One part of the streetscape elevation drawn by architects of the Old Philadelphia Survey. This drawing shows #133, a stables, still standing. It would be demolished in 1940. You can see more of the drawings from the survey and from the Historical American Buildings Survey here.
Over the last few episodes, we have shown how Elfreth’s Alley went from a neighborhood of artisans in early Philadelphia to a rundown street in the shadow of factories and warehouses, with unsanitary conditions and rampant overcrowding by the 1930s.
Today, Elfreth’s Alley is in nearly every guidebook to Philadelphia as a must-see attraction. During a typical summer Saturday, some thousand visitors walk down the length of the block, duck into Bladen’s Court, a small offshoot of the Alley, and retrace their steps back up the street, posing for photos in front of the Instagram-worthy houses and the historical flags waving above.
How did this transformation happen? Why did it happen? Who made it happen?
In this episode, we will examine the beginning of Elfreth’s Alley metamorphosis into a tourist spot.
I wrote a blog post with some more info about the Richard Allen bust!
Also, just as I was publishing the podcast episode, I saw this piece from Hidden City which details another fight for a memorial. Fifty years after the Centennial, initiated during the ill-fated Sesquicentennial celebration, the All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors was created to pay tribute to America’s Black armed forces, but was originally tucked behind Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, much to the chagrin of its supporters. It now sits along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway as originally intended.
Mourners at the tomb of Richard Allen, ca. 1925. William Still Collection, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries, accessed via Goin’ North
FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW SOURCES
List of Sources
Bruggeman, Seth, Here, George Washington Was Born.
Coe, Alexis, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington
“Elfreth’s Alley Committee [Reports],” Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks Minutes
Elfreth’s Alley Scrapbook
Federal Writers’ Project (Pa.) and Pennsylvania Historical Commission, Philadelphia, a Guide to the Nation’s Birthplace (Harrisburg, Penn. : Telegraph Press, c1937).
Gold, Susanna W. The Unfinished Exhibition: Visualizing Myth, Memory, and the Shadow of the Civil War in Centennial America, 0 ed. (Routledge, 2016), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315453132.
Herr, Mickey, “Frances Anne Wister: Philadelphia’s Patron Saint of Historic Preservation,” Hidden City
“Mary McLeod Bethune,” The Journal of Negro History 40, no. 4 (October 1, 1955): 393–95, https://doi.org/10.1086/JNHv40n4p393.
Mitch Kachun, “Before the Eyes of All Nations: African-American Identity and Historical Memory at the Centennial Exposition of 1876,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 65, no. 3 (1998): 300–323.
“Mourning at the tomb of Richard Allen ,” Goin' North
Nash, Gary B., First City, Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), [i]-[vi], https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fj3c5.1.
Newman, Richard S. Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. NYU Press, 2009.
Rydell, Robert W., All the World’s a Fair : Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1984. http://archive.org/details/allworldsfair00ryde.
Snyder, Jeffrey Aaron, Making Black History: The Color Line, Culture, and Race in the Age of Jim Crow (University of Georgia Press, 2018).
Waldo, Fullerton Leonard, Good Housing that Pays: A Study of the Aims and Accomplishment of the Octavia Hill Association, 1896-1917. Philadelphia: The Harper Press, 1917.
Wolf, Stephanie Grauman, “Centennial Exhibition (1876)” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Ted Maust:
Sometime in 1931, a handful of men arrived on Elfreth’s Alley, with pencils, notebooks, and measuring tools. Over days, maybe weeks, they worked their way down the street, taking notes, measuring the facades of the buildings as well as the shutters on the windows, and the details around the doors. Imagine the residents peeking out through curtains, opening upper floor windows to try to catch snippets of these men’s conversation as they went about their work. Imagine Goldie Morton in #135, now ten years old, asking her mother Gladys what the men were doing as they were silhouetted in the first floor windows, stretching a tape from one edge to the other. Perhaps Gladys hurries Goldie away from the window, worried about what these men were doing in the street.
To some residents of Elfreth’s Alley, who had seen factories and warehouses encroach on this little residential street, perhaps these men seemed like a harbinger of more change--perhaps these houses were being measured so they could be repurposed as warehouses, with the tenants evicted.
