But when you're living in Downingtown waiting for construction on your home in Philly to start, sometimes the best way to relax after a long day of work by burying yourself in research. Since March of 2015, I've been going back to a number of online resources and poring over them for glimpses of what the front of this building looked like. I have a folder in my Dropbox full of related images, and what good is that folder if no one else can see it?
Okay. Here we go.
One of the earliest representations of William Penn's Philadelphia was Thomas Holme's A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, and a variety of prints and copies of this can be found online, and the copy passed down through the Chew family is one of the clearest I've found. The survey dates back to 1683 - the foundation for our building wouldn't be laid for nearly eight decades. But it's interesting to see that at the time, the land was outside of the original plans for Philadelphia. "Poole's Hill" rose above the Cohoquinoque Creek (later Pegg's Run, later Willow Street), which was surrounded by marshland. William Poole lived on Poole's Hill, and he or someone in his family constructed a bridge to cross into the countryside north of Philadelphia.
This drawing is from a survey, and it actually lines up incredibly well with modern satellite photography - overlaid atop each other, the shore of the Delaware neatly follows where Water Street turns left into Willow Street today. These details also helped me spot the neighborhood in this aerial illustration "from 1702", taken from an 1875 lithograph by F. J. Wade. Every copy of the lithograph I could find dates to 1875, but the features match up with earlier drawings and descriptions of Philadelphia, leading me to believe that it was probably created to celebrate the centennial, it was done with a decent amount of research - and good research in the 19th century was hard to find.
Most digital copies of the image (like the Library Company of Philadelphia link above) are black and white, but there's a watercolor-painted variation at the State Museum of Pennsylvania. They don't have it in high resolution anywhere, but I did spot it in a YouTube video about the planning of Philadelphia, which is where the above screenshot was sourced. So I took the fairly low-resolution color screenshot, combined it with a high resolution black-and-white digital copy, and here's what the neighborhood looked like before Callowhill Street came into being.
The scale is a little bit off - the bridge to the left is Front Street passing over Arch Street, the shipyard just right of center is where Vine street would eventually meet Water Street, and that's Pegg's Run on the right, eventually getting covered over to become Willow Street. Keep in mind that this was not a contemporary illustration, but was mostly based on the early 19th century text, Watson's Annals of Philadelphia.
Next on the timeline is a painting from 1720 that only survives by luck. Peter Cooper's "The South East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia" was discovered in the rubbish outside of a London curiosity shop by a British Member of Parliament in the mid-1800s, and it was subsequently donated to the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1857. Though it doesn't really include my neighborhood, it's interesting to me because it was painted in Philadelphia by an amateur, it's an early example showing the colors of the town: seasoned wood, brick, and a very silty river that even today has this same hue. The above link has the painting as it exists at the time of this post, but below I've done some quick color correction in Photoshop:
Yeah, all these pictures showing the Delaware River a cool shade of bright blue? Complete fantasy! Peter Cooper though? Nailed it. Note the very last building on the far right, numbered 24, the Penny Pot Tavern, with a ship laid up in front of it. More on this later.
The next illustration I found is from some three decades later, and Philadelphia's growth during that time has been incredibly dramatic. The city's becoming the second largest in the British Empire, and Thomas Penn sought out someone to create an illustration of the city to help promote it back home in England. The sequence of events that leads to the famous Scull & Heap "East Prospect of Philadelphia" is more complicated than it should be: George Heap hears about this call for an illustration, and does a drawing on his own time, which turns out to be better than any of the official drawings made by artists Thomas Penn had hired. Heap boarded a ship to England with his drawing, but died before the ship left the Delaware. Scull bought the (now damaged) drawing from his widow, made a copy, and sent this overseas, from which Gerard Van der Gucht created two different engravings: One in four large panels, another in a single, long panel. Huge thanks to Peter Ansoff for detailing this in "A Striped Ensign in Philadelphia in 1754?" Initally, I was only aware of the later, second engraving, which I downloaded in high resolution from the Library of Congress. Here's a close-up showing Vine Street on the left (marked by the number 11, if you look closely) and the bridge over Pegg's Run is on the far right edge. The ample woods seen in the 1702 picture are still present here, as well.
