The Library Company of Philadelphia has fielded a beguiling
winner in architect / engineer Benjamin Latrobe’s “Views of Jeffersonian
America 1795-1820.”
There’s a tasty oil portrait of our immigrant hero—from the UK at
age 31—by Rembrandt Peale: spit-curls garnishing a thoughtfully broad
brow, a fluffy white choker accenting his stark black broadcloth, dinky glasses
sliding off a boldly fleshy nose, eyes aglitter with the curiosity that made
him a trustworthy and indefatigable natural historian as well as an elegant
architect. (I consider Latrobe’s Baltimore Roman Catholic Cathedral one of the
most enduring places of worship in our country, certainly the best by far of
its era.)
But while I knew his buildings and love them (extant and,
alas, demolished), his natural history was news to my eyes. I relish the ground
squirrel (5/31/96), which the witty inside-dopester gives the fake scientific
appellation of “phlebotomy gratis,” which is to say, “free bloodletting,” a
poke at one his era’s grossest medical miscalculations.
I delight as well in the caption trivia which gives the
etymology of “chipmunk,” which is Ojibway for “head first,” the way the critter
descends trees. And his color sketch of a triplet of dolphins fully lives up to
his astonished prose: “Nothing can exceed the beauty and gaiety of the color of
the dolphins.”
More sociological but equally fascinating is “Preparation
for the enjoyment of a fine Sunday among the blacks, Norfolk” (3/4/97), in which
a trio of slaves are primping and getting ready to have a holiday.
His topographical scenes don’t turn me on as much, except
when they have some human element, as in his observations about the rampant
vulgarity of a provisioning hamlet in the Delta of the Mississippi below New
Orleans.
But Philadelphians will be most intrigued by the light
thrown on the early years of the region. He designed the first steam-powered
waterworks in 1801 when the population was 50,000. Wells were not working well
enough—you couldn’t fight fires or clean streets with their pathetically
unpowered streams, and yellow-fever epidemics threatened to foul them up when
they weren’t going entirely dry.
So one engine took in clean, clear water from the
Schuylkill, ran it through a brick conduit under Chestnut Street to Centre
Square (where City Hall now stands) where another steam engine dumped it into a
cistern for distribution through wooden pipes to hydrants and houses. Annual
water fee, $5!
The drawings and landscapes are delectably bucolic. In the
days before trash, there was steam—and yellow fever to worry about. That’s why
we have place names like Fair Mount and Mount Airy, the canny rich having
discovered that there was an inverse correlation between height of housing and
number of mosquitoes.
But Latrobe will always be in our civic debt for the first
big commission he had after he moved here in 1798—the $4,000 fee (a lucrative
payment in the day of $5 annual water fees) for the Bank of Pennsylvania, which
he supervised the erection of between 1799-1801. (The Feds who hadn’t yet
learned their preservationist manners, demolished it in a High Vic frenzy in
1897.) Its cool Federalist elegance set a high standard for civic architecture,
and Latrobe regarded it as his masterpiece.
But you’ll have to come to the Library Company to see what
it looked like. And don’t miss the teenagers’ discovery of their peers,
1870-1920, next door at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. It’s a
landmark.
Benjamin Latrobe exhibit: At the Library Company, 1314
Locust Street, through October 17. 546-3181. You may want to buy volume three
of the Yale edition of Latrobe’s papers, a bargain at $30, on sale at their
registration desk.
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, October
15, 1986
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