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

From the turn of the twentieth century until the Depression, rapidly evolving power generation technology and an exploding demand for electrical service forced American cities to establish and expand their utility infrastructure, in the process determining the role of those utilities in the landscape. In Palazzos of Power, Aaron Wunsch’s essay accompanied by Joseph E. B. Elliott’s photos of these grandly ruinous plants in early twenty-first-century decline presents a focused case study on how Philadelphia responded to the challenge. Wunsch argues that the power stations constructed by the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO) used the language of the City Beautiful movement to ally their private character with the public identity of the city. Meanwhile, Elliott’s photos of their abandonment evoke the possibilities and perils implicit in that partnership.

In Philadelphia between 1902 and 1928, the recently amalgamated PECO constructed a series of five massive power generating stations designed in classical revival styles, building monumental City Beautiful landmarks in industrial, primarily waterside areas of Philadelphia and its environs. PECO engineer William Charles Lawson Eglin, working with architect John Torrey Windrim, designed and built these plants. More than steel and concrete boxes with the nicety of an applied colonnade on the street façade, they were well-detailed classical designs that creatively used their riverside sites, as well as their scale, massing, materiality, smokestacks, coal elevators, ash bunkers, and other elements to create an intentional grandeur. Colonnaded turbine halls, scrolled cornice brackets, meander-patterned trim, and vaulted cafeterias ensured that the interiors matched their exteriors in monumentality and richness.

Constructed when the memory of the Columbian Exposition impressed itself upon cities across America and the world, these buildings were also products of the Progressive Era, which valued efficient, “scientific,” and apolitical government. Public opinion was reformist and broadly suspicious of the intentions of private corporations. Cities actively considered the public ownership and management of essential industries. At the turn of the century, PECO enjoyed strong relations with the traditional, machine-era mayors, those who also advanced advantageous street-lighting projects and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia’s main City Beautiful effort. Schuylkill Station (1902, with subsequent expansions), the first of the grand central stations, became a civic gesture, visually aligning the private corporation with the public good. Shorter workdays, good working conditions, and pension plans further marked PECO as a beneficent employer, an adherent to the tenets of welfare capitalism, diffusing political momentum toward public acquisition.

The import of this alignment became clear during the tenure of reformist mayor Rudolph Blankenburg (1912–1916). Morris Cooke, the city’s director of public works, sued PECO for inefficiency, unfair contracts, and mismanagement. After several years of legal effort, PECO agreed to significantly cut rates. Just as that legal entanglement ended, another arose. As the federal government began preparing for World War I, Pennsylvania explored the potential of a regional power generation system, which would have rendered PECO a mere distributor of power to the city. The protracted legal case and threat of federal usurpation coincided with a decade of nearly continuous power station construction for PECO: Chester Station (opened 1918), Delaware Station (begun in 1917, construction delayed by WWI and restarted in 1919), Richmond Station (opened 1925), and Conowingo Station (opened 1928). In comparison with Schuylkill, these plants were grander and more committed to City Beautiful ideals. The technical requirements, style, and materials for these plants varied, but architect Windrim understood them as monuments, contributors to the civic landscape, although they remained privately held. Images of these stations populated PECO’s public relations materials, becoming the corporate identity for the large, decentralized system.

Wunsch, an established architectural historian and preservationist in Philadelphia, concludes his essay with a discussion of the role of these massive buildings in Philadelphia’s present and future. Twentieth-century...