The Last Man Who Knew Everything

Joseph Leidy of Philadelphia

Joseph Leidy at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Joseph Leidy (1823-1891) is best known as a pioneer in the study of dinosaurs. In 1868, he guided a team that erected "the first fully articulated dinosaur skeleton display in the world." The skeleton was put on display at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, which at the time was located on the northwest corner of Broad and Sansom, and it revolutionized the concept of a natural history museum.

In addition to attracting visitors to museums - lots of visitors - dinosaurs were also instrumental in getting people to think seriously about the then-novel concept of evolution. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection had only appeared in 1859, and it would be an understatement to say that the guardians of received wisdom were not very receptive. Leidy, in a letter, wrote of the importance of dinosaur displays: "They break up old and rather fixed views about the world being created just as we now see it. Nothing tends so much to lead people to believe in the existence of former races of animals, as such restorations."

(See Robert McCracken Peck and Patricia Tyson Stroud, A Glorious Enterprise: the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, [2012], pp. 136-138, 140.)

Leidy was also a pioneer in the use of the microscope, which he called his "first love." His work in this area included parasites (he found the source of trichinosis in pork and later recommended more thorough cooking as a preventive measure) and his beloved rhizopods, tiny creatures some of whom are better known as amoebas, which he lovingly reproduced in illustrations that showed a very considerable artistic talent. (See Leonard Warren, Joseph Leidy, The Last Man Who Knew Everything, New Haven, Yale University Press [1998], pp. 65, 69, 166-169; and Henry Fairfield Osborn, Joseph Leidy 1823-1891, City of Washington, National Academy of Sciences, 1913, pp. 351-352. This last is available online.)

Leidy was probably the first in America to use the microscope in forensic medicine. Shortly after he graduated from medical school, the coroner of Philadelphia hired him as a part-time assistant coroner. It probably didn't hurt that the coroner was his cousin Napoleon B. Leidy. During his four years on the job (1845-1849) Joseph showed that nepotism could have an upside. In 1846 a farmer was murdered in north Philadelphia, and a day later a man was arrested because of the blood on his clothing and also on the hatchet he was carrying. This fellow would probably have benefited from watching a few noir movies, but of course movies hadn't been invented. Anyway, he claimed that the blood came from chickens he had killed. Leidy threw some samples under his microscope, and declared that he was not looking at chicken blood. The suspect, apparently lacking any plausible plan B, wound up confessing. (Warren, pp. 59, 72.)

But perhaps the thing about Leidy that most astonished his contemporaries, from students in the hallway to colleagues in the faculty lounge, was the simply amazing amount of stuff he knew about the natural world. From dinosaurs to clinical pathology, botany, zoology, rocks and gems, "if Leidy didn't know, no one knew," in the words of his biographer Warren (p. 192).

Leidy had a happy life and many friends, and he was a pillar of three major institutions in Philadelphia: Penn's medical school, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Wagner Free Institute of Science. He received the M.D. degree from Penn's medical school in 1844 and in 1853 was appointed professor of anatomy at the medical school, a position he held for nearly four decades. He also served as dean of the medical school, curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences and, in the 1880's, president of that institution,  and as president of the Wagner Free Institute. And he taught natural history at Swarthmore for many years.

It seems that just about everybody liked Leidy. The few who didn't like him seem to have been annoyed that, even though he was a really nice guy, you couldn't push him around.

Leidy was born at his parents' home, 312 North Third Street, which was conveniently next door to his father's hat store. In 1864 he married Anna Harden, daughter of the Reverend Robert Harden of Louisville, Kentucky. In 1876 the couple adopted Allwina Franck, the orphaned daughter of a Penn engineering professor. Leidy was raised as a Lutheran, but migrated in later years to Unitarianism. His funeral was held at Frank Furness's First Unitarian Church at 2125 Chestnut Street. (Warren, pp. 1, 143, 145-146, 221, 225.)

Leidy was a part of the western migration of Philadelphia during the nineteenth century. He grew up on Third Street, and in 1859 he purchased a house at 1302 Filbert Street, where he lived for many years. In the last year of his life he lived at 2125 Spruce. (Warren, pp. 19, 173, 221, 270.)

The Dr. Joseph Leidy House at 1319 Locust Street was the home of Dr. Joseph Leidy, Jr., who was Professor Leidy's nephew. It was built several years after Uncle Joseph died. Penn's online biography of Leidy gets this wrong in the last paragraph.

The site of the Filbert Street house later became part of the City Hall Annex, which is now a hotel. Across Filbert today is the city's criminal justice center.

Things obviously looked a bit different when Leidy was living there. For several decades he got to watch the construction of City Hall, a block away. Although the Reading Terminal was not built until after his death, there were markets on 12th Street before the Reading Terminal arrived.

