The Perfect Square: A History of Rittenhouse Square

5. The Encroaching City (1884–1913)

I  5 The Encroaching City [ 1884–1913 ] In March 1884, Philadelphia’s two legislative bodies, the Select and Common Councils, announced a “plan for the improvement of Rittenhouse Square.” In order to better accommodate the city’s growing traffic of horsecars, carriages, and ambulances, streets around the Square were to be widened to thirty-six feet, and seventy-four treasured street trees, as well as the iron fence surrounding the Square, were to be removed. To its proponents, the plan was a logical response to urban congestion: Thanks to its “golden triangle” of coal, iron, and railroads, Philadelphia had become America’s industrial hub, and its population had soared from 568,000 in 1860 to 800,000 in 1880.1 But the proposed plan struck most Rittenhouse Square neighbors as a threat to their way of life. Already James Harper’s home on Walnut Street had been converted to the Rittenhouse Club—the first nonresidential property on the Square since the brickyards had operated there two generations earlier (Figure 5.1). The Pennsylvania ■ Figure 5.1 Rittenhouse Club. This picture shows the evolution of the building: James Harper’s house and his daughter’s house next door were joined in 1902, and a beaux arts facade was created to form the Rittenhouse Club as seen today. The Encroaching City [1884–1913] [ 81 Railroad’s new line to Chestnut Hill was encouraging many residents of the Square to move to that quaint “suburb within the city,” where some Square residents already had summer homes. The proposed new traffic patterns seemed likely to hasten this exodus. The result could be the destruction of life on Rittenhouse Square as its residents had known it. By 1884, the Square’s “founding fathers”—Philip Physick, John Hare Powel, James Harper, William Divine, Joseph Harrison, Thomas Scott, and Henry Cohen—were all dead. In some cases their formidable widows—most notably Matilda Cohen, Anna Scott, and Mrs. J. Edgar Thomson—still survived. All the supposed prestige and influence of the Square and its residents seemed to count for little with the city’s two Common Councils, whose newer members no longer respected the old names and who had other more pressing priorities in any case. “If the Commissioner of Public Property would extend his walks as far as West Rittenhouse Square,” complained one anonymous Rittenhouse Square woman in a letter to the Evening Bulletin that February, “he would see the results of his efforts to clean one portion of the city at the expense of another by his act of removing the snow and dirt from the State House [later Independence Hall] pavements and placing it in huge piles in the Square, to lie for months, until the spring sun shall have power to melt them. . . . The present condition of the Square is a disgrace to the city, an eyesore to the residents in the neighborhood, and will probably be productive of sickness and disease.”2 In the absence of systematic snow removal, the iron gates to the Square were often locked in winter until accumulations of snow were sufficiently melted. During such weeks, Charles Cohen later recalled, “our chief amusement was to decide the depth of the snow, it being measured by the small round-topped wooden stools.”3 The city’s two Councils had properly focused on the larger and immediate needs of a relentlessly growing city; to their members, the Square was above all an obstruction to the orderly flow of traffic through the heart of a great city, not to mention an onerous expense (the Councils’ resolution also called for reducing the The Perfect Square [ 82 Square’s maintenance costs by replacing its gravel walks with asphalt). But to the Square’s residents, the greater challenge lay in preserving their genteel, humane enclave for the benefit of future generations. The question was how, precisely, to respond. At the time, no formal civic advocacy organizations existed. Citizens with civic complaints met informally, wrote petitions and presented them to the City Councils, and then disbanded until the next crisis. To be sure, Rittenhouse Square residents of both genders had already begun banding together to create a variety of civic and cultural institutions and clubs where ideas, once exchanged, might be translated into political action. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was opened in Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park in 1877 as an outgrowth of the Centennial. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was in its period of highest national prestige. Small private groups for...