Hi everybody,

Hope you’ve had a great summer. I know it’s been awhile since the last blog, but in the past few months, we’ve added seven sites in the Fishtown/East Kensington area.  These include a few along the Delaware waterfront such as Penn Treaty Park, the Sugar House, Dyottville Glass Factories, and Cramp’s Shipyard, as well ...]]>

Hi everybody,

Hope you’ve had a great summer. I know it’s been awhile since the last blog, but in the past few months, we’ve added seven sites in the Fishtown/East Kensington area.  These include a few along the Delaware waterfront such as Penn Treaty Park, the Sugar House, Dyottville Glass Factories, and Cramp’s Shipyard, as well as a few on or near Frankford Avenue like St. Mary’s Hospital, Newt’s Playground, and Palmer Cemetery.

The story of Palmer Cemetery goes hand-in-hand with the history of the neighborhood and is a good place to start in understanding its development.  Anybody with an interest in utopian experiments will get a kick out of Dyottville, which was a very interesting response to “the labor problem” in early industrial–era Philadelphia.  Next, the Sugar House and Cramp’s Shipyard reveal Kensington at the height of its proud industrial history as well as its subsequent decline. The numerous fights over the proposed closings of St. Mary’s Hospital and the rehabilitation of Penn Treaty Park both demonstrate the resolve of the community in the face of decades of hardship after World War II.  And the story of Newt’s Playground , featuring an interview with a veteran of the formerly cinder-covered field, provides  a glimpse of what it was like to grow up in the Fishtown of the 1960s.

The Sugar House (Pennsylvania Sugar Company), Delaware & Shackamaxon, 1936

The Sugar House Casino, Delaware & Shackamaxon, September 2010

T. W. Dyott’s Glass Works at Richmond & Beach, as seen from the Delaware River, 1831

Stay tuned in the next few weeks, because we’ll also add sites west of Front Street like Fairhill Cemetery. And, I’m finishing up a couple longer essays dealing with Kensington west of Front Street that I blogged about when I first started my internship. One piece focuses on the company-produced employee newsletters of Stetson Hats and features an interview with a former Stetson employee, and another tells the story of the now defunct Old Kensington Redevelopment Corporation through three interviews.

Meanwhile, here are some contemporary shots of some of the sites. Check them out!

Penn Treaty Park, Delaware & Beach, September 2010

Palmer Burial Ground, Palmer & Memphis, September 2010

Shissler Recreation Center, or “Newt’s” to longtime Fishtowners, Blair Street, September 2010

View of the El from Newt’s, September 2010

Neumann Senior Housing, formerly St. Mary’s Hopsital, 1600 E. Palmer Street, September 2010

Olde Kensington Pavilion senior housing, 3rd & Thompson, September 2010

This past Friday I spent the afternoon at Norris Square Presbyterian Church for the Kensington Art of History Project. There, students from El Centro de Estudiantes, a school started in 2009 by the non-profit Big Picture Philadelphia in ...]]> El Centro students document the neighborhood. Images from the Kensington Art of History blog.

This past Friday I spent the afternoon at Norris Square Presbyterian Church for the Kensington Art of History Project. There, students from El Centro de Estudiantes, a school started in 2009 by the non-profit Big Picture Philadelphia in association with Congreso de Latinos Unidos, presented their findings on the history of Kensington and Norris Square neighborhoods in an exhibition called “Threads of History: A Living Museum of Kensington’s Past and Present.” The multimedia presentation, which included photos, texts, old maps of the neighborhood, and most notably, performances by the students, was informative and entertaining. Most impressive was the depth of research done by the high-school students and the engaging way they presented the material. The project was devoted to relating the experience of past immigrants of Kensington and the problems they dealt with — like the necessity of child labor — to the experience of recent immigrants to Kensington today and the struggles they face. I really enjoyed the humorous interaction performed by two students, playing John B. Stetson and one of his employees, in which the employee begrudgingly accepts a meager amount of cash offered by Stetson out of his own deep pockets.  Visit the Kensington Art of History project’s blog for more about the students’ research, including photos and video.   Read more about Big Picture Learning’s  project-based schools here, here, and at the Philadelphia Public School Notebook blog.

Images from “Threads of History: A Living Museum of Kensington’s Past and Present,” June 11, 2010

Last week I was researching Cramp’s shipyard in Fishtown so that I could add this site to the PhilaPlace map. Cramp’s shipyard was a fixture on ...]]> Slinky inventor Richard James and son Thomas, play with Slinkys on the stairs of the James family home in Philadelphia in 1945. Courtesy of the Independence Seaport Museum.