This iteration of the illustration dates back to 1761, so it was being sold in London right as the foundation was laid in Philadelphia at the building that would become The Hannah Callowhill Stage. We know that the set of buildings due west of our building were erected first. I was disappointed to find that though the buildings very roughly matched up with the much-copied Clarkson & Biddle map of Philadelphia (also circa 1761), the details and perspective weren't great. Here's the detail from the Clarkson & Biddle map, also taken from the Library of Congress' digital collection.
At the time of the survey, 103 Callowhill Street (which, prior to a mid-19th century renumbering of Philadelphia streets, was 21 Callowhill Street) was a 16-foot-wide vacant lot of land (next to the rotated L-shape block, east of the square where Callowhill meets New Market in the above illustration), and as this was being distributed, the bricks that make up the sides of the building today were being laid. It would have been present for John Hills' "plan of the city of Philadelphia and its environs", which doesn't detail individual buildings, but does a good job of showing the features of the land - with marshy land around Pegg's Run, and the cliff sides running along the Delaware River.
After finding Ansoff's PDF about the history of these illustrations, I not only found decent scans of that earlier 1754 engraving, but I found a pretty spectacular 1975 reproduction on Etsy. Seen below, it has much better detail than the second go - no doubt because it's a much larger print. Note that the rather unimaginative colors are particular to this 1975 reproduction, and as far as I know, the originals were strictly in black and white.
Zooming in on
the area between the West Shipyard and Pegg's Run, I'm inclined to say that the original four brick buildings described in
Benjamin Mifflin's deed on the property are shown in the illustration -
with what appears to be a wood shack on the property where 103
Callowhill would be later built. As for the issues with perspective, I read a contemporary account of the drawing that lamented Heap's failure to properly capture depth in his drawing.
Most other examples of this prospect of Philadelphia are copies-of-copies, each engraving losing more detail, but there is one other engraving that was based on Heap's drawing (and not on the engraving of the drawing), twenty-five years later, by Carington Bowles. I haven't sourced a high quality scan of this one yet, so it hasn't been helpful to my cause, but when I do, I'll be sure to update this entry. I haven't found any evidence that either Heap's original drawing nor Scull's copy of the original drawing survived beyond the 18th century, so I think the above image is likely the most accurate period illustration of Philadelphia.
Callowhill Street between Front and Second is almost solid with buildings at this point, and market houses have been built in a square where New Market Street intersects with Callowhill. This can be seen in greater detail from what appears to be a pencil drawing of Pegg's Run based on an earlier drawing by Edward William Mumford - another variation was later done as a woodcut for the Annals of Philadelphia by his brother, Thomas Mumford.
The prototypical drawing for these illustrations can be found in River Chronicles from The Journal of Philadelphia Waterfront Heritage & Archaeology., and although it's not done with an eye for art necessarily, it has a lot more detail about the geography of Pegg's Run and its surroundings.
Bryn Mawr had a few low-resolution scans of these other drawings online, and when I first came across them, I was astonished at how they resembled black and white photography. For example, here's the illustration of the Penny Pot Tavern, which was just down the street, where Vine met Front Street.
These same buildings are visible on the watercolors at the beginning of this post. The detail seems impressive, considering the building had long been demolished and replaced by the mid-1800s when Mr. Mumford was doing these drawings. Almost any later illustration of the Penny Pot appears to have been based off this one. Between this illustration and the 1752 Scull & Heap drawing, the Penny Pot Tavern bears a striking resemblance to a house in Swarthmore where Benjamin West was born.
So we're halfway through the 19th century and still don't actually have any visual representation of The Hannah. It will still be several decades before a glimpse becomes available, but in 1843, Joseph Burn insured the building with the Philadelphia Contributionship, one of the earliest insurance companies in the colonies. They go into great detail about the inside of the building, and go so far as to draw a plan of the property - all of that can be viewed on their website here. Notably, the address is listed as 21 Callowhill Street, but the drawing refers to 103 Callowhill Street. I'm sure at some point I figured out exactly when they re-numbered, but I can't recall at the moment, and given the conflicting information in this listing, the change probably took place in the early 1800s. Even in 1843, the neighborhood was still pre-industrial -- but just barely. The building type is entered as "Carpenter's Shop" - which could refer to it originally being used for carpentry, or it may be a reference to the original owner, Abraham Carpenter. I bring up this possibility because the drawing itself lists the building as housing a tailor.
