Lost Building of the Week-- November 16th

The Franklin Building

125 South 12th Street

Aww shit.

                       The site of this building is now a crappy parking lot with a big mural on it. What a shame that this one got lost. The Franklin Building was a result of Mega Grandmaster of Ass Kick Frank Furness' childhood friendship with William West Frazier, sugar tycoon and generalized rich-ass motherfucker. Take a good long look at that thing and make sure to check out the super-high-res version of this picture here. Furness threw everything he had at this little building.
                      Each row of windows has something different about it except for the 5th and 6th floors. The facade even wraps around what was then called Lawson Street so even if you were pissing the the middle of that alley you could still enjoy some Furnessian magic. It even has statues of strongmen as the four columns over the front door, as if they're saying, "Show some fucking respect to this building or we'll drop it on you!".

                     The origin of this building is quite simple. William West Frazier had known Furness since they were both toddlers. When Frazier grew up, he commissioned Furness to build him a shitload of houses and other buildings. You can read more about their relationship here. When Frazier needed an office building for the family's sugar business, at that time called Franklin Sugar Company, he went to straight to his buddy for a design. The Franklin Building was built in 1895.
                     The Frankin Sugar Company was constantly embroiled in lawsuits, many of which went to the United States Supreme Court. One about their inclusion in the "Sugar Trust" monopoly, one about not paying proper taxes and tariffs, another about their crooked transportation of goods. Even when this building was being built, they were going through multiple legal battles at once.
                    Records are spotty about when this thing was demolished. However, it's pretty safe to say that this thing was removed sometime in 1939 or 1940. How do I know? Well, here's a close-up of an aerial photo from 1939:

There it is!

                        .... and here's a picture of the same address on the last day of 1940:

Fuck.

                       So there you have it. Instead of this cool-ass Furness building, we've gotten a shitty parking lot for the last 70 years. To this day, there's a big hole in this part of the 12th Street streetscape. If this building was still around today, it would make for a pretty badass apartment or condo building. Enjoy your fucking parking lot, everybody.

The site of the Franklin Building as it appears today. Yay, a mural.

Butt-Fugly Building of the Week-- November 15th

The Rittenhouse Savoy

1810 Rittenhouse Square

Blarf.

                       Buildings like this are why NIMBYs exist. This is supposed to be a residential tower? Those shitbag ribbon windows make it look like an old dilapidated hospital. This style of facade was the shit that dictated butt-fugly buildings for decades to come. Even in its own time, it was hated. Now that its aged (badly), it makes even more of a stink today.
                      As we all know by now, the mid-20th Century is when architecture went to shit. This building and its slightly less fugly brother, the Claridge, represent the some of the beginnings of that architectural assness hitting Philadelphia. The Savoy was first introduced to the Center City Residents Association in February 1950. NIMBYs came at it in full force, and rightly so. Some unoccupied historical old rowhouses stood in the way of the development.

This aerial view from 1950 shows the historically significant rowhouses that the NIMBYs were trying to save.

                      The builders and newspapers all assumed that the residents hated the building because of its height, but that's a stupid assumption... the Square already had tall buildings that had been there for decades. The NIMBYs were more worried about the shitty look of the horizontal-ribbon windowed exterior fucking up the beauty of their pretty-ass Square.
                     You see, the Rittenhouse NIMBYs of that age considered themselves heroes. They had just come off of squashing a horribly-thought-out plan to turn the Square into an underground parking garage, so they were reveling in their newly-discovered powers. They literally shouted down the parking lot developer until he gave the fuck up.

This right here proves that the NIMBYs of old were true heroes...today, not so much. Check out the early rendering of the Savoy that was included.

