Historic Philadelphia

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On November 11, 1918, an armistice was
announced ending hostilities in World War
I. Broad Street below City Hall was wall to
wall from morning to night with dancing,
singing celebrators, defying the influenza
epidemic that had been raging since
September 18. There were 47,094 flu cases
reported in the city in nine weeks, and some
thirteen thousand deaths. Overwhelmed
cemeteries resorted to digging mass graves.
COURTESY OF THE URBAN ARCHIVES, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
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refused to recognize a new union that some
carmen were joining. The company tried to
soothe the workers by offering to increase
their wages to twenty-four cents an hour and
to put pianos in the carbarn lounges. On
Sunday, February 19, the strike began. Some
men stayed on the job, and about 700 of the
2,200 trolley, El and subway cars were
operated. Strikers and other unionists attacked
trolleys with bricks and stones. They beat up
motormen and set fire to trolleys, jammed
switches, threw sewer gratings on the tracks
and fought with police. There were two
hundred arrests in the first two days.
On the fifth day, the carbarn at Thirty-first
and Dauphin was blown up by dynamite.
Cops rushed from riot to riot in the new piece
of crime-fighting technology the department
had just acquired: a horseless patrol wagon.
Before the sixty-three-day strike was settled,
twenty-nine persons were killed. The
situation became so bad that the police
department had to call off its annual
interdistrict roller skating competition.
The first section of the great Northeast
Boulevard, from Broad and Cayuga to
about Second Street, was in use by 1911.
The second section, extending all the way
to rural Rhawn Street, was opened in 1914.
The highway had a sixty-foot-wide central
section, with outer drives not yet paved. In
January, 1919, former President Theodore
Roosevelt died, and residents of the Logan
neighborhood started a movement to rename
the road Roosevelt Boulevard. The name was
made official on October 27, 1920, when
Roosevelt’s widow and his son, Kermit,
attended dedication ceremonies.
Senator Boies Penrose kept growing in
political influence, and also in size, reaching
give or take three hundred pounds. At the
opposite end of the social scale from Penrose
were political leaders George, Edwin, and
William Vare, of South Philadelphia. Sons of a
pig farmer from the island of Jersey, the Vares
raised pigs in the Neck, acquired the city
contract to collect garbage, fed it to the pigs,
and made money at both ends of the deal. Hurt
when Penrose referred to them as “the slop-cart
statesmen,” Ed Vare sniffed that on “many a
cold morning as a boy,” on garbage collection
duty, he could be seen “carrying a half-barrel of
frozen swill on my shoulder. If Penrose and his
high-toned crowd find anything to laugh or
sneer about in that, let them laugh.”
Tradition has it that the Vare gang made a
distinct contribution to American culture. A
bunch of South Philly ward heelers was gathering
on a chartered bus to go to a political
meeting uptown. One man was missing. He
showed up at the last second, and as the completed
delegation rolled up Broad Street, an
inventive member extemporized words to the
refrain of The Pirate Chorus from The Pirates of
Penzance. The carol began, “Hail, hail, the
gang’s all here! What the hell do we care…”
The sentiment appealed to politicians everywhere,
and in 1917, a pair of songwriters had
the chutzpah to publish and copyright the
anthem, while Gilbert and Sullivan turned
over in their respective graves.
The doings of the Republican politicians
caused some businessmen to form the
Keystone Party, intended to battle machine
politics. Reform attempts seemed futile, but in
1911, the Penrose faction, headed by George
H. Earle, Jr., challenged William S. Vare at the
polls. They canceled each other out, and the
Keystone candidate slipped into the mayor’s
office. He was Rudolph Blankenburg, a whitewhiskered
yarn manufacturer who, because