The Book of
Philadelphia
By Robert
Shackleton
©1918
The Penn
Publishing Company
Philadelphia
Chapter X
ROMANTIC
BUSINESS
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HOUSE stately
and tranquil and wide, with fluted Corinthian pillars upholding a squarish
portico, a house of dull redbrick and creamy marble, with its front door
double-approached up four or five steps from the sidewalk: such is the structure
that was put up almost a century ago for the offices of a company which even
then was well on toward the completion of its first century of age; the office
building of the oldest fire insurance company of the United States. And it
might be taken for stately, old-fashioned dwelling, here on South Fourth
Street, in the heart of old Philadelphia, now a busy but dingy region.
You enter a wide, clear, fine hall, scrupulously buff
as to wall and creamy as to paint, with classic inner doorways, and a leather
firebucket or so hanging up as reminders of the past. You enter the
drawing-room at the right; that is, you feel as if it must be the drawing-room,
but it is really an office,
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a quiet and immaculate and soft-colored office, with
a quiet and buff-colored safe and sedately quiet-seeming desk, and a general
air of peaceful courtesy enveloping all. Behind, and seeming to be an intimate
part of the offices, is an old-time garden, orderly and fragrant and sweet.
The general air is that of leisured ease, the air so
typical, as one finds, of much of Philadelphia business; and it seems only
natural to find, not only that this company still exists in a strong and
vigorous old age, but that its most important feature is that it insures
property in perpetuity!—delightful touch, significant of the very atmosphere of
the city.
This ancient company, organized in 1752, owes its
inception to Franklin; for in fire-insurance, as in so many things, "Abou
Ben Franklin's name led all the rest." The attention of Franklin was early
attracted to the general subject of fires and fire protection, and while still
a young man he organized a volunteer fire-fighting company which did fine service
through the many years of its existence. After a visit to Paris he wrote
urgently regarding safety in building, basing his ideas on the French avoidance
of fire dangers; and when he came to the building of his own house he put all
that seemed feasible into practice.
The plan of a fire-insurance company met with the cordial
approval which was customarily given to whatever he proposed; and the old
company still exists, proud of its origin and of its long and busy life, an
important factor in giving the color of
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romance to the
business of the city. The Hand-in-Hand—so the company is generally and
lovingly, known, from its ancient design of four clasped hands, crossed in the
unbreakable grasp of the "My Lady goes to London" of childhood.
A picturesque
feature of the older portions of the city is the fire-mark still in place on
the fronts of old-time houses. For it was long the custom, for the Hand-in-Hand
and the early companies which followed it, to place their designs on the houses
they insured: fire-marks of lead or iron, a foot or so in height; not at all
the insignificant flimsy little marks used in other cities some years ago, but
big and effective and noticeable marks that were honored ornaments.
The
Hand-in-Hand design, the design of hose and hydrant, the design of a hand
fire-engine, the eagle, the Green Tree, most romantic mark of all the marks such
are the principal designs still to be found on the old house-fronts of the
city. And in early days they not only served to indicate which fire-insurance
company held the policy, but their presence or absence on the front of a
building was likely to determine whether or not it should burn if a fire
started, for it came about that volunteer fire-fighting companies and the
insurance companies had affiliations, and that a volunteer company protected or
assisted by an insurance company would make an effort at a fire only if the
fire-mark of its company were to be seen.
The Green Tree
company was formed from a ro-
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mantic cause.
For it came to pass that the Hand-in-Hand
decided, on account of the burning of several houses that had been closely
surrounded by trees, that it would refuse insurance to any house thus situated;
it was feared that dry trees would spread a fire and that green trees would prevent
the getting at a fire, hence the ban; whereupon a company was quickly organized
which made its special appeal to the owners of houses which, were
close-encompassed by trees, and this new and rival company adopted as its
fire-mark a green tree; and the mark was not only of a tree, but it was really
green, as, like the other fire-marks, this was painted in color. The Green Tree
became swiftly popular, and the prompt reversal, on the part of the
Hand-in-Hand, of its own opposition, gave tree-surrounded houses a new popularity.
On the same
street as the old Hand-in Hand company, the almost as old Green Tree has, its
offices: in an old house, once a dwelling house, the home of the Cadwaladers:
one of the names before which the natural Philadelphian knee naturally
genuflects. It is a mansion of rather high effect, with two arched doorways. It
is full of the feeling of charming old age. It has the atmosphere as of some
old London business house such as one may dream about or find suggested in
Dickens; only full of the charm of old Philadelphia and with a certain sweet Americanism.
Climb the stairs, and you find a great drawing-room stretching through the
house. There are old and lovely dewdrop chandeliers. There are
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great Empire
doorframes with ormolu ornaments. The doors are laterally paneled, and the
panels are decorated in black and tawny gold; soft lacquer colors in classic
arabesques. There are superb white marble mantels. There is a great old sideboard
and there is a long mahogany banqueting table; for this is one of the old
Philadelphia houses which keeps up the custom of having dinner on the occasion of
a meeting of directors. There is old Canton china in blue and gold. There are
tureens, and there are tall jugs, and there is a veritable fleet of decanters,
in varying degrees of fullness or emptiness. It is very lovely in the old
high-ceilinged rooms. And the hall of this second floor is magnificently
divided into anterooms by doors which are topped by great semi-circles of glass
that are perhaps ten feet or so across.
There is an
unreality about this, which goes with the unreality of the powerful existing
ancient companies, so charmingly named as they are. Of course the Green Tree
has a more formal name, just as the Hand-in-Hand has a more formal name, but it
is quite unnecessary to keep the formal names in mind; although, after all,
such a name as "The Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of
Houses from Loss by Fire," is itself a delightful sonorous mouthful of
words.
To add to the
unreality there is, in the Green Tree building, the best of all the portraits
of Franklin; a Duplessis, but perhaps a replica, a painting warm in color, with
the collar of mink showing Franklin's
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face as quiet
and strong, with the kind, of mouth to utter terse and clinching sentences, and
a look in the kindly face such as makes people listen and heed; and the world
certainly listened and heeded when Franklin spoke. He wears a coat of a redness
not unlike the hue of the brick of the houses of this, his city. It is a superb
portrait; and the president of the company said, simply, "I do not think
they paint portraits like that nowadays."
Further to add
to the romantic sense of unreality, there hang on the walls portrait after
portrait of successional directors and company presidents, early portraits by
Neagle, later ones by Cecilia Beaux and Abbey and Sargent. Here is a portrait
of S. Weir Mitchell, here is one of his father, and here is a portrait of his
son; thus illustrating, as nothing else could so absolutely do, the sense of
continuance and inheritance in Philadelphia financial organizations.
And, after
all, it was in Philadelphia that the story was located of the young lawyer who,
taken into his father's firm, hurried triumphantly in, one day, with the
announcement that he had settled a case that had been pending for many years;
at which the father groaned and said, "My son, my son, I had intended that
case to give you an income throughout your life!" And it is far from a
jest, but a serious reality, that many an old house in this city stands for
decade after decade, in charge of some trust or trust company, empty, going to
ruin, the heirs receiving nothing, the property depreciating.
Philadelphia
possesses the most effective depart-
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ment store in
the world, considering beauty of appearance, size, the character of the
displays and the unusual adjuncts. It also possesses the largest, the most
beautiful and best equipped building in the world that is devoted to
publishing. In commercial museums and in technical schools the city is also far
up among the leaders.
Philadelphia
might fairly claim romantic business on the single ground, even if there were
not numerous other grounds, of possessing, as its old Stock Exchange, so
perfect a structure as that at Third and Walnut and Dock streets, where Dock
Street opens into the broad space of its old-time market; Dock Street itself
being a romantic survival of early days, in its ramblings, its divagations, its
un-Philadelphia-like meandering course, following as it does the ancient
waterfront, and still dingily but very busily occupied with old-fashioned
businesses, with fish markets and produce houses.
The old Stock
Exchange is a rounding fronted structure of stone, impressive in its uniformity
of soft-toned gray; a classic structure, perfect in mass and in details, an
upstanding, forthfacing, audacious building, looking out from its sweeping
curve with such graceful bravery as gives a veritable Victory of Samothrace
air. Its tall and fluted classic columns stand in a noble hemicycle. The
building is exceedingly high-set, with no steps to break the curving front, but
with stairs of admirable design at either, side. Around the edge of the flat
roof of the structure is a wonderful line of classic, palmettes,
THE OLD STOCK EXCHANGE
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and above the
roof rises a tall, slim, audacious cupola, pilastered and lantern sided.
But there was
a period when Philadelphia reveled in business structures of fearsome, and
depressing type; I was on the point of saying the late Victorian period, that it seems unfair to seem to put the blame on
a woman and a foreigner, especially as a principal architectural offender of
that sad period made a paint of proudly refusing to see Europe lest his taste
be impaired; so let us say the Benjamin Harrison or early Grover Cleveland
period, when Philadelphia outdid other cities in its erection of massive stone
buildings, especially banks, with ponderous towers and bastions and a general
originality in ugliness, with the unfortunate promise of standing forever, and
with the air of conscious respectability which visitors think they see in
Philadelphians themselves.
The city has not
maintained much of the romantic along its waterfront; but there is still preserved
the memory of how William Penn himself loved both the Delaware and the
Schuylkill, and loved to go a-boating, now on one river and now on the other,
flying his flag of lord proprietor on his stately barge built high at bow and
stern. And there is a pleasant tale about the building of an early bridge
across the Schuylkill, for, there having arisen a good deal of doubt about the
bridge's strength, the builder, when it was finished, cunningly offered one
dollar each to every man who would drive upon it with a wagon loaded with stone
and remain until the
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bridge was
filled from end to end. Thus the bridge was tested, satisfactorily, and at
slight cost; and, it is recorded, without
those out in the middle complaining of
their greater degree of danger or their longer wait; and ill-natured folk used
to point to this as an example of how attractive a dollar has always looked to
a Pennsylvanian.
The city is
rich in traditions of its far-flung business line of even distant days; it is
rich in traditions of early trade with India and with China, and many is the
old family which holds, among its precious treasures, punch-bowls of Chinese
Lowestoft, crape shawls of the Orient, china and silks, and brass-bound chests
of camphor-wood. Young men of family used to covet the chance of sailing to the
Orient as (fascinating word, so familiar in the boys' books of a few decades
ago!) supercargo of a clipper ship; and a husband and wife, long-time dwellers
on Spruce Street, are proud to say that on each side of the family a
grandfather went out to the East, when a young man, as supercargo, and that
their home contains two beautiful sets of Nankin china, because the taste of
each of the supercargo ancestors ran to Nankin; the bleu de Nankin of thonsand-chimneyed King-te-tching.
Galloping
across the great high plains among the Colorado Rockies, I noticed how fine was
the effect of the most typically Western hats, broad of brim and goodlooking in
shape, worn by the most typically Western of the horsemen of that region; and I
found that these most Western-appearing hats were of
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Philadelphia
make and always thus spoken of, by name.
Franklin has
set down that when he was a boy his father loved to quote encouragingly, "seest
thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings"; and
that in the course of his long career he actually stood before five kings this
fact, in which he would be justified in feeling immense pride, in the simplest
half dozen of words, without even itemizing the monarchs who welcomed him; and
somehow this success with kings recalls a Philadelphia triumph with a
President, for, only a few years ago, when a Philadelphia merchant wished to
open a new retail store under the highest possible auspices, he just naturally sent
an invitation to the White House, and the then President of the United States
quitted his national duties long enough to come here to take part.
I have seen
thousands of people gathered in the great inner court of a Philadelphia store,
listening to the playing of a mighty organ of the store; business thus becoming
a social and musical affair! And I have seen and heard, in the same court,
after our entry into the great war, thousands of people singing national songs;
business thus becoming a patriotic affair. And in this city business may also
become an artistic affair, for in the great entrance hall of a publishing house
is a mosaic of great length, and of wealth of color, softly glowing above a
long pool of water which lies pictorially on almost the level of the floor.
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Along the
Schuylkill, the vicinity of the Falls, is
a Philadelphia that is practically unknown except to such as labor there; a
district of endless stretches of close-crowded mills and factories, a district
which seems a succession of English mill towns; with much of picturesqueness
too, for there is the river itself, and there are the steep-rising slopes up,
which lead streets that go straight or go twisting, and where little stone
homes alternately straggle or pack close for comradeship.
And, to return
to the center of the city, it is but typical of the ancient portion, that you
may pass through an arch beneath a building and unexpectedly find yourself
within a little court surrounded by offices thus quite tucked away.
To enter
through an archway is always felicitous; and most fascinating of all is it to
enter through an archway, closed at night with ancient wooden doors, on Second
Street near Callowhill, for it is the entrance to the ancient Black Horse Inn.
And within the archway is still the ancient inn-yard, a long, rough-paved
parallelogram, enclosed by simply balustraded doddering balconies. It is such
an old innyard as used to be common in London, and which may still be seen in some
of the English provincial towns. From such an innyard Pickwick himself might
have driven. Old windows look down into the ancient court, and wagons are still
driven, into the enclosure, and the imagination cannot but reconstruct all the
busy life of an age that has vanished quite away. The flickering lights and
glooming
THE ANCIENT BLACK HORSE INN
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shadows, the
old-time atmosphere of it all, serve to make it among the most romantic of
Philadelphia memorials.
It would seem
as if the entrance of women into business must needs add touches of romance;
and it has added at least one touch of diversion. At a war-charity rummage
sale, or "gefoojet,” one of the many features was the offering of chances
on a sweater at twenty-five cents a chance. And as I stood there, getting
something else at the same counter, the girl in charge of the sweater said,
quite openly, to the woman in charge of that department, that she thought she
had reached the limit on chances but could sell the article outright.
"I have
taken nine dollars and twenty-five cents on chances and have been offered four
dollars for it outright," she said. “Sell it! That will make over thirteen
dollars!" was the unhesitating reply.
At a meeting of
a business association, it was moved that some severe criticism of the Reading
Railway be adopted. (This was shortly before the taking over by the government
of all the railways, during the war.) But one wealthy man rose quickly to his
feet. His wealth, as everybody knew, had come to him through the killing of a
rich uncle by this very railway. "I object!” he cried." God bless the
Reading Railway!"
The romantic
or the unusual, may readily, in business, become the bizarre; and I remember a
notice which I saw in the window of a big undertaking establishment on Chestnut
Street: "Wanted; Ten
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intelligent
men to act as Professional Pallbearers”; and it added, with praiseworthy
attention to detail, that they must be a least five feet ten inches in height;
and the notice concluded with the extraordinarily practical touch that they “must
have black hair”! After all, it was a South Street black woman who put on not
only a black dress but black underwear, when her husband died, because when she
mourned she “mohned all over.”
[Fire
Signs]