These men were a sign of change on Elfreth’s Alley, but not the kind that tore down houses. The interlopers on the Alley in 1931 were out-of-work draftsmen, hired by the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects at the rate of $4 per day. They came to Elfreth’s Alley to measure these homes in order to draw them and to preserve them, if only in pen and ink, for generations to come.
Isabel Steven:
Welcome to the Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia. We tell the stories of people who lived and/or worked on this street, which has been home to everyday Philadelphians for three centuries. While we start in this neighborhood, we will explore connections that take us across the city and around the globe.
Over the last few episodes, we have shown how Elfreth’s Alley went from a neighborhood of artisans in early Philadelphia to a rundown street in the shadow of factories and warehouses, with unsanitary conditions and rampant overcrowding by the 1930s.
Today, Elfreth’s Alley is in nearly every guidebook to Philadelphia as a must-see attraction. During a typical summer Saturday, some thousand visitors walk down the length of the block, duck into Bladen’s Court, a small offshoot of the Alley, and retrace their steps back up the street, posing for photos in front of the Instagram-worthy houses and the historical flags waving above.
How did this transformation happen? Why did it happen? Who made it happen?
In this episode, we will examine the beginning of Elfreth’s Alley metamorphosis into a tourist spot.
Episode 7: When Elfreth’s Alley Became Historic
Ted Maust:
Act I: Dolly Ottey and Frances Anne Wister
When we consider why Elfreth’s Alley became a National Historic Landmark, we have to consider both sweeping cultural changes and the actions of individuals. The draftsmen were on Elfreth’s Alley because of Frances Anne Wister and also because of big trends as Americans sought to protect and shape their history.
In our last episode, we introduced you briefly to Frances Wister, a member of the Civic Club and contributor to the Octavia Hill Association. Wister had also become very involved in Arts and Culture organizations; she sat on the board of the Philadelphia Orchestra and joined the National Society of Colonial Dames of America.
It was in her work with the Orchestra that Wister first became involved with preservation, interceding in 1920 when the Orchestra wanted to leave the Academy of Music building for a new building along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Wister won, and the Orchestra stayed, likely saving the Academy of Music, which is still one of Philadelphia's premier venues.
Perhaps as a result of her victory in that case, Wister began thinking more ambitiously. In 1929, at a meeting of the Philadelphia Zoning Commission, she buttonholed the architect--and member of the Commission--D. Knickerbocker Boyd. The city was considering how to intervene in the downtrodden areas of Philadelphia’s oldest neighborhoods and Wister shared her vision for retaining and celebrating the 18th-century architecture of this area. To accomplish this vision, Wister pitched a survey of “Old Philadelphia” with the view of saving and rehabilitating as many historically significant buildings as possible.
Boyd got the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects to take on the survey project and Wister secured a donation from Kate Stanwood Cutter Pillsbury Curtis, wife of the publishing magnate Cyrus H. K. Curtis, to fund the project. In 1931, many Philadelphians were out of work, and the AIA saw this project as a way to employ some otherwise-unemployed draftsmen.
This of course is how those men ended up on Elfreth’s Alley, producing a full elevation of the houses on the street and details of several of the homes. The “Old Philadelphia Survey” as the project came to be known, produced architectural drawings of many of the oldest buildings in Philadelphia, including the Powel House, the former home of Philadelphia’s “Patriot Mayor,” Samuel Powel, and his wife Elizabeth Powel, one of the most influential women in early Philadelphia and by some accounts a great personal friend to George and Martha Washington.
In 1931, during the Survey, the Powel House was nearly sold off to become parking for a nearby taxi company. Wister gathered many of her associates from the Colonial Dames and formed a new organization, the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks. Within a year, the Society had purchased the Powel House and initiated a restoration and reconstruction.
Meanwhile, in 1892, a world away from either Frances Anne Wister’s stately Germantown childhood or Elfreth’s Alley, Mary R. Wyle (WHY-LEE) had been born to Harriet and Bernard Wyle, farmers in Waterford Township, New Jersey (1900 Census). Mary, who shared her grandmother’s name, would be known as “Dolly” throughout her life, including on several U.S. censuses.
By 1920, Dolly had married William H. Ottey, an accounting clerk for a railway company, who had literally lived down the road from the Wyles in his teenage years. Harriet Wyle, who had been widowed, lived with the couple. As late as the 1930 United States census, Dolly was listed as having no employment, but that was about to change.
