Historic Philadelphia

The city began developing the abandoned
Hog Island shipyard as an airport. Mayor Wilson
named it the S. Davis Wilson Airport. Upon his
death in August 1937, it was unnamed by the
council. George Connell became acting mayor,
but did little acting, and January 1938 opened
with Robert E. Lamberton the elected mayor.
Colonel James Elverson, second generation
publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, died five
months before the newspaper’s hundredth
birthday, in 1929, in his apartment in the
gleaming white tower of the building he had
erected in 1925 at Broad and Spring Garden.
A newcomer to Philadelphia bought the
Inquirer from the Elverson heirs in 1936. He
was Moses L. Annenberg, who had
newspapered in Chicago, Milwaukee, and
New York, and was making big money
publishing Racing Form and other gamblingoriented
periodicals. He had just sold his
Miami Tribune to Ohio publisher John S.
Knight, who had recently bought the Miami
Herald. Annenberg began livening up the
formerly stodgy Inquirer. With him to Philly
came his quiet twenty-eight-year-old son,
Walter; no one suspected then that the lad
would become one of America’s richest men.
A little-noticed phenomenon in 1933 was
government approval of twenty-eight experimental
television frequencies around the nation.
One was assigned to the Philadelphia Storage
Battery Company, another to RCA Victor
Corporation in Camden. Some engineers had
primitive TV sets in their homes to receive test
broadcasts. In 1936, invited journalists and
other guests in Philco’s chief engineer’s basement
in Rydal saw transmissions from the C and
Allegheny plant, including two stenographers
singing a duet and two male employees boxing.
Some University of Pennsylvania home football
games were telecast.
✧
Left: A bright moment in the gloom of the
Depression was the invention of the
Philadelphia steak sandwich. It was either
1930 or ’31 or ’32; details are lost in the
greasy mists of time and frying oil. This
much seems clear: Pat Olivieri, born in
South Philadelphia in 1907 and originally
an apprentice blacksmith, was working
nights as a drop forge operator at the S. L.
Allen & Co. Flexible Flyer sled works, and
started a lunch stand in his spare time at
the confluence of Ninth and Wharton
Streets and Passayunk Avenue. One day,
bored with a constant diet of his own hot
dogs, he sent his brother, Harry, to the
butcher’s for some steak. As he stirred the
shredded meat with onions on the grille, a
customer admired the concoction. Pat sold it
to the guy on Italian bread for a nickel. This
launched the word of mouth that made Pat’s
Steaks famous and copied widely and
prodigiously. It was after World War II
when Pat and Harry were hit with the
genius of applying adhesive-quality cheese,
the final step in creating a major source of
Philadelphia pleasure and cholesterol.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Below: William E. Lescaze and George
Howe greeted the Depression by designing a
skyscraper that pulled Philadelphia into the
future. The PSFS tower at Twelfth and
Market Streets was second to City Hall in
height, and elegantly plain where City Hall
was extravagantly ornate. The south section
loomed over an old Quaker meeting house,
and twenty-seven-foot-high letters PSFS
glowed atop the 492-foot, $10-million
masterpiece. “It will not conform to
precedent,” George Howe explained the
design in 1931, “because it meets specific
requirements with which our ancestors were
unfamiliar. It will not be the product of
fashion or of individual taste, but of
irresistible social and economic forces.”
Those forces have struck again. The building
has become a hotel.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER V
109