Point State Park & Pittsburgh Walkabout

Posted on July 14, 2019 by admin

RIP, Patricia Deany, mother of our dear old friend Kevin Deany, and a kind and gracious lady. She passed last week at age 90.

At the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers is Point State Park, a 36-acre triangular patch of land that may well be featured in every bit of tourist literature ever published about Pittsburgh since the park’s creation nearly 50 years ago.

But that’s no excuse not walk over to the park from downtown Pittsburgh and make a circuit around the fountain at the tip of the park, which is what we did after lunch at the Oyster House on July 5.
That image makes it look like no one else was there, which wasn’t true at all.
The park offers views of various other parts of Pittsburgh, such as Mt. Washington and the Duquesne Incline.

Or Heinz Field, home of the Steelers. There ought to be a giant ketchup bottle in there somewhere.

Away from the fountain, there’s a view of the Fort Pitt Bridge, which carries I-376 across the Monongahela. It replaced the Point Bridge, which was destroyed, along with the Manchester Bridge, to make way for the park.

Besides being a pleasant green space with views, the park makes various nods to the early history of Pittsburgh. An irregular path of sidewalk follows the outline of Fort Duquesne, the French outpost. Elsewhere other sidewalks mark the outline of the somewhat larger Fort Pitt, the succeeding British outpost, also in the classic star (Bastion) shape.

The U.S. flag is a little unusual. Not in having 13 stars, but in that they aren’t the circular arrangement you usually see. Then again, no one specified how the stars in the canton should be arrayed in those days (and maybe we should go back to that).

On one edge of the park is the Fort Pitt Block House, Point State Park’s only surviving structure from colonial times, built in 1764 as a redoubt of Fort Pitt. It has endured since then in its original spot, for many years as a residence, more recently as a relic.

Our walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh started at the Block House, led by an energetic young woman, native to Pittsburgh and eager to talk about various places and buildings, though less about design and more about history.

Naturally, the names of Pittsburgh robberbarons Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick came up a lot, including the story about a dying Carnegie writing a letter to the estranged Frick asking for a meeting, presumably in the spirit of reconciliation.

Les Standiford tells the story, via NPR. A man named Bridge, who delivered the letter, was Carnegie’s assistant.

“Frick’s ire was, after all, legendary. He’d gone toe-to-toe with strikers, assassins, and even Carnegie himself, and had rarely met a grudge he could not hold. Long before Frick had constructed the mansion that would dwarf Carnegie’s ‘Highlands’ up the street, he had gone out of his way to purchase a tract of land in downtown Pittsburgh, then built a skyscraper tall enough to cast Carnegie’s own office building next door in perpetual shadow.

” ‘Yes, you can tell Carnegie I’ll meet him,’ Frick said finally, wadding the letter and tossing it back at Bridge. ‘Tell him I’ll see him in Hell, where we both are going.’ ”

Whatever else you can say about the steely-eyed bastard Frick, at least he had no illusions about his benevolence, as Carnegie seemed to have had. Our guide also mentioned the taller Frick building next to Carnegie’s, and in fact pointed them out. They are both now overshadowed by more recent Pittsburgh buildings, of course.

At one point, we passed by a building associated with both Carnegie and Frick, along with a lot of other Gilded Age and later tycoons: the Duquesne Club on Sixth Ave.
Founded in 1873 and still a social club for the wealthy, its current home, a Romanesque structure designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, opened in 1890. Just in time for Carnegie and Frick to discuss, possibly over brandy and cigars, the busting of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Speaking of labor history, not far away from the club, I noticed this historic marker.
The founding convention of the AFL was in a Turner Hall. Our guide didn’t mention that, and I asked her about the Turner Hall. She hadn’t heard it. To be fair, I’d never heard of Turner Halls until recently either. To be extra fair, I’m not guiding walking tours of a major American city, so I consider that a small lapse on her part.

The Turner Hall in Pittsburgh, unlike that in Milwaukee, is no more. The site is now called Mellon Square, a 1950s park-like creation paid for by the Mellons to go with the development of Alcoa’s new headquarters building at that time.

Alcoa isn’t there any more, and the building is now known as the Regional Enterprise Tower, but it still has its distinctive aluminum skin. The New York modernists Harrison & Abramovitz designed it.

I’ve read that a Beaux-Arts palace of a theater, the Nixon, was destroyed to make way for Alcoa, causing some consternation even in the tear-it-down midcentury.

Another historic marker that I noticed (that also wasn’t on the tour).
Why Pittsburgh? I wondered. I looked it up later. NPR again: “Slovak culture is everywhere in the Steel City. It’s home to the Honorary Slovak Consulate, a handful of social clubs, cultural centers and annual holiday festivals dedicated to maintaining and celebrating Slovak traditions.

“ ‘Allegheny County has the highest percentage of all of the counties in the United States, not just Pennsylvania, of people who claim Slovak heritage,’ said Martin Votruba, head of Slavic studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Slovaks and Czechs formed a group called the Czecho-Slovak National Council of America. Because there were so many Slovak immigrants living in Pittsburgh, Votruba said it seemed like the perfect location to have a big meeting on Memorial Day in 1918.”

Along the way, we looked at a work of public art in Pittsburgh, a 25-foot bronze fountain centerpiece at Agnes R. Katz Plaza by Louise Bourgeois, completed in 1999. The eye-like smaller bronzes are actually benches, though it’s hard to tell from this angle.

By the time we got to the U.S. Steel Tower, the tallest building in Pittsburgh, a light rain was falling. It would continue at varying strength through the rest of the walk.

