Lost trolleys, mislaid priorities

There is something marvelous about the renaissance of a semi-moribund research institution. I don't mean to imply that the Library Company was dead to the world these many years. It has been a redoubtable resource for serious researchers.

But it has not been the demotic institution it has recently become. Its luminous exhibition of photographs, "Philadelphia: Then and Now," is a brilliant example of its new liveliness. It wears its learning with enough panache to tempt anyone off Locust Street to take a look--not just Ph.Ds in search of documentation.

Just as Jefferson argued that our democracy can be no better than its common school system, so the vitality of our cultural life can be no feistier than the median pizazz of our museums.

The catalog text, by Kenneth Finkel--curator of prints at the Library Company and perennial op-edifier in the Inquirer--urges us to husband our heritages, physical and psychological. The photographs are taken by a cadre of largely anonymous documentary photographers, with modern updates by Susan Oyama.

For someone like me--who did not come East in a huff of hauteur from Detroit until 1955--it is a major epiphany to see the old Broad Street Station, sacrificial lamb of a clone of St. Pancras Station in London, offered up on the altar of Ed Bacon's marvelous Center City renaissance, which began with the GooGoo Dems' taking over City Hall in 1952.

And the Chinese Wall was only a metaphor for downtown disorderliness until I took a look at page 22. The contrast is not always as stark as in the Reading Terminal, circa 1950 and 1987. Yes, Virginia, those are streetcars on Market Street.

Blame their absence today on the mallification of America, which was aided and abetted by the Interstate "defense" highway, that suburbanizing strategy which abandoned the inner city to impecunious blacks.

Broad Street south of Oregon Avenue, 1926 and 1987, shows a rare improvement in our streetscape--and the crackpot Liberty Bell triumphal arch of 1926 is reason enough to explain why the Sesquicentennial was a flopperoo.

Occasionally, our historical guidelines area bit overbearing, as in juxtaposing (on pages 10 & 11) and 1867 photo of Queen Street between Swanson and Front Streets--lovely 1740-era row houses--with the underside of Interstate 95 today.

I mean, Interstates have to have undersides, and I'll tell you that every time I whizz to the airport from my Academy Road on-ramp, I don't rue a whit those lost English-style speculators' houses. There is a soft, sentimental streak in the best of preservationalists that diminishes their political (and intellectual) effectiveness.

And frankly, the crocodile tears shed over Wyndmoor (pages 118 & 119) don't get to me either. Our docent is Finkel: "Old money had its claim to the Main Line, west of the city. New money found company in the northern suburbs, where palatial estates were, in a fashion, paid for with hats (Stetson), ice cream (Breyer), magazines (Curtis), and oil and transportation (Elkins).

"Each was more opulent than the previous. But none outdid Whitemarsh Hall, paid for by money made with money. Edward T. Stotesbury, who built Whitemarsh Hall with his wife Eva, headed Drexel and Company, part of J.P. Morgan's empire . . ."

"In 1917, they commissioned architect Horace Trumbauer and landscape architect Jacques Greber to convert more than 300 acres of rolling Montgomery County farmland into one of America's most flamboyant estates . . . Whitemarsh Hall has 153 rooms. 28 bathrooms, three elevators and separate apartments for guests, who were each assigned a servant and chauffeur. Neither princes nor presidents, cardinals nor comics, declined a Stotesbury invitation."

That's marvelous history and elegant prose and epitomizes perfectly why the cultural establishment in Philly have been a chain gang of "Yassuh, yassuh" lackeys for the rich. Can't we expect, now and then--if not then and now--a little more compassion for the horrendous social costs of this flaunting of wealth?

What was Brigid (or perhaps Aretha) being paid for cleaning out those 28 toilets for the foolishly newly rich who really thought their defecations were of a higher ordure than those of the rest of us?

This fine book, flawed by its blindness to the long-range social costs of the Robber Baron insolence, is the best example I've found in a long time of the systemic hat-in-handedness of our curators.

They spend so much of their time worrying how to get old money to balance their budgets and finance their aspirations to do more and better that they simply don't see the downside of the patrons they praise so fulsomely.

It's a great pity, for now we have to cope with that loose cannon, John Street, talking in City Council about how all culture is political. All because the Main Line has been sucked up to for so long by our museum directors and curators. Ho hum.

from Welcomat: After Dark, March 15, 1989