A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination 9780271078946

Citation preview

A Greene Country Towne

A Greene Country Towne philadelph ia’ s e c o lo gy in t he cult ural i m agi nati o n

Edited by

Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Braddock, Alan C., 1961–­, editor. | Igoe, Laura Turner, 1982–­, editor. Title: A greene country towne : Philadelphia’s ecology in the cultural imagination / Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe, eds. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A collection of essays exploring the ways in which art and literature have imagined, animated, and embodied the complex ecology of Philadelphia since the seventeenth century. Essays utilize emerging methods of interpretation in ecocriticism, new materialism, art history, philosophy, and urban studies”—­Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2016031246 | ISBN 9780271077130 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Urban ecology (Sociology)—­ Pennsylvania—­Philadelphia—­History. | Ecocriticism—­Pennsylvania—­Philadelphia—­ History. | Ecology in art. | Ecology in literature. Classification: LCC HT243.U62 P45 2016 | DDC 307.7609748/11—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2016031246

Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-­1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-­free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48-­1992. This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste.

Contents

List of Illustrations  (vii) Acknowledgments  (xi)

Introduction: Imagining Urban Ecology  (1) Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe

1

Ink and Paper, Clamshells and Leather: Power, Environmental Perception, and Materiality in the Lenape-­European Encounter at Philadelphia  (19) Michael Dean Mackintosh

2

“Processes of Nature and Art”: The Ecology of Charles Willson Peale’s Smoke-­Eaters and Stoves  (34) Laura Turner Igoe

3

Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology  (50) Mary I. Unger

4

Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park: Economic Diversity, History, and Photography in Nineteenth-­Century Philadelphia  (65) Nate Gabriel

5

Netted Together: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion at the Dawn of Comparative Biology  (81) John Ott

6

Expansive Exhibitions: Agriculture and Environment in Walt Whitman’s Camden-­Philadelphia Region  (96) Maria Farland

7

“Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden”: Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia, and Domestic Animality  (118) Alan C. Braddock

8

“A Thorough Study of Causes”: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, and Progressive Era Materiality  (141) Scott Hicks

9

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center: Negotiating Environmental and Civic Reform in a Popular Postwar Planning Vision  (153) Amy E. Menzer

10

“Entertainment for All of the Senses”: Stephen Starr’s Experience Dining and the Revitalization of Postindustrial Philadelphia  (175) Stephen Nepa

11

“The water flows beneath it still . . .”: Remembering and Reimagining Philadelphia’s Old Dock Creek  (192) Sue Ann Prince

12

Remapping Philadelphia’s Postindustrial Terrain: A Network in Flux  (208) Andrea L. M. Hansen

List of Contributors  (221) Index  (225)

Illustrations

I.1 Thomas Holme, A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, 1683. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, DAMS #485.  (5) 1.1 Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, 1771–72. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr. Collection), 1878.1.10.  (20) 1.2 Lenape artist, wampum belt, ca. 1682–1750. Courtesy of the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection.  (21) 2.1 Charles Willson Peale, “The Smoke-­ Eater,” from The Weekly Magazine (Philadelphia), July 21, 1798. The Library Company of Philadelphia.  (35) 2.2 Charles Willson Peale, The Peale Family (Peale Family Group), 1773–1809. New-­York Historical Society, 1867.298. Photography © New-York Historical Society.  (37) 2.3 Charles Willson Peale and Raphaelle Peale (attrib.), “Chimney for a Parlour” model, 1796–97. American Philosophical Society.  (38) 2.4 James Trenchard, after a drawing by Charles Willson Peale (attrib.), “Perspective View of the Country between Wilmington and the Delaware,” from Columbian Magazine, April 1787. Courtesy Winterthur Museum, Bequest of Henry Francis du Pont, 1959.1387.  (39)

2.5 Charles Willson Peale, The Accident in Lombard Street, 1787. Courtesy Winterthur Museum. Museum purchase with funds provided by Caroline Clendenin Ryan Foundation, Inc., 1962.88A,B.  (44) 2.6 “Chimneysweep,” from The Cries of Philadelphia: Ornamented with Elegant Wood Cuts (Philadelphia: Johnson and Warner, 1810), 32. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, DAMS #1091.  (45) 3.1 “Philadelphia and Environs,” from Henry S. Tanner, The American Traveller; or, Guide through the United States, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Henry S. Tanner, 1839). The Library Company of Philadelphia.  (54) 4.1 James Cremer, Peter’s Island, ca. 1880. Fairmount Park Historic Resource Archives, City of Philadelphia.  (71) 4.2 Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2010.106. Photography by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  (71) 4.3 James Cremer, “West from North Laurel Hill,” ca. 1880. New York Public Library.  (72) 4.4 James Cremer, “Lover’s Walk—­ Landsdowne Valley,” ca. 1880. New York Public Library.  (72) 5.1 Eadweard Muybridge, “Pigeon, Flying,” from Animal Locomotion: An Electro-­Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements

Illustrations

(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 755. University of Pennsylvania Archives.  (82) 5.2 Eadweard Muybridge, “Hand-­spring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering” (detail), from Animal Locomotion: An Electro-­ Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 365. University of Pennsylvania Archives.  (83) 5.3 Eadweard Muybridge, “Jumping a Hurdle, Saddle, Rider 105, Nude, Gray Mare Pandora” (detail), from Animal Locomotion: An Electro-­Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 642. University of Pennsylvania Archives.  (85) 5.4 J. H. Lamprey, Figure of Young African, from “On the Method of Measuring the Human Frame,” Journal of the Ethnological Society, 1869.  (88) 6.1 Craig, Finley & Co., “Pennsylvania State Fair, Philadelphia,” 1885. The Library Company of Philadelphia.  (97) 6.2 Grass display, 1850s agricultural fair, from “Important Discoveries in Agriculture,” Manufacturer and Builder 3, no. 6 (June 1871): 132–­34.  (107) 6.3 Centennial Photographic Company, “Agri[cultural] Hall, Main Avenue,” ca. 1876. The Library Company of Philadelphia.  (109) 7.1 Kuni Takahashi (photographer), “Monkeys sit on the sidewalk in Delhi, India,” from “For Obama’s Visit, India Takes a Broom to Stray Monkeys and Cows,” New York Times, January 23, 2015. Photo © The New York Times.  (119)

viii

7.2 Thomas Eakins, Bobby, Sitting on a Porch, ca. 1885. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust, 1985.68.2.784.  (120)

7.3 Thomas Eakins, Susan Macdowell Eakins with a Monkey and Two Cats in the Yard of the Family Home at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, Philadelphia, ca. 1895. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust, 1985.68.2.282.  (122) 7.4 Thomas Eakins, Grouse (H. Schreiber’s Dog), 1872. The Harry and Mary Dalton Collection, 2000.36.10. Collection of the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina.  (133) 7.5 Thomas Eakins, Francis J. Ziegler (The Critic), ca. 1890. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.130. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.  (134) 9.1 Exhibition floor plan from the pamphlet The Better Philadelphia Exhibition: What City Planning Means to You (Philadelphia: City Planning Commission, 1947). Photo: Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.  (154) 9.2 Al Fenn, Planning Philadelphia, 1947. Visitors observing mechanized model of downtown Philadelphia, Better Philadelphia Exhibition, Gimbels department store. Photo: Al Fenn / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.  (155) 9.3 Gimbels owner Arthur C. Kaufmann, Philadelphia mayor Samuel, and Pennsylvania governor Duff (left to right) at the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, 1947. Philadelphia Bulletin photo collection. Photo: Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.  (155) 9.4 Montage with visitors and aerial photograph of downtown Philadelphia, from the pamphlet The Better Philadelphia Exhibition: What City Planning Means to You (Philadelphia: City Planning Commission, 1947).

9.5 Girl who officially opened the exhibition, holding the key to a Better Philadelphia, 1947. Philadelphia Bulletin photo collection. Photo: Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.  (169) 10.1 Stephen Starr, The Continental, Second and Market Streets, Philadelphia, opened 1995. Photo: author.  (176) 10.2 Stephen Starr, Pod, interior, 3636 Sansom Street (University City), Philadelphia, opened 2000. Photo: author.  (177)

Historical Park, Philadelphia. Photo by the artist.  (198) 11.4 Brett Keyser, TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia, 2008. Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia. Photo: Frank Margeson.  (200) 11.5 Brett Keyser, TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia, 2008. Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia. Photo: Frank Margeson.  (204) 12.1 Andrea L. M. Hansen, The Flux Network: Site Prioritization Mapping, 2010. Photo: Andrea L. M. Hansen.  (214)

10.3 Stephen Starr, Talula’s Garden, Washington Square, Philadelphia, opened 2011. Photo: author.  (177)

12.2 Andrea L. M. Hansen, The Flux Network: Proposed Amtrak Northeast Corridor, 2010. Photo: Andrea L. M. Hansen.  (215)

11.1 Winifred Lutz, Drawing Dock Creek, 2008. Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia. Photo: Karen Mauch.  (193)

12.3 Andrea L. M. Hansen, The Flux Network: Proposed Reading Viaduct Corridor, 2010. Photo: Andrea L. M. Hansen.  (216)

11.2 Babi Hammond, map of Drawing Dock Creek and the surrounding historic district, 2008. American Philosophical Society Museum, Philadelphia.  (197)

12.4 Reading Viaduct, 2010. Photo: Andrea L. M. Hansen.  (217)

11.3 Winifred Lutz, Drawing Dock Creek, 2008. Independence National

Illustrations

Photo: Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.  (166)

12.5 Andrea L. M. Hansen, The Flux Network: Port Richmond / I-­95 Corridor, 2010. Photo: Andrea L. M. Hansen.  (218)

ix

Acknowledgments

An interdisciplinary undertaking of this kind benefits from a multitude of contributors and participants. In keeping with our book’s principal aim of reimagining Philadelphia as a complex ecological community, we would like to acknowledge a somewhat broader range of supporting agents than usual. First among these, appropriately enough, is Philadelphia “itself ”—­a rich source of inspiration composed of various human inhabitants, colleagues, and friends, as well as nonhuman denizens whose anonymity and numbers make them impossible to identify individually. Let us at least mention a few of the latter, known particularly well to the editors for having shared our respective living spaces in Philadelphia while the project unfolded: the intrepid squirrels, sparrows, and even a red-­tailed hawk who alighted on a bird feeder hanging behind Alan’s apartment on Mount Vernon Street, near the Thomas Eakins House, in a garden also populated with hyacinth, lantana, Mexican hyssop, bees, and an opossum, among others, all avidly observed by two cats named Matilda and Benjamin, along with Alan’s partner and cowrangler, Karen Sherry; the paved, gridded streets that facilitated Laura’s bike rides throughout the city while she researched her dissertation and that occasionally caved in to create large sinkholes in front of her row home, revealing layers of past urban infrastructure and ancient pipes but also flooding her basement. Among the many professional colleagues that helped make this project possible, we especially would like to thank our contributing authors for writing such engaging chapters and for being so patient through a lengthy process of editorial review, in which even the typically routine task of identifying appropriate anonymous readers proved to be quite a challenge due to the unusual interdisciplinary orientation of the book. Accordingly, special appreciation goes to the anonymous readers themselves, a remarkably gifted and insightful group of scholars whose constructive comments improved the text immeasurably in two different phases. Other individual professional colleagues and friends offered advice or lent a helping hand along the way. They included Jane Boyd, Drew Isenberg, Nicole Joniec, Brett Keyser, Winifred Lutz, Timothy Morton, Joe Rucker, and Mary Grace Wahl.

Acknowledgments

xii

Several institutions provided valuable assistance. The College of William and Mary supplied funds to support production of the book. The following institutions delivered digital photographs for reproduction: the American Philosophical Society; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Fairmount Park Historic Resource Archives (City of Philadelphia); Harvard Art Museums; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Library Company of Philadelphia; The Mint Museum of Art; New-­York Historical Society; New York Public Library; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent; Redux Pictures; Special Collections Resources Center, Temple University Libraries; University Archives and Resource Center, University of Pennsylvania; and Winterthur Museum and Library. We also heartily thank these heroic people at Pennsylvania State University Press for their help, encouragement, and endurance through the publication process: Kathryn Yahner, Hannah Hebert, Charlee Redman, Laura Reed-­Morrisson, Jennifer Norton, Patty Mitchell, and Kendra Boileau. Finally, this book is dedicated to one of the newer members of Philadelphia’s vibrant ecosystem, Brooke Igoe. May she also experience and engage with her environment in imaginative ways.

Introduction Imagining Urban Ecology

alan c. bra d d o ck a nd l aura t u r n e r i g o e

In 1683, shortly after founding Pennsylvania, William Penn described the various characteristics of that new colony in a published letter to its European inhabitants. Penn’s letter provided “A General Description of the said Province, its Soil, Air, Water, Seasons and Produce, both Natural and Artificial.” The phrase “Natural and Artificial” distinguished things Penn perceived to be simply available in a readymade state for “the use of man”—­“Trees, Fruits, Plants, Flowers . . . living Creatures”—­from cultivated agricultural products such as “Wheat, Barley, Oats, Rye, Pease, Beans, Squashes . . . and all Herbs and Roots that our gardens in England usually bring forth.” For Penn and his educated English readers, the distinction between “Natural and Artificial” itself seemed natural, since it expressed a prevailing European belief about the objectivity of “Nature” as something qualitatively different from the subjective cultural agency, or artifice, of “Man.” According to that ontological distinction, which had been institutionalized philosophically by Enlightenment thinkers such as Bacon, Newton, and Descartes, human beings actively used and transformed the essentially passive matter of the nonhuman world. Penn’s letter also cast the local indigenous human inhabitants in roughly the same relation to that world, describing them as “Persons” who “have . . . several sorts of Beans and Pease . . . and the Woods and Rivers are their Larder.” And yet, despite Penn’s evident embrace of Enlightenment humanism, his phrase “Produce, both Natural and Artificial” also implicitly ascribed some agency to “Nature” as the producer of

a gre e ne country tow ne 

“Trees, Fruits, Plants, Flowers,” and “living Creatures.” In other words, not all production was “Artificial” in Penn’s view. His neat binary opposition erodes further when we consider the historical capacity of human beings to cultivate the sorts of “Produce” he and his contemporaries deemed “Natural.” As a result, the ontological line Penn drew between “Natural and Artificial” begins to look blurry, to say the least.1 Inspired by the entanglement of human and nonhuman forces acknowledged by Penn, this anthology explores the ways in which art and literature have imagined, animated, and embodied the complex ecology of Philadelphia since the seventeenth century. Drawing upon emerging methods of interpretation in ecocriticism, new materialism, art history, philosophy, and urban studies, the chapters included in this volume offer an unconventional history of the city—­ indeed, of any city—­by operating at the threshold of cultural and environmental studies. Expanding the meaning of community to encompass nonhuman beings, things, forces, and matter, as well as humans, the book reimagines Philadelphia as a vibrant assemblage of multiple constituents and actants. It also encourages readers anywhere to envision their own environments in a new, more ecological and encompassing light. The chapters in this volume draw from the emerging discourse of ecocriticism in order to reframe creative cultural encounters with Philadelphia’s ecology and environmental history. Briefly summarized, ecocriticism expands the scope of scholarly inquiry by recovering lost or neglected evidence of environmental conditions that bear on politics, society, and culture. Ecocriticism offers a self-­critical, interdisciplinary approach to art and literature, questioning the prevailing anthropocentrism of the humanities by recognizing the importance of environmental history and nonhuman agency as part of the context in which creative human works unfold. We do not seek to remove human beings and their artifacts from consideration—­far from it—­for this would be contrary to the fundamental ecological principle of interconnectedness that our book seeks to foster. Obviously, an irreducible element of humanism necessarily informs any study of cultural history and this book is no exception, but our engagement with ecocriticism endeavors to expand the meaning and parameters of such history to include more than merely human concerns.2 Broadening the cultural and environmental history of Philadelphia to include the “Natural” and “Artificial” as evidence of prolonged human-­nonhuman entanglement requires a more capacious definition of agency. Accordingly, this anthology draws some inspiration from recent scholarship in “new materialism,” which actively explores the vitality of matter and things long regarded as inanimate and inert. Challenging the entrenched dualism in Western thought inherited from Enlightenment natural philosophy’s separation between human subjects and material objects, new materialism finds lively force in the stuff we habitually take for granted. Unlike Marxist materialism and its predominantly human-­ sociological frame of reference, new materialism directs attention beyond human agency and subjectivity.

Introduction

Using a historical perspective, the political theorist Jane Bennett, for example, has traced an enduring philosophical counterdiscourse of “vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans” in the writings of Lucretius, Epicurus, Spinoza, Thoreau, Bergson, and others. Bennett gives new materialism an ethical-­ecological inflection by emphasizing “the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces” in order “to dissipate the onto-­theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic [and thereby] induce in human bodies an aesthetic-­affective openness to material vitality.” Other scholars—­Bruno Latour, Manuel De Landa, Timothy Morton, Cary Wolfe, and more—­have also questioned such binaries in revisiting the ontological status of nonhuman matter, things, and beings. These scholars have expanded our understanding of the field of forces around and inside us, calling into question the presumptive anthropocentrism of philosophy, politics, and “the humanities” in general.3 Just as Bennett recognizes the contribution of earlier philosophers to a modern understanding of new materialism, we wish to shine a light on the enmeshed human-­nonhuman relationships recognized by artists, writers, architects, and planners working in the Philadelphia region over three centuries. A century after Penn’s “General Description,” for example, a remarkable letter published in the Pennsylvania Gazette revealed awareness and concern about the material agency of the region’s trees. Continental Congress delegate Francis Hopkinson penned the letter in 1782 under the pseudonym “Silvester,” a play on the word sylvan. Silvester described an imagined meeting in Philadelphia’s House of Assembly, where a wooden column in the meeting hall was miraculously granted speech in order to challenge a bill proposing the removal of all city trees to prevent the spread of fire. Hopkinson’s column insisted that he was “the true representative of a numerous race, descended in a direct line from the aborigines of this country; those venerable ancestors who gave the name of Pennsylvania to this State.”4 In his speech, Silvester acknowledged the porous boundaries between the human and vegetal world and described trees as animated, cognizant beings: “The superiority which man hath assumed over what he calls the irrational and inanimate creation, is a superiority only founded in their own pride and ignorance of our nature and faculties. The same divine hand that formed you, formed us also; the same elements that nourish you, nourish us also; like you we are composed of bones, blood vessels, fibres, and, for ought you know, nerves and muscles.”5 The column additionally outlined the many benefits his tree ancestors provided, heralding them as the “best and safest Physicians,” providing shade and cleaning the air of noxious, disease-­causing particles. In a particularly dramatic passage, Hopkinson’s columnar narrator directed the senators to reflect on the changing landscape of Philadelphia: “look towards the banks of Schuylkill. Where are now those verdant groves that used to grace the prospect?—­Alas! nought now remain but lifeless stumps, that moulder in the summer heat and winter frost.” The British destroyed those “verdant groves” for fuel when they occupied Philadelphia in 1777. According to the column, those trees sacrificed

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their lives in dedication to the Revolution: “We stood our ground, and we suffered in our country’s cause.” Despite this impassioned speech, the House passed the bill, although it was later repealed due to citizen protest in the form of a petition. This imagined scene illuminates the multilayered symbolism and agency of the trees within the city, envisioning them as active participants in improving public health and achieving political independence.6 In various ways, the chapters in our book contend that the city of Philadelphia, far from being either a discretely human entity or an inanimate object alone, instead must be understood as a living assemblage of beings, things, and matter that have interacted dynamically over time—­a fact powerfully captured in art and literature. In The Sanitary City, environmental historian Martin Melosi observes, “The idea of the city as animate—­if not ‘natural’—­is essential for an understanding of urban growth and development. Cities are not static backdrops for human action, nor are they organic metaphors: they are ever-­mutating systems.” In other words, the city comprises an extraordinarily complex gathering of human and nonhuman agents, or “actants,” to borrow Bruno Latour’s nondiscriminatory term for describing constellations of such varied material forces. Bennett invokes Gilles Deleuze’s term assemblage to refer to these “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts . . . living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within.” Bennett’s example is the electrical power grid, comprising a dynamic interrelationship among humans, institutions, electrons, coal, computer programs, trees, wind, fire, wire, and electromagnetic fields, among other things. She specifically examines a massive 2003 power blackout in the northeastern United States to highlight the “limitations in human-­ centered theories of action” as well as “the inadequacy of understanding the grid simply as a machine or a tool.” Instead, argues Bennett, the grid and blackout must be viewed as a complex “human-­nonhuman assemblage.” Not unlike Bennett’s electrical power grid, a city might be said to constitute another massive, dynamic entity marked by “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements” and “vibrant materials” in “throbbing confederations,” with “uneven topographies” where “no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group.”7 It hardly needs to be said that the grid—­as structure and metaphor—­has often provided a conceptual foundation for cities as well as electrical networks. Discussing Descartes’s Enlightenment ontological distinction between thought and matter, Samantha Coole observes that “the kind of grid-­like arrangement one finds in many American cities . . . renders matter a fundamentally quantitative phenomenon, amenable to precise measurement and, in particular, to the sort of calculations facilitated by Euclidean geometry.” That statement overlooks a host of older international urban grid designs, such as those used throughout the Roman Empire, but it nevertheless captures an important historical fact about certain American colonial cities, including the one famously founded by William Penn in 1682. Penn initially envisioned his settlement as a rural

fig. i.1 Thomas Holme, A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, 1683. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, DAMS #485.

Introduction

township of “ten thousand acres” in which “the streets may be uniform down to the river” and “the distance of each house from the creek or harbor should be in my judgment a measured quarter of a mile, at least two hundred paces.” Thomas Holme later rendered Penn’s abstract, measured vision as a city plan that epitomized Enlightenment rationalism and spatial geometry by reducing the matter and topography of a particular place to mere extension, readily amenable to Euclidean calculation (fig. I.1). Thus it is tempting to think of Philadelphia as a Cartesian city.8 And yet, a closer look at Penn’s words and Holme’s plan from an ecocritical perspective informed by new materialism discloses greater complexity, including an acknowledgment of the agency of matter as something exceeding mere extension. For example, the same document in which Penn described the settlement’s ideal measurements contains the declaration “Let every House be placed, if the Person pleases in the middle of its platt as to the breadth way of it, that so there may be ground on each side, for Gardens or Orchards or feilds [sic], that it, may be a greene Country Towne, [which] will never be burnt, and allways be wholsome.” Few early residents actually followed those planning recommendations, but Penn’s words deserve attention for the way in which they look beyond mathematical calculation to take into account nonhuman forces—­namely, “ground,” “gardens,” “orchards,” and “fields”—­as material agents capable of preventing fires and ensuring public health. His statement also tacitly acknowledged the power

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of pollution, miasmic disease, and fire, which he knew well from London and its devastating conflagration of 1666. The phrase “greene country towne” even suggests an imaginative, literary sensibility on Penn’s part when we consider the antiquity of that colorful botanical metaphor, used to connote vitality in pastoral writing at least since Virgil. Penn was no environmentalist in the modern sense, but he understood his settlement as a creative, material collaboration between human beings and nonhuman things long before the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel coined the term “ecology” in 1866.9 A creative negotiation of human and nonhuman production played a significant role in articulating Philadelphia from the outset, notably in Holme’s grid plan. By inscribing that plan with the title Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, Holme invested the urban grid with vitality as both an artistic construction and a quasi-­living thing—­a subject of “portraiture”—­framed by and founded upon forceful nonhuman entities: the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, their tributaries, and land that he described in a related 1683 document as “level, dry and wholsom.” As a work of imagination, the grid certainly imposed an imperial sense of order upon the site of Penn’s “greene country towne,” but it also acknowledged that the city would never entirely be a human invention or “Product.” A closer look at the plan reveals acknowledgment of irregularities in its aesthetic en-­framing of the future city, notably in how the rivers and tributaries defy Euclidean logic and human control—­a fact that eventually prompted residents to dredge, divert, fill, pave, and otherwise manage them. But even those efforts at containment could not prevent the waterways’ periodic eruption and reemergence through various urban accidents, discoveries, reassessments, redesigns, and acts of ecohistorical remembering and reimagination. In her chapter in this volume, Sue Ann Prince investigates how in 2008 the artist Winifred Lutz, working in collaboration with the American Philosophical Society, created an outdoor installation in Philadelphia titled Drawing Dock Creek, “drawing” attention to a historically important, but largely forgotten, waterway: Dock Creek, a tributary to the Delaware River, later an open urban sewer, and finally almost erased from memory through filling and paving. In this case, human artistic imagination helped the creek reassert itself, producing an uncanny reminder of Philadelphia’s past ecology and its historical transformations since the seventeenth century. The Holme plan had acknowledged something of this irrepressible nonhuman agency and vitality from the beginning.10 A Greene Country Towne offers an unprecedented kind of urban environmental history where human beings are not the only protagonists. It does so by exploring the material evidence of human-­nonhuman interaction in artistic and literary visions of Philadelphia through three centuries. Some of the works in question enjoy canonical status (Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Philadelphia Negro, for example), while others exist at the periphery of conventional aesthetic taste (as in Charles Willson Peale’s fireplace designs, George Lippard’s The Quaker City, and Stephen Starr’s restaurant interiors). We have not imposed a one-­size-­fits-­all theoretical straightjacket on our

Introduction

contributors, but their chapters (and ours) variously demonstrate the power of ecocriticism and environmentally engaged cultural inquiry to tell a new, more expansive, and less anthropocentric story about Philadelphia. We firmly believe that works of art and literature—­as creative acts and material artifacts—­can help broaden our understanding of the meaning of community to encompass human and nonhuman constituents, thereby gesturing toward greater ecological sustainability. The chapters in this volume bring together these diverse forms of art and literature with the sciences and other discourses in order to demonstrate their vital interactions in imagining Philadelphia’s urban ecology as a human-­ nonhuman mesh. In considering the urban ecological implications of art and literature, the contributors to this volume also critically investigate issues of social and environmental injustice. Perhaps this is most evident in Scott Hicks’s chapter examining W. E. B. Du Bois’s Philadelphia Negro project and the material inequities faced by African Americans in the city’s Seventh Ward circa 1900, but other chapters address ecologies of difference in the city as well. For example, Laura Igoe discusses racialized discourse about soot and blackness in connection with Charles Willson Peale’s fireplace designs, Mary Unger analyses “queer ecology” in George Lippard’s The Quaker City, and Nate Gabriel critiques class politics and the visual erasure of economic diversity in Fairmount Park. Still other chapters, including those by John Ott on Eadweard Muybridge and Alan C. Braddock on Thomas Eakins, address asymmetrical relations across species in Philadelphia amid emerging Darwinian discourse about the evolutionary kinship of humans and nonhuman animals. Why Philadelphia and why is such a book necessary? Scholars in environmental studies have engaged in “ecocriticism” and urban studies for a long time, but there has been very little ecocritical inquiry focusing on Philadelphia even as other cities have received attention along these lines in recent years. See, for example, William Cronon’s landmark book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992), Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1992), Andrew Hurley’s Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–­1980 (1995), Ari Kelman’s A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (2003), Joel A. Tarr’s Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (2004), and Matthew Klingle’s Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (2007). None of these historical studies examines at length the ways in which art and literature refract urban materiality or nonhuman agency.11 Three recent books have illuminated relationships among art, science, and the environment in Philadelphia from an anthropocentric viewpoint. In Nature’s Entrepôt: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds, edited by Brian C. Black and Michael J. Chiarappa (2012), scientists and historians investigate “the human impact on this unique urban environment, examining its long history of industrial and infrastructure development, policy changes, environmental consciousness, and sustainability efforts.”12 The second book, Knowing

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Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–­1840 (2012), edited by Amy R. W. Meyers, focuses squarely on art and other creative human products—­textiles, decorative objects, interior design, architecture—­in an effort to demonstrate how “artistic and artisanal culture informed scientific interpretations of the natural world.”13 Finally, Elizabeth Milroy’s The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–­1875 (2015) gamely mines a plethora of primary sources in examining the early history of the city’s plan and park areas, described as “among the world’s most distinctive man-­made environments.”14 All three of the aforementioned texts insightfully explore human cultural impact on environmental conditions while illuminating aspects of “natural” history within the city. Yet Nature’s Entrepôt has little to say about art and literature, and Meyers and her contributors generally overlook Philadelphia’s urban ecology, environmental history, and nonhuman constituents, except as objects of human knowledge. Milroy’s study ends with the 1876 Centennial. Contrary to the complex sense of distributed agency already articulated by Penn himself in the seventeenth century, all three publications represent Philadelphia’s urban ecology as primarily a product of human industry, policy, and consciousness. Despite their respective merits, these books do not aspire to a broader, new materialist vision of ecological community in their investigations of the city.15 A Greene Country Towne examines the cultural and environmental history of Philadelphia precisely with that expanded sense of ecological community in mind. Settled by Lenape, Dutch, and Swedish inhabitants before its formal inception as a British colonial city by Penn in 1682, Philadelphia has been marked by a dynamic and contested confluence of agents in various forms for centuries—­water, plants, humans and other animals, paintings, trees, diseases, books, traffic, buildings, photographs, industry, and much more. Our book examines creative engagements with some of those agents and several others. The scholarship here, by an interdisciplinary group of established and emerging scholars in art history, literary criticism, and urban studies, promises to dislodge and defamiliarize settled anthropocentric notions about Philadelphia and cities in general—­something we regard positively because it may encourage readers to see urban ecologies strangely anew as vibrant, living entities, neither human nor nonhuman entirely. This book extends the work begun by William Penn in complicating his own distinction between “Natural” and “Artificial,” revealing the city’s constitutive elements to be thoroughly imbricated with one another. ***

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The first chapter of this volume, by Michael Mackintosh, reexamines the mythic founding of Philadelphia as an encounter between two human groups—­Lenape Natives and European newcomers—­who held conflicting environmental perceptions and expectations. Mackintosh analyzes two material artifacts at the center of this encounter: a wampum belt reportedly presented to William Penn by the Lenapes to commemorate their friendship and Holme’s Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, already briefly discussed in this introduction. Mackintosh argues

Introduction

that where the wampum belt embodies Lenape values of mobility, flexibility, and reciprocity, the Portraiture represents colonial expectations of acquisition, permanent possession, and the rationalization of nature into ordered space and economically useful commodities. Whereas the temporary nature of Lenape material culture and place names—­like Shackamaxon, or “place of the eels,” referring to a constantly shifting location—­responded to the vital agency of environmental phenomena, European names overlooked such agency and sought to impose a colonial sense of stasis that did not exist inherently in the natural world. These competing views of land use help us reimagine Philadelphia and the region as a dynamic space with layered ecological meanings. Laura Igoe’s chapter investigates a series of fuel-­efficient fireplace and stove models designed by the artist and museum curator Charles Willson Peale in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peale designed his heating devices to address two related, environmental ills facing early national Philadelphia: the “economy of fuel” and the “evil of smoke,” which were closely linked to regional deforestation, diminishing urban air quality, and devastating outbreaks of yellow fever. These concerns reoriented public attention to the many ways nonhuman agents—­trees, air, fever, and smoke—­impacted the city and its inhabitants. As Igoe argues, Peale’s inventions indicated that humans would have to modify their own consumption in order to adapt to transforming environmental realities. His models, however, additionally reinforced racial hierarchies by attempting to order, refine, and cleanse perceived social-­environmental dangers of blackness, encompassing smoke, soot, and the dark skin of African Americans, which were increasingly linked in public imagination. The next chapter, by Mary Unger, examines George Lippard’s queering of urban space in his 1845 Gothic novel, The Quaker City. While William Penn and Thomas Holme may have constructed Philadelphia as a meticulous grid rooted in the democratic ideals of seventeenth-­century Enlightenment thought, Lippard presented these spatial-­political ideas as unraveling in the face of unruly, illogical, and materially transgressive forces of corruption during the antebellum period. The novel’s manor of vice, Monk Hall, proved to be as twisted as the city streets themselves, facilitating behaviors, experiences, and affective states unregulated by hegemonic forces. By perverting the “natural” order of national space, bloodlines, marriage, and even narrative structure, The Quaker City queered urban ecology, rupturing the ideological underpinnings of a national geography rooted in Penn’s plan for urban harmony. Yet while Lippard’s exposé revealed Philadelphia’s illicit upper class as the source of urban unrest, his sensational story undercut any social transformation he may have imagined, leaving us with a narrative that enacted the very “unnatural” order it attempted to ameliorate. Nate Gabriel takes as his subject the establishment of Fairmount Park, a sprawling public space created by the city during the second half of the nineteenth century, stretching northwest across the Schuylkill River from the historic center of Philadelphia. Previous scholars have interpreted the foundation of Fairmount and other parks of the period primarily as a therapeutic environmentalist

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response to urban industrialization, but Gabriel instead argues that such spaces actually helped construct and reinforce the engine of industrial capitalism by firmly demarcating distinct zones of “nature” and “culture” as well as “premodern” and “modern” spaces of economic activity. Gabriel explores the visual and textual work park officials had to accomplish in order to cultivate public perception of the park as a “wilderness” in contrast to the cultural space of the city. Establishment of the park required removal of factories along the banks of the Schuylkill, modification of natural and built features, and regulation of nonleisure subsistence activities previously taken for granted by local working-­class residents within park boundaries. Gabriel uses a variety of material and visual evidence to illuminate the cultural reframing of Fairmount as a modern urban “nature” park, including the changing views of Lemon Hill mansion, landscape photographs by James Cremer, and annual reports of the Fairmount Park Guard. John Ott explores changing conceptions regarding the relationship between human and nonhuman residents of Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century through the lens of Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion photographic series produced at the University of Pennsylvania during the late 1880s. Whereas most scholarship on Muybridge’s series tends to dwell on its construction of human bodies, Ott reorients our understanding of the photographs by relating their inclusive, transspecies array of specimens—­with human beings categorized as animals—­to late-­nineteenth-­century Darwinian veterinary science. Although Animal Locomotion powerfully asserted the dominion of science and imagery over nonhuman beings, it also implicitly acknowledged their physiological and evolutionary connection to humans. By demonstrating how Muybridge’s work was sponsored by several institutions and individuals invested in veterinary and zoological science, Ott also reveals a kind of interdisciplinary kinship in the increasing collaboration across different branches of knowledge. In the next chapter, Maria Farland reads Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in terms of contemporary agrarian modernization in Philadelphia and the Delaware River region, where the poet resided in his later years. Contrary to the familiar image of Whitman as a writer associated primarily with the rapid urbanization of New York or the human demographics of American nationalism writ large, Farland unpacks the form and meaning of Leaves of Grass in an entirely new way by revealing the poem’s acute sensitivity to intimate interconnections between city and country as well as between human and nonhuman life. Approaching the poem’s title freshly at face value, Farland argues that Leaves of Grass expresses contemporary anxiety about soil depletion while also celebrating grass as a vital agent of agrarian revitalization. Profoundly concerned with the perceived disintegration of organic forms, Whitman’s poetry sought to reshape and restore nature by intertwining human and nonhuman elements in dynamic ways. Ultimately, Farland challenges previous interpretations of Leaves of Grass as a celebration of an idyllic, perfected landscape, and instead encourages us to view Whitman’s poems as careful constructions of cohesion in response to agricultural problems of the late nineteenth century.

Introduction

Alan C. Braddock’s chapter examines the work and life of Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia’s most famous artist, a painter closely associated by scholars with the character of the city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Having lived nearly his entire life there, earning notoriety for his realism in depicting the nude, anatomy, and the psychological interiority of his local subjects, Eakins is widely regarded as epitomizing both Philadelphia and “humanity” in art. This familiar scholarly narrative, however, represents the city anthropocentrically while eliding Eakins’s deep and abiding fascination with other animals, not to mention his own complex sense of animality—­abundant evidence for which Braddock finds in the artist’s pictures, letters, daily life, and critical reputation. Nowhere is this nonhuman presence more palpable than in images and descriptions of the Eakins household, where he produced most of his work. It contained a veritable menagerie of animals—­dogs, cats, birds, a rabbit, a turtle, and even a pet capuchin monkey named Bobby—­such that the artist could describe his yard in 1894 as looking like a “zoological garden.” By revealing this pervasive nonhuman dimension in the work, life, and household of Philadelphia’s signature artist of “humanity,” Braddock defamiliarizes the city’s broader urban ecology during a period described by historians as the “Great Separation,” when humans rapidly erected new barriers and institutions to segregate themselves from most other animals. Scott Hicks reconsiders the human-­nonhuman urban ecology of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro, a key sociological text from the turn of the twentieth century. Undertaken in the spirit of Progressive Era reform, Du Bois’s survey systematically inventoried the inhabitants of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, a historically black community, paying particular attention to their employment, education, and living conditions. Hicks’s chapter investigates the sociologist’s understanding of air, light, water, and dirt as social and environmental vectors, arguing that they constituted for him not simply drivers of discrimination and victimization but also forces with which human subjects needed to engage and creatively collaborate in order to improve living conditions. Hicks proposes that Du Bois’s “thorough study of causes” offers a complex, paradoxical vision of Philadelphia’s urban ecology as something altered, alterable, and altering. Amy Menzer’s chapter examines the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, a spectacular public display on the fifth floor of Gimbels department store in 1947, as a celebration of the urban center’s potential amid the growing trend of suburbanization after World War II. In an effort to counteract that exodus from the city, the exhibition highlighted rehabilitation of existing buildings and the construction of highways—­or “new traffic arteries”—­to manage increasing numbers of automobiles, improve water and sewer systems, and preserve Center City. The exhibition’s planners, including Edmund Bacon and Oscar Stonorov, being attuned to issues of environmental quality, land use, and conservation, projected a vision of the city as a vital, living organism of integrated physical and social forms. Challenging previous scholarly interpretations of postwar development as primarily top-­down, Menzer demonstrates that the exhibition’s emphasis

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on participatory planning imagined a form of environmentalism based on the dynamic interaction of human and nonhuman agents within the city, albeit with certain political shortcomings and social blind spots. Primarily overseen by white male civic leaders, this planning program ultimately perpetuated racial, ethnic, and gender asymmetries, but Menzer asserts that for all its limitations, the exhibition provided a significant departure from both the corrupt “machine” politics of Philadelphia’s past and the burgeoning forces of postwar “white flight.” Stephen Nepa turns our attention to the post–­Cold War context of new urbanism at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-­first, when postindustrial economic conditions and cultural tastes began to facilitate flight back to Center City Philadelphia. Nepa examines revitalization specifically in Old City and University City through the phenomenon of “experience dining” championed by restaurateur Stephen Starr. Starr’s carefully curated restaurants produced a theatrical assemblage of people, food, and environment that engaged visitors affectively through the senses of vision, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. These multisensory environments attracted diners and helped transform previously neglected neighborhoods into hip entertainment zones for middle-­ class, new urbanist consumers and tourists. Nepa’s close investigation of three restaurants—­the Continental, Pod, and Talula’s Garden—­reveals how Starr and his customers reimagined the dynamism of the built environment through creative appropriation of the city’s history, pop culture design aesthetics, and the vital agency of food. In a chapter exploring the power of art to reanimate Philadelphia’s environmental history, Sue Ann Prince considers the work of two artists, Winifred Lutz and Brett Keyser, who fictively resurrected Dock Creek, an important waterway in the colonial period that served the burgeoning city for decades until pollution from tanneries, slaughterhouses, and other industries transformed it into an underground sewer. In an outdoor installation and performance commissioned by the American Philosophical Society in 2008, Lutz and Keyser conjured the vital agency of the now-­buried creek by retracing its path and restaging historical interactions of human and nonhuman forces along its banks and in its waters. In Drawing Dock Creek, Lutz marked the creek’s former course with chalk paint and bright blue bungee cords that shimmered and rippled in the sun like flowing water. Keyser interacted with this installation for his performance, TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS, presenting imagined encounters with fictional lost souls and other “civic effluvia” linked to key moments in the creek’s history. Finally, Andrea L. M. Hansen addresses the dynamic potential of contemporary urban “ruins” created by industrial decline and suburbanization in the late twentieth century. Hansen proposes a creative architectural program for reappropriating and reviving these sites—­specifically the Amtrak Northeast Corridor, the Reading Viaduct, and the I-­95 Corridor in Port Richmond—­in order to reimagine Philadelphia’s postindustrial vestiges not as liabilities but as assets. Her program, called Flux Network, would transform these abandoned, decaying zones into ribbons of dynamic interaction and productivity, revitalizing

Introduction

Philadelphia’s urban environment along historic infrastructural corridors. Hansen embraces decaying, decomposing buildings and disused land as vital agents and collaborators able to accommodate change over time, inviting us to rethink the city with their materiality and temporal dynamism in mind. *** Together, these twelve chapters reveal Philadelphia to be a human-­nonhuman assemblage, the result of complex, ongoing interactions among a variety of agents over time. Obviously, no single book can do everything. Since this collection provides more of a methodological model than a comprehensive survey of pertinent topics, let us conclude this Introduction by highlighting a few other contemporary projects in Philadelphia that have sought to reintegrate the urban “natural” and “artificial” in a manner recalling Penn’s description quoted earlier. At the risk of seeming promotional (which is not our intention), we find it remarkable and worth noting in this context that the New York Times recently listed the city as one of the top travel destinations for 2015, primarily thanks to its creation and revitalization of green spaces.16 The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC) Master Plan for sustainable development of a six-­mile riparian parkway along the east side of downtown Philadelphia, adopted by the City Planning Commission in March 2012, has been particularly proactive in sponsoring these projects. The DRWC Master Plan envisions thirteen parks linked by a continuous multiuse trail with accommodations for mixed-­use and residential development as well as ecological and wetland habitat restoration. The plan’s focal point, an expanded cap over the I-­95 expressway between Chestnut and Walnut Streets, will eventually reconnect historic Old City to the waterfront and replace the concrete surfaces of Penn’s Landing with a wide lawn, trees, and walking paths.17 As a preview for these long-­term projects, the DRWC has sponsored a variety of short-­term improvements along the river that combine “natural” elements (plants and trees) with materials salvaged or repurposed from Philadelphia’s industrial past (retrofitted shipping containers, wooden pallets, and industrial spaces) in order to create dynamic and occasionally temporary spaces that evolve over time, enriching residents’ and visitors’ connection to the Delaware waterfront, its ecology, and its history. A word or two about the river’s history helps put these recent regenerative urban environmental initiatives into context. As the original center of economic life in Philadelphia, the Delaware waterfront changed dramatically over three centuries of industrialization, transportation, and expressway construction. The Delaware River provided a deep harbor for ships and a shipbuilding industry that flourished in the city as early as the seventeenth century, thanks to the region’s abundant supply of trees, including oak and white pine.18 Trade and commerce facilitated by the river encouraged most of the city’s population to cluster initially along the Delaware, spilling northward and southward outside of the confines of Holme’s grid. In the nineteenth century, Pennsylvania coal and railroad transportation helped establish industrial shipbuilding facilities

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like the Philadelphia Navy Yard, which produced steam-­powered iron turret ships for the Civil War and employed more than fifty thousand workers for the construction of battleships, including the famous U.S.S. Maine, from the late nineteenth century through World War II. Interstate 95, originally conceived in the late 1930s as an industrial highway linking the Delaware River to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, was intended to facilitate commerce along the river while also alleviating urban traffic congestion. The construction of I-­95 in the 1960s and 1970s, however, destroyed hundreds of historic homes, aggravated local citizens, and effectively severed the waterfront from Old City and the rest of downtown Philadelphia.19 Unable to support a nuclear navy following World War II, the Navy Yard closed for shipbuilding in 1997, and the city, therefore, became further removed—­physically, socially, and psychologically—­from its once active and vibrant waterfront.20 According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, news of “drownings, pier collapses, oil spills and the occasional body part bobbing around have hitched ‘dangerous’ with [the Delaware] river in many people’s minds” in the early twenty-­first century.21 The new DRWC Master Plan attempts to intervene in this public perception of the Delaware and instead facilitate interaction between the human constituents of the city and the nonhuman residents, spaces, and structures of the river. According to local architectural critic Inga Saffron, recently rehabilitated spaces along the Delaware River such as the Race Street Pier, Washington Avenue Green, and FringeArts performance venue burrowed “into old waterfront structures”—­a municipal pier, an immigration station, and a pumping station, respectively—­“using the past to leverage the Delaware’s future.”22 FringeArts, for example, converted the brick 1903 High Pressure Fire Service Building, situated at the base of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, into a theater, restaurant, and outdoor beer garden. Large tanks dominate the soaring dining room and exposed pipes snake across the ceiling, reminding restaurant visitors of the building’s original purpose of distributing water from the Delaware River—­visible outside the large arch windows—­to fire hydrants throughout the city during the twentieth century.23 The Spruce Street Harbor Park, a pop-­up beer garden and entertainment zone opened during the summer of 2014 south of the Independence Seaport Museum, incorporated elements of the waterfront’s historical and industrial past: shipping containers housed restaurants, bars, and local crafts, while people rested in swaying hammocks in the shade of a monument to Christopher Columbus designed by Robert Venturi in 1992. Local design group Groundswell constructed and installed three landscaped barges in the nearby marina to provide a “floating oasis” complete with a shipping-­container bar, Adirondack chairs made by local Amish craftsmen, and a cantilevered net lounge, allowing visitors to recline while suspended over the water. In the center of the barges, seven floating islands populated with coneflowers, ninebark, hosta, grasses, and joepye weed, and constructed from a durable, nontoxic postconsumer plastic, not only beautify the space but also break down nutrients and other waterborne pollutants in the marina.24

Introduction

According to Groundswell principal designer David Fierabend, the deployment of “large, mature ‘things’” that emphasize “materiality, color, and scale” infuses the park, previously a relatively unused space, with life or vitality. These “things,” which can include cantilevered netting, mature trees, or shipping containers, together create an atmosphere that impacts visitor experience and fosters diverse encounters with the waterfront and the river. Fierabend encourages us to “think of the shade, the variation in light and color, the sound of wind in the leaves of the trees”—­elements that together form a vital assemblage capable of shaping perceptions of public spaces and the city. It is the pop-­up’s embrace of change or flux that, according to Fierabend, makes it a corrective to other static public spaces: “People like change in the landscape, it keeps them coming back. The city can change quickly, but public spaces, until recently, weren’t the things popping up or changing.”25 Spruce Street Harbor Park and other recently revitalized spaces along the Delaware therefore embrace the dynamism, temporality, and flux already apparent in the flowing and transforming river nearby. Artist and professor of film and media arts at Temple University Roderick Coover attempts to reconnect Philadelphians to the Delaware River in a different way. In his Altered Shorelines Project, Coover has investigated how industrial uses of rivers—­specifically the Delaware River and the Thames in England, where the artist hails from—­have become inscribed in a visual language ranging from geological maps to flood markers. Coover investigated the industrial docklands of the Delaware River from Cape Henlopen to Trenton, New Jersey, via kayak and investigated the river through visual analysis of photographs, interviews, digital mapping, and environmental research. His Chemical Map (http://​www​.unknownterritories​.org/​ChemicalMap2​.html), an interactive website, depicts more than two hundred industrial sites and brownfields, documenting the chemicals they store and release along the Delaware’s shores in order to map the material landscape of the river. We learn, for example, that asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) may be found in the vicinity of the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead reside in a chemical dumping site monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency across the river from Spruce Street Harbor Park in Camden, New Jersey. Coover’s map encourages viewers to consider what happens when the industrial waterfront and climate change collide, or when floods and storm surges carry these toxic chemicals into nearby neighborhoods and drinking water intakes.26 The Chemical Map therefore offers a more troubling counternarrative to the optimistic vision of the human-­river relationship underlying support of the pop-­ups and green spaces curated by Groundswell and the DWRC. Both Spruce Street Harbor Park and Coover’s Altered Shorelines, however, recognize the need for Philadelphia residents and visitors to reimagine the way nonhuman agents—­whether a river, an interstate, a hammock, or a toxic chemical—­shape and inform our urban experience. In the spirit of such projects of critical reimagination, we offer the following chapters as models for rethinking the environmental history of Philadelphia.

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notes 1. William Penn, A Letter from William Penn, Proprietary and Governour of Pennsylvania in America, to the Committee of the Free Society of Traders of that Province (London: Andrew Sowle, 1683), i, 3–­5. 2. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, by William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 69–­90; Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher, eds., A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2011). 3. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), viii–­x. See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 4. Silvester [Francis Hopkinson], “Letter,” Pennsylvania Gazette, August 21, 1782. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. John Fanning Watson, “The Annals of Philadelphia” (Philadelphia, 1829), 1:25–­26, John Fanning Watson Collection on the Cultural, Social, and Economic Development of Pennsylvania 1693–­1855, coll. 0697, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

7. Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 3. Melosi is not interested in new materialism and is more concerned with the ecological impact of technology systems. Latour, Politics of Nature, 75, 77, 80; Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23–­24. 8. Diana Coole, “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of the Flesh,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, ed. Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 94; William Penn, “Instructions given by me William Penn . . . [30 September 1681],” in The Papers of William Penn, Vol. II, 1680–­1684, ed. Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 121; Hannah B. Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 49–­78. For the distinction between Penn’s “greene country towne” and Holme’s grid plan, see Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 357n2; Hannah Benner Roach, “The Planting of Philadelphia: A Seventeenth-­Century Real Estate Development, I,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92, no. 1 (January 1968): 3–­47; Gary B. Nash, “City Planning and Political Tension in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Philadelphia,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, no. 1 (February 15, 1968): 54–­73. 9. Penn, “Instructions of William Penn,” 121; “Green,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed June 9, 2013. On “ecology,” see Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), I: 8, II: 253–­56, 286–­87; Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 192. 10. Thomas Holme, “A Short Advertisement upon the Scituation and Extent of the City of Philadelphia and Ensuing Plat-­ form thereof, by the Surveyor General” (1683), in William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania: A Documentary History,

Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche, eds., Biocentrism and Modernism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). 16. “52 Places to Go in 2015,” New York Times, January 11, 2015. 17. Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, “Master Plan for the Central Delaware,” December 2011, http://​www​ .delawareriverwaterfront​.com/​planning/​ masterplan​-for​-the​-central​-delaware. 18. Donna J. Rilling, “Sylvan Enterprise and the Philadelphia Hinterland, 1790–­1860,” Pennsylvania History 67, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 194–­217. 19. For more information on the conceptualization, construction, and critique of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, see John F. Bauman, “The Expressway ‘Motorists Loved to Hate’: Philadelphia and the First Era of Postwar Highway Planning, 1943–­1956,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 115, no. 4 (October 1991): 503–­33; Scott Gabriel Knowles, ed., Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the City of the Future (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Alanna C. Stewart, “The Construction of Interstate-­95: A Failure to Preserve a City’s History” (master’s thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2011). 20. For more on the history of shipbuilding in Philadelphia, see Jeffrey M. Dorwart, “Shipbuilding and Shipyards,” in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, ed. Charlene Mires, Howard Gillette, and Randall Miller, http://​ philadelphiaencyclopedia​.org/​archive/​ shipbuilding​-and​-shipyards/; Jeffrey M. Dorwart and Jean K. Wolf, The Philadelphia Navy Yard: From the Birth of the U.S. Navy to the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 21. Jason Nark, “Nutter Seeks to Turn the Tide on Delaware Waterfront,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 10, 2011. 22. Inga Saffron, “Changing Skyline: A New Wave on the Delaware Waterfront,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 6, 2014. 23. Harry Kyriakodis, “Hero of the Waterfront,” Hidden City Philadelphia, September 6, 2011, http://​hiddencityphila​.org/​ 2011/​09/​hero​-of​-the​-waterfront​-2.

Introduction

ed. Jean R. Soderlund (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 322. 11. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992); Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–­1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Joel A. Tarr, Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004); and Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 12. Brian C. Black and Michael J. Chiarappa, eds., Nature’s Entrepôt: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), book jacket. 13. Amy R. W. Meyers, ed., Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–­1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), book jacket. 14. Elizabeth Milroy, The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–­1876 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), quote from David B. Brownlee on the dust jacket. 15. For some intriguing analysis of dirt as a complex material agent in various contemporary urban contexts, including Philadelphia, see Megan Born, Helene Furján, and Lily Jencks, with Philip M. Crosby, Dirt (Philadelphia: PennDesign and MIT Press, 2012). A few studies have begun to revise our understanding of the Enlightenment, natural science, and other historical contexts in new materialist terms, but without focusing on particular urban centers. See, for example, Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art,

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24. “Spruce Street Harbor Park: Attractions,” Delaware River Waterfront, accessed February 22, 2015, http://​www​ .delawareriverwaterfront​.com/​places/​ spruce​-street​-harbor​-park/​attractions. 25. Nathaniel Popkin, “With Pop-­Up Beer Gardens under Threat, Here’s Why They Matter,” Hidden City Philadelphia, July

22, 2014, http://​hiddencityphila​.org/​ 2014/​07/​with​-pop​-up​-beer​-gardens​-under​ -threat​-heres​-why​-they​-matter. 26. Chris Mizes, “Feeling Climate Change along the Chemical Estuary,” Hidden City Philadelphia, June 20, 2013, http://​ hiddencityphila​.org/​2013/​06/​feeling​-climate​ -change​-along​-the​-chemical​-estuary.

1 Ink and Paper, Clamshells and Leather Power, Environmental Perception, and Materiality in the Lenape-­European Encounter at Philadelphia mi c hael d ea n ma cki nt o s h

Philadelphia is a city with a powerful founding myth. As the story goes, chiefs of the Lenape Indians, the native inhabitants of the land, and William Penn, newly arrived from England to establish a city and a colony, met beneath the green leaves of a graceful elm on the banks of the Delaware River at Shackamaxon in 1683 and forged a Great Treaty of peace and friendship. This legend, which was amplified by the trans-­Atlantic popularity of Benjamin West’s ca. 1771 painting Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (fig. 1.1), portrays the founding of Philadelphia as a crucial moment that initiated a golden age of cooperation and harmony between Indians and Europeans.1 The importance of the elm tree in the telling of the tale conveyed the idea that the new friends enjoyed gentle harmony not just with each other but also with the natural environment they shared. This legend became important later in Philadelphia’s history, especially as nineteenth-­century population growth, massive immigration, urbanization, and industrialization brought rapid change to the region. Philadelphians looked to their city’s remarkable history in response and rediscovered several significant material artifacts created at the time of the city’s founding.2 A popular 1812 republication, for instance, of the Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia (see Introduction, fig. I.1) sparked renewed interest in the founder’s original vision for the city. The Portraiture, drawn in 1682 by Penn’s surveyor, Thomas Holme, had presented a plan for an orderly new city and served as an enticement to prospective settlers. Romantically inclined nineteenth-­century Philadelphians saw the trees and open

a gre e ne country tow ne

fig. 1.1

20

Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, 1771–72. Oil on canvas, 75½ × 107¾ in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr. Collection), 1878.1.10.

spaces of the Portraiture as indications that a restorative and benign nature had been part of their city since its genesis. William Penn’s lyrical description of an early and subsequently abandoned plan for the city as “a greene country towne” further convinced them that this was so.3 The idea that Philadelphia had a special historical relationship with nature proved especially potent when combined with the related notion that the city’s past was also rooted in a peaceful relationship with Indians. William Penn’s great-grandson John Granville Penn validated this potent myth in 1859 when he presented the Historical Society of Pennsylvania with a wampum belt that he said had been a gift from the Lenapes to his famous ancestor at their legendary treaty (fig. 1.2). The belt, which shows an Indian and a Quaker holding hands in an unambiguous posture of friendship, seemed to corroborate and validate the legend of peace from a Native point of view. Together, the Portraiture and the wampum belt helped advance a mythical version of Philadelphia’s origins that was especially useful to its white citizens as they asserted their moral and ecological virtues in response to nineteenth-century urban stresses. The currents of the Romantic movement, which popularized Indians as symbols of the noble purity of American origins and of the “unchanged” natural world that was now threatened by the exploitations of industrial capitalism and population growth, only strengthened the appeal of this myth.4

Ink and Paper, Clamshells and Leather fig. 1.2 Lenape artist, wampum belt, ca. 1682–1750. Clam, whelk shell beads, leather. Courtesy of the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection.

Like all folktales, this mythic interpretation of the city’s origins obscures our understanding of the actual encounter between the first generation of Philadelphians and the Native Americans who lived there before. However, a close look at the material artifacts of the encounter—­the Portraiture and the wampum belt—­divested of their accreted myth reveals important dimensions of the historical meeting of Indians and Europeans at the founding of Philadelphia. Such an examination is especially helpful in illuminating the role of the Lenape people as an ecological vector in the origins of the city, a dimension that even the most recent scholarly examination of the environmental history of Philadelphia largely overlooked.5 These artifacts are not inert objects that merely reflect the experiences and expectations of their makers; both the Portraiture and the belt projected power, remade their environments (in the case of the Portraiture), or shaped social relationships among peoples (in the case of both). They illustrate and illuminate aspects of the encounter, but they also helped shape that encounter. The Portraiture facilitated (as it was facilitated by) colonial goals of acquisition, permanent possession, and the rationalization of nature into ordered space and economically useful commodities. The wampum belt propelled (as it was propelled by) Lenape practices of exchange, mobility, flexibility, and reciprocal negotiation. Good intentions of friendship on either side of the encounter, however sincerely held, were less powerful than the divergent environmental perceptions and expectations that the Portraiture and the wampum belt embody. The wampum belt is one of the few extant depictions by Indians of their encounter with colonists during Philadelphia’s founding. The belt’s provenance

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is murky: it was unknown outside of the Penn family until John Granville Penn brought it to the public’s attention in 1859. Its connection to a specific meeting between the Lenapes and William Penn, under an elm at Shackamaxon or otherwise, is unclear. Marshall Joseph Becker makes the sensible suggestion, followed herein, that “until a specific reference can be found which describes the . . . belt and the original context of its presentation, we only can assume that at best this belt was but one of many received by the Proprietor or his heirs over the years.”6 While its association with a Great Treaty testifies more to the enduring appeal of the myth of Shackamaxon than it does to the treaty’s reality, the belt almost certainly was created by Lenape hands and given to Penn around the time of Philadelphia’s founding, or soon thereafter. It is not only a historical artifact that illustrates aspects of a long-­ago event; as a material object created in response to the encounter between Lenapes and Quakers, it had a role in influencing the outcome of that encounter. The wampum belt is more than an articulation of a purely indigenous Native American view of the colonists. Its form hints at the hybridity of its origins. While historians have made much of the grid that Thomas Holme drew with ink on paper for the Portraiture, fewer have commented on the fact that the wampum belt is also an orderly grid, creating a meaningful image of purple and white clamshell beads in neat alignments of rows and columns. The knowledge that the wampum belt was not a purely indigenous mode of communication complicates a founding myth that claims Penn was welcomed and accepted by pure representatives of an untouched American nature. The belt was instead the product of mingled European and American expectations, economics, craftsmanship, and materials—­strips of leather from animal bodies, iron drill bits, hand-­shaped chunks of calcium carbonate that Indians and colonists alike agreed had significance. The entities responsible for it were constituents of a hybrid world. Waves of change that thoroughly engulfed the Lenapes even before Penn’s arrival created this admixed cultural environment, of which the belt was a part. These transformations were so significant that the Lenapes found they were living in a cultural, economic, and ecological “new world” that fundamentally reordered (and perhaps even helped to create) the communal identity and ethnic composition of the people who first appear to Europeans as the “Lenape.”7 Trade with Europeans, especially the Dutch, Finnish, and Swedish farmers who settled along the Delaware River in the early seventeenth century, and with Native neighbors through long-­established routes of exchange, brought a material revolution to Lenape life. Wampum was both a product and an agent of change that propelled the creation of this material new world. Before the arrival of Europeans, Indians valued rougher clamshell beads as ornamental objects, but iron tools made with European technology allowed for the creation of finely detailed weavings of small beads like the Penn wampum belt. In the early seventeenth century, Indians in clam-­abundant coastal New England took advantage of this new technology and created a virtual industry of wampum-­making. They

Ink and Paper, Clamshells and Leather

sold it to European traders, who used it to facilitate exchange in the developing fur trade. Massive quantities of beads spread through webs of trade, reaching much of eastern North America and spurring the widespread use of wampum belts in rituals, spiritual ceremonies, and diplomatic treaties.8 The material exchange of which wampum was such an important part bound Indians to trading relationships with the Europeans. Natives came to rely on new materials like iron, copper, brass, glass, cotton, wool, and linen. The properties of these new materials—­their hardness, their shininess, their durability, their rarity—­often intersected with Indian cultural practices in ways that changed the trajectories of Native societies. Indians found that a copper pot, for instance, could withstand direct heat better than any clay cooking vessel, and so they had an incentive to trade with the newcomers for materials they could not craft themselves.9 But Indian social norms prescribed gift-­giving as a path to status; the most powerful people were those who were most generous with powerful gifts. The rarity of new European materials and their remarkable physical qualities—­the brittle hardness of clear glass, the red flush of beaten copper, the gleam of brass, the sharp edge that an iron blade could hold—­gave them power and even spiritual agency in Indian cosmology, bringing prestige to those who distributed them as gifts. The desire for these goods and the status they conferred ignited competition among Indian groups. Early in the seventeenth century, Susquehannock Indians, who were eager to bring furs to the European settlers in the Delaware Valley, pressured the Lenapes of Philadelphia with waves of attacks.10 These new and desirable materials shaped the human habitation of the place that would become Philadelphia. The Swedish geographer Peter Lindeström, in his survey of the Delaware River three decades before Penn’s arrival, found a great concentration of Lenape settlements at the future site of the city. Lindeström reported that “six different places are settled, under six sachems or chiefs” near where the Schuylkill River flows into the Delaware, and he reckoned the population as “being several hundred men strong, under each chief, counting men and women.”11 This concentration of peoples was the result of geography, the economic forces of exchange, and the cultural forces that created a demand for European trade goods. The confluence of the two rivers was a critical point of interface; the Schuylkill provided access to the trade goods interior of the American continent—­especially the thick and valuable furs of the Great Lakes region—­while the Delaware River connected ocean-­going vessels with the entire Atlantic world. The Lenapes who chose to live at the confluence of these waters may have been driven by more cosmopolitan motives than Lindeström perceived, as they positioned themselves to take advantage of the same physical factors that would eventually help to make Philadelphia the wealthiest and most populous city in North America. As influential as the effects of material goods were in shaping demographics and settlement patterns, trade also facilitated an exchange of another kind. Microbes and germs that had devastating effects on Native Americans came along with wampum, iron, and wool. Native populations, who had no previous

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exposure to diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza, were “virgin soil” for these viral perils and suffered catastrophic mortality.12 The effects of disease on the Philadelphia-­area Lenapes specifically, however, are ambiguous. Contemporary European observers mention several seventeenth-­ century epidemics that devastated the Lenape populations, but Becker finds no archaeological evidence of a demographic collapse caused by European diseases.13 Low population density and dispersed settlement patterns might have helped protect the Lenapes from annihilation by disease, but conclusive historical evidence for this is unavailable. At the very least, European germs would have caused demographic, ecological, and spiritual turmoil in Lenape communities. To a people accustomed to negotiating with the forces of the world, this turmoil would have given them good cause to cultivate a powerful figure like Penn as an ally. The wampum belt’s depiction in white and purple shell beads of an Indian and colonist holding hands carries meanings about such power relationships. The world, as seen by the Lenapes, was animated with autonomous spirits. The community had to negotiate with rocks, rivers, trees, turtles, birds, and bears that were alive with personalities and potencies. Although power in this universe flowed in a lateral web of flexible and interconnected relationships, the Lenapes knew that they had to negotiate carefully with those spirits (and people) who were stronger than others.14 The Lenapes who presented the wampum to Penn would have recognized him as a particularly potent new force in their world. In a view that accords with Philadelphia’s founding legend, the belt can be interpreted as an Indian version of Benjamin West’s painting, an expression by the Lenapes of some degree of acceptance of the settlement of their land by whites. From an Indian perspective of negotiated relationships, however, it depicts an effort by the Lenapes to appropriate Penn’s power and enlist him as a useful ally and protector against the uncertainties of their changing world, a logical reaction to the difficult circumstances they faced. This is not to suggest, however, that in acknowledging Penn’s power the Lenapes meant to portray themselves as subordinate to it. In fact, the ambiguities of the belt leave its intended meaning open to a broad range of interpretation. In 1925, for instance, two Canadian Iroquois experts in the history of wampum suggested to the anthropologists W. C. Orchard and Frank Speck that the larger figure in the belt actually represents the Indian, wearing not a hat but a feather, and that his size portrays him as the dominant figure in the encounter.15 Although Orchard and Speck caution that theirs is “a feeble attempt, at so late a date,” to discover the meaning of the belt, “when the associations have been forgotten,” the literary scholar Andrew Newman embraces this interpretation, noting that seeing the larger figure as “an Indian is certainly in keeping with a ‘Facing East’ revision of our Eurocentric readings of colonial relations.”16 However, the Eurocentric (or modern) perspective that perhaps needs to be overturned is the notion that body size alone indicates the relative power of the figures. Even if we maintain the more widely held view that the larger figure is identified as a Quaker by his broad-­brimmed hat, we can look at other

Ink and Paper, Clamshells and Leather

elements of the depiction to see a Lenape assertion of strength in the relationship. The hat-­wearing colonist is indeed larger, but not necessarily more vital or healthy: in contrast to the Indian, the colonist is asymmetrical and thick, his head noticeably offset on his shoulders, and perhaps even hefting a pot belly. The grain-­rich European system of agriculture that provided colonists with a regular supply of abundant calories may have also promoted chronic diseases and physical infirmities that did not seem to plague the Lenapes. From their earliest encounters, European observers commented on the impressive physiques of Native Americans, and William Penn himself described the Lenapes as notably “tall, straight, well built, and of singular proportion.”17 If it was apparent to the Europeans, the Indians no doubt also noticed the contrast in the health of their physical forms, and the image on the belt may be an Indian acknowledgment of this European vulnerability. To the Lenapes, strength and weakness may well have been a more complicated matter than mere physical size. The rarity of the belt as an extant artifact lets us understand still more about Lenape environmental experiences. The Lenapes had a rich material culture, but their most common media of wood, hide, fiber, and leather were not long-­lasting. They also treated more durable items as ephemera rather than as permanent objects. Although wampum was at the center of the cultural complex that combined ceremonial practices with diplomatic proceedings among Native Americans in eastern North America, the belts were often disassembled for reuse once they had served their purposes in the rituals.18 Again, cultural practices intersect with the material nature of their artifacts; to Native negotiators, beads of clamshell endure against time, but treaties do not. The Lenapes would have seen no point in preserving a physical commemoration of an agreement that would, like all other social, political, and spiritual relationships, need to be constantly renewed and renegotiated. The Penn wampum belt survived because it was removed from the context of its creation when it passed into the Penn family’s hands, and the proprietor’s descendants treated it as a significant heirloom. Otherwise, the beads of the belt would have been scattered back into the diplomatic milieu of the colonial frontier. The relative scarcity of other extant Lenape material artifacts underscores the ephemerality of much of their material culture and the flexibility with which they engaged their environment. To invoke an environmentalist cliché that is nonetheless pertinent here, the Lenapes lived lightly on the land of the future Philadelphia—­in part because it was an exceptionally amenable place for human habitation and subsistence, tree-­covered and well-­watered with small creeks and streams that drained into the Schuylkill and the Delaware. Two geological regions intersect at Philadelphia: to the west of the city are the gentle hills and ridges of the Piedmont, which stretches to the Appalachian Mountains; to the east is the low and flat Inner Coastal Plain, extending to the Atlantic Ocean. This geological division bisects the city and is visible as the fall line that crosses the Schuylkill near present-­day Fairmount. The meeting of these geological zones created an aquatic edge effect (an area of exceptional biodiversity): multiple species of fish, shellfish, and edible reptiles filled the waters of the Inner Coastal