No aluminium for this behemoth, rather steel and lots of it. This too is a Harrison & Abramovitz design. The company made steel for its own building, a newish product at the time, corten or weathering steel, which ends up with a dark brown oxidation over the metal to protect the structure from the elements and obviate the need for paint. (The steel still has many surprising uses.) According to our guide, however, until recently the building skin had an unfortunate habit of spitting granules of this rust onto the sidewalks and people below.

Aluminium, steel and then glass. Fitting for the HQ of PPG, also a stop of the tour. Founded in 1883 as Pittsburgh Plate Glass, these days PPG is a supplier of paints, coatings, optical products and specialty materials.

The complex is actually six buildings, all opening in the early 1980s as part of the effort to revive downtown Pittsburgh. By that time, Johnson/Burgee were the go-to NY architects, so they designed the PPG. Rain prevented me from making a good image, but the tallest of the buildings towers over a plaza that features an ice rink in colder weather. It looks like this on a sunny day.

Toward the end of the tour, we made a stop at a place on Smithfield St. that has no marker of any kind and in fact isn’t distinctive in any way, except for one thing: it was the site of an early nickelodeon, thought to be the first theater anywhere devoted exclusively to movies, as opposed to a live theater with a few machines tucked away to separate patrons from their coins.

“The first exclusive moving pictures theater in Pittsburg and the world was opened in 1905 by Harry Davis and John P. Harris in the Howard Block, west side of Smithfield street, between Diamond and Fifth avenue,” one E. W. Lightner wrote in 1919.

Diamond St. is no longer called that. Oddly enough, the change to Forbes St. was made as late as 1958. I’d imagine that would have been hard to do.

Lightner continues: “Curious to say, the second exclusive picture theater of the world was opened in Warsaw, capital of Poland, by a Pittsburg Polander, who saw the Davis-Harris adventure and recognized the possibilities of presenting so wonderful and profitable a development in his native country.”

“The original and only ‘Nickelodeon’ was opened at 8 o’clock of the morning and the reels were kept continuously revolving until midnight. A human queue was continuously awaiting the ending of a performance and the emptying of chairs. Inside an attendant would announce, ‘show ended,’ and spectators would be hustled gently to the street and new spectators welcomed, seated as quickly as possible, and the picture would again respond to the magic reel.”

As you can see, it was pretty much a nothing site when Google Images came by.

Still looks that way in July 2019. There ought to be a marker there at least, or maybe even a hipster bar with a nickelodeon theme.

The Cathedral of Learning & Its Nationality Rooms

Posted on July 11, 2019 by admin

Pittsburgh has some of the most convoluted street patterns I’ve ever driven through. It’s as if a few grids were thrown at random among the hilly terrain, sort of meeting each other in places, with additional streets — some large, some alley-like — crossing the grids at all angles, plus oddball five- and six-way intersections punctuating things. You know, like Boston, only with more hills.

But also more street signs. And fewer lunatics behind the wheel. At least that was my impression, admittedly based on a small sample, as I figured out how to get from place to place. So driving in Pittsburgh wasn’t actually that bad, certainly better than Boston, despite its initial challenges.

Our car has GPS with spoken instructions. I decided to try it on the first morning in town. Pittsburgh managed to flummox the system early in the game. That is, it was unable to give me directions that I could use in a timely manner. Maybe I misunderstood. Doesn’t matter — I found the system annoying, so I quit using it. I went back to consulting maps.

Still, the system’s misdirection, or my misunderstanding, at one point led us through the Liberty Tunnel. Earlier we’d gone through the Fort Pitt Tunnel. Pittsburgh might have some great bridges — more about which later — but it also has some really cool tunnels to drive through.

Our second major destination on the first day was the University of Pittsburgh, which is in the city’s Oakland neighborhood. Besides the Heinz Memorial Chapel, we also wanted to go there to see the Cathedral of Learning, which is a 42-story building. Despite the uncertainties of navigating through the Pittsburgh streets — the GPS voice was silenced by then — I knew I was in the right place when I saw a tall neo-Gothic building rising above everything else around it.

Not that Oakland is lacking for other large structures, just nothing else that tall. In fact the district impressed me as practically a city of its own, with its university buildings, healthcare facilities, sizable apartment buildings, a rich array of retail, some green space and a lot of people out and about. We probably could have spent an entire satisfying day in Oakland.

Even a few blocks away, the Cathedral of Learning makes an impression.

Charles Klauder, the same architect who designed the Heinz Memorial Chapel, did the considerably taller Cathedral as well. Both are Indiana limestone edifices.
Inside are classrooms and administrative offices, but that hardly describes the place. The soaring, four-story lobby could, if anyone wanted to do it, be decked out as a neo-Gothic church.
Something like the Heinz Memorial Chapel. Since the two structures were built at about the same time and designed by the same architect, that’s not much of a surprise.

What really makes the Cathedral of Learning distinctive are its 31 Nationality Rooms, most of which are working classrooms, but each designed to reflect a nationality that had an influence on Pittsburgh’s history.

They’re on the first and third floors. We spent time on the third floor looking at such examples as the Korean Room, based on the 14th-century Myeong-nyundang (Hall of Enlightenment), the main building at the Sungkyunkwan in Seoul.
It was completed only in 2015 by Korean carpenters who built it in that country, took it apart and shipped it to the university, where it was reassembled.

The Japanese Room.
Built in 1999 to evoke residence of an important village leader in a farm village in the mid-18th century in the Kinki district.