In 1933, Dolly opened a cafe—called The Hearthstone—in the house at 115 Elfreth’s Alley, commuting over the shiny new Ben Franklin Bridge. Among the sandwich offerings at The Hearthstone were: Creamed Chicken on Toast, pineapple and cream cheese with chopped nuts, creamed beef on toast, chopped olive and nut, veal loaf, tomato and lettuce, green pepper and bacon, and peanut butter and chopped celery. The creamed chicken and creamed beef cost 15 cents; all of the other sandwiches were 10 cents.
Soon after opening the Hearthstone, Ottey learned that three of the houses on the street--106, 114, and 124--were owned by the George Wetherill paint factory which had swallowed up nearly all of the buildings between Elfreth’s Alley and Arch St along Front Street. These three homes, built in the mid 18th century, were seemingly in danger of being absorbed by the Wetherill factory
Well, Ottey wasn’t going to let it happen, and wrote a letter to the Editor of the Sunday Evening Bulletin in August of 1933 asking for advice for how to protect these houses. Readers of the Bulletin were quick to put her in contact with Frances Anne Wister and the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks.
Act II: Nostalgia and Early Preservation
Both Wister and Ottey were part of the preservation movement, which in the 1930s was just coming into being. Like the reform efforts we talked about in the last episode, preservation in the early 20th century was tied up in lots of ideas about how the world should be as much as it was about how the world had been.
There had been previous waves of relic collecting and commemoration, but white Americans turned increasingly to nostalgia for the nation’s origins in the mid-to-late 19th century. Industrialization threatened the oldest buildings in American cities, but perhaps more importantly, immigrants and migrants brought increasing ethnic and racial diversity to urban centers in the North, and the 18th century not only presented a simpler time but also a whiter one. The crisis of the Civil War also sparked a new interest in the early history of the nation—how had Americans of the 18th century stayed united despite regional differences, and could the Americans of the 19th century do it again?
In Virginia, The Mount Vernon Ladies Association was founded to protect George Washington’s plantation and to turn it into a shrine that would reunite the fractured nation. Of course this framing betrayed the racism of the MVLA; for these white women (and the men they called on to lobby for their cause) the conflict was avoidable. The MVLA had supporters in the North and South and fundamentally these women found what they had in common to be more important than ending slavery.
That they rallied around Mount Vernon, a plantation where for centuries white enslavers inflicted violence upon enslaved people, was perhaps appropriate. The symbolic memory crafted at plantations like Mount Vernon intentionally ignored and erased this brutal historic reality and instead focused on the carefully curated furnishings and neatly cultivated gardens of these homes, while conveniently forgetting who had been forced to clean the house and work the land.
In 1860, Mount Vernon opened to the public, operating as a museumized home, and soon other homes of Washington were turned into shrines, with the houses of other notable Americans following suit.
Centennial Exposition
Turning houses into shrines wasn’t the only way that white Americans protected or celebrated their history in this period. There was a renewed interest in artifacts, a fascination with historical dress, and a proliferation of plaques and statues marking historic spots and honoring figures of the past.
Several of these forces came together at the Centennial celebration in Philadelphia in 1876. The event was the first of a string of World’s Fairs in the United States and attracted 10 million visitors. While the purpose of the fair was to demonstrate new products--like Heinz Ketchup!--and ways of making things, the fair also contributed to the popular history boom.
Statues and monuments were erected on the fairgrounds, including a statue of Christopher Columbus, erected by Italian-American boosters along Belmont Avenue. There was a life-size model of a New England Farmer’s Home with a Colonial-style kitchen, and some of George Washington’s personal effects were on display, staged as if he had just left.
The Centennial put some of these commemorative practices into the public eye, and also served as a launchpad for women’s voluntary organizations like those we discussed last episode. Women were barred from many of the public speeches of the Exhibition, but Elizabeth Duane Gillespie--the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin--and many other women organized a Women’s Pavilion at the fair to showcase achievements of women and inventions for use in maintaining a home. This organizing effort resulted in more formal women’s voluntary organizations, especially on the national scale.
Women’s Groups
These women’s groups would fuel the early preservation societies. The Mount Vernon group was explicitly a “Ladies Association,” and the leadership of The Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association, which preserved Alcott’s childhood home--Orchard House--was primarily women, with a few men who could give them access to legal and political power.
Even at a site such as Colonial Williamsburg, funded by Rockefeller money and run by the Bishop W. A. R. Goodwin, the vast majority of historical interpretation happening was done by costumed volunteer “hostesses.”