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Plain, while the many streams that plunged over the fall line from the Piedmont provided excellent sites for catching fish in traps.19 The geological features of the land attracted Indian and, later, European settlers, but the abundance of Philadelphia’s environment was more than an accident of nature. Despite both the gentle environmental tread of the Lenapes and “European images of an untouched Eden,” in the words of anthropologist Shepard Krech, “this nature was cultural not virgin, anthropogenic not primeval.”20 Indians dramatically reshaped their environment, perhaps most notably by deliberately setting fire to their forests. This method of environmental engineering cleared out tangles of underbrush that made travel difficult, encouraged grassy plants for deer and other game animals to thrive on, and created a sun-­ dappled parkland welcoming to human habitation. The ashes also fertilized the soil with potassium for gardens of corn, beans, and squash, which native women planted around their summertime villages.21 Lenape fires could be so great that Dutch sailor David de Vries, while approaching the mouth of the Delaware Bay in 1632, was able to perceive the smell of the burning before he saw land; he noted that the smoke “comes from the Indians setting fire, at this time of year, to the woods and thicket, in order to hunt.”22 These practices were part of a flexible system that shaped the nature of the people’s society as well as their relationship with the land. Unlike the more moderate European climates along the same latitudes, temperatures at Philadelphia fluctuated significantly with the seasons, and Lenape life fluctuated accordingly. In the warming days of spring, the Lenapes regrouped from their winter scattering in time to intercept the vernal migrations of eastern North America: geese and ducks on their way back from southern refuge, and successive runs of alewives, shad, and sturgeon returning from the ocean to spawn in fresh water. When the days grew longer and warmer still, groups dispersed again and moved inland to take advantage of summer’s growth. Women and men probably separated into gathering and hunting camps, respectively, with women tending their gardens and collecting berries, roots, mushrooms, and a broad variety of green edible plants. Men moved to the best locations for hunting the animals that provided summer’s meat. When the year turned toward fall, Lenape women gathered the ripe acorns and tree nuts of fall and harvested their gardens while men returned from their hunt. William Penn described a reunion from summer’s dispersion, noting that “in the Fall, when the Corn cometh in, they begin to feast one another” with dancing, music, and ritual celebration “to which all come that will.”23 In Philadelphia’s cold winters, the bare land could not support large concentrations of people, so the Lenapes dispersed again and scattered into camps of small family units.24 Forage could be scarce when plant foods were dormant, but hunting was good: winter animals were walking stores of calories and fur, and frequent snowfalls made for easy tracking.25 The forests of Philadelphia, then, were not at all empty or untouched by human hands. The Lenapes used them extensively, but flexibly. They settled and planted, but these settlements lacked the permanence of European-­style towns. The Lenapes

Ink and Paper, Clamshells and Leather

established most villages where smaller streams emptied into the Schuylkill or Delaware; the largest village, Passyunk, was a summer camp at the confluence of the two rivers themselves. Beginning with Lindeström’s survey of the Delaware, Europeans ascribed fixed names, derived from the Lenape language, to these villages.26 Passyunk meant “in the valley”; Wecacoe, in today’s South Philadelphia, meant “place of the pines at the head of a creek”; Nittabakonck, where the Wissahickon joins the Schuylkill, was the “place of the warrior”; Shackamaxon, the site of the legendary treaty and its elm, meant the “place of eels.” These names certainly tell us something about how food sources influenced Lenape environmental perceptions, but they also reveal European notions of place. It suited European notions of fixity to use descriptive phrases like “the place of the eels” as a permanent name for a place or settlement, but such an approach might have been foreign to a Lenape outlook. The Lenapes probably identified places with more awareness of the fluidity of their environment and the contextual nature of their engagement with it; “the place of eels” may not have been at the same fixed place every year, or the place described as Shackamaxon might not have been the place of eels at all to another kinship group, during a different season, or from one year to the next.27 But as European disease and settlement dispersed Indians from these places, colonists overlooked the agency of the fluid environmental phenomena from which the Lenape names had originated, and Passyunk and Wecacoe became fixed names for previously dynamic sites. Fluidity manifested in other areas of Lenape life. The relative rarity of the Penn wampum belt indicates that the Lenapes viewed ownership of material objects in transient terms. Their mobile use of the land meant that they carried very few possessions from place to place. With the exception of some items of European manufacture, it was often more efficient to make a new tool at the destination than to haul a burden of existing artifacts. The Lenapes also understood land ownership in a fluid sense. Communities could possess the right to hunt, fish, farm, or forage in particular places, but because of the abundance of terrain and resources relative to the size of the population, these understandings were flexibly conceived and did not require a rigid system of defined and defended boundaries. Moreover, to the Lenapes, land ownership was changeable in time as well as in place. The transfer of usufruct rights or other versions of ownership was a temporary arrangement, usually part of an exchange-­mediated relationship that needed to be periodically negotiated and renewed.28 The idea that any person could own a specific portion of land in perpetuity and exercise exclusive control over all its resources was foreign to the Lenapes but central to Penn’s vision. Perhaps nothing illustrates the contrast better than the Portraiture. Penn initially hoped to establish an expansive capital, eschewing the idea of a dense city in favor of a massive settlement of ten thousand acres along the Delaware River. Houses would be spread out on large lots with “ground on each side, for Gardens or Orchards or feilds [sic], that it may be a greene Country Towne, [which] will never be burnt, and allways be wholsome.”29 Although the idea of Philadelphia as “a greene country towne” later took on a

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life of its own, circumstances interfered with Penn’s vision and prevented the establishment of such a settlement: most of the land along the Delaware was already planted with the farms of Dutch and Swedish settlers, leaving no space for such an extensive town, and Penn’s colonists demanded a more practical commercial center for the colony. Penn abandoned his expansive vision and made plans for a smaller and more compact Philadelphia, located on about two square miles between the Schuylkill and the Delaware on land purchased from its Swedish occupants.30 Thomas Holme surveyed the land on Penn’s orders and created the Portraiture, a vision of nature controlled by straight lines and right angles. Penn saw a wilderness turned into a city as a means to an end: his idea of good environmental order was designed to promote good social order, a great concern of an idealist who wrote of his colony as a “holy experiment.”31 The historian Michael J. Chiarappa points to William Penn’s membership in the Royal Society, “a group with decidedly pragmatic views towards using nature,” to argue that he was part of a cohort of English thinkers that was willing to experiment with the connections between ordering nature and creating a stable society.32 In the Portraiture, five squares of open space, four of them drawn with neat rows of trees, depict the domestication of the land between the Delaware River and the Schuylkill. Historians cite a range of influences on William Penn’s urban vision, including Richard Newcourt’s plan for rebuilding London after the fire of 1666, the open spaces of seventeenth-­century London, the 1638 grid plan of New Haven in Connecticut, and the standard layout of the military camps of the nascent English empire.33 In doing so, however, they often take for granted the idea of fixity and the goal of rationalization in Penn’s vision of Philadelphia. These concepts are too self-­evident for more subtle examinations of seventeenth-­century urbanism, but fixity and rationalization are fundamental in the context of the encounter between colonists and Indians in Philadelphia. For all of the straight lines and regular spaces of the Portraiture’s grid, natural features such as creeks and streams intruded into the plan, suggesting that even the most optimistic promoters of the imagined city understood that the imposition of order on the environment would be complicated. It was; the reality of the colonial city never approached the vision of the Portraiture. The new citizens of Penn’s Philadelphia clustered at its eastern edge along the banks of the Delaware, unwilling to spread into the available space and live at a distance from one another. Even one hundred years after the city’s founding, most of Philadelphia’s population still lived on the banks of the Delaware; the rest of the space covered by the grid was largely rural or even remained forested.34 But still, the founders of Pennsylvania determinedly used the Portraiture and its grid as a blueprint of the systematic development of the environment. If the Lenapes had flexible place-­names for their settlements, Philadelphians were very deliberate in domesticating the environment by affixing permanent names to the grid. The name that Penn chose for the city had nothing of the environmental context that previous Lenape inhabitants had considered when

Ink and Paper, Clamshells and Leather

giving names on the same land. Penn’s selection of a foreign name for a distant city from an ancient book (in Revelation, the Greek city of Philadelphia in Asia Minor was promised the favor of God) was meant to convey his hopes for the spiritual future of the place, but it had nothing to do with his response to the physical place itself.35 Penn’s decision to name the east-­west lines of the grid after the trees of the region may initially appear to be more aligned with Lenape sensibilities, but the choice still focused on the domestication and control of the land and ultimately proved more coercive than responsive.36 Many of the tree species in Philadelphia were close American cousins of European varieties and so were familiar enough to excite exploitative imaginings rather than discomfort in an alien environment. Vine Street evoked William Penn’s thwarted hopes that the Philadelphia climate would be similar enough to the European Mediterranean, with which it shared a line of latitude, to produce excellent wines. Even more optimistic was Mulberry Street, hinting at the unrealized dream of many American colonizers of a successful sericulture (mulberry leaves being the preferred food of notoriously frangible baby silkworms) to compete with that of China, also at Philadelphia’s latitude. While no marketable wine or silk ever came from Philadelphia, these names imposed on the lines of the city’s grid reinforced its commodification of nature.37 European powers of environmental commodification extended far beyond the few square miles depicted in the Portraiture. Philadelphia functioned as a valve connecting Pennsylvania to the larger world; the city so profitably funneled the agricultural goods and natural resources of the region into the Atlantic economy that it quickly became the largest and richest city in British North America. The Portraiture played an important role in this transformation. The map was a reference and a blueprint but also an advertisement and an invitation. Penn printed and distributed the plan along with his pamphlet Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in America, a glowing description of the natural bounty and promise of the infant colony. The material on which this message was carried played an important role in shaping the city. While Indian wampum belts were ephemeral, European materials of paper and ink allowed for images and text to have a much longer-­lasting and widespread impact. As a material, paper is just absorbent enough to accept ink in proper measure for a precise image, durable and light enough to carry a message far, inexpensive enough to disseminate it widely. The sheets, made from the fibers of felled trees, were themselves an invitation to harvest the trees of American forests and make the forest into a city. While the precise impact of the Portraiture’s enticement is impossible to measure, people did come to the city. The success and growth of Philadelphia, though, was not without cost. Like any effort to establish control over the environment, Penn’s vision carried with it a dimension of social power, and the founding of Philadelphia created a catastrophe of Native American displacement, dispossession, and dispersal that undermined his goal of a peaceful relationship with the Lenapes.38 The orderly urban plan that Penn hoped would create a

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harmonious, prosperous colony left no space for Indian life and only attracted more land-­hungry European settlers. The Lenape and Quaker participants in the encounter at Philadelphia faced a divided future, but they colluded to distort an important dimension of the environmental and cultural history of the place. The Delaware Valley saw, in the words of the historian Jean R. Soderlund, “sixty-­five years of exchange, conflict, accommodation, and alliance between the Natives, and the Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and English,” not to mention the dispersal of the Lenape population from what would become Philadelphia and its settlement by Swedish farmers.39 If Benjamin West had been present to witness the single most important agreement that allowed for the founding of Philadelphia between newcomers and the people who lived on the land, he might have depicted the negotiations between Penn’s agents and a group of Swedish farmers. The founding myths of Philadelphia elide the existence of these “Old Settlers” and emphasize the importance of Native Americans. Such an arrangement fulfilled Penn’s need to establish the legitimacy and the exceptional nature of his colonial experiment, but it fulfilled Lenape needs as well. The historian Amy Schutt points out the importance in Lenape culture of “the building and renewal of relationships through processes of exchange,” which included land.40 Schutt observes that the Lenapes “apparently viewed early land sales as elements in the creation of relationships. Exchanging European goods for land or for rights to its use was not unlike exchanging presents to establish or renew treaty relationships between peoples.”41 Land, in this perception, was not an inert commodity to be traded, but an animated force that could shape and mediate human relationships. The Lenapes’ emphasis on the importance of exchange, however, led them to misfortune. For all his idealism, Penn was primarily a land speculator and Philadelphia was foremost a real estate venture. Penn’s success—­financially, socially, and spiritually—­depended on selling land to settlers. While other Europeans acquired American soil through conquest, Penn was determined to gain “peaceable possession” of it.42 To him, this meant obtaining land from Indians in a nonviolent manner that satisfied English legal standards for real estate transactions in order to gain legitimacy for his massive investment. Indians, willing to engage in traditional practices of negotiation and exchange in order to acquire and maintain power, complied with Penn’s wishes. However, the parties of this exchange could not forever overlook their different modes of environmental perception.43 The Lenapes exchanged land as something that they viewed as flexible, animated, and renegotiable to people who viewed what they received as fixed, inert, and exploitable. This incompatibility, or fundamental disagreement, over the meaning of land and its use sowed the seeds of conflict that would eventually bring terrible violence and racial hatred to the peoples of Penn’s Woods.44 It did not tragically emerge only after Pennsylvanians betrayed the legacy of the founder’s noble intentions and the goodwill of the people who gave him the wampum belt; it was there from the beginning, perhaps from the moment that Thomas Holme put pen to paper and sketched the first lines of the Portraiture.

1. See Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). 2. See Gary Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 25–­34. 3. On neglect, rediscovery, and restoration of the original squares depicted in the Portraiture, see Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 113–­19. 4. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, 1978), 86–­96; Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 95–­127. 5. Brian C. Black and Michael J. Chiarappa, eds., Nature’s Entrepôt: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). 6. Marshall Joseph Becker, “Lenape Land Sales, Treaties, and Wampum Belts,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 3 (1984): 356. For further treatments of the belt’s provenance, see Nash, First City, 27–­28; and Hampton L. Carson, A History of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1940), I:246. For a contrary view to my rejection of the Great Treaty’s historical reality, see Andrew Newman, On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 95–­132. 7. James H. Merrell, “The Indians’ New World: The Catawba Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 41 (1984): 537–­65. On cultural changes among these peoples, see Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jean R. Soderlund, Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society before William Penn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 8. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of

Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 43–­53. 9. For an analysis, from an archaeological perspective, that emphasizes the persistence of indigenous material culture among the Lenapes in the face of these colonial-­era changes, see R. Michael Stewart, “American Indian Archaeology of the Historic Period in the Delaware Valley,” in Historical Archaeology of the Delaware Valley, 1600–­1850, ed. Richard Veit and David Orr (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), 1–­48. 10. C. A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 98–­104. On trade and hybridity, see Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–­1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Soderlund, Lenape Country, 42. 11. Peter Lindeström, Geographia America, with an Account of the Delaware Indians, Based on Surveys and Notes Made In 1654–­ 1656, trans. Amandus Johnson (Philadelphia: Swedish Colonial Society, 1925), 170. 12. Alfred Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (1976): 289–­99; and Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972). 13. Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Peopling and Depeopling of Early Pennsylvania: Indians and Colonists, 1680–­1720,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116 (1992): 12–­13; Marshall Joseph Becker, “Lenape Population at the Time of European Contact: Estimating Native Numbers in the Lower Delaware Valley,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133 (June 1989): 112–­22. 14. Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–­1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 1–­22. 15. See W. C. Orchard and Frank G. Speck, “The Penn Wampum Belts,” Leaflets of

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notes

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the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation 4 (1925): 13. 16. Orchard and Speck, “Penn Wampum Belts,” 9; Newman, On Records, 129. Newman refers to an approach that seeks to interpret Native American experiences in the colonial period from an Indian point of view, one that “faces east” from Indian country toward the newcomers. See Richter, Facing East. 17. William Penn, A Letter to the Committee of Free Society of Traders (London: Andrew Sowle, 1683). 18. Becker, “Lenape Land Sales,” 355–­56. 19. John L. Cotter, Daniel G. Roberts, and Michael Parrington, The Buried Past: An Archaeological History of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 2–­3. 20. Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 122. Also see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); William M. Devenen, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 369–­85; Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005). 21. Becker, “Lenape Population,” 17–­118. 22. David de Vries, “From the ‘Korte Historiael Ende Journaels Aenteyckeninge,’” in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630–­1707, ed. Albert Cook Myers (New York: Scribner’s, 1912), 9. 23. Myers, Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, 233–­34. 24. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 34–­53. 25. Herbert C. Kraft, The Lenape: Archaeology, History, and Ethnography (New Brunswick: New Jersey Historical Society, 1986), 113. 26. Lindeström, Geographia America, 157–­73. 27. George P. Donehoo, Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1928); and Cotter, Roberts, and Parrington, Buried Past, 27–­28. Several sources also propose that Shackamaxon derives from sakimucheen, “the place where chiefs are made.” This interpretation probably follows from rather than proves the reality of the treaty.

28. See Cronon, Changes in the Land, 19–­33; and Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 36. 29. Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn, eds., The Papers of William Penn, Vol. II, 1680–­1684 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 121. 30. Hannah Benner Roach, “The Planting of Philadelphia: A Seventeenth-­Century Real Estate Development, I,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92 (1968): 19–­21; and Craig J. Zabel, “William Penn’s Philadelphia: The Land and the Plan,” in Nature’s Entrepôt, ed. Black and Chiarappa, 23–­24. 31. William Penn to James Harrison, 25 August 1681, in The Papers of William Penn II, 107. 32. Michael J. Chiarappa, “Fed by Adjoining Waters: The Delaware Estuary’s Marine Resources and the Shaping of Philadelphia’s Metropolitan Orbit,” in Nature’s Entrepôt, ed. Black and Chiarappa, 162. 33. Margaret B. Tinkcom, “Urban Reflections in a Trans-­Atlantic Mirror,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 100 (1976): 287–­313; Elizabeth Milroy, “‘For the Like Uses, as the Moore-Fields’: The Politics of Penn’s Squares,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 130 (2006): 257–­82; Zabel, “William Penn’s Philadelphia,” 24. 34. Zabel, “William Penn’s Philadelphia,” 23–­24; and Roach, “The Planting of Philadelphia,” 27–­28. 35. Rev. 3:7–­13. 36. Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn, “The Founding, 1681–­1701,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 7. 37. William Penn, Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in America (London: Benjamin Clark, 1681). 38. C. S. Lewis puts it well: “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 55. 39. Soderlund, Lenape Country, 4. I agree with Soderlund’s assertion that the Quakers elided the long history of European-­Lenape interactions on the Delaware before 1681, but differ with her

43. See Cronon, Changes in the Land, 53; and Richter, Facing East, 55. 44. See James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); and Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007). For an analysis that gives special attention to this conflict over perceptions of land ownership, see Daniel K. Richter, Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 155–­76.

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on a related point. She sees a founding mythology in which “the Lenapes are often portrayed as a weak people lacking the numbers and fortitude to defend their homeland,” while I assert that it served the purposes of the myth to exaggerate the Lenapes’ strength and disposition in 1681. 40. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 32. 41. Ibid., 34. 42. See Sugrue, “The Peopling and Depeopling of Early Pennsylvania,” 15–­20; and Steven Craig Harper, Promised Land: Penn’s Holy Experiment, the Walking Purchase, and the Dispossession of the Delawares, 1600–­1763 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2006), 21–­45.

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2 “Processes of Nature and Art” The Ecology of Charles Willson Peale’s Smoke-­Eaters and Stoves lau ra t ur ner i g o e

In an 1802 letter to his sons Rembrandt and Rubens, the artist and museum proprietor Charles Willson Peale described a series of fuel-­efficient stoves installed in his Philadelphia Museum, once located on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House. These stoves, called “smoke-­eaters,” drew smoke back down into the fire to undergo combustion a second time, expelling clean, warm air outside of the building via hidden pipes underneath the floor, and causing “much wonder as the doors are open and no smoke comes into the room.” According to the letter, Peale installed a mirror on an altar-­shaped stove at the west end of the museum’s long main room, “makeing it emblamatical [sic] of Truth.” At the opposite end of the same room stood an additional stove, shaped like a classical column, plastered and painted white to resemble marble. A bust of Cicero topped this stove, but Peale hoped to replace the Roman orator with a portrait of the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Peale experienced difficulty choosing an appropriate bust for his third smoke-­eater in the adjoining Quadruped Room, since he was reluctant to move the figure of Truth from its current location. Ultimately, Peale preferred to display a personification of Nature, but worried that the allegorical figure’s uncovered breasts would “afford occasion to excite indelicate remarks of the inconsiderate, and nothing must have a place in this museum which can call up a blush.”1 An extant sketch of the columnar smoke-­eater (fig. 2.1), the only surviving pictorial representation of the stoves, reinforces the corporeal presence of these inventions as described by Peale. With its erect form and internal circulatory

“Processes of Nature and Art” fig. 2.1 Charles Willson Peale, “The Smoke-­Eater,” from The Weekly Magazine (Philadelphia), July 21, 1798. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

system, topped by a sculptural head, the stove evokes a human body in appearance and structure. Even the term “smoke-­eater” invites comparison to the bodily process of consumption; a stove efficiently inhaling oxygen and expelling or consuming noxious smoke mirrored biological mechanisms of circulation, respiration, and digestion. While Peale saturated his models with metaphors of the body and its internal processes, he expressly designed his heating devices to address two related environmental ills facing Philadelphia: the “economy of fuel” and the “evil of smoke,” which were closely linked to regional deforestation, diminishing urban air quality, and devastating outbreaks of yellow fever.2 According to Peale scholar David Ward, the artist-­curator employed a “network of institutions”—­including his large, artistically inclined family and the museum—­to “shape health and the environment” in Philadelphia.3 By ascribing to Peale ultimate power to “shape” his world, however, such an interpretation overlooks the myriad nonhuman forces that inflected visual and material production in the early republic. Even before the modern articulation of “ecology” as a scientific concept by late-­nineteenth-­ century naturalists such as Ernst Haeckel, the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman agents became evident in early national life, especially when urban citizens encountered certain unruly or cataclysmic subversions of perceived

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systems of order. In Philadelphia, the U.S. capital from 1790 to 1800 and America’s leading metropolis until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, such disorder took on national significance. Deforestation, smoke, disease, and other environmental problems challenged the prevailing classical conception of a static, harmonious nature embodied in Peale’s museum displays, showing specimens arranged neatly and hierarchically according to the Linnaean system of classification. Philadelphia’s urban ecological concerns destabilized deeply ingrained beliefs about human dominion and reoriented public attention to the many ways nonhuman agents—­trees, air, and water—­impacted the city and its inhabitants. Peale’s fireplaces and stoves responded to these dynamic forces of change by promoting efficient fuel and smoke consumption while attempting to provide a model of corporeal equilibrium to his museum visitors. In other words, despite his commitment to classical concepts of order and harmony in nature, Peale’s designs indicated that humans would have to modify their own consumption in order to adapt to transforming environmental realities. While modern disciplinary specialization has encouraged separate treatment of human and natural history, this chapter utilizes an ecocritical approach to reintegrate the processes of nature and art within our understanding of urban life in the early republic.4 Although Peale’s fireplaces and stoves directly engaged shifting ecological conditions, his models reinforced racial hierarchies by attempting to order, refine, and cleanse imagined social-­environmental dangers of blackness that threatened to subsume Philadelphia at the time. The cleansing process metaphorically encompassed perceived subaltern bodies of African Americans, who occupied an ambiguous role within the early republic—­especially in Philadelphia—­as a result of uncertainties about slavery and citizenship. Peale’s smoke-­eaters underscored a growing public association of black skin with smoke and disease as the city confronted yellow fever and increasingly polluted air. A close analysis of Peale’s fuel-­efficient, smoke-­consuming devices therefore reveals a number of related social, political, economic, and environmental concerns in the early republic. While his family’s many artistic and cultural achievements have received much scholarly attention in the past few decades, Charles Willson Peale’s interest in fuel economy and fireplace design has been largely ignored, even though he spent considerable time and creative energy on these endeavors.5 Evidence of such concerns quietly informs a famous group portrait that he produced between 1773 and 1809, showing his large family engaged in the various activities of child-­ minding, sketching, and painting, bookended at left by a picture of three maidens signifying “Concordia Animae,” or “agreement of the spirits,” and at right by a mantel, indicating the presence of an unseen fireplace (fig. 2.2). Adorning the mantel in a place of honor appear four classically inspired busts; one is cropped so the face is obscured and the other three represent Peale himself, his teacher Benjamin West, and a patron named Edmund Jennings.6 The artist also appears in the flesh at left, standing in front of the “Concordia Animae” painting and leaning over to observe the activities of his loved ones below. His outstretched right hand with palette of paints, together with the fireplace across the room,

“Processes of Nature and Art” fig. 2.2 Charles Willson Peale, The Peale Family (Peale Family Group), 1773–1809. Oil on canvas, 56½ × 89½ in. New-­York Historical Society, 1867.298.

forms a book-­like enclosure that seems to embrace the family, demonstrating the equal importance of mechanical and fine arts in the Peale household. Charles Willson Peale had already begun to experiment with heating devices in his museum when the American Philosophical Society, promoting its mission to expand upon useful knowledge in the young United States, offered a premium of sixty dollars for the improvement of fireplaces or stoves in May of 1796. The advertisement for the contest stated that these designs should “benefit . . . the poorer class of people . . . to this end, the stove should be cheap, and of durable material; should afford the necessary degree of a salubrious and durable heat, with the least expense of fuel possible.”7 In response, Peale and his son Raphaelle submitted a set of five diminutive fireplace models, constructed in white pine and paper and ranging in size from five to ten inches in height.8 Their “chimney for a parlour” (fig. 2.3) drew upon a set of recognizable symbols of classical refinement—­Arcadian landscapes, columns, garland reliefs—­in offering a vision of virtuous, tasteful domestic life. While the exact roles of father and son in designing and constructing the models are unclear, Charles Willson’s earlier experiments and ongoing activities with heating devices suggest that he was the driving human force behind these miniature designs. For their models, the Peales appropriated the designs of Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford), earlier fireplace inventors who both grappled with issues of fuel efficiency. Prior to his own experiments in heating technologies, Peale warmed his parlor with a smaller variation of the cast iron Franklin stove designed by David Rittenhouse, the Philadelphia astronomer, clockmaker, surveyor, and inventor.9 The Peales’ fireplace models combined the Rittenhouse stove design with the slanted jambs from Rumford’s chimneys

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fig. 2.3 Charles Willson Peale and Raphaelle Peale (attrib.), “Chimney for a Parlour” model, 1796–97. Wood, paper, and metal, 9¾ × 5¼ × 3¼ in. American Philosophical Society.

fig. 2.4 James Trenchard, after a drawing by Charles Willson Peale (attrib.), “Perspective View of the Country between Wilmington and the Delaware,” from the Columbian Magazine, April 1787. Engraving. Courtesy Winterthur Museum, Bequest of Henry Francis du Pont, 1959.1387.

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and added mechanisms to improve fire safety. American Philosophical Society members could manipulate and test these mechanisms on the miniature “chimney for a parlour” by rotating vents and opening and shutting the sliding metal door beneath the mantel. The damper at the back of the chimney could also be closed in order to simulate the method for preventing smoke from escaping into the room or quickly extinguishing the fire. Using the pseudonym “Oeconomy,” the Peales won the premium from the Society in 1799 for their designs and received the first patent for a fireplace in the United States.10 The issue of fuel economy concerned scientific institutions and natural philosophers throughout the eighteenth century, both in the United States and abroad. Many urban centers, including Philadelphia, contended with the escalating cost of heating homes and businesses due to rapid depletion of easily accessible firewood. Already in 1744, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Wood, our common Fewl, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some Towns, and make a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families.”11 The northeastern firewood market depended on the variable conditions of early national waterways and roads, which were frequently blocked by snow or ice in cold winters when demand for fuel increased. After the Revolutionary War, bituminous coal from Great Britain and Virginia supplemented Philadelphia’s use of firewood, but not enough to satisfy the fuel requirements of the city’s growing population. From 1754 to 1800, the price of firewood in Philadelphia nearly tripled as demand for the dwindling resource escalated.12 While Peale did not comment specifically on deforestation, an engraving attributed to him from a 1787 issue of the Columbian Magazine (fig. 2.4) captures the impact of widespread development on the local landscape.13 Depicting a portion of the country between Wilmington, Delaware, and the Delaware River,

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the engraving portrays a wide swath of undulating farmland punctuated with houses, fences, cattle, and a pair of travelers on horseback. A tall, barren tree cuts through the center of the horizontal composition like a dark gash interrupting the otherwise bucolic, ordered landscape. Its upraised branches frame a lone bird that traverses the sky. In 1795, the Irish traveler Isaac Weld noted that the countryside near Philadelphia was well cultivated, with neat houses, but the land itself was bare in appearance, “totally stripped of trees which have been cut down without mercy for firing and to make way for the plough.”14 Even while the countryside in Peale’s engraving appears to be fertile and productive, the prominent, gnarled tree and lone stump (in the right foreground) serve as visual remnants of the abundant forests that recede into the background of the composition.15 For the overmantel decoration in their miniature “chimney for a parlour” (see fig. 2.3), the Peales featured a very different sort of landscape: rolling hills, winding river, and tall, willowy tree—­the very antithesis of Peale’s earlier engraving of the deforested Delaware countryside. In both iconography and medium (wood and paper), the overmantel scene alludes to the dwindling resource that fueled such fireplaces and their innovative designs. A lightly sketched Arcadian scene on the central panel of the frieze beneath the overmantel and above the hearth thwarts an accurate identification, but it appears to depict an animal sacrifice in which three figures and a goat or sheep approach a deity on a pedestal. The significance of fire and burning in such a classical scene links it thematically with the modern combustion device on which it is delineated. Such visual allusions to wood fuel through material and ornament—­including Peale’s proposed installation of the figure of “Nature” on one of his smoke-­eaters—­projected ideals of earthly abundance and connected the stove models to the landscape that fueled them. These ornamental additions attempted to naturalize technology by implying that the Peales’ mechanical designs preserved forest resources through their efficient operation. While only a select group of enlightened specialists at the American Philosophical Society could admire and manipulate the miniature fireplace models, the general public encountered Peale’s full-­size smoke-­eaters in his Philadelphia Museum.16 An institution displaying art, scientific specimens, and intellectual pursuits all under one roof, the museum organized its collection according to the Linnaean system of taxonomy, which represented the natural world as an interdependent hierarchy of distinct species and genera. Peale believed in the classical idea of a Great Chain of Being, which stipulated that all organisms existed within a linear, hierarchical series, progressing from the basest matter to the most perfect form of creation: man. For Peale, the natural world offered a model of divine plenitude and harmony for all citizens, even as man, through the mechanical arts, could also shape and improve it.17 This theme of balance and harmony in nature, promoted through the displays in the Philadelphia Museum, served as the foundation of Peale’s fireplace designs and his theories of bodily health. His use of the pseudonym “Oeconomy” in submitting the fireplace models to the American Philosophical Society was probably intended to invoke an influential 1749 essay by Linnaeus titled “The Oeconomy of Nature,” which addressed the natural

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equilibrium and interrelationships of various species in their cycles of growth and decay. As previously mentioned, Peale planned to install a bust of the Swedish naturalist on one of the smoke-­eaters in his museum, suggesting that he perceived a connection between the stove’s efficient circulation and Linnaeus’s theory. Within the museum space, Peale’s stoves acquired a physical presence as upright forms topped with busts of allegorical or intellectual figures such as Nature and Cicero. According to his personal correspondence, the smoke-­eater stove illustrated in The Weekly Magazine (see fig. 2.1) stood in the center of the museum’s Long Room. Peale installed an opening in the flue that connected the stove to the chimney “in order to shew that no smoke went through it, of course it was consumed, putting your hand in this opening a moisture would rest on the hand, which the moisture of the wood in burning threw out, but no smoke was seen, or even smelt on the hand.”18 In other words, the smoke-­eaters not only resembled bodies in structure and external appearance, but they also generated warmth, much like a living body. As Peale’s descriptions suggest, museum visitors engaged directly with the stoves by opening doors to view the wondrous interior processes of smoke consumption. Actively exploring these devices and peering into the mirror accentuating the altar-­shaped stove representing “Truth” encouraged visitors to understand these inventions as reflections of themselves. In addressing fuel efficiency and smoke consumption, however, Peale’s stoves unintentionally highlighted the limits and problems involved in the consumption of essential natural resources while also exposing certain environmental inequalities that further challenged the harmonious, hierarchical worldview epitomized by the Philadelphia Museum displays. The heating devices suggest that Philadelphians became increasingly attuned to how the availability—­or scarcity—­of certain resources could drastically transform urban development, expansion, and daily life. By implicitly acknowledging that humans had to alter their modes of consumption in response to a growing scarcity of wood, Peale’s fireplaces and stoves questioned the classical conception of a static, ordered nature during the early republic.19 Peale’s models took on a special urgency amid recurring concerns about bodily health and air quality in late-­eighteenth-­century Philadelphia. At that time, the city was still recovering from the first major urban yellow fever epidemic in the United States, which decimated Philadelphia’s population in 1793. Periodic outbreaks continued through the 1790s, including the summer of 1798, when the administration of John Adams was forced to move temporarily to Trenton, New Jersey.20 That same year, the fever also claimed the life of Peale’s eighteen-­year-­old son, Titian, whose early inclination toward the natural sciences prompted Peale to proclaim him the future “Linnaeus of America.”21 Nearly a century before Carlos Finlay and Walter Reed proved that mosquitos spread the blood-­borne disease, Philadelphia physicians were divided between two schools of thought regarding the cause of yellow fever. Contagionists at the College of Physicians recognized that fevers were distinct diseases, spread by contact with the infected, and they advocated for the quarantine of ships arriving from foreign ports. A climatist faction of doctors, however, argued that all fevers were variations of the same disease,

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caused by immediate environmental conditions. Benjamin Rush, who established the Academy of Medicine to counter the College of Physicians and promote this doctrine of local origins, insisted that “highly putrid and offensive” effluvia emanating from a shipment of damaged coffee near the Delaware waterfront caused the 1793 outbreak. Urban life was immersed in a frequently overwhelming sea of sight, sounds, and smells, prompting the widespread belief among residents and physicians that strong odors inhaled into the body possessed the power to either sicken or cure. According to Rush, fever thrived in the city as opposed to the country, where “pure air” diluted the “miasmata”—­unhealthy smells and vapors—­that characterized the urban atmosphere.22 Even the physician and devoted contagionist William Currie believed that polluted air encouraged the spread of fever. He wrote: “In populous cities in sultry weather, the exhalations, from the vaults, privies, sinks, sewers, gutters, shambles, slaughter-­houses, tan-­yards, from respiration, and the combustion of fuel, and a variety of other processes of nature and art, are inconceivably great. Nor can such exhalations fail of filling the air with a noxious mass of invisible corpuscles.”23 Currie’s passage maps an urban assemblage of various odors—­including the “combustion of fuel”—­emanating from the wastes and exhalations of humans, animals, and resources consumed within the city, explicitly linking the “processes of nature and art” within a web of “invisible corpuscles” infecting Philadelphia. Peale also recognized the close connection of nature and art in the promotional materials for his museum. A 1788 ticket proclaimed, “Admit the Bearer to Peales Museum, containing the Wonderfull works of NATURE! And curious works of ART.”24 For Peale, Currie, and others, therefore, “nature and art” were important coconstituents of the urban environment. This emphasis on a mesh of environmental factors facilitating the spread of disease proved problematic at a time when the political well-­being of the nation was closely tied to the physical health of its citizens. In 1789, Rush wrote to John Adams, “Passions produce fewer diseases in a republic than in a monarchy. [Therefore,] the effects of the political passions upon health and life will be still less perceptible in our country.”25 This connection of public and political health made the yellow fever epidemic particularly challenging. Since Rush and his followers attributed the spread of disease to environmental conditions, the noxious urban atmosphere—­including smoke—­affected not only the health of the individual body but the political body of the nation as well. The presence of disease additionally signaled that something was inadequate or failing within the national body itself.26 When envisioning an efficient heating device that responded to these interrelated concerns regarding physical and political health, Charles Willson Peale embraced metaphors of circulation and respiration evident in the natural world and the human body. A written description of his fireplace models, published in the American Philosophical Society Transactions, contains multiple metaphorical references to chimney anatomy, including “arms,” “tongues of sliding mantel,” “breast work,” “marble cheeks,” and the “throat of the chimney.”27 Franklin, as a point of comparison, did not use any of these corporeal terms in describing his Pennsylvania

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fireplace.28 Peale’s respiratory vocabulary—­cheeks, tongue, throat, and breast—­ closely aligns the efficient burning of fuel with the inhalations and exhalations of a human body. Such a conflation of body and machine was not uncommon in eighteenth-­century medical publications, where organic and mechanical processes were frequently intertwined. For example, in The Art of Preventing Disease and Restoring Health, published in New York in 1794, Doctor George Wallis proclaimed it was “unavoidable to give some account of the human machine, with regard to the structure, dependencies, and action of its parts.”29 Similarly, Charles Willson Peale used mechanical terms to refer to the body by observing that improper modes of living “wear out the machine,” leading to an early demise.30 When viewing the smoke-­eaters within Peale’s museum, whether appreciating their warmth or opening a door to observe the consumption of smoke, visitors perceived an efficiently operating body with structural integrity that stood in stark contrast to the fever-­wracked figure that terrified the city nearly every summer. According to Rush, symptoms of the fever included suffusion of blood in the face, hemorrhages from the nose and ears, excessive vomiting, diarrhea, and even “eruptions of various kinds on the skin,” as if internal processes bubbled up and through the surface of the body, causing it to break down and dissolve.31 Peale’s fireplace and stove models, therefore, in their rational, classical forms, provided an ideal counterpoint to the messy, amorphous, diseased body that haunted early national Philadelphia citizens. These technological bodies operated on a paradigm of visibility and legibility, whereas yellow fever proved frustratingly elusive, opaque, and inexplicable. The stoves could be controlled and manipulated, improving air quality and educating the public as to how a body should aspire to equilibrium, for the benefit of their own health and that of the nation’s political body as well. Certain bodies, however, occupied a more tenuous position in this discourse on environment, air quality, and public health. In 1787, a decade before he constructed his first fireplaces, Charles Willson Peale depicted a figure intimately connected to their operation: the chimney sweep. Peale’s etching, The Accident in Lombard Street (fig. 2.5), depicts a young white girl who, after absent-­mindedly dropping her pie on the ground, has been surrounded by barking dogs and mocking chimney sweeps. Text accompanies the image: The pye from the Bake-­house she had bought But let it fall for want of thought And laughing Sweeps collect around The pye that’s scatter’d on the ground The dark, sooty faces of the sweeps obscure their racial identity, but their ragged clothes and amusement at the girl’s misfortune suggest a low moral character and marginal position within urban society. Peale and his family lived on Lombard Street, in the large house on the left, foreground corner, in front of which walks a tall, upright woman who has managed to remain attentive to

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fig. 2.5 Charles Willson Peale, The Accident in Lombard Street, 1787. Etching. Courtesy Winterthur Museum. Museum purchase with funds provided by Caroline Clendenin Ryan Foundation, Inc., 1962.88A,B.

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her pie. This image, therefore, is not only a commentary on foolish carelessness; it is also a statement on the moral superiority and virtuousness of the Peale household. Peale’s house stands tall and unsullied, in contrast to the darkened sweeps and frantic girl; the building even bears a fire mark beneath the upper attic window, indicating that the house is responsibly insured from fire.32 Because the position was so hazardous and undesirable, chimney sweeping was overwhelmingly conducted by free black men and young boys in the decades after the Revolutionary War, as illustrated by a wood engraving from the popular illustrated text The Cries of Philadelphia (fig. 2.6).33 Here, the engraver’s dense hatching of parallel lines overwrites the sweeps’ facial details and expression, obfuscating any sense of identity or agency. On the roof of the structure in the background, a shadowy figure emerges from, or descends into, the chimney like a puff of smoke, visually equating the sweep with the soot he was hired to remove. Because physicians initially believed they were immune to yellow fever, the city’s black population also became visible harbingers of death, as they were enlisted as nurses, corpse collectors, and hearse drivers during the 1793 epidemic. Rush, an active abolitionist, noted the dire situation of a patient who woke in the night and “saw through the broken and faint light of a candle, no human creature, but a black nurse, perhaps asleep in a distant corner of the room, and who heard no noise, but that of a hearse conveying perhaps, a neighbor or friend, to the grave.”34 Rush here positioned the black nurse as a nonhuman presence, and by rhyming “nurse” with “hearse,” the physician implied an uneasy connection between the two terms.35

Peale himself promoted harmonious relations between races but also believed in a natural hierarchy and subordination of blacks to whites. David Brigham has demonstrated that, even though Peale advertised his museum as accessible to all, the majority of the subscribers and patrons who attended exhibits and lectures, sat for silhouettes, and donated objects were white men.36 Peale lobbied for the Pennsylvania legislation that required the manumission of slaves over the age of twenty-­eight, freeing his own slaves, Lucy and Scarborough, in 1786. Their son, Moses Williams, however, remained a slave in the Peale household until 1802, after which he continued to cut silhouettes in the Philadelphia Museum. As Brigham, Gwendolyn Shaw, and others have explained, while Peale educated Williams in taxidermy, animal husbandry, museum operations, and the physiognotrace used to cut silhouettes, he did not teach him the fine art of painting, as he did for his own sons.37 In 1799, Peale advertised the display of an “Ourang Outang, or Wild Man of the Woods” in his museum with an engraving of the ape standing upright, gazing directly at the viewer, and holding a stick like a gentleman holding a cane. This depiction purposefully blurred the boundaries between humans and apes. In a description of the museum and its collections, Peale described the orangutan as “next to man” and explained that the audience’s first reaction to the specimen would be “How like an old Negro,” essentially designating blacks as intermediaries between apes and whites in Peale’s natural hierarchy.38 Peale demonstrated his own awareness of the close association between the black body and soot by publicizing an exhibition of life-­size wax figures of different races in his museum, including “the North American Savage and the Savage of South America,” “a labouring Chinese and the Chinese Gentleman,” and the “sooty African.”39 In the same advertisement promoting his wax figures, Peale emphasized the wholesome atmosphere of the museum building, claiming that it “stands in an airy and healthy situation . . . free from the epidemic that at present afflicts the city.”40 This “airy and healthy situation” would soon be even more improved by the addition of his cleansing smoke-­eaters in 1798.41 At a time of high anxiety regarding yellow fever and air quality, a visitor to Peale’s museum could view the smoke-­eater, in its whitewashed neoclassical

“Processes of Nature and Art”

fig. 2.6 “Chimneysweep,” from The Cries of Philadelphia: Ornamented with Elegant Wood Cuts (Philadelphia: Johnson and Warner, 1810), 32. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, DAMS #1091.

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form, consuming smoke and soot embodied metaphorically by the nearby wax African figure’s dark skin. Such a display provided audiences with two contrasting corporeal visions: one mechanical, clean, and rational, and the other “sooty” and unsanitary. Within the context of an increasing population of freed blacks in Philadelphia following the American Revolution and Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition of slavery beginning in 1780, Peale’s stoves reinforced the social hierarchy on display within his museum and reaffirmed white superiority.42 This reinforcement of social hierarchy is evident in the distribution of Peale’s fireplace and stove designs as well. Although Peale’s fireplace designs have been understood as examples of eighteenth-­century “fuel philanthropy,” their high cost, partially resulting from Peale’s own assessment of patent fees, kept them out of the reach of all but wealthy patrons or large institutions.43 The technological and aesthetic complexity of several of his designs, especially the smoke-­eaters, made them too costly for most Americans to afford and too complicated to reproduce for wide distribution. Although studied and praised by members of the American Philosophical Society and wondered over by museum visitors, ultimately Peale’s fireplace and stove designs did not benefit “the poorer class of people” as envisioned. Attending to the environmental context of Peale’s fireplace and stove designs uncovers a rich and complex story connecting deforestation, air pollution, public health, and race in early national Philadelphia, one shaped by both human and nonhuman protagonists. While attempting to improve the consumption of wood and smoke through layered references to the human form and corporeal processes, Peale’s models unintentionally challenged his museum’s conception of a static, ordered nature through their implicit acknowledgment that humans had to alter their modes of consumption in response to a growing scarcity of wood. They additionally reinforced racial hierarchy and environmental inequality at a time when ideas about soot, black skin, and disease became increasingly intertwined. Peale’s mechanical and artistic designs demonstrate that environmental forces played a significant part in shaping urban life and artistic production in the decades following U.S. independence, in a time of social, political, economic, and ecological change.

notes

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1. Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt Peale and Rubens Peale, Philadelphia, December 12, 1802, in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, ed. Lillian B. Miller and Sidney Hart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 2:472–­73. 2. Charles Willson Peale, “Smoke Eaters,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, December 11, 1802. I am not the first to reflect upon the anthropomorphic qualities of nineteenth-­century American stoves. In his essay in the anthology, American Artifacts, Joel Pfister investigates

a Victorian-­era parlor stove, also decorated with pastoral figures and Arcadian scenes, which he describes as a “hungry creature that demands to be fed, emptied, and cleaned.” Pfister, however, interprets the stove and its occlusion of the open hearth as a more nefarious presence in the context of rapid mid-­nineteenth-­century industrialization, dangerous work in coal-­ burning factories, and social alienation. He only briefly touches upon issues of fuel efficiency and deforestation in New England. Joel Pfister, “A Garden in the









of the American Philosophical Society,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 5 (1802): 320–­24. In a catalogue of the American Philosophical Society’s collections, Robert P. Multhauf identified “Oeconomy” as an anonymous inventor and proposed that Charles Willson and Raphaelle presented two models, a “common chimney altered” and a “chimney for a parlour” to the American Philosophical Society separate from the contest. According to Charles Coleman Sellers, “Oeconomy” was, in fact, the Peales’ pseudonym: “[In] March 15, 1799, a committee reported that the paper of ‘Oeconomy,’ though ‘not entirely original,’ was fully deserving of the award. On June 21 it was duly conferred, and the winner revealed as Charles Willson Peale and his son Raphaelle.” According to Sellers, “Oeconomy” submitted a set of five models, including the two attributed to the Peales by Multhauf. Since four of the five remaining fireplace and stove models in the American Philosophical Society Museum’s collection are numbered, as if received as a group, I am ascribing all five models to the Peales. Multhauf, Catalogue of Instruments, 55–­58; Sellers, “Charles Willson Peale,” 31. Hart ignores these models completely in his discussion of Peale’s experiments with heating devices. Hart, “‘To Encrease the Comforts of Life,’” 335–­41. 9. The Rittenhouse stove also contained a back plate angled downward to direct heat into the room. “Formerly [my parlor] was warmed by a fire made in one of the best constructed open stoves, being an improvement of Mr. Rittenhouse on Dr. Franklin’s stove.” Charles Willson Peale, “A Letter from Mr. C. W. Peale to the Editor of the Weekly Magazine,” Weekly Magazine, March 31, 1798. 10. The Peales reference their attainment of the patent in their published description of the fireplace models. Peale and Peale, “Description of Some Improvements,” 321; Miller and Hart, eds., Selected Papers, 5:239n102; Hart, “‘To Encrease the Comforts of Life,’” 337–­38. 11. Benjamin Franklin, An Account of the New Invented Pennsylvanian Fire-­Places (Philadelphia: Franklin, 1744), 2. 12. Sean Patrick Adams, “Warming the Poor and Growing Consumers: Fuel

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Machine: Reading a Mid-­Nineteenth-­ Century, Two-­Cylinder Parlor Stove as Cultural Text,” in American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture, ed. Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 157, 162. 3. David C. Ward, Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 101. 4. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–­222; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 5. For sources that mention the Peales’ fireplace designs in passing, see Priscilla J. Brewer, From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America, 1st ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 42–­52; Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., “Heating Stoves in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia,” Bulletin for the Association for Preservation Technology 3, no. 2/3 (1971): 64–­65, 86–­88; Sidney Hart, “‘To Encrease the Comforts of Life’: Charles Willson Peale and the Mechanical Arts,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 110, no. 3 (July 1986): 335–­41; Robert P. Multhauf, A Catalogue of Instruments and Models in the Possession of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1961), 55–­58; Edgar Preston Richardson, Brooke Hindle, and Lillian B. Miller, Charles Willson Peale and His World (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1983), 149–­50; Charles Coleman Sellers, “Charles Willson Peale with Patron and Populace. A Supplement to ‘Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale’. With a Survey of His Work in Other Genres,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 59, no. 3 (1969): 31. 6. New-York Historical Society, Catalogue of American Portraits in the New-York Historical Society, vol. 2 (New Haven: Published for the New-York Historical Society by Yale University Press, 1974), 609–­11. 7. “Advertisement,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): v. 8. Charles Willson Peale and Raphaelle Peale, “Description of Some Improvements in the Common Fire-­Place, Accompanied with Models, Offered to the Consideration

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Philanthropy in the Early Republic’s Urban North,” Journal of American History 95, no. 1 (2008): 70; Donna J. Rilling, Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism: Builders in Philadelphia, 1790–­1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 91–­93. See also Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–­1776 (New York: Knopf, 1955), 25–­27. 13. See Edgar Preston Richardson, “Charles Willson Peale’s ‘Engravings in the Year of National Crisis, 1787,’” Winterthur Portfolio 1 (1964): 166–­81. 14. Isaac Weld Jr., Travels through the States of North America . . . , 2nd ed. (London: Printed for J. Stockdale, 1799), 1:31–­32; E. McSherry Fowble, Two Centuries of Prints in America, 1680–­1880: A Selective Catalogue of the Winterthur Museum Collection (Charlottesville, VA: Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum by the University Press of Virginia, 1987), #272. 15. Peale’s engraving is an early example of a longer tradition of nineteenth-­century tree stump iconography. According to Nicolai Cikovsky, the stump in post-­ 1825 landscape painting conveyed conflicted feelings of conquest and loss that attended the civilizing of America. Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., “‘The Ravages of the Axe’: The Meaning of the Tree Stump in Nineteenth-­Century American Art,” Art Bulletin 61, no. 4 (December 1979): 611–­26. 16. As Alexander Nemerov has explained, the small scale of these devices relegated them to the realm of the elite, since only a select group could view, handle, and comprehend them at a given moment. Alexander Nemerov, Mammoth Scale: The Anatomical Sculptures of William Rush (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute, 2002), 10. See also Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 1st paperback ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 17. See David R. Brigham, “‘Ask the Beasts, and They Shall Teach Thee’: The Human Lessons of Charles Willson Peale’s Natural History Displays,” Huntington Library Quarterly 59, no. 2/3 (1996): 183–­ 206; Ward, Charles Willson Peale, 155–­92. 18. Charles Willson Peale, “Autobiography,” in Selected Papers, ed. Miller and Hart, 5:239.

19. For a history of the growing acceptance of extinction and limits in the early republic, see Mark V. Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15–­46. See also Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2–­55. 20. See J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith, eds., A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (Canton, MA: Published for the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Library Company of Philadelphia by Science History Publications/USA, 1997); Simon Finger, The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). 21. Charles Willson Peale, Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on the Science of Nature; with Original Music, Composed for, and Sung on, the Occasion: Delivered in the Hall of the Universiy [sic] of Pennsylvania, Nov. 8, 1800 (Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson Jr., 1800), 47. 22. Benjamin Rush, An Enquiry into the Origin of the Late Epidemic Fever in Philadelphia . . . (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1793), 6–­9. 23. William Currie, A Treatise on the Synochus Icteroides, or Yellow Fever; as It Lately Appeared in the City of Philadelphia . . . (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1794), 72; Finger, Contagious City, 154–­55. 24. Brigham, “‘Ask the Beasts,’” 205, fig. 8. 25. Benjamin Rush to John Adams, Philadelphia, June 15, 1789. Benjamin Rush, Letters, ed. L. H Butterfield (Princeton, NJ: Published for the American Philosophical Society by Princeton University Press, 1951), 517. 26. Benjamin Rush, An Oration, Delivered before the American Philosophical Society . . . (Philadelphia: Charles Cist, 1786); Jacquelyn C. Miller, “The Body Politic and the Body Somatic: Benjamin Rush’s Fear of Social Disorder and His Treatment of Yellow Fever,” in A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, ed. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 61–­74.

37. Brigham, “‘Ask the Beasts,’”; Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “‘Moses Williams, Cutter of Profiles’: Silhouettes and African American Identity in the Early Republic,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149, no. 1 (March 2005): 22–­39; Ellen Sacco, “Racial Theory, Museum Practice: The Colored World of Charles Willson Peale,” Museum Anthropology 20, no. 2 (1996): 25–­32. 38. Charles Willson Peale, “A Walk through the Philadelphia Museum,” 1805–­6, 7, Peale Family Papers, coll. 0481, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic, 130. 39. Charles Willson Peale, “Peale’s Museum,” Aurora General Advertiser, September 30, 1797. 40. Ibid. 41. Peale advertised his wax figures in the Aurora General Advertiser from September 1797 until July 1798. It is highly likely, therefore, that they overlapped with Peale’s columnar smoke-­eater, which was introduced in The Weekly Magazine that July. Charles Willson Peale, “Original Communications: Description of the Stove Lately Built by Mr. Charles Willson Peale, in His Museum, and Which Burns the Smoke of Its Fuel,” Weekly Magazine, July 21, 1798. 42. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–­1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 163–­71. 43. After receiving a patent, Charles Willson Peale charged a fee of ten dollars for the right to alter a single fireplace or chimney in accordance with his designs, which did not include tradesmens’ fees. In 1798, when the New York City almshouse installed six fireplaces of Peale’s design, they were forced to hire and pay Peale to oversee the construction. It is not clear how long or how efficiently the fireplaces operated at the almshouse, but ultimately, due to his museum responsibilities, Peale was not able to capitalize further on his heating devices. Brewer, From Fireplace to Cookstove, 43; Hart, “‘To Encrease the Comforts of Life,’” 340–­41. I have borrowed the phrase “fuel philanthropy” from Adams, “Warming the Poor and Growing Consumers,” 69–­94.

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27. Peale and Peale, “Description of Some Improvements.” 28. Franklin did, however, refer to the “ears” and “shoulders” of the stove’s cast iron plates when describing how to assemble them. Franklin, An Account of the New Invented Pennsylvania Fire-­Places, 13–­23. 29. George Wallis, The Art of Preventing Diseases and Restoring Health, Founded on Rational Principles, and Adapted to Persons of Every Capacity (New York: Samuel Campbell, 1794), 19. 30. Charles Willson Peale, An Epistle to a Friend on the Means of Preserving Health, Promoting Happiness; and Prolonging the Life of Man to Its Natural Period, Philadelphia, March 1803, in Miller and Hart, eds., Selected Papers, 2:495. 31. Benjamin Rush, An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever, as It Appeared in the City of Philadelphia, in the Year 1793 (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1794), 39–­78. For a description of “eruptions” on the skin, see ibid., 71. 32. Bernard L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–­1830 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 261–­66; Richardson, Hindle, and Miller, Charles Willson Peale, 75–­79. 33. Paul A. Gilje and Howard B. Rock, “‘Sweep O! Sweep O!’: African-­American Chimney Sweeps and Citizenship in the New Nation,” William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 3 (July 1994): 507–­38. 34. Rush, Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever, 311. 35. Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 35. 36. Of the many extant silhouettes produced at the museum, only two feature black men: “Mr. Shaw’s blackman,” after 1802, The Library Company of Philadelphia; and a possible self-­portrait of Peale’s black silhouette cutter by Moses Williams, after 1802, The Library Company of Philadelphia. See David Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 1–­12, 30–­31, 70–­71.

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3 Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology mary i . ung er

Queer ecology was not unfamiliar to residents of antebellum Philadelphia. Although not theorized until the twenty-­first century, the idea that, as Timothy Morton writes, “all life-­forms, along with the environments they compose and inhabit, defy boundaries between inside and outside at every level” would have been legible to the curious readers who took up George Lippard’s sensational 1845 novel, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall.1 The illusion of keeping inside and outside in neat, separate categories was difficult to maintain in Lippard’s Philadelphia; even Penn himself understood a century earlier, as Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe explain in their introduction to this collection, that separating the natural from the artificial was—­at best—­itself an artificial business. Still, the project of antebellum nation building depended on the material imposition of social order onto the “natural” world. Assembling a nation out of the Enlightenment principles of reason and order relied on mastering a supposedly unruly environment “naturally” devoid of organizational logic. The “natural” nation, therefore, was one that reflected the discipline of its political ideology in its carefully manicured geography—­for Philadelphia, this meant the urban grid. Such efforts to manage the environment through municipal planning help “sustain the fantasy,” as Jane Bennett has written, “that ‘we’ really are in charge of all those ‘its.’”2 By the 1840s, however, Penn’s democratic vision of systematically organizing “all those ‘its’”—­the material objects and conditions of his city—­into a tediously ordered grid teetered on the brink of

Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology

utter chaos. With growing class anxiety amid an accelerating financial crisis, Philadelphia’s populace struggled to keep up the illusion of complete mastery over both “social” and “natural” environs—­to uphold, in other words, the “boundar[y] between inside and outside at every level.” In this context, then, “queer” refers broadly to a variety of forces that complicate dominant cultural and spatial boundaries, with interesting implications for how we understand the literary imagination of Philadelphia’s urban environment. Perhaps no one understood such social and spatial tensions better than Lippard himself. As a radical reformer devoted to the working class, the journalist, editor, public speaker, and author witnessed a Philadelphia spiraling out of control in the 1830s and 1840s.3 As David S. Reynolds writes, “This was a time of bank closings, unemployment, strikes, and widespread starvation.”4 Following the Panic of 1837, a “general state of financial and moral collapse”5 quickly morphed into a depression that would last until 1844—­just as Lippard was publishing The Quaker City as a series of pamphlets. Armed with what Reynolds calls “firsthand knowledge of the terrible effects” of this financial crisis and “alarmed by this social misery” that ensued, Lippard chose sensational fiction as a vehicle for protest against the moral and economic corruption of his city.6 In doing so, he specifically targeted the city’s wealthy elite—­who managed to profit despite the economic hardships of these decades—­as the cause for urban unrest.7 Writing The Quaker City would incense his readers into political action on behalf of the working class, Lippard believed, thus purging Philadelphia of its antidemocratic elitism. Lippard’s resulting exposé is as scandalous and licentious as the author perceived his unstable times to be. Indeed, the novel’s dizzying maze of plots and subplots; dozens of nefarious characters, including tramps, prostitutes, and con men; and its circuitous, exhaustive narrative (coming in just under six hundred pages) were “mind-­boggling” enough for one scholar to dub it an example of “the American Porno-­Gothic”: “It is febrile social critique,” J. V. Ridgely wrote more than a century later, “horrific melodrama, low comedy, a post-­adolescent’s sex dream.”8 The novel’s original audience agreed—­and loved it. When published in 1845, the novel “sold 60,000 in its first year and 10,000 copies annually during the next decade”; it was “the most popular American novel” before Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in 1852, Reynolds tells us.9 The novel’s “fierce social satire and suggestive eroticism made it an instant succès de scandale.”10 It even caused a riot when Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre tried to stage a production in November 1844.11 At its core, Lippard’s succès de scandale is a seduction narrative—­the story of Mary Arlington, the “flower of one of the first families of the city,” and her abduction by the wealthy rake Gustavus Lorrimer.12 The majority of the novel’s action takes places in the infamous (and fictional) mansion, Monk Hall.13 It is here that the elite gentry of “the city which William Penn built in hope and honor” ritually convene to feast, drink, womanize, and smoke opium (540); it is also where Mary is taken to “wed” Lorrimer before he rapes her.14 She is later

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rescued when her brother, Byrnewood Arlington, discovers the sinister nature of Lorrimer’s plans. Lippard loosely based the novel on a sensational murder case that involved Philadelphia man Singleton Mercer killing Mahlon Heberton as revenge for his seducing Mercer’s sister “on a promise of marriage” and leading her to “a house of assignation”; in 1843, Mercer was acquitted for Heberton’s murder.15 On its own, such a sensationalist narrative would have touched a moral, even political, nerve with Lippard’s audience. Yet the force of the novel’s critique comes not from individual depraved characters but from spaces within the narrative that incite characters to act in deviant manners, engendering salacious motives and behaviors. That is, Lippard relies on particular spaces within the novel that disobey and transgress the boundaries of Philadelphia’s egalitarian grid—­spaces that seem to turn themselves, and thus the “natural” social order, inside out. The narrative depends, in other words, on a queer ecology of urban space, which Morton describes as “catastrophic, monstrous, nonholistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative.”16 Like other queer ecologies, Lippard’s Philadelphia “def[ies] boundaries between inside and outside at every level,” truly eroding (per Bennett) “the fantasy that ‘we’ really are in charge” of it. Indeed, Lippard’s fictional Philadelphia mimics the disorder and disarray of the material one he had come to know in the midst of social and financial upheaval. In an opening gambit of the novel, a fictionalized “essay” titled “The Origin and Object of this Book,” Lippard suggests that “Philadelphia is not so pure as it looks,” noting that its “regular streets” and “The Whited Sepulchre” are actually “without all purity” and plagued by “rottenness and dead men’s bones” (3). Here Lippard sets a dramatic stage for his coming narrative, contending that the physical Philadelphia readers think they know is a fraud; instead, he insists, the orderly streets and innocent buildings prove “catastrophic, monstrous, nonholistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative.” Here streets are rotten rather than regular. Wanting to provide an “illustration of the life, mystery and crime of Philadelphia” (4), The Quaker City thus throws this queer ecology into relief for the citizens of the antebellum United States, reflecting the true “nature” of their urban space back at them in strange ways. “When we examine the environment,” Morton contends, “it shimmers, and figures emerge in a ‘strange distortion.’”17 What The Quaker City does is narrate this “strange distortion” of the urban grid, translating its material “shimmering” into the most sensational of literary forms. Such material instability worried Lippard, however, who mobilizes a queer ecology in the novel to expose Philadelphia’s growing social ills rather than embrace the artificiality of material boundaries. Reynolds notes, “The inequality Lippard perceived in the city’s physical landscape reflected the widening gap between the rich and the poor.”18 Lippard uses the instability of Philadelphia’s queer ecology to articulate the “inequality” of a degenerate urban grid’s growing social and economic disparity. Moreover, he links disorderly space with disorderly social institutions such as patriarchy: ­hallmarks of heteronormativity including inheritance, genealogy, and marriage all become warped within the novel. In this way, space is truly queer in The Quaker City because it is

Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology

peculiar or strange, and also because it challenges heteronormative powers that undergird U.S. nation building. By presenting unmappable spaces as a danger to ideological stability, Lippard uses this threat of a queer ecology to caution his readers against immoral behavior that would plunge Philadelphia deeper into degeneracy. Determined “to write a book which should describe all the phases of a corrupt social system, as manifested in the city of Philadelphia” (2), Lippard attempts to rally the citizens of Philadelphia to reclaim their city from the greedy, corrupt, and vile urban elite—­in other words, to restore the city to the “natural” order its grid abstractly promised.19 In this way, Monk Hall functions in the novel as what Bennett (following Bruno Latour) refers to as an “actant”: “a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events.”20 As a nonhuman object, Monk Hall indeed does things; it eludes characters, endangers others, and ultimately enacts various courses of action on all of them. In the process, the spaces of, within, and around Lippard’s illicit mansion claim (borrowing Bennett’s words) a “material agency” and “vitality” that allow them “not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”21 Monk Hall pushes and pulls characters through its queer space, dictating their behaviors along the way and embodying a nonessentialist view of material culture—­the mansion is not just an object or force but simultaneously both. In the end, it is this both/and quality of Philadelphia’s ecology—­indeed, its queer materiality—­that provides the Gothic horror of Lippard’s sensationalist story.

“A Queer Old House” By the nineteenth century, Philadelphia had seemingly mastered its “natural” environment.22 Emerging as a waffle-­iron configuration of squares, rectangles, corners, and right angles, the urban space established a common geography rooted in the neoclassical principles of order and logic. Nowhere is this philosophy more vividly on display than in maps of the city from this era such as “Philadelphia and Environs,” published by a well-­known cartographer, Henry S. Tanner, in his 1839 collection, The American Traveller (fig. 3.1).23 Here the city appears as a paragon of order and logic, a space materially fixed by notions of egalitarianism, harmony, and balance. Tanner’s map includes detailed images that illustrate the dizzying array of urban vectors crisscrossing the Philadelphia urban landscape and highlights significant locations such as banks, jails, and courthouses that define the abstract squares and rectangles dotting the landscape. “By consulting either the book or map,” Tanner assures his audience, “the place sought for in the other can be found with great facility.”24 By familiarizing the foreign landscape for travelers, “Philadelphia and Environs” normalizes the urban grid, directing its readers to interpret the space uniformly so that “this

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fig. 3.1 “Philadelphia and Environs,” from Henry S. Tanner, The American Traveller; or, Guide through the United States, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Henry S. Tanner, 1839). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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street” is Chestnut Street to me just as it is to you.25 Tanner’s abstract rendition offers “great facility” to its users by creating a common fantasy of order and control over the “natural” environment. And yet, while Tanner’s map wants to organize and universalize the urban environment, its audience will inevitably experience this space as individuals. You and I might both call this street Chestnut Street, but we most likely will experience it quite differently; Chestnut Street will therefore assume various meanings. “Philadelphia and Environs” thus reveals a tension “natural” to urban space and to maps themselves; the abstracting tendencies of the grid are continually at odds with the subjective embodiment of its citizens. The space of Philadelphia—­its abstract meaning—­is quite different from, for instance, the (fictive) place named

Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology

Monk Hall, which is a material location rooted in physical geography. As Doreen Massey notes, place has the ability to “raise an image of one’s place in the world, of reputedly . . . deep meanings of ‘a place called home’ or, with much greater intimations of mobility and agility, can be used in the context of discussions of positionality.”26 Tanner’s map reveals the ability of a material place to counteract its idealized space.27 In this way, Philadelphia spills over the inside/outside binary to represent a “strange distortion” of its abstract representation. The Quaker City capitalizes on such spillage by creating deviant space within its narrative. Lippard’s characters inhabit not the logical grid of Tanner’s map but a queer ecology that refuses to fit into neat categories or predictable patterns. For instance, Monk Hall itself seemingly embodies both abstract and material qualities. On one hand, the mansion is described in physical, material terms: the structure is “a massive edifice” boasting “one plain mass of black and red brick, disposed like the alternate colors of a chessboard” with a “massive hall-­door, defended by heavy pillars, and surmounted by an intricate cornice, all carved and sculptured into hideous satyr-­faces” (46). In sum, we are told, its “strange and uncouth shapes . . . produced a general impression of ease and grandeur that was highly effective in awing the spirits” (46). On the other hand, the mansion remains elusive, nearly impossible to locate. The narrator describes Monk Hall as teetering on the “out-­skirts of the southern part of the city” where it remains “a place hard to find, abounding in mysteries, and darkened by hideous crimes committed within its walls” (46, 60). To find it, one “would have to wind up a narrow alley, turn down a court, strike up an avenue, which it would take some knowledge of municipal geography to navigate” (48). Yet even residents with such “knowledge” find it difficult to locate; in the opening pages of the novel we witness Lorrimer lead a group of drunken friends to the house of debauchery by “threading a labyrinth of streets” (62). In a moment of frustration, one cries, “‘I say, Gus, what a devil of a way you’ve led me! . . . up one alley and down another, around one street and through another, backwards and forwards, round this way and round that—­damme [sic] if I can tell which is north or south except by the moon!’” (50). In addition to misleading them, the urban landscape literally trips them up: as they wander through the moonlit streets, the men stumble over and curse “How d—­d irregular these [street] bricks are” (5), finding the materiality of the city more disabling than the brandy they have consumed. Here and throughout the narrative, Lippard’s confounded characters experience the urban grid as Morton’s “catastrophic, monstrous, nonholistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative” queer ecology.28 The city—­despite its fantasy of organized, controlled space—­ ultimately resists normative materiality, paradoxically situating Monk Hall both off of and anchored to the urban grid. The space within the great mansion is similarly labyrinthine, further challenging the inside/outside binary of space in the novel. Characters often become discombobulated trying to navigate its myriad corridors, rooms, back alleyways, and side streets. Rooms spill into one another, trapdoors fall into hidden

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subterranean spaces, and a seemingly infinite number of closets and chambers emerge and recede in syncopated succession. Visitors who manage to find their way to Monk Hall then risk becoming engulfed in its interior web of spaces. As Lorrimer warns Byrnewood, “You see, the entire arrangements of this place may be explained in one word—­it is easy enough for a stranger . . . to find his way in, but it would puzzle him like the devil to find his way out. That is, without assistance” (53). Later, as Byrnewood races to save Mary, he “entered the chamber, and . . . strode forward to the damask curtain. He swung one of its hangings aside, expecting to behold the extreme wall of the chamber. To his entire wonder, another chamber, as spacious as the one in which he stood, lay open to his gaze” (72–­73). Similarly, as Luke Harvey attempts to find his way through the manor, he encounters walls that seemingly melt away at the slightest touch: “The back wall of this closet, is nothing less than a portion of the wainscotting of the next room. Give me your hand—­it is firm, by G—­d!—­Do you feel that bolt? It’s a little one, but once withdrawn, the panelling swings away from the closet like a door, and—­egad!—­the next room lays before you!” (111). Although Monk Hall occupies the Philadelphia grid as “a massive edifice” of “black and red brick” (46), its spaces remain troubling, intangible, and transient, metaphorically compromising social boundaries and logic at every turn. Monk Hall’s queer ecology thus offers its readers a “strange distortion” of the urban grid. Lorrimer curiously refers to it as “a queer old house . . . where the very devil is played under a cloak and sin grows fat within the shelter of the quiet rooms and impenetrable walls” (23). The place is “queer” indeed in that it appears “impenetrable,” solidly affixed to the Philadelphia grid, yet it remains obscure, harboring secrets that also mix material metaphors by remaining both out of sight (“under a cloak,” “within the shelter”) but also physically excessive (“fat”). In this way, the greatest danger of Monk Hall’s queer ecology is its ability to harbor the “devil” and “sin” within its distorted spaces, thus upending a social order supposedly anchored to an egalitarian urban grid.