The Armenian Room, dating from 1988. Most impressive.
Inspired by the 10th- to 12th-century Sanahin Monastery in Aremenia, which I’d never heard of, so I looked it up.

Also impressive, and probably-not-by-accident on the other side of the building from the Armenian Room, is the Turkish Room, completed in 2012.
In the style of a main room of a 14th-century Turkish house, but also sporting a picture of Ataturk near the entrance (he’s teaching the Turkish nation the Latin alphabet).

My favorite, I think: the Indian Room, completed in 2000. This is the view from the lectern.
A closeup of the columns, decorated with rosettes, swags, and fruit.
The style is a 4th- to 9th-century courtyard from Nalanda University, a Buddhist monastic university. I had to look that up as well.

There might be a lectern, but I can imagine that professors might not spend much time behind it, but rather pace up and down the rose brick floor to more closely converse with the students, who are facing each other.

The Heinz Memorial Chapel

Posted on July 10, 2019 by admin

Chapel has a cozy connotation: little chapel in the woods, wayside chapel, goin’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get married, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t find some sizable edifices that are chapels all the same, such as the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, or the Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh.

Late on Friday morning we arrived on campus to see the sizable chapel, funded by condiment money in the 1930s.
More specifically, the will of ketchup baron Henry Heinz (d. 1919) vaguely provided for the development of a building for religious training and social events at the university. His children and the university administration ultimately decided on a soaring neo-Gothic structure, designed by Philadelphia architect Charles Klauder, who was known for his university work. Apparently the chapel was nondenominational from the get-go.

Looking toward the sanctuary.
Toward the back of the nave. The organ has 4,272 pipes, and when we were in the chapel, an organist was filling the space with soft practice notes.
Both transepts feature dual banks of some astonishingly tall stained glass windows: 73 feet tall, designed by Charles J. Connick’s Boston studio.
I found a pamphlet that tells me that the four tall windows each have a theme: Temperance, Truth, Tolerance and Courage. Some of the characters depicted in those windows are religious figures, as you’d expect, such as the Virgin Mary, Moses, King David, St. Francis, St. George and Joan of Arc.

Others are less expected, such as Sir Isaac Newton. With Edmund Halley down in the corner, helping prove Newton’s laws of motion.
Or President Lincoln.
Or Dorethea Dix.
That’s just a small sample. “The windows, which highlight an equal number of women and men, contain sacred and secular figures from history, literature, and science,” the chapel web site says. There are 391 figures in all.

The Duquesne Incline

Posted on July 9, 2019 by admin

A hundred years ago, hilly Pittsburgh had a lot of operational funiculars: the Castle Shannon Incline, Castle Shannon South Incline, Duquesne Incline, Knoxville Incline, Monongahela Incline, Monongahela Freight Incline, Mount Oliver Incline, Norwood Incline, Penn Incline, and the St. Clair Incline.

Yet others had already come and gone by then: the Bellevue Incline, Clifton Incline, Fort Pitt Incline, H.B. Hays and Brothers Coal Railroad, Nunnery Hill Incline, Pittsburgh and Castle Shannon Plane, Ridgewood Incline and the Troy Hill Incline.

That’s enough for a whole chapter of a coffee table book: Great Funiculars of the World, a sequel to Great Elevators of Europe. The designer of most of them was one man, Samuel Diescher, a Hungarian who came to America in 1866 and did an exceptional number of engineering projects during his career.

Only two funiculars survive in 21st-century Pittsburgh, the Duquesne Incline and the Monongahela Incline, about a mile apart on the slopes of Mt. Washington, to the south of downtown. We couldn’t come to Pittsburgh and not ride at least one of them, and so on mid-morning of July 5, we drove to the Duquesne’s lower-level parking lot and climbed the stairs on the left for access to the funicular.

The Duquesne, in operation since 1877 and restored in 1963, rises about 400 feet.
Round-trip for ages 12 to 64 is $5, and completely worth it. Though part of Pittsburgh’s transit system, on a quasi-holiday in summer, tourists seemed to be the main customers.
At the top is a splendid view of downtown Pittsburgh and the three rivers and their bridges, though things were a little hazy that morning. No matter.
A few minutes’ walk to the west of the top of the Duquesne is the small Point of View Park. Besides offering roughly the same view of downtown, the view from the park down the Ohio is nice.
The park also features two bronzes in a curiously intimate pose: George Washington and Seneca leader Guyasuta by local artist James A. West (2006).
A nearby plaque says that “this bronze depicts a meeting in October 1770 between [Washington and Guyasuta]… this work captures a moment in time between two formidable men whose actions had a huge impact on Pittsburgh…”

Looking closely at the Wiki entry on Guyasuta, I see this detail about his name: “The many spelling variations include Guyashuta, Guyasoota, Guy-a-soot-er, Guyasootha, Guyasotha, Guyasutha, Kayashota, Kayasota, Kayasutha, Keyashuta, Kiasota, Kiashuta, Kiasutha, Kiosola, Kiyashuta, and Kyasoota.”

Pittsburgh ’19

Posted on July 7, 2019 by admin

Independence Day fell on a Thursday this year, creating a four-day window of opportunity to go somewhere. So late on the afternoon of July 3 we headed east, spending the night near Toledo, Ohio. On the 4th, we drove on to Pittsburgh, where we spent three nights and two full days, returning after an all-day drive today.