                    To calm down the NIMBYs, the developer of the Savoy, some dude named Kaiserman, assured them that the architects' drawings were rendered in such a way that the facade only APPEARED overly horizontal. He stated that vertical lines would also be included in the composition of the facade. Of course, he was lying through his teeth. Look at that thing. That's a horizontal as horizontal gets. Kaiserman had no respect for the Square. He just figured that people hate new shit so it was just natural opposition to have to deal with. I guess he didn't wear his glasses enough back then or something because the Savoy is ugly as fuck in any time period.
                     Despite the NIMBY powers at hand, the Square had its new butt-fugly piece of shit Savoy building, along with its bro, the Claridge, by the end of 1951. Though the Savoy is pretty nice on the inside, the Square really gets uglied up by it, especially now that its getting old. What a fuck up. Other ugly-ass Rittenhouse buildings in later decades would be sequels to this mess. Thanks a lot, Kaiserman.

Old-Ass Building of the Week-- November 14th

Applebee's Center City Philly (aka Bookbinders Seafood House, aka 5th Police District Station House)

215 S. 15th Street

Yes, I'm going to talk about an Applebee's. Picture by VikingSquirrel.

                     Check this thing out. Though sitting in the shadows of much taller buildings, this thing is a vestige of a much earlier time for 15th Street. At one point, everything else on the street matched this. Not a bad looking building for an Applebee's. Of course, its original purpose wasn't as a chain restaurant... or as Bookbinder's Seafood House. It was originally a police station.
                    It all began with the consolidation of a shitload of little townships and villages into the coterminus City/County of Philadelphia. The need arose for a Philadelphia police force to serve every district. Since they had little time to plan or waste, a bunch of shitty little police stations popped up all over county in existing homes or quickly-built police shacks. These sub-standard stations stayed in use well into the 1860's and by 1869, looked like shit. The Police Chief at this time was St. Clair A. Mulholland.
               Chief Mulholland was a fucking died-in-the-wool mega-badass. Born in Ireland, he came to Philadelphia early in life and enlisted his ass into the Civil War. He went straight up the ranks and became the last person to be made a Major General during the war. He was horribly wounded four separate times, each one thought to be a mortal wound. He didn't fuckin' care and kept on fighting. After the war, he became a well-known expert in the field of penology, that is to say, the study of PUNISHMENT. He became Philadelphia chief of police in 1868.

Now that's a beard.

                       In 1869, Mulholland was pissed off about the sorry-ass state of the city's police stations. He went up to then-mayor Daniel Fox, put him in a full nelson, and said, "Build me some better police stations you slimy bastard!!!". Fox was like, "Don't hurt me, General Mulholland!" and had the 1857-built Fifth District Police Shack knocked down and rebuilt in 1870. Back then, the fifth district was in what is now Center City. The new building was built at 215 South Fifteenth Street, then known as the corner of 15th and Brighton.
                    People liked the new police station because it didn't look like shit. The other police shacks soon got demolished and replaced with similarly nice-looking buildings. Mulholland later retired, moved to Paris and became a painter (!!!). The Fifth District Station House stayed in use as a police station for at least 50 years. An addition was tacked on in the very early 20th Century.

15th Street in 1913. You can see the police station's roof just to the upper left of the middle of the image.

                    By the end of the 1920's, the station house was a piece of shit. It was too small for modern needs and was falling apart. It probably would have been demolished if not for the events that occurred next.             
                   Across town in Old City, in the early 1930's, the Bookbinder family gave over their famous seafood restaurant to an organization called the Jewish Federated Charities. The grandsons of the founder of Bookbinder's were like "Fuck that, we'll start our own restaurant!!", and opened the Bookbinder's Seafood House in the old Fifth District Station House in 1935. It became even more famous than the original.

Postcard for the place from The Epoch When Everything Was A Postcard.

