Historic Philadelphia

Stotesbury, president of the Fairmount Park
Commission, to facilitate construction of the
proposed Philadelphia Museum of Art by
shaking loose three thousand tons of rock
from the hillside and, perhaps more difficult,
shaking loose a $2 million appropriation from
the councilmen watching the detonation.
Work had started in 1919 on a design by
architects C. L. Borie, Jr., C. C. Zantzinger,
and Horace Trumbauer. Early estimates
placed the cost at $3 million. The museum’s
walls rose through 1921, and so did the price.
There were accusations of graft and favoritism
in contracts, and the age-old lamentation that
the money could better be spent on schools,
housing or health care. By 1925 the price tag
was nudging $15 million. The Park
Commission voted to stop spending, abandoning
many planned embellishments.
On the last day of 1921, Senator Boies
Penrose died in his specially reinforced oversize
bed in his apartment in the swank Wardman
Park Hotel in Washington. He had been ill since
1919. In 1920, in his house on Spruce Street,
he had lain wheezing in his giant bed, with a
direct phone line and a private bedside
telegraph line and operator connecting him
with the Republican Convention in Chicago as
he maneuvered to nominate Warren G. Harding
for president. Philadelphia reporters knew of
Harding’s selection before the press corps at
the convention.
Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick looked for a
tough police commander to crack down on
Prohibition lawlessness. In 1924 Kendrick convinced
the Marine Corps to lend him, on a two
year leave of absence, Major General Smedley
Darlington Butler, forty-three, a Philadelphia
fighting Quaker noted for brash speech and
action. He had won the Medal of Honor twice.
Most of Philadelphia winked at laws against
drinking, but Butler would broach neither winking
nor drinking. He raided speakeasies and
other social venues with no regard for political
sensibilities. Arrests for conducting speakeasies
in September 1923, totaled fifty-seven. In
September 1925, at the end of Butler’s tenure,
there were 1,081 such arrests. The fact that the
thousand arrests resulted in only two convictions
didn’t bother Butler. He just kept raiding. “I give
’em hell and make ’em like it,” he chortled.
Butler remained a popular figure in the city
after his controversial reign ended. In 1931, in
a Philadelphia radio interview, he used the
word “hell” and the station manager cut the
program off the air. The incident attracted
amused nationwide attention, and a Baltimore
radio station invited Butler to do a broadcast
there in which he would be permitted up to six
hells and six damns. The affair grew into a
legend, with people believing that Butler was
regularly being censored by Philly broadcasters
for uncontrolled cussing. A few months before
he died at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital in
1940, Butler arose to speak at a Salvation Army
luncheon, pointed suspiciously at the
microphone, and said, “You’ve got to be careful.
These things misquote you.”
THE SOGGY SESQUI
Soon would be the moment for some civic
hoopla again: 1926, the 150th anniversary of
the Declaration of Independence, the Sesqui-
Centennial. John Wanamaker proposed an
exposition. The Vares pushed for use of their
✧
Construction crews made adjustments to
allow a funeral from Camden to ride over
the unfinished Delaware River Bridge on
March 3, 1926. Annie T. Barlow, wife of a
Bridge Commission member, was ill, and
prayed that she would live to cross the new
bridge. She died on March 1, but
posthumously got her wish to cross the
engineering marvel. President Calvin
Coolidge officially opened the 1.81 mile
single span suspension bridge, then the
longest in the world, on July 4, 1926. For
Philadelphians heading automobiles “down
the shore,” the bridge rendered ferry boats
from necessity into nostalgia. It was
renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge
in 1956.
COURTESY OF THE URBAN ARCHIVES, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY.
CHAPTER V
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