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.

Eastern State Penitentiary

Posted on November 1, 2016 by admin

What to do after you’ve visited a major cemetery in Philadelphia? Visit a former prison, now a museum. You could, anyway, since they aren’t that far apart, though not comfortable walking distance.

Specifically, you find yourself outside the massive walls of Eastern State Penitentiary, built in the late 1820s as one of the first modern prisons in the United States, and the first of its kind. In its early days, the prison enforced solitary confinement all the time for all the prisoners.
The museum’s web site tells the tale of its development very well: “In 1787, a group of well-known and powerful Philadelphians convened in the home of Benjamin Franklin. The members of The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons expressed growing concern with the conditions in American and European prisons… It took the Society more than thirty years to convince the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to build the kind of prison it suggested: a revolutionary new building on farmland outside Philadelphia.

“Eastern State Penitentiary broke sharply with the prisons of its day, abandoning corporal punishment and ill treatment. This massive new structure, opened in 1829, became one of the most expensive American buildings of its day and soon the most famous prison in the world. The Penitentiary would not simply punish, but move the criminal toward spiritual reflection and change. The method was a Quaker-inspired system of isolation from other prisoners, with labor…. proponents of the system believed strongly that the criminals, exposed, in silence, to thoughts of their behavior and the ugliness of their crimes, would become genuinely penitent. Thus the new word, penitentiary.”

Eventually — though it took a long time to abandon the system, as usual with institutional change — the practice of all solitary was abandoned when it became clear that solitary confinement all the time drove a lot of prisoners nuts. Guess that counts as an example of good intentions paving the road to Hell.

Eastern State’s massive walls form a square, the idea of which was to look as scary as possible from the outside, to deter criminal urges among those still outside (I doubt that that worked, either). Inside, the British-born architect John Haviland’s design included “seven cellblocks [that] radiate from a central surveillance rotunda,” explains the museum web site.

In our time, a number of the cellblocks have been partly restored to an earlier look.
Not quite the original look, since at first the hallways’ only connection to the cells were through slots through which food was passed. “Haviland’s ambitious mechanical innovations placed each prisoner had his or her own private cell, centrally heated, with running water, a flush toilet, and a skylight. Adjacent to the cell was a private outdoor exercise yard contained by a ten-foot wall,” the prison says.

That wall had the only door, which of course was locked all the time. “In the vaulted, skylit cell, the prisoner had only the light from heaven, the word of God (the Bible) and honest work (shoemaking, weaving, and the like) to lead to penitence,” continues the web site. “In striking contrast to the Gothic exterior, Haviland used the grand architectural vocabulary of churches on the interior. He employed 30-foot, barrel vaulted hallways, tall arched windows, and skylights throughout. He wrote of the Penitentiary as a forced monastery, a machine for reform. ”

Later, Eastern State became more of a standard 20th-century prison, closer to the New York system, rather than the Pennsylvania system pioneered at Eastern State, finally closing in 1970. Hallway doors were added.

New cellblocks were also added, including a few two-story ones.

Some cells are open. Many of the cells are unrestored, containing debris of various kinds.

A few are more-or-less restored. The urge to take selfies doesn’t seem to go away just because the setting is a prison ruin.

Note that the fellow in the picture is wearing earphones. Part of the price of admission — not an extra — was the loan of an mp3 player and some earphones. Wearing them, you went to various stations and listened to narration about the prison by actor Steve Buscemi. He had a good voice for the text, which was well-written and informative. Adding an extra layer of interest: some of the segments also included interviews (perhaps done some years ago) of both inmates and guards at the prison in the 20th century.

The museum featured a number of other restorations, such as a barber shop, the exercise yard, hospital, and (surprisingly) a synagogue. The museum couldn’t resist re-creating Al Capone’s cell, and I couldn’t resist taking a picture of it.
There are about a dozen artists’ installations in the museum, most of which occupy single cells in various parts of the prison. I found this one, “Other Absences,” the most compelling.
Artist Cindy Stockton Moore’s web site says she created “fifty portraits of murder victims. The paintings, created with loose ink washes on translucent mylar, depict men, women and children whose deaths were attributed to those incarcerated at Eastern State Penitentiary.” That’s good. The prisoners shouldn’t get all of the attention.

Laurel Hill Cemetery

Posted on October 31, 2016 by admin

Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia is known as the second major rural cemetery in the country, dating from 1836. Its location isn’t remotely rural now, but in its early days the cemetery was outside the city on a sizable hill overlooking the Schuylkill River.

As the cemetery’s web site says, “Previously, churchyards were the only places available to bury the dead, and they were often as crowded and unsanitary as the streets that bordered them. Worse yet, rapid industrialization and population growth commonly led to the disinterment of burial grounds to make way for roads and buildings…. Laurel Hill was not only established as a permanent, non-sectarian burial place for the dead, but also as a scenic, riverside sanctuary for the living.”

