Palazzos of Power: Central Stations of the Philadelphia Electric Company 1900–1930 by Aaron V. Wunsch, Joseph E. B. Elliott (review)

Philadelphia holds a special place in the history of electrification, by virtue of its central role in American industrialization and as the locus of a case study in Thomas P. Hughes’s 1983 landmark Networks of Power. This book, with text by Aaron V. Wunsch and photographs by Joseph E. B. Elliott, deepens our understanding of the civic, symbolic, and architectural meaning of the Philadelphia Electric Company’s (PEC) urban power stations, while also knitting them into the larger fabric of regional utility development.

The photographic treatment lightly covers other company buildings—substations, head office, and suburban branches—but focuses on the thermal power stations completed between 1903 and 1925: Schuylkill A1 and A2, Chester, Delaware, and Richmond. The text—accompanied by its own illustrations—ranges more widely, covering some earlier thermal power stations and the Conowingo (Maryland) hydroelectric plant (1926), which anchored the Philadelphia New Jersey (PNJ) regional transmission network established in 1927.

One theme is the long-standing professional partnership of William C. L. Eglin (1870–1928), who rose to be PEC chief electrical engineer, and John T. Windrim (1866–1934), architect and civic designer, whose imprint on Philadelphia extended well beyond the power stations. While the location, layout, and massing of the buildings and their ancillary structures (coal loaders, smokestacks) were determined by their function, there was ample scope for structural innovation, surface treatments, and decoration. The book pays close attention to the latter in the context of the neoclassical Beaux-Arts aesthetic and City Beautiful planning principles fashionable in the United States at the time. Modernism in the sense of, say, Peter Behrens’s AEG factory in Berlin (1909) did not get a look in, except in the less visible power station facades and the more remote substations.

The text emphasizes the significance of buildings in the PEC’s corporate imagery, which promoted both its electricity business and the solidity and conservatism of the enterprise itself. As an investor-owned utility, PEC astutely deployed this civic capital to soften regulation and to head off the federally inspired “Giant Power” proposals of 1926. Organized as a long essay, the text is discursive (in a good way), covers a lot of ground, and is unfailingly interesting.

The book adds fascinating local color and detail to what is a common phase in the trajectory of electricity generation in industrial cities: the stage between small stand-alone power companies and the city’s absorption into a regional, state, and ultimately a national grid. As the scale of generation technology increased after World War II, it made sense to locate new power stations near the primary energy sources, whether hydro or coal. This left a legacy of urban power stations which eventually became uneconomic to operate and too costly to demolish. In Philadelphia’s case two of the power stations have found re-use, which is a pretty good average.

The second half of the book consists of evocative monochrome photos of disused power station interiors and exteriors. These are presented largely as industrial archaeology, with some subject and location notes but few explanations of dates, functions, or significance. The two halves of the book are not closely integrated, perhaps due to the preexistence of the photos as a stand-alone exhibition in 2008. An index might have helped tie the halves together.

In fact, if there is a blemish it is in the organization and accessibility of the material. The text essay contains over sixty figures, including construction drawings and photos of the power stations in their operating heydays, but these are grouped on separate illustration pages rather than located near the point in the text where they are referenced. As an additional irritation, the figure captions and credits are at the very end of the volume, so the reader must go to three separate places to follow...