                 For the next seven decades, Bookbinder's Seafood House rocked this building while 15th Street went through change after change after change all around. Eventually, the building was caught in a nearly permanent shadow from the taller buildings surrounding it.
                 For most of its life at 15th Street, it was one of the only nice and high quality restaurants in town. In the 90's and 00's, a shitload of new and exciting fine restaurants popped into the city and made business in the old guard of restaurants suffer. There was also a conflict between the owners of the restaurant, which at this point were two Bookbinder brothers that were descended from the original gangstas that started the place.
                In 2004, one of the brothers sued the other. One had agreed to buy out the other in 1989 and 1997 and financed the purchase over a long period of time. When the restaurant's business waned, payments were no longer possible. The lawsuit in 2004 shut down Bookbinders' Seafood House for good. The building then sat there doing nothing, the first time it had been unoccupied since the early 1930's.
                In early 2006, the building became an Applebee's. Restaurant snobs and regular citizens alike were pissed off that this chain, which is known for its suburban banality, pushed its way into Center City in this way... in this building. Personally, I'm just glad the building is occupied. I admit, I've caught a meal or two there just because I was drunk from McGlinchey's and all the other restaurants on the row were too crowded.
              When it comes down to it, the chain signed a 15-year lease on the spot, so get the fuck used to it. Unless something drastic occurs, they'll be there until at least 2021. No trace of its use as a police station still exists and only an image of a lobster in the front door recalls its life as Bookbinder's. Again, at least the 141-year-old building is still in use.

Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week-- November 10th

John G. Johnson Art Gallery

Northeast Corner of "Fairmount Plaza" (later turned into Eakin's Oval)

Noooooooo!!! Son of beeech!!

                           You think Barnes got shafted? You think his will wasn't honored? At least there'll soon be a building with his name on it. Wait until you hear about John G. Johnson. This motherfucker got the big fucking stiffy.
                     John Johnson was the most badass lawyer in town. When he died, they called him the greatest lawyer in the English-speaking world. That's fucking insane. This guy loved art, and collected over 1,300 pieces that he displayed in his gigantic house on South Broad that was between South and Lombard, now the site of that shitty midcentury-modern medical clinic. 
                    This guy's art collection was well-known while Johnson was still alive and many people, including super-rich mega tycoon P.A.B. Widener, wanted that shit. In the earliest stages of planning for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, they just assumed that Johnson's collection was coming their way. In his will, Johnson stated that he would donate all of his artwork to the city and that he wanted it to stay on display in his house forever, thereby fucking over the PMA and everyone else who was after his shit. After he croaked in 1917, a ton of motherfuckers started chomping at the bit to make some dough off his kick-ass collection.
                   In the early days of designing the Parkway, plans called for the northwestern terminus of it to be a traffic circle called Fairmount Plaza that would be surrounded by Art-related institutions. Not only would the Philadelphia Museum of Art be there, but a new Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, a new Pennsylvania School of Industrial Arts (now UArts), and the building in the rendering above, the John G. Johnson Art Gallery.
                     That's right... John Johnson's collection was so huge and awesome that an entire museum was planned for the Parkway just to show off his shit. You'll have to realize that this was at the same time that it was assumed that the new Parkway would be the main street of Philadelphia for EVERYTHING. Not just museums, but Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania as well. Basically, the Parkway was going to be Valhalla and the John G. Johnson Gallery was just going to be one of the many great institutions that would line this thing. Sure, it wasn't in his will, but at least the collection was have stayed together and be safe. Had this been built, the bullshit that occurred next would not have happened.
                         By 1933, the old Johnson Mansion was starting to fall apart and became a leaky firetrap. The PMA jumped on the situation and used it as a sideways way of snapping up John G. Johnson's $4,445,802 collection for free. The PMA came along and graciously offered to hold the work to keep it safe in their new fireproof mega-castle, just for awhile.

Johnson's badass Mansion in 1936. It doesn't look all that bad to me.

                        Plans for the Johnson Gallery on the Parkway kept going back and forth well after the PMA took the collection, I guess to keep the surviving Johnsons' mouths shut. It no longer mattered after 1955, however, because John G. Johnson's kickass residence was knocked the fuck down in that year in favor of that shitbag medical center that stands there now. Don't get me started on that place.
                      This story makes the shit happening with the Barnes seem like some trifling-ass bullshit. At least his collection will be displayed to millions of people in the way that he configured it with a building with his name on it. Johnson gets no such glory. This sad motherfucker was "probably less known to the general public in proportion to his importance than any other man in the United States." according to his obituary, and even now that title still stands.
                     In the 1980's, the PMA gave an even bigger "fuck you" to Johnson and dispersed his collection throughout the museum instead of having it set aside as its own gallery. That would be like if the PMA picked apart the Barnes collection and spread it out all over the whole museum. Barnes' dead ass should consider itself lucky. PMA, if you gave a fuck (which you don't), you would take over those two baseball fields on the Parkway and build the John G. Johnson Gallery as restitution for the shit you pulled eight decades ago. I fucking dare you, assholes!

