Demolition of buildings surrounding Carpenters’ Hall in Independence National Historical Park. Image from the Housing Association of Delaware Valley collection at the Temple University Special Collections Research Center.
Google Streetview from the same vantage point as the photo above, with Independence National Historical Park’s “18th-Century Garden” in the foreground. Carpenters’ Hall can just be glimpsed through the trees.
This season we have worked our way from dressmakers in 1762 through to 20th-century preservationists, with many other topics in between. We have explored how the neighborhood around Elfreth’s Alley was built and rebuilt, how economic and demographic changes in the city as a whole affected this little street, and how commemoration and preservation began to remake the street even as these efforts remained, in effect, racially segregated.
Today we continue with the story of 20th century commemoration efforts on the Alley as well as at Independence Hall, and we will wrap up this first season of The Alley Cast.
This season would not have been possible without the huge contributions of Isabel Steven and Joe Makuc, both Allen Davis Fellows at Temple University’s Center for Public History. Cynthia Heider was super helpful with episodes 6 and 7. Enya Xiang made huge contributions to episode 8.
Arthur Evans, dressed as Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal church, stands in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington Square Park in 1776. Image from George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Collection at Temple University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center.
FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW SOURCES
List of Sources
Ammon, Francesca Russello. “Resisting Gentrification Amid Historic Preservation: Society Hill, Philadelphia, and the Fight for Low-Income Housing.” Change Over Time 8, no. 1 (2018): 8–31. https://doi.org/10.1353/cot.2018.0001.
Bruggeman, Seth, Here, George Washington Was Born.
Burns, Andrea A. From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement. 2013.
Clay, Grady. "The Alley Revisited." Landscape Architecture 87, no. 8 (1997): 140-39. Accessed August 1, 2020.
Greiff, Constance M. “Independence: The Creation of a National Park.” 1985
Herr, Mickey, “Frances Anne Wister: Philadelphia’s Patron Saint of Historic Preservation,” Hidden City
Imagining Philadelphia, edited by Scott Gabriel Knowles, 52–77. Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhgj3.6.
“Independence National Historical Park: Business Plan,” National Park Service.
Mires, Charlene, Independence Hall in American Memory, 1–30. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt189ttpq.4.
Newhouse, Sarah. “Lovingly Curated: the Batcheler, Hartshorne, and Sahlin Families Papers.” Historical Society of Pennsylvania, May 23, 2013.
Skiba, Bob, “Gay Pride in Philadelphia, 1972-2018“ Philly Gay News.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Ted Maust:
It’s 2019 and a family walks down Elfreth’s Alley. The adults remember coming to this street as schoolchildren, and they try to remember what they were told about this place. It’s very old, they know that for sure. These houses have been here and looked this way pretty much forever. Outside house #126, the family sees a sign inviting them into the Elfreth’s Alley Museum. They pay admission and enter the home, with a volunteer as their guide. She tells the family about Mary Smith and Sarah Melton, the dressmakers who lived here in 1762, and points to the carefully staged table of fabric, and sewing tools. There is a dress on a form, approximating Smith and Melton’s handiwork.
The family moves through the house and the rest of the museum with their guide. They learn about the German immigrant shoemakers who lived in #126 in the 19th century, and they hear about how Dolly Ottey saved the street. As they leave, one of the adults remarks with awe that they didn’t remember even half of this from their childhood. The visitors walk to the end of the street, admiring the houses. On the way back toward 2nd Street, they stop and talk with their guide again in front of the Museum.
“What is the quickest way to Independence Hall?” one of the adults asks. It’s only six blocks away, but the guide hands them a map, tracing the route with a finger.
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.
This season we have worked our way from dressmakers in 1762 through to 20th-century preservationists, with many other topics in between. We have explored how the neighborhood around Elfreth’s Alley was built and rebuilt, how economic and demographic changes in the city as a whole affected this little street, and how commemoration and preservation began to remake the street even as these efforts remained, in effect, racially segregated.
Today we continue with the story of 20th century commemoration efforts on the Alley as well as at Independence Hall, and we will wrap up this first season of The Alley Cast.
Episode 8: Renewal
Ted Maust:
Act I: INHP
Independence Hall had been a potent symbol for Americans ever since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, though it has shifted and grown in size and meaning. Historian Charlene Mires has shown how the footprint of what was important in Independence Hall expanded over time, from just the Assembly Room-- where the Declaration of Independence was signed--in the early 19th century to the first floor by the Centennial, with subsequent restorations including the whole building and even adjacent buildings. In the 19th century, the Liberty Bell became an important symbol in the abolition movement, and in the early 20th century, the Hall became a site of protests advocating for women’s suffrage. By World War II, the Hall and the Bell were still powerful rhetorical devices in debates about what it meant to be American. For instance, in 1942, Richard R. Wright, Sr., whose son helped found the Armstrong Association in Philadelphia three decades before, led the call for a national celebration of the 13th Amendment, to be known as Freedom Day, to be celebrated at Independence Hall.
