritual and tradition. Such classes had their own junior recital balls—events that Godey’s Lady’s Book, in a March 1888 article on the Philadelphia social scene, called “a sort of step-great-grandchild of the Assembly.” A separate ball, the Philadelphia Charity Ball, was founded in 1884 as a debutante ball for prominent Philadelphian families. But while the Philadelphia Assembly has never been a “debutante ball,” members have debuted there, including Main Line socialite Hope Montgomery (1904-95).

Over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the waltz replaced the minuet, and big bands were substituted for violin players, the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly continued to thrive as one of the—if not the—highlights of the Philadelphia social season. The tradition of preserving a social hierarchy around founding families continued. In 1904, the Assembly moved to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. Although another a wartime gap occurred between 1941 and 1946, the Assembly resumed after World War II ended and celebrated its bicentennial in 1948.

In the 1980s, the Assembly Ball saw a resurgence of popularity, which some observers attributed to the Reagan era’s emphasis on tradition and conservatism. The Assembly drew over 1,700 subscribers, and those who delayed in making their reservations found themselves turned down. Somewhat mysterious to the general public, the Assemblies of the early twenty-first century remained more exclusive than other “assembly balls” in cities like Cleveland, Boston, Baton Rouge, and Charleston. The Philadelphia Dancing Assembly retained a tradition of admission to membership by heredity according to the male line for a grand, annual, white-tie ball.

Zara Anishanslin is Assistant Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware and the author of Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016). Erica Lome served as research assistant for this essay. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Philadelphia Dispensary opened in rented space but was able to erect a handsome building on Fifth Street between Chestnut and Walnut in 1801. Both Quaker and non-Quaker citizens supported the enterprise, originally headed by the admired Episcopal Bishop William White (1748-1836) and administered by other prominent Philadelphians, particularly members of the Wistar/Wister family. Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) headed the first subscribers, who could each list two persons for free care. Many prominent physicians served as regular dispensary doctors or consultants. An employed apothecary prepared the pills, tinctures, salves, and the like, which almost all patients received: the name “dispensary” well fit the function. The Philadelphia Dispensary also offered  inoculation against smallpox. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the dispensary cared for large numbers of African Americans, and then Irish following their increasing immigration in midcentury.

Overwhelmed with clientele, the Philadelphia Dispensary in 1816 made loans to support the founding of the Northern Dispensary, serving the Northern Liberties into Kensington, and the Southern Dispensary (chartered in 1817) for Southwark, Moyamensing, and Passyunk. These functioned very much like the parent institution. Eventually, dispensaries could be found in the various townships and neighborhoods. For example, the Germantown Dispensary (later Germantown Dispensary and Hospital) opened modestly in one room in 1864, an initiative of the prominent physician James. E. Rhoads (1828-94). The Camden City Dispensary was founded in 1866, with members of New Jersey’s prominent Cooper family enrolling as “life members” (subscribers). Norristown Hospital and Dispensary was among facilities in the region to offer  both inpatient and outpatient services; founded in 1889, it soon changed its name to Charity Hospital, and later Montgomery Hospital.

Specialty Dispensaries

The evolution of Philadelphia’s various dispensaries reflected changes in the region’s population and in medicine. The Southern Dispensary in Philadelphia, for example, saw increasing numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy as well as African American migrants from the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the growth of specialization in medicine, specialty dispensaries arose for skin diseases, eye and ear problems, pediatrics, and for the ubiquitous and deadly tuberculosis. The older dispensaries organized their clinics by categories of disease. Nonetheless, the major dispensaries of Philadelphia remained mainstays of outpatient medicine for ailments such as coughs and catarrhs (colds), “rheumatism,” dyspepsia, and diarrhea and earaches among children. Dispensaries in industrial areas also looked after cuts, burns, and various injuries not needing hospitalization or major operations.

Something like a dispensary mania surged in the second half of the nineteenth century. The strong presence of the alternative therapeutic practice homeopathy in the city led to homeopathic dispensaries. The House of Industry and the College Settlement also offered dispensaries. Jewish anarchist physicians opened their Mt. Sinai Dispensary at 236 Pine Street in 1900. The major hospitals spawned dispensaries, as did some of the medical schools.

Medical education had played a major role at dispensaries from the beginning, since young doctors used them to gain experience. Alumnae of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania founded an outpost, the Barton Dispensary (named for a founder), on Third Street in South Philadelphia in 1895; it later moved, when the college did, to East Falls. The “Medical Society for Self-Supporting Women” for some years in the late 1880s conducted an evening dispensary for working women, with women physicians as staff.  In 1883 surgeon John B. Roberts (1852-1924) and others opened the Philadelphia Polyclinic and College for Graduates in Medicine at Thirteenth and Locust Streets. This “short course” school for those already holding the M.D. aimed at providing practical experience sometimes lacking in conventional medical schools. Instruction depended largely on the institution’s dispensary practice, although later, at Lombard Street between Eighteenth and Nineteenth, it added a hospital (later known as Graduate Hospital).  While many Philadelphia physicians practiced at a dispensary sometime in their careers, and some even founded one, other physicians thought the proliferation was getting out of hand. They suspected that persons capable of paying a fee to a private practitioner nonetheless would seek care at a dispensary–what was referred to as “dispensary abuse” or more broadly, “charity abuse.” This tension arose in other cities as well.

Clinics Evolve

Over the course of the twentieth century, other forms of free clinics gradually replaced dispensaries. A 1929 report on medical facilities in Philadelphia listed seventy-one dispensaries, almost all of them outpatient practices of hospitals, medical schools, or other organizations. Only the Northern Dispensary and the Southern survived as independent entities. The original Philadelphia Dispensary had merged with the outpatient services of Pennsylvania Hospital in 1922. By the 1940s, health clinics conducted by the Philadelphia Department of Health assumed some of the work once done by the city’s dispensaries. Outpatient departments of hospitals and medical schools expanded (and eventually could gain reimbursement with the advent of Medicare and Medicaid in 1966). Nonprofit agencies such as the Public Health Management Corporation also opened free-standing clinics, including the Mary Howard Health Center, managed by nurses and serving Philadelphia’s homeless population. Into the 1980s and 1990s, community-minded medical students and faculty physicians at Hahnemann Medical College and the Medical College of Pennsylvania (the former Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, coeducational as of 1970) reinvented the free neighborhood night clinic. Surprisingly, the term “dispensary” resurfaced in 2017 with a novel connotation—the place to go for medical marijuana.

Philadelphia’s dispensaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the nation’s first such institution, served basic health needs of the poor, particularly first-generation immigrants, though their educational function may have been at times exploitive. Various free or low-cost clinics continued to operate in the early twenty-first century, demonstrating a persistent need despite the availability of health insurance and the federal Medicare, and Medicaid programs.

Steven J. Peitzman is Professor of Medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine. His historical work includes the book  A New and Untried Course: Woman’s Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850–1998 (Rutgers University Press, 2000) and articles about medicine and medical education in Philadelphia and Germantown. (Author information current at time of publication.)