A student who lived with the Leidys, Charles S. Dolley, tells us that Leidy "did most of the marketing and I frequently accompanied him to the 12th St. Market and carried home the basket of meat, fish or vegetables which he selected." At the time hucksters would also walk the streets, calling out their wares. Fresh crabs were frequently on offer in the summer, and when Leidy heard the soft-shelled crab men "crying 'crabs, crabs,' he would take some change from his pocket and say, 'Charlie, suppose you run down and get some crabs and a pitcher of beer from the corner saloon' - a very respectable place on the corner of 13th and Filbert - in fact, right next door. Then we would have a jolly snack." (Warren, pp. 143-145.)

Although not a great traveler, Leidy did get to Europe four times. And from time to time the world came to him. A Glorious Enterprise has a wonderful photograph on page 275 that shows Joseph Leidy standing with Edgar Allan Poe in the Academy of Natural Sciences at Broad and Sansom, during the winter of 1842-1843. The authors report that Poe spent time at the Academy researching mollusks; the photograph - a daguerrotype - is "the oldest known photograph of an American museum interior."

Much later in life, Leidy served on the committee at the University of Pennsylvania that supervised the work of Eadweard Muybridge, who was conducting photographic studies of human motion. (Warren, p. 240.)

While Leidy was slowly moving westward across Philadelphia, his two main employers were doing the same thing.

From 1751 to 1801, the University of Pennsylvania's college was located at Fourth and Arch. The medical school was founded in 1765 and located in Surgeons' Hall, on Fifth near Walnut.  (Because the site of Surgeons' Hall is in the Independence National Historical Park, there is a plaque.) In 1801 the college and the medical school moved to Ninth and Market, where they stayed until the move to West Philly in 1872.

The Academy of Natural Sciences held its first meeting in 1812, in a private residence near the northwest corner of Market and Second. It was soon renting a meeting space above a milliner's shop at 94 North Second Street, and in 1816 moved to purpose-built quarters on Arch between Front and Second. The building was presumably designed by William Strickland, who was on the building committee. In 1826 the members, moving the collections themselves, to save money, occupied a former Swedenborgian church (which was definitely designed by Strickland). This structure was located at 12th and George (now Sansom) streets. In 1840 the Academy continued its trek west, to Broad and Sansom, where it stayed until 1876, when it moved to its current location on Logan Square, at 19th and Race. (Peck and Stroud, pp. 2, 6, 13, 30, 32, 43, 144, 149, 154 fn. 69, 410.)

Warren (p. 207) says the Academy moved to Broad and Sansom in 1826. I believe he is mistaken.

Warren does have one significant criticism of Leidy. It's an interesting point, with which I happen not to agree, but it is well worth discussing.

Leidy lived at a time when modern science was really beginning to take off, with the experimental method becoming more and more important.  Leidy, though well aware of these developments, continued to work throughout his career in the more traditional vein of descriptive science. Warren thinks that Leidy should have jumped on the experimental bandwagon. (Warren, pp. 6, 41, 92, 105, 236, 252.)

(Think of Louis Pasteur saying, "Look at all those microbes in the fresh milk." And then saying, "I wonder what happens if we heat the milk." The first is observation. The second is the beginning of an experiment.)

I have several reactions. First, the idea of looking very carefully, and then reporting precisely what you have seen, lies at the base of modern science. Today we may take this approach for granted, but it was not always so.

For example, maggots seem to have the ability to appear out of nowhere. In reality, they come from very tiny eggs, and later in life they turn into flies. Leidy spent a good amount of his time, over the years, dealing with people who sincerely believed they had witnessed the spontaneous generation of life. (Warren, pp. 106, 116, 122, 130.)

Second, there is no guarantee that Leidy would have been half as good an experimenter as he was an observer, reporter, and illustrator. I'd say Leidy knew what he was good at, and he stuck to it. There's a really bad John Wayne movie from 1968 called Hellfighters, in which the veteran character actor Jay C. Flippen says to Katharine Ross, "Your father is the best there is at what he does. No man can walk away from that."

Third, observation continues to be in considerable demand even today. A recent article in the New York Times carries the title "The 8 Million Species We Don't Know." In it, the eminent entomologist Edward O. Wilson suggests that biodiversity is a good thing, estimates that there are currently 10 million species on the planet, of which only 2 million have been described, and argues that we can't save species if we don't know they're there.

If Joseph Leidy were alive today, his services would definitely be in demand. Eight million species to go. He'd be a happy man.

The statue of Leidy is by Samuel Murray (1870-1941). It was originally installed at the west front of City Hall in 1907 and moved to its present site in front of the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1929.

Which Side Are You On?

Sometimes It Comes Down to This

2100 block of South Street.

I'm on the left. And I hope you are too. Call it eye candy. Call it visual interest. My eye goes to the facade on the left. There's something to look at. The one on the right looks like it's basically trying to disappear, and it's doing a pretty good job.