The war had brought an increased interest in the Hall, but also fears about its destruction, both by foreign enemies and by accidental fire from neighboring buildings. Shortly after the inaugural Freedom Day, around the time that Dolly Ottey closed the Hearthstone on Elfreth’s Alley for good, 51 people were invited to a meeting about how to preserve Philadelphia’s historic sites, especially Independence Hall. Eighteen people came to the meeting; the only woman among them was Frances Wister. Wister would become a vice-president of the organization that came out of this meeting, the Independence Hall Association.
The Independence Hall Association was not the first group to advocate for the old State House--or even the first to propose making it into a national park, but they were the ones who set in motion the eventual creation of Independence National Historical Park by congressional legislation in 1948.
Plans for Independence Hall over the previous 50 years had often involved demolishing buildings immediately across the street, creating a plaza or park, to make the site more visible and to make room for gatherings there. As the National Park Service planned out the new national park, they settled on a plan that called for the creation of a green space extending several blocks North from the front of the hall. Another green space would run East from the Hall nearly to the Delaware River, dotted with buildings constructed before 1850 and reconstructions of buildings which had been demolished. The creation of these open green spaces required the demolition of whole blocks of buildings which were not sufficiently old.
Just as the scale of what was important at Independence Hall had grown in the past, Charlene Mires argues that the creation of Independence Mall and the National Park was another step in this process, extending the meaning of Independence Hall over blocks.
Today, maps of the National Park show park property as far south as the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial on Pine Street, as far west as the Mikveh Israel cemetery in between 8th and 9th streets, as far north as Race Street, and as far east as Front Street, claiming 55 acres of land spread over 20 city blocks.
Many visitors to Elfreth’s Alley assume that the street is part of the Park, and I would argue that Independence Hall’s aura has continued to grow as tourism to Philadelphia’s Old City has grown in recent decades.
Ed Bacon and Urban Renewal
The scale of demolition necessary to create the park, this lush green space in the heart of Philadelphia was achieved by the city planning offices. The person who has come to represent mid-century city planning in Philadelphia is Edmund Bacon, perhaps better known as actor Kevin Bacon’s dad. Bacon literally became the face of city planning nationally when he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1964. Bacon and city planners of his era wanted to remake cities, updating them according to a holistic plan which would solve social problems through design. This idea was called “urban renewal.”
Take the humble alleyway: Since the first American cities, the urban alley was an ordinary location, “the outback world of the unmentionable, if not the unwanted,” as American journalist Grady Clay called it. The historical alley was an access point for city services, such as drinking water, electricity, and law enforcement. It was an ordinary place where people lived and got on with their lives.
When automobile ownership in the U.S. tripled from 1915 to 1925, alleys were no longer needed. There was no longer a need to access the barns and stables that may have been situated in alley ways. And by the 1950s, car manufacturers were lengthening their new models, making narrow alleys completely inconvenient. In the 1960s, urban development favored removing alleys in favor of superblocks.
This same principle was embraced on a wider scale, as highways and bypasses were built, prioritizing the movement of cars, especially those from the suburbs, over the existing urban environment. The brick wall along the Eastern end of Elfreth’s Alley is a product of urban renewal. It shields the street from highway I-95, which cut through the Philadelphia waterfront in the 1960s.
Urban renewal projects typically targeted areas of the city which were seen as blighted. The neighborhoods with unsanitary housing we described in episode 6 fit this description, as did many of the blocks of old factories and warehouses which surrounded Elfreth’s Alley.
There is a fundamental consequence to this idea: if you remove a block of housing, which is affordable for the people who live there because it is in disrepair, with brand new houses, you are effectively forcing those residents out. Urban renewal often caused extreme and speedy gentrification, removing low-income residents and replacing them with middle-to-upper-class residents as quickly as new houses could be built.
Just to the East of what is now Independence National Historical Park lies one of Philadelphia’s most historic residential neighborhoods, now known as Society Hill. Mother Bethel AME church is near the Southwest corner of this area, which stretches from about 8th street to the Delaware River between Walnut and Lombard Streets. In the early 20th century, this neighborhood, especially the southern half, was home to many Black and Jewish residents, as well as people of Italian descent.