We stayed at a hotel in the pleasant Moon Township, Pa., not far from Pittsburgh International Airport. The days were hot and steamy and punctuated by vigorous rainfall in the afternoons — supposedly typical for western Pennsylvania in July, though it was a lot like home this summer. Anyway, even occasional heavy downpours didn’t slow us down much.

The road from metro Chicago to Pittsburgh, if you take the Indiana East-West Toll Road and then the Ohio Turnpike, takes you smack through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We spend a few hours walking its trails on July 4 as a stopover on the way to Pittsburgh.

Getting up early(ish) on July 5, we first went to the Duquesne Incline, one of Pittsburgh’s two funiculars, and rode it up and down. At the top we took in the hazy morning view of the city and the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. My thinking about funiculars: when you find one, ride it. My thinking about the Monongahela: that’s just a damned fun name to say.

Next we drove to the Oakland neighborhood and spent time at the University of Pittsburgh. Specifically, the Heinz Memorial Chapel — the church that ketchup built — and the Cathedral of Learning and some of its highly artful, internationally themed rooms, unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Lunch on the first day was at the the Original Oyster House on Market Square, which is known as Pittsburgh’s oldest bar and restaurant, and which serves up a mighty fine array of seafood. From there we repaired to Point State Park at the meeting of the rivers, site of a French and then British fort in the days before American independence, and the seed of modern Pittsburgh. That’s also where our lengthy guided walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh began, which took up the rest of the afternoon.

That should have been enough for the first day, but our momentum carried us on to the Andy Warhol Museum for a few hours in the early evening, taking advantage of its longer hours on Fridays. A suburban location of Primanti Bros., a local chain, provided a hearty dinner that night.

The second day, July 6, wasn’t quite as busy, but we got around. Late in the morning, we took an extensive tour of Carrie Furnace, a hulk of a former blast furnace complex on the Monongahela. It reminded me greatly of the Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, though the scale was even larger. After all, Birmingham was the Pittsburgh of the South, not the other way around.

After lunch in a nondescript but decent Chinese restaurant, we visited the Frick Pittsburgh, whose grounds include his mansion, a museum with his art, a greenhouse, and a carriage and antique auto exhibit. We saw the greenhouse and the auto exhibit.

After treating ourselves to some hipster ice cream late in the afternoon, we went to one more place, despite thunder and rain: Randyland.

It’s the kind of outsider art phantasmagoria beloved by the likes of Roadside America or the Atlas Obscura. For good reason. As Roadside America puts it, the place is a “circus-colored oasis of sunny vibes on Pittsburgh’s formerly grim North Side.”

Phil-Tex Debris

Posted on November 8, 2016 by admin

I did my little part in the 58th quadrennial presidential election this morning — the 10th in which I’ve voted — at about 10:30, figuring that the morning rush would be over. Only one person was ahead of me when I arrived, but about a half-dozen were waiting when I left, so I guess there was ebb and flow throughout the day.

In Illinois, for the record, only four candidates were on the ballot for president: Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and Green. Left out: the Reform Party (remember them?); the Constitution Party, who seem to wuv the Constitution, except that pesky establishment clause; America’s Party, a splinter of the Constitution Party, because there are always splinters; the American Solidarity Party, an amalgam of social conservatism and economic redistributism; the Socialist Workers Party; the Communist Party USA; or any number of independents or micro-parties.

Besides Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, I managed to see three other burial grounds during my recent trip, two others in Philly, one in Lampasas, Texas, none of them by design. They all happened to be near places I was going anyway.

Across the street from the U.S. Mint is Christ Church Burial Ground, home to about 1,400 markers on two acres, many dating from Colonial or Revolutionary times. With its irregular stones, worn inscriptions and modern buildings just outside the walls, the place reminded me of King’s Chapel and the Granary Burial Ground in downtown Boston.

Christ Church’s most famed permanent resident is Benjamin Franklin, whose stone was covered with pennies. I overheard a guide say that the cemetery earns a couple of thousand dollars a year picking up the coins left for Dr. Franklin. I like to think he’d be amused by that. A penny saved might be a penny earned, but better for people to give you pennies because they want to.

Another resident I recognized was Benjamin Rush, patriot and man of medicine, in as much as that was possible at the time. His attitude toward bleeding was, alas, about the same as Theodoric of York. Still, he did what he could, especially during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.

The burial ground is a few blocks away from Christ Church itself, which presumably needed the expansion space. The church has a smaller cemetery on its grounds, as well as burials inside. It’s a lovely, light-filled Wren sort of church.

Besides its importance as a place of worship for numerous leaders of the Revolution and early Republic, Christ Church was also pivotal in the organization of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. The Most Reverend William White, first presiding bishop of that church, is buried in the church’s chancel. (His house on Walnut St. is part of Independence National Historical Park these days.)

The churchyard is as much garden these days as cemetery.
Lampasas, Texas, is west of Killeen and Temple, and a burg of about 6,600. While driving along US 190 (Plum St.), a main road through town, I spotted Cook Cemetery, established as a pioneer graveyard in the mid-1850s, with its last known burial only in 1873.

In our time, it’s a slice of lightly wooded land between the road and a large parking lot. There are a number of stones, as well as broken stones and fragments, and a few burial sites enclosed by short walls.

A couple of stones include later markers denoting citizens of the Republic of Texas. For instance, this stone’s a little hard to decipher, but one of the dates seems to be November 8, 1855, or 161 years ago exactly. Could be the stone was erected that day, since Rebeca seems to have been born in 1801 and died in ’54.
Enough about cemeteries. Here’s something else I spotted in Philadelphia, at Market and 5th. Another Megabus.
In Dallas, I finally got a decent image of my brother Jay’s dogs, in one of their common poses.