Finding this plan was way more exciting than it should have been to me - although it didn't really tell me anything new about the buildings, it did give additional context. While we had some information about the building from the old deeds, the detail that the Contributionship went into helped paint a better picture of what the interior of this building must have looked like. Using Sketchup and the details in the insurance records - as well as the measurements in the drawing - I set about modeling what the building might have looked like when it was originally built. I'm not entirely sure where the chimney was - insurance references there being two mantles on almost every floor, but with an alley on one side and "close newel winding stairs" running from the basement into the attic, I'm just guessing.
In reality, the house was sandwiched between other buildings, necessitating that alleyway, and the city block was already growing in density, despite the best intentions of William Penn's original plan for spacing buildings out (a reaction to growing up during the era of the Great Fire of London). To the west, four other 16-foot-wide 3-story brick buildings of similar build had been erected in the 1740s, and to the east, a tavern on the corner of Front and Callowhill had extended all the way back to share walls with 103 Callowhill, as seen on this detail from an 1858 map by Hexamer and Locher. Fences and horse stables separated the back lots, the "New Market" had already failed, and these small factories were quickly becoming flophouses as industrialization revolutionized the way people created and consumed things.
What was once a forested hilltop overlooking a marshy creek was now jam-packed with factories, coal yards, warehouses, and breweries. Pegg's Run was so filthy, it was converted into an underground sewer line, and overlaid with Philadelphia and Reading Railroad tracks. The Delaware river had been dredged, and the resulting soil and silt was used to extend the shoreline out, creating Delaware Avenue, setting Water Street a block further away from the feature that it was named after. Below is a detail from Baist's Property Atlas, circa 1895.
We're well into the age of photography now, but decades away from any
pictures of the building, still. In 1914, Philadelphia-native artist Joseph Pennell stops by the
neighborhood, and from across the street, sketches the intersection of
Front and Callowhill streets. Though he was across the street from where
I'm now typing this, he focused his attention towards the docks. We're a
decade into the 20th century, and in this silty, smokey section of
Philadelphia, horses still drag wagons across Belgian block streets, while great
steamships and sailboats choke the ports at the end of the road, and a mere
block north, constantly moving hordes of coal-fired steam locomotives
noisily lurch back and forth, bringing goods from ships to cold storage
warehouses to be delivered hundreds of miles away across
trans-continental railroads. Where there had once been gas lamps providing light and chimneys the only indication of interior climate control, we're now seeing early utility poles carrying electricity out to the piers and to the dozens of buildings crammed into every subdivided city block. And in just two more years, a dramatic new addition will come into play along the waterfront: The Market-Frankford Elevated Line.
In 1916, they were breaking up Front Street, pouring new concrete footers, and dropping in steel beams to support an elevated electric train, and documenting every step of the way. Not every photo is online, but there are some pictures that are, and once again, they're just around the corner from my point of focus.
This is looking north from the intersection of Front and Callowhill. You can just make out the Philadelphia Warehouse & Cold Storage Company building in the back - the company still operates out of the same building today, which was adorned with a giant American flag mural after the September 11th attacks. I found the above photo at the Temple archives, where it's labeled "First section of the Frankford Elevated." Around this time, Sanborn Fire Insurance is printing maps based on new surveys, and this is where we get a look at the first major modification of 103 Callowhill Street, as well as all the growth surrounding it.
In 1905, the owners of the building demolished the second floor of the "court dwelling" in the backyard, extended the back of the building nearly all the way to the end of the lot. A pair of skylights were installed, and this became a cold storage warehouse. An iron awning encompassed nearly the entire block, terminating at this property. That's just about all the information I have on the look of the building from this era, so based off that, I put the following model together.
Again, this representation is not really an accurate portrayal of what things really looked like. The block added even more density over the last decade or two, and with that Sanborn map, I put together a rough model of the entire block, which came to be very helpful as I parsed the aerial photography that I'll get into below.