A Queer Social Order

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Riddled with “dens of iniquity and holes of wickedness” (56), Monk Hall’s irregular materiality indeed breeds deviance and corruption. Lorrimer boasts to his fellow miscreants that it is a “queer old house my good fellow, where, during the long hours of the winter nights, your husband, so kind and good, forgets his wife, your merchant his ledger, your lawyer his quibbles, your parson his prayers” (22–­23). By encouraging respectable citizens such as merchants and lawyers to “forget” their responsibilities, Monk Hall threatens the codes that police everyday life in the streets of Philadelphia. The mansion’s queer space thus enacts its material agency on individuals—­inciting rape, murder, and general debauchery—­thereby threatening cultural institutions. In particular, Monk Hall defies heteronormative principles of national space. Indeed, prevailing notions

Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology

about the early American landscape (rural or urban) were premised on its reproducibility across geographical and human bodies.29 Even before the national era, Penn had associated his “Holy Experiment” with the reproductive birth of a child: “And, thou, Philadelphia, the virgin settlement of this province, named before thou wert born, what love, what care, what service, what travail has there been, to bring thee forth.”30 In order to regulate the development of “unnatural” land, Penn conflated spatial and genealogical normativity. By the nineteenth century, such normativity had become institutionalized in municipal structures such as Eastern State Penitentiary (visible in the upper left of fig. 3.1)—­a prison designed by John Haviland and opened in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood in 1829 using panoptic discipline, solitary confinement, and “Quaker” principles of moral penitence that soon became unwieldy, famously provoking a charge of inhumanity by Charles Dickens in his American Notes of 1842. Shortly after The Quaker City, Lippard published another serialized novel in 1849, The Killers, which features the penitentiary prominently in its sensational account of events surrounding the 1849 Philadelphia race riot.31 Already in The Quaker City, though, the fictive Monk Hall had critically deconstructed the material and ideological order of Philadelphia. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have defined queer space as exceeding that which “can be mapped beyond a few reference points,” a space—­like Lippard’s strange manor—­ “of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies.”32 The polymorphous and perverse mansion also harbors taboo behavior within its intangible spaces and thereby stands, borrowing a phrase from queer theory scholar Judith Halberstam, “in opposition to the institutions of the family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.”33 Monk Hall allows for greater sexual and personal freedom, a place where individuals can live without the spatial and even temporal restraints of a heteronormative society organized around “paradigmatic markers of life experience—­namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.”34 The mansion, then, is “unnatural” in that it harbors immoral behavior that does not engender normative nation building. Bloodlines are likewise queered in The Quaker City; much of the terror that emerges in the novel stems from histories that are out of order or that refuse to be mapped. The history of Monk Hall itself is warped, misunderstood, and shrouded in mystery: few are certain of its past, and the myths that remain in public circulation pervert the memory of its previous inhabitants. We learn, for instance, that the mansion was originally built by “a wealthy foreigner, sometime previous to the Revolution”; however, “who this foreigner was, his name, or his history, has not been recorded by tradition” (46). The narrator recalls a long line of “strange rumors” and “conflicting traditions” that circulate, while other stories about the mansion, “so vague and so conflicting, are still preserved in the memories of aged men and white-­haired matrons” (46, 47–­48). Likewise, Lippard presents the genealogy of his characters as twisted, misconstrued, and transgressive. We are often unsure of people’s true identities and

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their relationships to one another, and most of the novel’s sensationalism derives from discoveries of how characters are related (or not). We learn dramatically, for instance, that Byrnewood and Mary are brother and sister (96); Fitz-­Cowles is not the “son of an English Earl” but rather the “bastard of a Creole slave” (551); the seductress Bess is really Emily Walraven (80); and Devil-­Bug is Mabel’s illegitimate father, not Reverend Pyne or Livingstone (338, 340, 556). Even genealogies that can be sorted out often turn out to be contaminated or polluted, as is the case with Lorrimer: “From generation to generation, the family of the Lorrimer’s [sic], had been subject to an aberration of intellect. . . . From father to son, since the family has first come over to Pennsylvania, with the Proprietor and Peace-­maker William Penn, this temporary derangement of intellect, had descended as a fearful heritage” (146–­47). A victim of his own lineage, Lorrimer suffers from a fouled and “fearful heritage.” Moreover, the institution of the Philadelphian aristocracy proves to be a sham. Dora, for instance, manipulates her way in and out of certain lines of inheritance depending on her sexual engagements. Of a modest background, she first marries the rich merchant Livingstone and then plots his murder so that she may climb even higher on the social ladder and marry the “son of an English Earl,” Colonel Algernon Fitz-­Cowles. Regardless of her insatiable and criminal desires to become part of the aristocracy, however, she finds it suspect: “‘An Aristocracy founded on the high deeds of dentists, tape-­sellers, quacks, pettifoggers, and bank directors, all jumbled together in a ridiculous mass of absurdities. . . . Pah! There is no single word of contempt in the whole language, too bitter, to express my opinion of this magnificent Pretension—­the Aristocracy of the Quaker City!’” (183). In Lippard’s novel, aristocracy incites not virtue but murder. In a final deathblow to the heteronormativity that underpins Philadelphia’s social order, Lippard exposes marriage itself as a bogus institution. Instead of a sentimental passing of a woman from one man to another, the only marriage in The Quaker City occurs because of a malicious bet. While feasting in the oyster cellar at the beginning of the novel, Lorrimer announces his plan to ruin a “sweet girl” by seducing her with the promise of marriage (13). “Only a pretend marriage, my boy,” he assures his male companions, “as for this ‘life interest’ in a woman, it don’t suite [sic] my taste. A nice little sham marriage, my boy, is better than ten real ones” (15). The “wedding,” when it occurs later that evening within the gloomy shadows of Monk Hall, insults tradition as well as Mary’s virtue. As the blushing bride stands before her guests, she remains unaware that the cronies of Monk Hall perform the ceremony in jest. But if Philadelphia’s social order is corrupt, so too is its “natural” world. Indeed, Mary’s ruin resides at the center of Lippard’s novel and draws on imagery from nonhuman nature to illustrate the perversion of the city’s own “natural” order. Before her capture, Mary is associated with the beauty of flowers: she gives “you the idea of a bud breaking into bloom, a blossom ripening into fruit” (18); her foot “tremble[s] like any leaf ” (20); and she resembles “the swelling fulness [sic] of the rose-­bud that needs but another beam of light, to open it into

Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology

its perfect bloom” (84). But as Byrnewood finds himself trapped in a secluded tower of Monk Hall while Lorrimer carries out his devious plan, the protective brother frets, “Last night she was pure and stainless—­to morrow morning dawns and she will be a thing stained with pollution, dishonored by a hideous crime!” (117). Indeed, after Lorrimer’s crime, the narrator describes Mary as “stained” and “unnatural”: “She was no longer the trembling child whose young face, marked the inexperience of her stainless heart. A new world had broken upon her soul, not a world of green trees, silver streams and pleasant flowers, but a chaos of ashes, and mouldering flame; a lurid sky above, a blasted soil below, and one immense horizon of leaden clouds, hemming in the universe of desolation” (145). The real tragedy of the novel, therefore, is the desecration of the natural world Mary metaphorically embodies—­a pollution harbored and facilitated by Monk Hall that also resonated with ongoing realities of environmental pollution in Philadelphia (like those discussed in the previous chapter by Laura Turner Igoe as well as those contributing eventually to the establishment of Fairmount Park, discussed in subsequent chapters by Nate Gabriel and Alan C. Braddock).35 Meanwhile, the manor’s infamous doorkeeper, the monstrous hunchback Devil-­Bug, also draws on natural metaphors to provide a cautionary tale of Philadelphia’s perverted political ecology. As he provokes disgust with the “hideous moral deformity of his nature,” he exemplifies nature gone awry (303). Two other “insects,” Glow-­worm and Musquito, the “‘police’ of Monk Hall,” similarly link Philadelphia’s social and ecological corruption with their “scarcely human” forms (53, 52). As African Americans, they likewise fulfill a common racial stereotype of the nineteenth century, linking the racialized Other with deformity and disease. In this way, Monk Hall desecrates everything that is “natural”—­ from flowers and insects (the natural ecology of the landscape) to patriarchy and marriage (the “natural order” of civic life). Lippard suggests, however, that such degradation is not unique to the urban landscape, ending his bizarre narrative in a secluded frontier as despoiled as the city. Here, in the novel’s final chapter, we learn through a series of dramatic revelations that Byrnewood is now husband to domestic servant Annie and father to her child. While this domestic scene restores the family unit that Monk Hall unraveled, Lippard’s ending remains displaced and unnerving. It does not legitimate the family or the role of the father; rather, it frames these institutions as an uncanny nightmare. We learn, for instance, that the cottage, like Monk Hall, harbors dark spaces behind locked doors: in a secret room Byrnewood keeps a portrait of Lorrimer that allows him to relive their violent encounter ad infinitum. Unable to leave behind the terror of Monk Hall in the wilderness, Byrnewood obsessively plays out his dreadful night of sin and malice again and again: “He found an awful pleasure in contemplating the portrait of [Lorrimer]. . . . but the memory of the scenes he had witnessed in Monk-­Hall . . . dwelt like a shadow on his soul” (574–­75). Lippard thus ends the novel not with rehabilitative space—­ space that sutures the wounds Monk Hall tears in the social fabric—­but rather with pathological space. This nightmarish frontier debunks the wilderness myth

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of regeneration as a solution to the ills of Lippard’s troubled city, disorienting the reader just like the urban space where the winding narrative begins.

A Queer Political Ecology Monk Hall’s transgression of Philadelphia’s moral and geographical grid illustrates the power of space and materiality to shift cultural, historical, and political paradigms. Indeed, “space is fundamental in any exercise of power,” Michel Foucault argued; it is an articulation of power that shapes and is shaped by the malleability of social relations.36 And yet, while space is “a means of production . . . a means of control, and hence of domination,” Henri Lefebvre contends, “it escapes in part from those who would make use of it. The social and political (state) forces which engendered this space now seek, but fail, to master it completely.”37 To be sure, the actors of Lippard’s narrative have little agency and control over their surroundings, seemingly victims to every devious environmental whim. In this way, Lippard’s novel demonstrates Philadelphia’s vibrant materiality as a place—­its ability, quoting Bennett again, to “aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us.”38 The material power of Monk Hall serves as the key nonhuman actant of Lippard’s sensational story, nudging the plot along by aiding, destroying, enriching, disabling, ennobling, and degrading its characters. In the process, this queer ecology of The Quaker City dissipates what Bennett called “the onto-­theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic.”39 It defies the very boundaries, categories, and order an artificial urban grid imagines as natural. But just in which direction the novel shifts the city’s social paradigms remains as elusive as the mansion itself. Monk Hall helps us understand the constantly shifting geometries of social and power relations that underpin Philadelphia, particularly in terms of socioeconomic class, but it does not clarify whose side it ends up on.40 The Quaker City seems to support Lippard’s working-­class sympathies: If the novel “has the atmosphere of a nightmare,” writes Reynolds, “it is largely because Lippard regarded American society as a nightmarish realm of class divisions, economic uncertainty, and widespread corruption.”41 But because it privileges elites who exploit the workers of Monk Hall, the illicit manor also reinforces antiegalitarian, stratified relationships based on race, class, and gender. Indeed, the subversive sphere facilitated by Monk Hall cannot exist except alongside the socially sanctioned, public sphere of banks, churches, and courthouses: the two spaces are not diametrically opposed but rather wed to one another. As Steve Pile attests, “There is never one geography of authority and there is never one geography of resistance. Further, the map of resistance is not simply the underside of the map of domination—­if only because each is a lie to the other, and each gives the lie to the other.”42 Rather than being a “geography of resistance” that challenges Philadelphia’s “geography of authority,” Monk Hall constitutes and is constituted by the troubled

If you discover one word in its pages, that has a tendency to develop one impure thought, I beseech you reject that word. If you discover a chapter, a page, or a line, that conflicts with the great idea of Human Brotherhood, promulgated by the Redeemer, I ask you with all my soul, reject that chapter, that passage, that line. . . . Take the book with all its faults and all its virtues. Judge it as you yourself would wish to be judged. Do not wrest a line from these pages, for the encouragement of a bad thought or a bad deed. (2)

Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology

intersection of these two political ecologies. It is a space where women such as Mary and Bess fall prey to the sexual violence of men, where racial minorities such as the brute henchmen Glow-­worm and Musquito remain subservient to the white clientele of Monk Hall, and where Devil-­Bug’s gloomy basement quarters symbolize his social standing. As a result of this systematized disenfranchisement, characters such as Lorrimer and Fitz-­Cowles reap the same gender, race, and class privileges they would normally receive outside the mansion. Meanwhile, the marginalized characters of the novel remain acutely aware of these inequalities. As Devil-­Bug explains, in Monk Hall, as in the streets of Philadelphia, the upper-­class, white gentry exploit the racial and gendered Others for their illicit entertainment: “While the broadcloth gentry of the Quaker City guzzle their champaigne [sic] two stories above, here, in these cozy cellars of Monk Hall, old Devil-­Bug entertains the thieves and cut-­throats of the town with scorchin’ Jamakey spirits and raw Moneygehaley!” (220). Monk Hall may seem to subvert Philadelphia’s “natural” grid, but in many ways it constructs its own geography of unequal power relations, thus undercutting its antiegalitarian social critique.43 Ultimately, this is the real terror of The Quaker City: its flimsy materiality conveys a flimsy morality. Lippard set out to write a story that held Philadelphia’s wealthy accountable for a city on the brink of ruin, but his narrative falls prey to its own unruly sensationalism. The Quaker City suggests that urban space troubles our ability to recognize the “good” guys from the “bad,” and it in turn tries to help us sort them out. It attempts to guide us, much like Tanner’s map, to locate trustworthy and honorable individuals within Philadelphia; it aims to interpret this confounding artificial urban ecology for us, allowing us to navigate the real, material one safely. But the sheer sensationalism of the narrative fails to guide us; instead, it distracts us by blurring rather than defining boundaries. As Lorrimer and his posse of lawyers, merchants, and other city leaders debauch the night away in Monk Hall, for instance, Lippard ratchets up his readers’ anxiety by questioning their ability to distinguish between productive, moral citizens and those who defile genteel civility. While the city’s elite fail to uphold a code of honesty and decency, so too do the marginalized workers of Monk Hall: Devil-­Bug, for one, commits murder (and seems to like it). In this way, Lippard loses control over his own narrative, displaying once again the vibrant materiality of nonhuman agents. Lippard anticipated this problem, cautioning his readers in a prefatory note to a later edition of his novel:

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As an actant of its own, The Quaker City enacts a bawdy sensationalism onto its readers, luring them into the realm of the “impure” and “bad,” thus troubling the political efficacy of this reformist text. In so doing, The Quaker City “sustains the fantasy” that “‘we’ really are in control of ” it—­that the queer ecology that “shimmers” back at us from its pages is one we actually recognize, and not a “strange distortion” of George Lippard’s sensational imagination.

notes

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1. Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (March 2010): 274. 2. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), x. 3. For more on Lippard’s biography, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-­Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987); David S. Reynolds, introduction to The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, by George Lippard, ed. David S. Reynolds (1845, repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), vii–­ xliv; David S. Reynolds, “Introduction: George Lippard in His Times,” in George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical, 1822–­1854, by George Lippard, ed. David S. Reynolds (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 1–­42; Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 4. Reynolds, “Introduction,” xi. 5. David Anthony, “Banking on Emotion: Financial Panic and the Logic of Male Submission in the Jacksonian Gothic,” American Literature 76, no. 4 (December 2004): 730. 6. Reynolds, “Introduction,” xi. 7. “According to some historians,” Reynolds reports, “during this period the share of Philadelphia’s wealth controlled by the richest 10% of the city’s population nearly doubled, increasing from 50% to 90%. Even more remarkably, the share controlled by the wealthiest 1% ballooned from less than a quarter to a half, while that owned by the poorest 75% sank from 30% to less than 3%.” Reynolds, “Introduction,” 12. 8. J. V. Ridgely, “George Lippard’s The Quaker City: The World of the American

Porno-­Gothic,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7 (1974): 77. 9. Reynolds, “Introduction,” vii. 10. Ibid. 11. For more on the botched theatre production of The Quaker City, see Julia Curtis, “Philadelphia in an Uproar: The Monks of Monk Hall, 1844,” Theatre History Studies 5 (1985): 41–­47. 12. George Lippard, The Quaker City, or, The Monks of Monk Hall, ed. David S. Reynolds (1845; repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 15. Subsequent references to The Quaker City will be made parenthetically in the text. 13. The location is alternatively referred to as “Monk Hall,” “Monk-­Hall,” and “Monk-­hall” throughout the narrative; I use the version on the novel’s title page. 14. Though fictitious, “Lippard’s notion of a huge Monk Hall where the wealthy gathered to revel was by no means a complete fabrication.” Reynolds, “Introduction,” 13. Rather than a wild fantasy, Lippard’s mysterious den of vice—­as well as its exploitative gentry—­would have been a dangerous reality for his contemporary readers. 15. See Reynolds, “Introduction,” xii. 16. Morton, “Queer Ecology,” 275. 17. Ibid., 274. 18. Reynolds, “Introduction,” xxxiii. 19. See Lippard’s prefatory note to The Quaker City, “The Origin and Object of this Book,” in which he recalls a wild story concerning a dying friend who entrusts him with secret documents so that he may “lay bare vice in high places” (4). 20. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii. See also Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75, 77, 80.

31. On Eastern State Penitentiary, see Norman Johnston with Kenneth Finkel and Jeffrey Cohen, Eastern State Penitentiary: Crucible of Good Intentions (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art for the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, 1994); Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 238; George Lippard, The Killers: A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia, ed. Matt Cohen and Edlie L. Wong (1849; repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 32. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Winter 1998): 558. 33. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 1. 34. Ibid., 2. 35. Here Lippard seems to be drawing on the very real material pollution that had plagued the city since the late eighteenth century as the population increased. See Michael P. McCarthy, Typhoid and the Politics of Public Health in Nineteenth-­ Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987), for more on Philadelphia’s ongoing environmental troubles, particularly concerning water and disease, as well as Brian C. Black and Michael J. Chiarappa, eds., Nature’s Entrepôt: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), for a general environmental history of the city. 36. Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 252. 37. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 26. 38. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii, ix. 39. Ibid., x. 40. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 4. See David Harvey, The Condition of Post­ modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), on the unfolding of uneven space and the dissemination of power, specifically pertaining to the role of capitalism. He concludes, “Spatial and temporal

Mapping The Quaker City’s Queer Ecology

21. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix, viii. 22. A process, of course, only possible by the removal and extermination of American Indians—­an oversight Penn and even Lippard easily make. 23. For an extended analysis of the map in a different version of this argument, see Mary Unger, “‘Dens of Iniquity and Holes of Wickedness’: George Lippard and the Queer City,” Journal of American Studies 43, no. 2 (August 2009): 319–­39. 24. Henry S. Tanner, The American Traveller; or, Guide through the United States, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Henry S. Tanner, 1839), iv. 25. For additional scholarship on Philadelphia’s grid, see Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 26. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1. 27. In the case of Philadelphia, this spatial tension may have been exacerbated by the geography of the city itself. Despite its attempt at uniformity, Sommer has noted, Philadelphia in particular was built with a predisposition to spatial irregularity. See Richard M. Sommer, “Philadelphia—­The Urban Design of Philadelphia: Taking the Towne for the City,” in Shaping the City: Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design, ed. Edward Robbins and Rodolphe El-­ Khoury (New York: Routledge, 2004), 141–­42. 28. Morton, “Queer Ecology,” 275. 29. In Jefferson’s vision, American soil is primed for the reproductive labor of preserving heteronormativity. As Philip Fisher notes, Jefferson inextricably links national space to families or, more specifically, to “independent family farms” that “[provide] for both self-­sufficiency and for reproduction” of themselves and of the nation. Philip Fisher, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 65. 30. Penn quoted in Edwin B. Bronner, William Penn’s “Holy Experiment”: The Founding of Pennsylvania, 1681–­1701 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1962), 69.

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practices are never neutral in social affairs. They always express some kind of class or other social content, and are more often than not the focus of intense social struggle” (239). See also David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). 41. Reynolds, “Introduction,” xxxii. 42. Steve Pile, “Introduction: Opposition, Political Identities and Spaces of Resistance,” in Geographies of Resistance, ed. Steve Pile and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1997), 23. 43. In this way, Monk Hall resembles what Foucault describes as heterotopias—­ “something like counter-­sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can

be found within this culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 24. We might also draw comparisons with Nancy Fraser’s “subaltern counterpublics,” a term for spatioideological spheres that remain antagonistic yet “porous” to one another. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–­39. See also Warner’s discussion of counterpublics in Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002). Both Fraser and Warner echo Pile’s assertion that authoritative and resistive geographies can never be wholly disentangled from one another.

4 Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park Economic Diversity, History, and Photography in Nineteenth-­Century Philadelphia n ate gab r i el

The establishment of Fairmount Park occurred in fits and starts in the years that straddled the Civil War. For decades Philadelphians sought out and enjoyed park-­like spaces in the city in graveyards, private pleasure grounds, and a few small urban squares, but Fairmount Park was the largest piece of property—­ approximately three thousand acres—­ever to be set aside for public use in any city in the world. Philadelphia obviously was not alone in its desire for such an expansive, accessible space. In the middle of the nineteenth century, numerous other American cities established large parks of their own, including New York (Central Park), Chicago (Lincoln Park), and San Francisco (Golden Gate Park). Previous scholars have primarily understood the foundation of these parks as a response to popular unrest and demand for spaces of recreation and regeneration that accompanied changing urban conditions. Elizabeth Milroy, for example, explains how concerns about declining water quality resulting from industrialization along Philadelphia’s waterways, as well as the need for leisure space for a growing industrial working class, enabled the appropriation of lands for this project.1 Indeed, even a cursory reading of popular period writing in newspapers and magazines underscores a connection between industrialization and park-­ building.2 As early as 1843, for example, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia issued recommendations that “the city of Philadelphia should possess so much of the shores of [the Schuylkill River] . . . as may be necessary to protect the purity of the water [from industrial development].”3 Interpretations of this period along

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these lines have become a veritable set-­piece of scholarship on nineteenth-­century urban parks at least since Roy Rosenzweig’s classic 1983 study, Eight Hours for What We Will.4 Yet these interpretations take for granted a teleological economic development narrative that ignores the contingent nature of industrialization during this period and the material and discursive work that was required to produce this vision of industrializing cities and their parks in the minds of city dwellers. In this chapter, I argue that such approaches to the period of park formation in the mid-­nineteenth century oversimplify a more complicated set of historical and material conditions that attended it. After all, the lands that would eventually become parks were in many cases already in use for a number of purposes. Shantytowns of the poor, for example, occupied what would become New York’s Central Park.5 Intensive urban development in Philadelphia only began to extend beyond the Schuylkill River when public sentiment was sufficient to authorize the purchase or seizure of three thousand acres for use as a public park in 1867, even though numerous nearby settlements, like Germantown, had been officially incorporated in 1854. At the time of this expansion, the city’s populace was still coming to grips with the notion of a vast industrial metropolis; Philadelphia had not yet extensively reoriented itself to the demands of large-­scale manufacturing. As with Central Park in New York City, residents of Philadelphia used the land that eventually became Fairmount Park for a variety of economic activities, but city leaders largely ignored these pursuits as they reframed the area in question as a zone of “nature” that, though proximate to the city, was defined by the supposed absence of humans and therefore could serve as a therapeutic counterweight to the industrial space of the growing city. Even as Fairmount Park thus became understood in environmental terms as an effort to protect public water quality and to preserve, rather than to create, a large expanse of “wilderness” near at hand, it required the removal of numerous factories and dwellings that dotted the banks of the Schuylkill River. The formation of the park also erased economic exploitation of already existing forests, farms, fields, and streams. I return to the various uses to which these lands were put in the final section of this chapter, but historical evidence suggests that local residents relied upon Fairmount Park as a source of food, cellar ice in winter, wood for fires, and timber. Finally, the institution of Fairmount Park influenced the biophysical makeup of the landscape as well, from the types of trees and plants growing within the park to the relationships among predators and prey that were allowed to persist. In order to recast the park and urban space in the bifurcated terms of “nature” and “city,” then, a great deal of work was necessary to reeducate the public and reshape the land. Park and city officials and their agents achieved this reeducation through the mobilization of new technologies of representation to construct a conceptual boundary between the human social/cultural space of the city and the “natural” space of the park. This shift became visible in three moments, which I relate in the following pages. I open with a vignette about Lemon Hill, one of the earliest spaces devoted to leisure activities in a park-­like environment. As such, it led the way in facilitating the articulation of a perceived (and growing) division between

Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park

economics and nature while also sparking controversy on this account. Following a brief discussion of Lemon Hill, I turn to a collection of photographs that did important work to stabilize and codify the discursive naturalization of Fairmount Park within the broader context of the city. Despite the power of these photographs to communicate a new vision of the urban park as a foil to, and retreat from, the city, such conceptual framing continued to face challenges by Philadelphians into the late nineteenth century (and beyond). Drawing on thirty years of annual reports submitted by the captain of the Fairmount Park Guard, I conclude with an examination of the ways in which the park remained a site of contestation between authorities and the everyday citizen-­users of urban public green spaces. In this final section, I focus especially on the ways that unsanctioned consumption of parks threatened to upset the conceptual arrangement of the urban space and park space within a new economic imaginary. In sum, I argue that a range of practices—­from the use of photographs as part of a didactic program of public education to the physical policing of park spaces and the transgressive activities of park users—­suggests that these sites have always been occupied, and cared for, by a wider range of constituents than typical histories would suggest. Further, paying close attention to the contested meanings and uses of urban “nature” in the nineteenth century helps restore this sense of complex negotiation among individuals and groups (including nonhumans) whose aims and desires did not always conform to dominant narratives of industrial economic development.

Lemon Hill The Lemon Hill estate, built in 1800 by a wealthy merchant named Henry Pratt, held and still holds special significance in narratives about the formation of urban parks in Philadelphia.6 The estate’s importance derives in large part from the way it symbolized the juxtaposition of unspoiled urban nature against the modern capitalist city. Those seeking to create a new park valued the Lemon Hill estate highly because of the views it offered of the burgeoning metropolis and the Schuylkill River, prompting its purchase by the city in 1844—­the first such purchase in a twenty-­five-­year campaign to protect the urban water supply through land acquisitions.7 According to an anonymous antebellum journalist writing in 1854, “It only requires a glance at the map or a visit to the ground to convince any one how important it is to secure this piece of land, to make Lemon Hill as it should be—­a most eligible and beautiful tract with boundaries free from objectionable features.”8 In the 1850s, however, to the dismay of many, the German tenants of the Lemon Hill property operated a popular beer-­garden, a purpose that park enthusiasts saw as an affront to the grace and natural beauty of the site. Another antebellum commentator noted that respectable citizens “had for many years watched with great solicitude the destruction of . . . a spot incomparably well adapted to the purposes” of an urban park.9 Recalling this destruction three decades later, local historian Charles Keyser wrote that “the

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tenants settled like incubi upon the spot . . . the shrubbery [was] destroyed . . . they erected great ice houses of stone and when these fell into ruin, they left the ruins and erected others in their places.”10 Such framings of the Lemon Hill beer-­garden proved effective and soon the sentiment prevailed. The city declined to renew the tenants’ lease on the Lemon Hill property, expelled the proprietors of the beer-­garden, and eventually incorporated the site into the first iteration of Fairmount Park. Officials declared the land public property, leading Keyser to proclaim triumphantly that “nature [was] restored. . . . its verdure grows for the eyes of the little child ignorant of the means of [private] property, and for the old man who has long outlived the hope of acquiring it.”11 Thus, for Keyser and other like-­minded citizens of Philadelphia, establishing a park at the Lemon Hill estate set it out of bounds for certain unapproved economic uses; a restaurant, for example, continued to operate on the site even after the expulsion of the beer-­garden proprietors. This designation ostensibly produced a therapeutic, “natural” retreat while selectively maligning particular kinds of commerce in such places of refuge. Similar struggles continued elsewhere during the first decades of the park’s existence, as activity from taverns operating near park boundaries spilled onto park lands. The land occupied by the Lemon Hill estate became the keystone of the larger park founded in 1867 and it remains, not incidentally, central to the history of the park as it is told today—­a reminder of the binary at the heart of the meaning of Fairmount Park.12 In some respects, establishing this spatial and conceptual division between preservation and economic activity via Fairmount Park was a local iteration of a growing national habit. As William Cronon argues, the nineteenth-­century environmental movement’s romanticization of wilderness as pristine simultaneously distracts attention from “the homes we actually inhabit.”13 So it was in Philadelphia: the park became a symbol of “pristine” nature, leaving the rest of the city open to all comers, especially for industrial development, even as a number of historical estates were left standing as reminders of a preindustrial past. However, the point is not that the establishment of Fairmount Park was a cynical ploy that helped usher in unbridled capitalist development in urban lands. Rather, it is that the park played a key role in institutionalizing the notion of the industrial city altogether by affirming its direct claim to all areas of the city not defined as “nature.” Meanwhile, as we will see in more detail shortly, even noncapitalist forms of economic activity were prohibited within the park itself. Thus the creation of Fairmount Park arguably put modern industrial capitalism on an even firmer footing than before by reinforcing a developmental narrative of linear progress, though not without facing resistance. In 1867, the Pennsylvania State Assembly authorized the purchase or seizure of thousands of acres from wealthy suburban estates and industrial operators along the Schuylkill River.14 Newspaper commentary of the time clearly frames a social and economic division between the park and the city. For example, in parks, Philadelphians could “get a breath of God’s pure air, or enjoy the grateful shade and sweet aroma of woods . . . [where urban people] can be transported in a few minutes from

Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park

the heat, and dust, and noise of a great city—­its disagreeable sights, and smells, and sounds—­into a rural scene of surprising loveliness, amid green fields, and purling brooks, and the waving forest, and flowering shrubbery.”15 Another writer expressed the urgent need for a park as an urban refuge: “[Philadelphia] must have some rest of business and labor . . . [Fairmount Park is] a place not surpassed anywhere for this object.”16 While citizens frequently communicated these sentiments in daily and weekly newspapers and magazines throughout the mid-­nineteenth century, these sources are silent about the specific, everyday acts that constituted the park. That is, such publications tell us little about how, or by what means, this framing took hold and acted on urban people. Much of that inculcating work was done through photography, spurred on by new technological improvements that allowed for the mass production and wide dissemination of images.

Parks and Photography Much has been made of the power of photographs to fix meaning and lend the illusion of objective truth and permanence to the subjects they depict.17 This view goes back at least to William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented a technique for photographic reproduction using negatives. In his book The Pencil of Nature (1844), Talbot celebrated the potential uses of photography for inventorying, since it allowed the photographer to make quick and reproducible records of items stored, for example, on a bookshelf. The photograph, he wrote, was advantageous “both for completeness of detail and correctness of perspective.”18 But Talbot was also enamored of the ability of photographs to record nature’s “artistry,” enabling the photographer to reproduce environmental wonders that he or she could only approximate by other means, like painting or drawing. For Talbot, the photographer was a documentarian, or perhaps a scientist, but never an artist. Of course, the notion of objectivity on the part of the photographer ignores the decisions that photographers must make in doing their work. Such considerations include the positioning of the camera, the framing of the shot, the composition of scenes, and so on. In addition, both the photographer and the photograph itself are part of larger social assemblages, embedded in social webs—­not working independently but constrained (as well as enabled) in what they can do and in what can be said meaningfully.19 Thus the photograph is not a simple medium for recording visual information any more than the photographer acts independently of social context. In this sense, photography is a practice of assembling and therefore a political practice that works to produce some forms of knowledge while destroying or eliding others. To the extent that photography is directed at depicting human activities in space, it helps produce particular kinds of subjects that are capable of some forms of behavior and incapable of others. According to the visual culture scholar Suren Valvani, “photography operates in disciplinary discourses to arrest, isolate, and instantiate the body in relation to the axes of time and space; it enables the decipherment, delineation, and analysis of the

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body’s surface.”20 In the words of art historian Thomas Patin, “the use of the natural world as a constituent material component of visual rhetoric helps to create extraordinarily powerful, ‘naturalized,’ and almost undeniable arguments and rationales for what are ultimately . . . political positions.”21 The era of large park construction coincided with an era of rapid innovation in photography. New developments in photographic technology occurred during the mid-­to late-­1800s, but perhaps the most significant, at least for the purposes of this chapter, were improvements in the collodion process, which improved on Talbot’s earlier success in reproducing images from paper negatives. While techniques of copying images from negatives had been demonstrated some time before, the collodion process used glass slides rather than paper ones and enabled photographers to create durable negatives that could be stored and reused almost indefinitely, increasing reproduction quality, efficiency, and distribution. James Cremer (1821–­93), a British-­born photographer and inventor who moved to Philadelphia at the age of twenty-­two, was particularly skilled in taking advantage of these new photographic capacities and became the city’s most prolific producer of stereoviews, publishing a set of photographs of Fairmount Park that earned him a bronze medal at the Franklin Institute Industrial Exhibition of 1874.22 While many details of his life and work are elusive, we know that his Fairmount Park collection was highly regarded and widely available both in the city of Philadelphia and beyond. The images were sold at his “photographic emporium” and as souvenirs during the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, which was held in Fairmount Park. Cremer’s Fairmount Park photographs extended an artistic tradition, established earlier by nineteenth-­century landscape painters, that became known as the Hudson River School. According to the art historian Barbara Novak, that tradition “carried with it not only an esthetic view, but a powerful self-­image, a moral and social energy that could be translated into action.”23 Many of Cremer’s photographs borrow pictorial conventions from landscape painting, such as the motif of the human spectator placed in the foreground to provide a sense of scale while also marking selected “views” and modeling proper habits of aesthetic “nature” observation. Compare, for example, Cremer’s use of this familiar motif in one of his Fairmount Park scenes (fig. 4.1) with that in Asher B. Durand’s famous Kindred Spirits (fig. 4.2), suggesting the photographer’s thorough awareness of prevailing aesthetic frameworks. We have no independent documentary evidence of Cremer’s direct communication with Durand or other landscape painters, but his photograph provides visual confirmation that artistic ideas had become the lingua franca among park advocates, including William Cullen Bryant, a proponent of Central Park in New York City, shown standing with the artist Thomas Cole—­founder of the Hudson River School—­in Kindred Spirits.24 Furthermore, the works of Durand, Cole, and others would likely have been familiar to Cremer, as their landscapes were exhibited at various points throughout the mid-­1800s at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.25 However, Cremer’s work played a very different didactic role from that of the Hudson River School. While some of the sites depicted by landscape painters

Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park fig. 4.1 James Cremer, Peter’s Island, ca. 1880. Albumen stereograph. Fairmount Park Historic Resource Archives, City of Philadelphia.

fig. 4.2 Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849. Oil on canvas, 44 × 36 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2010.106.

were accessible to wealthy and middle-­class tourists, most urban residents had neither the leisure nor the economic wherewithal to visit such locations (indeed, this was one of the strongest arguments in favor of large urban parks).26 Moreover, many landscape paintings, including Durand’s Kindred Spirits, depict idealized scenes, cobbled together from views of multiple sites. In contrast, Cremer’s photographs were intended largely for local consumption, and many of the scenes he depicted were actual places (albeit constructed to look “natural”) that could be visited. Indeed, attracting visitors to the park was the central purpose of the collection.

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Cremer’s photographs of Fairmount Park fall into three categories. The first consists of various types of scenery within the park—­forests, rivers, streams, and open fields—­mostly taken at a distance, sometimes featuring a lone individual, usually a man (see fig. 4.1). The second category features buildings in the park, most notably homes, but situates them within particular rural and historically distant frames, as in the case of Cremer’s “West from North Laurel Hill” (fig. 4.3), which shows a cluster of picturesque old buildings at the Schuylkill River’s edge surrounded by neatly tilled fields and a distant forest. The third category emphasizes genteel park visitors, alone or in groups, relaxing leisurely in quiet contemplation of rustic “natural” surroundings (fig. 4.4). These scenes also feature paths, benches, or bridges—­components of the park that facilitated the rest and therapeutic retreat from urban society that city residents were supposed to seek in the park.

fig. 4.3 James Cremer, “West from North Laurel Hill,” ca. 1880. Albumen stereograph. New York Public Library.

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fig. 4.4 James Cremer, “Lover’s Walk—­Landsdowne Valley,” ca. 1880. Albumen stereograph. New York Public Library.

Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park

Looking more closely at the first of these image categories, we see that Cremer’s photographs, in depicting human beings as small in relation to the park’s majestic landscapes, produce a domesticated version of the romantic sublime for tourists. In many pictures, anonymous visitors appear diminutive and at a distance, creating a perspective that emphasizes the grandeur of their surroundings (see fig. 4.1). As a result, humans—­both depicted visitors and viewers of the photographs—­seem to be outside the park even as they apparently stand within it; for Cremer, as for other artists using similar motifs at the time, people are temporary visitors to the holy temples of nature’s beauty.27 A short, three-­paragraph essay affixed to the back of all the published Fairmount Park pictures by Cremer, presumably written by the photographer himself, helps illuminate the significance of such scenes: “The city has purchased the ground of either side of the Schuylkill River . . . and have [sic] dedicated it as a Public Park and Pleasure Ground. . . . For natural beauty, it is unsurpassed, and has every variety of scenery—­cascades, green wooded islands, meadows, uplands, lawns, rocky ravines, hill-­summits and open fields.” Like the photographs themselves, the essay constructs the park as a space defined by these “natural” constituents, not by the people who visit them. Cremer’s pictures deserve attention as much for what they omit as for what they include. When he took the photographs, Fairmount Park was very much a work in progress; in many places roadways, homes, mills, and manufacturing works interrupted its forests and pastures. Barely a decade before, such structures had been mainstays in framing Philadelphia as an emerging industrial city, but Cremer’s photographic survey of the park largely erased them. By bracketing out these buildings or consigning them to the past, Cremer portrayed the park as a preserve—­a space of exception set apart from the expanding city. The omission of evidence that waterways like the Schuylkill River were important power sources, for example, obscured the conditions of industrial production. Inclusion of modern factories and mills was unimaginable for aesthetic reasons, for it would have required framing the park as something other than a pristine, natural, preindustrial space. At the same time, by aestheticizing “rural” scenes, Cremer’s photographs helped reinforce an emerging understanding of urban space that took for granted the reorientation of economic activity toward industrial production. His Fairmount Park scenes also modeled a related shift away from forms of social organization in which rural economies were more closely integrated with their urban counterparts. In figure 4.3, for example, a few buildings rest on the western bank of the Schuylkill River, amid agricultural fields or pastures.28 This notion of rus in urbe, or country in the city, famously informed Frederick Law Olmsted’s planning of Central Park in New York City, and park historian Terrence Young argues that the same notion was central to the early planning and design of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.29 Photographs like Cremer’s, then, guided park visitors toward a particular understanding of the park within the larger context of the city and its history.

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Finally, Cremer’s photographs established a set of ethical guidelines for their intended audience that maintained a distance between the park and economic activity. They invited city dwellers into the park, encouraging them to sit, read, explore, and be inspired by the park’s natural surroundings. Many of his photographs show people engaged in direct enjoyment of the park—­sitting for picnics, relaxing on benches, reading newspapers or books, or simply reclining on lawns. The men and women in figure 4.4 have come dressed for a day of relaxation in the grass. Even the title, “Lover’s Walk—­Landsdowne Valley,” suggests a leisurely, romantic stroll through the park’s winding pathways. Images like this one confirm that the park existed for leisure, not work. In doing so, Cremer’s images placed the park within a teleological narrative of urban change in which economic development rendered preindustrial modes of production obsolete as industrial ones came to dominate. In constructing the park as an environment distinct from—­and opposed to—­the modern urban workplace, the photographs circumscribed the bounds of behavior in and out of the park, providing a coherent set of ethical guidelines for prospective visitors at a moment when clearly defined tourist itineraries had not yet been established. As previously discussed, factories found no place in Cremer’s narrative, but neither did the kinds of forest-­based economic activities that many people living in Philadelphia engaged in regularly, including the harvesting of fruits, nuts, firewood, river ice, or timber. With these activities in mind, I shift my discussion to the Fairmount Park Guard, an appendage of the park commission that was charged with maintaining civil order in the park. Specifically, I turn toward the guard’s record of criminal activity in the park, one of the few documented instances of the use of park lands for economic means.

Erasing Economic Difference in the Park The matter of clubbing trees [to obtain fruits and nuts] has become a serious one. . . . Many of the best as well as the lowest class of citizens seem to be of the opinion that they have a right to club trees [in the park] and take any fruit they can obtain. . . . There are many fruit trees in isolated places that are of no benefit and had better be cut down.30

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When the Pennsylvania State Assembly passed the bill that authorized the formation of Fairmount Park, it also approved the creation of the Fairmount Park Guard. In 1872, just four years after the official founding of the park, the captain of the guard, Louis Chasteau, began submitting annual reports of the guard’s activities to his superiors. Chasteau’s reports span a twenty-­seven-­year period and document, among other things, the guard’s efforts to shift park users’ activities away from extractive uses of forest resources and toward a new set of leisure activities. As a corollary to Cremer’s photographs, the reports framed the

Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park

park as a place of nonindustrial leisure as well as an object of knowledge that could be comprehended through the use of statistics, detailed record-­keeping, and surveillance. In monitoring and policing the park, the guard also maintained its perceived moral integrity through efforts to shape the activities of both human visitors and nonhuman constituents with which they interacted. Not surprisingly, Chasteau and his officers faced a great deal of public resistance in this regard. Such resistance, and his reporting of it, offers a counterview of the constructed division between the park and the city, as propagated by the newspaper accounts and photographs discussed above. As the Fairmount Park Guard reports demonstrate, the policing practices of the park guard did substantial work in bringing the division of park and city into being. The guard surveyed the park by stationing officers at newly constructed guard houses at regular intervals throughout the park. Guards were encouraged to move about the park within a prescribed territory so that visitors became familiar with individual guards. In this way, the potential presence of a park officer served as a deterrent for criminal activity and more minor violations of park rules, including trespassing beyond specific park entrances and trails where visitors could walk, ride, and drive. Chasteau’s reports demonstrate that the role of the park guard was not simply to provide for the safety of visitors; the guards also enforced adherence to the moral code that undergirded the set of rules instituted for humans’ use of the park. The behavior of adults and the care of children, including the enforcement of gender roles and sexual norms, as well as the bounds of appropriate forms of recreation, fell within the purview of the park guard. Among his many duties, Chasteau maintained “The Statistics,” a yearly report that communicated to park commissioners a series of data points related to the use and abuse of park lands. “The Statistics” included a list of “nuisances” confronted by park guards (“bands of gypsies,” “dead dogs”) and a list of the rules that had been violated (“insulting women,” “throwing stones,” “females swimming”) as well as the number of visitors entering and picnics occurring in the park. It is important to note, however, that Chasteau’s reports do not consistently document offenses that occurred in the park every year. Indeed, the categories of incidents reported (offenses, nuisances, etc.) changed from year to year. This fact suggests that the key function of such reporting was not simply to record human activity but to establish the park’s spatial and behavioral boundaries, thereby distinguishing it from the city. By posting a list of rules at all entrances and attempting to prevent entry into the park except at these spots, the guard achieved some success in that regard. These posted rules introduced the visitor to the ethical landscape of the park and included a set of criteria that restricted economic activity within it. According to the guidelines, “no person shall carry fire-­arms or shoot birds in the Park . . . disturb the fish or water-­fowl in the pool or pond, or birds in any part of the Park . . . cut, break, or in any wise injure or deface the trees, shrubs, plants, [or] turf . . . [or] take ice from the Schuylkill within the Park.” Such rules regulated activities familiar to many working-­class people who previously had subsisted upon them. In other words, day-­to-­day

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interactions among the park’s human and nonhuman inhabitants did not always conform to the new regime of bourgeois aesthetic leisure governing the modern industrial city, whose authorities sought to prohibit them. Nevertheless, many park users continued to pursue these proscribed alternative activities. For the purposes of this chapter, key components of Chasteau’s reports are his narrative descriptions of violations, which highlight a set of economic practices that continued to be performed long after the establishment of new park guidelines. The offenses Chasteau documents run the gamut of preindustrial subsistence practices, including the collection of fruits and nuts by “tree-­ clubbing,” “shooting at game,” “killing rabbits,” and even pasturing cows in the park. Other prohibited activities included cutting ice from the river during the winter, fishing, felling trees, and gathering fallen limbs for firewood. The guard was also preoccupied with preventing the collection of ferns, leaves, and medicinal plants from the park. Chasteau’s frequent remarks on these forbidden practices suggest that they were commonplace. In an especially telling episode described in an 1878 report, containing the text of this section’s epigraph, two brothers were arrested for collecting nuts from trees found in the park. The next day, the boys’ father visited Chasteau’s office to argue that the boys had a right to collect nuts from public land. Indeed, he stated that he moved to a house adjacent to the park so that his sons could “have the advantages of all that might be obtained” from it.31 These and other events reported throughout the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s suggest that the division between the leisure-­space of the park and the work-­space of the city imposed by the park guard and the Fairmount Park Commission more broadly was by no means universally accepted. In response to such conflicts, Chasteau requested in his 1878 report, and again in 1891, that the park commission destroy fruit trees in the park to prevent their use.32 Much of this activity might seem to suggest that the park and its nonhuman inhabitants were passive servants of conflicting human endeavors. Yet a new materialist perspective on this urban environmental context also prompts us to pay attention to the nonhuman “labor” or agency that facilitated various human activities and thwarted others. To begin with, one could argue that tree clubbing, berry ­picking, or collecting ice from frozen rivers was only possible because plants grew and ice froze in particular ways that were useful to people. There were other, even more dynamic, roles that plants and animals played in fueling this conflict between park users and the park guard. One example from Chasteau’s reports tells the story of “young lovers” who took advantage of the park’s overgrown areas to escape the prying eyes of adults.33 Sexual activity in the park, facilitated by untended plants that impeded the guard’s surveillance of park lands, was especially vexing for Chasteau. The guard captain also complained about the abundance of predatory animals, like hawks and feral cats, which he feared would decimate nonpredatory songbird populations preferred for their picturesque beauty and auditory appeal. His repeated requests for more frequent maintenance of overgrown areas and his desire to rid the park of hawks

Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park

and other predatory birds parallel his efforts to remove nut-­bearing trees from the park. For Chasteau, Fairmount was a park whose primary purpose was to provide bourgeois aesthetic space for picnics, contemplative walks, and leisurely drives, not working-­class human subsistence or animal predation (activities perhaps better suited, in the minds of park authorities, to Philadelphia’s tenement neighborhoods and zoological garden, founded in 1874).34 Ironically, park restrictions seem to contradict a yearly event instituted in the first years of the park’s existence. On “Nutting Day,” school children were invited by the thousands to collect chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts found in the park.35 Three years after the park’s founding, in 1871, it was estimated that one in six individuals living in Philadelphia participated in the event, including the adult guardians of the schoolchildren for whom the event was ostensibly created.36 At first glance, the park commission’s endorsement of the event would seem to embrace the very economic uses that Chasteau vehemently opposed. However, it is important to note that the collection of nuts on Nutting Day was meant as a form of recreation, a leisure activity for children, not subsistence labor for working adults. To that effect, one participant described Nutting Day as a time for remembering “the old times when Fair-­Mount was nothing more than a wildwood.”37 Another explained, “To the children, [Nutting Day] was something which, in after years, would appear a big bright slice of their childhood. It was a new song in the dusty market-­place which they would learn by heart and we fancy will never forget. . . . Contact with God’s world outside of a town is as necessary for the development of the soul of a boy as fresh air is for his body.”38 Unlike the activities of the boys described in the epigraph above, nut collection on Nutting Day was a form of historicist reenactment that subdued and domesticated older, more aggressive tactics, like tree-­clubbing. Thus Nutting Day—­like Cremer’s visual and textual reframing of the historical homes and estates encompassed by the park—­reinforced the hegemony of the industrial city by defining other forms of economic behavior as obsolete, the domain of the past, more akin to the play of children than to the work of adults. Just as Chasteau proved unsuccessful in his campaign to remove fruit-­and nut-­bearing trees from the park (plenty of which remain today), Nutting Day ended only a few years after it began.39

Conclusion The establishment of large urban parks in the mid-­1800s was part of a broader effort to establish a set of modern economic relations oriented around industrial production. Places like Fairmount Park served a discursive function by ostensibly situating urban nature within the geography of a city but conceptually beyond its economic space. The establishment and maintenance of urban parks helped to do some of the work required to render another set of practices unviable. Yet the practices supposedly erased by the imposition of this new framing

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were more tenacious than expected, as the narrowed vision of the industrial city proved inadequate for the desires of urban populations living near forested lands. Annual reports of the Fairmount Park Guard demonstrate that some human and nonhuman inhabitants of Philadelphia did not adhere to this new vision, for they continued to pursue a different mode of urban material subsistence despite its official prohibition, its elision from Cremer’s photographs, and its active opposition by the Fairmount Park Guard. Official techniques for the conceptual partition, regulation, and surveillance of “nature” in Fairmount Park failed to contain the resistant energy of human and nonhuman agents who rejected their modern bourgeois industrial logic. However dominant and powerful that particular framing logic had become, its artificial division between nature and the city—­whatever qualities might be attributed to them—­needed to be continually reinforced. Moreover, in order to be successful, human endeavors required the integration of a range of nonhuman actors in the production of these urban and natural spaces. In the case of James Cremer, his work in projecting a particular image of the park required him to bring together two as-­yet unintegrated assemblages—­the emerging technological ensemble of Talbot’s collodion process (glass slides, albumen, cardstock, and chemical baths) and the raw material that served as the subjects of his photographs (the plants, trees, houses, and people who variously occupied the newly classified space of Fairmount Park). From one perspective, it is easy to imagine Cremer as the central actor in this assemblage, directing the actions of other human and nonhuman participants in producing this new cultural landscape. We must remember that Cremer’s role in this process was not uncontested by the technoenvironmental assemblage he wished to direct; instead, we might think of Cremer as one of many participants in this project, enabled through the capacities of the various human and nonhuman allies with which he engaged. This point is made clearer when we recognize that the park was constituted not only through the influence of Cremer, the Fairmount Park Commission, and the Park Guard but also by a host of unruly participants who, to Chasteau’s continual frustration, threatened to disrupt the new vision of the city that park discourse gradually brought into view. Conceptualizing chemical baths or birds of prey as “mediators” of social interactions rather than as mere “intermediaries,” to use Bruno Latour’s terms, sensitizes us to the ensembles that came together during the construction of urban parks in the mid-­nineteenth century, highlighting the diverse and contested roles that parks (and their varied constituents) played during this period. New materialism forces us to acknowledge that the stories usually told about parks have too often overlooked the complex work that was necessary to bring these environments into being. Finally, it reminds us that struggles such as these continue to shape present-­day contests over the city, its nature, and the interplay of humans and nonhumans in their reproduction.

1. Elizabeth Milroy, “Pro Bono Publico: Ecology, History, and the Creation of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System,” in Nature’s Entrepôt: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds, ed. Brian Black and Michael Chiarappa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 35–­54. See also idem, The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–­1876 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). 2. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–­1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Terrence Young, “Modern Urban Parks,” Geographical Review 85 (1995): 544–­60. 3. College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Summary of the Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Volume I. From November, 1841, to August, 1846, Inclusive (Philadelphia: William F. Geddes, 1846), 179. 4. Rosenzweig, Eight Hours; Young, “Modern Urban Parks”; Terrence Young, “Social Reform through Parks: The American Civic Association’s Program for a Better America,” Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996): 460–­72; Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). On the Schuylkill River and Wissahickon Creek as Philadelphia waterways that were fundamental to a precoal industrial base, releasing industry from its reliance on water as a power source, see Nate Gabriel, “Mapping Urban Space: The Production, Division and Reconfiguration of Natures and Economies,” CITY 17 (2013): 325–­42. 5. Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 6. Prior to Pratt’s purchase of it, the Lemon Hill estate was part of a larger estate owned by Robert Morris, signatory to the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, who was in debtor’s prison at the time of the purchase. 7. Elizabeth M. Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis: 1841–­1854,”

in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell Frank Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 307–­62. 8. “Lemon Hill,” Daily Reporter, November 16, 1854. 9. “Public Parks,” Daily Times, April 24, 1856. 10. Charles Shearer Keyser, Lemon Hill and Fairmount Park (Philadelphia: Thomas Cochran, Horace J. Smith, 1886), 7. 11. Ibid., 11. 12. In its 1999 master plan, for example, the Fairmount Park Commission recommended beginning “viewshed” restoration efforts in Lemon Hill in part “because of its historical importance” to the development of the park system. See Fairmount Park Commission, Fairmount Park System Natural Lands Restoration Master Plan (Philadelphia: Fairmount Park Commission, 1999), 2:346. 13. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 81. 14. Geffen, “Industrial Development,” 307–­62. 15. “Fairmount Park,” Philadelphia Evening Journal, August 29, 1859. 16. “Something Worth Seeing,” Trenton Daily Gazette, May 25, 1875. 17. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 18. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1844). 19. Tagg, Disciplinary Frame, 3–­7. 20. Suren Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 33, citing Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

Visualizing Urban Nature in Fairmount Park

notes

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21. Thomas Patin, introduction to Observation Points: The Visual Poetics of National Parks, ed. Thomas Patin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), ix–­ xxvi, xii. 22. Cremer’s photographic work extended beyond documenting the park. During the same period, he was commissioned by the city of Philadelphia to produce a different collection of stereographs that documented the construction of City Hall from 1873 to 1875. For documentation of Cremer’s bronze medal, see “Franklin Institute Exhibition, 1874, Awards of Premiums,” Journal of the Franklin Institute 99, no. 2 (February 1875): 91. 23. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–­ 1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6. 24. Geffen, “Industrial Development,” 307–­62. 25. Peter H. Falk and Anna Wells Rutledge, The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, vol. 1 (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1988). 26. Young, “Modern Urban Parks”; see also Novak, Nature and Culture. 27. See Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” for more discussion on the interpretation of nature as God’s work on earth. 28. It isn’t clear, from the title of the image, to whom the building depicted belonged. The section of the park shown in the image (the west bank of the Schuylkill, across from the northern section of Laurel Hill Cemetery) was the site of a cluster of small lots about which little is now known. 29. Young, “Modern Urban Parks”; Gandy, Concrete and Clay. 30. Louis Chasteau, Annual Report of the Fairmount Park Guard, 1878, manuscript, Philadelphia City Archives.

31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. See John Ott, “Netted Together: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion at the Dawn of Comparative Biology,” chapter 5 in this volume; and Alan C. Braddock, “‘Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden’: Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia, and Domestic Animality,” chapter 7 in this volume. 35. Sylvester W. Burley and Charles Holland Kidder, American Enterprise (Philadelphia: S. W. Burley, 1876), 430. 36. Charles Shearer Keyser, Fairmount Park: Sketches of Its Scenery, Waters, and History (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1872). 37. Norman Allison Calkins, The Student and Schoolmate: An Illustrated Monthly for Youth (Boston: Joseph H. Allen, 1871), 27–28:585. 38. Keyser, Fairmount Park, 116. 39. Recent scholarly attention has demonstrated that the collection of plant materials for food, medicine, and active recreation remains important to many urban people in the twenty-­first century. The popularity of such activities, as well as their illegal status, suggests that the urban environmental imaginary laid out here remains relevant today. For further discussion, see Nathaniel Gabriel, “Urban Non-­Timber Products in Philadelphia” (master’s thesis, Temple University, 2006); Rebecca J. McLain, Patrick T. Hurley, Marla R. Emery, and Melissa R. Poe, “Gathering ‘Wild’ Food in the City: Rethinking the Role of Foraging in Urban Ecosystem Planning and Management,” Local Environment 19 (2014): 220–­40.

5 Netted Together Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion at the Dawn of Comparative Biology john ott

“A Very Independent Creature” (Consider the Pigeon [Columba livia]) Wednesday, August 12, 1885: it was 100 degrees outside and still hotter within the brick walls of the birdhouse at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden. British immigrant photographer Eadweard Muybridge sweated and waited to begin his three-­week effort to capture stop-­motion pictures of animals. The Evening Telegraph detailed the scene: “The first subjects were the pigeons. A black Antwerp pigeon was first placed in a trap at the edge of the portable screen. . . . Everyone waited for the bird to shoot out, but . . . he proved himself to be a very independent creature. . . . Finally, when all coaxing failed, the pigeon flew out so suddenly and went up so straight, that he got away without having his picture taken. The same fate awaited the second trial. All this loss of time rendered the success of the day . . . very doubtful.”1 It took Muybridge six birds to obtain useable shots (fig. 5.1). Carefully selected and edited, the resulting images obscure the profound difficulty of subjecting wild animals to instantaneous photography. The clinical grid of sequential stills betrays neither evidence of “the unmitigated disgust of Mr. Muybridge” at equally uncooperative lions nor any sign of how “Professor Muybridge nearly swore in exasperation” at a truculent donkey. Instead, we see what appear to be unmediated views of the hidden secrets of the animal world. And as the images circulated in the international press, commentators like Century

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fig. 5.1 Eadweard Muybridge, “Pigeon, Flying,” from Animal Locomotion: An Electro-­Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 755. University of Pennsylvania Archives.

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magazine invariably perpetuated a vision of animal management and ignored those rare portions of the archive in which the pigeons or other animals asserted their independence, as in “Hand-­spring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering” (fig. 5.2).2 Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic stop-­motion photographs have recently undergone a renaissance of academic inquiry, but writers tend to fixate on his human studies. Reexamining Muybridge’s work through the lenses of ecocriticism and new materialism obliges us to refocus attention on his pictures of animals and what they reveal about nonhuman agency. And indeed, zoology was the essential nucleus of the twenty thousand individual images he produced while in residency at the University of Pennsylvania for his landmark text, Animal Locomotion (1887).3 The man who brought Muybridge to university president William Pepper’s attention, Fairman Rogers, was not only a university trustee but also a passionate equestrian who authored a book on coaching etiquette. The first investor was another trustee, publisher Joshua Ballinger Lippincott, who also underwrote the veterinary department and its animal hospital.4 Most profoundly, it was a condition of Muybridge’s sponsorship that he be provided workspace on the grounds of the veterinary department.5 Finally, when the university published the results of Muybridge’s four-­year study, President Pepper, a medical doctor, unequivocally asserted that “the sole subject which induced the University to assume supervision of this work was to contribute to the scientific study of animal motions.”6 Accordingly, Muybridge’s project provides rare insight into evolving conceptions about the relationship between human and animal Philadelphians: on the one hand, Animal Locomotion manifests and naturalizes human domination over and exploitation of the animal world; on the other, it reveals a growing recognition, in the local scientific community and beyond, of the interconnectedness of human and animal species. Although it predates wide diffusion of the term ecology in English, the Muybridge archive drew from and contributed

Netted Together fig. 5.2 Eadweard Muybridge, “Hand-­spring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering” (detail), from Animal Locomotion: An Electro-­Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 365. University of Pennsylvania Archives.

to the emergence of a kind of “zoocentrism” that recognized the complex and dynamic interactions of human and nonhuman in the urban habitat of Philadelphia. Like that Antwerp pigeon, the city’s nonhuman agents stubbornly resisted the photographs’ promise of greater understanding of and mastery over animals, and thus compelled gradual but fundamental changes in biological discourse.7 Other symptoms point to these subtle but important shifts in the way humans understood their interactions with animals. The year 1866 saw the creation of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, while the American Humane Society was established in 1877 to improve the welfare of both animals and human children. That same year, Anna Sewell released Black Beauty, a book narrated in “first horse” and published in at least twelve editions before 1900.8 As with so much in the biological sciences, Darwin played an important part in the reconceptualization of the hierarchical Great Chain of Being as something more dynamic—­that is, something closer to modern notions of ecology. As early as 1837, he began musing about the mutuality of species: “If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals—­our fellow brethren in pain, diseases, death, suffering and famine, our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—­they may partake from our origin in one common ancestor, we may all be netted together.” Rigid Linnaean taxonomy became fluid and amorphous, a net heavy with every species inexorably snared in its webbing.9 By and large, however, most Darwinists maintained a conventionally hierarchical model of nature, in which humans were interrelated with, but distinct from and superior to, other animals. It was only in the 1880s that more

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recognizably ecological thought took root in the United States, first in the discipline of botany. Through his studies of Midwestern lake biomes, Stephen Forbes reimagined the Darwinian tree of life as a kind of superorganism: While the structural relations of living organisms, as expressed in a classification, can best be figured by a tree . . . yet this illustration does not at all express their functional relations. While the anatomical characters of the various groups may show that they are all branches of a common stock, from which they have arisen by repeated divisions and continued divergences, the history of their lives will show that they are now much more intimately and variously bound together by mutual interactions than are twigs of the same branch—­that with respect to their vital activities they occupy rather the relations of organs of the same animal body. But despite his belief that “we find a mutual interdependence of organic groups and a modifiability of their habits, numbers and distribution,” Forbes still asserted that this arrangement “brings them under the control of man.” Discourses of human dominance and more biocentric ideas coexisted uneasily in the Victorian era, as we will see through the lenses of Muybridge’s battery of cameras.10

“The Reeds of Quackery” (Consider the Veterinarian)

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For a decade Muybridge worked under the sponsorship of Leland Stanford to produce frozen images of horses in transit. After this partnership ended in an ugly lawsuit in 1882, the photographer undertook an international lecture tour and published a prospectus to attract investors for further experiments. With Rogers’s support, the University of Pennsylvania invited Muybridge to speak in Philadelphia in February 1883.11 After securing $30,000 from six major underwriters, the university trustees made formal arrangements with Muybridge in August to conduct a series of photographic studies. His supervisory committee consisted of the university president; professors of anatomy, physics, physiology, veterinary anatomy, civil engineering, and dynamical engineering; and both the director and the chairman of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.12 After working with university personnel to solve numerous technical problems, Muybridge began photographing human and animal subjects on the Penn grounds, at the zoo, and at the Gentlemen’s Driving Park in nearby Belmont from the fall of 1884 until the fall of 1885, when he began editing the eleven volumes of prints eventually titled Animal Locomotion.13 Philadelphia was an important early center of human medicine and veterinary science in the nineteenth century. During a period of expansion and transformation into a research institution under Dr. Pepper, Penn’s faculty and trustees adopted resolutions to charter a veterinary school in 1878. Generous donations allowed construction to begin on the property bounded by Pine, Guardian, and

fig. 5.3 Eadweard Muybridge, “Jumping a Hurdle, Saddle, Rider 105, Nude, Gray Mare Pandora” (detail), from Animal Locomotion: An Electro-­Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1887), plate 642. University of Pennsylvania Archives.