Three More Philly Sites

Posted on November 7, 2016 by admin

One of the things to do while you wait to enter Independence Hall is take a look at the museum of the American Philosophical Society, which stands very near the hall itself.
I wasn’t aware that the APS is still an ongoing thing, but that’s just me being ignorant again. It’s a learned society, originally inspired by the old concept of leisure. “The first drudgery of settling new colonies is now pretty well over,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1743, “and there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts, and improve the common stock of knowledge.”

The main current exhibit at the APS museum is Gathering Voices, which “tells the story of Jefferson’s effort to collect Native American languages and its legacy at the Society,” says the museum. “Jefferson had an abiding interest in Native American culture and language, while, at the same time, supporting national policies that ultimately threatened the survival of Indigenous peoples. As president of the APS from 1797 to 1814, Jefferson charged the Society with collecting vocabularies and artifacts from Native American nations. Over the next two hundred years, the APS would become a major repository for linguistic, ethnographic, and anthropological research on Native American cultures.”

It was an interesting display, including some documents in Jefferson’s hand. The collection isn’t as large as it might have been, however. The museum also tells this little-known story: “When Thomas Jefferson left Washington after two terms as President of the United States, he packed 50 Native American vocabulary lists in a trunk and sent them on a river barge back to Monticello along with the rest of his possessions. Somewhere along the journey, a thief stole the heavy trunk, thinking it was full of treasure. Upon discovering it was only filled with papers, he tossed the seemingly worthless contents into the James River. The loss of the vocabularies represented the destruction of 30 years of collecting on Jefferson’s part.”

Photocopying. That’s what Jefferson needed, but didn’t have.

In the West Wing of Independence Hall, there’s a small exhibit that doesn’t require waiting or a ticket to enter — another thing you can do while waiting to get into the rest of the hall. The exhibit is called Great Essentials.

On display are original printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. All very interesting, but the thing that really got my attention was the Syng inkstand. A fine work of silversmithing, and highly placed in the history of the United States. It may be the only inkstand anywhere that has a proper name, though I wouldn’t swear to it.

“Irish-born Philip Syng was the son of Philip Syng, a silversmith,” notes the Penn University Archives and Records Center. “In 1714 he and his father emigrated to America. In 1726, after a successful apprenticeship in Philadelphia and a trip to England, Philip established himself as a silversmith in Philadelphia. In 1730 he married Elizabeth Warner; together they had at least eighteen children.

“Perhaps on his trip to England, and if not, soon thereafter, Syng met Benjamin Franklin. The two formed a friendship, leading to Syng’s inclusion in the Junto, Franklin’s group of political and intellectual civic leaders… Syng was also elected to various public offices including city assessor, warden of the port, and treasurer of the city and county of Philadelphia.

“Syng was renowned as a silversmith, creating the finest work for Philadelphia’s leading families. His most famous work was the inkstand he made for the Pennsylvania Assembly, which was then used by the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. He provided seals for the Library Company, the Union Fire Company, the Philadelphia Contributionship and for various surveyors and Pennsylvania counties. His shop produced not only silver bowls, tankards, teapots and trays but also gold belt buckles, buttons and teaspoons.”

A block north of Independence Hall is a visitors center of fairly recent vintage, at least compared with the original buildings, and across Market St. from the center — between it and the Liberty Bell — is the President’s House Site.

I quote the NPS on the history of the site at some length, because it’s a relatively unknown place, but much happened there. It was originally built in 1767, and was known as the Masters-Penn house (a grandson of William Penn lived there in its early days).

“In September 1777, British forces under General Sir William Howe occupy Philadelphia after the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown. General Howe makes the Masters-Penn house his winter residence and headquarters while Washington and his troops retreat to Valley Forge. In June 1778, the British evacuate Philadelphia and consolidate their forces in New York.

“Colonial forces enter Philadelphia under the command of Major-General Benedict Arnold. Arnold promptly makes the Masters-Penn House his residence and headquarters. In March 1779, Arnold resigns his post and two months later, while still living in the house, he begins his treasonous correspondence with the British.

“In January 1780, the house is severely damaged by fire, and is subsequently purchased and rebuilt by Robert Morris, the famed ‘Financier of the Revolution.’ Morris rebuilds the house to its original plan, enlarges the property, and adds an icehouse and several back buildings.

“In 1790, Robert Morris volunteers his house to serve as President Washington’s residence while Philadelphia temporarily serves as the nation’s capital. Washington occupies the property from November 1790 to March 1797, during which time his household includes nine enslaved Africans brought up from Mount Vernon. He also makes several enlargements and modifications to the house and back buildings, including the addition of a slave quarters between the kitchen and stables.

John Adams succeeds Washington as President and moves into the President’s House in March 1797. Adams leaves Philadelphia in 1800 and moves into the newly completed White House in Washington D.C. on November 1.”

So it’s a house associated with the Penn family, Gen. Howe, Benedict Arnold, Robert Morris, George Washington and John Adams. What happened to it later?

“In 1832, the building is demolished and rebuilt as a series of three narrow stores. Only the east and west walls of the original house are left standing, and are incorporated into the later commercial buildings… In 1935, the later commercial properties are themselves demolished, although remnants of the original east and west walls of the President’s House survive until the early 1950s. In 1951, the entire block is razed.”

What’s standing there now is a monument, completed in 2010 after much agitation, to the slaves who came with George Washington to attend his household while he lived there. (And whom he rotated back and forth to Virginia to avoid having to free them under Pennsylvania law.)