Last week I was researching Cramp’s shipyard in Fishtown so that I could add this site to the PhilaPlace map. Cramp’s shipyard was a fixture on the docks of Fishtown from 1830 until the end of World War II (with the exception of a twelve-year stretch during the Great Depression when it fell into disrepair). It had developed a reputation for producing not only commercial ships but also “men of war” starting in the Mexican War and continuing through World War II.  Cramp’s  good reputation was international– it produced ships for the Imperial Russian Navy as well as the Ottomans. Benefitting from lucrative naval contracts, during World War I Cramp’s employed 11,000 workers. During World War II, the number shot up to 18,000. Cramp’s was a major player in the shift from wooden clipper ships to steam-driven ships of iron and finally steel ships.

But here’s a little known fact my supervisor came across last week–the Slinky was also invented at Cramp’s when naval engineer Richard James’s work with tension springs gave him the idea for a children’s toy in 1943. He unveiled the new toy in Philadelphia at Gimbels department store in 1945. Here is yet another example of a consumer product that emerged (albeit indirectly) from capital the military invested in new technology. And conveniently, there is an exhibit about this very topic now running at the Independence Seaport Museum. The exhibit, which runs until January 3, 2011, includes such products as the Slinky, bellbottoms, and car tail lights. Yes, I know what you’re thinking– it does sound really cool. So check it out!

…and for your viewing and listening pleasure, alone, or in pairs:

Hi all, my name is Ian Charlton. A couple of weeks ago, I started my internship working on the PhilaPlace project –exciting stuff. I’ll be focusing mainly on the Kensington/Fishtown area for the next six months.  The first major essays ...]]> Aerial view of Stetson Hat manufacturing complex, circa 1940. Photograph of painting.

Hi all, my name is Ian Charlton. A couple of weeks ago, I started my internship working on the PhilaPlace project –exciting stuff. I’ll be focusing mainly on the Kensington/Fishtown area for the next six months.  The first major essays on the horizon involve Stetson Hats and the Old Kensington Redevelopment Corporation. In a way, Stetson Hats was the epitome of industrialism in Kensington, spanning over 100 years as a major employer in the community. At its peak, it employed 5,000 Kensington residents; its hats, donned by famous Western movie stars like Tom Mix, were wildly popular in the United States and abroad. It is the perfect example of Philadelphia, and specifically Kensington, as “Workshop of the World.” Yet it is also interesting in another sense: at a time when much of the country’s labor force was unionizing in groups like the American Federation of Labor, John B. Stetson maintained a system of relationships with his workers that has been described as benevolent feudalism– to the chagrin of the AFL. Both his paternalistic methods and workers’ responses to them will be interesting topics for study.

The story of Old Kensington Redevelopment Corporation seems like the next logical step to me in doing a history of Kensington. While Stetson Hats embodied industrial Kensington, OKRC provides a lens with which to view the transition to post-industrial Kensington. Growing out of the “Area E” group of Philadelphia’s Antipoverty Action Committee, the entity that implemented Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty in Philadelphia, OKRC officially began attempting to rehabilitate the neighborhood only a few years prior to the closing of Stetson Hats. In fact, before it closed, a high-ranking member of Stetson sat on the OKRC board.  The fact that these rehabilitation attempts occurred during a period of intense racial animosity is especially interesting, given the racial alliances on which the group was formed and on which it depended. Moreover, the city’s changing power structure is significant for this story: women who ran neighborhood associations like OKRC began to replace male ward leaders who had traditionally mediated between city hall and the neighborhoods.  Given that OKRC has been defunct since the mid- 1990s, it would also be interesting to view its successes and failures from the vantage point of the present, since sections of Northern Liberties and Fishtown have recently seen successful revitalization efforts.

Finally, these stories have broader implications for the identities of the people who lived and worked in Kensington over the past 150 years.  Did the majority of Stetson’s workers see themselves as Kensington residents who happened to work at a factory there, or as members of a parish that happened to be in Kensington, or rather as members of the Stetson family, as John B. Stetson would have wanted, living in a “city within a city” – that is, the Stetson community within Kensington. Also, since place plays such a vital role in the construction of identity, what does this mean for residents of Kensington in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and beyond, who spent so much of their time in what were racially contested spaces?

Workers making Stetson cavalry hats, 1918.

“Miss Anne Alexander, employee of Stetson Hat Co., 5th & Montgomery, wearing the famous 10 gallon Stetson hat & holding two of the new spring style hat for 1941.”

Stetson Hat Styles, Winter 1873-4

Demolition of Stetson building, 1979. Courtesy Temple University Urban Archives.

See more images of Steston Hats on PhilaPlace.org