Historic Philadelphia

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Albert M. Greenfield died in January 1967,
at age seventy-nine. His will ran to fortyfive
pages with an eighty-page inventory. He
left behind millions of dollars, forty-nine
valuable paintings, a collection of
Napoleonic materials, a Gutenberg Bible,
twenty-one grandchildren, and the kind of
life that caused obituary writers to call him
“Mr. Philadelphia.”
COURTESY OF THE URBAN ARCHIVES, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
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become nearly boundless. His organization
controlled on and off, but mostly on, the top
hotels (Bellevue Stratford, Benjamin Franklin,
John Bartram, Ritz-Carlton, Sylvania,
Adelphia, Essex) and department stores (Lit
Brothers, Snellenburgs, Bonwit Teller and
stores in New York, Boston, New Orleans and
Chicago). He had a hand in Yellow Cab, the
Philadelphia Transportation Co., assorted
financial and realty concerns, and even the
207 Loft’s Candy stores. His philanthropies
also seemed endless.
Basketball went big time in Philly when the
Warriors team won the championship of the
new Basketball Association of America in
1947. The sport was only fifty-five years old,
but it had caught on early in Philadelphia.
School, church, and YMCA teams had been
common since the turn of the century. The
dominant team started in the early 1920s as
the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association,
abbreviated SPHA. While in the early days the
letters on their game shirts were Hebrew
samech, pey, hey, aleph, and at times the
shirts said simply “Hebrews,” the team
became identified as the SPHAs. They gained
a national reputation, even beating the
vaunted New York Celtics in Manhattan in
1926. The modern era of professional
basketball began in 1946, when owners of
arenas in large cities got together to form the
Basketball Association of America. They
invited the SPHAs maven Eddie Gottlieb
to enter a team. Gottlieb enlisted four
SPHA headliners, added four gentile local
college stars, and founded the Warriors. They
won the 1947 BAA title, and got hero
treatment from sports fans, but Philly’s
professional roundballers didn’t win another
championship until 1956.
W3XE, the old Philco television station,
had been broadcasting commercially since
1941 and was designated for channel three
when the government assigned frequencies,
taking call letters WPTZ. Annenberg’s WFIL-
TV was given channel six, and the Bulletin’s
WCAU-TV channel ten. Channel six began
commercial broadcasts in September 1947,
and channel ten in May 1948. There were
some thirty-five thousand television sets in the
area in the spring of 1948, and viewers had
their choice of programming daily from 6.30
p.m. to as late as 11:15. Only Philadelphia,
New York, and Washington had three
channels in operation. The three networks
reached from New York to Richmond,
Virginia, and were expected to connect with
stations as far west as Chicago by 1949.
The Keystone Telephone Company gave up
the ghost and was absorbed by Bell
Telephone. Its system of phones in city
offices, police stations, and fire houses was
retained by the city and became the
MUNicipal exchange, later MU6 and then
686. For years, city workers still called each
other on “the Keystone.”