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Cleveland (now University) Streets. In April 1883, the trustees appointed Dr. Rush Shippen Huidekoper (1854–­1901) as dean of the new department. This local blueblood was a descendant of Benjamin Rush and received his MD in 1877. He also eventually appeared in Animal Locomotion performing drill maneuvers with a rifle and riding his steeplechase mare, Pandora, wearing only a pelvis cloth and smoking a cigar (fig. 5.3). When the veterinary science department opened in October 1884, it became only the second such academic unit after New York University’s.14 Throughout the nineteenth century, the term “horse doctor” was one of many synonyms for a confidence trickster, and period visual culture was unkind to the veterinary trade. Veterinary schools became the chief mechanism of disciplinary professionalization. At the department’s inauguration, Dr. Huidekoper lamented how “[we must] contend with the prejudice which ignorance has attached to veterinary surgeons as a class.” President of the United States Veterinary Medical Society (est. 1863) for four terms (1887–­89; 1890–­92), Huidekoper played a major role in the effort to improve the field’s reputation. “Veterinary medicine,” he urged in the keynote address of the organization’s 1889 meeting, “like the turtle, must drag itself from a lowly origin. Its advance must be slow, through the mire of public prejudice, entangled by the reeds of quackery on all sides.”15

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Economic Animals (Consider the Horse [Equus caballus]) We cannot know the precise extent to which Penn’s supervising commission dictated the form and subjects of Animal Locomotion, but many aspects of the project synchronize with the interests of the new veterinary school. First, the experiments helped fortify the department’s claims to be veterinary science. The setup of the camera shed and complex recording instruments evoke the research laboratory, a forum that matured both in academia and in the industrial sector in the 1870s and 1880s. Moreover, when it came time to publish the results of the experiments, the university turned not to Muybridge but to its own faculty. Professors of engineering (William Marks), comparative biology (Harrison Allen), and human physiology (Francis X. Dercum) all penned scientific texts dense with technical jargon, complex diagrams, and even a complete taxonomic roster.16 The use of photography likewise helped characterize both Muybridge and Penn’s veterinary staff as scientists. The long-­noted “truth claims” of photographs reinforced the objectivity and accuracy of these empirical inquiries. The serial format of the prints, meanwhile, promised viewers comprehensiveness, a veritable zoorama.17 Second, the archive emphasizes animals’ fitness for human exploitation; the kind of science practiced both at the veterinary department and in Muybridge’s studio was a highly interested one. The particular sequence of species within the portfolio ranks them by their importance for the larger economy. Domesticated animals precede wild animals. Tamed animals appear in the order of their relative value: beasts of burden (horse, mule, ass, and ox), then sources of food (pig and goat), and finally pets (dog and cat). The cavalcade of wild animals, meanwhile, begins with species closest to domesticates: first ungulates (orex, deer, elk, eland, antelope, gnu, buffalo), then feline predators (lion, tiger, jaguar), and finally a hodgepodge of exotic beasts whose unusual features long made them star attractions on the menagerie circuit: the elephant, camel, guanaco, capybara, baboon, sloth, and kangaroo. Animal Locomotion even sorts birds by their relative tractability: tamable species (pigeon and cockatoo) precede larger raptors (hawk, vulture, and eagle) and giant oddities like the ostrich and the adjutant stork. Those zoo animals whom Muybridge could not persuade to parade before his cameras, including the owl and the bears, are altogether absent from the archive.18 The favored place of horses in Muybridge’s zoorama likewise suited veterinarians’ efforts to stress the economic value of their profession. Horses were the most valuable individual animals in both farms and cities, and so equines lead the procession of beasts and star in almost half (95 of 219) of Muybridge’s animal series. The precedence of and disproportionate emphasis on horses occurred not just in the pages of Animal Locomotion but throughout the growing network of veterinary schools. “Every first-­year veterinary student’s course of study,” writes historian Susan Jones in Valuing Animals, “concentrated on the intricacies of an equine cadaver as the prototypical animal body.” This emphasis on horse anatomy

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also extended to artistic training; Thomas Eakins required his students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to dissect horses at a local slaughterhouse.19 Muybridge further subdivided his archive by type of locomotive action, and the activities chosen also underscore the utility of the animal world. Thus the captions for the plates define their subjects in terms of their functions: we see horses hauling, pulling sulkies, being ridden by jockeys in silks, hurdling as in a riding competition, and performing circus tricks like bell ringing and drinking from a bottle. As with the ordering of the animals, the sequence of activities for individual species begins with work, continues with leisure, and ends with those few “wild” actions unsupervised by humans. In his prospectus Muybridge promised study of “the action of the horse, under various conditions of health and disease,” but here too financial considerations determine his selective attention to afflicted animals. Animal Locomotion features those injuries most common to the hauling animals upon which urban economies depended—­lameness, osteoarthritis (spavin), and ossification—­and in so doing indexes the special expertise of the veterinarian.20

Snapshot Taxidermy (Consider the Kangaroo [Macropus giganteus]) The Muybridge archive not only redeemed horse doctors as veterinary scientists and demonstrated the discipline’s contributions to the larger economy; it also promised to discipline and dominate beasts of field and woods alike. Mechanisms of human restraint—­leashes, saddles, bridles, and halters—­populate the photographs. And to record “actions . . . which cannot be controlled, as for instance the erratic movements of the animals in the Zoological Gardens,” Muybridge introduced an electric timer capable of capturing “one leap or stride . . . of a restless leopard.”21 But as if to suggest that images of jungle beasts taxidermied by the battery of cameras were insufficient to convincingly show a tamed wilderness, Muybridge also included further signs of domination: the collar and lead on the baboon, the elephants’ chaperone, and, above all, the iron bars of the zoo cages. No aspect of Muybridge’s work in Philadelphia attracted more attention from the local press than his laborious efforts to wrangle zoo animals before his lenses. At Fairmount Park the photographer required a half dozen assistants, plus members of the zoo staff. Journalists snickered in print at how shadows thrown by the cage bars in the carnivore house interfered with the photography of its residents, how keepers needed to jab the tiger with a long pole and beat the donkey with sticks to ensure successful sessions, and how the lions tore down the white backdrops, which also scared the deer and the kangaroo, who became “sufficiently disturbed to cause that animal to bump his nose against his bars and set it to bleeding.”22 Not even a large entourage and the instantaneity of electrical current, then, were enough to manage nature’s most unruly creatures. Cyanotype proofs for Animal Locomotion reveal how Muybridge artfully staged compelling images of nature tamed, not just at the zoo, but also in his photographic studios on the Penn campus. He cropped and centered individual frames in order to transform

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“a very independent creature” into a biological specimen.23 And his use of gridded backgrounds intimated the ability of both stop-­motion photography and veterinary science to regiment nature. During his first (and largely unsuccessful) period of residency at the zoo, he used monotone backdrops, but upon his return one year later, he began employing the grids. These metrics had also appeared in recent anthropometric photography, as in the work of ethnologist J. H. Lamprey (fig. 5.4), indicating that Muybridge quite literally measured animals with a human yardstick. The use of the grid as a visual tool in the human arts and sciences has an ancient history (going back well before Thomas Holme’s Portraiture of Philadelphia for William Penn), but its deployment here by Muybridge may have been suggested—­and obviously was endorsed—­by university professors on the supervising committee.24 The ubiquitous grids of Animal Locomotion manage fauna in numerous ways. As in Lamprey’s human studies, the latticework of Muybridge’s prints types and standardizes its subjects.25 We see not a particular individual but a “Young African”; not Dr. Huidekoper but “Rider 105”; not one pigeon but the pigeon. “The erratic movements . . . of a restless leopard” become a system of mathematical

fig. 5.4 J. H. Lamprey, Figure of Young African, from “On the Method of Measuring the Human Frame,” Journal of the Ethnological Society, 1869.

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coordinates on a Cartesian plane. Furthermore, the extension of the grid across both individual stills and complete series visually suggests containment; no matter the species, its posture, or type of movement, Animal Locomotion boxes its quarry inside perfect squares. The felicitous visual affinity of the grid for the fencing that appears in many zoo photos reinforces its function as a mechanism of control. Many professional Philadelphians worked to rationalize and manage other aspects of city life, and so we may also understand Muybridge’s promotion of urban veterinary science in the context of the growing bureaucratization of urban America. Among others, historian John Henry Hepp’s The Middle-­Class City has documented the bourgeois rationalization of urban space in Gilded Age Philadelphia. Like a transit map of the city, a floor map of Wanamaker’s department store, a guidebook to the Centennial Exposition, and even the layout of the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, the Muybridge archive and the Zoological Gardens were in their organization fundamentally taxonomic, at once compartmentalized and hierarchical.26

“The Animal Life of Man” (Consider the Human [Homo sapiens]) The grid system, the taut leash, the iron cage, and the scientific diagram all signal human control over and difference from animal subjects, but other aspects of Animal Locomotion both suggest and compel the recognition of things shared by Homo sapiens and the other members of the kingdom Animalia. For the Muybridge archive, however hierarchical, was also a project that encompassed humans and beasts alike. His initial prospectus promised, in a single clause, the study of “the attitudes of man, the horse, and other animals.” Produced in a laboratory that was physically situated between the university’s hospital and its veterinary school, these photographs transformed people and animals into equations plotted on the same coordinate axes. Response to Animal Locomotion suggests that it persuaded commentators of these commonalities. It is not surprising that Penn scientist Harrison Allen would observe, upon his study of the photographs, that “the attitude taken by the human fore limb is precisely that of the fore limb of the quadruped engaged in terrestrial progression.” But even lay ­students of the archive saw continuities. Reflecting on Muybridge’s three-­week tenure at the zoo, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “It is found that a man crawling on his hands and knees imitates the walk of the lion and the horse in the sequence of footfalls.” “Out of the 781 plates he has now published,” wrote the Nation upon final publication, “. . . 562 are devoted to men, women and children . . . acting before our eyes the animal life of man.”27 Here too the photographer’s interests accorded with Penn’s scientific communities. Under Pepper, the university pioneered developments in comparative medicine, the joint study of veterinary and human biology. Its veterinary department was as much an extension of its medical school as its own entity; most of its faculty members had MDs, and both units shared the same admission requirements. No one better embodied the program’s interdisciplinarity than its

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dean. A medical doctor with certification in veterinary science, Rush Huidekoper also edited the Journal of Comparative Medicine and Surgery from 1886 to 1901.28

“The Golden Link” (Consider Trichinosis [Trichinella spiralis]) Like Darwin’s legacy, the emergence of germ theory propelled the rise of comparative medicine, and in this sense, too, the veterinary school stood at the intellectual vanguard. A wave of experiments in the 1870s revolutionized pathology. Significantly, it was the study of epizootics, or animal diseases, that provided the earliest successes for these new hypotheses about pathogenic bacteria.29 For veterinarians, then, germ theory presented an unmatched opportunity to redefine themselves as professional scientists and stewards of the public welfare. From the Civil War forward, a string of devastating epizootics slowed military advances, accelerated economic downturns, and even worsened urban conflagrations as fire engines stood idle, wanting animals to pull them. Professional organizations like the United States Veterinary Medical Association calculated the cost of animal plagues like the Great Epizootic of 1872 in the millions of dollars in order to highlight the economic importance of their trade.30 In Philadelphia, Dean Huidekoper was an important vector of this new scientific thought. In 1881, he enrolled in the National Veterinary School in Alfort, France, where he worked in the labs of the field’s pioneers: Robert Koch, Auguste Chauveau, and Louis Pasteur. “The curriculum [of the veterinary department],” according to school chronicler John Martin, “leaned heavily to subjects on pathology and contagious diseases.” In the original compound, “contagious diseases” boasted their own laboratory.31 But people and animals did not merely occupy the same world of unseen contagious agents; they also shared the same germs. In American cities humans and domesticated animals were packed together as closely as they were in the pages of Animal Locomotion. There were more than fifty thousand horses in Philadelphia in 1900, when domesticated animals outnumbered people three times over nationwide. No wonder, then, that students of comparative medicine paid special attention to zoonoses, or diseases transmitted between humans and animals. Veterinarians hoping to tout their profession invariably name-­dropped rabies, anthrax, trichinosis, and other transspecies infections. Philadelphian James Law, for example, advanced this “Plea for Veterinary Surgery” in 1878: “Several of the specific and contagious diseases of animals are communicable to man. . . . If physicians are left ignorant of the affliction in the beast, and veterinarians of the same in man, they each miss the golden link which would reveal the true nature and dangers of the disease.” Law’s statements were not idle academic inquiry; so polluted were the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers that Philadelphia suffered one of the highest death rates from typhoid fever among major American cities.32 Animal doctors thus tried to leverage discoveries in microbiology into influence over the creation of public health policy. Huidekoper seldom missed an

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opportunity to carve out this larger role for his profession, even during a dinner he hosted at the Philadelphia Club on the occasion of the death of his beloved mare, Pandora. As the New York Times reported, “After the filet had been eaten and pronounced very toothsome by the guests Dr. Huidekoper remarked that he was glad of his guests’ appreciation for his favorite horse ‘for,’ he said, ‘you have just eaten her. . . .’” Having successfully captured his guests’ attention, he went on to stump for laws mandating the inspection of beef. “Dr. Huidekoper . . . in speaking at the dinner at which Pandora was devoured, said ‘All horse meat is as good as beef. . . . I can go to the stock yards in West Philadelphia and pick out a dozen head of cattle any morning that are utterly unfit to eat that are sent to market. There is no inspection of meat in this city and the law is violated every day.’” But this effort to redefine veterinary medicine as a public health agency was more than a question of diet. In 1880, Philadelphia had the most horse-­powered streetcar lines in the nation, so scientists like Huidekoper could legitimately claim to be caretakers of the city’s economy and welfare alike.33

Close Looking (Consider the Corpuscle [Species Unknown]) But what do disease pathology and hippophagy have to do with the Muybridge archive? I would like to argue that Muybridge’s promise to reveal the secrets of an unseen world would have greatly enticed Penn scientists like Huidekoper who were consumed with exploring phenomena invisible to the naked eye. While no member of the supervisory commission explicitly discussed Muybridge’s work in these terms, numerous contemporaries marveled at scientists’ ability to breach the threshold of retinal vision. Commenting on the publication of Animal Locomotion, the campus paper wrote, “We may stand in awe of those who have made great discoveries in regions of science and philosophy beyond our ken.” And the reviewer in Century magazine lauded the venture as “an important addition to the instruments of scientific research, by extending observation along a path where the limits of human sense had barred advance.” The reviewer even connected these investigations into biomechanics to trends in microbiology: “The use of instantaneous photography in reading the secret of motion was as much the introduction of a new instrument of precision to supply the lack of sense as the use of the microscope.”34 This conceptual proximity of Muybridge’s experiments to microscopic vision, then, would have helped contemporaries regard Penn’s school of veterinary science as the home of scientific experts who safeguarded the city’s economy and health. It would not have been strange for university scientists to mention stop-­motion photography and microscopy in the same breath. As with the other biological sciences, Penn also stood in the forefront of microscopy. Its faculty members included Joseph Janvier Woodward, who published lithographs based on photomicroscopy in his Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, 1861–65 (1870–88) and Joseph Richardson, author of A Handbook of Medical Microscopy (1871).35 Moreover, microbiology was a cornerstone of comparative medicine,

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and not only because of germ theory; like the Muybridge archive, studies in microscopy suggested that the harder one looked, the more animals and humans resembled one another. Despite his manipulation of data to rank “man” above and apart from other animals, for example, Joseph Richardson, in his comparison of the size of red corpuscles for different species, only demonstrated the stark similarities between human and, say, whale blood. Forensic scientists ultimately required other technologies to be able to refute murder suspects’ frequent claims that the blood found at a crime scene was a dog’s or another animal’s.36 All told, these various forms of extraretinal spectatorship allowed Gilded Age Philadelphians to catch glimpses, however fleeting, of a heretofore unseen ecology shared by humans and animals alike. Pigeon, horse, and Huidekoper had all been “netted together,” as Darwin had put it, by the grids of the Muybridge archive, and under the microscope slide. But Animal Locomotion does not simply document this conceptual sea change; so indelibly is it a product of its urban biome that we might add to the long roster of Muybridge coauthors not just the many Penn scientists, underwriters, and models but also the pigeons, horses, and kangaroos that fill its pages—­even the bacterium Salmonella typhi. And since these photographs also by necessity fall inside Darwin’s net, their publication and circulation, finally, in turn played their own role in shaping the multispecies city.

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1. “The City,” Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, August 12, 1885. 2. “Taking Leo’s Picture,” Philadelphia Press, August 22, 1885, 5; Talcott Williams, “Animal Locomotion in the Muybridge Photographs,” Century 34, no. 3 (July 1887): 362. 3. The one exception is Ann Greene’s brief discussion of Muybridge in her history of the horse in industrial America. See Ann Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 208. 4. On Rogers, see “Muybridge’s Investigations—­the Action of Animals in Motion as Shown by Photography,” Philadelphia Ledger and Transcript, September 6, 1884, 5; Anita Mozley, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” in Eadweard Muybridge, Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion (New York: Dover Publications, 1979 [1887]), xxvi. On Lippincott, see Williams, “Animal Locomotion,” 358; Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 146; and John E. Martin, A Legacy and a Promise: The First Hundred Years, 1884–­1984, School of Veterinary Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 29–­31. 5. Mozley, “Introduction,” vii. When they consider it at all, scholars ascribe the experiments’ location to the need for privacy for photographing nude humans. See Janine A. Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera: Eadweard Muybridge’s Studies of the Human Figure,” American Art 16, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 35. 6. William Pepper, “Note,” in Animal Locomotion: The Muybridge Work at the University of Pennsylvania, ed. Eadweard Muybridge, William D. Marks, Harrison Allen, and Francis Xavier Dercum (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1888), 7. 7. Ernst Haeckel first used “Oecologie” in Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), esp. 286–­87. Its subsequent translation and dissemination in English began with Haeckel’s The History of Creation (New York:

13. Haas, Muybridge, 153. 14. On the department, see Martin, A Legacy and a Promise, 31; Evan L. Stubbs, A History of Veterinary Medicine in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ca. 1960s), 3–­5; and Ray Thompson, After 1883: One Hundred Years of Organized Veterinary Medicine in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1982), 21. On Huidekoper, see Martin, A Legacy and a Promise, 31; and J. F. Smithcors, The American Veterinary Profession: Its Background and Development (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1963), 87, 338–­39. 15. The quotations appear in Martin, A Legacy and a Promise, 34; and Smithcors, American Veterinary Profession, 304–­5. On the USVMA, see Jones, Valuing Animals, 14–­16; Greene, Horses at Work, 230–­35; and Smithcors, American Veterinary Profession, 331–­38. 16. On research laboratories, see David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), esp. 3–­20. The roster appears in Harrison Allen, “Materials for a Memoir on Animal Locomotion,” in Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 100–­101. See also Haas, Muybridge, 152. 17. The photographic multiples, when combined with the clinical aesthetic of Muybridge’s studio, participated in what art historian Robin Kelsey has usefully identified as “the archive style.” “The producers of archives have,” argues Kelsey, “claimed and defended the completeness, authenticity, and reliability of their holdings.” Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–­1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 5. See also Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1983), 8; Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15–­31; John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); and Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–­65. On photographers’ and medical doctors’ interdependent efforts

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Appleton, 1876), xiv, but the landmark text, featuring the term prominently in its title, is Eugenius Warming, Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant-­Communities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909 [1895]). See Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 192–­93. 8. Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 141; Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 9, 47; and Greene, Horses at Work, 200–­203. 9. Gavin de Beer, ed., “Darwin’s Notebooks on Transmutation of Species: Part I. First Notebook (July 1837–­February 1838),” Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Historical Series 2, no. 2 (January 1960): 69. 10. Steven A. Forbes, “On Some Interactions of Organisms,” Bulletin of the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History 1, no. 3 (November 1880): 1, 15. On Forbes, see Sharon E. Kingsland, “Defining Ecology as a Discipline,” in Foundations of Ecology: Classic Papers with Commentaries, ed. Leslie A. Real and James H. Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2–­4. Worster has documented the contradictions inherent in the Victorian natural sciences. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 114. 11. He appeared at the Academy of the Fine Arts on the ninth, the Academy of Music on the twelfth, and at PAFA again on the thirteenth. “The Star Course,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 13, 1883, 8. 12. Investors were Charles C. Harrison, Thomas Hockley, Samuel Dickson, Edward H. Coates, and J. B. Lippincott. See Mozley, “Introduction,” xxv. The committee consisted of Pepper, Professor of Anatomy Joseph Leidy, Professor of Physics George F. Barker, Professor of Veterinary Anatomy and Pathology Rush Huidekoper, Professor of Dynamical Engineering William D. Marks, Professor of Civil Engineering Lewis M. Haupt, Professor of Physiology Harrison Allen, Edward H. Coates, and Thomas Eakins. Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 6.

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to professionalize, see Tanya Sheehan, Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-­Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). 18. On owls and bears, see “The City,” Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, August 13, 1885; and “Laws of Motion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 1885, 3. Brian Wallis has observed of other period scientific photographs that “the ‘shadow archive’ . . . implied a hierarchical ordering,” while Marta Braun has also noted that the volumes of Animal Locomotion have “a covert sociological hierarchy.” Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 47; Marta Braun, “Animal Locomotion,” in Philip Brookman, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art and Steidl Publishers, 2010), 271. 19. On horses’ preeminence, see Jones, Valuing Animals, 23–­27. The quote appears on p. 26. On Eakins, see William C. Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia,” Scribner’s Monthly 18 (September 1879): 737–­50; and Alan C. Braddock, “‘Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden’: Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia, and Domestic Animality,” chapter 7 in this volume. 20. Eadweard Muybridge, Prospectus of a New and Elaborate Work upon the Attitudes of Man, the Horse, and Other Animals in Motion (New York: n.p., 1883); Jones, Valuing Animals, 27. 21. “Muybridge’s Investigations,” 5. 22. “Laws of Motion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 24, 1885, 2; “Mr. Muybridge’s Photographs,” New York Times, August 16, 1885, 5; “Taking the Tiger’s Picture,” Philadelphia Press, August 19, 1885, 3; “Taking Leo’s Picture,” 5. 23. On the proofs, see Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 199–­210. The author observes that, in the case of bird images, “a considerable amount of intervention was sometimes required to make the final plate cohesive” (209). Likewise, Marta Braun notes that Muybridge “did employ certain

strategies in his sequential arrangements to ensure that any gaps or inconsistencies would not be seen.” Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-­ Jules Marey, 1830–­1904 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 235. 24. Grids are first reported in “Mr. Muybridge’s Art,” Philadelphia Times, August 11, 1885. See also J. H. Lamprey, “On the Method of Measuring the Human Form, for the Use of Students of Ethnology,” Journal of the Ethnological Society 1 (1869): 84–­85. On visual anthropometrics, see Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 46–­54; Philippa Levine, “States of Undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination,” Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 200; and Mozley, “Introduction,” xxxi. On the grid, see Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Grid, the True Cross, the Abstract Structure,” Studies in the History of Art 48 (1995): 302–­12. 25. Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 48–­49. 26. Jones, Valuing Animals, 24; John Henry Hepp, The Middle-­Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–­1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); see also Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–­ 1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). 27. Allen, “Materials for a Memoir,” 98; “Laws of Motion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 1885, 3; “Animal Locomotion,” The Nation, January 19, 1888, 55. 28. On the nomenclature of “comparative medicine,” see Jones, Valuing Animals, 4. On the veterinary department, see Thompson, After 1883, 76; and Martin, A Legacy and a Promise, 32. On Huidekoper, see Smithcors, American Veterinary Profession, 338–­9. 29. On the rise of germ theory, see Joanna Swabe, Animals, Disease, and Human Society: Human-­Animal Relations and the Rise of Veterinary Medicine (London: Routledge, 1999), 110–­11; and Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 29–­34. On the importance of the animal sciences to pathology, see Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, Horse in the City, 160–­62; Jones, Valuing Animals, 30–­ 31; Swabe, Animals, Disease, and Human

Profession, 339; and Thompson, After 1883, 22. On streetcars, see Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davis, “The Iron Age, 1876–­ 1905,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 484. 34. The quotations are from “The University and Mr. Muybridge,” Daily Pennsylvanian, November 15, 1887; and Williams, “Animal Locomotion,” 356–­58. 35. On microscopy, see Jutta Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–­1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Tomes, Gospel of Germs, 29. See also George A. Otis and Joseph Janvier Woodward, Reports on the Extent and Nature of the Materials Available for the Preparation of a Medical and Surgical History of the Rebellion (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1865), esp. 146–­51; Amy V. Rapkiewicz et al., “Surgical Pathology in the Era of the Civil War: The Remarkable Life and Accomplishment of Joseph Janvier Woodward, MD,” Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine 129 (October 2005): 1313–­16; and Joseph Gibbons Richardson, A Handbook of Medical Microscopy (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1871). 36. Richardson, Handbook of Medical Microscopy, 288; Tal Golan, “Blood Will Out: Distinguishing Humans from Animals and Scientists from Charlatans in the 19th-­Century American Courtroom,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 31, no. 1 (2000): 93–­124.

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Society, 111; Tomes, Gospel of Germs, 37; and Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–­1900 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 43. 30. Jones, Valuing Animals, 24–­30; McShane and Tarr, Horse in the City, 159. 31. Jones, Valuing Animals, 15; Swabe, Animals, Disease, and Human Society, 109. On Huidekoper, see Smithcors, American Veterinary Profession, 338–­39. On the veterinary department, see Martin, A Legacy and a Promise, 30–­33. 32. Statistics come from McShane and Tarr, Horse in the City, 16; and Jones, Valuing Animals, 17. On zoonoses, see McShane and Tarr, Horse in the City, 153–­55; and Smithcors, American Veterinary Profession, 396–­98. The quotation appears in Smithcors, American Veterinary Profession, 396; see also Frank Seaver Billings, The Relation of Animal Diseases to the Public Health, and Their Prevention (New York: D. Appleton, 1884), 210. On Philadelphia and disease, see Alan C. Braddock, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 118–­21; and Braddock, “‘Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden,’” chapter 7 in this volume. 33. Smithcors, American Veterinary Profession, 389–­96; Jones, Valuing Animals, 16. On the Pandora dinner, see “Eating the Old Mare,” New York Times, October 8, 1888, 5; McShane and Tarr, Horse in the City, 29; Smithcors, American Veterinary

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6 Expansive Exhibitions Agriculture and Environment in Walt Whitman’s Camden-­Philadelphia Region mari a fa r l a nd

Grass is the sine qua non of live-­stock! The essential of dung! and therefore the nursery of corn and of all farming products! j o hn b eal e b o r d l ey, Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs ( 17 9 9 ) In his autobiography Specimen Days, penned during the years surrounding 1870 in the rural environs of Camden-­Philadelphia, Whitman recalls a striking image of agriculture encountered during a walk on Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street: “A few days ago one of the six-­story clothing stores along here had the space inside its plate-­glass show-­window partition’d into a little corral, and litter’d deeply with rich clover and hay . . . on which reposed two magnificent fat sheep, full-­sized but young—­the handsomest creatures of the kind I ever saw. I stopp’d long and long, with the crowd, to view them. . . . Their wool, of a clear tawny color, with streaks of glistening black—­altogether a queer sight amidst that crowded promenade of dandies, dollars and drygoods.”1 In this vignette, the sheep’s “glistening” wool serves to advertise the quality and authenticity of the store’s wares. The fodder and livestock are a jarring sight against a “crowded promenade of dandies” and the glass front of the department store, often seen as icons of urbanization and consumer culture. But for residents of Philadelphia

fig. 6.1 Craig, Finley & Co., “Pennsylvania State Fair, Philadelphia,” 1885. Chromolithograph advertising card. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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in these years, the display of livestock, grass crops, and farm machinery in iron-­ girded structures was a familiar sight, whether in the Centennial Exhibition’s Agricultural Hall or at the Pennsylvania State Fair’s Exhibition Grounds at Broad Street (fig. 6.1). In Whitman’s image of the pastoral pair on display in the plate glass window, we see the profound material interconnectedness of urban spaces and their agrarian neighbors. If this convergence of city and country is jarring in certain respects—­“a queer sight”—­Whitman brings them together in the gentle fusion he elsewhere calls “One Identity.”2 The fleece and fodder appear alongside the store’s “drygoods”—­just as “iron interlaces” with apples and potatoes in one poem published in Philadelphia in the same years—­in ways that typify the interdependence of agrarian and urban spaces in Whitman’s work (III, 689). The sketch invites us to ask what Leaves of Grass would look like if critics focused on the grass crops of the book’s title—­or the farmland where Walt Whitman spent his childhood and his later years in rural portions of the greater Philadelphia region—­rather than the urban environment where he spent his twenties and thirties. Whitman titled his book Leaves of Grass during a decade of what one contemporary termed “the prevalence of grass mania” among agriculturists; grass became an object of fascination among those who wished to elevate agriculture to a modern, profitable activity, and it was even dubbed the origin “of all farming products.”3 The first Leaves edition was written during a year of unprecedented and searing droughts, the agricultural famine of 1854. While Whitman is frequently seen as an urban poet—­albeit one who sometimes turned

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to pastoral imagery—­the title of his evolving work, Leaves of Grass, highlights a competing aspect of his poetry: agricultural crisis and rural improvement efforts within the Camden-­Philadelphia region where the poet spent his later years. By stressing Whitman’s acute awareness of the city’s deeply layered connections to plant and animal life in rural settings, my chapter reflects new materialist approaches in ecocritical scholarship, especially their emphasis on deep connections between human and nonhuman forms of identity.4 And by emphasizing his concrete immersion in material aspects of the agricultural countryside outside Philadelphia, I suggest that Whitman might be understood as a poet deeply engaged with contemporaneous developments in agricultural modernization. The improvement of agriculture supplied both the content and the venue for works like Whitman’s poem “After All, Not to Create Only”—­later retitled “The Song of the Exposition” and reprinted in the late-­career Philadelphia volume Autumn Rivulets—­which the poet first recited at an 1871 exhibition devoted to the improvement of agriculture and manufacturing.5 Typifying these concerns, “Song of the Exposition” declares itself a “song of the soil, and the good green grass!,” declaring that the poet is “no more of the city streets.”6 Like the agricultural exhibitions it evokes, the poem showcases the regionally specific products of a growing agrarian economy: “the buckwheat of Michigan,” “the cotton in Mississippi,” “the wool of California or Pennsylvania.”7 It also catalogues the inventions and “labor-­saving implements”—­cotton gins, hay-­rakes, and “steam-­ power reaping-­machines”—­that featured prominently in the era’s agricultural fairs and exhibitions (III, 596). An avid enthusiast of exhibitions like the 1853 New York Crystal Palace and the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, Whitman performed his poem against a backdrop of exhibits dedicated to the improvement of agriculture, and these developments are keys to understanding his poetry. Recalling London’s Royal Society, the organizers of the Crystal Palace exhibitions had stated their primary goal as “the reclamation of sterile or exhausted soils” at a moment when Americans noted “the deplorable sterility of the land almost on all sides.”8 As historian Steven Stoll has shown, it was an era of pervasive concern regarding exhausted soils, or what contemporaries termed “old fields.”9 The “American farmer despoils his fields,” complained renowned soil chemist Justus von Liebig, noting that the “prosperity of the country is declining, instead of increasing,” due in large part to “the fact that the soil is almost everywhere exhausted.”10 Mirroring these concerns, the agricultural press aimed to reinvigorate depleted fields and farms by popularizing scientific approaches to the cultivation of “grasses, and grains, and fruits, and whatever nourishes and sustains man’s body.”11 While commentators varied in their explanations of agriculture’s precipitous decline, they uniformly testified to the land’s frightening deterioration, and Whitman’s poems are shaped within this sense of decline. Against this backdrop, his decision to foreground “grass” assumes new significance. Much as Whitman’s contemporaries praised agricultural science for its ameliorative effects, Leaves of Grass celebrates a revitalized agrarian landscape, as the poet

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exclaims: “This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, / This is the common air that bathes the globe” (I, 22). As I will show here, critics have failed to recognize the specific milieu of agrarian crisis from which Whitman’s signifier “grass” arose, and thus have neglected not only the broad role of agriculture across Leaves but also the key role of nonhuman entities like grass and soil for his poetry. Beyond their relevance to the thematic concerns of Leaves, these agricultural elements illuminate Whitman’s aesthetic strategies, which arise from his profound concern with the perceived disintegration of organic forms. The poet composed his avid celebrations of “limitless” grass during the acute agricultural famine of 1854, when soil depletion had destroyed most of the crops in the continental United States. In the 1854 sermon “Lessons of the Drought,” one contemporary evokes “an arid landscape of waste and destitution”: “From the Atlantic to the Mississippi, the sky has bent hot, hard, and hollow over a parching soil. The hillsides are blasted with fever. The grass has been scorched. The fruits have shrunk. The trees are withering with thirst, and shedding shriveled leaves. . . .”12 These grim images of nature’s vulnerability and imperfection—­epitomized by “shriveled leaves”—­ stand in stark contrast to Whitman’s own modes of representation, which aim to improve upon the perishable forms found in nature. If the events of 1854 revealed the disturbing possibility of organic disintegration, the aesthetic strategies in Leaves offer forms of wholeness—­or, to use Whitman’s preferred term, “unity”—­seen as absent or lacking in natural forms. Lexically, agriculture—­the science and art of cultivating the soil—­describes the process of reshaping organic forms of nature into artificial forms. Fittingly, agriculture becomes the model for Whitman’s proto-modernist poetics: the making of artificial forms that are imagined to mimic, but also to incorporate, natural ones. His poems thus interlineate human and nonhuman elements in dynamic ways. If agriculture is frequently defined as an “art,” it shares art’s capacity for radically remaking the world, as Whitman and his contemporaries understood in surprisingly modern ways. In an 1849 lecture to the New York Agricultural Society, James F. W. Johnston predicts that advances in farming will “dispense with” nature entirely: “The art of man shall not only acquire a dominion over that principle of life, by the agency of which plants now grow and alone produce food for man and beast, but shall be able . . . to imitate or dispense with the operations of that principle . . . the time will come when man shall manufacture by art those necessities and luxuries for which he is now dependent on the vegetable kingdom. . . . Is the order of nature . . . to be completely altered by the progress of scientific knowledge?”13 Johnston conjures up an imaginary future time when artificial processes will free humankind from “depend[ence] on the vegetable kingdom.” In this vision of agricultural improvement, humans gain “dominion” over the fundamental processes of plant life. While Johnston commends the “tranquil pleasures of a country life,” the future he imagines is one in which technologies come to “imitate or dispense with” nature entirely. Such a version of nature, freed from

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the “uncertain seasons” and “rain and drought,” surpasses unimproved nature in its stability, coherence, and reliability, restoring exhausted lands “to a more fertile condition.”14 To say that Whitman’s poetry, like Johnston’s vision of agricultural modernism, seeks to repair the shattered natural world by substituting an artificial or enhanced version of nature—­a version broadly associated with agricultural improvement—­is to challenge the commonplace assumption that Whitman’s nature is unaffected and sincere or, to use the poet’s term, “spontaneous” (I, 257). And to say that his poems are steeped in agricultural improvement concerns is to depart markedly from the dominant conception of Whitman as an urban poet. As I have argued elsewhere, many of Whitman’s poems are deeply inflected by nineteenth-­century developments within agricultural chemistry, and his richly detailed use of plant names and processes reflects the era’s vogue for botanizing and scientific horticulture, as well as its intensified attention to fertilizers and manures.15 Whitman’s evident enthusiasm for the kind of scientific agriculture seen at the Crystal Palace and the Philadelphia Centennial points to clear agrarian themes within Leaves of Grass. Beyond these thematic elements, however, agrarian motifs help us understand certain formal features within Leaves that have long been viewed as central. In what follows, I examine several key instances of agricultural decline and improvement as shaping forces for Whitman’s poetry: the poet’s representations of grass in the opening sections of “Song of Myself,” his depictions of agricultural exhibitions and improvements in the later Autumn Rivulets, and his exploration of the schism between country and city featured in “There Was a Child Went Forth.” By stressing the fallen landscape rather than the Edenic “Nature’s nation” as the proper context for understanding these elements, we see these poems not as celebrations of an idyllic, perfected landscape, but as the poet’s careful construction of cohesion that the unfolding agricultural crisis had stripped from the natural world. Embracing a radically novel poetic style, the written language of Leaves can achieve a wholeness and integrity absent in the natural world, which is seen as marred by drought and human neglect of the land. Leaves is thus forged in the crucible of antipastoral images of what contemporaries termed “worn out” and “exhausted” lands. It situates itself between the struggling farms of Whitman’s neighborhoods in Long Island and Camden—­and the formulaic images of agrarian and environmental decline pervading the newspapers and periodicals familiar to the poet—­and the visions of rural progress and improvement they offered as an antidote.

“Vehement Agrarians”

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The agricultural images at the heart of Leaves of Grass reveal a forgotten but crucial dimension of Whitman’s environment and thus contribute to our understanding of U.S. environmental history and its analytic categories. In response to events like the famine of 1854, regions like New York and Camden-­Philadelphia

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(Whitman’s home after 1873) became centers for agricultural and horticultural science and improvement, radically changing these areas in the years surrounding the 1855 publication of Leaves. New York City emerged as the nation’s top center for scientific agriculture with the founding of the American Agricultural Association in 1846, and Brooklyn as Whitman knew it remained chiefly agricultural, becoming the nation’s second largest vegetable producer.16 Philadelphia, too, emerged as a center for the cattle and milk trades. Beginning with the 1785 founding of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture and the publication of The Farmer’s Cabinet and the Plough, Loom, and Anvil throughout the nineteenth century, the city also became a center for scientific agriculture.17 The categories of country and city remained deeply interdependent, and in Camden-­Philadelphia agricultural spaces persisted in spaces we now think of as urban, reshaping the environment that forms the backdrop for poems in Leaves and Autumn Rivulets. In 1873 Whitman relocated to Camden, New Jersey, located directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia and often viewed through the lens of urbanization and industrialization. But it was agriculture as much as industry that transformed Camden-­Philadelphia in these years. Typifying these changes, Edmund Morris’s best-­selling 1864 memoir, Ten Acres Enough—­the product of the author’s retreat from Philadelphia to a small New Jersey farm—­instructed readers on how to support a family on a ten-­acre plot. An early instance of the “back to the land” self-­help genre, Morris’s Ten Acres chronicles the growing agricultural prosperity surrounding Camden: “The Camden and Amboy Railroad came in . . . terminating in New York and Philadelphia. . . . A cash market being brought to their very doors, where none had previously existed, an immense stimulus to production followed. . . . Hundreds of farms were renovated. . . . To both railroad and farmer it has proved highly remunerative traffic.”18 With the coming of the railroad to Whitman’s Camden, the region’s agriculture gained access to lucrative urban markets, and Ten Acres Enough praises the transformative effects: “Lands rose in value, better fences were supplied, new houses built, and the whole system . . . was revolutionized” by scientific improvements such as manuring and draining.19 Whitman’s Camden-­Philadelphia region was an increasingly integrated metropolitan area where growth depended on agricultural networks linking rural and urban areas through interconnected lines of distribution, shipping, and rail. Indeed, the New Jersey Agricultural Society was founded in the year Whitman composed “Song of Myself,” holding its first meeting and 1855 agricultural fair in Camden, and agricultural improvement remained central to the exhibitions at the centennial and the Pennsylvania state fairs in subsequent decades.20 During these same years, Whitman’s relationship with one New Jersey farming family, the Staffords, brought him to their farm each summer, as biographers have shown, and in the decade of the 1870s he spent roughly half the year in this rural setting.21 At the Stafford farm, located near Laurel Springs, New Jersey, Whitman first rented a second-­floor farmhouse room, and between 1874 and

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1886 created his own separate residence on the farm at 315 Maple Street. There, farm work formed the core of daily life, and the effects of this agrarian milieu on his writing are striking. The transformation of the Delaware River region to an area of hugely profitable agriculture was a change that the poet experienced at close range, and it was a change deeply rooted in the previous decades’ sense of the land’s decline. Though “the county stretching from Camden some forty miles towards New York” had been judged “worthless” for agriculture, Morris later recalled, the agricultural press promoted the virtues of manures “imported from the city”—­both Philadelphia and New York—­and as a consequence, “hundreds of farms were renovated, cleared of foul weeds, drained, and liberally manured.”22 It was an era of intense innovation in agriculture, with urban waste—­especially human waste—­repurposed in rural locales to meet the escalating need for urban food consumption. As the New Jersey soil that farmers had “skinned into the most squalid poverty” was gradually restored through careful manuring and drainage, the land skyrocketed in value.23 What Morris termed the “exhaustless fountain of wealth” in the neighboring cities made Camden County, much like Brooklyn, one of the nation’s largest agricultural producers.24 “New York and Philadelphia may be likened to two huge bags of gold, always filled, and ever standing open,” effused Morris in 1864: “The appetite of the cities . . . [has] enhanced the value of thousands of acres, infused a higher spirit in cultivators, and elevated . . . growing to a science.”25 In this sense, the Camden and Philadelphia of Whitman’s later years resembled the Brooklyn of his youth: a largely agrarian space in which farms and industry existed side by side. Like 1830s and 1840s Brooklyn, Camden in the 1870s and 1880s was dedicated to what was then termed “truck farming” of crops through distribution channels that linked rural and urban markets.26 With farm products furnishing the bulk of the materials shipped from the ports in Baltimore and Philadelphia and forming the basis for manufactures such as shoes, hats, and textiles, country and city were symbiotic as never before. Yet despite this emergent prosperity in the region, the agricultural images in Leaves arise from a set of organic processes that are seen not as paradisiacal and plentiful but as broken down and depleted—­the “skinned . . . and squalid poverty” noted by Morris and other agrarians of the era.27 Despoiled land sapped of its fertility hangs in the backdrop of Leaves, and in order to understand the poems’ repeated and insistent celebrations of grass, soil, and fertility, it is crucial to comprehend the collapse of nature’s bounty that impels Whitman’s literary efforts to restore it. For Whitman’s contemporaries, the restoration of the land’s productivity would depend on a grab bag of technical and scientific remedies in emergent domains of knowledge such as organic chemistry and geological surveys. At times, Leaves of Grass registers a clear awareness of these technical remedies, whether in poems like “This Compost,” where Liebig’s cutting-­edge soil chemistry is the clear interlocutor, or “The Return of the Heroes,” where a panoply of modern industrial farm equipment is paraded before the reader. But Leaves is also notable because it sees poetry itself as the superior remedy for the

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implosion of organic forms, and poetry emerges as an alternative to technical remedies that are seen as insufficient. Leaves of Grass offers its own poems as the remedy for organic disintegration and decay, revealing surprising connections between the poems’ rhetorical strategies and the larger projects of agricultural improvement and modernization.

“Grass Mania” As is well known, section six of “Song of Myself ” devotes itself to the question “What is the grass?”—­a question that features conspicuously in the agricultural periodicals and exhibitions of the era (I, 6). Within the proposed remedies for America’s declining agriculture at midcentury, the category of grass appears frequently and insistently, signaling both environmental concerns and the imperative to improve U.S. farm production across all levels and regions. The poet of Leaves of Grass greeted an audience already seized by what contemporaries termed “grass mania,” as seen in the explosion of U.S. publications dedicated to the graminae, or grass species.28 In the decades surrounding 1855, virtually every U.S. agricultural publication—­ranging from The Farmer’s Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Rural Affairs (1848) to more abstract treatises like the Duke of Bedford’s landmark grass study, Hortus Gramineus Woburnensis (1813), and Charles L. Flint’s Practical Treatise on Grasses and Forage Plants (1857)—­devoted a section to grasses. Though we now use the term grass in a much more limited sense, for Whitman and his contemporaries, grass stood for the varied arenas of agricultural production, from cultivated fields of wheat and corn to the herds of domesticated animals that depend on fodder crops. Above all, grass designated a vital interconnectedness between what Whitman and his contemporaries termed “herbage”—­then a common synonym for grass—­and animal and human life. Indeed, the era’s agriculturalists saw “reciprocity between cattle and grasses” as the driving engine of rural prosperity.29 The “herbage of the grass on which the animal feeds,” explains Asa Gray in an 1845 issue of North American Review, gives rise to all living things: “The animal accumulates these materials, changing them . . . but giving them all back finally to the earth and air. Literally, then, ‘all flesh is grass.’”30 The Isaiah allusion, also prominent in the opening sections of Leaves, links the era’s agricultural chemistry to a biblical tradition in which grass is an emblem of human mortality, weakness, and sin. But in Gray’s reformulation, as in Leaves, grass connotes regeneration and vitality, underscoring the conversion of grass to animal flesh, then manure, and finally soil nutrition. Human and nonhuman materials exist in a perpetual feedback loop, reciprocal and dynamic. Mirroring this logic, Philadelphia agriculturalist John Beale Bordley celebrated grass as “the sine qua non of live-­stock!” during the early national period, calling it the origin “of all farming products!”31 From this perspective, grass is a potent metaphor for agricultural prosperity, standing at the nexus of livestock, vegetable, and grain crops. As early as the 1850s, this nexus

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finds corresponding expression in the economy and landscape of Philadelphia, as the railroads were “fitted up expressly for the cattle trade.”32 By the time of Whitman’s residence in Camden, Philadelphia was home to both the Philadelphia Milk Exchange and more than 140 slaughterhouses, further underscoring its central role in the American export cattle trade and the worldwide market for farm commodities.33 Reflecting this milieu, in Leaves, grass first appears in the singular, not the plural, when the poet is seen to “loaf and lean” while “observing a spear of summer grass” (I, 1). The deliberate isolation of the single “spear” of grass diverges entirely from the “leaves” of the book’s title, and it markedly departs from the realm of empirical observation, where we rarely encounter a single blade of grass in isolation. The poem thus begins by subtly shifting its mimetic object from the external world of reality—­where humans observe grass in the aggregate—­to the internal world of the poem, ­where a single strand of grass can appear in bold relief, apart from the profusion and abundance of the natural world. More familiarly, in section six, grass functions as an emblem of regeneration and longevity: “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life. . . .” (I, 8). At such moments, the poem asserts its power to produce a simulated version of the organic forms found in nature in the form of an imagistic emblem, the single “spear” or “smallest sprout” of grass. Yet grass seldom figures in the singular in Leaves, and the poem quickly issues forth a profusion of leaves, memorable for their sheer variety: the well-­known grass of section six, the “Prairie Grass Dividing” of the “Calamus” section, or the quaintly titled “Chant of National Feuillage,” later renamed “Our Old Feuillage.” In many instances, especially in section six, Whitman’s metaphorical grass achieves plasticity and fertility that surpass that of the natural world, and the poem’s representations of grass suggest that aesthetic, linguistic forms exceed natural ones in their power to proliferate. Poetic grass becomes the analogue of agricultural improvement, an iconic specimen seen to endlessly regenerate and reproduce in ways impossible in the natural world, with its droughts and depletions of soil. In selecting the signifier “grass,” Whitman also invokes a longer literary tradition in which grass serves as an overarching synecdoche for agricultural improvement itself. Indeed, in the decades surrounding the initial publication of Leaves, agrarian writers frequently quoted a striking line from Gulliver’s Travels—­ “making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before”—­to evoke the social and monetary value of agricultural upgrades.34 This well-­worn phrase was pervasive in nineteenth-­century texts of agricultural chemistry and instruction as a generalized encomium to agrarian improvement.35 (While scientific paeans to grass were more common than poetic ones, agricultural periodicals like The Working Farmer and The Farmer’s Cabinet—­a farm paper based at the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Agriculture—­often juxtaposed lyric poems and scientific treatises.) In 1875, prominent naturalist John Henderson devoted a series of scientific papers entirely to “proper understanding” of “grass culture” as integral to agricultural prosperity.36 Improved grass varieties would not only

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benefit livestock—­the primary consumers of grass—but would also result in dramatic improvements to “the sterile looking pasture lands so common” on the eastern seaboard.37 Agriculturalists’ paeans to grass therefore embody a watershed moment in environmental history, and Leaves obliquely signals its awareness of this transformation. Notably, the focus on grass was distinctly ecological—­though it precedes the emergence of the term ecology by more than a decade—­in its attention to the interdependent elements of the natural world.38 In 1817, the Duke of Bedford, in cooperation with his gardener George Sinclair, had performed a series of experiments reported extensively in the American press, identifying 215 distinctive varieties of grass. In their report, a single crop category, grass, gives way to a richly delineated taxonomy of grass varieties: “Sweet scented vernal grass, Sweet scented soft grass, Meadow foxtail, Blue moor grass, Alpine foxtail grass, Downy oat grass, Alpine meadow grass . . . Waved mountain hair grass, Bulbous barley grass, Reed-­like fescue grass, Sea-­side brome grass, Tall fescue grass, Upright mat-­grass. . . .”39 This scientific nomenclature highlights the diverse spatial locales where grass can be found—­from the “blue moor” to the “Alpine foxtail” and “Yorkshire grass”—­and their diverse morphologies and botanical properties. A 2002 account in Science calls Sinclair’s grass garden “the world’s first ecological experiment,” since the grass experiments would lead Charles Darwin to postulate that species-­rich communities were more productive than single-­species crops.40 Some scientists even trace the modern concept of biodiversity to the grass garden, since Sinclair’s were among the first widely circulated studies to highlight the virtues of species diversity.41 Likewise, by featuring grass as the central botanical specimen for his poetic work, Whitman was clearly attuned to midcentury Americans’ “grass mania” within the larger context of agricultural improvement.42 But while for today’s reader the term biodiversity conjures up a pleasing ecological richness, for the nineteenth-­century reader, the notion of nature’s multiplicity seemed to threaten its coherence and unity. The era’s grass studies suggest a newly protean quality of grass—­its fragmentation into dozens of distinct types—­and Whitman’s poems register this perceived instability. Seen through the lens of evolutionary theory, grass appears disjunct and fragmented, its apparent unity masking a disturbing undercurrent of change and disruption within the natural world. It is therefore not surprising that in Whitman’s hands, this profusion is reduced to “leaves of grass,” with grass made singular in a way that restores fictive unity to a category that was becoming conceptually and taxonomically unmanageable in its diversity. At the same time, the phrase resonates with a sense of abundant verdure and foliage, a proliferation of growth that restores nature’s plenitude within the space of the poem. Responding to this sense of crisis, Leaves deliberately substitutes an artificial, linguistically mediated unity for the threatening multiplicity inherent in empirical nature—­a strategy for coherence also seen in the book’s unusual title, Leaves of Grass. While the phrases “blade of grass” and “spear of grass”—­or even

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“spire of grass”—­appear with some frequency in the era’s agricultural journals, Whitman seems to have fashioned this locution himself.43 But the uncannily similar phrase “leaves of the grasses” does appear in Sir Humphrey Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1819), a major work that circulated widely in the United States. Serving as the venue of publication for Sinclair’s grass study, Davy’s work underscores nature’s interconnectedness: in “the leaves of the grasses,” the study reports, could be found nutrients “extremely similar in chemical” composition to that of the “dung of cows.”44 In an era of meteoric enthusiasm for fertilizers as an antidote to exhausted soil, Sinclair’s euphoric description of the powers of “the leaves of the grasses” employs language eerily similar to Whitman’s.45 Within the fields of grass, according to this logic, could be found the corrective to depleted soils and almost inexhaustible wealth, as Sinclair notes: “The leaves of the grasses are the most valuable part of the plant.”46 Not only do “leaves of the grasses” epitomize the expansion of wealth in the form of livestock, dairy products, and grain-­stuff; they also assume the power to heal the earth, as Steven Stoll has argued: “If poor farmers would do nothing more than plant quality grasses . . . they would discover a way to . . . better their land and themselves.”47 In this view, Stoll suggests, grass is the best remedy for what were then termed “old fields,” lands broken by poor farming practices. These are the same “barren” lands seen in Whitman’s newspaper sketch of an 1879 trip the poet took on the Camden and Amboy railroad: “A thin-­soiled, non-fertile country all along, yet as healthy and not so rocky and broken as New England. . . . The whole route (at any rate from Haddonfield to the seashore) has been literally made and opened up to growth by the Camden and Atlantic Railroad. . . . It all reminds me much of my old native Long Island, N.Y. . . . the same level stretch, thin soil—­healthy but barren—­pines, scrub oak, laurel, kill-­calf, and splashes of white sand.”48 In depicting the railroad that brought prosperity to the Camden-­Philadelphia corridor, the poet juxtaposes images of “sterile” soil and the improved agriculture that forms the state’s prospering economy, “two-­thirds in cultivated farms” and a population he calls “vehement agrarians.”49 As a corrective to such sterility, Leaves offers itself as a kind of textual analogue for the project of agricultural reform, as if the linguistic world of the poem could be crammed full of the verdure that destructive farming practices had removed from the earth. Such was the perceived power of grass as an emblem of agricultural prosperity, science, and even the restoration of depleted lands, that agricultural exhibitions often included prominent displays of grass culture (fig. 6.2). I have suggested that the signifier “grass” is not merely an emblem of longevity and regeneration but a way of enacting those processes within the semiotic system of the poem. It is a claim not merely about the neglected agrarian content of Whitman’s poem, but about the ways that agrarian concerns structure formal elements within Leaves in his work. It is a commonplace that Whitman reinvented the form of the poem—­and even the book—­to make dilation, accretion, and revision part of the poem’s identity. If we again return to the potent signifier

Expansive Exhibitions fig. 6.2 Grass display, 1850s agricultural fair, from “Important Discoveries in Agriculture,” Manufacturer and Builder 3, no. 6 (June 1871): 132–­34.

“leaves,” we recall that it encompasses both botanical meanings—­the growths or shoots from a plant—­and textual ones—­the folded sheets of paper that constitute a book. The addition of lyrics, or “leaves”—­Whitman’s strategy for augmenting his book—­becomes a formal strategy of accretion that mimics the proliferation, propagation and growth that agrarian reform idealized and endorsed. In its material form, literal grass epitomizes the abundance and plasticity of the natural world for agricultural endeavors. It also embodies the regeneration of life from a defunct earth, the repair and restoration of the land through the plowing in of grasslands. As a signifier, Whitman’s textual grass mirrors the plasticity and fecundity of natural grass but strives to exceed it. Whereas natural grass suffers fragmentation and vulnerability to depletion and decay, textual grass aims to remedy these defects. In these ways, Whitman’s grass is a double and contradictory emblem of agricultural decline and prosperity, gesturing backward to a landscape seen as depleted and stripped of productivity, and forward to an era of improved husbandry and prosperity in metropolitan regions like Brooklyn-­ Manhattan and Camden-­Philadelphia.

Dilation as Sequence: Two Rivulets and Autumn Rivulets Beyond the ways in which agricultural history presents rich new contexts for understanding why Whitman titled his epic poem Leaves of Grass, these details also point to new ways of understanding the poet’s 1876 Philadelphia Centennial

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book, Two Rivulets, later revised and regrouped for the 1881 and 1892 editions as Autumn Rivulets. Though recent critical studies have suggestively proposed that Rivulets might represent the culmination of Whitman’s career, the book’s subject has eluded critics. Michael Moon, one of Whitman’s ablest textual editors, has observed that “as a group” the Rivulets poems contain “no common theme or progression of ideas.”50 But perhaps critics have failed to identify an organizing subject for Rivulets because they accept the dominant view of Whitman as an urban poet, or as a poet of the body and sexuality. From its inception, Rivulets centers on questions surrounding agriculture and conceives of its own modernity in terms that highlight the interconnectedness of rural and urban spaces within an expanding nation. This commitment to agricultural uplift announces itself in the book’s opening poems, where man-­made and artificial versions of nature surpass nature in their fertility and beauty. At the same time, pivotal poems in Rivulets key their narrative progression to recognizable tropes for agricultural improvement, or what Raymond Williams terms the “modernising spirit.”51 From its first page, the book’s “rivulets” are linked to the pressing necessity of irrigation in the nation’s agrarian landscapes and are juxtaposed with the poet’s “Thoughts for the Centennial” in the prose notes.52 The nation’s network of waterways—­from the “herb-­lined brook[s]” to the “subterranean sea-­rills making for the sea” and the “ever-­modern rapids”—­infuses the continent with refreshing wetness. They connect “Ohio’s farm-­fields” to a network of “sources of perpetual snow,” submerging the land in fertile currents. Syntactically, the lyric also equates these “wayward rivulets” with the man-­made flow of Rivulets, as if the flowing of the book’s poems and the flowing of the earth’s products were commensurate: Currents for starting a continent new, Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid, Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pensive waves, . . . Out of the depths the storm’s abysmic waves . . . Or from the sea of Time, collecting vasting all, I bring, A windrow-­drift of weeds and shells.53

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In the “currents for starting a continent new”—­identified with both the flow of the book’s poems and the flow of the earth’s waterways—­the poem locates a principle of a radical remaking that is simultaneously liquid and linguistic. The poet thus offers the linguistic world of his poems—­their flow and their fecundity—­as the powerful analogue of the irrigated landscape made “new” and newly fertile. A “windrow” is a row of mowed grass, usually allowed to dry before being baled or rolled for storage. The equation of the book’s poems and the earth’s processes continues in the signifiers “weeds and shells,” analogues for the poet’s verses. The opening of Rivulets imagines poetry itself as the agent of this expansion, as if the abundant flowing of poems within Leaves could stand in for the upswelling of irrigative improvements across the prairies.

Over the fields of the West those crawling monsters, The human-­divine inventions, the labor-­saving implements; Beholdest moving in every direction imbued as with life the revolving hay-­rakes, The steam-­power reaping-­machines and the horse-­power machines, The engines, thrashers of grain and cleaners of grain, well separating the straw, the nimble work of the patent pitchfork, Beholdest the newer saw-­mill, the southern cotton-­gin, and the rice cleanser. (III, 596)

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Building upon this vision of agricultural prosperity, the poem “The Return of the Heroes” presents a paean to agricultural machinery:

Celebrating the vitality and animation of “labor-­saving implements,” the poem’s homage to agricultural progress extends beyond “implements” to encompass steam-powered “thrashers of grain and cleaners of grain.”54 Infused by the latest machinery and gadgetry, this picture of profitable, modernized farming recalls the scenes of newly mechanized agrarian America found in the era’s periodicals and advertisements, as well as in exhibitions such as the Philadelphia Centennial, where Whitman would have seen mechanical harvesters and plows alongside forty-­two acres of livestock and farm exhibits (fig. 6.3). It is tempting, following David Reynolds’s lead, to ask whether Whitman’s later poetry is best understood as nostalgic for “a pre-­industrial America of small farms and homesteads” or alternatively as committed to the “rewards of modern

fig. 6.3 Centennial Photographic Company, “Agri[cultural] Hall, Main Avenue,” ca. 1876. Albumen print on photographic mount. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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technology” and industry.55 Yet the dichotomy is a false one, insofar as mid-­ nineteenth-­century writers on “the subject of political economy” had come “to regard Agriculture as the trunk of a great national tree, with Manufacturing and Commerce as its branches.”56 The marriage of agriculture and manufacturing structured the very fabric of institutions like the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, where the latest developments in agricultural technology—­McCormick’s harvesting machine, Maillard’s chocolate-­making machinery, U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Machinery—­were exhibited alongside industrial advances such as Corliss’s steam engine.57 We know that Whitman attended these exhibitions repeatedly—­even obsessively—­in the 1850s and that he retitled his 1871 poem “After All, Not to Create Only” as “The Song of the Exhibition” in an effort to curry favor with the directors of Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition.58 (Whitman hoped to be invited to read his poems at the exhibition, an honor that instead went to works by Bayard Taylor, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Sidney Lanier.)59 The poem offers itself as the literary equivalent of the exhibition’s displays of American progress: Mark, thy interminable farms, North, South, . . .  The varied products of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Georgia, Texas, and the rest; Thy limitless crops—­grass, wheat, sugar, corn, rice, hemp, hops, Thy barns all fill’d—­thy endless freight-­trains, and thy bulging store-­houses, The grapes that ripen on thy vines—­the apples in thy orchards, Thy incalculable lumber, beef, pork, potatoes . . . (III, 623) Though critics have sometimes dismissed the poem as simplistic in its rhetoric, “After All” performs complex cultural work, interlineating agriculture and industry in ways that exemplify the midcentury U.S. political economy. In lavishly praising “farms, inventions, crops”—­and in juxtaposing “potatoes” and “apples” with “coal” and “iron”—­the poem brings together agriculture and industry as the twin engines of a modernized U.S. economy. In this view, modernity’s “rapid patents,” “workshops,” “foundries,” and factory “chimneys” find their origins in farm products such as “cotton” and “grains” (III, 623). The lines of the poem display “grass, wheat, sugar, corn, rice, hemp, hops” much in the way that exhibitions at Philadelphia and New York touted the volume of farm products. Such interdependence of the rural and urban economies created a regional economy linking Camden and Philadelphia to worldwide channels of distribution and consumption. Taking shape within the complex agrarian/urban milieu in which Whitman lived in these years, the 1876 Rivulets sets itself in the “soil of autumn fields” in a poem titled “A Carol of Harvest for 1867”:

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A song of the grass and fields! A song of the soil, and the good green grass!

A song with the smell of sun-­dried hay Where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-­fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-­husked maize.60

Expansive Exhibitions

A song no more of the city streets; A song of the soil of fields.

Turning his back on the more familiar setting of “city streets,” the poet extols the “lavish parturient earth” as well as a corresponding rural environment of “soil of fields” and “countless armies of grass” (III, 590). He even implores the “Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice!” (III, 590). Yet the “soil,” “grass,” and “fields” cited in the poem do not evoke a peaceful Jeffersonian yeomanry or the pastoral setting of simpler times. Instead, the “countless” and “measureless pasturages” issue forth in the form of commercial “growth and products,” worldly “riches,” “wealth,” and “great possessions.” “Fecund America” is “swimming in plenty”; it is an “infinite teeming womb” bringing forth not merely natural growth but growth equated with commercial products: “the shows of all the varied lands and all the growths and products” (III, 591). In section three, the virgin land appears in the “swathing garment[s]” of “great possessions” and the “precious values fallen upon . . . and risen out of” the earth (III, 591). Rivulets narrates a post–­Civil War demobilization in which “processions of armies” return to the work of cultivation and enrichment: “Toil on heroes! harvest the products!” (III, 595). Reprising the symbol of grass, the poem’s celebration of “the good green grass, that delicate miracle the ever-­recurring grass,” takes shape in an expansive geographical matrix of burgeoning commerce (III, 595). Rivulets sets its attention on the commercial cultivation of specialized crops, as commanded in the poet’s most imperative mode: Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, every barbed spear under thee. Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, each ear in its light-­green sheath, Gather the hay to its myriad mows in the odorous tranquil barns, Oats to their bins, the white potato, the buckwheat of Michigan, to theirs; Gather the cotton in Mississippi or Alabama, dig and hoard the golden the sweet potato of Georgia and the Carolinas, Clip the wool of California or Pennsylvania, Cut the flax of the Middle States, or hemp or tobacco . . . (III, 596) This fascinating catalogue, later retitled “Return of the Heroes,” envisions a world in which specialized crop production edges out an older variety of farming in which individual producers harvest a range of products. Though elsewhere poems like Whitman’s “The Ox-­Tamer” idealize the figure of the yeoman farmer, such farms were in fact giving way to the regionally specific, specialized farmed commodities seen in Rivulets. The repeated invocations of “products” in Rivulets

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signal the representation of farming on an industrial scale that the poet terms “a million farms,” gesturing forward to an incipient model of factory farming (III, 592). Importantly, the image is one of a nationwide agricultural economy at a time in U.S. history when such an economy was still embryonic. Echoing the concerns of “Song of the Exposition,” these poems locate America’s distinctive identity in the expansion of entwined agriculture and manufacturing. Mirroring this emphasis, the penultimate lyric of Autumn Rivulets, “The Prairie States,” lauds a national economy rooted in America’s agriculture, spanning “populous millions” of farms: A newer garden of creation, no primal solitude, Dense, joyous, populous millions, cities and farms, With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one By all the world contributed—­freedom’s and law’s and thrift’s society, The crown and teeming paradise (III, 689) The poem, composed at Camden in 1880, was published in facsimile in The Art Autograph and originally included a dedication “for the Irish famine,” most likely referring to the 1879 food shortage in Ireland.61 In both Rivulets versions, the New World’s agricultural riches beckon to immigrants who are “risen again young and strong in another country.”62 The grasslands of “The Prairie States” absorb the “millions” of emigrants streaming west, and “cities and farms” emerge in tandem to form a “teeming paradise” of prosperity and futurity (III, 689). This “newer garden of creation” evokes the mechanized farming that was coming to replace the smaller yeoman farmer and his “primal solitude” (III, 689). It links agrarian and urban spaces in its images of “cities and farms, / With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one” (III, 689)—­images that highlight both the mechanization (“iron”) and the interrelationship (“interlaced”) of agrarian America.