There's a human standing outside of 103 Callowhill, to give a sense of scale. Here's an overhead view, showing the rear of the building, and the mess of rear alleyways, dwarfed by three and four story buildings ringing the block, and a soap factory (already vacant & dilapidated by 1919) filling the subdivided interior. Here's a rendering of the same Sketchup model from a different angle, using Twinmotion, a tool that uses the Unreal engine.
We're so close to seeing an actual photo of the building, but before we get there, I'm going to point out Sweatman's Malt House. This architectural curiosity sat on the opposite side of Callowhill Street through the early 20th century, and makes the area very easy to spot. It can be seen in the background of this 1919 sketch by Frank Taylor, again sourced from Bryn Mawr. More of Taylor's work can be viewed online at the Library Company of Philadelphia's website.
Somewhat maddeningly, if ol' Frank here would have been facing north instead of south, he might have included 103 Callowhill in his sketch, but to be fair, the skyline is much more interesting when you've got two massive smokestacks poking out of a tall building like that. It's quite the standout feature, clearly visible from the Camden side of the Delaware river on the right, below.
The earliest photo I found of 103 Callowhill Street exists because of the Ben Franklin Bridge, which before being renamed, was known as the Delaware River Bridge. Quite the engineering feat at the time, there are hundreds of aerial photographs that were taken during the course of the construction of the bridge. Most of the ones I found were by the Dallin Aerial Survey company. The Hagley Digital Archives have hundreds of aerial surveys from Dallin, viewable online in high resolution, and this proved to be a boon for me. This photo from 1924 gives you some idea of how busy the port of Philadelphia was, even a quarter of the way into the 20th century.
Taking what we know about the Market Frankford Elevated line, Sweatman's Malt House, and the 3D model of what the block looked like in 1919, if we zoom into the right place...
That's my neighborhood! Almost entirely unrecognizable compared to what it looks like today, from roughly the same angle.
Compared to a rendering of the full block at a similar angle...
There it is! Three and a half stories with a dormer window!
I was unreasonably excited about what is, in effect, a smudge on a huge picture. But it was a start! Here's detail from a different photo, from 1925.
And in 1927, from a different angle.
There are several variations of this - a small portion in the background of a photo of a bridge. The most detail is from a 1937 photo, looking almost directly north.
You can make even make out the shutters! Keep in mind, this is a small section of a much larger photo - the full size scan is available here. Two decades pass between this image and the next one I can find, and in that time, Philadelphia, like most American cities, begins to tumble down a post-war decline.The photo on the left, by Dennis Linski, was taken in 1959 from the Ben Franklin bridge, and in the distance you can just make out the mansard roof of 400 N Front Street, painted yellow - which seems to have happened between 1927 and 1937, based on the shades of the photos above.
Many of the buildings in these photos, by the middle of the 20th century, are over two hundred years old, and they've been put through their paces, without care being paid toward maintenance. The wonderful PhillyHistory.org turns up the photo below, dating from 1963.
The familiar mansard roof of 400 North Front Street has survived, as has the cornice along that building, but the brick structures that Benjamin Mifflin had built in the 18th century are far worse for wear. 103 Callowhill's top was removed in 1942 - a flat roof built over top the floor planks of the otherwise demolished third story. 105 and 107 Callowhill had both been reduced to a single story, and while they retained their brickwork, 103 Callowhill got one of the nastier looking stucco jobs I've ever seen. Three star bolts are keeping the front of the building from shearing off. But this was only 1963. The waterfront still has farther to fall. By this time, plans are well underway to build an expressway along the Delaware River. Following a national trend, the decision was made that crime and poverty should be dealt with using bulldozers. Check out this aerial view from 1972.
Compare that to the photo above taken during the construction of the Ben Franklin bridge. Thousands of displaced lives, the leveling of thousands of historic buildings. The railroads have failed, and large swaths of the population are fleeing to the suburbs. Philadelphia has a plan to re-purpose the Callowhill district into a series of massive industrial buildings and parking lots, hoping to attract jobs that will bring auto-centric suburbanites back into the center of the city, but the timing for this plan couldn't be worse. 103 Callowhill is in that photo above, near the bottom-left where the El crosses Callowhill Street, but there's not a lot to look at. Within three years, most of the demolition is complete, and work begins on the new expressway. I found the following photo on Flickr, and though I reached out to Leroy Demery about a higher resolution scan, he had trouble getting it to me. Right in the center of this picture, the drab, stucco exterior of 103 Callowhill can be seen. You kind of have to squint, though.