As urban guru Jan Gehl puts it, "If ground floor facades are rich in variation and detail, our city walks will be equally rich in experience." (See his book Cities for People, p. 41.) Gehl goes on to suggest that thriving commercial streets all over the world tend to have a new shop or booth every 16-20 feet, which means that someone strolling along will see something new every five seconds or so (p. 77).

Stretches of certain Philadelphia streets do pretty well at this test - Walnut and Chestnut of course, parts of South Street, both east and west, East Passyunk. There are others.

Residential Streets
But what about residential streets? Are we doing enough to keep the walk interesting? I'd say yes and no. Some blocks in Center City are so beautiful that I don't mind a certain sameness. Take the 1800 block of Delancey, with its facing rows of gorgeous Georgians. Even here, though, not all the buildings are in the Georgian style, and if you look a second time you'll notice that the Georgians are not all identical. There is a pleasing variation in the details of the facades. And it doesn't hurt to have a Frank Furness building plopped at each end of the block. Two very different buildings, both very different from the Georgians.

Other blocks can be more diverse and still read as a coherent and pleasing whole, with buildings of different size and use and age finding a way to meld together. It's a balancing act, but to my mind a touch of chaos is preferable to dead conformity.

As Jane Jacobs notes, this is the way cities lived before the clear-cutting of urban renewal: "A successful city district becomes a kind of ever-normal granary as far as construction is concerned. Some of the old buildings, year by year, are replaced by new ones - or are rehabilitated to a degree equivalent to replacement. Over the years there is, therefore, constantly a mixture of buildings of many ages and types. This is, of course, a dynamic process, with what was once new in the mixture eventually becoming what is old in the mixture." (See The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 189.)

If you're looking for an example of what a street like this can look like, take a stroll down the 1900 block of Panama.

And if the architects are having trouble getting the mix right, we can always bring in the artists. A blind wall can bring life to a whole street with the help of a mural (walk by 17th and Waverly), or a mosaic by Isaiah Zagar (see this story on the 800 block of Pemberton).

Or street furniture like trash cans and utility boxes can become accent points: Send in the Mural Arts Program or students from the University of the Arts. (See What Should We Do With the Humble Dumpster?)

I have one more idea. Let's take a cue from the abstract expressionists and try some color field painting.

Yellow Houses
Oops. It looks like we're already doing this. Have a look below. Without the yellow facade, this would probably be a car ad. With the yellow, architecture wrests back primacy from the automobile.

And, as an added treat, just this once, the building owns the street down to its toes. Normally, parked cars drown the bottom half of the ground floor. I think this state of affairs does untold damage to the pedestrian experience, and I think we're so used to it we don't even notice what we don't have.

11th Street at Waverly.

As Jan Gehl notes, the ground floor is overwhelmingly what pedestrians look at. But they do look up occasionally; Gehl suggests the person on the street can relate pretty well to the first five floors of a building (p. 40). Think about the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which is 68 feet above the ground. People can see it just fine. Michelangelo made sure of that.

So our new corps of color field painters should treat the whole facade as their canvas. Let's pull back a bit from this building and see what it looks like from Waverly.

The whole building.

Now let's pull a bit more back up Waverly, even though it's trash day. An accent point can pull together a whole lot more than itself.

From Waverly near Jessup.

Here's another yellow building. I've been passing it for years, and a few days ago, for the first time that I know of, the parking spot in front of the building was empty. And I had my camera with me.

2100 block of Locust.

And here's another.

2000 block of Waverly.

One more. You'll notice that the street trees can be much more than bit players, if you can see them.

25th at Panama.

Let's look at some other colors.

Other Colors
Blue, for instance. This one is across the street from Frank Furness's Thomas Hockley house. (For more on Frank Furness in the Rittenhouse area, click here.)

21st Street south of Walnut.

I call this one the Jolly Green Giant.

Naudain at 24th Street.

I really like this one. It's a little hard to find. Addison Street in this block is a stub that doesn't open onto either 10th or 11th. You need to walk down Waverly and then turn onto a little north-south stub called Alder, and a few steps will take you to Addison.

1000 block of Addison.

Plenty of Painted Buildings
At the risk of stating the obvious, there are plenty of painted buildings in Philadelphia. Very few of them look like the house on Addison Street above. I'm trying to make the case for a bolder use of color. And the good news is that I can do it by walking around and taking pictures of stuff that's already there.

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of lovely pastels around town - two of the yellow houses above are pastels. I particularly like them when they use features like doors, windows, and the cornice as accent points.

Red: A Special Case
Years ago S. Weir Mitchell wrote a novel about Philadelphia called The Red City. It's still red. We've got plenty of red brick buildings, including the new Museum of the American Revolution.

So why would you paint a red brick building with brick red paint? Do you really think we don't notice the difference?

Painting red bricks red displays, to my mind, a certain lack of imagination. I understand the desire to fit in, and I understand that the paint may be covering a myriad of flaws, and I'm not opposed to painting brick. But really, that color? You're not fooling anyone. The facade lacks the texture of brick and the variety that comes with the contrasting color of the mortar. Next time, have a look at chrome yellow.