“All the Changes of City and Country”

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Many of the key poems discussed here derive from the Rivulets sequence, where poems offer varied responses to perceived agricultural decline, from the celebrations of the rural modern machinery seen in “Return of the Heroes” to the vivid depictions of the ameliorative effects of agricultural chemistry seen in “This Compost.” As I have shown, many of these poems push beyond thematic concerns about the decline of American agriculture or its land to enact formal literary strategies for revising and reshaping the organic form of the earth through parables of the earth’s restoration. Such strategies gesture forward toward modernism in their concern with the restoration of wholeness and unity in the face of fragmentation, as well as in their creative use of literary form to address the problems besetting organic forms. Perhaps the most acclaimed poem of Rivulets, “There Was a Child Went Forth”—­called “one of the most sensitive lyrics in the language”—­provides

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a synthetic view on the issues discussed here, while also offering a unique vantage on Whitman’s efforts to address the social transformations the poem aptly terms “all the changes of city and country” (I, 151).63 Mirroring many Leaves poems we have seen, “There Was a Child Went Forth” dramatizes the ruptures caused by the rapid transition from rural to urban, with special emphasis on threats to the self ’s coherence in an era of rapid changes. Previous critics have noted the poem’s phrenological account of maturation, concluding that it offers a protopsychological interpretation of human or cognitive development.64 But the poem’s depiction of human identity is emphatically linked to the ways in which the child is shaped by what the poem terms “all the changes of city and country” (I, 151). Like many poems in Leaves, “There Was a Child” identifies the poet with a scene of farming origins, as he begins his early years alongside the “noisy brood of the barnyard”: “Third-­month lambs” and “the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf ” (I, 150). Opening with the assertion that all moments of experience “became part of ” the child’s identity and closing with the reiteration that these elements “became part of that child,” the poem records dozens of scenes that the child absorbs as he moves from rural to urban locales. In the poem’s first half, the child absorbs the agrarian milieu and natural surroundings: The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass and white and red morning-­glories, and white and red clover, . . .  And the noisy brood of the barnyard . . . The field-­sprouts of the Fourth-­month and the Fifth-­month became part of him, Winter-­grain sprouts . . . and the esculent roots of the garden. (I, 150) The poem’s claim that these rural scenes “became a part of him” involves both the self ’s material composition—­the grass, clover, and livestock that feed the human body—­and its social milieu. The child’s early social environment is likewise iconically rural, as he encounters the rural school mistress, the local tavern, and the problem of rural deviance in the form of the “old drunkard” and “quarrelsome boys” (I, 150). But in the poem’s second half, an abrupt shift occurs. There, the drama of identity shifts to a distinctly urban milieu, to “men and women crowding fast in the streets” against the backdrop of “the streets themselves and the facades of houses, and goods in the windows” and the “huge crossing at the ferries” (I, 151–­52). These ferries, crowds, and streetscapes recall more familiar scenes of poems like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” They also offer a self-­reflexive meditation on the nature of self-­fashioning at a time when Whitman was also composing Specimen Days, an episodic account of his life in which farms and countryside jostle uneasily with ferries and urban streetscapes. But while the poem confidently asserts that the lilacs, grass, clovers, and field-­sprouts are an integral “part of ” the child’s identity, the poem’s urban scenes are dreamlike and insubstantial, and the poet begins to wonder whether “if after all it should prove unreal”:

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The doubts of day-­time and the doubts of night-­time, the curious whether and how, Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks? Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes and specks what are they? (I, 151) As Michael Moon astutely observes, the poem echoes the pessimistic “Calamus” lament that “maybe the things I perceive” are “only apparitions.”65 The passage from rural to urban is an unsettling passage from real to unreal, from fact to apparition. “There Was a Child” registers a disturbing threat to subjectivity in the wake of urbanization, as if the early childhood scenes of grass and roots, and the later urban scenes of cities, ferries, and crowds, are so divergent as to fracture the self ’s very identity and coherence. The fracturing of the geographical landscape brings the potential fracturing of the self—­a radical form of human and nonhuman relationship. What can we conclude about the fascination with agricultural crisis and improvement that shaped Whitman’s oeuvre? First, as we have seen, Leaves of Grass is highly indebted to ideas of agricultural chemistry and the kind of ecosystem biology seen in George Sinclair’s grass study. While Whitman cannot be said to highlight the full diversity of grass species—­in many cases he refers to “grass” as a broad category rather than to its individual varieties—­he gives a central place to grass as an icon of agrarian prosperity. Conversely, nodal poems within Leaves—­and especially within Rivulets—­endorse the kind of crop specialization and factory farming that are integral to emergent scientific agriculture. In these endorsements, Leaves points toward a new monocrop model and away from the sense of interconnectedness that is almost formulaically associated with Leaves, though poems like “The Prairie States” insist that agricultural specialization will bring greater unity to a nation “composite, tied, many in one” (III, 689). In these later poems, we find nostalgia for older forms of agrarian life jostling with images of modernized farming techniques. In many poems within Rivulets, the narrative of national progress is keyed to agricultural modernization, with farming seen as a nodal activity for American prosperity and growth. Key poems within the sequence gesture forward to a world, as seen in “The Song of the Exposition,” in which “machinery and shrill steam-­whistle” stand alongside “drain-­pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers” as icons of a modernity in which agriculture plays a vital role (III, 615). In images of the machine age that anticipate those of Hart Crane or Jean Toomer, Whitman imagines the very modernity of his poems will turn “gushing, sentimental reading circles to stone or ice.”66 In this surprising vision of poetry’s future, the popular feminine poetry of his contemporaries is supplanted by the masculine masses of metal and glass that constitute the Crystal Palace or the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition Whitman attended in 1876: “High rising tier on tier, with glass and iron facades” (III, 617). Paradoxically, the triumphant arrival of modern American industry traces its origins to the nation’s agrarian underpinnings, and the poems of Rivulets narrativize the transition

Expansive Exhibitions

from a subsistence economy to a wider, flourishing national marketplace for farm products and industrial products fashioned from farm materials. Throughout this chapter, we have seen that Whitman’s poetry strives to reintegrate and reinvigorate an agrarian world in crisis through the use of poetic devices—­figurative language, persona, narrative—­that restore coherence and integrity to organic forms. The ruptured identity of the agrarian subject in “There Was a Child” presents itself as the familiar symptom of a rural world seen as drained of its integrity or fertility, and the poem’s effort to restore unity to the child’s identity employs rhetorical strategies seen throughout Leaves. Foremost, the poem’s repeated assertions that grass, grains, and livestock “become part of ” the child’s physical person reprise the claims made throughout Leaves for a radical material equivalence between the natural and the human body, with the recurring metaphors of grass and vegetation serving to unify and restore the earth’s fertility and health. From section six of Whitman’s Leaves to the grasses of “Our Old Feuillage” and “Calamus” to “There Was a Child Went Forth,” the integrity of the poem substitutes for the integrity of the organic body, magically converting the remains of nature into new forms of growth. Likewise, the poems’ syntactical features function to fuse together the scenes of manufacturing—­ streets, facades, ferries, and shops—­with more familiar scenes of agrarian life. As both “become part of ” the child’s experience and identity, these competing rural and urban elements of modern selfhood constitute the poem’s imaginary persona, just as the poetic persona serves to unite the nation’s disparate regions or its agriculture and manufacturing. As in Leaves as a whole, the creation of a composite, artificial person works to repair the fractured landscape that hovers just below the surface of the poem. Strategies of representation stitch together elements of city and country in ways that typify the increasingly interlineated commerce linking the Stafford farm to Camden, Philadelphia, and even worldwide markets. They also suture human and nonhuman identities in radical and unexpected ways. Such interlineations form the basis for works like Autumn Rivulets and Specimen Days—­works that, if they were never formally read at the 1876 Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, nevertheless bear the unmistakable marks of that exhibition’s unique material culture and modes of display.

notes 1. The New-York Historical Society, the University of Buffalo, and Fordham University provided support for my research. See Walt Whitman, Specimen Days and Collect (Philadelphia: Rees Welsh, 1882–­ 83), 129. 2. Whitman, “Our Old Feuillage,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism, ed. Michael Moon, Sculley Bradley,

and Harold William Blodgett (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 149. 3. John Donaldson, Treatise on Manures: Their Nature, Preparation, and Application (London: R. Baldwin, 1842), 307; J. B. Bordley, Essays and Notes on Husbandry and Rural Affairs (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1799), 516. 4. See especially Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the

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Material Self (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 5. “After All, Not to Create Only,” New York Evening Post, September 7, 1871, 2. The poem was reprinted in several newspapers and as a pamphlet and later appeared as “Song of the Exposition” in Two Rivulets (1876) and with some revisions in the Leaves of Grass 1881 and 1892 editions. 6. Walt Whitman, Two Rivulets, Including Democratic Vistas, Centennial Songs, and Passage to India (Camden, NJ: Printed for the author, 1876), 87. 7. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, Vols. I–III, ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White (New York: New York University Press, 1980), III, 596 (hereafter cited in parentheses). 8. “Report to the New York State Agricultural Society,” Annual Report of the American Institute of the City of New-­ York (New York: C. Van Benthuysen, 1849), 9. 9. Quoted in Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-­ Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 137. 10. Justus von Liebig, Letters on Modern Agriculture (New York: John Wiley, 1859), 178. 11. “Report to the New York State Agricultural Society,” 87. 12. Thomas Starr King, “Lessons of the Drought,” reprinted in Christianity and Humanity: A Series of Sermons by Thomas Starr King (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877), 106. 13. James F. W. Johnston, Lectures on the Applications of Chemistry and Geology to Agriculture (New York: C. M. Saxton, Agricultural Book Publisher, 1851), 29; emphasis added. 14. All quotations from ibid, 9. 15. Maria Farland, “Decomposing City: Walt Whitman’s New York and the Science of Life and Death,” in English Literary History 74, no. 4 (2007): 799–­827. 16. The creation of a national organization for agricultural advancement followed two decades of agricultural organization in New York State, which had boasted

one of the first state-­level societies in the 1830s and 1840s. See Dale Kramer, The Wild Jackasses: The American Farmer in Revolt (New York: Hastings, 1956), 77, 38. 17. On the history of the Philadelphia society, see George Blight, “A Historical Sketch of the Society,” Agriculture of Pennsylvania, Vol. 9 (Harrisburg, PA: Edwin K. Meyers, 1885), 139–­44. 18. Edmund Morris, Ten Acres Enough: A Practical Experience Showing How a Very Small Farm May Be Made to Keep a Small Family (New York: J. Miller, 1864), 126. 19. Ibid., 162. 20. Carl Woodward, The Development of Agriculture in New Jersey, 1640–­1880 (New Brunswick: New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, 1927), 210. 21. See David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America (New York: Vintage, 1996), 525. 22. Morris, Ten Acres Enough, 122. 23. Ibid., 178. 24. Ibid., 255. 25. Ibid. 26. The term dates at least to the 1780s, well before the invention of motorized trucks. Some speculate that it derives from the French troquer, to barter. 27. Morris, Ten Acres Enough, 178. 28. Donaldson, Treatise on Manures, 307. 29. Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 57. 30. Asa Grey, “The Chemistry of Vegetation,” North American Review 60, no. 126 (January 1845): 181. 31. Bordley, Essays and Notes, 516. 32. On 1850s alterations to the railroads, see The Annual Report of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Rail Road Company, vol. 17 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Rail Road Company, 1853), 110. 33. On the Philadelphia Milk Exchange, see “The Philadelphia Milk Market, Past and Present, and How to Meet Its Future Needs,” in Twenty-­Fourth Annual Report of the State Board of Agriculture for 1896, New Jersey Board of Agriculture (Trenton, NJ: J. L. Murphy, 1897), 180–­99. 34. The reference is from Gulliver’s Travels, in which the King of Brobdingnag advises that “whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before” is a benefactor to “mankind.” For two contemporary examples,

48. Walt Whitman, “Winter Sunshine: A Trip from Camden to the Coast,” Philadelphia Times, January 26, 1879, reprinted in Prose Works, vol. 1, Specimen Days, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 334. 49. Ibid. 50. Michael Moon, “Editor’s Note,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 300. 51. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 69. 52. Whitman, Two Rivulets, 15. 53. Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Moon, 300–­301. 54. Ibid., 305. 55. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, p. 1 of chapter 15. 56. Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 29. 57. These are a sampling of the exhibits reported in Linda P. Gross and Theresa R. Snyder, “Agricultural Hall,” Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibit (Chicago: Arcadia, 2005), 85–­94. 58. On the publication history of this poem, see Karen Wolfe, “Song of the Exposition,” in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 661–­62. 59. See Elmar Lueth, “Centennial Exhibition,” in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, 111–­12. 60. Walt Whitman, Two Rivulets, 87. 61. Michael Moon’s note appears in Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Moon, 338. 62. Ibid., 308. 63. Edwin Haviland Miller, Walt Whitman’s Poetry: A Psychological Journey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 27. 64. There is an ample scholarly literature on Whitman and phrenology. On this poem specifically, see Harold Aspiz, “Educating the Kosmos: ‘There Was a Child Went Forth,’” American Quarterly 18 (Winter): 655–­66. 65. Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Moon, 103, 307. 66. This line is from the Two Rivulets version of “Song of the Exposition” but was removed from subsequent versions. See Whitman, Two Rivulets, 5.

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see James F. W. Johnston, Catechism of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology (Albany: Erasmus H. Pease, 1852), 4; Andrew Jackson Downing, Rural Essays (New York: George P. Putnam, 1853), 5. 35. In the year 1877, for example, members of the American Institute heard papers on “Grass as a renovator of the soil” (January 9, 1877) and on “The Graminae or grass family” (January 18, 1876). A lengthy paper was read by Mr. Morrell on “fourteen varieties of grass” he had studied. There was also an 1876 paper by John Henderson on grasses (January 25, 1876). 36. John Henderson, Handbook of the Grasses of Great Britain and America (Northport, NY: Journal Publishing, 1875), 17. 37. Ibid. 38. On the history of the term ecology, see Carolyn Merchant, Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 159. 39. George Sinclair, “Details of Experiments on Grasses,” in Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, by Sir Humphrey Davy, George Sinclair, and John Bedford (Philadelphia: B. Warner, 1821), 258–­92. 40. Andy Hector and Rowan Hooper, “Darwin and the First Ecological Experiment,” Science 295 (January 2002): 640. 41. Hillary Mayall, “Was Darwin Influenced by Experiment in English Garden?,” National Geographic News, February 5, 2002, http://​news​.nationalgeographic​.com/​ news/​2002/​02/​0205​_020205​_darwin​.html. 42. On Whitman’s scientific inclinations, see Joseph Beaver, Walt Whitman, Poet of Science (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1951). 43. At least one critic has wrongly attributed it to Justus von Liebig’s landmark study of soil chemistry, with which Whitman was familiar. See Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America. 44. Davy, Sinclair, and Bedford, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, 296; emphasis added. 45. George Sinclair, Hortus Gramineus Woburnensis: Or, an Account of the Results of Experiments on the Produce and Nutritive Qualities of Different Grasses (London: J. Ridgway, 1824), 240. 46. Ibid.; emphasis added. 47. Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 106.

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7 “Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden” Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia, and Domestic Animality alan c. b ra d d o ck

In January 2015, on the eve of a major diplomatic visit by U.S. President Barack Obama, government officials in India embarked on a campaign of urban beautification intended to “sanitize” New Delhi, the nation’s capital and the largest city on the president’s itinerary. This clean-­up campaign targeted not only litter and panhandlers but also the city’s large population of stray nonhuman animals—­ notably cows and monkeys—­whose presence Indians ordinarily take for granted, as indicated in a photograph showing rhesus macaques lounging around with people on the street (fig. 7.1). In a New York Times article accompanying the photograph, journalist Ellen Barry quoted local residents of New Delhi who expressed bemusement about the national sanitation effort, which apparently entailed nonlethal, noninjurious methods to displace vagrants of various species from selected areas on a temporary basis. In the words of one elderly man named Vinod Pahuja, “Suppose there is a marriage in your family: You whitewash your house—­that is what our government is doing, whitewashing our city.” Asked what he expected to happen after Mr. Obama’s departure, Mr. Pahuja added (“cheerfully,” according to Barry), “Then everything will be the same as it was before.” According to Dr. Shukla Saumya, a medical officer with the New Delhi Municipal Council, “The basic mentality of any Indian not to harm any animal is still there, so we cannot use any stringent measures.”1 In a somewhat different scenario covered by the New York Times in 2014, stringent measures of extermination were used by Russian officials to eradicate

“Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden” fig. 7.1 Kuni Takahashi (photographer), “Monkeys sit on the sidewalk in Delhi, India,” from “For Obama’s Visit, India Takes a Broom to Stray Monkeys and Cows,” New York Times, January 23, 2015.

stray dogs in Sochi prior to the 2014 Winter Olympics, prompting animal rights activists to work fervently to save some of them. The mere fact that a prominent American newspaper would give attention to such international stories raises interesting questions about the perception of urban interspecies relationships in the United States. What do Americans take for granted in their cities, including Philadelphia, now and in the past? Where would we locate Philadelphia on a spectrum of cultural attitudes and interspecies relations alongside cities such as Sochi and New Delhi? If, as Dr. Saumya observed in New Delhi, the “basic mentality of any Indian” involves a benign attitude toward animals, can we say the same about “any” American? Probably not, considering the relative unfamiliarity of urban scenes in the United States like the one shown in figure 7.1, which Indian governmental officials and the Times both recognized as evidence of significant cultural and historical differences between the two countries. The Russian extermination of stray dogs in Sochi also seems somewhat unfamiliar from an American perspective, but not nearly as alien as the scene of interspecies intimacy visualized in New Delhi. Stray dogs are regularly euthanized in the United States, they are rarely allowed to roam freely in packs in American cities, and we almost never see large livestock or wildlife lolling around freely and casually with human beings on street corners in places like Philadelphia, New York, or Washington, DC.2 The key point here is this: The aforementioned picture and journalism reveal a tacit presumption about the general absence of large, free-­ranging mammalian wildlife, domesticated livestock, and packs of stray animals in plain view in

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American metropolitan areas today. Indeed, that absence seems to be a “natural” fact of city life in the United States. Further evidence of this presumption appears in the startled curiosity—­often mixed with alarm—­expressed in local and national news reports when such animals (not only bears, moose, cougars, coyotes, and so on, but also escaped livestock and packs of wild dogs) occasionally materialize in American cities. In the United States, urban environments are perceived as decidedly human places that presuppose the nonexistence of nonhumans, apart from domesticated pets, service animals, and small wildlife such as birds, squirrels, turtles, rabbits, and benign insects. This perception in turn acknowledges that other kinds of animals—­especially wild megafauna—­have material agency that exceeds the acceptable parameters and expectations of American urban environments.3 I offer these preliminary anecdotes as a way of framing the following historical chapter, which explores the work and life of Thomas Eakins, an important Philadelphia artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eakins owned, knew, and depicted a multitude of nonhuman animals, including a South American brown capuchin monkey named Bobby, shown here in an 1885 photograph taken on the porch of the artist’s home at 1729 Mount Vernon Street in downtown Philadelphia (fig. 7.2)—­an image that strangely resembles in its intimacy the one taken in New Delhi more than a century later. Even though Bobby appears to be chained and unaccompanied by human beings in the picture, his intent stare at the beholder suggests recognition of Eakins behind the camera. Eakins acquired Bobby sometime in the late nineteenth century, probably around the time this photograph was taken,

fig. 7.2 Thomas Eakins, Bobby, Sitting on a Porch, ca. 1885. Platinum print, 1¾ × 2½ in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust, 1985.68.2.784.

“Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden”

when the artist’s wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins, happened to be out of town. The presence of such an exotic animal in their home reveals Eakins’s unusual understanding of what could constitute an urban domestic environment in nineteenth-­century Philadelphia. According to one friend and portrait sitter, Leslie Miller, Eakins “really seemed to prefer things that are outside the range of what are usually reckoned as constituting not only the charms but even the amenities of existence.”4 Although chained when outside (where he apparently was restricted to the Eakins family’s fenced yard), Bobby had free rein inside the house. According to early biographers of Eakins, the monkey harried other pets, annoyed many human visitors, and particularly enjoyed riding around on the artist’s shoulders, pounding his owner on the head with silver dollars. Remarkably, Bobby lived for twenty-­five years in the Eakins home, which also included various human family members as well as cats, dogs, birds, a rabbit, a turtle, and even tame rats and mice. Evidence of this domestic menagerie can be found in numerous photographs and letters, including an 1897 note to another friend and portrait sitter named Henry A. Rowland in which the artist observed, “Our yard looks something like a zoological garden.” One photograph taken around this time (probably by Eakins) shows Susan with Bobby and two cats in that very yard (fig. 7.3). Art historians have mentioned Eakins’s interest in nonhuman animals before, but always in passing; they have not considered the creative or intellectual significance of his household “zoological garden” or its implications for understanding Philadelphia’s urban domestic space during his lifetime.5 In this chapter, I argue that Eakins and his art help us see nonhuman animals as something more than perfunctory aesthetic props or household ornaments and rather as dynamic agents that materially inflected his life and work, thereby complicating familiar anthropocentric art-historical narratives about him. Moreover, in light of Eakins’s close association with the city of Philadelphia, the zoological complexity of his home provides an illuminating case study with which to examine the dominant humanizing trend of this American city in modernity. Like other metropolitan areas in the Western world during the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia participated in an epochal shift of urban interspecies relations, a shift only partially unfolding today in places like New Delhi and Sochi amid forces of globalization. Already during the late 1800s in Europe and America, nonhuman beings—­especially wildlife and free-­roaming large domesticated animals—­were increasingly perceived as nuisances alien to urban environments, which were transforming through the sanitizing processes of “civilization.”6 Eventually, the presence of these animals could only be tolerated under highly controlled conditions, as in zoos, laboratories, or in carefully regulated systems of economic production, where domesticated horses served as labor or where livestock such as cattle, pigs, chickens, and sheep were slaughtered for meat and materials. Eakins did not run a farm or sheepfold on Mount Vernon Street, but by turning his household into a veritable “zoological garden” and by tolerating considerable nuisance from nonhuman beings—­especially Bobby—­ the artist to some extent resisted the powerful sanitizing, segregating impulses

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fig. 7.3 Thomas Eakins, Susan Macdowell Eakins with a Monkey and Two Cats in the Yard of the Family Home at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, Philadelphia, ca. 1895. Platinum print, 3¾ × 411∕16 in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust, 1985.68.2.282.

that were then remaking cities like Philadelphia into more or less monolithically human environments. At the same time, however, Eakins’s art and personal life embodied period forces of domestication and control that tended to instrumentalize or “pettify” those nonhuman animals that remained within urban places.

The Great Separation Recent scholarship at the nexus of animal studies and urban studies calls the historic shift in question the “Great Separation,” part of a broader conceptual division of city from country, and culture from nature, in modernity. In a 2012 anthology titled Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories, editor Peter Atkins observes the following:

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[There] were large numbers of animals in many cities before 1850. They were at the center of a circulating system which used their wastes to fertilize peri-­urban agricultural production, which in turn then supplied fodder to close the loop. The evidence that these animals were

To demonstrate that nonhuman animals were becoming more and more “unwelcome” in cities after the middle of the nineteenth century, Atkins cites various forms of historical evidence, from public complaints about smells and noises to the emergence of technical literature on sanitation and popular illustrations satirizing things like an urban sheepfold and “the cattle nuisance” in London, among others. Atkins correlates the Great Separation with a number of contemporaneous structural changes in the management of Western cities, from the creation of modern sewer systems and zoos to the construction of industrial slaughterhouses. Since the separation obviously was never achieved in an absolute sense—­a fact proved by the lingering presence of some wildlife and other nonhuman animals in Western cities (birds, snakes, rats, insects, horses, chickens, cats, dogs, coyotes, etc.)—­Atkins cautions against adopting the term in a crudely dualistic way. Nevertheless, the Great Separation usefully describes a powerful historical tendency and discourse since the nineteenth century, one that has succeeded not only in reducing and regulating the presence of nonhuman animals in cities but also in reconstructing attitudes by making urban environments seem distinctly human in their orientation and purpose. According to Atkins, historical scholarship has only lately begun to revise this century of entrenched anthropocentrism and “neglect of urban animals” by cultivating more “animal-­centeredness” and acknowledging that “the principal inhabitant of cities was a large-­brained bipedal primate that displayed many animal characteristics and behaviors.” The present chapter reexamines Eakins and Philadelphia in light of this recent “animal turn” in scholarship.8 In noting that turn, Atkins acknowledges the influence of a number of earlier critical thinkers, including the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who described dirt as “matter out of place”; the psychoanalytical critic Julia Kristeva, who theorized the uncanny power of abject materials such as corpses, blood, and excreta; and the dissident surrealist writer George Bataille, who highlighted “base materialism” and the “accursed share” as forces of formlessness, waste, and excess that resist modern capitalism and idealist aesthetics. Atkins also pays particular homage to Jennifer Wolch, a more recent urban theorist and historian who coined the term “Zoöpolis” in 1996 to describe the complex, multispecies life of cities. Critiquing the “deep-­seated anthropocentrism” of “contemporary urban theory—­whether mainstream or Marxist, neoclassical or feminist,” Wolch calls for a “transspecies urban theory” to counteract “the logic of capitalist urbanization” that “proceeds without regard to nonhuman animal life, except as cash-­on-­the-­hoof headed for slaughter on the ‘disassembly’ line or commodities used to further the cycle of accumulation.” In place of prevailing “theories and

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unwelcome in the city is lacking until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was the birth of the sanitary idea that was responsible for a reassessment but it was not until the end of the century, or even later in some European and North American cities, that the “Great Separation” of human residence from animal production began.7

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practices of urbanization [that] have contributed to disastrous ecological effects” and the “isolation of urban people” from most other species, Wolch envisions Zoöpolis as a “renaturalized, re-­enchanted city” fostering “reintegration of people with animals.” Under such conditions, says Wolch, “an interspecific ethic of caring replaces dominionism to create urban regions where animals are neither incarcerated, killed, nor sent off to live in wildlife prisons but instead are valued neighbors and partners in survival.”9 Wolch’s ideas have gained traction lately, inspiring not only Atkins’s anthology but also Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s recent book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, a legal treatise advocating different categories of real citizenship for nonhuman animals, based on their particular relationships with human communities. Worth noting here is the fact that nonhuman animals play a relatively minor role in Jane Bennett’s new materialist exploration of “vibrant matter,” except for brief passages on the agency of earthworms in Charles Darwin’s writing and Bennett’s own encounter with a dead rat on a street in Baltimore. Building on the ideas of Wolch and Atkins, I contend that new materialism and the broader environmental humanities would benefit from a more thorough consideration of nonhuman animals with help from the rich, rapidly emerging scholarship in animal studies. Likewise, art history is a discipline that would do well to pay more attention to this emerging critical wave, which calls for the overhaul of classical cultural assumptions about species difference, hierarchy, and relations. Indeed, art history arguably has contributed a great deal to the sanitizing processes of the Great Separation over the last two centuries by largely cleansing nonhuman animals from its account of the past. Bringing new attention to the neglected presence and agency of nonhuman animals in the world of Thomas Eakins, therefore, might enrich our understanding of his city and his art.10

Monstrous Nuisance

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Historical evidence of the Great Separation in Philadelphia is easy to find, even though nineteenth-­century residents and modern urban studies scholars of the city have never used that term to describe the phenomenon. Indeed, Philadelphia’s establishment in 1874 of the first American zoological garden organized on scientific principles suggests the city was on the leading edge of a major shift in urban species relations in the United States. As we will see shortly, Eakins’s association of his own yard with a “zoological garden” clearly registered his awareness not only of the Philadelphia Zoo but also of other manifestations of this modern institution dedicated to the science and spectacle of nonhuman animals. Not surprisingly, given the city’s claim to national priority and the ongoing popularity of such institutions today, scholarship on the Philadelphia Zoo has tended to be overwhelmingly celebratory. There has been no critical consideration of the zoo’s role in segregating urban space into carefully regulated and partitioned species zones, where nonhuman animals are perceived

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either as objects of entertainment, domestication, and economic production or, if unregulated, as nuisances in need of removal.11 Nineteenth-­century newspapers provide a wealth of anecdotal information about the increasing regulation and segregation of nonhuman animals from human beings in Philadelphia. A search in the America’s Historical Newspapers database using the terms “animals,” “nuisance,” and “Philadelphia” yielded the following number of results: 37 for 1800–­1850, 77 for 1850–­75, 127 for 1875–­1900, and 136 for 1900–­1925. According to newspaper accounts, animal-­related nuisances during the antebellum era usually took the form of odors or hygiene concerns arising from the presence of slaughterhouses and urban livestock pens within the city as well as dogs and other animals in the streets. For example, an 1832 article in the National Gazette (Philadelphia) described new Board of Health resolutions to confront miasmic “filthiness” and “noxious exhalation” associated with the city’s cholera epidemic, including a plan to “prevent the existence of pig-­pens, or places where such animals are kept, within the bounds of the said city and districts.” An 1845 article titled “Monstrous Nuisance” in the North American (Philadelphia) complained that “the inhabitants of the southwestern part of our city have occasionally been annoyed of late by an indescribable sickly effluvia in the air, the cause has been discovered in a new pig establishment in Moyamensing said to contain from 1000 to 1500 of these animals. This is past endurance. It is but an infinitesimal quantity of air we get any how in our city, and no man has the right to poison that scarce supply with the intolerable stenches of pig-­styes.”12 The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a marked increase in calls for regulation, segregation, and outright elimination of nonhuman animals within the city. An 1861 Philadelphia Inquirer article on “The New System of Street Cleaning” exclaimed that “to-­day inaugurates, it is to be hoped, the era of cleaner city highways.” The article touted a series of unprecedented municipal regulations stipulating not only the regular pickup of trash and washing of streets and sidewalks but also the removal of “any offal, dead animals or other substances that may at any time be or become a nuisance.” In 1872, the Inquirer reported on “The Cattle Bill,” a series of new resolutions by the Philadelphia Select and Common Council declaring the following activities to be public “nuisances”: “To drive, lead or take at large, or in droves, cattle of any description whatever, that is to say, any cow, heifer, bull or steer, sheep or sheep kind, or hog, sow . . . pig or goat, across the bridge over the river Schuylkill at Chestnut Street. . . . [or] through any of the streets of the city within the limits of Washington avenue on the south, and Montgomery avenue on the north, except between the hours of seven P.M. and seven A.M. each day.”13 The evening exception mentioned in that resolution indicates the transitional and nondualistic nature of the Great Separation, noted by Atkins, even as it confirms the trend toward greater regulation and segregation of nonhuman animals in the city. In the same year, 1872, an article in the Public Ledger (Philadelphia) titled “Getting Rid of Nuisances” began as follows: “Troublesome insects and animals and foul smells are the terror of good housekeepers, and

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various modes of exterminating living creeping things and of dissipating disagreeable odors have been devised.” In addition to touting a new invention from England for fumigation, the article asserted emphatically that “the true system in house-­building and housekeeping is so to arrange houses and drains, and so to manage housekeeping details, that refuges for vermin, and nooks for the generation of foul gases be reduced to the smallest possible degree.”14 During the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia newspapers regularly expressed alarm about water pollution in the city’s rivers resulting from industrial animal operations (tanneries and slaughterhouses) as well as from untreated sewage. Such concerns prompted public health officials to conduct inquiries and publish findings. In 1872, the Water Department commissioned a prominent Philadelphia physician named Charles Cresson to carry out a systematic study of water quality around the city. After collecting and examining samples for three years, Cresson summarized his findings in an official report in 1875: The pollution of the Schuylkill river has been increased to such an extent as occasionally to class the water as “unwholesome;” prompt measures should therefore be taken to relieve it of sewage containing faecal and decaying animal matter. . . . That portion of the sewage which is most dangerous, and which would in the presence of an epidemic produce fatal results, is derived from the cess-­pools and the drainage of slaughter houses. Singularly, the river is tolerably free from such sewage until it enters the pool of Fairmount dam. Into this pool from both sides of the river is poured an enormous quantity of animal refuse from slaughter houses, in which I am informed not less than 25 per cent of the whole number of animals needed for our market are killed. . . . The amount of sewage found in Fairmount forebay . . . has been steadily increasing since [1872, when the study began], until the water is occasionally charged with an amount of sewage exceeding that carried by the river Thames at London (England), and is totally unfit for use.15

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Even as Philadelphia was passing resolutions to remove livestock from its streets, these animals reasserted their presence in the form of offal that tainted the city water supply, leading to new forms of regulation and segregation contributing to the Great Separation. Such conditions had already motivated city officials to establish Fairmount Park in part as an environmental protection project, involving the removal of some industrial operations along the Schuylkill upstream from the Fairmount water intake, but water pollution exacerbated by animal operations continued to be a problem throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.16 A systematic statistical study of Philadelphia public health and police reports concerning nonhuman animal–­related nuisances would be very interesting, but it is beyond the scope of the present chapter. Suffice it to say that Philadelphia—­ whose water pollution problem Dr. Cresson explicitly compared to London’s—­ partook of a broader Western transformation of urban practices and perceptions

Domesticating the Zoöpolis in Art Eakins is generally regarded as one of the greatest American realist painters of the human figure, which he invested with various personal and public meanings concerning academic art training, scientific knowledge, social identity, and civic pride. His famous 1875 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross), showing an eminent Philadelphia surgeon performing an operation to save a patient’s leg in an amphitheater full of medical students—­including a self-­ portrait of Eakins—­might be said to epitomize such human-­centered meanings and subject matter. The basic terms for understanding Eakins and his work were established long ago by art historian Lloyd Goodrich, his first biographer, who described him as an uncompromising artist of “humanity.” Even most recent revisionist scholarship on Eakins maintains a fundamental emphasis on human social identity and psychology. In a word, the prevailing view of Eakins remains resolutely anthropocentric. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, art history here (and elsewhere) thus exemplifies “the anthropological machine of humanism,” which maintains a firm boundary separating our species from nonhuman others. By casting Eakins more or less exclusively as a painter of human beings, art history has buttressed its own anthropocentrism as a discipline.18 Just as scholars regard Eakins as an artist of “humanity,” they almost invariably represent him as someone deeply rooted in his native city of Philadelphia. In the words of Goodrich, “His work could have been painted in no other time and place than in the United States from 1870 to 1910, and more particularly in Philadelphia, with its conservatism, its quiet, solid, rich, respectability . . . its pleasant, healthy outdoor life on the Schuylkill and in the surrounding countryside. . . . An integral part of this environment, living its life, he painted the people and things that were closest to him.” As we have seen (and as I have written elsewhere), outdoor life on the Schuylkill during the nineteenth century was not always “pleasant” or “healthy”—­a fact confirmed by other chapters in the present volume. Nevertheless, versions of Goodrich’s idealistic interpretation of Eakins as an artistic embodiment of Philadelphia have reverberated in various texts down to the present, including the corporate “Sponsor’s Statement” for the catalogue of the last major retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work held

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regarding species relations. According to Atkins, “The Great Separation was the materialization of an ontological split that had been building during the eighteenth century but which was conjured from its chrysalis in the early nineteenth century by one of modernity’s most powerful tunes: the song of sanitation. . . . Thus were born new ways of seeing the environment, and the division of animals from urbanized culture was almost incidental to the wider project of bringing nature under control.” By the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia had joined an international chorus in singing “the song of sanitation.”17

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in 2001: “Thomas Eakins was a world-­class artist whose Philadelphia roots and influence were woven throughout his works and his teachings.”19 The prevailing anthropocentric view of Eakins and Philadelphia overlooks the fact that he lived with, encountered, and represented nonhuman animals regularly throughout his career. Scholars have noted evidence of his keen hunting and equine interests in works like Rail Shooting on the Delaware (1876) and A May Morning in the Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-­in-­Hand [1879–­80]) as well as the recurring presence of Harry, the artist’s beloved setter, in several important pictures such as Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River (1881), The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog (1884–­86), and Swimming (1885).20 But in many other paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs by Eakins, we see dogs, cats, horses, cows, sheep, hogs, geese, chickens, turkeys, reed birds, ducks, a ram, and, of course, Bobby the monkey, as well as other human beings. This species diversity in his art and life complicates a strictly anthropocentric account of Eakins even as it reveals his complicity with the domesticating impulses of the Great Separation, which increasingly controlled the city’s zoöpolitan dimensions by reducing nonhuman animals to one of three main instrumental categories: livestock, game, or pets.21 Eakins’s correspondence frequently mentions nonhuman animals as well. The largest trove of Eakins letters originated during his four-­year period of art study abroad in Europe, mainly in Paris, in the 1860s. Then in his early twenties, the young artist was particularly enamored of the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, considered the world’s oldest public zoological garden. It was founded in 1793 during the French Revolution, with a collection of exotic animals confiscated from the aristocracy, and located near the Seine in the center of Paris.22 In a letter to his mother written shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1866, Eakins said, “There is a splendid menagerie there . . . probably the finest in the world. I can never get tired of seeing elephants camels or monkeys.” In a letter to his father, he wrote: There is a great big garden at Paris with cages and wire fences in it and these are full of animals, so that it is like a menagerie, only you don’t have to pay to go in. There are elephants, lions, tigers, bears, hippopotamuses [sic], rhinocerusses [sic], camels, snakes, wolves, monkeys and a great many other kinds of beasts. I went there last week, and saw some boys throwing bread in to the zebras. A zebra is a horse with stripes all over him so that he looks as if he was painted. There are a great many little birds at Paris that are very saucy. When the boys would throw the bread the zebras would run after it as fast as they could but very often the little birds would be flying off with it before they got to it and this made them very mad and the boys always threw it near the birds on purpose to make the zebras mad.23

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Yet another Eakins letter from Paris recounts in even greater length his observations of a street entertainer with “a little dog and a monkey,” the latter named “Funny.” Too long to quote, the letter goes into remarkable detail about how the dog could stand on his or her hind legs and dance “for a very long time” and then

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“be horse for the little monkey.” In addition to riding the dog, Funny could play musical instruments, mimic “naughty little children,” catch a coin thrown by a spectator, and then “take off his hat and bow to the person that had given it.”24 Beyond mere description, Eakins’s written references to nonhuman animals sometimes allowed him to make interspecies social observations and statements about art theory, as when he noted how a sheep appeared “intellectual looking & spirited” compared to its European peasant owner, or when he criticized Dutch naturalism in art for being mimetically “monkey-­like,” or when he praised his French art teacher Jean-­Léon Gérôme for standing above other men “as man himself is raised above the swine,” or when he complained about President Rutherford B. Hayes as an uncooperative portrait sitter whom he “had to construct as I would a little animal.”25 Although Eakins’s early letters at times reveal conventional Western assumptions about species hierarchy and human exceptionalism, they also contain observations that ran counter to those assumptions, suggesting a certain degree of fluidity in his perspective on such issues. A sense of fluidity becomes even more apparent when we consider that Eakins’s acquaintances frequently referred uneasily to his own “wolfish looks,” “brutal talk,” and “brutally frank” realism, as if the artist and his work were not entirely human. Frank Stephens, the antagonistic brother-­in-­law married to the artist’s sister Caddie, even accused Eakins of “bestiality,” but the meaning and substance of this claim has not been verified.26 Eakins was not an animalier artist per se and nonhuman animals did not outnumber human subjects in his oeuvre, nor was his attitude toward other species wholly or consistently sympathetic (as indicated by some of the quotations above), but a broader sense of animality pervaded his life and career on multiple levels. The Great Separation had not entirely transformed Eakins or his art. The only Eakins scholar to address nonhuman animals at length has been Sarah Burns, who attempted to situate the artist and particularly The Gross Clinic in relation to the grisliest aspects of nineteenth-­century medical research, including animal vivisection, a practice endorsed by Dr. Samuel D. Gross and other Philadelphia physicians with whom the artist was closely acquainted. According to Burns, The Gross Clinic provoked hostility among nineteenth-­ century viewers in part because it intimated what she calls “the brutalizing torture chambers of modern science,” where thousands of animals routinely suffered excruciating pain at the hands of physician-­vivisectionists who claimed to be acting in behalf of humanity and the progress of medicine. One of the most vocal proponents of vivisection in Philadelphia was Dr. William Williams Keen, whom Eakins assisted in teaching anatomy to art students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Sparring regularly in public with animal welfare advocates like Caroline Earle White, Frances Power Cobbe, and Lawson Tait, Dr. Keen gave lectures and published articles, including “Our Recent Debts to Vivisection” (1885) and “The Progress of Surgery as Influenced by Vivisection” (1901). Another Philadelphia physician, Dr. Horatio Wood, a neurologist acquaintance of Eakins and the subject of an important 1886 portrait by the artist, was cited in Peter Singer’s influential manifesto Animal Liberation (1975)

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as an egregious example of scientific abuse for having conducted experiments in the 1880s in which he cooked rabbits, pigeons, and cats alive in glass-­lidded boxes placed in the hot sun in order to observe how the animals died. Burns did not mention Wood, but she strongly insinuated that Eakins shared with such physicians a compulsive, quasi-­pornographic desire for scientific violence against nonhumans. In her words, “the sight of vulnerable flesh, cutting instruments, and trickling blood was the source of the same schadenfreude that supposedly thrilled surgeons and vivisectors in their cold mastery of helpless bodies.” Burns even described the artist as having a “pathological” compulsion in this regard. The stark impression left by this interpretation is that Eakins, who apparently never engaged in vivisection himself, sided willingly and implicitly with physicians who did. And by extension, suggests Burns, the artist thus aligned himself against the burgeoning anticruelty or animal protection movement.27 Yet Eakins and his wife, Susan, were widely recognized to be animal lovers— ­a fact borne out by considerable visual and verbal evidence. The art historian Douglass Paschall has even noted that they were members of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).28 Details about their affiliation with that organization are unclear, but membership in it suggests a more complex relation to nonhuman animals than one of cold, scientific brutality. Numerous anecdotes recounted by early biographers capture a sense of the complexity at issue here. Based on interviews with the artist’s widow, Goodrich observed that “Eakins was gentle and patient with their animals; he often said that there was no good in being impatient with animals or inanimate things.” Goodrich went on to say, “Mrs. Eakins told me that the only time she ever saw him angry with any of them was when the rabbit, who fraternized with Harry, stuck his nose in the dog’s face, and Harry snapped at him, breaking a blood vessel in his head; the rabbit went in to Eakins and climbed on his lap and died. Eakins ran out with tears streaming, and gave Harry a whipping.” Susan further explained that “when any of the animals had to be put away,” Eakins “did it himself.” For example, Eakins shot and killed a sick cat that belonged to his youngest sister, Caddie, evidently out of mercy, but the act tainted his relationship with that sister forever. We also know that Eakins regularly took his students from the Pennsylvania Academy to slaughterhouses to study horse anatomy. Later, after his forced resignation from the academy amid scandal (owing to his unusually frank approach to anatomy), Eakins traveled west to the Dakota Territory in 1887 for several weeks, returning to Philadelphia with a “gentle & bright & intelligent” horse named Baldy, whom he accompanied on a cattle train for the entire trip. In 1905, the Philadelphia Inquirer cited Eakins as an anatomical authority in a full-­page, illustrated article (with a photograph of the artist) advocating more intelligent and humane treatment of carriage horses in the city, specifically by calling on drivers not to rein in the animals when they stumbled in the streets, so as to allow them freedom to right themselves. Quoted at length in the article, Eakins observed, “To one who has studied anatomy physics intelligently, it should be apparent that the practice of drivers and

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riders to pull up the head of a falling or stumbling horse is antagonistic to the law of inertia, to say nothing of its inhumanity.” Clearly, Eakins was prepared to kill, eat, and use nonhuman animals, but his perspective on interspecies relations seems to have been more complex than coldly clinical schadenfreude.29 Moreover, while Eakins generally viewed human beings as the preeminent species in nature, he did not exclude them from the category of “animal.” Vivid evidence of this inclusive tendency appears in an early letter from Europe describing a traveling Japanese circus. Illustrating the letter with small sketches, Eakins recounted seeing a contortionist with his head doubled-­back, looking out between his legs. Next to one sketch, Eakins wrote the following: “This position is not very beautiful but the fellow that can do such a thing with ease & then throw a dozen somersets [sic] is the finest animal in all nature & the most beautiful.” Eakins’s praise for this “fellow” and “animal” foreshadowed his own later photographic work, both independently and as a member of the committee supervising Eadweard Muybridge’s “animal locomotion” project at the University of Pennsylvania. As John Ott discusses in another chapter in this book, such terminology implicitly affirmed Darwinian assumptions about human beings as creatures existing within the animal kingdom, not apart from it. Eakins manifested a similar openness to viewing humans and nonhuman animals together as occupying a continuum, not as absolutely distinct forms of life. With Eakins, in other words, we have come a long way from the seventeenth-­ century philosopher René Descartes, who notoriously and influentially described nonhuman animals as inarticulate automata without thought or feeling. For this reason, we need to distinguish Eakins from scientific colleagues like Keen and Wood, whose attitudes were unflinchingly Cartesian.30 It is illuminating here to note the complexity of Darwin’s perspective on nonhuman animals, which arguably serves as a more useful barometer for comparison with Eakins. The literary historian Chris Danta has observed that while Darwin was “an ardent supporter of vivisection,” he was also “known not only to care deeply about animals but also, on occasion, to intervene vigorously on behalf of those he saw being mistreated,” including carriage horses. Danta quotes an 1871 letter from Darwin to an Oxford zoologist named E. Ray Lankester, saying, “You may ask my opinion on vivisection. I quite agree that it is justifiable for real investigations on physiology; but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity. It is a subject that makes me sick with horror.” Also in 1871, writing in The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin observed that “man bears in his bodily structure clear traces of his descent from some lower form,” yet “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties. . . . The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. . . . The fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as ourselves is so well established, that it will not be necessary to weary the reader by many details.” Darwin even acknowledged that “most of the more complex emotions are common to the higher animals and ourselves.” Following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of

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Man, during a period coinciding with Eakins’s maturation as an artist, a flood of popular and scientific commentary in the United States—­including news coverage and even a satirical cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly—­addressed the relationship between human beings and other animals, indicating widespread fascination with evolution, ethics, and the relative intelligence of species.31

Portraying Animal Subjectivity Eakins apparently never mentioned Darwin in his letters or conversations with contemporaries, so we do not know with certainty that he pondered the British scientist’s ideas directly. Nevertheless, the artist’s obvious curiosity about “animal locomotion” and the “zoological garden” in his own yard have a very timely Darwinian flavor, suggesting his arrival at a similar perspective. Not unlike Darwin, Eakins found in nonhuman animals more than just the mechanical-­ anatomical physiology of “locomotion.” As revealed by his persistent comments about the sentience and affective behavior of nonhuman animals—­the “mad” zebra, the “intellectual looking & spirited” sheep, his own “gentle & bright & intelligent” horse—­Eakins also found in them a subjective, inner life of emotion and cognition. Not surprisingly, he attempted to depict this in his art, just as he often did with human beings. In 1872, Eakins painted Grouse, a portrait of a dog (fig. 7.4). Around this time, in a letter to his former art teacher in Paris, Jean-­Léon Gérôme, Eakins wrote, “I have made some genre portraits and some portraits of animals.” Like a number of contemporary and historical artists—­Gérôme, Rosa Bonheur (whom Eakins also knew personally in France), Edwin Landseer, George Stubbs, William Hogarth, and more—­Eakins clearly regarded particular nonhuman animals as individual subjects worthy of portraiture. Grouse was a setter that belonged to his friend, Henry Schreiber, a fellow rower who, with his father George Francis Schreiber, operated a family photographic studio in Philadelphia that specialized in “life-­like portraits” of animals, according to nineteenth-­century business listings and other publications. An article in the American Journal of Photography described the rationale behind Schreiber & Sons’ chosen line of work: “Growing tired of the whims and caprices of human subjects, he [Schreiber] abandoned this branch and devoted himself wholly to the photographing of domestic animals.” As Douglas Paschall has shown, Eakins based his painting Grouse closely on a photograph by Schreiber & Sons that was published in the journal Philadelphia Photographer.32 More than simply an exercise in “monkey-­like” copying (to quote the artist’s earlier disparaging remark about Dutch naturalism), Eakins’s Grouse imbues this dog with a sense of monumentality by enlarging upon the photographic image using techniques of squaring, transferring, and translation into paint. Unlike the flat blank gray background in the original photograph, Eakins’s picture has a richly textured ground of olive green paint that makes the dog’s white fur and whiskers

“Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden” fig. 7.4 Thomas Eakins, Grouse (H. Schreiber’s Dog), 1872. Oil on canvas, 20 × 24 in. The Harry and Mary Dalton Collection, 2000.36.10. Collection of the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina.

vividly project from the surface, giving this “sitter” an appropriately realistic look of depth. Indeed, such formal devices amplify the feeling of subjectivity and psychological interiority conveyed by the dog’s slightly downcast head—­already a signature posture in human portraits by Eakins that would become a veritable trademark of his late work, as seen, for example, in his 1890 work Francis J. Ziegler (The Critic; fig. 7.5). Elsewhere I have argued that this motif originated in certain early ethnographic human portraits that Eakins painted in Europe during the 1860s, which showed racial and ethnic others with looks of emotional resignation. In this instance, however, otherness seems to arise from a Darwinian sense of transspecies identification and similarity-­in-­difference.33 Literature scholar and animal studies theorist Cary Wolfe has pondered, “What happens when the Other can no longer safely be assumed to be human?” According to Wolfe, simply asking such a question destabilizes the edifice of humanism by forcing us to rethink our relation to other living beings in less absolute and less hierarchical terms while revealing structural limitations in anthropocentric systems of knowledge. To the extent that Eakins’s Grouse broaches the fluidity of perceived boundaries between humans and other animals—­in a timely Darwinian way—­the portrait helps us recognize humanism for what it is: a limited and historically constructed category that may not, and perhaps should

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fig. 7.5 Thomas Eakins, Francis J. Ziegler (The Critic), ca. 1890. Oil on canvas, 24 × 19¾ in. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.130.

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not, endure in perpetuity, at least not in its traditional anthropocentric forms. Furthermore, the work was clearly not alone in this regard, for it participated in a wider period discourse about “portraits of animals” that included other image-­makers in Philadelphia.34 It should be emphasized here, however, that Grouse was a domesticated companion animal, or pet, like Eakins’s own beloved dog, Harry, who appears in a number of the artist’s other pictures (though never as the sole focus of a finished portrait). In an important study on the history of pets in America, Katherine Grier has observed that “the history of pet keeping is an integral part of everyday life in the United States” and “part of the environmental history. . . . While painted portraits of pets were rare, Americans brought dogs and, later, cats by the thousands into photographers’ studios as soon as the technology arrived in America in the 1840s.” Grier also notes that in the nineteenth century, “many Americans began to rethink their relationship with the animals living in and around their households,” informed by a “new domestic ethic of kindness” and “gentility” associated with middle-class notions of citizenship, education, and domesticity. According to Grier, “The domestic ethic underlay the expansion of pet keeping and the creation of new animal welfare groups following the Civil War,” but “because of its focus on the heart of each individual and on the private household . . . the ethic had distinctive limits that impeded discussion of the structural character of cruelty in a large-­scale, industrializing society.” These historical observations help illuminate the “limits” of pet keeping and “portraits of animals” in Eakins’s Philadelphia. In many ways, such activities promoted and participated in the Great Separation, for they afforded nineteenth-­century urban dwellers a safe, respectable mode of ethical interaction with selected domesticated animals while permitting the wholesale segregation and industrial management of others. In other words, as a vision of domestication—­albeit a complex one—­Eakins’s Grouse was symptomatic of the historic shift away from the zoöpolitan city in modernity.35

I close this chapter by returning to Bobby, the capuchin monkey who lived with Eakins for a quarter century beginning sometime in the 1880s (see figs. 7.2, 7.3). Exactly how Bobby became a member of the artist’s household is not known. Eakins could have acquired him through an exotic animal dealer or through contacts at either the University of Pennsylvania or the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Grier notes the existence of a number of pet stores on Ninth Street in Philadelphia that solicited customers by putting caged animals out on the sidewalk for pedestrians to see, sometimes attracting crowds and police. An 1888 London guidebook on monkey pet ownership by Arthur Henry Patterson explained that “the Brown Capuchin is the most commonly imported; and a right nice little fellow he is, as much liked by the children and ladies as he is by the Italian musician who perambulates the streets with him. When well treated he places the utmost confidence in his keeper, cuddling up like a child to be petted and to claim protection. This variety is the commonest found in the dealers’ hands. . . . Capuchins, too, are wonderfully free from the filthy habits so common to the Catarrhines.”36 If Eakins did not go to such a dealer, perhaps he obtained Bobby through someone like Edward Drinker Cope, an evolutionary paleontologist and comparative anatomist at the Academy of Natural Sciences whom the artist had known for years. As a young art student in Paris, Eakins had facilitated the shipment of a collection of fossilized vertebrate specimens for Cope from the Loire Valley. Later, in Philadelphia, Eakins consulted with the scientist about horse physiology while preparing a paper for publication in the Academy’s Proceedings during the 1880s. In addition to writing frequently about the anatomy, behavior, and evolution of humans and nonhumans, including monkeys, Cope was a philanthropic supporter of the Philadelphia Zoo. In an 1872 issue of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Cope wrote a short piece about “Intelligence in Monkeys,” noting, “I have two species of Cebus in my study, C[ebus] capucinus [white-­headed capuchin] and a half-­grown C[ebus] apella [tufted or brown capuchin].”37 Bobby’s antics were well known within the Eakins family and to a wider circle of the artist’s acquaintances and sitters. Allowed to run freely about the house, Bobby upturned inkwells, bit the heads off goldfish, and generally made a nuisance of himself among people and pets alike. One Eakins portrait sitter, Helen Parker Evans, recalled that the artist’s family referred to the monkey as “emotional.” Most visitors to the Eakins residence expressed strong reservations or outright disgust about Bobby’s presence, but one individual who took a special interest in the monkey was the anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, the subject of a major portrait by Eakins in 1895. The Cushing portrait shows the anthropologist dressed as a Native American war priest, holding sacred military objects. In preparation for the portrait, Eakins and his sitter built a pseudo-­kiva in the artist’s studio as a way of reconstructing the anthropologist’s celebrated fieldwork expedition at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico during

“Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden”

Bobby’s Intention

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the 1880s. Before embarking upon this elaborate project, Eakins and Cushing became friends, discussing a range of topics, including Bobby the monkey.38 In an extraordinary letter to Cushing in July 1895, Eakins described at length Bobby’s deceptive techniques for tormenting the family cats. According to the artist, Bobby “entices the cats by holding back of the full length of his chain ready to dart forward” so as to be able to beat them with “one of his numerous war clubs.” After such premeditated attacks, said the artist, Bobby “shows a fiendish delight if he hits.” As Eakins observed further, “The first time we saw this done we felt there might be chance, but now we have seen it so frequently as to eliminate all the factors but those of pure intention.” These comments hinted at an ongoing discussion between artist and anthropologist regarding comparative intelligence of species. According to Eakins, Bobby displayed intention, a faculty traditionally attributed to human beings but ascribed by Darwin and his followers to a wide range of nonhumans as evidence of intellect. For example, in a book titled Animal Intelligence (1883), Darwin’s friend and colleague George John Romanes distinguished between reflex action and conscious intention by saying, “Reason or intelligence is the faculty which is concerned in the intentional adaptation of means to ends. It therefore implies the conscious knowledge of the relation between means employed and ends attained, and may be exercised in adaptation to circumstances novel alike to the experience of the individual and to that of the species.” Judging from Eakins’s letter to Cushing, Bobby’s deceptive manipulation of his chain revealed the kind of “intentional adaptation of means to ends” described by Romanes.39 Amid his conversation with Eakins in 1895, Cushing published a scientific study in the journal American Anthropologist examining the evolution of primitive military technology, in which he referred explicitly to “observing Bobby,” a monkey belonging to “My friend, Thomas Eakins, the scientist-­artist, of Philadelphia,” who “is honoring me by painting my portrait.” According to Cushing, Bobby provided living evidence of so-­called early approaches to weaponry comparable to those of Native Americans, “very little children,” “Tasmanians,” and other people “in the true paleolithic period of their development.” Though steeped in the late-­nineteenth-­century discourse of linear social-­evolutionary hierarchy, such comments further suggest that both the anthropologist and his artist friend viewed Bobby through a timely Darwinian framework that recognized kinship between human beings and nonhuman animals. Appropriately enough, a contemporary critic described the Cushing portrait as “brutally frank,” affirming the importance of animality as a rubric for interpreting Eakins’s work.40 After Eakins died in 1916, Bobby continued to live in the family home on Mount Vernon Street. Early biographer Margaret McHenry says that one day, as Susan Eakins was sweeping the floor, Bobby became startled and attacked, biting the length of her arm. This incident prompted Susan to send him away to the Philadelphia Zoo, where she would periodically visit him with Eakins’s student Samuel Murray. On these occasions, Bobby recognized them from far away and became excited as they approached.41

By now it should be clear that nonhuman animals exerted considerable agency in the Eakins household, in the artist’s imagination, and in the city where he lived. Accordingly, we should look beyond the anthropocentric lens of “humanity” in assessing his achievement. Eakins’s pet keeping and more-­than-­human portraiture hardly constituted an aggressive assertion of nonhuman animal rights. Though somewhat unusual in his attention to other species and his cultivation of a “zoological garden” on Mount Vernon Street, the artist participated in emerging trends of domestication associated with the Great Separation. Still, the animality of his life and art deserves more attention than it has received, for it reveals complexity and richness missing in traditional humanistic scholarship. In order to fully comprehend the work of this artist and his Philadelphia environment, we need to reckon with their nonhuman dimensions.

“Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden”

Conclusion

notes 1. Ellen Barry, “For Obama’s Visit, India Takes a Broom to Stray Monkeys and Cows,” New York Times, January 23, 2015, http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2015/​01/​ 24/​world/​for​-obamas​-visit​-india​-takes​-a​ -broom​-to​-stray​-monkeys​-and​-cows​.html. 2. David M. Herszenhorn, “Racing to Save the Stray Dogs of Sochi,” New York Times, February 5, 2014. On the 2.7 million shelter animals (mostly dogs and cats) euthanized in the United States every year and related statistics, see “Pet Statistics,” American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, accessed March 6, 2015, http://​www​.aspca​.org/​ about​-us/​faq/​pet​-statistics. 3. “Young Moose Wanders into Vermont Cities, Injures Nose after Smashing Windows,” The Associated Press, May 7, 2014, http://​www​.nydailynews​.com/​ news/​national/​young​-moose​-wanders​ -vermont​-cities​-article​-1​.1782548; Russell Hulstine, “Cattle Escape When Semi Crashes near Bartlesville,” Newson9.com (Oklahoma), November 4, 2014, http://​ www​.news9​.com/​story/​27266257/​cattle​ -escape​-when​-semi​-crashes​-just​-south​-of​ -bartlesville; “Mountain Lion Wanders into California City Center, Is Killed,” Reuters (Los Angeles), May 22, 2012, http://​www​.reuters​.com/​article/​2012/​ 05/​23/​us​-usa​-mountainlion​-california​ -idUSBRE84M04U20120523.

4. Leslie Miller to Lloyd Goodrich, April 23, 1930, quoted in Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1982), 2:12. On Bobby, see Margaret McHenry, Thomas Eakins, Who Painted (Oreland, PA: Privately printed, 1946), 60–­61, 127; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, 2:11–­12, 2:137. 5. Thomas Eakins to Henry A. Rowland, August 17, 1897 (Philadelphia), quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, 2:137. 6. On sanitation and “civilization,” see Daniel Eli Burnstein, Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York (Champaign-­Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 22, 31, 38, 93, 141, 165, 170, 187, 198. 7. Peter Atkins, ed., Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 2. 8. Ibid., 1 (quotation). On verbal and visual discourse about nuisance, see Atkins, “Animal Wastes and Nuisances in Nineteenth-­ Century London,” in ibid., 19–­51. 9. Ibid., 20; Jennifer Wolch, “Zoöpolis,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7, no. 2 (June 1996): 21–­47. 10. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010),

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xiii, xviii, 3–­6, 10, 21, 94–­100, 103, 107–­9, 120–­21. 11. On the founding and history of the Philadelphia Zoo, see Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 3, 11–­16; Clark De Leon, America’s First Zoostory: 125 Years at the Philadelphia Zoo (Virginia Beach, VA: Donning, 1999); Williams Biddle Cadwalader, Bears, Owls, Tigers, and Others! Philadelphia’s Zoo, 1874–­1949 (New York: Newcomen Society in North America, 1949). 12. “Health Office,” National Gazette, June 6, 1832, 3; “Monstrous Nuisance,” North American, September 10, 1845, 2. On health concerns associated with living and decomposing dogs, see, for example, “Hydrophobia,” Public Ledger, March 16, 1837, 4; and “The Board of Health,” North American, May 5, 1842, 2. 13. “The New System of Street Cleaning,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 15, 1861, 2; “The Cattle Bill,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 31, 1872, 4. 14. “Getting Rid of Nuisances,” Public Ledger, July 31, 1872, 2. 15. Charles M. Cresson, Results of Examinations of Water from the Schuylkill River (Philadelphia: William Mann, 1875), 9–­10. 16. On Philadelphia’s water pollution problems, see Sam Alewitz, “Filthy Dirty”: A Social History of Unsanitary Philadelphia in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1989); Michael McCarthy, Typhoid and the Politics of Public Health in Nineteenth-­ Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989). 17. Atkins, Animal Cities, 51. 18. On “humanity” as a defining trait of the artist’s outlook and work, see Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1933), 50, 112, 116, 143, 155; Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, The Revenge of Thomas Eakins (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 188. Examples of recent humanist revisionism include Martin Berger, Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); David Lubin, “Modern Psychological Selfhood in the Art of Thomas Eakins,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional

Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 133–­66; Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). My own book, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), concentrates on anthropological matters but includes discussion of environmental issues and nonhuman animals. See pages 87, 96, 113–­24, 131–­48, 150, 154–­55, 157, 164–­65, 194, 202, 209, 219, 238. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 29. On The Gross Clinic, see Kathleen A. Foster and Mark S. Tucker, eds., An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing “The Gross Clinic” Anew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 19. Lloyd Goodrich in Alfred H. Barr, Catalogue of the Sixth Loan Exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, May, 1930: Winslow Homer, Albert P. Ryder, Thomas Eakins (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1930), 16–­20; Dennis Alter, “Sponsor’s Statement,” in Thomas Eakins, ed. Darrel Sewell (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), v. On water pollution and typhoid associated with the Schuylkill River during Eakins’s lifetime, see Alan C. Braddock, “Bodies of Water: Thomas Eakins, Racial Ecology, and the Limits of Civic Realism,” in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 129–­50. 20. For illustrations of these paintings, see http://​artgallery​.yale​.edu/​collections/​ objects/​52629; http://​www​.philamuseum​ .org/​collections/​permanent/​43938​ .html; http://​www​.philamuseum​.org/​ collections/​permanent/​42514​.html; http://​ www​.metmuseum​.org/​collection/​the​ -collection​-online/​search/​10811; http://​ www​.cartermuseum​.org/​artworks/​491. 21. Nonhuman animals appear in so many works by Eakins that a comprehensive list would take up too much room here. For a partial list of photographs by Eakins depicting nonhumans from a single museum collection, grouped in species categories, see Susan Danly and Cheryl

for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Avon Books, 1975), 52. For Eakins’s Dr. Horatio C. Wood (1886, Detroit Institute of Arts), see Elizabeth Johns, Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 136, 161, fig. 110 or http://​www​.dia​ .org/​object​-info/​76361662​-f3ac​-493e​-81a2​ -707bdd30b4f2​.aspx​?position​=​322. 28. Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 282n21. 29. On Caddy’s cat, see Adams, Thomas Eakins Revealed, 66; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 101–­2. For Eakins’s teaching visits to slaughterhouses, see Charles Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia,” Scribner’s Monthly Illustrated Magazine 18 (September 1879): 742. On Baldy, see Foster and Leibold, Writing about Eakins, 93, 159–­60, 242–­45. 30. Thomas Eakins to his family, June 3, 1869, in Paris Letters, ed. Homer, 260. On Descartes’s view of animals as nature’s automata without language, see Stephen F. Eisenman, The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 73–­84; Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-­Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald, eds., The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings (New York: Berg, 2007), 59–­62. 31. Chris Danta, “The Metaphysical Cut: Darwin and Stevenson on Vivisection,” Victorian Review 36, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 51–­65; quotations on p. 53. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton, 1871), 1:33, 34, 38, 40; Cynthia Eagle Russett, Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865–­1918 (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). Examples of Philadelphia news coverage about Darwin can be found in the following: “The Darwinian Theory of Creation,” Daily Age, August 17, 1864, 4; “The ‘Origin of Species,’” Public Ledger, October 2, 1866, 2; Public Ledger, September 3, 1868, 2; “Review of New Books: The Descent of Man,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 13, 1871, 3. For the Thomas Nast cartoon, see Harper’s Weekly, August 19, 1871, 776.

“Our Yard Looks Something like a Zoological Garden”

Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph: Works by Thomas Eakins and His Circles in the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 207–­13. 22. On the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, see Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-­ Fugier, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 73–­79. 23. Thomas Eakins to Caroline Cowper­ thwait Eakins, Paris, November 8, 1866, in The Paris Letters of Thomas Eakins, ed. William I. Homer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 68. 24. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, Paris, ca. 1866–­69, quoted in McHenry, Thomas Eakins, Who Painted, 4–­6. 25. Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, August 15, 1867 (Zermatt, Switzerland) and March 6, 1868 (Paris); and Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, April 1, 1869 (Paris), transcribed in Paris Letters, ed. Homer, 148, 197, 244; Thomas Eakins to Charles Henry Hart, September 13, 1912 (Washington, DC), cited in William I. Homer, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992), 90. 26. William and Frances Crowell to John V. Sears, June 5, 1886 (Avondale, PA), transcribed in Kathleen A. Foster and Cheryl Leibold, Writing about Eakins: The Manuscripts in Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 228; Riter Fitzgerald, “Thomas Eakins: Exhibition at Earle’s Opens To-­Day: The Portrait of Cushing: What Critics Say about the Artist’s Frankness,” Philadelphia Evening Item, May 12, 1896, 1. On the allegation of “bestiality,” see Henry Adams, Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64. 27. Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-­ Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 206–­7; William Williams Keen, Our Recent Debts to Vivisection (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1885); Keen, “The Progress of Surgery as Influenced by Vivisection,” Philadelphia Record, September 14 and 21, 1901. On Horatio Wood’s experiments, see Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics

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32. On Eakins’s Grouse, see W. Douglas Paschall, “The Camera Artist,” in Thomas Eakins, ed. Sewell, 241. Schreiber & Sons, “Photographs from Nature,” published in Philadelphia Photographer 10 (February 1873), reproduced as fig. 139 in ibid. For the reference to Schreiber & Sons producing “life-­like portraits of many favorite Jersey bulls and cows,” see “The Short-­ Horn Speculation,” American Agriculturalist 35 (September 1876): 333. For a listing of the firm as specializing in “photographs of animals,” see United States Centennial Commission, Official Catalogue of the U.S. International Exhibition (Philadelphia: John R. Nagle, 1876), 57; “A Veteran Philadelphia Photographer,” American Journal of Photography 13 (March 1892): 127–­28; the quote appears on p. 128. 33. On Eakins’s art of resignation, see Braddock, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, 66–­79. 34. Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), back cover. 35. Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 8, 12, 13, 14. 36. Ibid., 264. Arthur Henry Patterson, Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them (London: Gill, 1888), 46, 48. 37. On Eakins and Cope, see Paris Letters, ed. Homer, 219–­20, 225–­25, 231; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:128–­29; Thomas Eakins, “The Differential Action of Certain Muscles Passing More Than One Joint,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 46 (1894): 172–­80. On Cope’s scientific activities and beliefs, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 49–­50, 105, 115–­17; Peter J. Bowler, “Edward Drinker Cope and the Changing Structure of Evolutionary Theory,” Isis 68 (June 1977): 249–­65; John Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–­1884 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 3:2216; Edward Drinker Cope, “Intelligence in Monkeys,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, June 25, 1872, 40–­41. 38. On Bobby’s antics, see Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 101; McHenry, Thomas

Eakins, Who Painted, 60–­61, 125, 127; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:11–­12, 137. For the Cushing portrait, see Braddock, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, 191–­212. 39. Thomas Eakins to Frank Hamilton Cushing, Philadelphia, July 14, 1895, Cushing Papers, Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, cited in Braddock, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity, 194; George John Romanes, Animal Intelligence (New York: Appleton, 1883), 17. For more on nonhuman intentionality and intelligence, see Darwin, Descent of Man, 69, 304, 402; Ernest Menault, The Intelligence of Animals (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885); C. Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence (London: E. Arnold, 1890–­91); W. H. Larabee, “Intelligence of Cats,” Popular Science 38 (January 1891): 368–­80; E. P. Evans, “The Nearness of Animals to Man,” Atlantic Monthly 69 (February 1892): 171–­85; A. Pringle, “Reasoning Animals,” Popular Science 42 (November 1892): 71–­75. 40. Frank Hamilton Cushing, “The Arrow,” American Anthropologist 8, no. 4 (October 1895): 307–­49; the quotations appear on p. 328. 41. McHenry, Thomas Eakins, Who Painted, 127. In a recent literary article drawing inspiration from these events, author Revan Schendler presents an undated statement from unnamed Philadelphia Zoo officials describing Bobby as “a female Capuchin monkey (Cebus apella) . . . donated to the Zoo 13 Sept. 1917 by Mrs. Thos. Eakins” and that “this monkey died 1 Oct. 1919.” The statement is startling, since all previous references—­including those by Eakins, his family, and their contemporaries—­ describe Bobby as male. At the risk of sounding disrespectful to Schendler and the unnamed zoo officials, on this point I am inclined to trust those who knew Bobby best from a quarter century of cohabitation. After all, few people in Philadelphia at that time were keener observers of trans-­species anatomy than Eakins. Bobby was surely male. Schendler, “The Monkey and the Mask,” Raritan 29 (Spring 2009): 76.

