Historic Philadelphia

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Above: The Art Museum arose at the end of
the Parkway, over budget and criticized as
looking like “a greek garage.” Famous local
artist Joseph Pennell wrote to Mayor J.
Hampton Moore to admonish that “you will
be remembered as the mayor who ruined
the beauty of Fairmount Park.”
COURTESY OF THE CITY ARCHIVES, PHILADELPHIA.
Below: The Free Library of Philadelphia’s
new main building at Nineteenth and the
Parkway in 1927, with its twin Courthouse
in the next block, gave architect Horace
Trumbauer the opportunity to make Logan
Circle resemble the Place de la Concorde in
Paris. The Free Library had been
incorporated in 1891, funded by a quarter
million dollar bequest from George Pepper.
It first occupied an old concert hall on
Chestnut Street west of Twelfth, and
established branches with funds from
Pittsburgh steel magnate Andrew Carnegie,
who financed libraries all over the country.
COURTESY OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, DEPARTMENT
OF RECORDS, CITY ARCHIVES.
thousand women were trained to be welders,
a skill few had the chance to exercise again
after the troops returned from Europe.
The Hog Island ship builders had a colossal
impact on Philadelphia life. They introduced
the hoagie. Thousands of Italian Americans
from South Philly trekked to jobs at Hog
Island every day. They carried their lunches
in a convenient form: meat, cheese, and
vegetables stuffed into a loaf of Italian bread.
Just a few years earlier, another Philadelphia
delicacy was devised. In those benighted
days, bakers baked bulk cakes and cut off
portions for the customers. Philip Bauer, a
baker, and Herbert Morris, a salesman, got
the inspiration in 1914 to bake and wrap small
individual cakes to be sold in stores other
than bakeries. They called their products
Tastykakes, which, through the years, took
their place beside the big soft pretzel, the
hoagie, pepperpot, and scrapple as beloved
Philadelphia edibles.
Scrapple is an ancient southeast
Pennsylvania pork product made by cooking
into mush a bit of corn meal and a lot of
hearts, livers, tongues and other assorted hog
parts and attachments left over from
slaughtering. It is fried in small slabs until the
outside is crisp. Pepperpot is a soup that was
sold on the city’s streets in the earliest days. It
contains tripe, onions, potatoes, and much
other stuff. To make pepperpot the oldfashioned
way spans two days and involves
hours of simmering. In this age of microwaved
frozen dinners, few bother.
THE
TWENTIES
Federal prohibition of alcoholic beverages
started in 1919. Bootleggers and gangsters
became as common as pretzel vendors, and
speakeasies as accessible as the Automat.
More new technology emerged on May 14,
1921, when the Keystone Telephone Company
introduced dial telephones to the city, beating
its bigger competitor, Bell Telephone, by a
year. Instead of lifting the ear piece and talking
to an operator, users poked their fingers in
numbered holes on a rotating dial. Keystone
offered special services, too; to call the police
or firemen, one merely dialed 119.
On October 27, 1921, a dynamite blast
caused a modest avalanche atop Fairmount
as it assaulted the old reservoir, abandoned
in 1899. The lever was pushed by Edwin T.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
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