The women’s groups advocating for these preservation projects had strong ties to the reform-minded women’s clubs we discussed in Episode 6. In some cases there was simply overlap of personnel, as in the case of Frances Wister’s Landmarks organization, but other preservation organizations were the explicit creation of those clubs. The Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association, for instance, was created by the Concord Women’s Club, a member organization of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.
Museum Pedagogy
Why were clubs, such as the Concord Women’s Club, so interested in historic preservation? They were seen as a tool for teaching!
Historian Cynthia Heider has shown how as early as the 1890s, Settlement houses and connected organizations embraced the form and language of exhibits as a way to instruct audiences and shape public debate.
In Philadelphia, the Octavia Hill Association and the Philadelphia Housing Commision both installed exhibits of horrific housing conditions and statistical data; the OHA put a display up in Horticultural Hall in Fairmount Park in 1906, and the PHC rented a storefront for its own exhibit in 1914. Heider shows how museums adopted these strategies from social service organizations, not the other way around.
A Historic house museum like Mount Vernon or Orchard house could be a combination of a shrine and the more instructive mode of the Settlement houses. They used symbols--furniture, costumes, props-- to communicate the lessons they wanted their visitors to learn. Often these messages had little to do with historical fact. For instance, Patricia West has shown how Orchard House, the museumized childhood home of Louisa May Alcott, reflected--in its furnishings and messaging--the home of the March Family, characters in Alcott’s Little Women as well as leading interior design trends of the early 20th century rather than the lives of the Alcotts who were actually counter-cultural communalists.
Mount Vernon, Orchard House, and other early Historic House Museums were understood to instill American values in those who visited them. Immigrant children were paraded through Orchard House and other historic house museums and period rooms throughout the country.
Remember last episode when we mentioned that the Civic Club of Philadelphia had a committee for the “Americanization of Immigrants”? Well the chair of that committee was none other than Frances Anne Wister. It seems probable that Wister saw sites such as Independence Hall and the Powel House, each in their own way, as places where American-ness could be taught, especially to newcomers to this nation.
What did Wister see in Elfreth’s Alley? Certainly something worth saving, but she didn’t open a historic house museum on the street. Instead, the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks advocated for the preservation of the Alley by buying up condemned properties or finding buyers for them. These homes were then rehabilitated--at least to some extent--and rented out, likely to lower-income tenants, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants.
In 1917, the Octavia Hill Association had written, of its rehabilitation of an old house on Workman Place, along South Front Street, that “the Polish seamstress bends above her work in a room still haunted by the ancestral presences of those who were as deft in turning the heel of a stocking as in pouring tea.” Perhaps Wister envisioned that this proximity of immigrant tenants to historic homes would have much the same effect as a visit to Orchard House?
It certainly seems like someone involved on Elfreth’s Alley saw the street as a tool for acculturation: a 1937 newspaper photo of a historical pageant on the street shows a man dressed as George Washington kneeling next to nine Chinese-American children. The caption indicates that “Washington” was telling these children “the story of the founding of the United States.”
The pageantry that brought George Washington to the Alley was more the style of Dolly Ottey. With residents of the street, she formed the Elfreth’s Alley Association in 1934. The EAA doesn’t seem to have been as interested in owning property, at least not in the 1930s, preferring to stage events which often featured costumes.
Beginning in 1934, the EAA held annual open houses offered in conjunction with Landmarks, which cost 10 cents admission, offered children’s dances every hour, and tours of several of the homes on the street, for an extra price. This event, which came to be called Fete Day, has remained an annual tradition on Elfreth’s Alley, and today serves as a major source of revenue for the Elfreth’s Alley Museum.
Both Landmarks and the EAA had preservation victories on Elfreth’s Alley in the 1930s. Landmarks got the Mayor to put a stay on demolition orders for several of the houses and EAA members personally engaged in ongoing standoffs with the George Wetherill Paint Company, stopping demolition through petitions and in some cases their presence.
For Ottey specifically, her preservation was at least somewhat tangled up with her entrepreneurship. In 1935, she refitted the Hearthstone, expanding her capacity and naming the various dining rooms quote “for certain people who she thinks will arouse interest,” likely historical figures, and decorated with historical prints, playing up the vintage theme. Yet the Hearthstone was never a financial success--Ottey had to ask Wister to intercede with the gas company on her behalf in 1936 and closed for good in 1942.