Lost Bridge of the Week-- November 9th

The Great Arch

Crossing over Mulberry (Arch) Street at Front Street

Not impressed? If this was 1690 you'd be eating your own ass out with excitement over this thing!

                       Sometimes a bridge is so badass that an entire long-ass street gets named after it FOREVER. This is that bridge... the reason we call Arch Street "Arch Street" and not "Fucktograph Lane". The drawing above is conjectural, of course. The real bridge was probably much thinner.
                     Back in the primordial village/city of Philadelphia of the 17th Century, it was a pain in the ass to walk/ride up Front Street because there was this massive dip in it right at the corner of Mulberry Street. In 1690, some guys named Benjamin Chambers, Thomas Pearl, and Francis Rawle presented a petition to build a massive stone arch there so that travelers on Front Street could just walk over Mulberry instead. The little dinky 66-foot long pile of stones that ended up being built was the most high-tech piece of engineering in Colonial Proto-America.
                     The first written record of the bridge after it was built was written in 1698. In it, some dude named Gabriel Thomas describes how people often carted shit off huge ships docked at the Mulberry Street Wharf and brought the stuff down Mulberry Street under a huge arch. In 1704, there's an account of the city/village coming down on some dickhead for blocking the underside of the arch with his lumber.
                     The arch was apparently a piece of shit that didn't last very long because in the same year, plans were discussed on how to repair it. The whole next decade, accounts about how dangerous the arch was for "man and beast" pop up just about every year. It wasn't until 1712 that the arch had fences on either side to prevent people from falling off.  By 1713 the underside of the arch was becoming all fucked up and by 1718 the bridge itself was considered "impassible". In 1720, the arch had become a public nuisance and probably one of the city's first major pieces of blight. It was finally pulled down in 1721.
                    In April 1723, orders came down the line to level out Front Street so that it would meet Mulberry at the corner and there wouldn't be a dip there anymore. In 1727, Six years after the arch was completely removed, the first written account referring to Mulberry as Arch Street appears. Somehow, people loved this dangerous-ass pile of rocks so much that the street going under it carries that name to this day. That shit's fucked up, yo. Mulberry Street was officially renamed Arch Street in 1853.
                    Buildings that showed evidence of the previous height of Front Street stood long afterward, and became the clue that later historians used to start researching the ravings of old people that claimed that there used to be an arch over Arch Street. The site of the Great Arch is half covered with I-95 South, but if you go there you will see how Front Street gradually dips down to meet Mulberry... err... Arch Street.

Yay.

Butt-Fugly Public Art of the Week-- November 8th

Wave Forms by Dennis Oppenheim

Corner of 34th and Chestnut Streets

Ah jeez.

                    What the fuck!?!??! This garbage is some of the newest public art in Philadelphia and it looks like a dead dogs' dick. Its called Wave Forms but most people know it as Those Stupid Fucking Bells. That gas meter box thingy in the corner of the picture is better looking art than this shit.
                   First of all, Philly already is inundated with enough bell-related crap. Everywhere you go in the city has Liberty Bell-related imagery all over the place. You'd think that this artist, who's other work is actually pretty good, would have seen enough already. Oh wait, the artist for this, Dennis Oppenheim, doesn't know shit about Philadelphia. He's from California!! Why the fuck is so much of the public art in this city done by artists that aren't located here? This city has artists coming out of it's ears... use one of them once in awhile, assholes!!!
                 It all started with that Domus apartment project you see in the background of the picture above. They needed to satisfy the Percent for Art requirement and it seems that they misread it as Percent for Shit. They got 1.2 million dollars from the Hanover Company, whatever the fuck that is, to throw up some kind of public art that would compliment the plaza in front of their ugly-ass building.
                 Enter Dennis Oppenheim. Here's the shit he proposed:

Actually, several different configurations were proposed, none of which look like the final product.

