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PHILADELPHIA STREET HIERARCHIES Thomson Korostoff University Scholars Summer and Fall 2016

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PHILADELPHIA STREET HIERARCHIES Thomson Korostoff University Scholars Summer and Fall 2016 PHILADELPHIA STREET HIERARCHIES Thomson Korostoff University Scholars Summer and Fall 2016 Introduction The Philadelphia grid is considered one of the foundational American city plans, a pattern replicated across the nation that embodies geometry, legibility, and organization at its purest. A marked change, at its application in 1682, from the organic morphologies of European cities, the regularity of the drawn grid is startling. And over a century later Charles Dickens criticized Philadelphia: “It is a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.”1 But this grid is deceptive. Inside each of the huge blocks of Philadelphia’s grid are myriad alleyways, courts, back-buildings, and passages that defied the regularity of the external blocks. Dickens’ take on the personal aesthetic experience of the grid highlights its superficiality. While these alleys are composed of straight lines, it is only the visual appearance of non-crooked corners in the alleys and courts that distinguishes Philadelphia from a curving organic form such as Boston’s. The means by which internal courts are built and formed is the same organic growth as a non-gridded city.2 Unclear The scale of Philadelphia’s grid and the localized nature of organic growth within it create a distinctive urban form of squares and interiors, one that under examination at an intermediate block-level scale reveals a distinct hierarchy of street types. This hierarchical urban fabric produces a diversity of architectural forms that in turn allow for a city that retains a remarkable level of demographic racial diversity into the 20th century. This diversity is invisible at citywide scales, but becomes legible at a block-level scale when placed into a hierarchy of abrupt residential segregation. At an individual architectural scale, this becomes a matter of economics. The period around the First World War offers an opportunity to look at these alleyways before many came to be demolished in the 1930’s, while still allowing interpretation of their function in the face of the regularization of the 20th century. To consider this infill of courts and back-houses as an organic form contests the conception of Philadelphia as a rationally planned city; and as a distinct hierarchy of house sizes and values, and accompanying racial changes, emerges, the ideal of the nonhierarchical grid that defined the city’s identity in the early 19th century comes into question as well. 1 Quoted in Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth, 2nd Edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 53; see also Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 120. 2 Some of the infill in Philadelphia bears many formal similarities to burgage plot infill in European cities, especially in England, in which long lots are gradually filled in with a succession of buildings in the back yard. See Spiro Kostoff, The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1992), 289-305. Thomson Korostoff, University Scholars 2016 2 Urban and Historical Context In his most famous pronouncement, William Penn declared a hopeful vision of Philadelphia as a “green Country Town, which will never be burnt. and always be wholesome.”3 This was to be enacted by a grid plan—shown in the Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia by Penn’s surveyor Thomas Holme—which would organize the city for simple sale to remote investors.4 In the 18th century, the broader form of this grid spanning two rivers was forgotten as the city clung to the valuable Delaware waterfront. This port was loosely segregated by function; warehouses along the waterfront, and associated financial buildings behind these, rope-walks and shipyards along the river bank to north and south, a belt of retail, and civic and religious buildings the furthest from river at the apex of a triangle.5 These functions determined residential patterns, as most in the city lived as close to work as possible. Almost immediately, the colossal blocks of two hundred thousand square feet came to be divided up with small interior alleyways and courtyards, with small houses built on the backs of lots or around the perimeters of freestanding mansions.6 As the expanding scope of the mercantile world required new forms of classification, an interest in gridded forms made the jump from commerce to public identity. In 1789, the city, re-crafting its charter at a time when bureaucracy itself was had discovered enthusiasm for the orthogonal, suddenly remembered this city grid and incorporated the grid plan into the city’s seal, and its conception of itself as possessing a history of rationalism and equality. This new “imagination” of the grid surpassed any of Penn’s enthusiasm for the original grid, now declaring a nonhierarchical, humanist, rational system of organization for a plan that had, in 1682, professed an explicit hierarchy and had been chosen in part to make speculative sale possible.7 The very language—“green country town”—was itself an empty shell, referring to a plan for rural settlement that had already been abandoned by the time the Portraiture was drawn.8 Though this process of infill was increasing seen as a violation both of the Greene Country Towne ideal and the republican rationalism of the grid, Penn’s original plan foresaw this division into smaller lots, calling for “building here after streets,” in addition to grid.9 However, this technicality is still frequently overlooked today, and it certainly 3 As quoted in Upton, 114.This quotation is known to anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Philadelphia’s early history. 4 See image 1 5 From prior work done with the 1791 Philadelphia Directory. 6 Sharon Salinger, "Spaces, Inside and Outside, in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 1-31, page 14; James Vance, The Continuing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 265. 7 Upton 113-124 8 Upton chapter 5 footnote 2; Gary Nash,"City Planning and Political Tension in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Philadelphia," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, no. 1 (Febuary 1968): 54-73; Hannah Benner Roach, "The Planting of Philadelphia: A 17th-Century Real Estate Development," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92, no. 1 (January 1968): 3-47. 9 See Warner 52, Upton 115. Thomson Korostoff, University Scholars 2016 3 could not withstand the excitement of national myth-building. The ideology of the rationality and individualism of the grid itself assumed national significance in America in the early 19th century, becoming incorporated into the grid plan for New York in 1811, and across the nation as the township and range system, first used to divide Ohio in the last years of the 18th century, and in subsequent western territories as they were added. As Philadelphia industrialized in the 19th century, the blocks of the city grew denser with subdivisions and small houses for a growing proletariat and emerging middle class. Beginning in 1799 builders began constructing long blocks of speculative rowhouses, and permutations of the rowhouse became the dominant housing stock, even into the present day.10 Philadelphia rowhouses can be classified into four basic categories by the number of rooms and presence of a rear wing. The four most common rowhouse types in Philadelphia are the “bandbox” house, one room deep, known also in Philadelphia as trinities when three stories tall; and two-room “London-type” rowhouses. With the expansion of a rear wing—connected by a narrow neck known in Philadelphia as a ‘Piazza’—creates the “Town-“ and “City-type” rowhouses.11 These types have only loose correspondence with street types. The form of the “bandbox” house is not interchangeable with alleyway housing, though it was taken to be during tenement cleanups in the early 20th century. These narrow houses appear both on alleyways and on larger streets, and alleyway housing is a mix of one-room bandbox and two-room “London-type” rowhouses. As alleyway forms, small bandbox houses sometimes appeared behind larger rowhouses in residential courts and passages, while at other sites, larger speculative blocks of alley houses were constructed along secondary street in a block interior. Architecturally, the exceptions of everyday life do not permit any intermediate typology of alleyway forms—though houses fall into recognizable patterns, minor changes in conditions form a spectrum of small street types that defies any grouping. Even today, in surviving alleyways, there is little differentiation between through, closed, and internal streets, or those with and without garages. The city contained this variety of forms of alley and court already by 1860, and these primarily survive past 1920. Attached images are from 1916 fire insurance maps, but earlier maps show that almost all the alley houses and back-buildings in this area predate 1860, they are more likely to have disappeared between then and 1916 than been constructed. In this particular area the houses likely date to the 1840’s or 50’s.12 Subdivision for small lots is older in Philadelphia than in other American cities: in Washington, D.C., many similar alley houses date to the period after 1865. 10 These first rowhouses, Sansom’s Row at 7th and Sansom Streets, looked onto Washington Square which had also recently been remembered as a public space from the Holme plan, rather than a body dump. 11 William John Murtagh, "The Philadelphia Row House," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 16, no. 4 (December 1957): 8-13.
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