The end of the Hearthstone was not the end of the Elfreth’s Alley Association; Ottey herself continued to be involved on the street, and the EAA would continue to have a history intertwined with that of Landmarks, which we will learn more about in the next episode.
Act III - White Memory, Black Memory
Zooming out for a moment, much of what we recognize as “preservation” from this era was driven by women, but it was also nearly all done by white Americans. The people whose homes and battlefields were protected were, with very few exceptions, white.
From the 1870s through the 1930s, monuments were erected throughout the city and throughout the nation to commemorate the U.S. Civil War, cementing a national narrative of the war as a tragedy with honorable men on both sides and which actively minimized the history of slavery in an attempt at national reconciliation.
Even the historic sites and monuments which were not expressly supportive of this narrative upheld white supremacy by exclusively telling white stories as if native and Black people had not lived on this land in the past and did not live there in the present. And as if the only stories worth remembering were white.
Although textbooks on the history of preservation and early public history overwhelmingly include white individuals and organizations as the trendsetters and the historical actors, Black communities in Philadelphia and elsewhere were also engaging in commemoration and history work. Let’s rewind to catch up on how Black Americans were commemorating their history while Mount Vernon was being enshrined as a bandage for sectional discord.
Public annual commemorations of anti-slavery milestones, such as the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of Black West Indians in 1834, were one way in which Black Americans celebrated their history while advocating for racial justice throughout the 19th century. A key purpose of these commemorations, according to historian Mitch Kachun, was to both testify to Black Americans’ Americanness and also articulate a distinct history and heritage which deserved to be celebrated. In the 21st century, Juneteenth is a holiday which continues this tradition.
In Episode 6 we talked about how Mother Bethel AME provided a safety net for nearby residents in Philadelphia’s historically Black seventh ward, but the church has also served as a local hub of history and memory.
Much of the Black commemoration in Philadelphia in the late 19th century was centered around Richard Allen, the church’s founder and the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination. Allen’s tomb inside Mother Bethel became a sort of shrine, not unlike many of the sites celebrating George Washington.
When the Centennial Exhibition came to Philadelphia, AME leaders, led by Reverend Andrew J. Chambers, petitioned to have a presence in the expo grounds, the only Black presence in the entire event. A monument in tribute to Richard Allen was designed, to be topped by a bust of the man himself. They hoped that the monument, like the one of Columbus, would become part of the built environment of Fairmount Park, but Centennial authorities, without having even seen the piece, told them the monument would only stay for the fair. En route by train to the fairgrounds, the marble monument was destroyed in a railway accident, only the bust of Allen surviving to go on display for the last week or so of the Fair.
Richard Allen remained an important historical touchstone for Black Philadelphians, as did Octavius V. Catto, an activist, baseball player, and educator who was murdered trying to vote in 1871, and whose name graced the Black Elks lodge in the city.
As the example of Mount Vernon was spreading across the mid-Atlantic, with local, majority-white historical societies clamoring to mark where George Washington slept, Black Americans took history and commemoration national as well.
In 1897, Black collectors in Philadelphia created the American Negro Historical Society.
In 1915, Carter G. Woodson, whose parents had been enslaved, started the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). The Association produced two academic journals, one aimed at scholars and the other at high school teachers and by 1926, Woodson was advocating for “Negro History Week,” which would evolve into what we know as Black History Month.
Just as white women’s clubs got involved in history and memory work, so too did some of the Black women’s organizations. Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, was also a member of Woodson’s Association and reviewed one of Woodson’s books in the first issue of the Association’s Journal of Negro History. Mary McLeod Bethune, better known as an advisor to FDR, was also a key member of both the NACW and Woodson’s Association, serving as its president from 1936-1951.
Where white women’s clubs saw history as a way to educate, or perhaps indoctrinate, the masses into the American way, for Black women, history was often a way to claim a space as Americans.
Personally, I believe that the preservation accomplished in the early 20th century is a net good. Historic sites can be places of great empathy with the past, and can present useful tools for the present and the future. But it is notable that when comparing the Black and white commemorations of the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th century, during the Jim Crow era, it is the white commemorations which more often took the form of public monuments or historic house museums. Black commemoration more often took private or ephemeral forms, with sites such as Mother Bethel AME, which became a National Historic Landmark in 1974, the exception. When we look at the built commemorative landscape around us, those things which seem both old and somehow ageless or permanent, white commemoration and preservation still far outnumbers Black commemoration. In 2017, Philadelphia unveiled a statue of Octavius Catto next to city hall, its first full-body monument to a Black person in public space. How different might our world look today if more sites of Black history and memory had been protected a century ago?