The single-story building shells at 105 and 107 Callowhill are still visible as well, but their time is nearly up. Roman Zark posted the following photo to Facebook, and said it dates to 1976 - once again, a tree obstructs our building, but you get a pretty good view of 400 N Front Street.
Aside from one more photograph, these are the last images I could find of the building for three more decades. How I found the next photo of it involved quite a stroke of luck. During my search for older photographs of Philadelphia, I came across an online exhibit at PAFA for a photographer named Will Brown. There's a wonderful story in the Penn Gazette about a chance meeting that turned into the publication of a book of his photos some 30 years after they had been taken, and PAFA had a selection of photos online, including one simply called Ervin's.
I'd spent enough time combing through PhillyHistory.org photos to recognize the building. The mansard roof had been cropped off the top, but that was the corner of Front and Callowhill Street. As with so many other photos and drawings over the centuries, 103 Callowhill was just out of frame. There was another photo in the collection, Izzy's Fried Fish, which I recognized as being directly across the street from 103 Callowhill. It was enough that I reached out to the photographer, who still lived in Philadelphia, and asked if he had any more photos from that day. To my delight, he actually did, and after a quick Paypal transaction, he sent me a high resolution scan. What's below is a crop from that photo, and at a lower resolution than what he sent. The photo is from a little bit later, as evidenced by the new street lamp. (Will, if you come across this and want me to take it down, you know how to reach me. Sorry!)
By this point, the buildings next door have been razed, leaving lots that are still vacant today. You can see the edge of the concrete overpass where 95 crosses Callowhill Street, and it's already been pretty well tagged, so this photo is probably from the early 80s. 400 North Front Street is in sad, sad shape, but the worst is yet to come for that building. The two original windows at 103 Callowhill now have what appears to be vinyl siding covering them, and a window air conditioning unit providing what was likely minimal comfort to what must have been a super dank and terrible second-floor office space.
The first floor had, by now, been extended all the way to the end of the lot. More terrible stucco gets slathered across the 100 foot length of the west-facing side of the building. This building would maintain this look until around 1994, when the owner at that time took a permit out to completely re-do the facade, tearing out the old brick, putting up concrete block structure and a course of bricks out front. (Somehow, during this process, they'll fail to center the windows!)
I managed to find a photo in a report by the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission via CRGIS, where the report on the building states that "...Incompatible alterations to the shopfront of 103 Callowhill Street compromise its integrity... because of the alterations to the architectural and site integrity, this structure is not eligible for the National Register."
Ineligible for the National Register of Historic Buildings? Bring on the rollup metal security doors! Of note, the survey, listing this as "parcel NL29", estimated the construction of the building as being between 1916 and 1948, based on insurance maps. Had they had access to the guts of the building, the walls and floors told another story.
Between 1994 and the mid-2000s, the 90s sash windows were replaced with ill-fitting casement windows, and in its transformation into Grasso's Magic Theater, new brickwork (with old bricks) and woodwork replace the rolling steel graffiti canvas. It's not the worst example of bad 90s architecture in the neighborhood, but it's pretty close.
The photo above is what the building looked like when we first spotted it in 2014. At least, that's what the front of the building looked like. Let's peek around the side for a moment.
To be fair, I'd probably call those tags an improvement. You can still see variations in the rear roofline that indicate where that two-story brick messuage in the back lot had been, and where walls were extended in front and behind it, to build out the warehouse. There's a scar where the chimneys from 105 used to be. The skylights were roofed over, the rear window openings covered in tar muck, which served double-duty, holding the bricks together.
The roof over the second floor probably hadn't been updated since the 1940s, and the Swiss-cheese nature of the roof helped us get the building at the price that we did.
We ended up taking down everything but the walls, in the process of adding a third story to the building. We replaced the casement windows on the second floor with better casement windows, and while we didn't return it to its 3.5 story Georgian look, we did spring for a very modest cornice so that it wasn't just a flat wall of brick.