As the city grew around it, Laurel Hill itself become crowded, and it’s now a sizable necropolis with about 33,000 permanent residents in 74 acres. Many spots are lush with growth.Trees grow on the slope down to the river.Many parts are thick with stones.Some monuments reach toward the sky.
There are less conventional stones. Find a Grave says that “the shattered urn symbolizes a violet death. Stewart was murdered by his manservant.”
The cemetery also has a large stock of striking funerary art, such as the Warner Memorial. Bellamorte.net says: “The Warner Memorial, sculpted by yet another Scottish craftsman, Alexander Milne Calder, shows a full-sized female figure opening a casket while the spirit of its male inhabitant slips free and takes wing. Sadly, the monument has been the target of vandalism over the years; both of the woman’s arms are missing as is the nose of the rising male spirit.”
Another detail from the Warner Memorial.
I didn’t seek out too many notable burial sites, except for Gen. George Meade, resident of the cemetery since 1872. He and some of his family have a spot with a nice view of the river, and I can report that people put stones on his grave.
One of the oddest stones I saw belonged to Catharine Drinkhouse Smith and Levi Franklin Smith, a five-sided pillar (not four, as it says on Bellamorte.net). Mrs. Smith was a noted spiritualist of her time.

Her side of the stone said, with curious precision about some things: “Mrs. Catharine Drinkhouse Smith was born at Reading, Berks County, State of Pennsylvania, on Thursday, the Fifth day of August, 1824, at 15 minutes past 5 O’clock in the morning, and passed to spirit life 15 minutes before 12 O’clock the 27th day of March, 1893, from the residence of her husband, Professor Levi Franklin Smith, 2430 Thomson Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Smith was a devoted Spiritualist, and one of the best mediums of her time, and accomplished great good, in spreading this beautiful truth, and in demonstrating a continuity of life.”

Another odd thing: the cemetery had a gift shop. Besides Arlington National Cemetery, I think that’s the only time I’ve run across that. The man behind the counter was an informative fellow, happy to talk about the place (and a bit about Professor and Mrs. Smith). I did my little part to support the cemetery by buying some postcards and a refrigerator magnet.

Phil-Tex ’16

Posted on October 30, 2016 by admin

Just returned from Texas, where I visited family, but before I went there I had about a day and a half to kick around in Philadelphia, the largest city in the United States that I’d never been to before. Of course, size is only one measure of a city. After only a small sample, I’d say that Philadelphia counts as a highly worthwhile place to go for all kinds of reasons.

The visit was partly mad dash — on foot, by bus and by rail to a few places I really wanted to see — while also trying to take a more leisurely gaze at interesting things as I wandered down streets or sat next to bus windows. Those sound like contradictory activities, but not really. I was helped by the fact that both days were good for walking for different reasons: Friday, October 21 because it was warm, clear and nearly summer-like; Saturday, October 22 because it was overcast, cool and a distinctly fall day.

The region’s fall appearance was very distinctive in some places, such as this view of the west bank of the Schuylkill River (I didn’t make it over to the Delaware River).

I made it to the Laurel Hill Cemetery, one of the nation’s first park-like burial grounds, and about as picturesque as a cemetery can be, with weathered stones and funerary artwork and massive trees covering large hills along the Schuylkill, plus a few famed residents.

Also, I visited Eastern State Penitentiary, a museum that was once an enormous prison for the state of Pennsylvania. Not just any prison, but a 19th-century structure that was the first of an important kind of prison, and so an historic site. In our time it’s a magnificent ruin and quite a tourist attraction. Urban ruins are a little hard to come by, but not impossible.

I fulfilled a childhood ambition — I was a peculiar child — when I visited the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia just before it closed for the day on Friday, October 21. The last time I’d been to a functioning U.S. Mint facility was in 1980 in Denver, back before Big Zinc took an abiding interest preserving the penny.

I wouldn’t have been a first-time Philadelphia tourist worth my salt if I didn’t find myself at Independence National Historic Park during my visit, whose star attractions are Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. It was a popular place. Tourists from all over were there, taking pictures of the place where the United States was invented.

As well as of each other.
She took five or six jumps before he took a picture she liked.

Gettysburg

Posted on June 30, 2013 by admin

Got a postcard from my nephew Dees last week, the nephew who’s the drummer for Sons of Fathers. It describes the 12th Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival earlier this month, in which the band participated. The photo on the right depicts the only known first-name Deeses of the world, together about this time last year, when Sons of Fathers played at FitzGerald’s in Berwyn, Ill., and I went out to see them. He’s the hale fellow with facial hair.

A little further in the past – 1991 – I found myself driving from Boston to Chicago during this time of year, and I stopped at Gettysburg National Military Park. I missed the 128th anniversary of the battle by a few days, and presumably whatever commemoration events they had. I thought of that when I was reminded by the newspaper today that the 150th anniversary of the battle is upon us, beginning tomorrow, of course.

There were some other visitors when I was there, but not too many. It was a hot day, fittingly, since it was a high-summer battle, which must have added to the misery. This image captures the summer conditions of the site pretty well, besides the 72nd Pennsylvania Infantry Monument, which has its own intricate history, and which was knocked over by high winds only last week.

Here’s another view of the Angle – the stone wall that Pickett’s men managed to reach (Lewis Addison Armistead’s men, but let’s not be too pedantic).

I haven’t seen one of these quarters yet, though I’ve been noticing a number of national park quarters in change lately.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: Pennsylvania