Throughout the 1950s, dilapidated housing and a public food market were demolished, and replaced with a mix of ultramodern housing--such as the Society Hill Towers, designed by I. M. Pei--and houses designed to mimic the remaining, “historical” houses, which included the Powel House. In fact, it was Frances Anne Wister who two decades before had suggested the name “Society Hill” as a kind of rebranding of the neighborhood, hearkening back to the 18th century when much of the land was owned by the Free Society of Traders, a joint-stock company of Quakers.
In Society Hill, history and historically inspired architecture was actively used as a tool of displacement, forcing out the majority of the previous residents and becoming one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods in a matter of years.
Act II - Preservation and Experts
While Ed Bacon and Philadelphia’s other city planners were busy reshaping the city, National Park Service staff set to restoring Independence Hall and the surrounding buildings which had been spared the wrecking ball or even completely reconstructed. The concept of preservation had changed dramatically since the early 20th century when protected buildings, the contents of those buildings, and often the grounds around them were primarily symbols. The early preservation groups were primarily made up of middle-to-upper-class women who wielded these symbols with both moral authority and good taste. By the 1940s, preservation had become nearly a science. It was something you could get a degree in. It was a place for experts. The change was driven by the new popularity of graduate programs in history and the application of archaeology, which had previously only been used to learn about ancient civilizations, to more recent history. Suddenly there were lots of experts and nearly all of them were white men.
Many of them worked for the National Park Service, which had begun interpreting history sites in the 1930s. Many of these were handed off from voluntary organizations of the older school to the NPS, shifting control of these sites from women to men sometimes literally overnight.
There were a few individuals who bridged the gap of this gender shift. Louise DuPont Crowninshield, an heiress to the DuPont fortune, for instance, made a name for herself as an expert in furnishing historic homes with authentic charm.
Penny Batcheler
By the 1960s, though, there were women experts within the NPS in the academic mold. Penny Hartshorne received her degree in architecture in 1953, studying under Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She then moved to Sweden to study Swedish architecture. Upon her return to the United States, the drawings of Swedish log cabins she had created there helped her get an internship at the National Park Service, which brought her to Philadelphia.
In the 1960s, the National Park Service was involved in a series of local projects in Philadelphia in addition to its work at Independence National Historical Park; consulting on restorations of the Arch Street Friends Meeting House and the Powel House. At some point, Charles Peterson, Hartshorne's supervisor--and a preservation legend in his own right-- suggested that she moonlight on a restoration project happening on Elfreth’s Alley.
The Creation of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum
The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks had handed two of its Elfreth’s Alley properties over to the Elfreth’s Alley Association. The handoff had terms: that houses #124 and #126 would be leased for 20 years starting on Sept 1, 1957 and the EAA agreed to convert the two properties into a museum and to spend at least 4,500 dollars on capital improvements. This included repairing property, replacing broken windows, and providing electric services and heating.
The EAA secured the services of Oscar Stonorov’s architecture firm to accomplish the restoration, but as Stonorov was a modernist architect, it was an awkward fit. It was at this point that Charles Peterson connected the EAA with his protege, Hartshorne.
Preservation and historical reconstruction involves a kind of detective work--using the pieces of information you already have to try to create an ambience that has now vanished. It is especially nerve-wracking because every detail and alteration matters when recreating a historical setting. By Oct 12, 1959, Hartshorne had completed three drawings and made specifications regarding restoration of House 126. It would get a new door, copied from the door from 124. The original door jamb would be repaired and fit to a new sill, which would be copied from those of 120 and 122. A new pent eave would be derived from the existing original moldings on the building. A new wood fireproofed shingle roof would be put on as well.
Hartshorne faced a dilemma: The back half of the house was built sometime around 1850, nearly a century after the front part of the house. The Park Service projects Hartshorne was working on set out to restore a building to a particular period, removing nearly everything that had come later. At #126 Elfreth’s Alley, however, she decided to reconstruct the front half in the 18th century style and the back half would be in the style of the 19th century.
In the 70s, Penny ended up on the Elfreth's Alley Association Board of Trustees and she met her husband, George Batcheler, another architect, who lived in #137 Elfreth’s Alley. She describes the unusual circumstances under which she met George on a Fete Day: “In the early morning I was up on a ladder washing windows and I don’t know how we were introduced, but I remember being on that ladder.” Every Friday night, she and George would attend Property Committee meetings together and eat a cheap dinner together.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the Batchelers were witness to Elfreth’s Alley’s transformation from a neglected street to one that is well-loved and well-preserved, largely due to Penny Hartshorne Batcheler’s architectural work but also due to the work of many residents, who embraced the vision of Dolly Ottey, Frances Wister, and Penny Batcheler in preserving and restoring their homes. When you step into the Elfreth’s Alley Museum and observe the 18th century-style furnishings and building structures, be sure to note that Penny made the past less mysterious for us.