“Dominating the site as a whole is a large glass enclosure — the architects, Kelly/Maiello Architects & Planners, call it a ‘glass vitrine’ — protecting the fruits of a 2007 archaeological excavation. Within, about 10 feet below street level, visitors can see the remains of house foundations, revealing both the world of Washington and Adams (who held no slaves), and the world of indentured servants and Washington’s black chattel.”

For the record, Moll, Christopher Sheels, Hercules, his son Richmond, Oney Judge, her brother Austin, Giles, Paris, and Joe were the slaves who worked for President Washington at the Philadelphia household.

Of Hercules, the president’s chef, Wiki notes that “Stephen Decatur Jr.’s book Private Affairs of George Washington (1933) stated that Hercules escaped to freedom from Philadelphia in March 1797, at the end of Washington’s presidency… In November 2009, Mary V. Thompson, research specialist at Mount Vernon, discovered that Hercules’s escape to freedom was from Mount Vernon, and that it occurred on February 22, 1797 – Washington’s 65th birthday…

“At Martha Washington’s request, the three executors of Washington’s Estate freed her late husband’s slaves on January 1, 1801. It is possible that Hercules did not know he had been manumitted, and legally was no longer a fugitive.

“In a December 15, 1801 letter, Martha Washington indicated that she had learned that Hercules, by then legally free, was living in New York City. Nothing more is known of his whereabouts or life in freedom.”

The Second Bank of the United States & The Faces Within

Posted on November 6, 2016 by admin

Unusually warm these last few days. Today was so pleasant I cooked brats outside and we ate them outside for lunch. More leaves are gone than not, so for the moment there’s a mismatch between temperature and foliage, for this part of the country. It’s certain not to last.

The Second Bank of the United States is at 420 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia, just two blocks from Independence Hall. The gallery was as sparsely visited on October 22, a Saturday, as Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell were overrun by visitors. It’s the bank that President Jackson famously slew with a veto of its re-chartering in the summer of 1832, an act that was the focus of the election that fall — which Jackson won resoundingly.

The building is a handsome, bank-as-Greek temple sort of structure designed by William Strickland. Him again. I hadn’t realized he was so prominent in Philadelphia, since I’ve long associated him with Nashville. These days, the building is known as the Portrait Gallery in the Second Bank of the United States, displaying many portraits of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary luminaries.

That includes a large collection of paintings by Charles Willson Peale, whom I didn’t appreciate until looking at one portrait of his after another. The man had some serious talent for portraiture, and much else besides.

I spent time especially with lesser-known figures of the period, though I didn’t see Button Gwinnett. The nation may have just heard of that Declaration signer from Georgia, but I did a report on him in the 8th grade, when we had to do reports on signers (picked at random, I think). I remember him, because his name is hard to forget.

All of the portrait examples from the Second Bank of the United States posted here were painted by Peale. The Founding Fathers are always worthwhile to ponder, but a lot of other interesting people characterized the period. David Rittenhouse, for instance.

Talk about a lesser-known man of the Enlightenment. Of special interest to me is that he was a skilled astronomer — one of those worldwide who observed the Transit of Venus in 1769 — and first director of the U.S. Mint. Not only that, he built swell orreries and surveyed borders for mid-Atlantic states, including the half-circle border between Pennsylvania and Delaware.

“His scientific thinking and experimentation earned Rittenhouse considerable intellectual prestige in America and in Europe,” says the Penn University Archives & Records Center. “He built his own observatory at his father’s farm in Norriton, outside of Philadelphia. Rittenhouse maintained detailed records of his observations and published a number of important works on astronomy, including a paper putting forth his solution for locating the place of a planet in its orbit.

“He was a leader in the scientific community’s observance of the transit of Venus in 1769, which won him broad acclaim. He also sought to solve mathematical problems, publishing his first mathematical paper in 1792, an effort to determine the period of a pendulum. He also experimented with magnetism and electricity.”

Here’s John Dickinson, who didn’t support the Declaration. Later, though, he did his part for independence, and was a delegate in 1787.

“On July 1, 1776, as his colleagues in the Continental Congress prepared to declare independence from Britain, Dickinson offered a resounding dissent,” says HistoryNet.

“Deathly pale and thin as a rail, the celebrated Pennsylvania Farmer chided his fellow delegates for daring to ‘brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.’ He argued that France and Spain might be tempted to attack rather than support an independent American nation.

“He also noted that many differences among the colonies had yet to be resolved and could lead to civil war. When Congress adopted a nearly unanimous resolution the next day to sever ties with Britain, Dickinson abstained from the vote, knowing full well that he had delivered ‘the finishing Blow to my once too great, and my Integrity considered, now too diminish’d Popularity.’ ”

Here’s a nice dramatization of that moment from John Adams, with Dickinson portrayed by Zeljko Ivanek.

This is Thayendanegea, also known as Joseph Brant, a Mohawk war chief who was decidedly not on the side of the colonists during the Revolution.

He was pro-British in the war, in that it served the interests of the Iroquois Confederation. Awfully even-handed of the gallery to include him, though it’s good to acknowledge his leadership skills, which apparently were many in war and diplomacy.

