By John F. Bauman CALIFORNIA STATE COLLEGE DOWNTOWN VERSUS NEIGHBORHOOD: FOCUSING ON PHILADELPHIA IN THE METROPOLITAN ERA, 1920-1980 D ECENTLY, Sam Bass Warner observed that the modern 20th R\ century service-oriented city should be viewed as an artifact, its streets, sewers, schools and architecture monuments to the re- gimine of the past. Somewhat tremorlessly, this look at the literature on Philadelphia in the post-industrial era invokes the past-Antiquity and Saint Augustine-for its analytical model. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, scholars have been enticed by Saint Augustine's dualism of two cities. Victorians like Benjamin Disraeli, and and non-Victorians-Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes come to mind-assiduously juxtaposed the good with the bad city. Today writers inexorably contrast the city of slums and proverty with the city of insouciant wealth.' Influenced by the prolificacy of the Chicago School, modern students have grafted an anatomical dimension onto Augustine's dualism. Urban cores of sin oppose a progression of increasingly righteous zones. Crowded downtowns compete with lower density uptosVns, the inner city vies with the outer, the ghetto with the suburb, and so on. But a thread of consistency governed the texture of these polarities: the old city, whether titled core, slum, ghetto or inner city, invariably bore the stigma of decadence.' 1. Sam Bass Warner, The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New Yolk: Harper and Row, 1972); Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its TransJor- mations and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961); Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (London: New Editions, 1949). 2. For a recent discussion of the Chicago School, see David R. Goldfield and Blaine A. Brownell, Urban America from Downtown to No Town (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979), pp. 1-22; alsoJames F. Short,Jr. ed., The Social Fabric of theMetropolis: Contributions of the Chicago School of Urban Soriology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1971). 3 4 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY Perhaps Philadelphia does offer a variant form. Although the scholarship of Philadelphia as a post-industrial city fits the dualistic mold, curiously, writers habitually have viewed the city's downtown- its inner city-as the abode of hope rather than despair. This ex- amination of the studies of post-industrial Philadelphia, 1920-1980, focuses on both political and socio-historical monographs, and analyzes them according to their orientation to the downtown core as well as to the city viewed as a collectivity of neighborhoods. Not only does this approach afford insight into the historiography of the 20th century Philadelphia, but also, it illuminates the modern city itself. To begin, several studies have emphasized the segmented character of post-industrial urbanism. In his The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth, Sam Bass Warner treated the post-in- dustrial metropolis as a segregated city with a "downtown" dif- ferentiated as the locus of business and wealth. Surrounding the core of wealth Warner discovered equally differentiated neighborhoods including working class districts like Kensington, Fishtown, and Richmond, ghettoes and immigrant refuges like Southwark, Whit- man, and Queens Village, and commuter suburbs like Haddington and Wynnefield in West Philadelphia. Warner noted that the subway, trolleys, elevated trains and other expensive appurtenances of the city's costly transit system confirmed the city's dedication to privatism and reinforced the segregation of its neighborhoods by class, race and ethnicity.3 Likewise, William Cutler in the concluding chapter to Cutler and Howard Gillett's The Divided Metropolis: The Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1820-1975, interpreted the dichotomies, core and neighborhood, wealth and poverty, residence and work as part of a "persistent dualism" involving the dynamic forces of centralization and decentralization. While events such as the suburban annexation of 1854, 19th century mass transit, and the city charter movement of 1951 abetted centralization, the populari- zation of the automobile, the road and highway acts of 1916, 1921, and 1956, plus the Federal Housing Act of 1933, engendered significant decentralization.' 3. Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Phila- delphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1968): Warner reinforces his arguments about privatism, the impact of changing corporate forms, and the evolving segregated spatial form of the city in his The Urban Wilderness. 