Plaque remembering S. Weir Mitchell, 1500 block of Walnut.

See also City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street, Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor, Putting Some Park into Old Parking Lots, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets? 

Furness Buildings in Rittenhouse

Well Known and Lesser Known

Bates house, 1801 Delancey, 1867-1868.

I'd been walking by the building pictured above for decades, but it was only recently that I discovered Frank Furness had had a hand in its design. Which explains a lot about the Bates house at 1801 Delancey Place, on the northwest corner of 18th and Delancey.

As Michael Lewis puts it, "The house was an unconventional townhouse design for Philadelphia, where custom placed the rowhouse to the front of the lot, leaving a space for a private yard to the rear. The Bates design reversed this: a garden was created in the front, screened by a brick wall, a very eccentric feature." The result was "an unexpected suburban enclave on a street of stiff late Georgian townhouses." (Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind, 2001, p. 63.)

Not that Furness and his firm were averse to working on the gorgeous Georgians of Delancey Place. Records indicate the firm did alterations in 1820, 1821, 1823, and 1830 Delancey.

At the other end of the 1800 block of Delancey, just across 19th Street, is the famous Horace Jayne house, from much later in Furness's career.

Horace Jayne house, 1900 Delancey, 1895.

I'd been aware of the Jayne house and the Thomas A. Reilly house up on Rittenhouse Square. (The neighbors are having some work done.)

Thomas A. Reilly house, 1804 Rittenhouse Square, 1891-1892.

But mostly I'd been aware of Furness as a posthumously tragic figure whose unique style went out of style and whose buildings had an uncanny affinity for the wrecking ball, particularly in the years just before the rise of the historic preservation movement in the 1960's.

I'd never really looked into Furness. However, when I was working on my story about creating a large piazza to the west of Philadelphia's City Hall, I found myself checking books on Furness out of the library. I got what I needed out of them, finished the story, and then I kept reading.

A lot of Furness's best stuff did get hammered into dust and chunks, particularly the banks down on Chestnut near Independence Hall. It's a shame. We could be reusing those banks now for restaurants and museums. (Museum of the American Revolution, anyone? I guess we missed our Musee d'Orsay moment.)

I think there's a subtext, even today, to the conventional wisdom about Furness - that his buildings are so quirky they can't possibly work well. And that take is a mistake. Furness was, among other things, a master at moving people through space; his Broad Street Station, which used to stand just west of City Hall, was a prime example until it was knocked down.

A number of masterpieces remain - particularly the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on Broad Street, north of City Hall, and the Furness Library out at Penn. And, in the area around Rittenhouse Square, where I live, it turns out that we have a substantial number of surviving Furness buildings.

Some of these are institutional: His dad's old congregation, the First Unitarian Church, and his addition to the building that housed the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, now Dorrance Hamilton Hall of the University of the Arts. Hamilton Hall, by the way, is across the street from Furness's childhood home at 1426 Pine Street.

But most of what we still have in the Rittenhouse area is residential (we lost two major train stations, the Pennsylvania Railroad's Broad Street Station near City Hall and the Philadelphia Depot of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 24th and Chestnut).

I'd heard the Thomas Hockley house was by Furness, but I didn't really know. It is. When you think about it, the corner entrance, the pigmy columns, and the chimney that leaps out of the wall are certainly hints.

Thomas Hockley house, 235 South 17th Street, 1875.

A bunch more, almost all of them buildings I have walked by many times, I simply had no idea were by Furness.

I'm not even going to try to list them all - it would be too long a list, and I know I'd miss something - but here are a few Furness houses that can round out a walking tour of Furness in Rittenhouse.

Let's start up on Walnut Street, with the John Rice rowhouses. 2106 on the left has fared better than 2108 over the years. 2108 is currently undergoing a vigorous gut rehab, but it appears that what is left of the historical facade will be preserved. And then there's that new construction to the right. We can hope for the best.

John Rice rowhouses, 2106-2108 Walnut Street, c. 1870.

Next we can hop down to the E.B. Warren rowhouses at 2102-2106 Spruce Street.

E.B. Warren rowhouses, 2102-2106 Spruce Street, c. 1871.

A little while later the firm supplied a similar facade for the Rudolf Ellis house at 2113 Spruce. Having some work done here as well.

Rudolf Ellis house, 2113 Spruce Street, 1873.

On 17th Street north of Walnut, we have a more commercial neighborhood and a nice row of buildings known as the Caroline Rogers houses (124-132 South 17th Street). Originally there were five, but the northern two were lopped off, and now there are three; 128 is no longer recognizable as a Furness building, so that leaves us with 130 and 132, and they could use some work. The iron beam over the doorway is echt Furness.

Caroline Rogers houses, 124-132 South 17th Street, 1887.