8 “A Thorough Study of Causes” W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, and Progressive Era Materiality sc ott hicks

In his incisive and comprehensive The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), W. E. B. Du Bois undertakes what today, without much controversy, would be classified as environmental literature. He approaches his subject, Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, almost as an ecologist might investigate an ecosystem. After all, “a thorough study of causes was called for,” he writes later of his work.1 In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois—­an appreciator of natural beauty and well-­ tended gardens, as Kimberly K. Smith details in African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (2007)—­travels into uncharted territory, roots himself in place, and opens his senses wide to all he experiences in order to record a fulsome account of the actors, relationships, and settings that collude to create this environment.2 Ecocritics today are more likely to embrace African American writers within an environmental literary perspective, thanks to an expansion of what “environment” can mean as well as ever-­growing scholarly interest in identifying, contextualizing, and interpreting the environmental consciousness, practice, and experience of historically marginalized people in general. In his creative response to the more-­than-­human world that The Philadelphia Negro describes, Du Bois does what Smith calls the necessary work of “finishing creation” as an “active, creative, co-­equal [partner] in giving meaning to and redeeming the natural world,” fully immersed and engaged in all the forces and matters of that world.3 It is within this expanded context of environmental literature and of Du Bois’s full immersion in the city that I consider The Philadelphia Negro

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through the prism of ecocriticism. Propelled also by Jane Bennett’s new materialism, I argue that The Philadelphia Negro represents nonhuman agents as complex collaborators in the construction of environmental conditions in the Seventh Ward. In my interpretation of Du Bois, I accept Bennett’s invitation to consider how his project “picture[s] an ontological field without any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral. All forces and flows (materialities) are or can become lively, affective, and signaling. And so an affective, speaking human body is not radically different from the affective, signaling nonhumans with which it coexists, hosts, enjoys, serves, consumes, produces, and competes.”4 Obviously Du Bois was not a new materialist in the conscious, theoretical sense articulated by Bennett, so his words and concepts lack her explicit intent to blur such ontological “demarcations.” And yet, in this chapter, I am interested in Du Bois’s recurring references to nonhuman things as something more than merely negative markers of discrimination and victimization but as real forces and even productive agents with which his human subjects contended and ultimately might partner. Hence my close attention here to Du Bois’s “thorough study of causes” in The Philadelphia Negro as a work that imagines the complex interaction of human and nonhuman entities in constructing the urban environment of the Seventh Ward. In taking not simply Philadelphia’s people but also its matter as his text, Du Bois offers a nuanced, sometimes paradoxical, vision of urban conditions as altered, alterable, and altering. Not only might the elements that compose the Seventh Ward be conscripting and debilitating; so too might they be the elements of transformation. The Philadelphia Negro imagines a site where the materials of the place shape its human inhabitants, to be sure, yet it also offers the possibility that humans’ work—­that is, participation in, among, and with the elements—­can change the materials that surround and inhabit them. Ultimately, Du Bois suggests, the story consists not simply of human history (where his narrative, but not his survey, begins) but also of the materiality of things in and beyond the human.

“A Safe Guide”: The Context of The Philadelphia Negro

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According to David Levering Lewis, the growing unease of “respectable Philadelphia” with the deteriorating circumstances of the city’s black underclass catalyzed Du Bois’s study. By the late nineteenth century, progressive reformers on the board of the Philadelphia branch of the College Settlement Association of America advocated for an investigation of the city’s African American population in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. Lewis notes that the College Settlement progressives viewed poverty in “epidemiological terms, as a virus to be quarantined,” and Du Bois, recently of Wilberforce University, became the scholar who would “take responsibility for diagnosing the exact

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nature of the virus among Philadelphia’s African Americans.” From the beginning, this invocation of epidemiological discourse portrayed the problem of urban poverty in more-­than-­human, environmental terms.5 From August 1896 to December 1897, Du Bois and a small cadre of graduate students surveyed residents of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, a community bounded by South Seventh, Spruce, and South Streets and the Schuylkill River, drawing their questions from six different inventories: “A family schedule with the usual questions as to the number of members, their age and sex, their conjugal condition and birthplace, their ability to read and write, their occupation and earnings, etc.; an individual schedule with similar inquiries; a home schedule with questions as to the number of rooms, the rent, the lodgers, the conveniences, etc.; a street schedule to collect data as to the various small streets and alleys, and an institutional schedule for organizations and institutions; finally a slight variation of the individual schedule was used for house-­servants living at their places of employment.”6 Through their questions, Du Bois and his team of surveyors sought comprehensive demographic data, including but not limited to age, sex, marital status, literacy, occupation, property ownership, housing, and wealth. Du Bois and his coinvestigators crosshatched their findings from this house-­to-­house canvass with a street schedule of the ward and a general survey of other wards in the city in order to confirm the validity of their results. Such a scientific, empirical approach was consistent with that of progressive reformers and conservationists of the period. Like other Progressive Era exposés built on copiously detailed research so as to provide incontrovertible evidence for sweeping transformations of society, The Philadelphia Negro conveys a finely grained, detailed narrative that seeks to sway public opinion in favor of targeted, effective, and socially just policies, “lay[ing] before the public such a body of information as may be a safe guide for all efforts toward the solution of the many Negro problems of a great American city.”7 In The Philadelphia Negro, chapters 1 and 2 outline the scope of the study and the problem it seeks to address; chapters 3 and 4 sketch a history of African Americans in the city from 1638 to 1896; chapters 5 through 11 present the demographic and sociological findings of his surveys; chapter 12 explores African American organizations; chapters 13 and 14 discuss crime, alcoholism, and poverty; chapter 15 provides an overview of housing, sections, and social classes; and chapters 16 and 17 discuss interracial interaction and voting rights. Chapter 18 concludes the book with Du Bois’s urging that “with a spirit of self-­help, mutual aid and co-­operation, the two races should strive side by side to realize the ideals of the republic and make this truly a land of equal opportunity for all men.”8 Through its structure and content and in keeping with Du Bois’s explicit objective, combining a methodology of documentation with a fidelity to fact in its expository objectives, The Philadelphia Negro sits comfortably on the same shelf as John R. Commons’s Pittsburgh surveys and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, among any number of other works by Progressive Era reformers and muckrakers.9

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Likewise, major figures of the early conservation movement embraced scientism and specialization. As Samuel P. Hays documents in Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, early conservationists privileged systematic thinking and disciplinary expertise in determining and legislating Americans’ use of natural resources, turning to empirical facts and to the cultivation of new knowledge as a means for achieving resource-­saving efficiency.10 In the vein of progressive conservation, The Philadelphia Negro attends carefully to the material resources of human life in order to suggest a greater efficiency of human relationships, stripped of the barriers of racial prejudice and discrimination. For, as Du Bois writes, “while industrial co-­operation among the groups of a great city population is very difficult under ordinary circumstances, . . . here it is rendered more difficult and in some respects almost impossible by the fact that nineteen-­twentieths of the population have in many cases refused to co-­operate with the other twentieth, even when the co-­operation means life to the latter and great advantage to the former.”11 The result, he concludes, violates the “science of economics” and, as he will discuss later in The Philadelphia Negro’s final chapter, thwarts the ability of African Americans to utilize the resources they do possess in the work of ameliorating their conditions.

Air, Light, and Water: Nonhuman Agents in The Philadelphia Negro

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In The Philadelphia Negro, materiality is anchored in the home environments of the Seventh Ward’s African American residents. Du Bois describes the housing stock they occupy as more likely to be in “poor condition,” to “lack . . . repair [and] . . . conveniences,” and to suffer from a “limited share of air and light,” all worsened by “damp walls and poor sewer connections.”12 In some quarters of the ward, he describes residents’ homes as unfit for livestock: with “generally leaky” roofs and “floors so low that more or less water comes in on them from the yard in rainy weather,” these homes “would not give comfortable winter accommodations to a cow.”13 Until one is counted as a man (in the gendered language of so many antiracist protests since the abolition of slavery) and not an animal, Du Bois’s anthropocentric comparison here belies an initial resistance to the sort of elimination of demarcation and hierarchization that Bennett envisions in Vibrant Matter. Yet the faults of housing that Du Bois finds in his survey would affect a human just as they would a cow (or any other warm-­blooded creature), a truism that rejects any construction of animal and human binaries. In a housing inspector’s report that Du Bois quotes, moreover, many homes lack any access to sunlight: “Except at midday the sun does not shine in the small open space in the rear that answers for a yard,” the inspector notes.14 Moreover, few homes (about 13 percent, by Du Bois’s estimates) have even substandard access to water.15 Du Bois also makes clear the systems that serve to deny African Americans better housing as well as the forces that work in opposition to improved material conditions. Few African Americans are property owners, Du Bois finds, either of

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their primary residence or other real estate: “In all 197 or 8 percent of the families [of the Seventh Ward] are property holders.”16 He explains the wide disparity by pointing to four factors: (1) African Americans’ distrust of commercial banks, (2) the pervasive exclusion of African Americans from non-­African American neighborhoods, (3) their inability to afford rising housing expenses, and (4) the negative impact of shrinking opportunities in employment and in the wages those few jobs pay.17 Du Bois continues, explaining that the constricted supply of housing available to African Americans allows realtors to charge higher rents, while laboring as service workers (like domestics) leads them to choose housing close to their workplace, even if the housing is more expensive, because of its proximity to wealthier sections of the city.18 These patterns place a double burden on African Americans’ abilities to become autonomous partners with nonhuman materials and forces. First, without land of their own in an economic model that places the power to make decisions about land and water in the hands of those who own property, individuals who do not own property may not have full jurisdiction over or unencumbered access to materials with which they might partner. Second, their relegation to roles of subservience— ­to a corollary existence as beings in economic, caste, and spatial subordination to whites—­transforms African Americans into agents of whites, subsidiary actors carrying out the other’s transformation or survival. Du Bois illuminates how these forces interlock in opposition to African Americans’ ability to secure good housing, and The Philadelphia Negro implies that such a system of tenancy or landlessness undercuts the capacity of African Americans to become autonomous actors within their material environment. The water that leaks and floods and the sewage that backs up become material markers as well as material agents of discomfort, abjection, and oppression, all tending toward alienation from, not connection to, the nonhuman environment. The substandard housing relegated to Philadelphia’s African Americans threatens their quality of life and health. “Broadly speaking, the Negroes as a class dwell in the most unhealthful parts of the city and in the worst houses in those parts,” Du Bois writes, “lack[ing] some of the very elementary accommodations necessary to health and decency.”19 Their homes were usually located on back streets and off alleys; only 13.7 percent of residents had access to bathrooms and toilets, and most homes were overcrowded.20 In addition to his own surveys of the Seventh Ward, Du Bois cites city health inspectors on the unhealthiness of residents’ homes: “Few of the houses are underdrained, and if the closets have sewer connections the people are too careless to keep them in order. The streets and alleys are strewn with garbage, excepting immediately after the visit of the street cleaner. Penetrate into one of these houses and beyond into the back yard, if there is one (frequently there is not), and there will be found a pile of ashes, garbage and filth, the accumulation of the winter, perhaps of the whole year. In such heaps of refuse what disease germ may be breeding?”21 On the one hand, Du Bois’s pile of ashes might have a positive resonance, as Heather I. Sullivan posits in her proposal of a “dirt theory”: “Dirt, soil, earth,

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and dust surround us on all scales: we find them on our shoes, bodies, and computer screens; in fields and forests, [sic] and floating in the air.”22 These grains of human life, these companions in all human action, these building blocks of the planet sustain us—­the flecks of ash that constitute the tenement’s refuse pile—­ become, in Sullivan’s theory, “the dark side of vibrant, transcorporeal exchanges in the bacterial mesh. . . . Dirt is our radically local, material environment.” If we “embrace the combination of dirt’s gritty physicality with its elemental potential to inspire reverence and, hopefully, responsible care,” Sullivan concludes, we can become “environmental act[ors].”23 As I read Sullivan’s theory, I cannot help but see a postmodern Genesis story, and Du Bois’s ostensibly fallen Seventh Ward garden becomes instead a new Eden, whose African American inhabitants remake and redeem the world, ash by ash. Yet there remains the problem of stinking, fetid, noxious garbage, accumulating and oozing and growing—­a presence difficult to stomach or redeem. As the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice showed in comprehensive and statistical detail in 1987, environmental harms are still more likely to be located in racial and ethnic minority communities, a pattern that continues today on national and global scales alike. The cleanliness of white communities, that is, depends on the degradation of nonwhite communities, just as the material devastation of nonwhite and impoverished communities perpetuates their oppression and dispossession. In a society defined by the ideology and practice of what Du Bois labels “color prejudice,” whiteness becomes encoded as clean and pristine, while nonwhiteness becomes conflated with waste and refuse—­a class of human refused the status of persons. And to work with the waste and refuse among which they live—­as the Seventh Ward’s residents might have chosen to do, in a material ecocritical collaboration with nonhuman matter—­becomes a reinscription of second-­class citizenship.24 As The Philadelphia Negro wrestles with the menace of flooded basements in spaces without access to water and toilets, the text’s discourse of air is equally disconcerting, as Du Bois evokes a feeling of suffocation in disclosing chronic problems of unventilated, polluted air. Too many homes in the ward, Du Bois states, lack sufficient ventilation “to let in fresh air and light, and to let out foul air and smoke.”25 Likewise, Du Bois extrapolates the preponderance of pneumonia and consumption from the propensity of African American churchgoers to “sit for two and three hours in the foul atmosphere of a closely shut auditorium.”26 As he narrates these findings, Du Bois unveils interpenetrating threats to the well-­being of the Seventh Ward’s residents. Substandard housing produces citizens disproportionately subjected to air pollution, poor water quality, and inadequate sanitation systems for handling waste and garbage. In an urban ecology rife with material agents of disease and ill-­health, The Philadelphia Negro shows, people suffer. Du Bois makes clear the impact of black Philadelphians’ environments on their daily lives. Because of the higher price they pay for housing, “many a Negro family eats less than it ought.” What’s more, the inability to pay high rents, and the fact that housing costs consume from 25 to 75 percent of a typical family’s

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budget, means that residents frequently change homes, a state of nomadism that runs counter to their desire for community.27 And in the absence of indoor plumbing, Du Bois traces an uptick in crime and insecurity, for the building of outdoor baths creates “blind alleys and dark holes,” and “in all cases the alley closet becomes a public resort for pedestrians and loafers.”28 These elements—­ sacrificing food for shelter, the impossibility of settling down in one place, and the double insult of living without inside toilets and baths as a contributing factor to a landscape of fear and insecurity—­conspire to unanchor the individual from any sense of place or belonging. This estrangement is exacerbated, The Philadelphia Negro suggests, by a sheer lack of open space, for “the back yards have been filled by tenement houses.”29 For Du Bois, the imposition of Jim Crow fear and disconnection, compounded by environmental harms and unabated by access to “elementary accommodations necessary to health and decency,” destroys the society that arises in such conditions. In The Philadelphia Negro, crime becomes the natural outgrowth of these manifold oppressions. Crime, Du Bois asserts, signifies “the open rebellion of an individual against his social environment.” Such environmental rebellion, according to The Philadelphia Negro, becomes aggravated by dislocation and the absence of political or economic resources to remedy such a convergence of problems. As Du Bois puts it, “Naturally then, if men are suddenly transported from one environment to another, the result is a lack of harmony with the new conditions; lack of harmony with the new physical surroundings leading to disease and death or modification of physique; lack of harmony with social surroundings leading to crime.”30 To be sure, today we generally question the idea that harmony is somehow a natural state of being.31 As someone who still embraced that ideal, Du Bois recognized that too often African Americans faced daunting environmental and economic constraints. Whereas whites may choose to live in a suburban or exurban landscape, he notes, “the nature of the Negro’s work compels him to crowd into the centre of the city much more than is the case with the mass of white working people.”32 In such urban conditions—­disproportionately dense, unjustly impoverished, and inequitably burdened with the environmental harms—­crime becomes a reasonable albeit injurious response. Through this discussion of crime as response, Du Bois complicates historical reasons for the crisis of the “Philadelphia Negro” and hardens his environmental determinism, a prevailing theoretical position in social thought at the time.33 While he concedes the roles of slavery and emancipation and their concomitant “phenomena of ignorance, lack of discipline, and moral weakness,” Du Bois reiterates that “the world of custom and thought in which he [i.e., African Americans in general] must live and work, the physical surrounding of house and home and ward, the moral encouragements and discouragements which he encounters” are necessarily more operative and influential. Rhetorically underscoring his determinism is his increasingly dense accumulation of environmental detail, moving from “vague characterization” to thick, inescapable description of “its

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concrete manifestations.”34 With that provocative term, Du Bois holds forth the critical potential of thorough, encompassing knowledge about all actors within an environment even as he implies the straitjacketing, constrictive rigidity of such knowledge. In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois layers the individual’s “social atmosphere”—­“first his daily companionship, the thoughts and whims of his class; then his recreations and amusements; finally the surrounding world of American civilization, which the Negro meets especially in his economic life”—­ onto “the large influence of the physical environment of home and ward.”35 In moving beyond historical explanations, Du Bois begins to sketch a new history, and he acknowledges this new history in his attention to documenting and archiving for posterity the microscopic particulars and the macroscopic contours of the emerging environmental narrative he perceives.

“The Duty of the Negroes”—­and Their Opportunities—­in Remaking Their Environment

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For Du Bois, place becomes so determinative that it shapes the development of the individual from childhood to adulthood. As a parent, “the Negro finds it extremely difficult to rear children in such an atmosphere and not have them cringing or impudent: if he impresses upon them patience with their lot, they may grow up satisfied with their condition; if he inspires them with ambition to rise, they may grow to despise their own people, hate the whites and become embittered with the world.”36 In Du Bois’s analysis, the child who acquiesces to second-­class existence and refuses the work or ethos of reform falls prey to “the growing force that turns black boys and girls into gamblers, prostitutes and rascals,” thanks to a “social environment of excuses, listless despair, careless indulgence and lack of inspiration to work.”37 On the other hand, the child who is inspired to rise becomes psychologically and temperamentally unfit for the environment she or he inhabits and thus incapable of organizing collective reform. Indeed, this individual would be more likely to move away, thus absconding with a vision of an alternative world that could inspire others to take action. Either way, the health of the environment and its people continues to suffer. Within this no-­man’s-­land of giving up or moving on, Du Bois instead imagines grounds for meaningful reform. First and foremost, the drive for transformation must begin within the community, a way of crystallizing the strength and power of the race. “The main movement for reform must come from the Negroes themselves,” he writes. Their focus, he continues, should be “a crusade for fresh air, cleanliness, healthfully located homes and proper food”—­nonhuman constituents informing the narrative of The Philadelphia Negro from start to finish.38 To rally the reader to his recommendations, he personifies and embodies the suffering of those in the ward, writing that the conditions they suffer “cry for reform in housing.”39 In response to the unhealthy overcrowding of African

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American communities within the ward, he calls for “the buying of homes and removal from crowded and tainted neighborhoods,” supplemented by “lectures and tracts on health and habits.”40 In a recommendation that evokes the influence of Booker T. Washington, whose Up from Slavery (1901) is replete with exhortations to the families he visits to keep a clean house, bathe regularly, and brush their teeth, Du Bois calls for the purification and sanitization of “Negro homes,” which “must cease to be, as they often are, breeders of idleness and extravagance and complaint.”41 This statement underscores Du Bois’s attention to the immediacy of environmental improvement and broaches the possibility of avoiding subordination. Rather than being subservient to white domesticity, African Americans, in this reading, might instead transform their own homes into positive agents, reversing environmental racism and anticipating what the later urban studies scholar Nathan Hare would call “black ecology.”42 Because of the scarcity of outdoor space among the homes in the Seventh Ward, Du Bois puts special emphasis on “parks and airing spaces,” supportive of “Fresh Air Funds” already sponsored by some local churches.43 In addition to excursions to urban areas like Fairmount Park and wilder spaces outside the city, Du Bois puts forth other amusements, such as dancing, as important “means of health and recreation.”44 From housing and sanitation to clean air and water to parks and wilderness excursions, Du Bois’s environmental reforms were premised on the development of communal organization and mutual support that enabled African Americans to cultivate a more positive coexistence with nonhuman forces and agents. Lastly, in its attention to industrial and professional settings, The Philadelphia Negro focuses on human labor as a path to environmental justice and equality. First, Du Bois urges the “diversif[ication of ] Negro employments as to afford proper escape from menial employment for the talented few, and so as to allow the mass some choice in their lifework.” In other words, freedom of choice in employment might have the effect of fostering a greater sense of belonging, both economically and environmentally. Even among servants, Du Bois critically differentiates those who cultivate an attitude of “servility and toadying” from those who educate themselves “in problems of health and hygiene, in proper cleaning and cooking, and in matters of etiquette and good form.” For Du Bois, wider opportunities in labor “would be not only for the sake of Negro development, but for the sake of a great human industry which must continue to suffer as long as the odium of race is added to a disposition to look down upon the employment under any circumstances.”45 The future of human progress consists in its development of industry, Du Bois asserts, and he advocates “industrial chances” for African American “sons and daughters” as stepping stones of economic and environmental advancement.46 We must turn the page from medieval feudalism, he says, wherein “the mass of the nation, the pöbel, the mob, are fit to follow, to obey, to dig and delve, but not to think or rule or play the gentleman,” so as to work toward a life of leisure and comfort.47 For Du Bois, “to dig and delve” in filth and earth should not be the only employment option for African Americans. Taken together, Du Bois’s recommendations for the reform

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of work and labor—­diversification of career options, greater training toward professional skill, expanded competency in service-­economy roles, and greater class mobility—­have the potential to remake the ecology of black urban life. No elite Talented Tenth—­Du Bois’s term for the exceptional men who would lead the race to excellence—­would stand for housing without indoor plumbing. Du Bois’s recommendations suggest that, with full economic participation, fair wages, and good training, the mass of men and women will have the means and the vision to reclaim, resuscitate, and reinvigorate the physical and social environments that heretofore have stunted and deformed their better natures. With these stirring prospects, of a future transformed, of an environmental and communal order redeemed through human labor, Du Bois concludes this monumental work.

Conclusion: More than “Mere Land and Climate”

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In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois offers potentially tenable models of African Americans who utilize the materials of their environment toward uplift, equality, and freedom. In the opening chapters on the history of African Americans in Philadelphia, he celebrates Richard Allen, James Forten, and Absalom Jones (men who rose to prominence as early city leaders) and the “guild” of caterers (“Bogle, Augustin, Prosser, Dorse, Jones and Minton,” men whose surnames shorthand their place among the elite of this esteemed entrepreneurial sector). He underscores their trades—­Allen, a blacksmith, and Forten, a sailmaker—­and the materiality of their labor.48 For example, Forten, the sailmaker, exemplifies the “engage[ment] on land and sea” of “many Philadelphia Negroes” during the War of 1812.49 Likewise, Du Bois registers the materiality of the caterers’ trade, noting the “considerable stock of dishes, and such things as olives, pickles, etc.” at their cooperative store on Thirteenth Street.50 Their work with food—­what Bennett calls “edible matter”51—­effected a “striking advance,” according to Du Bois, who also writes, “The whole catering business . . . transformed the Negro cook and waiter into the public caterer and restaurateur, and raised a crowd of underpaid menials to become a set of self-­reliant, original business men, who amassed fortunes for themselves and won general respect for their people.”52 In each of these examples, individuals and groups utilize the materials at hand in transformative and collaborative ways, serving as inspiring models for The Philadelphia Negro’s readers to emulate. That these exemplars appear in the narrative’s early pages, in its historical overview, however, tempers their aspirational character, as if such figures do not exist in the present time and place. Indeed, the litany of African Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, or underpaid in chapter 16, section 47, provides a sobering reminder of the economic and environmental barriers that hinder the subjects of The Philadelphia Negro at the turn of the twentieth century. From start to finish, The Philadelphia Negro poses a complex challenge for ecocritical interpretation. On the one hand, Du Bois identifies the material

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resources his African American subjects used, or might use, positively for their survival, success, and sense of belonging. At the same time, we see the material agents—­garbage, sewage, ash—­that harm and constrain the subjects of his study, just as we learn about the vital resources—­sunlight, air, and clean water—­that are routinely withheld from them. Ecocritical interpretation helps us understand The Philadelphia Negro as a pioneering work of environmental literature deeply informed by Du Bois’s awareness of urban material conditions. His many descriptions and maps of the Seventh Ward effectively embed the reader in the community he describes. Contrary to the apparent order of his gridded diagrams, Du Bois’s text discloses palpable evidence of environmental disorder and attendant social inequality. In his elaborate enumeration of the statistics of African American life—­birth and death, household size and wealth, gender and race, and so on—­we appreciate the complexity of the population and its relationship to its place. His detailed descriptions of plumbing, privies, and sewers enable us to think systemically and structurally about natural resources like air and water as material agents with which human beings necessarily interact in a municipal apparatus. In his approbation of Fresh Air Funds and city parks, we sense his awareness of respiration and other bodily functions as environmentally and politically contingent. Du Bois did not use the term “environmental justice,” but he effectively captured its significance avant la lettre by highlighting considerable evidence of material disparities in Philadelphia. For him, such disparities also had broader implications for the future of the United States in general. To quote Du Bois, “Mere land and climate without law and order, capital and skill, will not develop a country.”53 In the end, The Philadelphia Negro suggests that such development demanded a more just and symbiotic sense of community, informed by greater knowledge about the vital interactions between human beings and their environment.

notes 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 194. 2. Kimberly K. Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). 3. Ibid., 11, 43, 66, 79, 141, 176–­77, 185, 191. 4. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 117; emphasis original. 5. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 130–­33.

6. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 2. 7. Ibid., 1. 8. Ibid., 389. 9. Maurine W. Greenwald and Margo Anderson, Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996); Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890). 10. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–­1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).

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11. Ibid., 145–­46. 12. Ibid., 160, 161. 13. Ibid., 304. 14. Quoted in ibid., 307. 15. Ibid., 292. 16. Ibid., 179. 17. Ibid., 184. 18. Ibid., 296. 19. Ibid., 148, 293. 20. Ibid., 287, 292, 297. 21. Quoted in ibid., 307. 22. Heather I. Sullivan, “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment 19, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 515. 23. Ibid., 529. 24. The specter of waste behind the Seventh Ward’s tenements underscores, to repurpose Cynthia Deitering’s interpretation of tropes of toxicity and garbage in American novels of the 1980s, “the shift from a culture defined by its production to a culture defined by its waste.” See Cynthia Deitering, “The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Consciousness in the Fiction of the 1980s” (1992), reprinted in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 196. 25. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 304. 26. Ibid., 160. 27. Ibid., 295, 297. 28. Ibid., 294. 29. Ibid., 293. See also Alec Brownlow, “An Archaeology of Fear and Environmental Change in Philadelphia,” Geoforum 37 (2006): 227–­45, for a discussion of racism and access to parks in the city. In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois reminds readers that despite considerable progress in race relations, blacks still confront “stares and discourtesy.” Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 326. He mentions Fairmount Park only insofar as it is a space of white presence, where a preponderance of white nursemaids reveals the expulsion of blacks from domestic service. Ibid., 139. In chapter 18, in his discussion of “The Duty of the Negroes,” he states that “parks and airing places . . . are little known or appreciated among the masses of the Negroes, and their

attention should be directed to them.” Ibid., 391–­92. 30. Brownlow, “Archaeology of Fear,” 235. 31. For a full discussion of the problems of ecology as a metaphor in literary studies, see Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 32. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 296. 33. See Richard Peet, “The Social Origins of Environmental Determinism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75, no. 3 (September 1985): 309–­33; Jeanne Kay, “Commentary on ‘The Social Origins of Environmental Determinism,’” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76, no. 2 (June 1986): 275–­ 77; James M. Hunter, “Commentary on ‘The Social Origins of Environmental Determinism,’” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76, no. 2 (June 1986): 277–­81. 34. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 284. 35. Ibid., 309. 36. Ibid., 324. 37. Ibid., 351. 38. Ibid., 163. 39. Ibid., 294. 40. Ibid., 391. 41. Ibid., 390. 42. Nathan Hare, “Black Ecology,” Black Scholar 1, no. 6 (April 1970): 2–­8. 43. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 390–­91, 217. In commending the presence of Fresh Air Funds at some churches, Du Bois might have been referring to charities such as The Fresh Air Fund Inc., which “allow[s] children living in low-­income communities to get away from hot, noisy city streets and enjoy free summer experiences in the country.” “Our History & Mission,” The Fresh Air Fund, accessed January 18, 2014, http://​www​.freshair​ .org/​history​-and​-mission. 44. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 391. 45. Ibid., 141. 46. Ibid., 391. 47. Ibid., 386. 48. Ibid., 18, 23. 49. Ibid., 23. 50. Ibid., 119. 51. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 39. 52. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 33. 53. Ibid., 355.

9 Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center Negotiating Environmental and Civic Reform in a Popular Postwar Planning Vision amy e. menzer

In September and October of 1947, returning GIs and their families moved into the first 300 houses on a converted potato farm in Levittown, New York, an event emblematic of the rise of the postwar suburbs. At the same time, in Philadelphia, more than 385,000 people moved through the Better Philadelphia Exhibition on the fifth floor of Gimbels department store downtown in an event that resisted the triumph of the suburbs by positing an alternative vision for the future civic and material life of cities (fig. 9.1). Through a $400,000 series of interactive displays, including a thirty-­by-­fourteen-­foot mechanized model of the downtown area (figs. 9.2, 9.3), a life-­size refurbished row house and yard, and placards of schoolchildren’s redrawn neighborhoods, the exhibition sought to stir Philadelphians’ imagination about the quality of their environment and the possibilities for shaping its future through coordinated planning.1 The projected “Better Philadelphia” embodied the points of consensus and contradiction within the disparate coalition that brought it about. But it also increased momentum behind a city reform movement that would lead in four years’ time to the ouster of the Republican machine, the adoption of a new city charter designed to preclude the possibility of corruption and foster openness and accountability, and the election to mayor and district attorney of two prominent members of the local chapter of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which was formed as the Better Philadelphia Exhibition was taking shape. More important for the purposes of this volume, its presentation strategies and engagement

fig. 9.1 Exhibition floor plan from the pamphlet The Better Philadelphia Exhibition: What City Planning Means to You (Philadelphia: City Planning Commission, 1947). Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.

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fig. 9.2 Al Fenn, Planning Philadelphia, 1947. Visitors observing mechanized model of downtown Philadelphia, Better Philadelphia Exhibition, Gimbels department store.

fig. 9.3 Gimbels owner Arthur C. Kaufmann, Philadelphia mayor Samuel, and Pennsylvania governor Duff (left to right) at the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, 1947. Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.

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with participatory planning imagined an interactive relationship between physical surroundings and citizen inhabitants. Though the exhibition’s success was highly circumscribed, elements of its conception demonstrate the integral importance of environmental and civic reform in Philadelphia at the time.2 Behind the exhibition was a coalition of independent Republicans and ADA-­ aligned reformers, businessmen, and city planners that debated the fate of postwar Philadelphia with full recognition that material questions of environmental quality, land use, and conservation were crucial. While they were not self-­described environmentalists, these coalition members negotiated their aspirations for the city’s postwar economic growth, its reformed and responsive government, and its engaged, active civic life largely through questions of environmental quality. The Better Philadelphia Exhibition was a spectacular public arena of such negotiation, within which the relationships among and importance of various reform elements emerged. Improvements in the physical design and material conditions of the city’s crowded, pollution-­filled blocks were needed to counter the threat posed by the suburbs’ expansive yards and factory sites. A more responsive government was identified as key to implementing these changes and ensuring that future interventions would be made according to rational standards instead of political patronage. An engaged, active civic life, reinforced by the spatial proximity and diversity of a refurbished urban environment, would ensure the continued responsiveness of government while generating a more critical memory and public sense of empowerment in shaping the city. To planners and reformers, at stake here was the fate of what ADA member Arthur Schlesinger would famously call a “vital center,” encompassing a complex ecosystem and political ecology.3 Recent histories of environmental politics in the United States leave one with the impression that in the 1940s and 1950s, a great many environmental ills arose, but little if any organized opposition or alternative visions emerged in response. Robert Gottlieb, for example, reasons that such responses were forestalled by a corporate-­and state-­led acquiescence to the imperatives of war mobilization and a triumphant postwar domination of nature and proliferation of consumer goods. This is a curiously monolithic interpretation, however, given that his book Forcing the Spring ambitiously surveys the struggles of earlier wilderness advocates, Progressive Era settlement house workers, and union-­backed nurses. He links them within an overarching definition of environmental politics by emphasizing their shared desires to curb the ill effects of an urban industrialized society on the natural world, human health, and human character. Yet he fails to see the work of urban planners and reformers in the 1940s and 1950s as continuing to represent an environmental politics. This neglect may be due in part to the professionalization of these roles, which was formally disconnecting and stabilizing their spheres of influence. But it may also be because the environmentalism of postwar planners and reformers was embedded in broader, explicitly pro-­urban agendas: they sought to conserve and revitalize threatened urban entities that, fifty years earlier, when they had flourished, had been seen as overwhelming threats to conservation and public health. Recent scholarship by David Kinkela has begun to correct this

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center

compartmentalization of urban planning and environmental politics by offering a synthetic analysis of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as nearly contemporaneous works that were “both part of a larger ideological movement that embraced ecology as an alternative model for human development.”4 A pro-­urban emphasis has tended to pose problems for historians of planning. The results of postwar efforts of planners and reformers, such as probusiness growth coalitions, the degeneration of neighborhoods through ill-­conceived urban renewal programs, and unabated suburban sprawl, have made notions of oppositional politics among them—­rather than opposition directed at them—­ difficult to discern. Roy Lubove, Joel Tarr, and other scholars have argued that in Pittsburgh, private capital and public elites conspired to underwrite postwar urban reform activity. John Bauman and Thomas Sugrue have shown how the interactions of various institutions and groups, some more closely aligned with the interests of capital than others, exacerbated structural economic changes and furthered cities’ decline and segregation in the postwar period. Without discounting the power of private capital, Joel Schwartz’s focus on the implementation processes of particular renewal initiatives in New York City challenges the idea that Robert Moses’s efforts were accomplished without the active assent of broader liberal civic forces. Most instructive for my purposes here, he shows how the immediate policy goals and long-­term ideological commitments of various neighborhood-­based, university, and citywide constituencies dovetailed—­often in spite of themselves—­to produce outcomes that further marginalized those who were already outside the networks of elites and policy professionals.5 In this chapter, I offer a similar analysis of the 1947 Better Philadelphia Exhibition. In fleshing out some of the details of its organization and content, I view it as an arena of political and social struggle rather than as an instrument or artifact of any single group. The exhibition has been cited as one building block in a triumphant story of Democratic Party ascendancy. Alternatively, it is seen as a successful effort by the local business community to generate enthusiasm for urban redevelopment—­part of a more coherent elitist strategy. While the exhibition contributed to such developments, its conflicted meanings and policy proposals are not comfortably reconciled within either of these interpretations because they exemplified an ongoing process of negotiation between various constituencies whose agendas were fraught with their own internal contradictions. Further, the exhibition directly sought to engage the public in an ongoing dialogue. Jon Teaford has characterized postwar redevelopment strategies as being largely top-­down. The exhibition suggests that among those at the “top,” there was some conflict over whether this should be the case.6 I do not claim that the Better Philadelphia Exhibition constitutes the “radical critique of the urban and industrial order” that Gottlieb finds to be absent in the period. Rather, it emerged as a moderate, alternative urban vision at a time when new suburban, single-­family detached homes moated by grassy lawns were coming to be viewed as the culmination of that dominant order. To put

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forth an insistently pro-­urban program for popular examination was surely one of the more ecologically sensitive political agendas regarding land use and civic life that could have been articulated in the 1940s. It was based on the reuse and renovation of existing housing stock, the construction of highways that planners believed would keep and attract businesses and make neighborhoods cleaner and safer, and the improvement of existing water and sewage systems. As a program, it anticipated contemporary efforts to curb sprawling development, and its story may thus prove instructive for contemporary planners and activists as well.7 The context of postwar labor-­management consensus, gender relations, racial and ethnic segregation and discrimination, and anti-­Communism that undergirded a coalition among largely white male housing reformers, patrician civic leaders, socialist architects, and representatives of the chamber of commerce riddled this program with the same sorts of ambivalences and missed opportunities that would be borne out in subsequent decades of urban renewal. But if the standards for what constitutes an oppositional environmental or urban politics are set too rigidly, scholars, planners, and activists will continue to neglect initiatives like the Better Philadelphia Exhibition and the degree to which they saw the enemy as suburbanization and not the “urban and industrial order” itself.

Keeping the Home Front in the City and the City in the Home Front

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The material and environmental conditions in Philadelphia that planners, reformers, and businessmen confronted as the war came to a close presented a challenge of resource mobilization with an army whose best troops of upstanding, taxpaying citizens and industries were fleeing across enemy lines. In an atmosphere of crisis fueled simultaneously by housing shortages, plant conversions, and a newly unleashed consumerism, the challenge of fostering social justice and environmental quality in urban form was confusing and complex to say the least. Unions idealized the suburban single family home as both a jobs program and a means of class mobility. Regionalist planners envisioned new satellite cities of less polluted, more spacious living. The Urban Land Institute sought public subsidy of central city land clearance by the square mile to prepare it for private redevelopment. The feasibility, and ultimate desirability, of securing the city’s reputation as an attractive place for people to live and for factories and businesses to locate was an open question after the war. Even the veteran radical housing activist Catherine Bauer responded with a lack of any clear conviction. Bauer, champion of public housing in the 1930s, reflected the resignation of many when she spoke of the inevitability of suburbanization and the inadequacy of rehabilitation programs at a Philadelphia conference in 1943.8 Recognizing this confused situation is important in appreciating what was attempted in the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, for it was an adamantly pro-­urban vision, riddled with ideological contradictions, which saw planning as a means for ensuring the city’s postwar survival and growth. A quarter century of underfunding

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center

and mismanagement of services and public works projects exacerbated the task of stemming the postwar suburban tide. In their ostensive ideological neutrality, the newly enacted Planning Commission and its civic counterpart, the Citizens Council on City Planning, became crucial institutional mediators for the relationships among the Republican mayoral administration, independent Republican civic leaders, housing reformers, anxious and confused businessmen, and an as yet skeptical local Democratic Party. The situation of the fledgling Planning Commission, enacted in 1942, was precarious. Previous commissions had been ignored once established or had seen their budgets rapidly whittled into oblivion by Republican administrations. The Better Philadelphia Exhibition served to shore up the authority of the Planning Commission by appealing to the broader public with a catholic agenda of improved environmental quality, touching on such fundamental needs as water, recreation, and transportation routes. Simultaneously, the exhibition served as a springboard for the reform movement to carry city planning and the city itself beyond its Republican machine–­induced limitations. Planning’s dual role, as ideologically neutral evaluator and enthusiastic agitator for broad social and environmental reconfigurations, echoed a crisis in McCarthy-­era liberalism. Unresolved ideological tensions that generally left postwar urban reformers ill-­equipped for the magnitude of their task weakened that of the exhibition.9 The process of organizing such a prominent exhibition supported by business may have widened the gulf between the ambitions of left-­liberal city reformers and those of radicals, as reformers saw opportunities for influence in political and policy arenas if they could surmount red-­baiting. The exhibition’s principal designers, Edmund Bacon and Oscar Stonorov, had both seen their work thwarted by red-­baiting in the past. As Guian McKee, Gregory L. Heller, and other scholars have noted, Bacon was forced to leave Flint, Michigan, after being denounced as a Communist in the city council in 1939, following a 1936–­37 sit-­down strike, for attempting to secure federal rent subsidies to buffer the effects of General Motors workers’ unstable incomes. Heller quotes Bacon as saying, “I was thrown out of Flint in disgrace. But I had learned that city planning is a combination of social input as well as design.” He went on to head the Philadelphia Housing Association (PHA), a settlement-­inspired reform organization, and served as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, having a hand in many of the successes and failures of urban renewal in the city. Stonorov had been fired from his architectural firm after submitting a second-­place entry in the 1931 competition for the Palace of the Soviets, a never-­constructed Communist version of the United Nations. He went on to design the cooperative Carl Mackley Houses for the Hosiery Workers’ Union in Philadelphia and remained involved with unions until his death in 1970, in the same plane crash as United Auto Workers’ president Walter Reuther. These men were hardly hapless agents of capital, but neither were they inclined to remain architectural visionaries with a host of unbuildable projects.10 The early career struggles of Bacon and Stonorov between radicalism and mainstream respectability were echoed in conflicts over the scope and definitions

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of citizen participation, civic reform, and city planning projected in the Better Philadelphia Exhibition. Citizens’—­and particularly women’s—­active involvement was to take only certain narrow atomistic forms if business interests had their way. The exhibition’s businessmen-­laden board of directors decided against reformer and ADAer Molly Yard’s request for civic organization booths at the end of the exhibition, at which citizens would have had the opportunity to join a collective reform effort. Minutes of the board meeting’s July 1947 discussion recorded that such booths would “divert public attention from the main purpose,” city planning, “and diffuse the effectiveness of the Exhibition.” Only the three sponsoring organizations, the chamber of commerce, the City Planning Commission, and the Citizen’s Council on City Planning (CCCP), would have booths. Hence the reformist implications of city planning remained formally disconnected at the exhibition from more decentralized sources of planning ideas and the diversity of groups that had helped enact the new Planning Commission, including the League of Women Voters, women-­led neighborhood groups, and the PHA. The marginalization of reformers encouraged a narrowing of the definitions of city planning, environmental change, and terms of potential discussion.11 An evasion of race and class issues in the Better Philadelphia Exhibition coincided with the marginalization of reformers and radicals, reflecting further divisions among the organizers. Most striking was the inattention to segregation and affordable housing programs, which appeared to reflect the wishes of Edward Hopkinson Jr., the Republican financier and chairman of the City Planning Commission. Hopkinson also helped to raise $300,000 in funds for the exhibition from local businesses, with another $100,000 coming from the Planning Commission. He urged designers to avoid generating more “unfavorable publicity” about the city than already circulated in the local and national press. In contrast, Richardson Dilworth, the reform Democratic mayoral candidate in 1947, built his campaign around mercilessly highlighting government corruption, polluted water, and poor housing conditions. He also vowed to implement fair employment practices in city government. Amid this highly charged political climate, reformers’ relationship to the exhibition was uneasy, with Dilworth blaming his loss on the boost the exhibition offered to the current mayor. Dorothy Montgomery, a woman active in the PHA, the CCCP, and the ADA, expressed support for the exhibition but with some ambivalence, noting the “small amount of housing that got into the show.”12 Conflicts among those organizing and funding the exhibition over its content and the course of broader reform in Philadelphia encouraged a more conservative definition of planning along professional and presumably nonideological lines. While this conservatism created some opportunities for recognition and political legitimacy, as described earlier, it also reinforced power asymmetries between professionals and reformers, male architects and female settlement workers, downtown elites and neighborhood concerns, white suburban commuters and black working-­class communities. In the next section I analyze the exhibition’s broad appeals for improving Philadelphia as a whole. I then discuss some of the

“Philadelphia Plans Again” It’s colossal! It’s a thrill to see! All the devices of the theatre and of science have joined together in one colorful, exciting show. . . . You can check the new improvements already scheduled for your neighborhood. You can see faded communities spring into new life before your eyes. You can learn how we can have playgrounds and parks and beauty where waste areas now lie.

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center

problems created by these general appeals, including the power asymmetries they reinforced. In the final section I discuss the display of schoolchildren’s planning proposals that owed their presence to agitation by planners and to the more radical, if still ambiguous, impulses of Bacon and Stonorov, as well as to the broader reform movement, in their encouragement of citizen participation and a critical understanding of place.

Attention! Beginning September 8th Philadelphia will rotate once every six minutes. Don’t be alarmed. Everything’s under control—­especially the realistic $50,000 model of downtown Philadelphia, which will perform amazing flip-­overs to show you what city planning can do for Philadelphia—­and you. Like sideshow barkers, advertisements such as these beckoned Philadelphians inside Gimbels department store. The temptation must have been great, and it was rekindled at every turn by the “2 million car cards, posters, window displays and billboards” and more than “300 columns of news stories, 20 full pages of advertising, 63 major radio broadcasts and 228 spot announcements.” Three-­hundred eighty-­five thousand people succumbed. The advertisements signaled the complex roles they were to play in city planning. As good students of scientific progress, visitors were implored to witness planning in action, to believe in the prospects for an improved quality of life by seeing these prospects demonstrated as if in time-­lapse photography. As enlightened citizens, they would recognize their links with a larger social and natural environment. As postwar consumers of technologically advanced convenience products, they would be shown how the labor-­saving advantages of city planning could provide a more entertaining and relaxing experience of urban space.13 Visitors entered the exhibition through a transformed auditorium. There they encountered a large bird’s-­eye-­view diorama, 22 by 28 feet in size, representing the city and its surrounding region as it would appear in 1982 (see fig. 9.2). Above it were projections of past public works projects demonstrating a precedent for what would follow, with the spotlighted text “Philadelphia Plans Again.” The exhibition’s designers assumed that the present challenge was to make the space within the city limits as desirable as the less-­developed spaces outside it.

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Their ambivalent and contradictory approach to accomplishing this involved both seeking to become just like the suburbs and competing on the terms of the suburbs’ valuation, while simultaneously emphasizing the city’s differences and uniqueness as a compact form of material, spatial, and social organization. A “hidden narrator” at the diorama laid out a case for broad government intervention to adapt Philadelphia to changing environmental and economic conditions: Our city is wearing out one old suit of clothes and measuring itself for a new size. . . . We must have the big scale of things of our age . . . to protect the small things we cherish . . . big new traffic arteries to protect residential neighborhoods . . . new industrial areas because in the old areas industry cannot expand. If—­in the competition of cities—­we want to remain among the leaders—­we must be flexible to meet new conditions; we cannot plan haphazardly, looking at each problem separately. We must look at the whole city, understand how all the problems of the metropolis are interrelated. This is City Planning.14 In addition to animating the city with vital metaphors—­as an entity “wearing” clothes, with protective “traffic arteries”—­this introductory segment provided a quick lesson in postwar Fordism as a “total way of life.” It was also a vehement defense of urbanism that sought, through a citywide unity, to defy cultural and economic trends of national scope that were rendering cities obsolete through creative destruction.15 Invoking the imperative of seeing the big picture might and did translate easily into an acceptance of a broader, market logic of valuation and a prodevelopment, trickle-­down calculus of the city’s financial future. But invoking the city as a living, vital whole was also a means of questioning the power and authority of any one interest group or policy to override the interests of others—­a means by which the city became synonymous with the civic space of noncoercive, democratic deliberation that inspired those in Americans for Democratic Action, who were particularly active in local Philadelphia reform politics. Visitors were encouraged to think about their own block in relation to other neighborhoods, the city, and the region. While the nature of these relationships and how they would be negotiated collectively was not directly addressed by the exhibition, its organization and strategies of presentation reveal some clues. It exemplified a dialectical movement between different spatial and temporal scales, between education and participation, and between identifying with experts and challenging them. Bacon, for example, who later became an ADA member but played no leadership role in the chapter, used criteria that “total community needs” were not being met to link the impacts of different, often inconsistent federal policies at a 1943 social workers’ conference. He questioned the immediate and long-­term effects on the city’s neighborhoods of a musical-chairs approach to housing that could not coherently link the situations faced by war and nonwar workers, blacks and whites, immigrant men and war-­widowed mothers. At the conference, as

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center

the managing director of the PHA, Bacon was the passionate political strategist, identifying a series of civic groups that might be mobilized to push for better program coordination. In the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, this planning agitator was often superseded by the technician-­planner who objectively evaluated these competing interests: the hidden narrator.16 After forty seconds of dramatic silence before the diorama, this narrator went on to evoke the Edenic virtues of the city projected for 1982. As if the city had been taken back from the horrors wrought by three hundred years of what Sam Bass Warner calls privatism, dream-­sequence imagery depicted “green spaces spread throughout the city . . . as [city founder William] Penn originally intended.” The return of the Schuylkill River’s green banks melded with a future in which “new buildings rise along the Parkway by the Wissahickon” River and “new industries [are] planned for modern production on open land, with plenty of space to spread out. . . . the whole metropolitan area is planned as a unit by the people through the cooperation of their local governments.” City planning would, in this depiction, be the means of harnessing and directing the economic growth and spatial expansion that would otherwise be more likely to strangle the city—­through capital disinvestment and pollution—­than depend on it. Planning would also be the means of reconciling economic development and environmental degradation. The immediate conflicts between the city’s economic and ecological future and that of the suburbs were reconciled through the invocation of a greater, regional scale of unity, and competition was displaced from being within the Philadelphia metropolitan region to occurring between it and other regions. Philadelphia as a city and as a metropolitan area could continue to be among the “nation’s leaders” without any of the region’s components being left behind.17 To counter the possibility that these broad scales of space and time might lose the exhibition visitor, the script abruptly shifted to the more familiar neighborhood scale, which included “the humbler things. . . . Playgrounds, sport centers, health centers, and nursery schools, new fresh housing where slums once stood. A setting, decent, pleasant and quiet, for the hundreds of thousands of self-­respecting homes.” These “humbler things” would repair “citizen morale,” that most volatile part of the urban fabric. The damage done daily to this morale under present conditions was the central theme of a radio program promoting the exhibition. In “A Soldier Hunts a Home,” a young couple finds their marriage strained and their son’s character degraded after being perpetually thwarted in their search for a decent home. All they can afford instead is “just a place to exist.” The well-­kept, financially obtainable row house on a clean, safe street would presumably instantiate a delicate web of human relationships including love, respect for elders, concern for neighbors, and the freedom and growth offered in safe childhood play. The ambiguity, however, in what was meant by “homes”—­family units living in various housing types or literal row houses—­evaded assumptions about the valuation of spaces produced by entrenched patterns of class, racial,

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and ethnic segregation. These assumptions, which I address further later, were a considerable barrier to the mass implementation of such a vision.18 Encouraging the association of these fantasies of home with city row house neighborhoods was in itself an uphill ideological and material battle with contradictory effects. Federal housing programs and mortgage lending criteria favored new developments of detached houses in outlying areas. Arguing, as the Better Philadelphia Exhibition did, that what real estate agents considered less desirable, blighted areas of the city’s core could also be sites of “pleasant . . . self-respecting” homes resisted the conventional new development wisdom of the day even as it reiterated the suburban standards of value. Planners recognized the inefficiencies for service delivery, such as trash pick-­up and water access, created by the more spread-­out housing developing on the city’s edges, and they realized the need to maintain property values and potential tax revenues. They hoped to “hold families” in existing neighborhoods, retaining the vitality and fiscal advantages of a more concentrated urban form, by incorporating new suburban amenities within the city.19

Fissures in the Vital Center

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By acknowledging and directly addressing dissatisfaction among Philadelphians with their living conditions, the exhibition took the focus off the poorest people and most blighted neighborhoods and sought to generate a cross-­class appeal for public planning and development initiatives. This focus had radical social and environmental possibilities in seeking to offer a compelling alternative to suburbanization. Further, it potentially extended public sympathy for state intervention in and supplementation of the private housing market as a policy directly benefiting everyone. Public housing advocates had sought this sympathy in the 1930s. But while collective green spaces figured prominently, low-­rent housing was marginal in the exhibit compared to the voluntarist display of affordable improvements homeowners could make to their private backyards. Yard work brought the exhibition down to an even smaller and more intimate scale that organizers rather didactically used to illustrate the point that a better Philadelphia required the active involvement of the entire community. This image did not equate citizenship with being a white middle-­class homeowner, for the modest redbrick row house seemed a reasonable, if still homogeneous, aspiration for all. But the exhibition simultaneously evaded complicated questions of social difference—­racial segregation, class hierarchy, and gender inequity—­even as it introduced a participatory planning process that would require engagement with these fissures in the “vital center” of Philadelphia and American life. Housing rehabilitation illustrates the complexity of renewal policies in the postwar period and helps explain the ambiguity of the Better Philadelphia Exhibition’s politics. To advocate rehabilitation in the late 1940s, as Bacon did in the exhibition and in the 1949 Planning annual, was to be simultaneously prescient

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center

and retrograde, antiauthoritarian and complacent. Rehabilitation curbed sprawl, but it was a benign strategy for at least four additional reasons, with varied political implications. First, it averted large-­scale demolition of blocks and displacement of communities—­the bane of later public housing complexes—­by repairing the existing urban material fabric. As Heller has noted, Bacon viewed the city as a “living organism” of integrated physical and social forms.20 Second, Bacon argued that by dispersing subsidies among standard working-­class row house neighborhoods, the poor could avoid having an economic situation become an enduring identity, and neighborhoods would be protected from declines in property values because there would be no visible differences between the subsidized and unsubsidized houses. This was an equalizing policy in the opportunities it created, but it did so by way of reinforcing a realtor’s logic of homogenization that ensured the most stable property values. Third, rehabilitation did not significantly challenge preexisting patterns of racial and class segregation by minimizing the conflict that might arise from the perceived encroachment of poor blacks, who were in disproportionate need, on white ethnic and black middle-­class enclaves. Fourth, it avoided introducing a more politically vulnerable state-­owned and -operated housing sector and continued state support of the private market. By dovetailing simultaneously with various political outcomes, rehabilitation may have been more politically palatable, but the pressures of postwar housing shortages and deterioration left most policy makers unconvinced that it was enough.21 The exhibition’s aspiration to be all things to all people is further illustrated by the segment that plotted numerous public improvements planned for the years 1947–­52 on a series of enlarged aerial photographs of the city. The photographs were scaled so visitors could walk around each of four sections, identify their own neighborhood and street, and see how the city’s plans affected them directly (fig. 9.4). Street and ward signs were placed on the photographs at frequent intervals to assist this identification process, and Plexiglas symbols, lighted from below, indicated where proposed parks, playgrounds, and health centers would be. While this section invited a direct feeling of investment in the larger task of planning, it also made the visitor aware that planning served the whole city, not just his or her immediate neighborhood, and fostered an understanding that other neighborhoods needed improvements as well. With a corrupt Republican machine still in office, this segment subtly appealed for a standard of public spiritedness that contrasted with the status quo. A publicly supported Planning Commission would provide better, more coordinated services to neighborhoods based on objective conditions rather than political patronage. Encouraging an appreciation of the whole city was also, however, an opening for arguments in favor of downtown development project funding, purportedly benefiting everyone, over what real estate magnate Albert M. Greenfield referred to as neighborhoods’ “sectional interests.” The meanings for prominent Philadelphians of an antimachine public spiritedness and funding priorities favoring downtown appear to have been somewhat confused in 1947. Greenfield, who owned

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fig. 9.4 Montage with visitors and aerial photograph of downtown Philadelphia, from the pamphlet The Better Philadelphia Exhibition: What City Planning Means to You (Philadelphia: City Planning Commission, 1947). Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.

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considerable property in declining downtown areas as well as the Lit Brothers department store catty-­corner to Gimbels, blamed the city’s “WASP-­Republican bankers” for abandoning him when disaster struck in the 1930s because he was Jewish. He had since thrown his support behind the Democrats. Reformers were incensed that the machine had been doling out uncoordinated infrastructure projects to boost the power of ward leaders over their neighborhood-­based, “sectional” interests. The interests of Greenfield and ADA-­aligned reformers thus converged over the desire to break the Republicans’ lock on city politics.22 The creation of a more efficiently operating vital center, depicted in the much-­ touted thirty-­by-­fourteen-­foot model of downtown Philadelphia, was the linchpin of the exhibition in its content and in maintaining cohesion among its organizers. Visitors lined up along ramps in anticipation of what could be brought about through thirty-­five years of planning. “Synchronized with an explanatory dialogue and section-­by-­section spot lighting,” the model’s panels rotated to reveal the possibilities. Among these possibilities was an expressway replacing Vine Street, a new bus terminal, and a grassy mall of several blocks framing Independence Hall as a democratic shrine dedicated to both city and nation. One flip-­over panel, showing an “improved waterfront,” included another expressway, a new wholesale food center, and bridges to a pier and harbor for “pleasure boats.” These proposed improvements facilitated the conduct of businesses through more efficient road access. The model also depicted elements of a cosmopolitan city, including new

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center

arts institutions and apartment houses, and the replacement of the gritty, elevated train tracks dividing downtown, known as the “Chinese Wall,” with a boulevard gateway between City Hall and the Thirtieth Street train station.23 But the media “buzz” generated about the downtown model through the exhaustive accounting of its construction, dimensions, and cost signaled a shift in presentation formats in which the general public’s role in the planning process was relegated to that of a consumer. The visitor went from bodily moving in and around displays, directly examining and interacting with neighborhoods, to being a spectator at a show of independent movements controlled by an expertly designed mechanism. A Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday photo feature entitled “Unique Device Rebuilds City While You Watch” highlighted the downtown model’s capacity to alter the environment with the ease and reliable performance of a kitchen appliance. Similarly seeking to merchandise the products of city planning, another installation displayed models of typical improvement projects with their price tags plainly affixed, revolving on a conveyor belt like entrees in a cafeteria. The marketing pitch of the exhibition, to convince the public to “buy a better city in which to live,” was most directly acknowledged in a procession of miniature sewage treatment plants, schools, highway interchanges, and health centers. By connecting it with the more familiar idea of shopping, the conveyor belt may have most effectively served to “sell” the idea of planning.24 Outfitting the space of the city properly while on a downtown shopping jaunt was an uncontroversial role that women could take up, which stood in contrast to the marginalization of their neighborhood organizing noted earlier. A news article appealing more directly to women, “A Chance to Go Shopping for the Future Philadelphia,” highlighted the feminization of this consumer role in promising that at the exhibition, “you’ll have a chance to study sample Cities of the Future, get a close-­up look at their spare parts, finger the price tags, pick out a city that appeals to you, and even try it on for size.” Prominently featured were photographs of women and girls, instead of the more typical male dignitaries. A young, stylishly dressed Miss Joanne Smith was shown picking up a miniature City Hall, complete with William Penn presiding at its tip-­top, from the downtown model, and a six-­year-­old pointed out the private Quaker school to her sister. While reinforcing gender stereotypes, this article represented women and girls as identifying with and owning their city, too. But as any experienced and responsible shopper knew, prioritizing which items to purchase—­and for whom—­was a difficult but frequently necessary process.25 Blacks did not make out well on this shopping trip, despite the fact that some African Americans apparently did visit the Better Philadelphia Exhibition (see fig. 9.2). Coinciding with the exhibition’s elaborate vision for a revived downtown were plans for the decimation of poor and working-­class black communities. The exclusion of blacks from the planning process, already discussed in relationship to how housing issues were portrayed in the exhibition, was in marked contrast with their increased visibility during the 1940s as a result of in-­migration and conflicts over integration. A strike of white workers at the

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Philadelphia Transit Company in 1944 over the hiring of black drivers had briefly halted war production in the city and provoked authorities to bring in the National Guard. The exhibition’s venue, Gimbels, was at the center of such shifts as the store began in 1947 to integrate its floor staff. Blacks remained almost exclusively concentrated in neighborhoods immediately north, south, and west of Center City. This settlement pattern did, however, dovetail with fears about the spread of blighted buildings downtown and with the paths of planned expressways, which perhaps informed the exhibition’s plea: “Don’t let Philadelphia burn out at the heart!” But the exhibition avoided directly addressing the simmering racial and ethnic tensions that threatened the center’s delicate hold.26 Bounding a revived Center City on all four sides by expressways was an agenda that, like housing rehabilitation, had various political and social implications. For black residents, the benefits were particularly difficult to discern. Expressway proposals joined several key threads running through the exhibition that, in their unifying and exclusionary effects, embodied contradictory environmental politics. The expressways highlighted the formal symmetry of city founder William Penn’s original planning vision and cleared away blighted buildings, adapting the city for the future. They served downtown businesses by relieving traffic congestion and responded to a mother’s anger that her block had “lost three kids this year” to the industrial truck traffic that disrupted her neighborhood’s streets. Further, they ensured the continued dominance of the city over its surrounding region—­or so planners thought—­by channeling rather than being choked by traffic and abated attendant pollution concerns on a citywide scale. However, the precise routes and locations of access ramps for the new expressways were not specified in the exhibition because plans were still being developed. Perhaps anticipating visitors’ concerns about displacement, this segment noted that while highways used to be constructed right through the center of communities, “new traffic ways . . . should go around them, to keep them good.” It is unclear what planners deemed a “good” community worth diverting a highway around. But in the specific case of the Crosstown Expressway, Bacon’s plans for stabilizing upper-­income, “good” Center City neighborhoods through the “creation of a definite boundary” to their south sacrificed the future of a racially mixed, deteriorating area in the pursuit of a supposedly common good. Blacks were disproportionately located in neighborhoods of more deteriorated housing due to discrimination and lower incomes, including the Seventh Ward, an area south of Market Street that had been the focus of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro half a century earlier.27 Therefore, large-­ scale construction projects believed to require the sacrifice of residences with the least economic impact ensured that realizations of this common good would be largely on the backs of African Americans. While construction of the Crosstown Expressway was eventually defeated decades later, its projection cast a shadow over South Street and led to disinvestment and further deterioration. The exhibition thus evaded the contradiction between its general statements about improving the city and its environmental conditions while protecting one community at the expense of another.28

The exhibition’s treatment of expressway development encouraged uncritical support for a common good dependent on racial and class exclusions. In contrast, its presentation of a participatory planning process promoted critical thinking and attention to real—­and “unfavorable”—­material conditions and was also more race, class, and gender inclusive. This disjuncture suggests a lack of ideological and policy consensus among those individuals organizing the exhibition regarding how diverse city planning and civic reform should be. The critical understanding of place—­of its fundamentally constructed and changeable nature—­fostered among schoolchildren in this final segment had radical, if largely unrealized, environmental potential. If it had seen broader implementation, it might have ultimately led to a confrontation between the citywide and neighborhood scales of planning and reform issues presented in the exhibition as well as to their more just and democratic formulation. Exhibition organizers and school officials arranged for youths in sixteen Philadelphia public schools, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, to study city planning and apply its precepts to the assessment and redesign of their neighborhoods (fig. 9.5). The display of their work would communicate to visitors that the well-­being of young people should be a central consideration of city planning and that youths’ participation in planning made them “responsible citizens.” Associate school superintendent Cushman stressed in an exhibition field trip guide that “if the Exhibition is a success . . . the youth of our schools . . . may gain confidence in the capacity of men and women to work together for

fig. 9.5 Girl who officially opened the exhibition, holding the key to a Better Philadelphia, 1947. Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center

Education for a Critical Consciousness of Place

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the realization of a better life in the neighborhood, in the City, in the State, in the Nation, and perhaps even in this One World.”29 In convincing principals and teachers of the dramatic stakes involved for the future of Philadelphia—­for its youth and for the very possibility of world peace and cooperation—­Cushman placed the focus of children on their neighborhoods within a larger context of Cold War fear and hope. Reversing this trajectory, one principal, a Miss Bright, reported to a meeting of exhibition organizers and fellow principals on what amounted to a civil defense program against the threat of urban blight. Children in Miss Bright’s school learned to express their feelings, observations, and suggestions about their neighborhoods in a variety of ways. They invited people from the neighborhood to a school assembly to answer questions, such as “What would you do if you lived in a house without a bathtub and teacher [sic] says you must come to school clean? What would you do if the house next door fell down during the night? How do you go about getting gas and water into your house?” A far more real and impending threat in the lives of these children than the atomic bomb was one that housing reformers had been fighting for decades: the possibility of the very floor falling out from under them. It is unclear if or how parents participated and where the landlords were during these inquiries. But another program involved students planning with the help of a “Homemaking Consultant” how they would talk to a landlord “so as not to infuriate them,” as well as how to budget their money and take trips on public transportation.30 Training youth in negotiating city streets, bureaucracies, and lease terms had its insidious aspects but also considerable radical potential. It may have sought to curb delinquent behavior by instilling greater respect, if not for adult authority figures that were frequently part of the problem, then for the quality of the urban environment itself. It undoubtedly sought to further instill in students a belief in the possibility of achieving meaningful change through the present political system, thus serving to stave off their recruitment by radical groups or their social and political apathy. But the curriculum also contained spaces of possibility for creating more assertive, highly articulate, independent-minded young people with a sense of entitlement to better environments. Further, the learning process the schoolchildren had undergone was then held up in the exhibition as an example for adults to follow. Modeled in the display of the schoolchildren’s work was the planners’ ideal process of public participation. Students discussed city planning and surveyed their neighborhood, during which “they were surprised when they counted three candy stores in one block and discovered no library within walking distance of their school.” The survey enabled them to evaluate the relationships between for-­profit candy stores and the lack of nearby reading materials in how these shaped the overall quality of their living environment. Individually the students developed plans for improvement projects and then came together to negotiate a group plan. Planning experts, other city officials, and neighborhood committees

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center

were consulted, and their city councilmen visited to discuss what ordinances could be enacted to realize the desired “playgrounds, good lighting, and safe streets.” A pamphlet on youth involvement is noteworthy, given other portions of the exhibition, for its explicitly inclusive photographs. One showed a white woman “expert” before a group of students, while another showed several students, including an African American girl and boy with a white male government official, accompanied by the caption: “The citizens’ plans of today may become the realities of tomorrow.” According to the pamphlet, the models that students created as learning exercises and means of illustrating their programs for the future were just the beginning of a continuing process. The next step would be finding out “what happens when money and people hold the program back,” and getting “representation on city planning groups.”31

Coda Models of schoolchildren made out of plywood flanked the passageway leading out of the Better Philadelphia Exhibition. At the exit these schoolchildren were shown as a plywood-­model grown-­up couple with children of their own. The growth and maturation of the plywood people signaled both the pedagogical intent of the exhibition and the frankly reproductive function of planning and public improvements for the continuation of capital accumulation. Without the explicit provision of means for visitors to link up with a range of reform forces, the dynamism of the exhibition may have been flattened at its close. But the relationship among planners, reformers, and private capital was an ongoing process of negotiation, exemplified in the exhibition’s contradictory messages. Planners and reformers appeared to get one last, if conciliatory, word in one of Lewis Mumford’s succinct declarations of humanistic principles, dramatically spotlit and mounted high against the wall before a lone drafting table tilting deferentially upward: “The final test of an economic system is not the tons of iron, the tanks of oil, or the miles of textiles it produces: the final test lies in its ultimate products—­the sort of men and women it nurtures and the order and beauty and sanity of their communities.”32 This benediction challenged the ultimate priorities of the businessmen without challenging their fundamental logic, just as the exhibition had challenged the increasing spatial suburbanization of land uses without questioning the dominant economic order itself. While the exhibition effectively demonstrated the binding power of issues of environmental quality for a renewed civic life, it evaded—­if it did not in fact serve to further obfuscate—­the recognition of social conflict and difference. Visitors exited through a bank of elevators to Chestnut Street or into the store itself, to shop.