When asked why Elfreth’s Alley is important, Penny replied, “Because everyone didn’t live like Mayor Powel. There are very few little house museums...do you know another in the city? I don't.”
Act III - Bicentennial
As the 1960s became the 1970s, historic sites and city planners alike began hashing out what the celebration of America’s Bicentennial in 1976 would look like and how it would remake the city. On Elfreth’s Alley, the street surface, paved with Belgian Block, would be ripped up for modern plumbing and electrical conduits, and then re-paved with historically-inspired brick, slate, and river rock.
From early on in the planning stages, which started in the 1950s, it became apparent to some observers that the Bicentennial was primarily being planned by and for white Americans, both those living in and around Philadelphia and the hordes that the city hoped would come and bring tourist dollars their way.
The 1960s had been a time of racial unrest locally as well as nationally punctuated by both protest and rioting. The election of Frank Rizzo as mayor in 1972 further escalated racist rhetoric in some parts of Philadelphia, leading federal officials to downscale the scope of the Bicentennial out of fear of racist and nativist violence.
A variety of Black Philadelphians, including Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, a historian and professor at Temple University, called for a Black history display at the Bicentennial, but importantly one controlled by Black people, perhaps even outside of the Bicentennial framework.
Eventually a compromise was struck, with the city of Philadelphia promising to build a museum of Black history in time for the Bicentennial Celebration.
This museum would become the African American Museum of Philadelphia, but before the museum could be built, its future location proved to be a site of more conflict. Architect Theodore V. Cam’s first choice location was at the corner of 6th Street and Pine, adjacent to Mother Bethel AME in Society Hill. The location was picked because of the neighborhood’s history as a majority-Black neighborhood, but the overhaul of Society Hill had achieved its aims: in the mid 1960s, Society Hill’s black population fell by 55 percent and the white population increased 67 percent.
The proposed African American Museum received significant push back from the Society Hill Civic Association, which had been incorporated in 1967, chiefly based on the idea that a history museum would disrupt foot and car traffic and in general the atmosphere of the residential neighborhood.
Supporters of the Society Hill location for AAMP contended that these objections were rooted in racism, especially given the proximity to Independence National Historical Park, which had caused its own share of neighborhood disruption and traffic.
There were also Black supporters of AAMP who wanted the new museum located in a majority-Black neighborhood such as North Philly as a community asset and anchor.
Ultimately, AAMP was constructed at Arch St and 7th, amid a sea of federal government buildings which had been built on the sites of former factories and warehouses. It was hardly the ideal location, but did keep the museum in proximity to Philadelphia’s historic core, 3 blocks away from Independence Hall and just 5 blocks away from Elfreth’s Alley.
The AAMP was far from the only product of Black commemoration in the mid-century era or the Bicentennial, and it would be far from the last. The decades since have seen a great number of preservation efforts in majority-Black neighborhoods, from murals and statuary to historic markers and more than a handful of historic house museums. In the 21st century, these organizations have often struggled, lacking the community wealth that undergirded similar projects led by white preservationists a century ago.
In Society Hill, one small group of residents living in homes operated by the Octavia Hill Association, evicted in 1971 as part of the Society Hill redevelopment project, fought through the end of the decade in the courts and finally won newly-constructed subsidized housing in the early 1980s. This small victory puts the enormity of the urban renewal project--which relocated some 6,000 Black Philadelphians from the center of the city between 1950 and 1980--into stark perspective.
Episode Conclusion
From World War II through the American Bicentennial, Philadelphia’s history, especially its role in the origins of the United States, became a topic of national concern. Independence Hall was a key part of this, and the new National Park became a stage for a variety of debates in 20th-century America, especially as the Bicentennial neared. During the Vietnam War, the Hall was the site of numerous protests and from 1972 to 1976, Philadelphia’s first Gay Pride marches ended in rallies at Independence Hall with activists invoking the founding principles of the nation as they protested discrimination.
While these protest movements used Independence Hall as a site to stake a claim to the founding principles of the nation, the restored homes of Elfreth’s Alley presented a canvas on which to reaffirm a more conservative vision of the nation’s origins. At Fete Days throughout the 1960s and 1970s, visitors, residents, and Elfreth’s Alley Association staff--the vast majority of them white--donned historical garb and engaged in patriotic pageantry. In contrast to Mount Vernon and other grand estates, Elfreth’s Alley represented a more working-class vision of early America, but in the mid-20th century, it was an overwhelmingly white vision.