We redid the entry on the first floor, and painted the rest of it black. There's at least one more revision in store for this part of the building, as we move towards opening a theater on the first floor again. But for now, this is what home looks like.
--Matt
Okay. Here we go.
One of the earliest representations of William Penn's Philadelphia was Thomas Holme's A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, and a variety of prints and copies of this can be found online, and the copy passed down through the Chew family is one of the clearest I've found. The survey dates back to 1683 - the foundation for our building wouldn't be laid for nearly eight decades. But it's interesting to see that at the time, the land was outside of the original plans for Philadelphia. "Poole's Hill" rose above the Cohoquinoque Creek (later Pegg's Run, later Willow Street), which was surrounded by marshland. William Poole lived on Poole's Hill, and he or someone in his family constructed a bridge to cross into the countryside north of Philadelphia.
This drawing is from a survey, and it actually lines up incredibly well with modern satellite photography - overlaid atop each other, the shore of the Delaware neatly follows where Water Street turns left into Willow Street today. These details also helped me spot the neighborhood in this aerial illustration "from 1702", taken from an 1875 lithograph by F. J. Wade. Every copy of the lithograph I could find dates to 1875, but the features match up with earlier drawings and descriptions of Philadelphia, leading me to believe that it was probably created to celebrate the centennial, it was done with a decent amount of research - and good research in the 19th century was hard to find.
Most digital copies of the image (like the Library Company of Philadelphia link above) are black and white, but there's a watercolor-painted variation at the State Museum of Pennsylvania. They don't have it in high resolution anywhere, but I did spot it in a YouTube video about the planning of Philadelphia, which is where the above screenshot was sourced. So I took the fairly low-resolution color screenshot, combined it with a high resolution black-and-white digital copy, and here's what the neighborhood looked like before Callowhill Street came into being.
The scale is a little bit off - the bridge to the left is Front Street passing over Arch Street, the shipyard just right of center is where Vine street would eventually meet Water Street, and that's Pegg's Run on the right, eventually getting covered over to become Willow Street. Keep in mind that this was not a contemporary illustration, but was mostly based on the early 19th century text, Watson's Annals of Philadelphia.
Next on the timeline is a painting from 1720 that only survives by luck. Peter Cooper's "The South East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia" was discovered in the rubbish outside of a London curiosity shop by a British Member of Parliament in the mid-1800s, and it was subsequently donated to the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1857. Though it doesn't really include my neighborhood, it's interesting to me because it was painted in Philadelphia by an amateur, it's an early example showing the colors of the town: seasoned wood, brick, and a very silty river that even today has this same hue. The above link has the painting as it exists at the time of this post, but below I've done some quick color correction in Photoshop:
Yeah, all these pictures showing the Delaware River a cool shade of bright blue? Complete fantasy! Peter Cooper though? Nailed it. Note the very last building on the far right, numbered 24, the Penny Pot Tavern, with a ship laid up in front of it. More on this later.
The next illustration I found is from some three decades later, and Philadelphia's growth during that time has been incredibly dramatic. The city's becoming the second largest in the British Empire, and Thomas Penn sought out someone to create an illustration of the city to help promote it back home in England. The sequence of events that leads to the famous Scull & Heap "East Prospect of Philadelphia" is more complicated than it should be: George Heap hears about this call for an illustration, and does a drawing on his own time, which turns out to be better than any of the official drawings made by artists Thomas Penn had hired. Heap boarded a ship to England with his drawing, but died before the ship left the Delaware. Scull bought the (now damaged) drawing from his widow, made a copy, and sent this overseas, from which Gerard Van der Gucht created two different engravings: One in four large panels, another in a single, long panel. Huge thanks to Peter Ansoff for detailing this in "A Striped Ensign in Philadelphia in 1754?" Initally, I was only aware of the later, second engraving, which I downloaded in high resolution from the Library of Congress. Here's a close-up showing Vine Street on the left (marked by the number 11, if you look closely) and the bridge over Pegg's Run is on the far right edge. The ample woods seen in the 1702 picture are still present here, as well.
