Historic Philadelphia

✧
Above: Jules Junker, who conducted a
bakery at Thirteenth and Spruce Streets,
owned the first automobile in the city, a De
Dion-Boutton Decouville model he imported
from France in 1894. It had a two-cylinder,
1.75-horsepower engine. Mrs. Aimee Junker
was awarded the city’s first summons for
horseless speeding in 1899. She was caught
doing eight miles per hour in Fairmount
Park. Junker bought two small houses in the
300 block of South Camac Street and had
them turned into a large building to keep
automobiles. It was the first garage in
Philadelphia, although the word garage was
not yet in use.
COURTESY OF THE URBAN ARCHIVES, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY.
had become Mayor Samuel H. Ashbridge’s
secretary, with an unusual idea. Why not
welcome the twentieth century on New Year’s
Day, 1901, by organizing the Mummers into one
big parade, on Broad Street? They would leave
their neighborhoods and usual routes for part of
the day, McHugh reasoned, if the city put up
some cash prizes. City Council appropriated
$5,000 to be spread thinly among the clubs, and
the upshot was a change in Philadelphia
tradition. About twenty-five hundred men took
part, coming up Broad Street from South Philly.
There were eight of what Mummers call comic
clubs, and four fancy clubs.
Many Mummers groups declined the
invitation to parade on Broad Street and made
the usual calls on neighborhood homes. One
was the Trilby String Band, described by the
Evening Bulletin in 1901 as “famous as the
only band of its kind in the city.” Its eighteen
banjo, mandolin, and guitar players had no
uniforms, but each wore a top hat and
blackface. Trilby’s leader, William H. Siebrecht,
said his musicians would stay in the Neck. He
was afraid they would be sandwiched between
two of the brass bands that accompanied other
clubs, and would not be heard. “We are not
running a pantomime show,” he grumbled.
On June 30, 1901, Samuel C. Perkins,
president of the Commission for the Erection
of Public Buildings, turned over the finally
completed new City Hall to Mayor Ashbridge.
The project had taken thirty years, and cost
$24,344,355.48.
On Washington’s Birthday, 1901, John R.
Hathaway, the city’s director of public works,
climbed out the second floor rear window and
up a ladder to the roof of a house at 422 North
Twenty-second Street, followed by assorted
puffing politicians and reporters. Swinging
a ceremonial ebony-handled silver pick,
Hathaway dislodged a brick from the chimney. It
was the beginning of demolition of houses to
Right: A Mummers comic brigade, with guns
in the old time New Year’s Shooter’s
tradition, posed on a South Philly doorstep
in 1904.
COURTESY OF THE MUMMERS MUSEUM.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
94