Season Conclusion
The arc of Elfreth's Alley's history, beginning with the construction of its houses in the mid-18th century through to the 20th, serves to trace the impact of many of the developments in larger historical movements, from modes of production to racial and ethnic demographics to urban planning to constructions of gender to historic preservation and commemoration. This season we have touched on many of these issues, exploring some in greater depth than others, all while trying to give a sense of the depth and length of Elfreth's Alley's history.
Many craftsmen, tradesmen, artisans, factory and service workers have made the Alley the home over the centuries, but we focused on garment production throughout the season. About 40 feet and a hundred years separated the dressmakers of #126 from Nettie McCrae of #135. A lot had changed over the century that separated these women. Much of garment production had moved outside the home into factories, and the knowledge required to create garments had changed too. Rather than the skill with a needle that Smith, Melton and Carr employed, McCrae needed to know how to work machines. And though the speed of production may have increased, both the dressmakers and McCrae had to work as efficiently and quickly as possible in order to scrape together a living.
However, more than just modes of production differed between the dressmakers and Nettie McCrae. Smith, Melton, and Carr had both one another to rely on, as well as a strong social network from other women on the street, particularly those who also headed their own households. McCrae, on the other hand, could only reasonably rely on the other families within #135, the Mortons and the Wilsons. Although we don't know for sure, McCrae, along with the Mortons and the Wilsons probably faced some level of discrimination from their white neighbors on the street.
That lack of community was compounded by the fact that there were very few Black families within the ward that Elfreth's Alley was located. The lives of the Black women on Elfreth's Alley who labored as domestic workers in the first decades of the nineteenth century were also precarious, with work that was contingent on the attitude and feeling of their white employers.
Community on Elfreth's Alley was not always guaranteed, as we have seen both in the experiences of the families in #135 and when the Public Universal Friend was run off the street in 1784 by an angry mob who found the Friend's openly ambiguous gender expression threatening. Although Elfreth's Alley tells the story of everyday and working class Philadelphians, again and again we have seen that these individuals' experiences were not one and the same, White and Black, men and women, those who conformed to their assigned gender and those who did not: the experiences and limitations faced by those who lived, worked or visited Elfreth's Alley differed markedly based on race, gender, and class.
When Penny Batcheler explained that Elfreth's Alley is important "because everyone didn't live like Mayor Powel," she asserted that the lives of working class Philadelphians were worth preserving, that they were worth learning about, that they were worth remembering even if they didn’t have power and wealth or political significance. Elfreth's Alley is unusual in this regard within the historic house museum world, even though the experiences of everyday working people are much more common than those deemed significant by historical or national memory.
In fact, Elreth's Alley as a street should be unremarkable. It was built as a narrow thoroughfare that connected to larger roads, one of many such alleys and streets in the urban landscape of eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Many of these streets still exist today, though others have been expanded or demolished to accommodate growing populations and changing transportation. Many people in Philadelphia today live in similarly narrow houses with corner staircases and kitchen expansions, just as generations of Elfreth's Alley's residents did. Many other alleys in Old City could just as easily have become a national historic landmark, while Elfreth's Alley remained in relative obscurity.
And yet, Elfreth's Alley is important. Certainly, we at the museum think so, as did preservationists and architects like Dolly Ottey, Frances Anne Wister, and Penny Batcheler, as do the thousands of tourists and visitors who come seeking out its colonial houses and old cobblestones. And certainly the thousands of people who made the Alley their home or place of business over three centuries of life thought that Elfreth's Alley was important. Elfreth's Alley was and is significant not because of any inherent value or impact on historical events, but because people made it so, whether that was in intentional acts of historic preservation, or in the daily business of leading a life.
Before I let the credits roll on this first season of the Alley Cast, I want to sincerely thank you for listening. This has been an experiment, a pivot from our Plan A during a pandemic. It has certainly been a learning experience. I am hopeful that there will be a Season 2 of The Alley Cast, so stay tuned. In the meantime, be sure to check out our website and our social media channels to keep learning about Elfreth’s Alley. Until next time, take care.
Isabel Steven: History is a group effort! This episode was researched and written by Enya Xiang, Isabel Steven, and Ted Maust, with editorial help from Joe Makuc.
Isabel Steven and Joe Makuc are Allen Davis Fellows at Temple University’s Center for Public History.
In addition to the sources cited by name, this episode drew heavily on the work of Andrea Burns, Constance Grieff, as well as 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.
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 supporting the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by listening to this podcast! If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! If you know someone who might like this podcast, tell them about it! If you are able to make a financial gift, you can do so at elfrethsalley.org/donate
Thank you and take care!