If you're interested in exploring further, allow me to send you to George E. Thomas et al., Frank Furness: The Complete Works, 1996. The catalog there supersedes the checklist in James F. O'Gorman, The Architecture of Frank Furness, 1973, which nonetheless remains a valuable resource.

I need to warn you that going through the catalog is a bit like reading the casualty lists from the Battle of the Somme in World War I. So much has been lost.

Let's go back for a minute to the little Thomas A. Reilly house at 1804 Rittenhouse Square. It had a big brother next door, the William West Frazier house at 250 South 18th Street, built in 1881-1882. It occupied the area from 1804 Rittenhouse down to the corner of 18th Street, and the front door was actually on 18th.

This site is now occupied by a large apartment building of which I am rather fond. But along with my fondness for the present, I must recognize that we lost one of Furness's signature works here. As Thomas et al. note (p. 230), "This was one of Furness's most important commissions located at the corner of Rittenhouse Square - one of the most visible sites in the city and Philadelphia's premier square."

I spend a fair amount of time in Asbury Park, a city which has also seen its share of devastation. A few years ago some intrepid techies put together an app that provided 3D images of structures along the boardwalk that aren't there any more, or that have changed greatly. As you walked along the boardwalk with a tour guide, you pointed your cell phone or tablet at a site, and up popped a ghost building. For good measure you could see the SS Morro Castle where it ran aground next to Convention Hall in 1934.

The app is called Augmented Asbury Park, and although there are no more walking tours it appears there is an online version.

My thought is that some group of intrepid techies in Philadelphia might like to do a similar app for missing Furness buildings. The south side of Rittenhouse Square would be a good place to start. Call it The Furness Ghosts.

This chimney at 132 South 17th has seen better days.

Transportation Should Not Trump Destination

New city to the left, old city to the right.

Of the original five squares in Philadelphia, only one of them is not a square today. Instead, Centre Square (also known as Penn Square) is occupied by City Hall. There are a bunch of smaller open spaces to the west of City Hall, including Dilworth Park and two plazas on the far side of 15th Street, one of which houses Claes Oldenburg's Clothespin (1976).

I think we should unite these shards of land to the west of City Hall to create a true square in Centre Square. St. Peter's in Rome has its square. City Hall should have a square.

We do this by closing 15th Street from JFK Boulevard to South Penn Square. To do this we will need to rework traffic patterns across a fairly large area, but before I get into the traffic weeds, let's have a look at how we got to where we are.

A Rare Opportunity
The area west of City Hall didn't always look the way it does now. Until the early 1950s there was an elevated train viaduct called the Chinese Wall, which ran from the Schuylkill River to a terminal facing City Hall (see map below). The terminal (designed by Frank Furness) and the Chinese Wall came down in 1953, and the City had a rare opportunity to redesign a large vacant space in the heart of a city that was already 250 years old.

The Chinese Wall, 1913.

I think it's fair to say that things didn't go as well as many people had hoped. There are a number of issues, but I'd like to focus on two things that I think underlie the traffic problems in the area - the street grid and the demands of the automobile.

The Street Grid
William Penn's 1682 plan for Philadelphia, with its rectangular street grid, recalls the layout of Roman military camps. The grid is a durable concept because it's useful, but we should remember that it was invented primarily with pedestrians in mind. Most Roman soldiers got around by walking. A few had horses; it helped to have a good seat, because stirrups hadn't been invented yet.

We should remember how good the Romans were at squeezing remarkable achievements out of very limited technical resources. For instance, how would you, as a Roman engineer, go about building a military camp, or castrum, on a rectangular grid? You used the Roman version of a surveyor's transit, which was called a groma.

The groma was a pair of straight sticks joined at right angles and mounted on a staff. Looking down one stick allowed you to shoot a straight line. Then, if you walked around and looked down the other stick, you could shoot a right angle. You could only shoot 90 degree angles with a groma. If I were an engineer, I would find that a pretty good argument for laying out an army camp in a rectangular grid.

The Roman castrum always came with two large streets that divided the camp into quarters. Where these big streets met, in the middle of the camp, there was a large open area. This was the parade ground, and the unit commander's headquarters was located on this square.

In Philadelphia we call these big streets Broad and Market; the central square is the home of City Hall.

I suspect that the grid worked pretty well for the Romans. At each end of the big streets, there were gates. A commander could readily mass troops along those streets and in the central square and then sally forth through any of the gates.

The main shortcoming of the grid plan is the lack of diagonal movement. In early modern times this issue was addressed by adding diagonal boulevards to the grid. Major L'Enfant did this in his plan for Washington, D.C., and Baron Haussmann employed them extensively in his reconstruction of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century.

Haussmann did not build the most famous Parisian boulevard, the Champs Elysees, which has roots extending back to the late seventeenth century. And it is the Champs Elysees which provides the inspiration for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.

It's important to remember that the boulevard concept, like the grid concept, was born in a world without cars. These streets were for pedestrians and also people who liked to ride around in horse-drawn carriages.