“The Mohawks chose to support the British because American colonists were already overrunning their lands,” says Upper Canada History. “The alliance was not unnatural as far as the Natives were concerned. For more than a hundred years, the Iroquois League had allied itself with the British in their long conflict with the Algonquins. Brant, Mohawk chief, had fought alongside the British in the Seven Years’ War and he remained loyal to the redcoats. This new alliance was really just a continuance of their long-standing cooperation…

“Brant fought with fierce determination against the Americans on the frontier and distinguished himself as one of their most courageous warriors and ablest strategists. His contribution to the cause did not go unrewarded. Of Brant’s loyalty and leadership, Lord Germain wrote, ‘The astounding activity of Joseph Brant’s enterprises and the important consequences with which they have attended give him a claim to every mark of our regard.’ In 1779 Brant received a commission signed by the king as ‘captain of the Northern Confederate Indians’ in appreciation of his ‘astonishing activity and success’ in the king’s service. Even though he esteemed his rank as captain, he preferred to fight as a war chief.”

After the Americans won the war, Thayendanegea led his people to Canada, with mixed results. He’s regarded highly enough in Canada to have been on a proof silver dollar in 2007, the bicentennial of his death.

Independence Hall

Posted on November 3, 2016 by admin

Just before midnight last night, I heard the distinctive popping of fireworks in the neighborhood.

I took that to mean that the Cubs won in far-off Cleveland. So they had. Not to be a mope, but I don’t know that the curse is actually broken. The curse could be, after all, that the Cubs will only win the World Series once a century. We may not ever find out; Neil and his generation might, though.

“Independence Hall,” said the guide at Independence Hall, “is the most important historic building in the entire country.” The guide, a gentlemen of retirement age and now a volunteer for the National Park Service, had probably been a teacher at one time. He had that manner, anyway.

He made a brief case for his assertion. “How can I say that? There are a lot of important historic buildings in every part of the country. But the key word is country. Because of what happened here, there’s a country that has a history.”

Not a bad argument. When you’re in a place like Independence Hall, where such weighty events occurred, such notions carry some weight. In as much as the United States was created in one place, this was it.
There’s nothing surprising about how the building looks. Everyone’s seen it depicted any number of times, including the Bicentennial Half Dollar (a nice design; the coin should have kept it) and the back of the current $100 Federal Reserve Note, which admittedly, I don’t see that much.

What surprised me was that Chestnut St., an ordinary street, runs right in front of the building. Maybe that’s too important a city street to close off, though I would have guessed that security-minded, or -obsessive, officials would want to. Apparently not.

The building was designed by Andrew Hamilton to house the Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and finished in 1753. Interestingly, in our time the building is actually owned by the City of Philadelphia — the Commonwealth having quit using it long ago — but administered by the National Park Service since 1948.

Another thing I learned about Independence Hall: William Strickland designed its distinctive clocktower, the same architect who did the fine Tennessee State Capitol. That was well after the meetings that ushered in the Declaration and the Constitution, however. The original steeple had rotted away as early as the 1780s, and was demolished in 1781. The Strickland replacement wasn’t until 1828, so when the delegates met to fix the Articles of Confederation in ’87, and came away with a new Constitution, that isn’t what they would have seen.

Independence Hall is only part of Independence Hall National Historic Site. Other structures include a modern Visitors Center, the Supreme Court Chamber in Old City Hall, Congress Hall, the First and Second Banks of the United States, Carpenters’ Hall, Merchants’ Exchange — another Strickland building — the Todd House, the Bishop White House, and of course the Liberty Bell Center.

There was a long line to get into to see the Liberty Bell (it too has been on a coin. More than one). I didn’t feel like waiting, especially since the bell is visible from a window, fairly close up. It has heft, that’s for sure. And yet it’s cracked. Maybe that’s a better symbol of fragile liberty than is generally acknowledged.
Getting into Independence Hall took a fair amount of time, first waiting to go through a metal detector, and then waiting for your timed tour of the inside. If you don’t order your tickets ahead of time, you risk not being able to get in.
Upon entering Independence Hall, you first assemble in a room — the East Wing of the building — in which the guide tells you about the building, how to comport yourself, etc. Then you enter the room that used to be Pennsylvania Supreme Court chamber; here’s a better picture than I could take.

The current interior of the courtroom, as well as the Assembly Room famed for the Declaration and the Constitution, is a mid-20th century reconstruction by the National Park Service, with the public rooms restored to their 18th-century appearance. Between the late 18th century and the mid-20th, after all, the building was changed and modified, as buildings tend to be.

This is the Assembly Room.

“One the questions I’m always asked,” our pedagogic guide said, “is whether the furniture is original. The answer is no. Most of it isn’t. But if you think about, the furniture isn’t why you’ve come to see this room. You’re here because what happened here.”

Sure enough. But he did point out that the president’s chair on display on the dais is the one that George Washington sat in when he presided at the Constitutional Convention.

Upstairs is the Long Room, where events were, and are, held. It’s long, all right.
Our guide had more tidbit to offer when we were there. During Lafayette’s triumphal tour of the United States in 1824-25, when he was feted everywhere he went, a particularly lavish reception for was held for him in the Long Hall, which was part of the Pennsylvania State Hall at the time (he got a parade in Philly too). The building was called the “Hall of Independence” for the event, the first known reference using that terminology. That was an early step for the building toward becoming a National Historic Site and a World Heritage Site too.

The U.S. Mint, Philadelphia

Posted on November 2, 2016 by admin

These days the headquarters of the U.S. Mint might be in Washington, DC, but its main branch is in Philadelphia, put there when that city was the national capital for a decade or so in the late 18th century. Congress created a national mint as part of the Coinage Act of 1792, as it was authorized to do by the Constitution (Article I, Section 8).