Conclusion:
In a 1937 guide to the city of Philadelphia, depictions of the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia sat just a page away from charming yarns about times gone by. The rundown houses on Elfreth’s Alley were being saved, and merited a spot on one of the walking tours of the city. This street might still know poverty, but it was becoming a bonafide attraction. A 1935 newspaper article hailed the residents of the street as quote “the city’s richest poor.”
By 1940, the Black families who had lived in house #135 a decade earlier were gone. If they left behind any belongings or any mark that they had ever lived there, it was probably gone, as the home had been vandalized and nearly all of the interior woodwork was gone, according to reports. The city had ordered the house demolished, but Frances Wister’s Landmarks society wanted to find a buyer for it to save it from that fate. In 1941, Sarah and Louis Packer bought the property. It is unclear what use the Packers put it to but they must have at least stabilized the building to keep the wrecking ball at bay. In 1946, the house changed hands again, sold to John and Anna Kumick, who opened a restaurant, The Coach House, the next year, five years after Dolly Ottey had closed the Hearthstone. The Coach House offered “Candle Light Dinners” and put a wishing well in the empty lot next door at #133, which became a fixture of Fete Days throughout the 1950s.
Whereas the Hearthstone had tried to cater to working Philadelphians with modest fare while dabbling in historical ambience, the Coach House seems to have aimed to capitalize on the street’s relative celebrity. The age of these houses was becoming a boon rather than a curse.
The Old Philadelphia Survey had shown that the part of the city between the Delaware River and 6th Street was loaded with old buildings as well as empty factories and warehouses. D. Knickerbocker Boyd, Frances Wister, and others saw an opportunity to remake this part of the city in a way that capitalized on the historical structures, but it would take money, legislation, and time.
Join us next week as we wrap up season 1 of The Alley Cast and look at a little bit of urban renewal history as well as how the Elfreth’s Alley Museum came into being.
A couple footnotes:
First, the Old Philadelphia Survey became part of a larger program operated by the National Park Service and the Library of Congress, the Historic American Buildings Survey, or HABS, which still documents historic structures, through drawings and photos today. You can find images from the Old Philadelphia Survey as well as all HABS images on the Library of Congress website.
Second, That Columbus statue in Fairmount Park I mentioned, created for the Centennial? It stayed there for a century, before moving to Marconi Plaza in South Philadelphia, where this year it has become a site of contested memory, as protestors have convincingly argued that Columbus--a man censured in his own time for abuses against native populations--is not a person worth enshrining in stone. Both the Philadelphia Public Art Commission and the Philadelphia Historical Commission have signed off on the statue’s removal.
Isabel Steven: History is a group effort! This episode was researched, written, and narrated by Ted Maust, with research and editorial assistance from Isabel Steven and Joe Makuc. Cynthia Heider served as a subject matter expert.
In addition to the sources cited by name, this episode drew heavily on the work of Mickey Herr, Susannah W. Gold, Gary Nash, Robert W. Rydell, Seth Bruggeman, and past volunteers and staff of the Elfreth’s Alley Association who collected news clippings and photos of the street’s history in the 20th century. Thanks to Elfreth’s Alley Association Board Members Brittany Thomas for archival photos and Emily Taggart Schricker for her work not only in keeping the Association’s archives, but also researching house #135.
See the episode page at elfrethsalley.org/podcast for a transcript and a complete list of sources.
Our theme music is the song “Open Flames” by Blue Dot Sessions from the album Aeronaut, used under Creative Commons license.
This podcast is recorded on the unceded indigenous territory of the Lenni-Lenape people, who were and continue to be active stewards of the land. We recognize that words are not enough and we aim to actively uphold indigenous visibility and sovereignty for individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. By offering this Land Acknowledgment, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the Elfreth’s Alley Museum accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! Be sure to join us next week for Episode 8, which will be the final episode of this season.
Thank you for supporting the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by listening to this podcast! If you are able to make a financial gift, you can do so at elfrethsalley.org/donate
Thank you and take care!