Cars Change Everything
And then came the cars. It's tempting to blame the beginning of our traffic woes around City Hall on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (built between 1917 and 1926). Or you can blame City Hall (built between 1871 and 1901). Or I suppose you could go back to the original William Penn plan and say that the two big streets meeting in the middle was a good idea for a Roman military camp, but that the intersection in the central square would clearly become a choke point when the concept was applied to a larger settlement.

Here's a map showing the central part of Philadelphia in 1859. Notice that the central square is already unlike the other four squares. In the outlying squares, the streets skirt the perimeter. In the central square they plow right through the middle, dividing the square into four pieces. A little over a decade later, City Hall started to arrive in the central square, at which point traffic was pushed to the periphery.

Market and Broad intersecting in Centre Square, 1859.

What would have happened to the central square if City Hall had not arrived? I suspect that it would have become a very large traffic circle, similar to Logan Square. We can only hope that the middle of the square would have an equally attractive water feature.

The street system is not the source of our problems. The problems came with the cars, and the problems came from the cars. After the introduction of the Model T Ford in 1908, cars hit cities like a tidal wave.  Cars are big and heavy and fast. They needed more space to move than the streets had, and they needed places to park. Starting in the 1920's, cities began to rebuild themselves to accommodate cars.

Peter D. Norton, in his Fighting Traffic (2011), goes through what happened in magisterial fashion. (I have reprised some of his arguments in Cars and Bikes - The Back Story.)

The reconstruction was managed by members of the new profession of traffic engineering, many of whom had gotten their start in municipal water departments. They effectively reported to the American car manufacturers and their allies. There were two key goals - a bigger pipe, and faster throughput.  The engineers knew how to move water, and they knew they needed a big pipe and high speeds to satisfy a demand that skyrocketed every year.

From this basic situation you get the Interstate Highway System, based on limited access, many lanes, and high speeds. This system actually works well out in the cornfields of Iowa. Drop it into a city that was designed in the seventeenth century, and there are problems.

It's not that you can't do interstates in the big city. Look at the Vine Street Expressway. I wish it were covered, and I wish the traffic volumes and number of crashes were lower, but you can do this. We could actually live with automobiles, if the car lobby were reasonable.

But what doesn't work is trying to turn local Philadelphia streets into fake interstates. And that's what's happening on 15th Street by City Hall.

The Nitty Gritty
Okay. I told you I would get to this, and here we are. Let's have a look at 15th Street by City Hall. The traffic engineers took one look at 15th Street, and they said "big pipe." I won't go through the history, but here's what's going on today.

Here are the feeders for the big pipe on 15th Street, which for out-of-town readers runs south past the west front of City Hall.

Let's start at the north, with the Vine Street Expressway. Both the eastbound and the westbound exits land you on 15th.

The Ben Franklin Parkway comes in by way of a little two-way section of Arch between 16th and 15th, just north of Love Park.

Arch Street between Broad and 15th, by the Municipal Services Building, is one-way westbound (we'll come back to that) and it also feeds 15th Street.

Just south of Arch, the 810-car garage under Love Park has an exit onto 15th.

At John F. Kennedy Boulevard, just south of the Municipal Services Building, Broad Street feeds into 15th by running around the northwest shoulder of City Hall.

And then Market Street butts into 15th on the west side of City Hall.

All this takes place in the space of five blocks.

I've written a bit about 15th Street by Love Park (for instance, Crossing 15th Street), so I'm going to limit myself to a comment on the intersection of 15th and Market.

Who thought it would be a good idea to have five lanes of traffic merge at a T intersection with another four lanes of traffic and then immediately split into three separate streams, flowing to 15th Street (south), Broad Street (south), and Market Street (east)?

The Furness Plan
This was a conscious decision. Previously there were two separate streets here - the street by the west side of City Hall, and then 15th Street. When Frank Furness designed the Broad Street Station, he preserved 15th Street by having it flow through the building. Here's his plan.

From James F. O'Gorman, The Architecture of Frank Furness (1973) p. 183.

The later arrival of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway created further issues, which I think have never been satisfactorily resolved. However, traffic on the Parkway has decreased since the construction of the Vine Street Expressway, and I think it should be possible to make things better in this area, provided people are open to new thinking.

A Different Approach
What happens if, instead of concentration and high speeds, we ask our street designers to look at diffusion and low speeds? In other words, let the grid do something it's good at.

Let's start with two easy ones.

Make the 1400 block of Arch two-way. The Benjamin Franklin Parkway ends at 16th and Arch. You can continue on to the 1500 block of Arch, north of Love Park, but then you are required to turn south on to 15th. Why can't you keep going east on Arch? Because it's one-way westbound from 15th east.

I think we should make Arch two-way down to Independence Mall at least. Then it could effectively serve as a distributor for the Ben Franklin Parkway east of Broad. But for now I'm happy to concentrate on the 1400 block, where we have some work to do.