The 1792 law is an interesting read for numismaphiles, especially the specifications for U.S. coinage — and the fact that the direct ancestor of our dollar was the Spanish milled dollar “as the same is now current.” This fact ought to be better known.

“By far the leading specie coin circulating in America was the Spanish silver dollar, defined as consisting of 387 grains of pure silver,” notes Murray N. Rothbard in “Commodity Money in Colonial America.” (The libertarian economist who seemed to have no love for that invention of the Devil, fiat money; still, I’ll bet he’s reliable when taking about the nothing-but-metal currency of the early Republic.)

“The dollar was divided into ‘pieces of eight,’ or ‘bits,’ each consisting of one-eighth of a dollar,” Rothbard wrote. “Spanish dollars came into the North American colonies through lucrative trade with the West Indies. The Spanish silver dollar had been the world’s outstanding coin since the early 16th century, and was spread partially by dint of the vast silver output of the Spanish colonies in Latin America. More important, however, was that the Spanish dollar, from the 16th to the 19th century, was relatively the most stable and least debased coin in the Western world.”

Indeed, the Spanish dollar was legal tender in the U.S. until 1857. Then there’s Section 19 of the 1792 law, on the penalties for debasing coins: “If any of the gold or silver coins which shall be struck or coined at the said mint shall be debased or made worse as to the proportion of the fine gold or fine silver therein contained, or shall be of less weight or value than the same out to be pursuant to the directions of this act… every such officer or person who shall commit any or either of the said offenses, shall be deemed guilty of felony, and shall suffer death.”

Italics added. I’m not going look into it further right now, but maybe that penalty was inspired by the penalty for such misdeeds at the Royal Mint, which I suppose would be a direct offense against the sovereign. Also, I doubt that anyone ever was executed in the United States for such a crime, though a few mint miscreants have probably been tossed in the jug over the decades.

In any case, the expectation in 1792 seemed to be that the mint would move with the national capital, but things didn’t work out that way. According to the Mint, in 1801 — after Washington City had been established, though it wasn’t much more than a marshy place on the Potomac — “Congressional legislation directs the Mint to remain in Philadelphia until March 1803.

“Mint Officials were not in favor of relocating the facility to the newly established Federal City in Washington, and addressed their concerns many times. Legislation extending the Mint’s stay in Philadelphia appears throughout the early 1800s. Most extensions were for five years. At some point Congress seems to have tired of these extensions. An Act of May 19, 1828, leaves the facility in Philadelphia ‘until otherwise provided by law.’ ”

Since then, the United States has manufactured coinage in four locations successively in Philadelphia. The first and second sites no longer exist. The current mint facility, a large concrete building not too far north of Independence Mall, dates from the 1960s. It’s the fourth facility, designed by Philadelphia architect Vincent G. Kling and, while concrete, isn’t especially brutal. Or that good-looking either.

As you’d expect, the third facility, completed in 1901, has more style. The Beaux Arts building, I’m glad to report, still exists. It’s home to the Community College of Philadelphia these days. I didn’t have time to see it, so it counts as another reason to return to Philadelphia sometime.

You enter the modern mint building on N. 5th St., through an entrance that has a guard and a metal detector. No photography allowed inside. The first place you come to is a floor that includes the gift shop and an electronic sign that tells you how many coins, and what kind, the facility has made lately. From there escalators rise a couple of floors to two long halls that overlook the mint factory floor. Along the halls, at least where there are no windows to look through, are displays about the manufacture of coins: blanking, annealing, riddling, upsetting, striking, inspecting, counting and bagging.

In front of a display about mint marks, I fell into a short discussion with an elderly couple about them. The displays said, naturally, that until fairly recently Philadelphia-made coins had no mint mark — except for ’40s wartime nickels — but that they do now, except for the penny. As we talked about that, I was astonished to realize that they’d never heard of mint marks, though I didn’t tell them that. The woman thought it a nifty thing to learn, and said that she’d be looking more closely at coins. I encouraged her to do so.

Wiki, though there’s no underlying reference, explains why Philadelphia pennies carry no mint mark, something I’d never seen clarified: “Currently, the Lincoln cent is the only coin that does not always have a mint mark, using a D when struck in Denver but lacking a P when ostensibly struck at the Philadelphia mint; this practice allows additional minting of the coin at the San Francisco mint (S) and West Point mint (W) without the use of their respective mint marks to supplement coin production without the concern of creating scarce varieties. Generally modern S and W coins do not circulate, being mostly produced as bullion, commemorative, or proof coinage.”

I can’t say that I understood by sight much of what was going on down at the Philadelphia mint factory floor. There are a lot of large machines, along with conveyor belts and other mechanical odds and ends down there, but few people. Mostly the process, from blanking to bagging, is automated. I got the same impression of bemusing industrialism at the Denver mint in 1980, and at the Canberra mint in 1991, (the Osaka mint had a museum, but I don’t think it gave tours).

The factory is unusual in that way down on the floor is a scattering of coins, mostly pennies, presumably those that have dropped from the process at one time or another. For that matter, most of what I saw in various bins and tubs were pennies. Many, many pennies. All that manufacturing effort for a coin no one really wants any more, except for the zinc barons.

It may be just as well when the U.S. cent coin finally dies, as well as the dollar bill. If coins in this country are to have a long-term future — and I’d be sad to think of a future without them — very small denominations need to make way for larger ones. As long as the design is interesting, and the presidential dollars certain qualify, transitioning to $1 coins would be OK. So would $2 coins, for that matter, as the Canadians have done with their loonies and twonies.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: Pennsylvania