                     The renderings for the stupid bells were put on display in 2006 at the Slought Foundation, in their own pretentious words, "a non-profit organization that engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change." (barf). Oppenheim came up with all kinds of goofy explanations to justify his dumbass design. He said the bells would "disturb the association of the bell as ‘object’ to bell as ‘dwelling’ ”. YOU go live in them, asshole. As with all art and design, the more you have to explain it, the more it sucks.
                     By December 2007, the stupid bells were installed (by a California company, of course), looking much different than the renderings, and with some colored granite squiggles between them that are supposed to represent sound waves made by bells. Dumb. There's six in all, 20 feet tall made of aluminum tubing. What a wasted opportunity. 1.2 million dollars to play with and this is all we get? Oooh, you can walk through them. WHO FUCKING CARES?!?!
                   

Here's the other three bells. From philart.net.

                    One of the kissing-ass articles that came out when this thing was installed says, "...Oppenheim reinvented the iconic symbol with inserted architectural elements including windows, promoting transparency." He put windows in it. WOW, what a genius!!!!! To promote TRANSPARENCY, you see. Was transparency getting a bad rap somewhere? Is transparency something that needs to be promoted? Promoted to what? Vice President of the Pretentious-ass Art Corporation? Feh.

Mystery Building of the Week-- November 7th

Medical Towers

251 S. 17th Street

One tall and thin fucking mystery. Pic by well-known Philaphile Brad Maule.

                      This is a nice looking building that is quite well known in the city, especially because at 364 feet, it has stuck out way taller than any other building in the immediate area until 1706 Rittenhouse was built across the street. The problem is, the history of this cool-ass building is somewhat of a mystery.
                     One of the weirder things about it is that its original name was "Medical Towers", plural. At first, I figured that more than one was planned to be built, so the name of the complex would be called "Towers", but then I found one of the original descriptions of it from when it was first proposed. It literally says "the building (singular) will be called Medical Towers (plural)". WHY THE FUCK would you call one building two buildings?!?!? Did they mean Medical Tower's, like a possessive? Is it a contraction for Medical Tower is? Did the person naming the building want to call it "Medical Tower's Gonna Kick Your Ass" but died before they could finish saying it? That's just fucking weird.
                   Here's another mystery for ya: the architect!!! There is seriously no architect associated with this project. All the little internet records and profile pages for this thing will tell you its height, build date, all kinds of other shit, but when you try to find who the architect was, NOTHING. Apparently the contractors found the plans for it drawn on a napkin at a bar or something.

Medical Towers under construction based on the plans of the famous architect Mystery Von Shitstery.

                   Medical Towers was built in 1931, during a huge building boom for this city, and has been in continuous use ever since for a medical clinic and a shitload of individual medicine-related offices. Some consider it one of the more ugly Art Deco buildings in America, but the ugliest Art Deco building in the world is better looking than 90% of the buildings built after that time.
                 That's pretty much it. I'd like to tell you about some kind of cool history that has happened here, but really, some buildings are just buildings. Some guy killed himself by jumping out of a high window in 1941, but that's that.
                So what's the deal? How could a building that was one of the tallest in the city for decades have no known architect? Why was it known as "Medical Towers" for so long? This shit is making my crazzzyyY!!! Uh oh, too late. Anyone out there have a clue where the fuck this building came from?

AND THE ANSWAH IS...

                            Hello again, this is John McLaughlin and you aah now reading this in my voice. The building was designed by the fiiihm of McIlvain and Roberts. GroJLaaaht is a moron and didn't look up the building by all of its altaahtanate names. BYE BYE!!!

                                                                     *Special Thanks to Bruce Laverty and Mike Seneca from the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project!