I'm actually a fan of Vincent Kling's Municipal Services Building, but it does have some problems, not least of which is the remarkably self-indulgent porte-cochere on Arch Street, which takes up two traffic lanes and spawns a wide sidewalk that almost nobody uses.

Sidewalk and porte-cochere at Municipal Services Building.

I'd demolish this porte-cochere - it's actually a free-standing structure - and narrow the sidewalk and let motorists go both east and west on this block.

Close the Love Park garage exit on 15th. These exiting vehicles cause a lot of craziness as they try to move left - the lane they exit onto is a right-turn only lane. This block is currently hell on wheels for pedestrians and motorists alike. I'm amazed that people actually ride bicycles on this block, but they do. There's another perfectly adequate garage exit on Cherry Street.

Okay. Now for the heavy lifting.

Close 15th Street from JFK Boulevard to South Penn Square. In Vietnam there was a road that French soldiers called la rue sans joie, or the street without joy. Greta Garbo starred in a film of the same name in 1925.

Fifteenth Street west of City Hall is a street without joy. There's no fixing it, in my opinion. So we should close it and allow Dilworth Park to expand and occupy the whole space from City Hall to the Clothespin.

How you do this is a little complicated, so please bear with me.

Make Market Street two-way from 20th to 15th. It's already two-way west of 20th and east of City Hall. I don't know why it's one-way on this stretch. Make a nice turnaround circle at 15th Street.

Provide similar treatments for the stubs of 15th Street and South Penn Square that would provide access to the buildings on the southwest corner of this new plaza.

My brother points out that you could marry up South Penn Square, 15th Street, and Ranstead, which extends from 15th to 16th. I think this is a nice solution, although I prefer mine.

Market Street will no longer be a through street in Center City. However, if you think about it, neither Market nor Broad have really been through streets in Center City since at least 1871. We've just been pretending.

Make JFK Boulevard two-way for its full length. Currently it is two-way from 30th Street Station across the bridge to 20th Street, and then one-way westbound between 20th and City Hall. We need to reroute Market Street's eastbound through traffic to JFK Boulevard. Motorists could make this move out by 30th Street Station, or on the east side of the Schuylkill at 20th, 18th, or 16th.

With no traffic on the west side of City Hall, the streets on the north, east, and south sides of City Hall all need to become two-way.

Here's some of the upside. A motorist coming from 30th Street Station can run straight down JFK to the east side of City Hall, make a quick right and a quick left, and then continue on Market Street to the Arden Theater for a reprise of Sweeney Todd.

Similarly, a motorist coming down Broad Street to City Hall can make a few quick turns and again be on east Market headed to Christ Church, one of George Washington's hangouts in Old City.

Currently, a motorist coming down Broad who wants to go east on Market has to go around three-quarters of City Hall and brave some of the nastiest traffic in the city.

Use Roundabouts. I think a number of the intersections under discussion - for instance, the intersection of Broad with JFK on the north side of City Hall - would benefit from the addition of roundabouts. These are basically very small traffic circles. I've seen them in action. In my experience they slow traffic, encourage polite driving, and in general work very well.

It's a Lot of Work. What's the Payoff?
A walkable city. As the headline of this story says, transportation should not trump destination. We need to have a there there, when people get out of their cars or off the train or bus, or when they dismount from their bikes or just show up by walking, which is what I usually do. And the there should not just be inside. We need outdoor public spaces, and frankly Philadelphia does them very well. It just needs to do more.

Things seem to be headed in this direction. Recently there have been suggestions in New York City that it is finally time to close Times Square to cars. We'll see how that goes. So much depends on elections.

But I think the Schuylkill Banks in Philly show that it is possible to blend hard-core transportation with bucolic recreation in a way that is highly successful for both. The early plans for the Schuylkill Banks called for the rail lines by the river to go away, but they didn't. And so we have a riverbank park that is easily accessible across rail lines that carry volatile petroleum and smelly garbage, and after years of settling in, and many, many snarky conversations, and the construction of some pretty amazing blast walls, things seem to be going reasonably well.

I'm not saying it's nirvana, but I am saying this is the way of the future.

The two most successful Center City parks, aside from the Schuylkill Banks, are probably Rittenhouse Square and Fitler Square. Although they don't have the industrial challenges of the Banks, they do have to deal with cars, which is the issue up by City Hall. And the answer is, if you have a nice park with greenery and a water feature and benches and maybe a few statues that kids can climb on, and the park is accessible across streets that are not terrifying, and if the din of the car traffic is low enough to meld with other background noises, and if maybe you have a certain amount of programming, then you've probably got yourself a successful park.

I think we could have a very successful park filling the open space on the west side of City Hall. People will say, if you build it they won't come. This is Philadelphia, and of course people are going to say that. But I don't believe them.

Plaque located in the northern arcade of the Municipal Services Building. It commemorates the Reyburn Plaza Bandstand, which was demolished in 1962.

The maps reproduced in this story are from the Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network.

See also Fixing Arch Street at Love Park; Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor; Love Park Redesign: Why Are There Still Five Traffic Lanes on 16th Street; Richardson Dilworth, an Urbanist for the Ages; Road Diet by Love Park - a Natural Experiment.

This Isn't Just Any Alley

Some of the finest architecture in Philadelphia stands next to this alley, which today, as you can see above, is largely devoted to the storage of trash. Welcome to the 1400 block of Moravian Street, just west of Broad Street, south of Sansom, north of Walnut. Two blocks from City Hall. But more importantly, this is where the people who really ran things, for many years, used to hang out.

To the left, in the picture above, is the Union League. To the right the big building, with the columns well above ground-level, used to be the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. The Drexel building, which we will see in a minute, is to the right, facing 15th Street and Walnut.

Years ago, I used to work in lower Manhattan. One day I was walking down Broadway near Trinity Church, and I passed a group of tourists who were standing at the head of Wall Street, by the church. An older gentleman placed his bag on the pavement with an air of arrival, straightened up, looked down Wall Street, and said, "Ach so, die Zentrum der Platz."

So that was Wall Street, and the alley above was essentially our Zentrum from before World War I to after World War II. I wonder what it was like when all the financiers crossed Moravian to eat lunch at the Union League, and when they went back to their offices after their steaks and succotash. Did they have dumpsters in those days?

I think most people don't even know this alley exists. Below is Moravian at 15th Street, the Union League to the left, the Drexel and Company building to the right. Looks thoroughly respectable, doesn't it? To see the alley, you need to be standing in the right place, and you need to be looking for it.

The Drexel family has a university named after it, but the eponymous building here was the brainchild of Edward T. Stotesbury, who in addition to running the Drexel firm found time to dabble in the sport of racing rowboats. The Stotesbury Cup, held on the Schuylkill every spring, is named after him.

The design of the Drexel and Company building is based on the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The Strozzi were rivals of the Medici, and they had a better architect. The Drexel building went up between 1925 and 1927.

And here's the Broad Street end, with the Banana Republic and a pile of condo apartments on the left and the Union League on the right.

You'll notice that this end of the Union League looks a lot different from the 15th Street end. That's because they're two different buildings. The building on Broad Street dates from 1865; the Renaissance palace fronting 15th Street was designed by Horace Trumbauer and went up between 1909 and 1911.

These two very different buildings joined at the hip can be a bit disconcerting to the modern eye. But I've gotten used to it. And this isn't the only building on Broad Street that looks like this. A few blocks to the south, at Pine Street, stands the main building of the University of the Arts, Dorrance Hamilton Hall. The front of this structure, which like the Union League extends through to 15th Street, was designed by John Haviland and built between 1824 and 1826, with wings added in 1838 by William Strickland. The back part was designed in 1875 by Frank Furness in his own style.

I've taken to walking down the 1400 block of Moravian on my way to the Reading Terminal Market. It's not a pretty place. Recently I've noticed that it's cleaner than it used to be. That's true of a lot of the alleys that I walk down. I haven't seen a dead rat in quite a while.

But still it's ugly. My best story comes from last year, in the warm weather. I was walking down the middle of the street, dodging puddles of slime - you need to watch your step in these alleys - and almost missed a man sitting on the sidewalk with his back resting against the old Stock Exchange building. He was a homeless man, bearded and quite dirty, and he was naked. His clothes were on the sidewalk next to him. I could relate. It was a warm day, his clothes were very dirty, and so was he. It probably felt good getting some fresh air on his skin.

But still. What would Mr. Stotesbury have said?

I'm not one of those who wishes that the homeless would just disappear, and doesn't particularly care what happens to them when that happens. Again, though, this should be one of the premier pedestrian streets in Philadelphia.

Just have a look at the front facade of the Stock Exchange building, over on Walnut Street. This is what the Moravian Street facade should look like as well, instead of having those lovely arched openings at ground level blocked in ways that only the Department of Licenses and Inspections could love.

The other Walnut Street frontages, below, show a similar sense of possibility.

If you go all the way back to the first picture, you'll notice that several of these buildings have fire escapes on their Moravian frontages. Show stopper, you say. Well, no. Andy Nicolini has been working on giving the 2000 block of Moravian, next to the Shake Shack, a makeover, and he and his design crew have come up with some very nice ways to make fire escapes cute, and even fun, without reducing their effectiveness in an emergency. (See Center City Quarterly 5:3, Fall 2015, p. 15.) Now he just needs to get his funding, so we can stop looking at drawings and actually go to the alley and look at the real thing. I think when that happens people will finally understand the value in these alleys - and, to use a real estate term - they may even feel motivated to unlock that value.

Finally, here is a shot of something that few people see. It is the south side of the Union League's new building - the extension built by Trumbauer in 1909-1911.

I like to think that, at some point, that naked homeless guy looked up and saw this.