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notes 1. On Levittown, see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 235. On the Exhibition, see “Philadelphia Plans Again,” Architectural Forum, December 1947, 65–­88. 2. On the ADA, see Hal Libros, Hard-­Core Liberals (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1975). 3. Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center (New York: Da Capo, 1949). 4. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), 75–­80; Samuel Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989) is another example of this neglect of postwar activism. On professionalization, see Eugenie Birch, “Advancing the Art and Science of Planning, Planners and Their Organizations,” Journal of the American Planning Association 46 (January 1980): 22–­49; and Cliff Ellis, “Professional Conflict over Urban Form: The Case of Urban Freeways, 1930–­1970,” in Planning the Twentieth-­ Century American City, ed. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 262–­79; David Kinkela, “The Ecological Landscapes of Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson,” American Quarterly 61, no. 4 (December 2009): 905–­28. 5. Roy Lubove, Twentieth-­Century Pittsburgh, vol. 1 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995 [1969]); Joel Tarr, Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004); John Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993). 6. Jeanne Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time (New York: Random House, 1967); and John Guinther, The Direction of Cities (New York: Viking Press, 1996) are triumphalist accounts. Bauman, in Public Housing, Race, and Renewal, sees an elite-­business collaboration. Jon Teaford,

The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–­1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 11, 89, 102–­3. 7. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 77. On unions and suburbanization, see Congress of Industrial Organizations Department of Research and Education, in Housing Association of Delaware Valley papers (HADV), “Good Shelter For Everyone” (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Urban Archives, 1944), 417–­22. The suburban-­centered illustrations, amidst an eclectic broader CIO agenda, are indicative. 8. Bauer’s remarks and Urban Land Institute proposals are in “Summary of Proceedings,” March 25, 1943. See Philadelphia Housing Association Conference, “Cities after the War: A Challenge to American Enterprise,” 1–­16, HADV 61–­46, Urban Archives, Temple University (TUUA). See also Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 135–­54. 9. Walter Phillips, “City Planning in Philadelphia,” CCCP, January 1944, HADV 2–­9, TUUA. On the Planning Commission’s organization, see Guinther, Direction of Cities, 90–­98; John Bauman, “Visions of the Post-­War City: A Perspective on Urban Planning, Philadelphia, and the Nation, 1942–­1945,” in Introduction to Planning History in the United States, ed. Donald Krueckeberg (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 170–­89. On the crisis in postwar liberalism, see Mary Sperling McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947–­1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978). 10. On Bacon and his departure from Flint, see Guinther, Direction of Cities, 72–­76; Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 21; Gregory L. Heller, Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 37. See also Andrew R. Highsmith, “Demolition Means Progress: Race, Class,

15. On Fordism, see David Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 135. Teaford notes this attempt to beat the suburbs at their own game on pgs. 7, 35. The panorama resembled GM’s Futurama at the 1939 World’s Fair, but while GM sought public support for highways to further private profits, the Better Philadelphia Exhibition centered on other, less quantifiable social benefits. See Robert Rydell, World of Fairs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 134–­45. 16. Edmund N. Bacon, “Abstract of a Talk” (speech delivered at the All-­Philadelphia Conference on Social Work, October 28, 1943, HADV, 189–­29, TUUA). 17. Sam Bass Warner in The Private City, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). Extended quote is from “Introduction,” “Final Script” for auditorium. 18. “Humbler Things,” from “Introduction,” “Final Script” for auditorium, probably by Bacon, as cited in note 14. “Citizen morale” is Bacon’s phrase in his “Urban Redevelopment,” Planning 1949, 18. Lyda M. Ickler, “The Soldier Hunts a Home,” Radio Script for the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, August 1947, General Pamphlet Collection, part 41, TUUA. 19. On housing policies, see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. “Hold Families” is from Edmund Bacon, “Statement before the Philadelphia Real Estate Board,” January 27, 1941, 1–­2, HADV 189–­29, TUUA. 20. Heller, Ed Bacon, 22. 21. Bacon, “Urban Redevelopment.” Also see Teaford, Rough Road to Renaissance, 115. 22. “Philadelphia Plans Again,” 72–­73; “Greenfield Hails Center City Plan,” Philadelphia Bulletin, September 16, 1947, clippings, TUUA. On “WASP-­ Republican bankers,” see Friedman, Philadelphia Jewish Life, 9, 17. 23. “Philadelphia Plans Again,” 75–­77. 24. “Unique Device Rebuilds City While You Watch,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 31, 1947; “$300,000 Exhibit Will Point the Way Out of the Past to a New City,” Philadelphia Bulletin, August 31, 1947. On consumerism and the merchandising of science through exhibitions, see Roland Marchand and Michael Smith, “Corporate Science on Display,” in

Exhibiting Philadelphia’s Vital Center

and the Deconstruction of the American Dream in Flint, Michigan” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009). On Stonorov, see Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 121. 11. Minutes, Board of Directors, Philadelphia City Planning Exhibition, July 31, 1947, City Planning Commission papers (CPC) box A-­2417, City Archives, 3 (PCA). Ironically, yet characteristically for the period, the reformers’ exclusion echoed their own categorical decision to prohibit Communists from membership in their new activism vehicle, which, soon after it was formed, became an ADA chapter in early 1947. Their bid for mainstream recognition and respect thus only partially succeeded in 1947, and during the 1951 mayoral campaign, Molly Yard would be red-­baited for her membership in the ADA by a desperate Republican party. The formation of Philadelphia’s ADA is discussed in Libros, Hard-­Core Liberals; Murray Friedman, ed., Philadelphia Jewish Life, 1940–­1985 (Ardmore, PA: Seth Press, 1986), 15. On red-­baiting, see John M. Cummings, “Record of ADA Shows Constant Leftward Course,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 1949 (unpaginated clipping in ADA, Philadelphia Chapter papers, TUUA, folder 17-­1-­107). See also Sherman Labovitz, Being Red in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1998). 12. On Dilworth’s 1947 campaign, see Joseph Fink, “Reform in Philadelphia: 1946–­ 1951,” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1971), 124–­31; letter from Edward Hopkinson Jr., Chairman of the City Planning Commission, to Robert B. Mitchell, Executive Director, July 5, 1945, box A-­2417, CPC/PCA. The fair employment pledge is in “Democratic Candidate Vows Fair Job Law If Elected,” Philadelphia Tribune, October 7, 1947, 3. Montgomery is quoted in Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal, 100. 13. Panorama Studios clippings, box PC-­3, TUUA. Publicity statistics in “Philadelphia Plans Again.” 14. “Introduction,” labeled “Final Script” for auditorium, no author, box A-­2417, 1, CPC/PCA. Drafts indicate this was Bacon’s responsibility.

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Scientific Authority and Twentieth Century America, ed. Ronald G. Walters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 148–­82. 25. Cassidy Morley, “A Chance to Go Shopping for the Future Philadelphia,” Philadelphia Bulletin, May 11, 1947. All Panorama Studios clippings, box PC-­3, TUUA. Regarding women as consumers and reformers, see Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 65–­83. 26. Allan Winkler, “The Philadelphia Transit Strike of 1944,” Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (June 1972): 73–­89; “Gimbels Official Describes Integration of Store Aides,” Philadelphia Bulletin, May 3, 1957, Gimbels clippings, TUUA; Carolyn Adams et al., Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Post-­Industrial City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 79; “bum out” quote in Frederick Gutheim, “Block-­Size Exhibit Vivifies Philadelphia’s Ambitious Long-­Range Program for City’s Modernization,” Philadelphia Bulletin, September 7, 1947, TUUA. 27. See Scott Hicks, “‘A Thorough Study of Causes’: W. E. B. Du Bois, The

Philadelphia Negro, and Progressive ­Era Materiality,” chapter 8 in this volume. 28. David Clow, “A House Divided: Philadelphia’s Controversial Crosstown Expressway” (proceedings of the Third National Conference on American Planning History, Sponsored by the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, Cincinnati, Ohio, November 30–­December 3, 1989). Diverting highways is in Raymond F. Leonard, “Notes for Highway Panel #8,” Division of Land Planning; “definite boundary” quote from Edmund N. Bacon to Robert B. Mitchell, “Recommendations for Portrayal of Planning Projects in Central City Model of City Planning Exhibition” (memo from May 14, 1947). Both CPC/ PCA, box A-­2417. 29. C. Leslie Cushman, “Suggestions on How to Make a Visit to the Better Philadelphia Exhibition,” HADV, 3–­20, TUUA, 2. 30. “Meeting with Principals-­February 13, 1947” (meeting notes, submitted by D. D. Longmaid to Oscar Stonorov, CPC/PCA, box A-­2417, 1–­3). 31. “Youth Shares in Planning a Better Philadelphia,” exhibition pamphlet, prepared by the Citizen’s Council on City Planning, CCCP, 115–­12, TUUA. 32. “Philadelphia Plans Again,” 88.

10 “Entertainment for All of the Senses” Stephen Starr’s Experience Dining and the Revitalization of Postindustrial Philadelphia stephen nepa

In 1995, Stephen Starr often drove past the Continental Diner, located at the desolate intersection of Second and Market Streets in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood. On a recent trip to Hollywood, he’d noticed in nightspots such as The Dresden Room and The Derby a trend for “cocktail culture” and an appreciation for swing bands, pompadours, and martinis. Later fixating on the Continental, he “just wanted to open a bar with a little bit of food and make a little money.” But knowing the value of creating experiences, Starr envisioned something more. Using proceeds from the sale of his concert-­promoting business, he purchased the diner and modified its workaday atmosphere with a global tapas menu, lamps shaped like tooth-­picked olives, Dean Martin on the stereo, and “slinky servers” in catsuits pouring chocolate martinis and cosmopolitans. On opening night in October 1995, the line to enter the new Continental stretched down Second Street. For older patrons, the revamped diner became a nostalgic passport to an earlier era; for the younger set, who, according to the Philadelphia Daily News, “looked as if they just signed some movie, modeling, or microchip deal,” Starr’s eatery represented fashionable urbanity. For both generations, thanks to a change of feel that appealed to multiple senses and historical sensibilities, the Continental emerged as a high-­concept restaurant within Old City’s deindustrialized landscape and spurred the creation of a new entertainment zone.1 Starr later owned thirty restaurants in four states, but he began his career in Philadelphia where, over time, his upscale eateries performed vital functions.

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Beyond providing food, they embodied and helped catalyze a shift in urban space from declining industrial infrastructure to pulsating areas of postindustrial consumerism. In the former “workshop of the world,” these were Philadelphia’s new factories, where in certain neighborhoods, they remediated what William Cronon termed “second nature”—­the built infrastructure atop the “inconvenient jumble” of the natural landscape. For his middle-­and upper-­class patrons, Starr’s restaurants redefined in psychological and cultural terms the city as a place in which to seek experiences. Through his recycling of the Continental Diner (fig. 10.1), his creation of University City’s Pod sushi bar in 2000 (fig. 10.2), and his 2011 opening of Talula’s Garden on Washington Square (fig. 10.3), Starr encouraged specific people to reimagine the city while revitalizing areas of its postindustrial landscape. Culinary historian Susan Parham termed such restaurants “bistros mondian,” in which “ambience and food fashionability” surmounted actual taste in terms of customers’ desires. Reflecting this definition, Starr proclaimed, “I liken the experience of dining out to that of attending a theater production where the players, props, backdrops, lighting, and rapport are integral components of an overall dramatic effect. . . . dining out at a Starr restaurant becomes entertainment for all of the senses.”2 This chapter examines how Starr’s restaurants helped revitalize Philadelphia’s urban environment through the creation of a new, affective phenomenon—­an innovative assemblage of people, food, and ambience at once material, theatrical, and psychological—­that I term “experience dining.” Experience dining corresponds with the broader contexts of postindustrial (or “experience”) economies. As noted by the business historians Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, in the experience economy, restaurants “provide a stage for layering on a larger feast of

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fig. 10.1 Stephen Starr, The Continental, Second and Market Streets, Philadelphia, opened 1995.

fig. 10.2 Stephen Starr, Pod, interior, 3636 Sansom Street (University City), Philadelphia, opened 2000.

fig. 10.3 Stephen Starr, Talula’s Garden, Washington Square, Philadelphia, opened 2011.

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sensations that enchants consumers.” For Starr, the “feast” was not simply a good meal; he conceived of his restaurants as stages or Hollywood film sets, his menu items and décor as props, his staffs as actors, and his patrons as audiences, an approach similar to Walt Disney’s, whereby the physical and sonorous materialities of space generated memorable experiences and feelings in people’s bodies and minds. Dining in his restaurants became an urbane, performance-­like social event that operated on multiple registers, involving not only tasting food (e.g., savoring edamame ravioli or goat cheese empanadas) but also visual perception, smell, hearing, and touch. Starr hoped to capture “foodies,” or well-­heeled customers hoping to confirm their social status through such culinary experiences, through carefully selected locations and themes. This approach enforced patterns of gentrification in the postindustrial city, affirming what Alan Ehrenhalt described as Philadelphia’s “healthy core surrounded by a badly decaying periphery.” Yet for privileged initiates, knowing the locations and themes of Starr’s restaurants (or having a favorite dish) was shorthand for knowing Philadelphia itself.3 In light of its complexity, experience dining chez Stephen Starr invites new materialist analysis in order to reveal the power of food (and its settings) to shape human thought and behavior. Accordingly, Jane Bennett regards “edible matter as an actant operating inside and alongside humankind, exerting influence on moods, dispositions, and decisions.” But Starr’s theatrical, multisensory staging of edible matter (and its consumption) also prompts consideration from the perspective of affect theory, an emerging body of thought aligned with new materialism that explores visceral, precognitive forces influencing consciousness and action. Writing in The Affect Theory Reader (2011), for example, Ben Highmore observes that “eating food . . . might necessarily privilege taste, yet to concentrate on taste to the exclusion of other senses means to fail to recognize that the experience of eating is also dependent on the haptic sensitivity of tongues and mouths, on our olfactory abilities, and on sight and sound.” Moreover, says Highmore, these multisensory experiences operate within “cross-­modal networks that register links between perception, affect, the senses, and emotions,” revealing how our understanding of “affective experience sit[s] awkwardly on the borders of the material and the immaterial.” Starr’s restaurants, by augmenting food with décor, music, lighting, and urban locations, commanded patrons to utilize their full sensory capacities while consciously (or subconsciously) recasting the city as entertainment. The environments of the Continental, Pod, and Talula’s Garden—­which I examine in greater detail below—­transported them into temporal sensatory worlds, from throwback diners and futuristic sushi bars to an urban Arcadia. Mirroring geographer Jane Speake’s “sensational city,” in which “the spectacular and superlative are used to encourage people to visit,” Starr’s experience dining aided an urban revitalization at once physical and psychological. In effect, his restaurants scaled up the agency of food from the experience of individual bodies to the broader environment and economic metabolism of the city, a process abetted by recent generations’ quest for tangible, sensory (not digitized) experiences.4

“Entertainment for All of the Senses”

While critics likened Starr to Disney on certain points, his restaurants emerged more as cinematic productions. With Doug Liman’s popular film Swingers (a 1996 Gen X dating comedy set amid Los Angeles’s big band–­crooner revival) released shortly after the Continental’s debut, Starr’s timing seemed pre­scient. Following Pod’s opening, he explained its theme and décor as “2001: A Space Odyssey meets Sleeper.” Though recent scholarship on the power of Disney’s affective allure for diverse consumers suggests he could have provided a model for Starr, no clear evidence of direct inspiration exists. Michael Sorkin states that Disneyland is a “mingle of history and fantasy, reality and simulation,” while Eric Avila suggests it “is a controlled landscape that orchestrates the movement and vision” of visitors. But as David Grazian explains, “Starr’s restaurants are designed as elaborate stage sets and theatrical spectacles of global cosmopolitanism,” the latter of which hardly reflected Disney’s principles. Yet Disney and Starr possessed very different ideas about urban environments. While Disney built entire cities from scratch (paving over California orange groves and draining Florida swampland), Starr refurbished sites in an existing city. Second, Disney derided older cities while Starr recognized their physical assets and entertainment potential; discussing his selection of the Continental, he recalled “that area was industrial and felt very much like SoHo. . . . it was my hope that the Continental [would] act as a catalyst” for development. Third, Disney created idealized interiors and exteriors. Starr instead reconfigured interiors while embracing the existing built environment’s dynamism—­its material and affective agency—­through either adaptive reuse (in the cases of the Continental and Talula’s Garden) or more comprehensive rehabilitation (in the case of Pod).5

Postindustrial Philadelphia Many U.S. cities shared a postindustrial fate similar to that of Philadelphia. For leaders concerned with salvaging a bankrupt New York in the late 1970s, Miriam Greenberg argues, “the standpoint of the out-­of-­towner and the imagination of the average tourist became overwhelming preoccupations.” Comparatively, when Ed Rendell won Philadelphia’s mayoralty in 1991, he inherited a city marred by rising crime, suburban flight, and the collapse of the local financial industry, all of which created a “civic funk” that appeared in cultural depictions of the city, from Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia (1993), featuring Bruce Springsteen’s ominous title song “Streets of Philadelphia,” to Terry Gilliam’s apocalyptic 12 Monkeys (1995). Rendell’s top priority was to improve the city’s image. Through tax abatement programs, privatization of municipal services, and promotion of Philadelphia’s entertainment potential, the city Rendell left in 1999 to his successor, as geographer Carolyn Adams argued, “no longer exported goods to the world . . . instead, it produced experiences.” In this context, Starr’s experience dining played an important role.6 Restaurants helped resuscitate postindustrial urban neighborhoods or, depending on one’s perspective, gentrified them—­a phenomenon hardly unique

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to Philadelphia. Describing how, in the 1980s, the Odeon flowered development in New York’s TriBeCa, Frank Bruni states, “Restaurants can wind up being so much bigger than themselves. Many of them mirror—­and a few even mold—­the communities around them.” In Detroit’s Corktown, Slow’s BBQ in 2005 repurposed a storefront near the vacant Michigan Central Station and, according to the Detroit Metro Times, accelerated investment, with more than a dozen new restaurants appearing in the next nine years. Philadelphia experienced its first “restaurant renaissance” in the 1970s, with chefs Peter Von Starck, George Perrier, and Steve Poses delighting diners with French and Thai cuisines. Yet during the 1980s, the city experienced continual abandonment and disinvestment. By the 1990s, with Starr retired from concert promoting and enticed by the cocktail craze in New York and L.A., he believed “there was a void in Philadelphia for a fun restaurant.” While many observers, including Rendell, still point to the Continental as jumpstarting Old City’s transformation into an entertainment district, others felt Starr dehistoricized traditional Philadelphia with “exotic fantasies,” that his upscale business model provided the best salvation for Center City corridors “beleaguered by flash mobs and tacky stores,” or that his themes were brazenly copied from others’ restaurants; the Continental’s direct inspiration was New York’s Global 33, a diner-­cum-­hip cocktail spot. That many of his patrons failed to see (or chose to ignore) the underside of experience dining attests to his restaurants’ ability to overwhelmingly pique the senses.7 Yet many patrons and critics felt Starr enlivened Philadelphia’s staid 1990s restaurant scene. While mainstays such as Perrier’s Le Bec Fin and Old City’s Bookbinders still drew crowds, national chains such as Chili’s, Hard Rock Café, and Applebee’s relied on visual and gastronomic sameness, preferring pragmatic, safe designs that appealed to conventioneers. Smaller restaurants, such as supper clubs, ethnic eateries, or the city’s many “bring your own bottle” places (BYOBs), focused mainly on food and contained minimalist décor. Though themed restaurants such as Pub Tiki (Polynesian) and the Monte Carlo Room (French chateau) predated Starr’s arrival, experience dining had yet to gain the cultural traction it assumed within the vertices of Philadelphia’s postindustrial era or mirror the broader appeal that the city’s restaurant scene held for its growing millennial population. No two Stephen Starr restaurants were alike. Skimming design magazines, thrift stores, album covers, cinema and television shows, and thematics from other restaurants, Starr and his designers merged cultural artifacts (e.g., vintage photo booths, shag carpets, hanging bamboo chairs) with staff uniforms (usually plain white or black), period music, and menu items, all of which coalesced into what he termed the “wow factor.” As Starr explained, “the common thread in all of [the restaurants] is great food and spirit. . . . but we always want the design to be different.” He avoided suburban locations, for while his restaurants enlivened certain urban neighborhoods, suburbanites and tourists constituted the bulk of Starr’s business. Speaking about his Manhattan restaurants, he stated, “Regular people are the ones who will ultimately pay the bills, like the lawyers from Long Island.”8

“Entertainment for All of the Senses”

Stephen Starr was born in 1956 and raised in Woodbury Heights, New Jersey, just south of Philadelphia. The son of a television repairman, he developed a fascination with the music, films, and ennui of the 1960s, a fascination later incorporated into his eateries. Long before venturing into restaurants, Starr dreamt of fronting a band (the Beatles were his favorite) or becoming a disc jockey. Landing his own radio show at sixteen and later graduating from Temple University, he opened entertainment venues in Philadelphia that hosted the biggest names in comedy and music in the 1980s. After selling his concert-­ promoting business, Starr invested $200,000 in the new Continental. Prior to his ownership, it faintly echoed the early 1960s, a time when, as Andrew Hurley argues, diners “helped millions of Americans translate material prosperity into some measure of social success.” Yet fast food chains and market fragmentation caused diners to decline sharply. By the 1980s, they were greasy spoons unfit to compete with ethnic restaurants and broadening consumer tastes. When ninety-­year-­old William B. Curry Sr., the third-­generation owner of an Old City stationery store, was profiled by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1987, he spoke of his then twenty-­year-­old breakfast ritual. Descending the staircase from his home above the store, he would amble one block north along South Second Street to the Continental and order “his usual fare” of eggs, bacon, and Scotch and water (the Scotch self-­brought). In 1989, the Continental received no mention in an Inquirer guide to the city’s diners. The omission—­and Curry’s imbibed morning routine—­were emblematic of the diner’s cultural rust.9 Through the late 1970s and 1980s, many of Old City’s vacant factories and warehouses were converted into lofts. According to one former resident, “Only artists moved into [Old City]. There were no stores. For three years, it was really desolate.” As with similar transformations in New York’s SoHo and London’s Docklands districts, Old City’s artists drove out remaining industrial firms. By 1989 the loft makeover ran out of steam, with the Philadelphia Inquirer lamenting, “Age, neglect, abuse, fire, bulldozers, greed and just plain bad taste slowly disfigured Philadelphia’s most historic district.” The Old City Civic Association (OCCA) in 1990 fought to “eliminate nightlife and severely regulate the location of new restaurants and other public businesses.” Fearful that too many bars and restaurants would devalue the neighborhood, the OCCA hoped to avoid the noise, vandalism, and public drunkenness that plagued South Street, then the city’s premier nightlife area. After the OCCA ruling passed, developers looked to Penn’s Landing, where during the 1980s more than $200 million was spent along the river in the way of restaurants, nightclubs, and apartments. Second and Market Streets, meanwhile, remained dark.10 The Continental The Continental’s location on Market Street’s south side did not conflict with the OCCA’s zoning amendment. In her study of Old City’s transformation, Bernardine Watson indicates that “with the conversion of the Continental diner to

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the considerably more upscale martini bar, given its upscale profile, the OCCA voted not to oppose the liquor license application.” But the Continental was a risky investment. When Starr approached the previous owner about selling, he asked, “What can you gross in a place like this? Four thousand a month if you’re lucky?” Starr later noted that he chose the Continental “because it was built in 1963. . . . the 1960s thing I always found fascinating, that era of early 60s design.” While he contributed to the décor, Starr hired designers Miguel Calvo and Owen Kamihira to fashion a “nostalgic passport to another era,” a martini bar reminiscent of the Jetsons’ home with Danish modern chairs and a dining room containing plush red leather booths and white leather wall panels. The bathroom corridors were lined with porthole windows. The first menu, with only twenty items, was printed in 1960s-­style cursive Murray Hill font. The bar’s most popular cocktail, the “Buzz Aldrin,” a concoction of peach vodka, triple sec, and Tang, paid homage to that astronaut’s 1969 moonwalk.11 The Continental’s first chefs, Bradlee Bartram and Raul Baccardo, seized upon early 1990s restaurant trends, primarily Asian fusion (pioneered in Los Angeles in the 1980s) and Spanish tapas. Reflecting what food critic Florence Fabricant termed “plates of fancy construction,” their lemongrass spring rolls, Thai chicken skewers, and lobster/Gruyère macaroni and cheese attracted fashionistas, lawyers in suits, and urban hipsters, who acted “like tourists in their own city.” Starr later recalled, “When the first customers came in. . . . it wasn’t like ‘this is a nice place.’ They were blown away.” While the diner’s steel shell and rotating sign remained, the Philadelphia Daily News praised its new interior “as a chic, Manhattan bistro amid Old City’s wonderfully eclectic grunge. Its waitresses are fantastically gorgeous, its tapas plates are delicious, and the martinis are bourgeois drinks in a shot-­and-­beer town.” After opening night, Starr noted, “There’s a large pocket of people in Philadelphia in the arts and fashion who have no place to go. I want a clientele that’s upscale, hip, and trendy.” Starr achieved a pitch-­perfect mixture of retro Rat Pack cool (Dean Martin also received a namesake martini), space-­age décor, and fusion-­twisted comfort food in 1995 Philadelphia. As condo developer and city councilman Allan Domb recalled in 2015, “The [Continental’s] food in those days was about more than taste, it’s that the taste of it made you imagine Philadelphia was hip. Unless you frequently ate in New York, you didn’t eat like that here back then.”12 The Continental propelled a wave of redevelopment geared toward middle-­ and upper-­class patrons, which the Philadelphia Inquirer dubbed “luxury lounge action.” By 2000 Old City, exchanging vacant factories for velvet ropes, trumped South Street as the city’s premier entertainment zone. As a local bartender explained, “Now the only people who go to South Street are tourists; it got too young. This is the new hot spot.” High-­end cars and limousines clogged Second and Market Streets, with celebrities, politicos, athletes, and the well-­ heeled converging on the Continental for tuna tartare and Tang-­rimmed martinis, while nearby establishments, such as Cuba Libre, Red Sky, Glam, and 32 Degrees (with $300 private “vodka lockers”) further catered to those seeking an upscale

“Entertainment for All of the Senses”

experience. By 2003, the area from Front to Sixth Streets and Walnut to Wood Streets contained ninety-­one restaurants and bars, with more than seventy south of Market Street. Restaurant and bar openings were so frequent that in 2003, the OCCA lobbied the city council (unsuccessfully) to extend their 1990 ordinance south of Market Street.13 In 2005, National Geographic Traveler heralded Old City as “the liveliest urban neighborhood between SoHo and South Beach.” Starr himself was named Bon Appétit’s 2005 restaurateur of the year, while USA Today hailed the Continental as “a seminal event in the city’s transformation.” Between 1995 and 2000, Starr opened Buddakan, Tangerine, Jones, Blue Angel, and Morimoto. Whether modeled on Paris’s Budda Bar (Buddakan), an Arabian fantasy (Tangerine), Hollywood’s Roscoe’s (Jones), a French bistro (Blue Angel), or a space-­age chamber (Morimoto), Starr’s experience dining hit notes of chic taste and fantasy. Jones, Blue Angel, and Morimoto, located steps from one another, revitalized Chestnut Street’s 700 block into a restaurant row. Starr’s model blossomed into a syndrome, one that the Washington Post described as “correctly predicting what people want,” and that placed several of his eateries on Restaurant Business’s Top 100 Independent U.S. Restaurants. In real estate circles, he became known as the “space junkie,” as he constantly received calls from agents announcing potential locations. Despite the journalistic praise, Starr’s subsequent moves into the city’s Frankford and North Broad neighborhoods (with historically working-­class and/or minority residents) generated resentment; while Frankford locals lamented the impending arrival of “foodie-­hipsters” and vehicular traffic, residents of North Broad felt his taking over a homeless shelter for use as a catering commissary meant those in need were getting “lost in the sauce.”14 Pod Despite mixed feelings about Starr, his success led him to cultivate what was in 2000 his most ambitious project: University City’s Pod. By the late 1990s, the University of Pennsylvania campus, stretching west from the Schuylkill River to Fortieth Street, suffered from an image problem. With numerous robberies and murders, including one in which a victim was killed for five dollars, the Ivy League school was “an exemplar of a crime-­ridden campus.” Former university president Judith Rodin recalled, “There were few restaurants, and the dark, empty streets made everyone jumpy.” With concerns over safety, Penn installed emergency lighting systems and hired security guards. Yet school officials hoped to upscale their campus and neighborhood by capitalizing on existing attributes (education, health care, scientific research, and transit hubs), combining them with new retail, restaurants, and residences, and replacing parking lots with green space. Recalling the redevelopment of Harvard and Georgetown universities, Penn’s “Agenda for Excellence” was geared toward resuscitating vibrancy and walkability in a neighborhood where people harbored fears of the streets. By constructing new public spaces in a heavily privatized area, the Agenda for

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Excellence was, in theory, an ambitious blueprint for allowing students, faculty, residents, and tourists to interact. In practice, the agenda roiled low-­income residents and small business owners, many of whom saw rents rise and profits plunge with the arrival of chain stores that catered to a wealthier, trendier client base. Nearly ten years after Pod’s opening, Philadelphia Weekly opined that the neighborhood was “poised on a tightrope between gentrified and genuine.”15 The University City District (UCD), funded by Penn and Drexel and charged with carrying out the agenda, proclaimed University City as “a center of the new economy.” Sprucing up the area with retail and restaurants was a primary goal. Yet the agenda relied less on attracting small, independent retailers and more on recruiting corporate nameplates such as The Gap, Starbucks, Hilton, and Ann Taylor Loft. With recognized corporate tenants, the UCD felt the area would be safer, clean, and more desirable to middle-­and upper-­class patrons. Regarding restaurants, the UCD took issue with the food trucks moored to Penn’s and Drexel’s campuses; as Rodin explained, “their presence on the streets was detrimental to a quality retail atmosphere and contributed especially to the lack of restaurants.” Eventually, though not without protest, the trucks were cleared from Sansom, Walnut, Thirty-­Sixth, and Thirty-­Seventh Streets.16 Sansom Commons, a $120 million mixed-­use development, anchored the new project. The most expensive commercial investment in west Philadelphia’s history, Sansom Commons was not universally accepted as the best choice for revitalizing the campus. With the neighboring areas of Walnut Hill, Powelton, and Spruce Hill populated mainly by black residents, and with Penn’s and Drexel’s largely white student bodies, the agenda faced racial discrimination issues. Particularly incensed were food truck and street vendors, many of whom were longtime residents. For them, Sansom Commons appeared as if the UCD “planned to turn Penn into a shopping center.” Rodin viewed the project as improving quality of life, arguing, “If we could make this a destination for tourists and campus visitors, or bring in shoppers from other areas, well, better still.” Attempting to generate goodwill, the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition (GPUAC) announced that Penn was “very committed to providing west Philadelphia residents with a chance [for employment]” in the construction of or operations in Sansom Commons. Beginning in 1998, several Sansom Commons businesses sponsored the Go West Arts and Restaurant Festival to connect residents with the new project.17 Given Starr’s track record, Penn and the UCD thought him a sound choice for Sansom Commons. But selecting Starr, along with national corporate tenants, indicated that experience dining appealed not only to the right kind of patrons but, in a corporate neoliberal sense, to real estate development interests as well. As Neil Smith has argued, such “revanchist” development supposes a “vendetta against workers and people of color” while espousing new urbanist designs and architecture that fail “to draw many non-­white faces to town.” Other sociologists, including Sharon Zukin and Joel Kotkin, described projects such as Sansom Commons as promoting “a universal rhetoric of upscale growth”; amenity-­driven development removed vestiges of urban history and increasingly

“Entertainment for All of the Senses”

gave way to upscale condos, boutiques, and pricey restaurants. Describing this trend in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit warned of “a new American economy in which. . . . everything will be more homogenous and more controlled or controllable.” The UCD pursued this strategy, with Rodin and others seeing the potential in up-­market amenities. Their reasoning stemmed from a large number of “sophisticates” in University City and their tendency to gravitate toward ethnic restaurants or those with edgy aesthetics.18 Starr recognized his latest venture’s target demographic (college students, faculty, and tourists), though he initially was unsure of its theme. He walked the Penn campus, quizzed passersby, and then discussed options with his marketing and design team. At first, Starr envisioned a family-­style Italian restaurant. But his colleagues advised him to be “edgy, hip, and do something high-­concept,” with some suggesting he mimic the kaitenzushi (or “rotary sushi bar”) craze then sweeping London and Amsterdam. The end result was the $3.2 million Pod, a futuristic Pan-­Asian eatery with space-­age décor and automat-­inspired technology (see fig. 10.2). Wedding cultural nostalgia to consumer taste, Pod’s aesthetics blended cinematic set design and automation with the artistic vision of the David Rockwell Group. A New York–­based, internationally recognized design firm, Rockwell had assembled an impressive résumé of restaurant interiors, including Manhattan’s Nobu, Adour Alain Ducasse, and Ruby Foo’s.19 Pod’s interior contained Star Trek–­like shimmering white walls with the bar surface emitting amber light. Yellowtail Ponzu and tempura items were placed on color-­coded plates and streamed out of the kitchen on conveyor belts. Bar stools glowed in red and blue when patrons sat down. The main dining room, with its escalator handrails and curvaceous white chairs, took cues from Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal. Wavy red and white booths recalled the Corova Milk Bar from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, while the private “dining pods” resembled the modular Pan Am capsules in his 2001: A Space Odyssey. Diners watched Japanese anime as a CCTV system beamed Pod’s interior happenings onto monitors facing Sansom Street, adding a voyeuristic element to dining. Pod’s aesthetics interiorized the luminous spectacles found in Tokyo’s Electric Town or in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner in a city whose laws forbade large electric signage on built exteriors. With its sanctuary feel, Pod mirrored what Peder Anker described as “closed ecologies,” spaces similar to the encapsulated colonies devised by the U.S. space program in the 1960s. Clearly, Pod’s patrons ingested menu items found in many other Philadelphia sushi restaurants. Yet here, with its colorful, futuristic framing, food proved more enticing, with one critic noting, “It’s not simply sushi or dim sum, it’s a total sensory experience. . . . I just had lunch on the Mothership.”20 In their time, the Continental and Pod generated new interest and flows of activity. However, the implications for the two neighborhoods differed. By the mid-­2000s, Old City was viewed in dubious terms. With some praising the nightlife and others loathing it, its once-­celebrity guests made way for the “bridge and tunnel crowds.” Though the Continental still did brisk business and increased its seating capacity threefold, bars outnumbered legitimate eating establishments

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in the neighborhood, with Starr remarking, “A lot of bars opened that disguised themselves as restaurants.  .  .  . when they become predominant, it becomes South Street.” With the proliferation of bars and cocktail lounges came the very elements that plagued South Street: drunkenness, public urination, graffiti, and occasional drive-­by shootings. Profiling Old City’s decline, Philadelphia Magazine noted Starr “was the neighborhood’s official Pied Piper . . . attracting the cocktail crowd, foodies, and boldface names.” While many wondered what precipitated Old City’s fall, the OCCA’s 1990s zoning restrictions sealed the fate of the blocks below Market as a “drinking ghetto.” Inga Saffron explains, “No one really prefers those types of clubs, but Old City became de facto designated.”21 Though Pod was not the area’s first destination restaurant (the White Dog Café and La Terrasse, one block away, dated from the 1970s), it helped Sansom Commons become the area’s new focal point; Rodin later cited Pod as her favorite place to take “out-­of-­towners.” Soon after, the UCD touted the neighborhood as a commercial and cultural alternative to Center City. Changes were noticeable as sidewalk cafés sprouted on once-­empty streets, and from 2001 to 2007, eight new upscale restaurants appeared in “a historically underserved culinary area.” Following Pod, celebrity chef Bobby Flay, local chef Jose Garces, and others came to University City. After 2005, the blocks west of Fortieth Street emerged as fertile restaurant ground with a revamped Marigold Kitchen, Distrito, and Abbraccio complementing the ethnic eateries of Dahlak and Gojo on Baltimore Avenue. Penn and Drexel continued to expand their campuses vertically with high-­rise dormitories and student amenities. The renaissance jumpstarted by Pod attracted what Penn executive director of public affairs Anthony Sorrentino termed “destination diners,” or those seeking a taste of the exotic. University City’s makeover, or what one longtime resident termed “Penntrification,” relied in part on a culinary colonization that, while luring new residents and investment, sheared away a former black community “to shape the neighborhood as an affluent white community.”22 Talula’s Garden

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Following Pod, Starr branched out to high-­end steakhouses, gastropubs, and speakeasies, restaurant trends at their high points in the mid-­2000s. By 2010, Philadelphia’s foodies had embraced the sustainable food trend. Rooted in the buy-­local ethos popularized by Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse and Europe’s slow food movement, farmers markets and organic groceries complemented eateries such as The White Dog Café, Horizons, The Farmer’s Table, Honey’s Sit and Eat, and Farm and the Fisherman, which used regional bounties to fashion a localized, ecological sensitivity within experience dining. Though localism and slow food had existed for decades, the farm-­to-­table craze carried them into the restaurantscape. As Carlo Petrini notes, such establishments “promoted local identity, the proper use of raw ingredients, and [revived] simple, seasonal flavors.” Yet until 2011, the genre’s most popular restaurant in the area was located

“Entertainment for All of the Senses”

forty-­five minutes from Center City. At Talula’s Table in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, the “mushroom capital of the world,” owners Bryan Sikora and Aimee Olexy had for years sold out their twelve $100-­apiece seats several months in advance. With artisanal cheeses, seasonal produce, and firm connections with local farmers, Sikora and Olexy created “a haven for foodies.” Their success caused Starr, mindful of industry trends, to take notice.23 Starr imagined an urbanized version of Talula’s Table for his former Washington Square restaurant on the park’s west side (see fig. 10.3). What distinguished this incarnation from its namesake was the outdoor deck adjacent to the dining room, housed in the Art Deco Ayer Building. Sandwiched between two residential towers, Starr retained the Groundswell Design firm to create “a lush, magical garden” using salvaged shipping pallets and granite, daffodils and kudzu, and a “green wall” of edible herbs. Spherical and teardrop-­shaped lights and flowerboxes accented the outdoor bar while butcher-­block tables with mismatched furniture and utensils graced the main dining room. Dismantling the frosted glass façade of his previous restaurant, Starr erected a vine-­entangled wrought-­iron fence with miniature birdhouses. Through an “apartmental nature,” fusing together the city and countryside, Talula’s Garden combined flora, food, and urban space with eyes trained toward sustainability. Emblazoned on the dining room wall was the Alice Waters adage “A garden brings life and beauty to the table.” The website used a butterfly for the apostrophe in Talula’s and touted “Seasonal American Food Inspired by the Farm and Garden” while displaying dishes from the menu in sensually enticing close-­up photographs with narrow depth-­of-­field focus. In warmer months the deck filled with people, who ordered vegetable- and herb-­ infused cocktails. When compared with the park, Talula’s Garden was devoid of panhandlers, canine waste, and the rat problem found across the street. This was imported nature, providing patrons a respite from the urban bustle. Philadelphia Style commented, “Eating at Talula’s Garden is like dining inside a dream catcher. . . . [It’s] one of the serenest dining spots in the city and the closest you can get to picnicking in Washington Square without a blanket.” By greening a concrete space, Talula’s emerged as third nature, a place to consume the products of the first while taking in the urbane atmosphere of the second.24 Praised in 2011 by Philadelphia Magazine for its menu’s “rustic alchemy” and hailed by Bon Appétit as one of the nation’s best new restaurants, Talula’s Garden represented a micro-­Arcadian reshaping of urban space. Some critics, maligning farm-­to-­table’s cultural elitism, cited the menu’s “extortionate prices” and “underwhelming portions.” Yet customers, after valet-­parking their foreign cars, enjoyed oxtail consommé, bone marrow dumplings, and counsel from one of the restaurant’s “cheese mongers,” and they took solace in confirming their status via sustainable consumption. Talula’s Garden’s environment recalled the urban-­rural schism identified by William Cronon, Raymond Williams, Peter J. Schmitt, and other historians. Intellectual traditions stretching back to Thoreau positioned landscapes such as Kennett Square’s as natural and those such as Philadelphia’s as “lacking nonhuman life.” But as Schmitt noted, urbanites’ appreciation for

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nature did not mean a rejection of the city. Instead of two distinct spheres, Talula’s Garden bridged city and hinterland, becoming a conduit through which Starr’s patrons could sample the countryside’s offerings while not disturbing their cosmopolitan sense.25 The Continental, Pod, and Talula’s Garden reveal how, through changing times and trends, Starr’s experience dining revitalized portions of postindustrial Philadelphia. By updating the postwar diner, creating a space-­age Pan-­Asian restaurant, and opening a third nature space, he combined food, materials, and human socializing, a synthesis that Henri Lefebvre likened to “connecting systems that might appear to be distinct.” In the process, Starr merged materiality, history, and culture into multisensory affective experiences. Regardless of the stage, Starr’s actors portrayed and his audiences ingested a city striving to shake off its rust and emerge as a sensational, experience-­producing metropolis; many future Philadelphia-­based chefs, including Jose Garces, Marc Vetri, and Michael Solomonov—­all of whom later amassed their own miniempires—­cited Starr as a creative influence. Yet Philadelphia did not completely shed its former skin; in 2015, the city contained thousands of abandoned factories and vacant lots while its poverty rate stood as one of the highest in the country and its landscape one of the nation’s most polluted. Still, Starr’s revitalizing portions of the city in physical and psychological capacities allowed middle-­ and upper-­class patrons to reimagine Philadelphia not as an urban mausoleum or postindustrial ruin but as a place of cultural vitality. As Starr commented in 2005, “I believe we really changed the way the city dines and goes out at night . . . and that’s great, and I’m very happy about it, and it’s a little scary.”26

notes

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1. Michael Sanson, “Born to Be a Starr,” Restaurant Hospitality 87 (July 2003): 30–­ 32, 30; Gerald Etter, “To a Young Crowd, This Spot and Its 15-­Martini Menu Are Cutting Edge,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 12, 1996, 31; Maria Gallagher, “Where the 60s Meet the 90s,” Philadelphia Daily News, October 11, 1995, F1; Don Russell, “Martini Madness Moves In,” Philadelphia Daily News, October 27, 1995, 48. 2. Oliver Evans Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, Workshop of the World: A Selective Guide to the Industrial Archaeology of Philadelphia (Wallingford, PA: Oliver Evans Press, 1990), accessed January 26, 2015, http://​www​ .workshopoftheworld​.com/​introduction/​ introduction​.html; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 56; Larry Platt, “The Reincarnation

of Stephen Starr,” in Philadelphia Magazine’s Ultimate Restaurant Guide, ed. April White (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 45; Peter Sundheim, “Convergence and Divergence: The Simultaneous Transformation of Old City Philadelphia,” University of Pennsylvania Urban Studies Program, January 1, 2007, 59, accessed January 23, 2015, http://​repository​.upenn​.edu/​cgi/​ viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=​1001​&​context​ =senior​_seminar; Susan Parham, Food and Urbanism: The Convivial City and a Sustainable Future (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 122; Starr Restaurant Group (SRG) press release, accessed October 22, 2014, http://​www​.starr​-restaurant​.com. 3. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater and Every Business a Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 4;







Kosher: Hasids, West Indians, Hipsters, and Pizza,” New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2010, 66; Michael Jackman, “Corktown Rises: Michigan Avenue Has a New Shine,” Detroit Metro Times, February 4, 2014, 19; Craig Laban, “In Closing, a Challenge Old Original Bookbinders Is Dead,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 5, 2002, E1; Tim Whitaker, “Stephen Starr Stands Up for South Street,” Philadelphia Magazine, August 18, 2011; Michael Klein, “The Continental Turns 20,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 8, 2015, accessed September 8, 2015, http://​ www​.philly​.com/​philly/​food/​The​ _Continental​.html. 8. Ken Alan, “What’s New and Hot within the Regional Hospitality Scene,” Pottstown Mercury, December 30, 2004, 3; Scott Cronick, “Starr’s Attraction,” Press of Atlantic City, October 11, 2007, 39; Florence Fabricant, “With 420 New Seats to Fill, Restaurateur Banks on Buzz,” New York Times, January 25, 2006, F1. 9. “Why Do Foodies Love Stephen Starr?” Philadelphia Magazine, April 2010, 18–­19; Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 103–­4; Michael Vitez, “Almost 90 and a Man to Keep up With,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 13, 1987, I1; Gerald Etter, “Can Anything Be Finer than to Try a Local Diner?” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 21, 1989, FG26. 10. Thomas Hine, “Architecture: A Look at the Surge towards Loft Living,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 1982, N9; Andrew Cassel, “Unsung Army Alters Face of Center City,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 21, 1986, I1; Thomas Hine, “Eager Developers Meet Cautious City in an Old District,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 19, 1981, B2; Hank Klibanoff, “Putting the Old in Old City’s East Market Street,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1989, B1; Bernardine Watson, “The New Old City: The Recycling of a Philadelphia Neighborhood” (master’s thesis, Temple University, 1997), 104; Margaret O. Kirk, “River of Dreams,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 28, 1990, D16. 11. Watson, New Old City, 110; Russell, “Martini Madness,” 48; Sundheim,

“Entertainment for All of the Senses”



Josee Johnston and Shyon Baumann, Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape (New York: Routledge, 2009); Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American Metropolis (New York: Knopf, 2012), 137. 4. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xvii; Ben Highmore, “Bitter after Taste,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 120; Jane Speake, “Sensational Cities,” Geography 92 (Spring 2007): 3–­12, 4. 5. In his review of Starr’s now-­defunct Tangerine restaurant, restaurant critic Craig LaBan noted, “It’s an imaginary world more delicious than even Disney could create.” LaBan, “A Fanciful Taste of Morocco on Market Street,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 30, 2000, M1; Michael Klein, “A New Stage for Stephen Starr,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 3, 2000, D1; Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 208; Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 106; David Grazian, On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 31–­32; Sundheim, “Convergence and Divergence,” 53; Andrea Hansen, “FLUXscape: Remapping Philadelphia’s Postindustrial Terrain,” in Dirt, vol. 2, ed. Furján Born et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 206–­17, 208. 6. Miriam Greenberg, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (New York: Routledge, 2008); Carolyn Adams, “The Philadelphia Experience,” Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science 551 (May 1997): 222–­34, 223; Michael Klein, “A Decade Chronicling Spots That Sizzled and Fizzled,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 10, 2003, F1. 7. Stephen Nepa, “Restaurants for Adaptive Reuse in Urban Architecture,” in America Goes Green: Eco-­Friendly Culture in the United States, ed. Kim Kennedy-­ White (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­Clio Press, 2012), 214; Frank Bruni, “Keeping It

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“Convergence and Divergence,” 54; Russell, “Martini Madness,” 48; Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005), 115. 12. Florence Fabricant, “Chefs Build on Architectural Aesthetic,” Nation’s Restaurant News, May 10, 1999, 64; Klein, “A New Stage,” D1; Erin Einhorn, “The Making of a Philly Hot Spot,” Philadelphia Daily News, June 15, 1999, 59; “Starr’s Philly Favorite the Continental Restaurant Opens in Atlantic City” (SRG press release, September 2006), accessed January 26, 2015, http://​www​ .continentalac​.com/​pdfs/​acrelease​.pdf; Allan Domb, interview with the author, August 19, 2015. 13. Linda K. Harris, “Hot Spot Old City Tries to Keep Its Cool,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 24, 2003, B1; Wendy Tanaka, “Mastermind behind High-­ Concept Eateries,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 26, 2002, E1; Michael Klein, “Table Talk,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 23, 2003, F1. 14. “Philadelphia: America’s Next Great City,” National Geographic Traveler, April 2005, 34; “From Rocky to Rockin’,” USA Today, November 11, 2005, 16; Roxanne Roberts, “How Stephen Starr Made Le Diplomate the Hottest Table in Town,” Washington Post, March 4, 2014, F1; Arthur Etchells, “Five Starr Restaurants among Top 100 Independent Restaurants in Sales,” Philadelphia Magazine, accessed October 29, 2014, http://​ www​.phillymag​.com/​foobooz/​2014/​10/​ 16/​five​-starr​-restaurants​-among​-top​-100​ -independent​-restaurants​-sales; Rick Nichols, “Adventure Awaits,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 6, 2002, 21; Stephanie Farr, “Homeless Lost in the Sauce of North Broad Rebirth,” Philadelphia Daily News, October 11, 2012, 8. 15. Sarah Smith, “Response to 1990s Crime Shaped Today’s Campus,” Daily Pennsylvanian, April 18, 2014, 3; Judith Rodin, The University and Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory Tower and into the Streets (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 10; Elizabeth Berlin, “Race and Redevelopment: The Consequences of Urban Renewal in West Philadelphia, 1950–­1970” (master’s thesis, Temple University, Templana Book Collection, 2005),

22–­27; Peter Key, “Science Center’s Cambridge Vision Develops Hazy Future,” Philadelphia Business Journal, February 8, 2008, 6; Caitlin Drummond, “Penntrification: Mom-­and-­Pops Keep Feeling the Squeeze in West Philly,” Philadelphia Weekly, July 27, 2009, accessed January 27, 2015, http://​www​.philadelphiaweekly​ .com/​news​-and​-opinion/​Penntrification​ -51796462​.html​?page​=​2​&​comments​=​1​&​ showAll. 16. Mark Davis, “University City Gets a Big Boost,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 19, 1997, A1; Rodin, University and Urban Revival, 113; Davis, “University City,” A1. 17. Larry Fish, “Penn, Reexpanding, Hopes It Learned a Lesson,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 4, 1998, A1; Rodin, University and Urban Revival, 116; David J. Wallace, “Penn Planning to Build Hotel and a Commercial Hub,” New York Times, September 21, 1997, 7. 18. Neil Smith, “Which New Urbanism? The Revanchist 90s,” Perspecta 30 (1999): 98–­105; Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 224; Joel Kotkin, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 59–­61; Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2000), 14; John Kromer and Lucy Kerman, West Philadelphia Initiatives: A Case Study in Urban Revitalization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 19. Monica Geran, “Mod Pod,” Interior Design 72 (March 2001): 174–­80; Katarzyna Joanna Cwiertka, Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power, and National Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 194; Michael Klein, “A New Stage,” D1; Rockwell Group Restaurant Portfolio, accessed December 5, 2010, http://​www​ .rockwellgroup​.com. 20. “Two Ps in This Pod,” Chestnut Hill Local, April 23, 2009, 25; Ed Lordan, “Slip into a Pod for Futuristic Asian Dining,” Delaware County Daily Times, April 11, 2001, 11; Sabrina Rubin Erdely, “Judith Rodin: My Philadelphia Story,” in The Philadelphia Reader, ed. Robert Huber and Benjamin Wallace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 142–­43;

24. “Talula’s Garden Restaurant” (press release, Groundswell Design Team), accessed January 20, 2015, http://​ groundswelldesigngroup​.com/​talulas​ -garden; David Schumway, “Nature in the Apartment,” in The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, ed. Michael Bennett and David W. Teague (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 257; Derek Lee, “Farmhouse Dinner at Talula’s Table,” Saveur, December 23, 2009, 13; Ken Alan, “Talula’s Daily Grows Talula’s Family,” Philadelphia Style, accessed January 25, 2015, http://​ phillystylemag​.com/​dining/​articles/​ talulas​-daily​-stephen​-starr​-aimee​-olexy. 25. Andrew Knowlton, “The Best Restaurants in America, 2011,” Bon Appétit, September 2011, 17; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 266–­67; Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 3. 26. Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” in Architecture of the Everyday, ed. Steve Harris and Deborah Berke (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 33; Marie Dale, “Stephen Starr Aims for Hip and Playful Legacy,” Doyles­ town Intelligencer, March 11, 2005, 11D.

“Entertainment for All of the Senses”

Peder Anker, “The Ecological Colonization of Space,” Environmental History 10 (April 2005): 239–­68, 241. 21. Richard Rys, “What the Hell Happened to Old City?” Philadelphia Magazine, August 27, 2010, 30; Francesca Chapman, “Next Course,” Philadelphia Daily News, February 6, 2001, 17; Rys, “What the Hell Happened?,” 31; Linda K. Harris, “Hot Spot Old City Tries to Keep Its Cool,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 24, 2003, B1; Inga Saffron, interview with the author, March 25, 2010. 22. David Faris, “West Philadelphia Is Poised for a Restaurant Renaissance,” Philadelphia Business Journal, January 5, 2007, 9; Faris, interview, 9; Johnston and Baumann, Foodies, 101; Matt Sanderson, “Penntrification: Race, Class, and Politics in West Philadelphia,” Always Hungry, October 29, 2012, accessed January 27, 2015, https://​sattmanderson​.wordpress​ .com/​2012/​10/​29/​penntrification​-race​ -class​-and​-politics​-in​-west​-philadelphia. 23. Carlo Petrini, Slow Food: The Case for Taste (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 51; Sandy Farnan, “Talula’s Table Is Set for Diners in Kennett Square,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 1, 2007, L12.

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11 “The water flows beneath it still . . .” Remembering and Reimagining Philadelphia’s Old Dock Creek su e an n p r i nce

In late August 2008, thousands of strips of electric-­blue bungee cord were stretched across the grass near Third and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia. Covering a grassy swale southeast of Carpenters’ Hall, the taut, closely positioned strips—­about seventeen thousand feet of cord in all—­shimmered in the sunlight. Opaque when seen obliquely from afar, more transparent from close up, the cords created a surface that rippled in the wind, providing a fluid, water-­like screen for the sun-­dappled shadows moving across it (fig. 11.1).1 This beautiful simulated water referenced old Dock Creek, a stream the Lenape Indians named Coocanocon (Place of Pines) long before the arrival of European settlers. The vibrant representation of a rippling stream, created by visual artist Winifred Lutz, was the culmination of a six-­month-­long installation process that unfolded above where the stream used to flow, on what are now the grounds of Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park (INHP). A meandering body of water, Dock Creek was inextricably linked to the founding of Philadelphia and to its growth as a new colonial city. The stream, which fed a large tidal cove off the Delaware River, had long been a safe haven for native peoples and early European settlers when rough weather forced them off the open water. Salt marshes spread to the south of the cove, and the two large branches of Dock Creek, fed by smaller tributaries, flowed into it from the north and west. Historical accounts indicate that when city founder William Penn arrived in the area in 1682, he recognized the cove’s potential as the only

fig. 11.1 Winifred Lutz, Drawing Dock Creek, 2008. Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.

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significant inlet along a stretch of high cliffs that bordered the Delaware River just north of where it intersected the Schuylkill River. Surrounded by sandy beaches, it offered ample areas for docks and easy access to a navigable waterway: the future Dock Creek. Both the cove (often referred to as “The Dock”) and the creek itself were critical assets for Penn’s new city, whose center was situated on a two-­mile-­wide stretch of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. But when Penn’s surveyor-­general Thomas Holme superimposed a grid on that land in order to organize and delineate the properties purchased by Penn’s stakeholders, the creek became an anomaly. Its twists and turns did not conform to the static, rectilinear lines of a drawn grid, one that still defines the layout of Center City Philadelphia today. Thus, even though Holme’s reasoned gesture has often been correlated with the Enlightenment ideals that lay behind Penn’s settlement project, it resulted in a grid that was unable to accommodate a vital, ever-­changing waterway. Over time, the creek would interact on its own terms with the Greene Country Towne’s new citizens, unsettling both the ideational force of the Penn-­ Holme grid and the routine activities of everyday life. Tanneries, slaughterhouses, a brewery, and other industries first thrived along the creek’s banks, and settlers built homes there to enjoy its beauty and abundance: large stretches of wild plants, grassy slopes, fish-­filled waters, and plentiful whortleberries nearby.2 Over the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, waste from the industries and private homes polluted and clogged the water. By 1739, Dock Creek was described as a “receptacle for all kinds of filth from a very great part of the Town,” and it was believed to have caused smallpox and yellow fever epidemics.3 Benjamin Franklin and others proposed various ways to clean up the waterway, but by 1751, after serving as a de facto open sewer for a half century, Dock Creek still “voided many unwholesome smells,” according to the American Weekly Mercury, and had become impassible; boats could no longer go beyond a drawbridge that crossed over the creek next to the Delaware at Front Street.4 Fourteen years later, in 1765, no comprehensive plan to clean up the creek had been agreed upon, and efforts to revitalize it were abandoned. Slowly but surely it was buried underground, irrevocably altering patterns of growth and economic activity in the Europeanizing city. By 1818, it had been entirely converted into a subterranean sewer. Today, the curved path of Dock Street between Front and Third Streets—­still a disruption of the city’s grid—­remains one of the few visual reminders of the concealed creek. This chapter explores Lutz’s visually stunning artwork, which she titled Drawing Dock Creek, along with a poignant theatrical performance that evoked the waterway’s history and impact on the city over nearly three centuries. The performance, TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia, was penned by writer, naturalist, and actor Brett Keyser and performed by him at the site of the bungee cords—­the epicenter of Lutz’s visual art project. These two works were among seven projects by five artists who were commissioned by the American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum to interpret major themes

“The water flows beneath it still . . .”

in its 2008 exhibition UNDAUNTED: Five American Explorers, 1760–­2007. Collectively titled UNEXPECTED: Five Contemporary Artists at the APS Museum, the artworks offered visitors multiple ways to explore the exhibition’s historical content through a contemporary lens. Along with numerous other such exhibition projects over the course of the APS Museum’s first twelve years as a new venue in INHP, the works by Lutz and Keyser helped fulfill the mission of the new museum: to interpret APS collections; explore the intersections of history, art, and science; and relate historical themes and objects in its exhibitions to relevant issues today. As director of the APS Museum from 2000 to 2014, I was responsible for developing that mission and for implementing it in large part through commissioned artistic projects and their associated programs. Looking back on Lutz’s Drawing Dock Creek and Keyser’s TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS, I am struck by how effectively each one called forth the once-­vital waterway, uncovering its hidden existence today and simultaneously interpreting its past. This chapter examines how these two artists symbolically represented the creek and its impact on the city and people of Philadelphia, inspiring a collective memory of its ongoing, ever-­changing presence over time. I also address both works from the perspective of new materialism, attending to the power of nonhuman phenomena while calling into question romanticized notions of a lost, pristine natural world—­a recurring motif in past art and literature.5 I maintain that these artists did not present a simplistic dichotomy pitting an unspoiled utopian landscape prior to European settlement against a later cityscape destroyed by reckless human action. Rather, Lutz and Keyser invoked the vital agency of the creek itself by offering a nuanced portrayal of interaction between human and nonhuman forces over the course of its history. As Keyser stated in his project proposal, his work would “draw attention to the relationship of waterways and human civilization, and to how each is changed by the other in both subtle and dramatic ways.”6 Further, in the course of their outdoor work, the artists themselves encountered and embraced vital forces and rhythms of nature as an integral part of their art, whether it was the rain that insistently effaced Lutz’s drawn marks or the setting sun that determined the time of Keyser’s performances.

Winifred Lutz, Drawing Dock Creek The initial inspiration for a Dock Creek project emerged from one section of the UNDAUNTED exhibition.7 That section explored the pioneering fieldwork of Ruth Patrick, a remarkable twentieth-­century scientist who studied single-­celled algae called diatoms. Patrick discovered that diatoms could be used to track the pollution levels in freshwater rivers and streams, and she also invented the toilet-­ float diatometer—­an ingenious mechanical device that afforded her the ability to collect thousands of diatoms underwater quickly and efficiently. Though Patrick began her career in the 1930s as a volunteer for eleven years—­because she was a woman—­she was ultimately hired by the Academy of Natural Sciences

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of Philadelphia (now of Drexel University) and went on to lead hundreds of researchers in collecting and analyzing data. Her extensive research resulted in the then startling discovery that biodiversity was essential to the health of a freshwater ecosystem and that the imprint of human activity could be measured by the degree of complexity in that system. This made her among the first to assert that the health of an ecosystem could best be judged by the variety of species it supports. Her theory became known as the Patrick Principle, for which Patrick ultimately received the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton in 1996.8 Linking Patrick’s important work in assessing the pollution levels of fresh waterways to the history of Dock Creek seemed especially fitting for the APS Museum, as Patrick was not only a Philadelphian but also a member of the APS. Further, the creek was a presence in the heart of Philadelphia when the APS was founded in 1743, and Philosophical Hall, the society’s original building, is situated on Fifth Street between Walnut and Chestnut Streets, an area where the northwest branch of Dock Creek flowed. Benjamin Franklin, founder and first president of the APS, was deeply involved in the mid-­eighteenth-­century debates over cleaning up the stream’s pollution. In his proposition for creating the APS, which he called “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in North America,” he discussed the need for land drainage techniques and a better understanding of water-­pumping machinery.9 Further, in a 1739 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, he had already advocated moving the tanneries and slaughterhouses away from Dock Creek in a proposal that was, in his words, “a modest Attempt to deliver a great Number of Tradesmen from being poisoned by a few, and restore to them the liberty of breathing freely in their own homes.”10 As noted above, however, no consensus was reached about how to clean up the creek or about who should be responsible—­industries, private property owners, or city government. The burial of the creek became inevitable. In commissioning the artistic projects of Lutz and Keyser, the APS Museum sought to bring Dock Creek to life again and instill its story in the imagination of tourists and Philadelphians, especially those who traverse the Park on a regular basis. Lutz’s symbolic “resurrection” of the creek, we hoped, would provoke a new awareness in passersby of what was hidden below their feet. In seeing their surroundings differently and in perusing the Patrick section of the exhibition, they would be able to link the history of Dock Creek to a distinguished Philadelphia scientist whose early work on biodiversity in fresh waterways was, and still is, all too little known. More specifically, Lutz’s work, seen in relation to Patrick’s discoveries, would encourage visitors to understand the slow “burial” of the creek over time as the result of a polluting process that caused a dramatic decrease in biodiversity. Lutz began her work by conducting considerable research on the history of Dock Creek, using archival sources as well as secondary ones, to determine exactly where the creek had flowed. She developed and presented a detailed proposal that included a hand-­drawn map and a work plan for marking the creek’s

fig. 11.2 Babi Hammond, map of Drawing Dock Creek and surrounding historic district, 2008. American Philosophical Society Museum, Philadelphia.

“The water flows beneath it still . . .”

path. Although the initial idea was to revitalize all the places where the stream had once flowed, the limitations imposed by cost and installation time rendered that plan unfeasible. It was agreed that the “drawing” of the creek would encompass a two-block area of the park bounded on the north and south by Chestnut and Walnut Streets, respectively, and on the east and west by Third and Fifth Streets (fig. 11.2). The installation would start from the intersection of what is now Dock Street and Third. From there, moving upstream, it would proceed to the site of the creek’s divergence into two tributaries and then follow the path of the southern branch to its intersection with Walnut Street and that of the northern branch to its nexus with Chestnut Street. After settling on this plan, the museum sought approval from INHP to carry out the project on federal land, at which point then superintendent Dennis Reidenbach readily agreed, recognizing its dynamic potential to reanimate the site: “We are very excited about this proposition as it comes at a time when we are transitioning our use of the landscapes as benign settings for our historic buildings to actively interpreted areas.”11 Funding was secured from the Heritage Philadelphia Program of

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the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage for Lutz’s projects as well as for four of the six other UNEXPECTED initiatives.12 Lutz’s concept for the work was grounded in the process and act of drawing by hand—but she would be drawing on outdoor surfaces such as grass, brick sidewalk, and cobble rather than on paper, and the markings would be made with eco-friendly soccer-field paints and whitewash rather than with pencil, charcoal, or ink. Beginning in March 2008, Lutz and her assistants traced the path of the stream over the two-block area (fig. 11.3). Though often delayed by inclement weather that spring, they persisted, and pedestrians often stopped to watch the long fluid lines being drawn on a variety of ground surfaces. In areas where paint and whitewash were applied to the lawn, the blades of the grass were allowed to grow tall, reinforcing the white markings. Their swaying in the breeze emulated the buried waterway’s movement through the city. Throughout the installation of her project, Lutz adapted to the unpredictability of rain and foot traffic, which gradually but relentlessly washed away the markings. She and her crew refreshed them repeatedly over a six-month period as needed. The rain’s persistent effacing of the drawn whitewash lines, followed by a repetitious and equally persistent remaking of the marks, embodied a give-and-take between human and nonhuman forces. At the end of the project, left to the whims of the outdoor environment and human footsteps, the white marks gradually disappeared over time. Lutz’s process, from start to finish, provided a material analogy to the slow but inexorable historical erasure of the creek—the very erasure that her project had worked to counteract, if only for a short period. In August, for the culmination of her work, the artist installed the blue bungee cords next to where the fork of the creek had been, near Carpenters’

fig. 11.3 Winifred Lutz, Drawing Dock Creek, 2008. Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.

“The water flows beneath it still . . .”

Hall and the First National Bank. The cords were stretched over what was, and still is, an artificially reconstructed swale—­a restoration created by INHP in the late 1940s and 1950s to serve as a reminder of the once lively waterway. The swale’s re-­creation, part of the much larger project of creating a national park within the boundaries of an established urban setting, included the demolition of all built structures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries over several blocks—­homes, businesses, parking lots, and the like.13 Another change in Lutz’s original conception occurred as she interacted with the terrain, the weather, and the public. She had originally planned to include cast concrete sculptures of bones, pig heads, fish, casks, and human debris in the grass. These objects, representing the accumulation of organic and other waste that had befouled Dock Creek in the eighteenth century, were intended to expand upon the interpretation of biodiversity as articulated by Patrick. They would have referenced the very mix of human and other forces that lay behind the decrease of species in the waterway. Lutz ultimately abandoned this idea, however, because of high production costs and concerns about theft and vandalism. Like the effacing of the whitewash marks, this change in plans demonstrated the artist’s agility in adjusting to the realities of an outdoor city landscape that was open at all hours to the unpredictable effects of weather and human activity—­ecological forces that became apparent during her working process.

Brett Keyser, TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia Once Lutz’s project was under way, I was eager to find more ways to interpret Dock Creek, and thus the APS Museum commissioned performance artist Brett Keyser of Nightjar Apothecary to write, perform, and produce a work that would elaborate on the history of the waterway and weave contemporary notions of ecology into that historical fabric. The result of this commission was TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia, which ran September 5–­27 as part of the 2008 Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival. It was performed at the site of the blue bungee cords, using Lutz’s artwork as the stage set (fig. 11.4). “Coocanocon, Coocanocon, Coocanocon,” chanted the solo character (Keyser) in his prologue to the outdoor performance, all the while mimicking the movement of a rower in a boat as the audience gathered on the “shore” of the bungee cords. Though in Euro-­American historical garb, Keyser would continue to interject an occasional “Coocanocon” throughout the narrative as an acknowledgment of the relationship between Native Americans and the creek—­even though few documented details about that rapport are known. His repeated insertion of this Lenape name produced a hybrid statement that gave voice to all such forgotten cultural associations with the waterway. At two minutes before sunset each evening, Keyser’s partly sung, partly spoken storyline began:

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fig. 11.4 Brett Keyser, TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia, 2008. Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.