4. See William Cutler's "The Persistent Dualism: Centralization and Decentraliza- PHILADELPHIA IN METROPOLITAN ERA 5 The literature then, albeit sparse, suggests that in the play of macrocosmic forces shaping modern Philadelphia-centripetal versus centrifugal-urbanization versus suburbanization-the neigh- borhood more than the downtown was the trampled and scarred victim. THE DOWNTOWN CONNECTION Most studies of the social and political dynamics of modern Philadelphia have stressed the real as well as the symbolic signifi- cance of the city's historic core: Vine Street to the north, South Street to the south, and bounded east and west respectively by the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. In his study of the Perennial Philadelphians Nathaniel Burt detected the locus of the Wharton, Pepper, Drexel, Biddle, Cadwalder and Clark family fortunes and power in the downtown. Burt even pinpointed the spot-Broad and Chestnut streets-referring to the august assemblage of banking edifices-the Philadelphia National Bank, Girard Trust, and Pennsylvania Company-as the "nest egg." Digby Baltzell's sociological odyssey, Philadelphia Gentlemen in the Making of a National Upper Class, traced the lineage, economic instru- ments, and social apparatus of the city's aristocracy before and after the Schuylkill Expressway became the umbilical cord con- necting "mainline" to center city Philadelphia. Like Burt, Baltzell acknowledged that the critical mass of mainline power remained concentrated in the old city despite the hegira to the suburbs. Warner noted that by 1930 the Central Business District (CBD) comprised the seat of Philadelphia corporate power and enclosed the ancillary communications and other tertiary functions which made the city a commercial and administrative hub. Nicholas tion in Philadelphia, 1854-1975," in William Cutler and Howard Gillett, eds., The Divided Metropolis: The Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1820- 1940 (Westport: Greenwood, 1980); on the impact of transportation on the modern urban spatial form see, John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge: M.I.T, 1970); and Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Lois .4igeles. 1850-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard, 1967); for an excellent discussion of the controversy among planners, traction owners and others concerning the decentralizing or centralizing impact of the automobile, see Mark Foster, "City Planners and Urban Transportation: the American Response, 1900-1940," Journal si Urban History, 5 (May 1979): 365-396. 5. Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Upper Class (Boston: Little Brown, 1963). 6 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY Wainwright's studies of the Philadelphia Electric Company and the Philadelphia National Bank detail the nexus between the corporate power and the central city.' Both John Reps and Mel Scott in their histories of planning explained how in the 1920s a harmonious alliance of Philadelphia wealth and boss politics graced the baroque designed Benjamin Franklin Parkway with City Beautiful embellishments while promoting the city efficient with the Broad Street subway.' Warner contends that as the down- town became more functionally specialized to include corporate headquarters, financial institutions, exclusive specialty shops and large department stores, the center city increasingly became the domain of the middle and upper classes. Skyscraper office buildings, gilded theatres, fine restaurants, posh hotels (until the Legionnaires disease), upper class clubs, museums, and the Academy of Music differentiated the downtown as an exclusive neighborhood. How- ever, with the intensification of modernization in the 1920s, Nathaniel Burt's Perennial Philadelphians shared this specialized urban space with the new middle class of professionals, engineers, and scientific-minded bureaucrats who-like the old elites-com- muted between the core and their suburban homes.' None of these historians overlook the city's costly transit system of subways, streamline trolleys and interurban railroads which made the core of business, entertainment and shopping accessible. Interestingly, one of "perennial Philadelphia's" most faithful 6. Digby E. Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (New York: Quadrangle, 1958); Nicholas B. Wainwright, Histoy of the Philadelphia Electric Company, 1881-1961 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Electric Company, 1961); Nicholas B. Wainright, History of the Philadelphia National Bank: A Centuy and a Half of Philadelphia Banking, 1803-1953 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia National Bank, 1953): one of the best discussions of the rise of the downtown as the center of tertiary functions can be found in Edgar M. Hoover and Raymond Vernon's discussion of the New York Regional Study, The Anatomy of a Metropolis (New York: Anchor Books, 1962). 7. See John Reps, The Making of Urban America: A Histoy of City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton