St. Peter's Church: Faith in Action for 250 Years

Chapter 8: St. Peter’s Reaches Out

ἀ e 200 block of Pine Street in 1905. By this time, the neighborhood around the church had long been in decline. Although many parishioners had moved west, church leaders saw a “vast opportunity for Christian work” among the immigrants filling the area. Alan J. Heavens and Cordelia Frances Biddle St. Peter’s Reaches Out 8 What had been cow pastures and ponds in the middle of the eighteenth century was, by the middle of the nineteenth, a crowded and gritty commercial and industrial neighborhood. In twenty-firstcentury terms, the area that St. Peter’s served—Society Hill and Queen Village— was also demographically “diverse,” and uncomfortably so. Germans, Irish, Jews, African Americans, and descendants of the original Swedish and English settlers, all working class and poor, lived on top of one another. Pitched battles among ethnic groups and between whites and blacks were common. Gangs of thugs roamed poorly lighted streets night and day. Saloons and gambling dens abounded, and brothels often operated in the seedier areas near the river. ἀ e farther south and east one went from the church, the worse conditions got. According to ἀ e Churchman magazine, of the forty-five thousand persons who had been convicted and punished in Philadelphia in 1880, more than twenty-seven thousand of the cases were for drunkenness. Adding the other crimes that had been prompted by intoxication, more than thirty-six thousand cases were directly traceable to strong drink. ἀ ere were over 5,800 saloons in the city. ἀ e spire rises above eighteenth-century houses subdivided by landlords for immigrants in the neighborhood on ἀ ird Street just below Pine Street. 108 St. Peter’s Church: Faith in Action for 250 Years Looking at these neighborhoods today, it is hard to visualize that scene. As the Civil War was ending, however, the situation had become so untenable in some of the older sections that many parishioners who had already moved west suggested that the church do so too. Instead, urged on by its well-to-do leadership, especially the women, St. Peter’s began reaching out to its neighborhoods, in much the same way that Bishop William White had dispatched his assistants as missionaries five decades earlier. ἀ e year 1868 was a pivotal one for St. Peter’s, with the Reverend ἀ omas F. Davies, a former professor of Hebrew at Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut, becoming rector. Quiet and scholarly on the surface, Davies had also been a hugely successful missionary in the mill areas around Middletown, Connecticut, so he was able to size up the situation around St. Peter’s quickly. ἀ e Head House, at Second and Pine Streets just a block east of the church, held the neighborhood market for thousands of poor and was the geographic center of several square miles that ranged from seriously declining to slum. Davies knew that few of these people would come to church on their own, so he decided to bring St. Peter’s to them. With financing by Margaretta Stocker Lewis, whose legacy remains part of St. Peter’s endowment today, the parish opened a chapel on the second floor of the Head House in November 1869, with regular services. St. Peter’s also built churches in other places, including Holy Comforter at 19th and Titan, St. Peter’s in Glenside, and All Saints at 12th and Fitzwater Streets. ἀ e clergy immediately saw the need for the church to do more than save souls. Parishioner Ann Wharton Lewis Glen, the wealthy widow ἀ e Church of the Holy Comforter at 19th and Titan Streets, a mission church of St. Peter’s to an Italian immigrant neighborhood. ἀ e church was designed by Furness & Hewitt. Chapter 8: St. Peter’s Reaches Out 109 of a prominent physician, had been working with poor women of the neighborhood, aided by other women of the parish. Davies got the church behind those efforts, and the first St. Peter’s House opened in 1869 at 323 Lombard Street. (ἀ e building later housed St. Peter’s Guild for Girls.) In the next two years, St. Peter’s House moved to larger, more centrally located quarters on Fitzwater between Front and Second Streets, and then to ἀ ird and Queen Streets. In 1871 a new St. Peter’s House opened at Front and Pine Streets. In terms of parish outreach, it became the jewel in the crown. ἀ ere were actually two buildings: One had been rented by...