Each day the same Ha le o Ha le o The sun rises and sets Ha le o Ha le o Upon the acts of men and women . . . Children, dogs, horses . . . Insects Bacteria The whole eukaryote array14

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Keyser decided to use the sunset to determine the beginning of the performance, not only because the action occurs at night, but also because, as he wrote in the proposal he submitted, “so often nature is bent to the service of human requirements. The Watered Ground [his working title at the time of the proposal] will symbolically nod in the other direction by the minor inconvenience of tying each performance’s start time to the local setting of the sun and what is known as ‘civil twilight.’”15 He also noted that his choice to start the performance at a different time every night, as determined by the sun, would heighten the awareness of our oft-­made “distinction between natural cycles and the clockwork universe of our [human] ‘construction.’” Over the course of the narrative, Keyser’s character slowly reveals himself to be an imaginary and apparently dream-­induced “fisher man” in a rowboat, dredging up the lost souls of those who drowned in Dock Creek or lost their lives near where it once flowed. The inspiration for this conceit—­a “fisher man” whose obsessive actions propel the storyline—­emerged from Keyser’s archival research, in which he read about a little girl who fell from the Chestnut Street bridge and drowned in

“The water flows beneath it still . . .”

the creek in the 1700s. Her death provides the pretext for the fisher man’s endless nocturnal searching in the water, which in turn leads to his discovery of other lost souls whose stories are linked to the history of the creek over nearly three centuries. In telling their stories, the narrative—­like that of a haunting, irrepressible dream—­ transcends the rational constraints of time and place, moving seamlessly between history and reflection, the actual and the imagined, the human and the nonhuman. The fisher man gives the name Eliza to the little girl who drowned on Chestnut Street. Overtaken by love and loss, he becomes obsessed by his desire to find her: “Each night the same / I set out in my little boat to look for her / Calling her name / Eliza.” Until he locates her, he says, “I can’t go home, she is my home, ever out in front of me / And so have I become the fisher man.” His search for her unfolds after sunset and continues throughout the night, every night. Thus the night itself functions as a major player in the performance, as both the natural force that induces the fisher man’s hallucinatory dreams and the setting in which they occur. He cannot escape its power: And no matter what we do Ha le o Ha le o [Sung] Le o Ha le o Try though we might Le o Ha le o Technology can threaten Ha le o Ha le o Ha le o But never Stop The night The audience is never able to decipher Eliza’s exact relationship to the fisher man, and it is impossible to locate him in any one time period. But he has been looking for her for so long that his memory begins to fail: “Is she my daughter or my beloved sister, or my wife, my love, my lover?” Whatever the case, he was haunted by an obsession to find her. Yet for much of the narrative, he only discovers and dredges up other lost souls, along with waste and debris. This dredging emphasizes an illusory commingling of human souls and bodies with all the other kinds of “civic effluvia” delineated in Keyser’s title.16 The separation of the word “fisherman” into “fisher” and “man,” both in the script and through an exaggerated pause between the two words at the beginning of his performance, calls attention to another crucial aspect of the narrative. First, it echoes Christ’s calling of the apostles Peter and Andrew to become “fishers of men,” thus implying an otherworldly realm of souls.17 And, as in the Biblical reference, it disengages our automatic association of the word “fisherman” with someone who catches fish—­a physical act—­and instead encourages a metaphysical reading. Finally, in repeatedly evoking the mental and emotional act of soul-­searching as well as the desire for a connection to other (“lost”) souls, Keyser’s narrative highlights the forces of the human psyche that lie behind the fisher man’s obsessive need to search.

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Over the course of the performance, the ever-­mounting presence of such forces—­all evoked by the night—­drives the action and immerses the fisher man in the reality of the murky creek and all that it contains: industrial and domestic waste; parts of dead animals; and most poignantly, the dead humans and their souls: The poling of what sinks and floats The drowned decay and horns of goats An otherworldly passage over waters green and brown The dead. I fish them up and hear their tales of life. Listen, and you will hear them, too. Though all “the dead” mentioned in the performance, except for Eliza, are fictional, they serve as reference points for different periods of urban development around Dock Creek. The fisher man’s first “lost soul,” for instance, is that of a carpenter who drowned in 1728, causing the fisher man to reflect on the dead man’s profession, which played a major role in transforming the eighteenth-­ century landscape around the creek: A wilderness becoming property, In defiance of topography, FLATTENED, That upon it we may build

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From this point on, the poetic script, still propelled by the fisher man’s obsessive search for his beloved, becomes a vehicle for commentary on the human, ecological, technological, and economic forces that shaped Dock Creek’s history. The story of one Mr. Henry, owner of a tannery along the creek in the eighteenth century, for instance, calls forth a sweeping summary of pollution along a waterway “that once fed the Lenape, seduced the Swedes and then the Dutch and later Father Penn himself to settle down beside her waters. . . . bright waters that have of late been called ‘the common sink,’” receiving “Carcasses. . . . Carrion and Filth of various kinds from slaughterhouses, tanneries, and homes.” Another man proposes a solution, according to the fisher man: “Not Ben Franklin . . . but an eminent philosopher named Zed, who was hooked by me one night instead.” Zed recommends burying the creek to get it “out of sight . . . / And soundly out of mind.” Despite the creek’s gradual burial underground, the fisher man’s search takes him across the centuries as he continues to find the bodies of others whose fate was connected to the “fetid Dock Creek water.” He notes that even after the creek was converted into a sewer, people continued to lose their lives: one trampled by a horse in Dock Street (Caroline McCartney, 1853), and one killed by a gunshot wound (Timothy Redlawn, 1908). Locating these incidents in their respective time periods, the fisher man’s rambling narration rapidly moves from the mid-­nineteenth to the mid-­twentieth century, dramatizing the changing legal

Sewers collapse and are rebuilt again Buildings fly into the heavens Houses are torn down, replaced by factories Factories torn down replaced by parking lots Parking lots give way at last to verdant grass and trees And the Department of Interior [referring to INHP] designates Historic Landmarks.

“The water flows beneath it still . . .”

domains imposed on the land—­residential versus commercial, private versus public, city versus federal:

Interspersed throughout these histories of land management and his tales of dredged souls are the fisher man’s reflections upon the ecological conundrums posed by “our collective residue.” At one point he speaks of the human tendency to close its eyes to this residue “and flush it down again”: Just a flaw in our design perhaps, another puzzle to undo Take a pipe wrench to the taps and stop the water coming through For with all of our technology there’s really nothing we can’t do (Oh yes, I can see it now . . .) A self-­composting human as the next big fashion trend Here the fisher man conjures a solution of his own: an intriguing but disconcerting image of a self-­composting human—­one that unsettles our usual distinction between ourselves and the nonhuman waste we compost. He then returns to recounting tragedies that occurred near where Dock Creek once flowed: Joseph Yang’s fall from a scaffold in 1964 and a car accident in which a woman named Liz was killed in 2008 on Walnut Street “at the Fourth Street inlet.” This latter incident precipitates a crisis—­a delusional moment near the end of the performance when the fisher man commingles the names “Liz” and “Eliza.” Believing he has found his beloved at the site of the accident, he is reunited with her soul. As “fisher” and “man,” he is himself then washed by rain down “the old storm drain,” becoming one with the waters and debris of Dock Creek (fig. 11.5). Even after uniting with Eliza and the creek, the fisher man continues his narrative, once again evoking how the girl’s presence constitutes his “home”: Each night the same I set out in my little boat . . . She is my home Not a house Or a hill Or memories of the land For the land changes hands Hands change its face

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fig. 11.5 Brett Keyser, TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia, 2008. Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.

The moon is rising The color of tallow The years are flying The nightjar wailing Wikweko The place where something ends And something else takes over There is no purely technological solution for love or for loss.

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This sudden, straightforward declaration, spoken in a different, more rational voice, interrupts the trance-­like, poetic qualities of the narrative. Its message is crucial to understanding the thrust of Keyser’s script as it proclaims the impotence of technology when up against the bewildering depths of human consciousness, whose force in the guise of the fisher man’s obsessive search blooms during the night, generating endless, immersive, and almost hallucinatory connections to people and places, past and present. The performance ends with “The Parting Glass”—­a toast addressed to the audience in the here and now. As with the statement about technology above, it could be in the voice of either the fisher man or the storyteller (Keyser). Whatever the case, the dreamlike imagery pulses with the endless, interlocking rhythms of human and nonhuman experience:

“The water flows beneath it still . . .”

When you turn the tap to pour a drink, Pour a drink for me. After all that has happened to the land The water flows beneath it still From its source beneath the flattened hill . . . And from the grates it shatters down In holes through our impermeable ground Pour me another round Around, a round in the pouring rain With the gutter full for the old storm drain. I have quoted at length here from Keyser’s script of TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS because it speaks so well for itself, eloquently and metaphorically embody­ ing the ecological give-­and-­take between the creek and the people, imaginary and real, who lived and died along its shores. The rhythmic cadences of the text express the energies of both the fisher man’s psyche and the human and nonhuman “refuse” he discovers. Though these energies intermingle, each one is in turn engulfed by the force of the other, over and over again. In an introductory panel text for the UNDAUNTED exhibition, I wrote, “One of the show’s surprising revelations is that exploration never ends. Peoples, places, and things—­and our ideas and questions about them—­are always changing and always ready to be explored again.” This statement, which acknowledges the ever-­shifting symbiotic relationship of human thought and activity to the nonhuman vitality inherent in places and things, seems as relevant to ecology as it is to exploration. Keyser’s conceit of the fisher man, however, presents a mode of ecological exploration that also suggests memory, emotion, and imagination as primary human forces that connect us to the world. His conjuring and commingling of those energies with dirty water, regulated land, dead bodies, and haunting souls unsettle existing ways of thinking about ecological interactions and thus provoke new questions. Both Lutz’s Drawing Dock Creek and Keyser’s TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS transformed historical material into consummate works of art that also serve as effective examples of artistic expression bringing Philadelphia’s urban environmental history to life. Lutz’s visual poetry and Keyser’s poetic storytelling will continue to resonate as material and symbolic representations of the ever-­unfinished process of remembering and reimagining the vitality and significance of Dock Creek.

notes 1. I would like to thank Lyndsey Rago Claro and Tara McGowan, curatorial research associates at the APS Museum, for their assistance in documenting and editing the first draft of this text, and I

am also deeply grateful to Laura Turner Igoe and Alan Braddock and for their insightful comments on the final draft. 2. John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Time: Being a

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Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants. . . , vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Elijah Thomas, 1857). This first volume of the Annals contains numerous descriptions of the landscape surrounding the cove and the creek. 3. American Weekly Mercury, August 9–­16, 1739, cited in Michael McMahon, “‘Publick Service’ versus ‘Mans Properties’: Dock Creek and the Origins of Urban Technology in Eighteenth-­Century Philadelphia,” in Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850, ed. Judith A. McGaw (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 127–­28. McMahon offers a detailed account of the arguments that occurred over the creek’s pollution. 4. Ibid., 127. 5. This longing for unspoiled nature was especially prominent during the Romantic movement, but throughout Western history many authors, artists, and others have subscribed to some version of this notion. See, for example, Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); Richard Heinberg, Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1989); A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935); Susan Snyder, Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Mark Keay, William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories during the Industrial Revolution in England, 1750–­1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 6. Brett Keyser, “Proposal to the APS for a Dock Creek Performance” (APS Museum files, 2008). 7. I am especially indebted to Mary Teeling, who, as our curator of museum education at the time, proposed the idea for a Dock Creek project, out of which grew not only Lutz’s and Keyser’s projects but also many other creative programs such as Water Walk Weekend and a partnership with the Schuylkill River Heritage Area for the 2008 Schuylkill River Sojourn. I also want to thank Ellen Owens, whose work in implementing Lutz’s work was exemplary. I am grateful to the many

staff members who contributed several years to the development and implementation of both projects discussed here, and to them I offer my heartfelt thanks. Finally, my interpretation of the works, though informed by my association with artists during both their development and their execution, are entirely my own. 8. See Ruth Patrick, “Some Diatoms of the Great Salt Lake,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 63, no. 3 (March 1936): 157–­ 66; Ruth Patrick and Dennis Strawbridge, “Variation in the Structure of Natural Diatom Communities,” American Naturalist 97, no. 892 (January–­February 1963): 51–­57; Ruth Patrick, “A Proposed Biological Measure of Stream Conditions, Based on a Survey of the Conestoga Basin, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 101 (1949): 277–­95; R. Patrick and C. W. Reimer, The Diatoms of the United States, vols. 1–­2 (Philadelphia: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1966, 1975). 9. Benjamin Franklin, “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in North America,” in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree and Whitfield J. Bell Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:381. Franklin, along with some of his friends, founded the society for the purpose of “promoting useful knowledge,” and this remains its mission today. The word philosophical was used because Franklin and other scientifically inclined luminaries of the eighteenth century called themselves natural philosophers. Though today they would be called scientists, the word philosophical remains in the society’s name. 10. Pennsylvania Gazette, September 6, 1739, 1. 11. Dennis Reidenbach, letter to Sue Ann Prince, December 8, 2006. 12. Marketing support was also received for the four projects from the Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative (PCMI). Both HPP and PCMI are administered by the University of the Arts. 13. Today, given the awareness of historical preservation, such a blatant, monumental act of historical erasure in Center City Philadelphia would be strongly contested. Priorities at the time, however, were to

membrane-­bound nucleus. “Eukaryote,” Biology Online, accessed February 21, 2015, http://​www​.biology​-online​.org/​ dictionary/​Eukaryote. Unless otherwise specified, all quotes in this section are from Brett Keyser, TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia (unpublished performance script, collection of the artist). 15. Keyser wrote, “‘Civil twilight,’ as defined by the U.S. Naval Observatory, ends in the evening when the center of the Sun is geometrically 6 degrees below the horizon. It is the limit at which twilight illumination is sufficient, under good weather conditions, for terrestrial objects to be clearly distinguished.” Keyser, “Proposal to the APS for a Dock Creek Performance.” 16. An excerpt from a 1739 article in Philadelphia’s American Weekly Mercury, which described the unpopularity of the city’s tanneries along Dock Creek, inspired Keyser’s title: “But when the Tann, Horns, Dead Dogs, Country People losing their Dogs, Tanners Dogs biting People, a Dog mangled, an other rescu’d from a Slaughter-­House, and such like, were urg’d before that Hon House as Reasons for Removing the Tanners out of Town, it was not thought necessary by them to reply to what, in their Opinion, was so impertinent to the Point.” American Weekly Mercury, August 16, 1739, 1. 17. “[Jesus] saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And He said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’” Matthew 4:18–­19 (English Standard Version).

“The water flows beneath it still . . .”

clear a space for a federal park mandated by Congress and provide a setting for two icons of American history—­the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. Supporters, including city, state, and federal governments, believed it would revitalize the area and enhance tourism in Philadelphia. A brief outline of the destruction and rebuilding of the area that is now INHP is as follows: In 1946, Governor Edward Martin approved $3 million for the acquisition of property and for demolition work that would allow for the construction of Independence Mall. President Harry S. Truman signed Public Law 795–­80th Congress two years later, establishing Independence National Historical Park. INHP began administration of the land by 1950 and the park purchased and demolished buildings over the next eight years to make way for improvements. In 1967, the construction of the Independence Mall was deemed complete. For more information, see William E. Lingelbach, “Old Philadelphia: Redevelopment and Conservation,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93, no. 2 (May 16, 1949): 179–­207; William E. Lingelbach, “Philadelphia and the Conservation of the National Heritage,” Pennsylvania History 20, no. 4 (October 1953): 339–­56; Charles E. Peterson, “The Independence National Historical Park Project,” in The Independence National Historical Park and Independence Mall in Historic Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Independence Hall Association, 1951), 21–­28. 14. Eukaryotes are single-­celled or multicellular organisms—­whether animals, plants, or fungi—­whose cell contains a distinct,

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12 Remapping Philadelphia’s Postindustrial Terrain A Network in Flux an drea l . m. h a nsen

In the case of the ruin, the fact that life with its wealth and its changes once dwelled here constitutes an immediately perceived presence. The ruin creates the present form of a past life, not according to the contents or remnants of that life, but according to its past as such. —­g eo r g s i m m el , The Ruin ( 1 9 1 1 ) Humans have a longstanding fascination with ruins and decay, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident today than in the cult status bestowed upon the modern urban ruin in recent years. Thanks to seductive photographic works such as Camilo Vergara’s American Ruins, as well as the rise of urban exploration (“urbex”) and its prolific documentation on photoblogging platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr, the term “ruin porn” has been added to the cultural lexicon. Along with it comes a critical backlash against the sometimes exploitative nature of this material. For instance, Americans watched news reports of Detroit’s bankruptcy filing in 2013—­almost always coupled with picturesque shots of cavernous abandoned buildings or row after row of abandoned or demolished homes—­with the kind of morbid fascination typically reserved for politics and reality television.

Remapping Philadelphia’s Postindustrial Terrain

To simply fixate on the aesthetics of these leftover spaces belies the details and complexity of their histories, many of which are fundamentally personal in nature. At the same time, it is difficult to avoid romanticizing ruins and, in so doing, imbuing them with a reverence that they did not necessarily inspire in their original form. As the architectural historian Ken Worpole explains, “Ruins, like skeletons, are . . . emblematic of a lost whole, whether it is a building, a body or an organic society. They represent the passage of time, decay and absence as much as physical presence: roofless and windowless creaking structures are about worlds and lives through which the winds now blow.”1 Ruins, of course, are imbued with far more complex emotions than reverence alone. Even the term ruin is itself highly loaded. Deriving from the Latin ruina, meaning “a collapse, a rushing down, a tumbling down,”2 a sense of catastrophic downfall is inextricable from the word. And while this may be fitting for ancient ruins and the empires that built them, we must tread carefully when speaking of modern abandoned structures and vacant lots as ruins. What then, shall we call these vestiges of industrial globalization? Lars Lerup, in his 1995 essay “Stim & Dross,” describes these spaces as dross, the “ignored, undervalued, unfortunate economic residues of the metropolitan machine,” which are the antipodes to the stim, or points of urban stimulation “pinned in place by machines and human events.”3 Alan Berger builds upon this definition of dross in his book Drosscape in order to formulate a design response, formalizing dross as “the landscape leftovers, or waste landscapes, typically found in-­between the stims and undervalued for many reasons (pollution, vacancy, natural conditions unsuitable for building, unprofitability, etc.).”4 Rem Koolhaas, meanwhile, addresses the man-made nature of these spaces more directly, naming them junkspace—­“the residue mankind leaves on the planet . . . or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fall-­out.”5 Delving deeper, Koolhaas notes that this junkspace left by modern human beings fails to measure up to the historical ruins of our ancient predecessors (“We do not leave Pyramids”).6 In another 1995 essay, Spanish architect Ignasi de Solà-­Morales Rubió borrowed the French expression terrain vague to describe these spaces within the context of aerial urban photography, noting that terrain has a more urban connotation in French than in English, and that vague derives in part from the German vagr-­wogue, meaning sea swell or waves on water, and as such contains an inference about “movement, oscillation, instability, fluctuation.”7 However, de Solà-­Morales Rubió notes that vague also carries the same Latin root as the English word vacant—­empty, unoccupied, free, available, unengaged. When the two words are joined together, the resultant term terrain vague becomes a powerful descriptor for the vast swaths of underused, neglected, or unprogrammed spaces we find in cities, because it alone describes these spaces not as wastelands or vestiges but as spaces of potential. For this reason, I prefer this term over other neologisms. Despite its many pitfalls, the residue of urbanization is not devoid of value, and while their terminology may have

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some negative connotations, Lerup, Berger, and Koolhaas all agree with de Solà-­Morales Rubió: the spaces themselves present a remarkable opportunity. I agree, and while this chapter is not intended to offer a universal approach to terrain vague such as Berger and Koolhaas set forth, I will offer a hypothetical design proposal for Philadelphia that, with some modifications, could easily extend to many other cities.

The Philadelphia Story From the confines of central Philadelphia, one sees a dynamic and growing city marked by all the signs of urban resurgence: cranes raising modern skyscrapers, pedestrian-­friendly streets and bustling storefronts, freshly painted bike lanes and Indego bike-­share hubs, lush parkland and streetscapes, and for-­sale and for-­rent signs dotting the windows of luxury condominiums and quaint townhomes. For all that, however, many sectors of the city are still struggling greatly to emerge from the crisis of deindustrialization and white flight. Like many rust-­belt cities, Philadelphia experienced dramatic change and decline in the twentieth century, as technological advances made much of the city’s nineteenth-­century industrial fabric obsolete and many city-­dwellers fled to the suburbs. This white flight left a trail of abandoned buildings and neglected lots in its wake, and while cities such as Seattle and New York have capitalized on such industrial properties, converting them into fashionable loft dwellings and picturesque urban parks, Philadelphia’s postindustrial terrain vague is somewhat different, and the response to it should be, too. Much of the fabric outside Center City and University City consists of either vast grids of row housing or large, irregularly shaped industrial sites and related infrastructure in various states of disuse due to technology-­induced obsolescence. These sites, like all industrial sites, are inherently driven by the logistics of transportation, energy, and waste, and as such form a natural network linked by roads, rail, utility corridors, and waterways. Because these sites already form a network, they are an ideal starting point from which to consider a citywide investigation into repurposing sites that typically fall into a challenging gray area of development. Neglected industrial corridors present multiple challenges, and their redevelopment is fundamentally different from and usually more costly than greenfield development. Vacant or underused industrial sites are often contaminated, typically at least partially paved, and/or possess buildings or other structures that often have significant structural issues. Before construction can begin, these sites must be remediated to remove or cap soil and groundwater contaminants, demolish paved surfaces and other structures, and rehabilitate structures intended to be repurposed, making demolition and remediation by standard measures a substantial component of the development budget. Even so, addressing these obsolete urban sites has become more pressing in recent years for economic reasons, as they can take up valuable developable space in city centers,

Proposal: From Industrial Corridor to Green Network In considering the innate challenges of redeveloping industrial sites, one of the most important considerations is the fact that these sites are so often adjacent to one another and to various types of connective tissue (rail and utility corridors, highways, and waterways, etc.). The connectivity of these properties means that redevelopment can benefit greatly from economies of scale. I therefore present a proposal that is rooted in a citywide strategy of distributed and networked development, which relies heavily on public-­private partnership at a range of scales. I call this proposal the Flux Network: flux for its ability to adapt to change (flux), and network for the way in which it links disconnected properties and its reliance on the collaboration, or net work, of many different public and private entities. Ultimately, the Flux Network can serve as a catalyst to engage many disparate parties within Philadelphia’s municipal government in a much-­needed dialogue on how to best approach the city’s terrain vague—­both active and vacant industrial properties, as well as their associated infrastructure. By following the principles set forth in the Flux Network, these public partnerships will be better able to reuse vacant land and landmark buildings adaptively, creatively, and sustainably at significant cost savings. And while implementation always presents challenges beyond what can be predicted in a conceptual scenario, this proposal enables Philadelphia to reclaim space in its urban centers, reconnect areas divided by the barrier of vacancy, introduce sorely needed resources into gaps in the urban fabric, and reframe the historical and aesthetic value of Philadelphia’s industrial past so that it can be appreciated for its vitality rather than neglected and left for dead. The basic idea of the Flux Network is to join neglected industrial corridors with Philadelphia’s strong existing green space network to create a system of thick landscape infrastructure. Lack of pedestrian access, poor visibility, accumulated debris and garbage, inhospitable conditions, and general decrepitude currently inhibit network proliferation along these corridors, but by remediating individual problem areas and reprogramming the corridors for production, transit, and recreation, the city can incubate smart growth in its neglected districts. Over time, these corridors can become catalytic, productive ribbons with flexible hybrid uses that will course life through long-­dormant veins of the city. Within this network, formerly neglected and disconnected sites acquire and assert new life as material agents that can dynamically respond to the needs of an urban environment in flux. The Flux Network operates under the following assumptions: 1. Allowing abandoned structures and vacant lots to remain unmonitored in their ruinous state is undesirable due to crime, vagrancy, and physical safety hazards.

Remapping Philadelphia’s Postindustrial Terrain

consume city resources while not producing property tax revenue, and often attract crime (thereby reducing property value).

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2. That said, demolishing the structures or fundamentally changing the character of unique sites destroys a part of Philadelphia’s architectural, cultural, and environmental history. Moreover, completely leveling these sites tends to be economically prohibitive because of the extensive mitigation processes involved. 3. Philadelphia, therefore, needs a comprehensive solution that allows industrial sites to remain at least partially intact. This approach, however, requires a rebranding of postindustrial sites to frame them not as liabilities but as material assets. By material assets, I refer of course to the economic potential of a networked and transformed site but also quite literally to the site’s physical material (e.g., its buildings and surfaces, smokestacks and piers, docks and machinery, overgrowth and patinas, etc.) that provide character as well as historical cues to the site’s or the region’s socioenvironmental history and past physical states. The Flux Network follows two conceptual approaches to express these material histories—­in spirit if not always in form or function—­both of which require cognizance of time periods outside of the site’s immediate frame of reference: 1. Look to the past by incorporating ruins into a new environment that expresses memory and history, whether canonical or vernacular. 2. Look to the future by anticipating the process of ruination to trace the physical transformations that will occur over a building’s lifespan. Both approaches take up the pervasiveness of change, the continuity of time, and the submission to decay that is construed as potentially lively and advantageous, rather than strictly inanimate and detrimental. The advantage of intentionally incorporating decomposition and weathering into design is that it grants the building or landscape the integrated flexibility to change over time. By embracing these inevitable processes, the Flux Network recognizes and facilitates the dynamism of buildings without actually making them move. In contrast to physical dynamism expressed through complicated mechanization, the Flux Network expresses temporal dynamism, both cyclical and accumulated. Not only is this form of transition easier to construct and maintain, but due to its variety and unpredictability, it is far more interesting.

Site as Continuum

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It is impossible to reinterpret and readapt Philadelphia’s terrain vague without first gaining a thorough understanding of its history, both as a conglomeration of individual sites and as a larger part of the Philadelphia story. More specifically, a site’s history cannot be limited to its original state, but rather is marked by a series of past, present, and future events. Likewise, a site’s history includes both a written (or

Remapping Philadelphia’s Postindustrial Terrain

anecdotal) record of attitudes and perceptions and a physical record of the changing contours of the building, landscape, and surrounding urban fabric. This archive of history, space, and culture regarding the site and its surroundings is critical, as it forms a contextual framework from which to approach a design strategy. The Flux Network approaches such contexts as generative continua that reflect the changing nature of a site over time—­the temporal spectrum of the site’s history, the fluctuating space of the site and its surrounding infrastructure, or the changing dynamics of the city’s demographics and social values, for instance. By seeing context as the framework for a design strategy, the project is able to respond fluidly to the dynamic needs of a contemporary city in flux. Furthermore, the system ensures responsiveness by avoiding the tendency to fetishize a frozen moment in the site’s past, present, or future—­instead reflecting a spectrum of temporal states. By focusing on making both functional and formal transitions that transcend linear time, the system becomes richer as it weaves together a tapestry of diurnal, seasonal, and historic gradients.

From Citywide Network to Site Design In the spirit of this tapestry of gradients, the Flux Network is intended to operate simultaneously along a gradient of scales ranging from citywide strategy to local site to hyperlocal material detail. Therefore, I will dive more deeply into three case study sites within the city in order to expound upon the potential of the proposal. Rather than selecting three sites at random, I developed a decision tool in order to prioritize sites by a range of factors. This tool is composed of a series of weighted mappings that build upon the “overlay method” originally developed by Ian McHarg, in which maps of singular factors were printed on transparencies and overlaid such that darker areas identified zones of higher suitability. For the Flux Network, this process was digitized, and weights were assigned to each layer for greater specificity. For instance, for the purpose of site selection, I mapped various federal, state, and local incentive programs; redevelopment districts; historic districts; and population change within Philadelphia (fig. 12.1). To further constrain the site selection, it was important that each site be located along an infrastructural corridor, ideally with each corridor having a different use and physical structure. This process resulted in the identification of three territories for design investigation: the Amtrak Northeast Corridor, located along an at-­grade and occasionally sub-­grade railroad; the Reading Viaduct Corridor, located along the raised and abandoned Reading Railroad train trestle; and the Port Richmond/I-­95 Corridor, sandwiched between the elevated I-­95 highway and the Delaware River. These three test cases are intended to show a range of design possibilities rather than prescribing a singular solution. More specifically, the designs present three ways in which neighborhood transformation could be catalyzed by landscape infrastructure, with an emphasis on bioremediation of contaminated sites,



a gre e ne country tow ne

fig. 12.1 Andrea L. M. Hansen, The Flux Network: Site Prioritization Mapping, 2010.

urban agriculture, and partnerships among the City of Philadelphia, developers, and community stakeholders. The first territory within the Flux Network proposes a significant initial public investment on a productive infrastructural park in order to incubate private development, especially in rehabilitating the architecturally significant warehouses and brownfield lots in the district. The plan envisions affordable housing, office space for locally owned businesses, and urban agriculture fields. Its main feature is an elevated cap park, or constructed green space, that spans over the active Amtrak rail line to “stitch” together the North Philadelphia and Fairhill neighborhoods. In partnership with the federal Rails-­to-­Trails program, the cap park and adjacent vacant parcels provide recreational space that will eventually become part of a regional trail system following the proposed Northeast Corridor High-­Speed Rail project. In addition, the adjacent lots will be incentivized for dedicated energy and food production, in keeping with Environmental Protection Agency recommendations. Finally, two superfund sites that border the cap park are phytoremediated with a poplar-­birch forest and contaminant-­specific forbs (herbaceous flowering plants) that can be used for educational and recreational purposes by the area’s many nearby schools. More detail on each component of the design is below:



• Linear Cap Park. A dendritic, or branching, linear cap park would rejoin the residential areas separated by the rail corridor and adjacent industrial parcels. It would connect at-­grade energy-­production, urban agricultural, and recreational zones by spanning the rail, whether below ground or at-­grade,

Remapping Philadelphia’s Postindustrial Terrain fig. 12.2 Andrea L. M. Hansen, The Flux Network: Proposed Amtrak Northeast Corridor, 2010.

providing a twenty-­two-­foot clearance to anticipate the requirements of the future high-­speed rail. • High-­Speed Rail. In the spirit of an energy-­producing corridor, the high-­ speed rail can be designed to actually create energy, resulting in a negative carbon footprint. The magnetosphere of the maglev rail, along with the latent kinetic energy of the deflection of the ground beneath the rail, can be harvested to create enough electricity to power the lighting and services required by the park and rail infrastructure. • Flexible Productive Zones. By facilitating public acquisition of dilapidated and vacant parcels adjacent to the rail corridor, the corridor can be transformed from an inaccessible barrier to a connective vein. These parcels would become an informal park and trail system while the cap park is being constructed, later providing fertile ground for public and private investment in energy farms and urban agriculture. • Poplar-­Birch Forest. Two superfund sites along the R5-­R6 Regional Rail line would be remediated with a poplar-­birch forest, which can extend the linear park system along the Amtrak Corridor and also be used as an educational resource for nearby schools. Poplars, which are extremely fast-­growing, excel at degrading and removing chlorinating solvents and aromatic hydrocarbons. This second site proposal within the Flux Network involves moderate public investment to revitalize Philadelphia’s abandoned Reading Railroad viaduct and transform it into a linear park. This viaduct park would be capped on either end with expansive new tracts of open space: at the southern end, a Green Roof Park would be constructed on top of the Philadelphia Convention Center on Eleventh Street, and at the northern end, a series of sloped green roofs would be built



a gre e ne country tow ne

fig. 12.3 Andrea L. M. Hansen, The Flux Network: Proposed Reading Viaduct Corridor, 2010.

as part of a new transit hub and mixed-­use development along the viaduct at Fairmount Avenue. This new park system, coupled with the prevalence of attractive historic warehouses in the district, will draw extensive private investment and development of high-­density, innovative architecture—­both rehab and infill construction—­with mixed-­income loft, hotel, and creative office space. The calling card of this architectural playground will be the hybrid symbiosis of old and new, where new construction respects the colors and textures of the industrial patinas through the use of materials such as COR-­TEN steel, copper mesh, and vegetated walls. Meanwhile, rehabilitation efforts will emphasize managed decay and creative structural reinforcement. More detail on each component of the design is below:



• Viaduct Park. Currently the Reading Viaduct is largely supported (with the exception of roadway crossings) by earth berms and retaining walls. Therefore it is possible to turn the viaduct into a park with minimal structural intervention, necessary only where the ground-­plane is unsupported by earth. The extant structure also means the viaduct is able to support trees, thus a planting gradient of larger trees and smaller shrubs expresses the underlying structure of the park (fig. 12.4). • Convention Center Green Roof. One of the largest “open spaces” in Center City is the roof of the Philadelphia Convention Center—­though it has not been realized as such at present. Located directly across the Vine Street Expressway from the current termination of the Reading Viaduct, the roof provides the perfect opportunity to bridge the crevasse created by the expressway, reconnect the two neighborhoods, and provide a centralized access

Remapping Philadelphia’s Postindustrial Terrain fig. 12.4 Reading Viaduct, 2010.

point to the viaduct. Moreover, converting the roof to a green roof—­even if weight limits determine that it cannot be accessible—means that the roof can become a significant storm-­water collector, which is much needed in the heavily impervious downtown area. Lastly, greening the roof has significant energy implications, from both a conservation and a production standpoint. • Transit Hub and Terminus Park. The Viaduct Park would culminate at its far end with a multiuse transit hub and park including affordable and market-­rate housing, art space, community gardens, retail, and dining. Moreover, the sloped green roofs of the complex could provide public access to the elevated park as well as a grand open space awaiting visitors at the end of the narrow viaduct. • Loft District. The area around the viaduct is characterized by large, historic warehouses, many of which have been lying dormant for years and are already being converted into loft apartments and condominiums. Completion of the proposed elevated park would attract new development to the area on top of the steady growth the district is now experiencing due to low rent and proximity to downtown. Forecasted growth makes the neighborhood a prime target for high-­density residential and mixed-­use development that is structurally symbiotic with the existing industrial fabric. The third and final design proposal within the Flux Network would be developed through a partnership between the city and Greensgrow Farms to create an agricultural park and subinfrastructural farmers market under I-­95 where goods and produce could be sold. After sufficient funds are raised, a



a gre e ne country tow ne

fig. 12.5 Andrea L. M. Hansen, The Flux Network: Port Richmond / I-­95 Corridor, 2010.

dedicated year-­round farmers market will be built as part of the new Richmond Waterfront District, to be populated with day and night entertainment, recreation, and food venues serving local produce. In addition to creating a hub for Philadelphia’s thriving urban agriculture industry, the greening and remediation efforts on the Port Richmond site serve to bridge the divide between the Richmond neighborhood and the Delaware riverfront by enlivening the ground underneath the interstate and by leveling a large wall along Richmond Street. Additionally, the elevated band along which the Reading Railway tracks used to converge into Port Richmond would be converted into a forested trail for biking, jogging, and hiking down to the river. More detail on each component of the design is below:



• Greensgrow Farm Expansion. The impetus and momentum for this site would be a partnership between the city, developers, and local stakeholders. Greensgrow Farm is a key community partner with vested interests in innovative green redevelopment and bringing urban agriculture to Philadelphia, so this site would be partially dedicated to the expansion of the farm’s agricultural efforts. Following moderate phytoremediation to mitigate pollution from the site’s industrial past, large tracts of farmland would link with community gardens to engender further partnership between local organizations and neighborhood residents. • Port Richmond Farmers Market and Freeway Park. Phase 1 of the farmers market envisions the area under I-­95 being transformed into a park and open-­air market. Turning a barrier into an active attractor would forge a

Remapping Philadelphia’s Postindustrial Terrain

connection between urban fabric and riverfront. This connection would be amplified in Phase 2 with a daily all-­seasons market selling food, goods, and crafts—­the northern analogue to the city’s already tremendously popular Reading Terminal Market. • Richmond Waterfront District. In order to complement the daytime use of the farmers market and the trails system by making the park active both day and night, the waterfront piers will be enhanced with space for restaurants, bars, clubs, and retail. The plan imagines this infrastructure being woven into the landscape and the farmers market, tracing the paths of the historic rail lines and integrating planting, views, storm-­water swales, and active and passive districts. • Rail-­to-­River Trail. The unused portion of the Reading Railway currently flows through a residential neighborhood. By converting this dormant track into a wildlife trail similar to the BeltLine Park in Atlanta, it can become a valuable resource for the community, seamlessly integrated into the network of thick green infrastructure. As shown by the citywide strategy and interventions for the three demonstrative sites, the Flux Network emphasizes design in conjunction with policy in an effort to rethink traditional planning models that have failed time and again by relying too heavily on one-­sided master plans and zoning codes or on grassroots activism. The flexible, hybrid strategic frameworks laid out by the Flux Network are visually accessible and conceived with the intent of encouraging partnerships among the municipal government, designers, independent organizations, and local residents. At the scale of urban planning, a striking design is useless without the kinds of informed partnerships that are proposed by the Flux Network strategy. The project provides a means for thorough site evaluation with an open range of intervention options to suit the changing needs and agencies of a city in flux: options for green infrastructure, urban agriculture, and other productive uses are linked to ensure longevity, applicability, and vitality for multiple sites, scales, and constituents.

notes 1. Ken Worpole, Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 128. 2. Douglas Harper, ed., “Ruin,” in The Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed September 21, 2015. 3. Lars Lerup, After the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 58.

4. Alan Berger, Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). 5. Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 175–­90, quotation on 175. 6. Ibid., 175. 7. Ignasi de Solà-­Morales Rubió, “Terrain Vague,” in Anyplace, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 119.



Contributors

alan c. braddock is the Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (2009) and coeditor, with Christoph Irmscher, of A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009). His essays have appeared in American Art, American Quarterly, Nineteenth-­Century Art Worldwide, Winterthur Portfolio, and A Companion to American Art, among other publications. l au ra t u r n e r i g o e is an art historian specializing in American art of the long nineteenth century. Her current book project, Art and Ecology in the Early Republic, investigates connections between art and environmental change in early national Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. in art history in 2014 from Temple University and her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Henry Luce Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among other institutions. She has contributed essays to American Art, Panorama, Common-­place, and the forthcoming exhibition catalogue Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment. m a r i a fa r l a n d is an associate professor of English at Fordham University, where she teaches courses in American literature and culture. Her chapter is drawn from her research on American antipastoral from 1850 to 1950, a portion of which has been published in American Literary History and English Literary History. Since 2009, she has served as coeditor of Studies in American Fiction. nate gabri e l is an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State University. He is also professionally affiliated with the USDA Forest Service Urban Field Station in New York City and the Community Economies Collective, an international community of scholars whose work centers on questions of class, social justice, and environment. His research focuses on contemporary and historical struggles over urban socionatural systems, with

Contributors

an emphasis on environmental and economic narrative, such as blight, urban greening, and sustainability, and their power to shape urban space. an drea l . m . han s e n is the principal of Fluxscape, which focuses on data visualization, mapping, and web applications for community and urban projects. She is also faculty in the Sustainable Urban Environments program at Northeastern University. Previously, she was chosen as the 2011–­12 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and as the 2013–­14 Marie Bickham Visiting Chair in Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University. Her publications include Composite Landscapes (with Charles Waldheim), which won the 2015 ASLA Honor Award for Publications, and Designing Places for People and the Environment (with Kalvin Platt). scott hic ks is an associate professor of English and the director of the Literacy Commons at the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. His work in ecocriticism has been published in Arizona Quarterly, Callaloo, Environmental Humanities, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment, and his current research focuses on pedagogies of environmental consciousness in challenging institutional and political contexts. michael dean mackintosh is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Temple University and a visiting instructor of history at Ursinus College. His research focuses on the causal connections between environmental change and the development of racial and social difference in early America. His dissertation is an environmental history of the founding of Philadelphia. amy e. me n ze r holds a Ph.D. in human geography from Johns Hopkins University, where she studied both historical and contemporary efforts to revitalize cities and older suburbs. She is currently the executive director of the Dundalk Renaissance Corporation, through which she is leading efforts to revitalize Dundalk, an older industrial suburb of Baltimore. She is also the immediate past president of the Community Development Network of Maryland. stephen n e pa is an urban and environmental historian. He currently teaches history and American studies at Temple University, Moore College of Art and Design, and at the Pennsylvania State University–­Abington. A contributor to numerous books and journals, he also appears in The Urban Trinity: The Story of Catholic Philadelphia and the Emmy Award–­winning documentary series Philadelphia: The Great Experiment. He received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University. He lives in Philadelphia.



j o h n o tt is a professor of art history at James Madison University and the author of Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (2014). His essays have

Contributors

appeared in scholarly journals including American Art, American Quarterly, Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, and Winterthur Portfolio. His current book project, Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–­1954, has received the support of a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship. su e ann pr i n ce recently retired from her position as founding director and curator of the American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum in Philadelphia. During her tenure, she commissioned numerous contemporary art projects that interpreted the exhibitions she curated, which explored the intersections of history, science, and art. She previously served as art critic at The Seattle Times, and at the Smithsonian Institution as Midwest regional director for the Archives of American Art and director of public information for the National Portrait Gallery. She holds M.A. degrees in both French literature and art history, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. mary i. u ng e r is an assistant professor of English at Ripon College, where she teaches American literature, gender and women’s studies, and disability studies. Her current research investigates the everyday practices of black reading publics in Chicago that modernized African American writing, identity, and publishing in the 1930s and 1940s.



Index

Academy of Medicine, 42 Academy of Natural Sciences, 135, 195 Adams, John, 41–­42 Adams, Carolyn, 179 affect and affect theory, 3, 9, 12, 132, 142, 176, 178–­79, 188 and abolition of slavery, 36, 45–­46 The Affect Theory Reader, 178 African Americans, 6–­7, 9, 11, 141–­51, 184; affected by gentrification, 186 and disease, 44, 59 and “sooty” skin, 44–­46 Agamben, Giorgio, 127 agency, nonhuman, xi, 1–­10, 12–­13, 15, 22–­23, 27, 30, 35–­36, 53, 56, 61, 76, 78, 82–­83, 87–­ 88, 90–­91, 99, 108, 120–­21, 124, 137, 142, 144–­46, 149, 151, 178–­79, 195, 211, 219 agriculture, 10, 96–­103, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114–­15, 214, 217 crop specialization, 114 exhibitions, 96–­98, 100–­101, 106, 108–­10, 114–­15 factory farming, 111, 114 interdependence of country and city, 97, 101–­2, 108, 110–­11, 115 machinery, 109–­10, 112, 114 modernization, 98–­104, 106, 108–­10, 114 urban agriculture and gardens, 1, 5, 14, 26–­27, 105, 112–­13, 122, 141, 146, 187, 214–­15, 217–­19. See also Philadelphia, Zoological Garden; Starr, Stephen, restaurants: Talula’s Garden Allen, Richard, 150 American Agricultural Association, 101 American Humane Society, 83 American Philosophical Society, 6, 12, 37–­40, 42, 46, 194–­96, 199 UNDAUNTED: Five Contemporary Artists at the APS Museum exhibition, 195, 205 UNEXPECTED initiative, 195, 198

Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), 153, 156, 160, 162, 166 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 83 anatomical, study and metaphors, 11, 42, 84–­86, 129–­32, 135 animals, nonhuman, 7, 10–­11, 67, 76–­77, 81–­92, 118–­37. See also diseases, fish and fishing, slaughterhouses, Thomas Eakins, and individual names of animals animal studies / animal turn in scholarship, 122–­24, 133 great separation from humans, 11, 122–­29, 134, 137 India, 118–­19 livestock, including cattle and pigs, 40, 86, 91, 96–­97, 101, 103–­5, 109, 113, 115, 119–­23, 125–­26, 128, 130, 144, 199 nuisance, to humans, 121, 123–­27, 135 pets and domestication, 11, 86, 120–­22, 128, 134–­35, 137 rights, 119, 124, 137 Russia, 118–­19 similarity with humans, 89–­90, 92, 128–­29, 131–­37, 144 wildlife, 118–­20 and zoocentrism, 83 Anker, Peder, 185 anthropocentrism, 2, 3, 7–­8, 11, 121, 127–­28, 133–­ 34, 137, 144 assemblage, city as human–­nonhuman, 2–­5, 7–­8, 13, 42, 78, 82, 92 Avila, Eric, 179 Atkins, Peter, 122–­25, 127 Baccardo, Raul, 182 Bacon, Edmund, 11, 159, 161–­65, 168 Bacon, Francis, 1 Bartram, Bradlee, 182 Bataille, George, 123

Index



Bauer, Catherine, 158 Bauman, John, 157 Becker, Marshall Joseph, 22–­23 Bennett, Jane, 3–­4, 50, 52–­53, 60, 124, 142, 144, 150, 178 Berger, Alan, 209 Bergson, Henri, 3 Berlant, Lauren, 57 Better Philadelphia Exhibition, 11, 153–­71 biodiversity, 25, 105, 195–­96, 199 Black, Brian C., 7 Bonheur, Rosa, 129 Brigham, David, 45 British, 3, 8 Brooklyn, New York, 101–­2, 113 Bruni, Frank, 180 Bryant, William Cullen, 70 Burns, Sarah, 129–­30 Calvo, Miguel, 182 Camden, New Jersey, 15, 96, 98, 100–­102, 104, 106–­7, 110, 112, 115 capitalism, 10, 20, 68 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 157 Centennial Exhibition, 70, 97–­98, 100, 107–­10, 114–­15 Central Park, New York, 66, 70 Chasteau, Louis, 74–­78 chimney sweeps, 43–­44 Chiarappa, Michael J., 7, 28 cholera, 125 Cicero, 34, 41 class, human socioeconomic, 7, 9, 37, 46, 51, 60–­61, 65, 77 A Clockwork Orange, 185 Cobbe, Frances Power, 129 Cole, Thomas, 70 College of Physician, 41–­42, 65 College Settlement Association, 142 colonialism, European, 4, 8–­9, 12, 19–­25, 27–­30 Columbian Magazine, 39–­40 Common, John R., 143 Communism, 158–­59 compost, 102, 112, 203 Coole, Samantha, 4 Coover, Roderick, Altered Shorelines Project and Chemical Map, 15 Cope, Edward Drinker, 135 Cremer, James, 10, 70–­74, 78 Cresson, Dr. Charles, 126 The Cries of Philadelphia, 44 Crystal Palace, New York (1853), 98, 100, 114 Cronon, William, 7, 68, 176, 187 Currie, William, 42

Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 135–­36 Cushman, Leslie, associate school superintendent of Philadelphia, 169–­70 Darwin, Charles, 7, 10, 83–­84, 90, 92, 105, 124, 131–­33, 136 David Rockwell Group design firm, 185 Davis, Mike, 7 Davy, Humphrey, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1819), 106 decay, 12–­13, 41, 103, 107 De Landa, Manuel, 3 Delaware River, 6, 10, 13–­15, 19, 22–­23, 25–­28, 30, 39, 42, 90, 101–­2, 128, 192, 194, 213, 218 Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC), 13–­15 Deleuze, Gilles, 4 Demme, Jonathan, Philadelphia, 179 Descartes, René, and Cartesian thought, 1, 4–­5, 131 Detroit, Michigan, 180, 208 De Vries, David, 26 Dickens, Charles, 57 Dilworth, Richard, mayor, 160 disease, 3, 6, 23–­25, 27, 41–­43, 59, 87 epizootics (animal disease), 90–­91 yellow fever, 35–­36, 41–­45 Disney, Walt, 178–­79 Dock Creek, 6, 12, 192–­205 Domb, Allan, 182 Donaldson, Sue, 124 Douglas, Mary, 123 Drexel University, 183–­84, 186 drought, 97, 99–­100, 104 Du Bois, W. E. B., The Philadelphia Negro, 6–­7, 11, 141–­51, 168 Duff, James H., governor of Pennsylvania, 155 Duke of Bedford, 105 Durand, Asher B., Kindred Spirits, 70–­71 Dutch colonists, 8, 22, 28, 30 Eakins, Susan Macdowell, 121, 130, 136 Eakins, Thomas, 7, 11, 118–­40 accused of bestiality, 129 and American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 130 and Harry, English setter, 128, 130, 134 humanity and humanism, 121, 127, 131, 133, 137 and medical community, 129–­30 and monkeys, 128–­29, 132, 135; Bobby the Monkey, 11, 120–­22, 128, 135–­36 and nonhuman animals, 11, 120–­22, 127–­ 40; compares them to human beings,

Fairmount Park, 7, 9–­10, 25, 59, 65–­78, 126, 149 Fairmount Park Guard, 10, 67, 74–­75, 78 famine of 1854, 97, 99, 100 farmers markets, 217–­19 fertilizer (including manure), 26, 100, 102–­3, 106, 114, 122 fire, 3, 5–­5, 9, 26, 28, 34, 39, 44. See also smoke, soot fireplaces, 7, 9, 36–­43, 46 firewood, 39, 66, 76 fish and fishing, 25–­27, 75–­76, 128, 135, 176, 178, 182, 185–­86, 194, 199–­205 Flay, Bobby, 186 food, 12, 26–­27, 66, 86, 99, 102, 175–­78, 180–­88 Forbes, Stephen, 84 Fordism, 162 Forten, James, 150 Foucault, Michel, 60

Franklin, Benjamin, 37–­39, 42, 194, 196, 202 fuel economy, 9, 35–­36, 39

Index

130–­31, 136; domestication, 132–­37; comparison with Darwin, 131–­33; observes their emotions, intelligence, subjectivity, 128–­30, 132–­36 in Paris, 128–­29, 132, 135 Philadelphia associations, 121, 127–­28 and zoos, 121, 128, 136 works: The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog, 128; Francis J. Ziegler, 133–­34; Frank Hamilton Cushing, 13; Grouse, 132–­34; The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross), 127, 129; A May Morning in the Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-­in-­Hand), 128; Rail Shooting on the Delaware, 128; Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River, 128; Swimming, 128 ecocriticism, 2, 5, 7, 36, 82, 98, 141–­42, 146, 150–­51 ecology, 2–­3, 6–­9, 11, 13, 20–­22, 24, 34–­36, 46, 82–­84, 92, 105, 124, 141, 146, 157–­58, 163, 185–­86, 199, 202–­3, 205 “black ecology,” 149–­50 political, 59–­61, 156 queer, 7, 9, 50–­53, 55–­56, 60, 62 sustainability, 7 Ehrenhalt, Alan, 178 Enlightenment, 1, 4–­5, 50, 194 dualism, 2–­3 environmental humanities, 124 Environmental Protection Agency, 15, 214 superfund sites, 215 Epicurus, 3 Euclidean geometry, 4–­6 Evening Telegraph, 81 evolution, 7, 10, 105

Garces, Jose, 186, 188 gender, 12, 60–­61, 75, 144, 151, 158, 164, 167, 169 General Motors, 159 germ theory, 90 Germantown, 66 Gérôme, Jean-­Léon, 129, 132 Greensgrow Farms, 217–­18 Gilliam, Terry, 12 Monkeys, 179 Gilmore, James, 176 Gimbels department store, 11, 153, 155, 161, 166, 168 Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 73 Goodrich, Lloyd, 127, 130 Gottlieb, Robert, 156–­57 Grazian, David, 179 Great Chain of Being, 40, 83 Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition (GPUAC), 184 grass, 97–­100, 103–­8, 111, 113–­15 green, color, as metaphor, 5 green roofs, 215–­17 Greenberg, Miriam, 179 Greenfield, Albert M., 165–­66 grid, 4–­6, 8–­9, 88–­89. See also Philadelphia, grid plan Grier, Katherine, 134 Groundswell Design firm, 14–­15, 187 Haeckel, Ernst, 6, 35 Halberstram, Judith, 57 Haviland, John, 57 Hays, Samuel P., 144 Heberton, Mahlon, 52 Heller, Gregory L., 159, 165 Henderson, John, 104 Heritage Philadelphia Program, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 197–­98 Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 20 Hogarth, Williams, 132 Hopkinson, Francis, 3 Holme, Thomas, A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, 5–­6, 8–­9, 19–­22, 27–­30, 194 Hopkinson, Edward, Jr., 160 horses, 40, 83–­87, 89–­91, 109, 121, 123, 128–­32, 135, 200, 202 Hudson River School, 70 Huidekoper, Rush Shippen, 85, 88, 90–­92 human beings as animals, 7, 10 human body, metaphors of, 3, 34–­35, 41–­43, 46 human–­nonhuman assemblage, city as. See assemblage, city as human–­nonhuman



Index

humanism and humanities, 1–­3, 8, 11, 121. See also Thomas Eakins environmental humanities, 124 Hurley, Andrew, 7, 181 industry and industrialization, 7–­8, 10, 12–­15, 19–­20, 22, 65–­68, 70, 73–­78, 80, 101–­2, 109–­10, 112, 114–­15, 123, 126, 134, 144, 149, 156–­58, 162–­63, 168, 194, 196, 202. See also Philadelphia, postindustrial irrigation, 108 Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of American Cities, 157 Johnston, James F.W., 99–­100 Jones, Absalom, 150 Kamihira, Owen, 182 Kaufmann, Arthur C., 155 Keen, Dr. William Williams, 129 Kelman, Ari, 7 Keyser, Brett, TANN, HORNS & DEAD DOGS, art performance, 12, 194–­95, 199–­205 the dead, 200–­203, 205 fish and other nonhuman animals, 200–­205 human compost, 203 Native Americans, 199–­200 pollution, 202 symbiosis, 205 Keyser, Charles, 67–­68 Kinkela, David, 156–­57 Klingle, Matthew, 7 Koolhaas, Rem, 209 Kotkin, Joel, 184 Krech, Shephard, 26 Kristeva, Julia, 123 Kubrick, Stanley 2001: A Space Odyssey, 179, 185 A Clockwork Orange, 185 Kymlicka, Will, 124



Lamprey, J. H., 88 Landseer, Edwin, 132 Latour, Bruno, 3–­4, 53, 78 Law, James, 90 League of Women Voters, 160 Lefebvre, Henry, 60, 188 Lemon Hill, 10, 66–­68 Lenape Indians, 8–­9, 19–­30, 192, 199, 202 cosmology, 23–­24 and land ownership, 27–­28, 30 naming practices, 27–­28, 192, 199 Lerup, Lars, 209

Levittown, New York, 153 Lewis, David Levering, 142 Liebig, Justus von, 98 Liman, Doug, Swingers, 179 Linnaeus, Carl, 34, 40–­41, 83 Lindeström, Peter, 23 Lippard, George, 6–­7, 9, 50–­62 The Killers, 57 The Quaker City, 6–­7, 9, 50–­62; Arlington, Byrnewood, 52, 56, 58–­59; Arlington, Mary, 51, 56, 58–­59, 61; Devil-­Bug, 58–­59, 61; Dora, 58; Fitz-­ Cowles, Colonel Algernon, 58, 61; Glow-­worm, 59, 61; Harvey, Luke, 56; Lorrimer, Gustavus, 51, 56, 58–­59, 61; Monk Hall, 9, 51, 53, 55–­61; Musquito, 59, 61 Lippincott, Joshua Ballinger, 82 London, 6, 28, 98, 123, 126, 135, 181, 185 Lubove, Roy, 156 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus), 3 Lutz, Winifred, Drawing Dock Creek, art installation, 6, 12, 192–­99, 205 changes due to rain and human interaction, 198–­99 historical research on Dock Creek, 196–­97 importance of ecosystems research by Ruth Patrick, 195–­96, 199 location, 196–­97 manure. See fertilizer Marxism, 2, 123 Massey, Doreen, 55 materiality, 2–­4, 7, 13, 15, 19, 53, 55–­56, 60–­61, 141–­51, 188. See also new materialism McHarg, Ian, 213 McHenry, Margaret, 136 McKee, Guian, 159 Melosi, Martin, 4 Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes (Paris), 128 Mercer, Singleton, 52 Meyers, Amy R. W., 8 Milroy, Elizabeth, 8, 65 monkeys, 118–­19 Montgomery, Dorothy, 160 Moon, Michael, 108 Morris, Edmund, Ten Acres Enough (1864), 101–­2 Morton, Timothy, 3, 50, 52 Moses, Robert, 157 Muybridge, Eadweard, Animal Locomotion, 6–­7, 10, 81–­92 Native Americans, 1, 8, 19–­30, 135–­36, 192, 199. See also Lenape and Susquehannock

Obama, Barack, U.S. President, 118 Olexy, Aimee, 187 Orchard, W. C., 24 Panic of 1837, 51 Parham, Susan, 176 Paris, 183. See also Eakins, Thomas Paschall, Douglass, 130, 132 Patin, Thomas, 70 Patrick, Ruth, 195–­96 Peale, Charles Willson, 6, 9, 34–­46 The Accident on Lombard Street, 43–­44 The Peale Family (Peale Family Group), 36–­37 Peale, Raphaelle, 37 Peale, Titian, 41 Penn, William, 1–­6, 8–­9, 13, 19–­20, 22–­30, 50–­51, 57–­58, 88, 163, 167–­68, 192, 194, 202 “A General Description of the Said Province . . . ,” 1–­3, 8, 13, 29 “a greene country towne,” describes Philadelphia as, 5–­6, 20, 27–­28 Treaty with Lenape, 19–­20, 22, 27 Penn, John Granville, 20, 22 The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 70, 84, 129–­30 Pennsylvania Gazette, 3 Pepper, William, 82, 84, 89 Perrier, Georges, 180 Petrini, Carlo, 186

Philadelphia Amtrak Northeast Corridor, 12, 213–­15 as human–­nonhuman assemblage, 2–­4, 8, 13, 78 Benjamin Franklin Bridge, 14 Better Philadelphia Exhibition, 11, 153–­71 bicycling, bike lanes, 210 Broad Street, 97, 183 Center City, 11–­12, 168, 180, 186–­87, 194, 210, 216 children and childhood (human), 36, 57, 59, 68, 75, 77, 83, 89, 97, 100, 112–­15, 136, 148, 153, 161, 163, 169–­71, 200 “Chinese Wall” (elevated railway), 167 City Planning Commission, 13 Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC), 13–­15. See also Delaware River Democratic Party, 157, 159–­60 Eastern State Penitentiary, 57 expressways, highways, and traffic, 8, 11, 13–­14, 101, 125, 158, 162, 166–­69, 183, 198, 211, 213, 216 Fairmount neighborhood, 57. See also Fairmount Park founding, 1–­5, 9 Frankford neighborhood, 183 Franklin Institute, 70 gentrification, 178–­79, 184, 186. See also Stephen Starr homes, houses, and housing issues (human), 5, 11, 27, 37, 40, 43–­45, 53, 55–­56, 76, 78, 101, 113, 120–­21, 125–­26, 134–­37, 143–­51, 153, 156, 158–­60, 162–­68, 170, 203, 210, 214, 217 FringeArts (Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival), 14, 199 “a greene country towne,” 5–­6, 20, 27, 194 grid plan, 4–­5, 8, 50–­51, 53–­56, 194 Independence Hall, 166 Independence National Historical Park (INHP), 192, 195, 197, 199, 203 Independence Seaport Museum, 14 Interstate 95 (I–­95), 12–­14, 213, 217–­18 Lemon Hill, 10, 66–­67 Market Street, 168, 175–­76, 181–­83 Navy Yard, 14–­15 new urbanism, 12, 184 Nittabakonck, 27 Northeast Corridor High-­Speed Rail project (proposed), 214 Old City, 12–­14, 175, 180–­83, 185–­86 Old City Civic Association (OCCA), 181–­83, 186 Passyunk, 27

Index

“Nature” and “natural” (nature as partly or wholly a cultural construct, or idealized as pristine), 1–­2, 4, 8–­10, 13, 20–­22, 26, 28–­29, 36, 40–­42, 45, 50–­54. 57–­61, 66–­78, 82–­82, 87–­ 88, 99–­100, 104–­8, 115, 120, 122, 124–­25, 127, 141, 147, 169, 176, 187–­88, 195, 200, 209 personification of “Nature,” 34, 40–­41 neoliberalism, 184 New Jersey Agricultural Society, 101 new materialism, 2–­5, 7–­8, 53, 76, 78, 82, 98, 124, 142, 178, 195 New York (City), 10, 43, 65–­66, 70, 73, 100–­102, 110, 119, 157, 180, 182, 185, 210 Crystal Palace (1853), 98 SoHo, 181 TriBeCa, 180 See also Central Park, New York New York Agricultural Society, 99 New York University, veterinary school, 85 Newcourt, Richard, 28 Newman, Andrew, 24 Newton, Isaac, 1 Nightjar Apothecary performance art group, 199 Novak, Barbara, 70



Index



Philadelphia (continued ) Penn’s Landing, 13, 181 Pennsylvania Turnpike, 14 Philadelphia Convention Center, 216 Port Richmond neighborhood, 12, 213, 218 postindustrial, 12–­13, 179–­81, 188, 208–­19 Powelton neighborhood, 184 Race Street Pier, 14 Rails-­to-­Trails program, 214 Reading Terminal Market, 219 Reading Viaduct, 12, 213, 215–­19 Republican Party, 153, 156, 159–­60, 165–­66 restaurants, 175–­88; and locavore movement, 186–­88. See also Stephen Starr Seventh Ward, 7, 11, 141–­51 Shackamaxon, 9, 19, 22, 27 shipbuilding, 13 South Street, 143, 168, 181–­82, 186 Spruce Hill neighborhood, 184 Spruce Street Harbor Park, 14–­15 street names, 29 suburbs, suburbanization, and “white flight,” 11–­12, 68, 147, 153, 156–­60, 162–­ 64, 171, 179–­80, 210 tanneries, 12, 126, 194, 196, 202 University City, 12, 176–­77, 183–­86, 210; Sansom Commons development, 184 urban planning, including City Planning Commission, 153–­71, 184. See also grid plan Walnut Hill neighborhood, 184 Washington Square, 176–­77, 187 Water Department, 126 waterfront, 13–­15, 42, 166, 218–­19 waterways. See Delaware River, Dock Creek, Schuylkill River, Wissahickon River Weccacoe, 27 wetlands and marshes, 13, 192 Zoological Garden, 77, 81, 84, 86–­89, 124, 135–­36 Philadelphia Housing Association, 159 Philadelphia (Peale) Museum, 34, 36, 40–­42 and Linnaean system of taxonomy, 40–­41 and racial hierarchy, 36, 45–­46 Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, 101, 104 Philadelphia Transit Company, 168 photography, 8, 10, 15, 67, 69–­74, 78, 81–­92, 161, 187, 208 aerial, 165, 209 African American subjects, 171 collodion process, 70 female subjects, 167 and microscopic vision, 91–­92

photomontage, 166 portraits of nonhuman animals, 118–­21, 130–­32, 134 time-­lapse, 161 pigeons, 81–­83, 88, 92 Pile, Steve, 60 Pine, Joseph, 176 Pittsburgh, 157 pollution, 6, 9, 11–­12, 14–­15, 58–­59, 156, 158, 163, 168, 188, 209, 213, 218 air, 36, 41, 42, 45–­46, 126, 146 water, 65, 90, 126, 146, 160, 194–­96, 202 Pratt, Henry, 67 Progressive era, 11, 141–­51, 156 Quakers, 20, 22, 24, 30, 32, 57 queer space, 57. See also ecology, queer race and racial discrimination, 7, 9, 11–­12, 36, 44–­46, 57, 59–­61, 88, 141–­51, 158, 168, 184 railroad, 13, 101, 104, 106 Reidenbach, Dennis, 197 Rendell, Ed, 179–­80 Reuther, Walter, 159 Reynolds, David S., 51, 60, 109 Ridgely, J. V., 51 Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives, 143 Rittenhouse, David, 37 Rodin, Judith, 183 Rogers, Fairman, 82, 84 Roman Empire, 4 Romanes, George Johns, Animal Intelligence, 136 Rosenzweig, Roy, Eight Hours For What We Will, 66 Rubió, Ignasi de Solà-­Morales, 209 ruins, 208–­9, 211–­12 as vital material assets, 211–­12, 219 historical and temporal dimensions, 208–­ 9, 212–­13 “ruin porn,” 208 Rush, Benjamin, 42–­44, 85 Saffron, Inga, 14, 186 Samuel, Bernard, mayor, 155 sanitation, sanitary idea, 4, 46, 118–­21, 123–­27, 146, 149 Schlesinger, Arthur, 156 Schmitt, Peter J., 187 Schreiber & Sons, photographers, 132 Schutt, Amy, 30 Schuylkill River, 3, 6, 9, 10, 23, 25, 27–­28, 65–­68, 72–­73, 75, 90, 125–­27, 143, 163, 183, 194 Schwartz, Joel, 157 Scott, Ridley, Blade Runner, 185 Seventh Ward, 7, 11, 141–­51

Tait, Lawson, 129 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 69–­70, 78 Tanner, Henry S., Philadelphia and Environs, 53–­55, 61 Tarr, Joel A., 7, 157 Teaford, Jon, 157

Temple University, 15, 181 Thames River, 15, 126 Thompson, Benjamin (Count Rumford), 37–­38 Thoreau, Henry David, 3, 187 trees, 3–­5, 9, 13, 29, 36, 40 “clubbing” for fruit and nuts, 74, 76–­77 deforestation, 3, 9, 35–­36, 39–­40 2001: A Space Odyssey, 179

Index

Sewell, Anna, Black Beauty, 83 Simmel, Georg, The Ruin, 208 Singer, Peter, 129 slaughterhouses, 12, 87, 104, 123, 125–­26, 130, 194, 196, 202 Sleeper, 179 Smith, Kimberly K., 141 soil, 10, 24, 26, 98–­99, 102–­4, 106, 110–­11 Solomonov, Michael, 188 soot, 43–­46 Shaw, Gwendolyn, 45 Sikora, Bryan, 187 Sinclair, George, 105–­6, 114 smoke, 26, 34–­36, 39, 41–­44. See also stoves, “smoke-­eaters” Smith, Joanne, 167 Smith, Neal, 184 Soderlund, Jean R., 30 Solnit, Rebecca, 185 Sorrentino, Anthony, 186 Speake, Jane, 178 Speck, Frank, 24 Spinoza, Baruch, 3 Springsteen, Bruce, “Streets of Philadelphia,” 179 Stanford, Leland, 84 Starr, Stephen, 6, 12, 175–­88 compared with Walt Disney, 178–­79 experience dining, 12, 175–­80, 183–­86, 188 and gentrification, 178–­79, 184, 186 influenced by Hollywood cinema, 175, 178–­79, 180, 185 restaurants: Blue Angel, 183; Buddakan, 183; Continental, 12, 175–­76, 178–­83, 185, 188; Jones, 183; Morimoto, 183; Pod, 12, 176–­79, 183–­86; Talula’s Garden, 12, 176–­79, 186–­88; Tangerine, 183 retro modern and exotic design elements, 175, 180, 182–­83, 185 Stoll, Steven, 98, 106 Stonorov, Oscar, 11, 159–­61 Carl Mackley Houses, designed by, 159 “smoke-­eaters,” 34–­36, 40–­43, 45–­46 stoves, 9, 34–­37, 40–­41, 43 Stubbs, George, 132 Sugrue, Thomas, 157 Sullivan, Heather I., 145–­46 Susquehannock Indians, 23 Swedish colonists, 8, 22, 28, 30 symbiosis, 102, 151, 205, 216–­17

United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 146 University of Pennsylvania, 10, 82–­89, 91–­92, 131, 135, 142, 183–­86 urban exploration (“urbex”), 208 Urban Land Institute, 158 Valvani, Suren, 69 Venturi, Robert, 14 Vergara, Camilo, American Ruins, 208 veterinary science, 10, 84–­86, 88–­91 Vetri, Marc, 188 vitality, nonhuman, 2–­3, 6–­7, 9–­13, 78 vivisection, 129 Von Starck, Peter, 180 wampum, 8–­9, 20–­25, 27, 29–­30 Wallis, George, 43 Ward, David, 35 Warner, Sam Bass, 163 Warner, Michael, 57 Washington, Booker T., Up from Slavery, 149 Waters, Alice, 186–­87 Weld, Isaac, 40 West, Benjamin, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, 19, 24, 30 White, Caroline Earle, 129 Whitman, Walt, 10, 96–­115 and agriculture, 10, 96–­115 Autumn Rivulets, 98, 100–­101, 108, 112–­15 Leaves of Grass, 10, 97–­98, 100, 102–­3, 105, 107, 114 Specimen Days, 96, 113, 115 at Stafford Farm, 101–­2 Wilberforce University, 142 “wilderness” idea, 10, 28, 59, 66, 68 Williams, Moses, 45 Williams, Raymond, 108, 187 Wissahickon River, 27, 163 Wood, Dr. Horatio, 129–­30 Wolch, Jennifer, 123–­24 Wolfe, Cary, 3, 133 Yard, Molly, 160 Zukin, Sharon, 184

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Typeset by scribe inc. Printed and bound by s h er i d a n b ook s Composed in n ea c a d emi a a n d b od on i Printed on n at u r es n at u ra l Bound in a r r es t ox