This iteration of the illustration dates back to 1761, so it was being sold in London right as the foundation was laid in Philadelphia at the building that would become The Hannah Callowhill Stage. We know that the set of buildings due west of our building were erected first. I was disappointed to find that though the buildings very roughly matched up with the much-copied Clarkson & Biddle map of Philadelphia (also circa 1761), the details and perspective weren't great. Here's the detail from the Clarkson & Biddle map, also taken from the Library of Congress' digital collection.
At the time of the survey, 103 Callowhill Street (which, prior to a mid-19th century renumbering of Philadelphia streets, was 21 Callowhill Street) was a 16-foot-wide vacant lot of land (next to the rotated L-shape block, east of the square where Callowhill meets New Market in the above illustration), and as this was being distributed, the bricks that make up the sides of the building today were being laid. It would have been present for John Hills' "plan of the city of Philadelphia and its environs", which doesn't detail individual buildings, but does a good job of showing the features of the land - with marshy land around Pegg's Run, and the cliff sides running along the Delaware River.
After finding Ansoff's PDF about the history of these illustrations, I not only found decent scans of that earlier 1754 engraving, but I found a pretty spectacular 1975 reproduction on Etsy. Seen below, it has much better detail than the second go - no doubt because it's a much larger print. Note that the rather unimaginative colors are particular to this 1975 reproduction, and as far as I know, the originals were strictly in black and white.
Zooming in on
the area between the West Shipyard and Pegg's Run, I'm inclined to say that the original four brick buildings described in
Benjamin Mifflin's deed on the property are shown in the illustration -
with what appears to be a wood shack on the property where 103
Callowhill would be later built. As for the issues with perspective, I read a contemporary account of the drawing that lamented Heap's failure to properly capture depth in his drawing. Most other examples of this prospect of Philadelphia are copies-of-copies, each engraving losing more detail, but there is one other engraving that was based on Heap's drawing (and not on the engraving of the drawing), twenty-five years later, by Carington Bowles. I haven't sourced a high quality scan of this one yet, so it hasn't been helpful to my cause, but when I do, I'll be sure to update this entry. I haven't found any evidence that either Heap's original drawing nor Scull's copy of the original drawing survived beyond the 18th century, so I think the above image is likely the most accurate period illustration of Philadelphia.
Callowhill Street between Front and Second is almost solid with buildings at this point, and market houses have been built in a square where New Market Street intersects with Callowhill. This can be seen in greater detail from what appears to be a pencil drawing of Pegg's Run based on an earlier drawing by Edward William Mumford - another variation was later done as a woodcut for the Annals of Philadelphia by his brother, Thomas Mumford.
The prototypical drawing for these illustrations can be found in River Chronicles from The Journal of Philadelphia Waterfront Heritage & Archaeology., and although it's not done with an eye for art necessarily, it has a lot more detail about the geography of Pegg's Run and its surroundings.
Bryn Mawr had a few low-resolution scans of these other drawings online, and when I first came across them, I was astonished at how they resembled black and white photography. For example, here's the illustration of the Penny Pot Tavern, which was just down the street, where Vine met Front Street.
These same buildings are visible on the watercolors at the beginning of this post. The detail seems impressive, considering the building had long been demolished and replaced by the mid-1800s when Mr. Mumford was doing these drawings. Almost any later illustration of the Penny Pot appears to have been based off this one. Between this illustration and the 1752 Scull & Heap drawing, the Penny Pot Tavern bears a striking resemblance to a house in Swarthmore where Benjamin West was born.
So we're halfway through the 19th century and still don't actually have any visual representation of The Hannah. It will still be several decades before a glimpse becomes available, but in 1843, Joseph Burn insured the building with the Philadelphia Contributionship, one of the earliest insurance companies in the colonies. They go into great detail about the inside of the building, and go so far as to draw a plan of the property - all of that can be viewed on their website here. Notably, the address is listed as 21 Callowhill Street, but the drawing refers to 103 Callowhill Street. I'm sure at some point I figured out exactly when they re-numbered, but I can't recall at the moment, and given the conflicting information in this listing, the change probably took place in the early 1800s. Even in 1843, the neighborhood was still pre-industrial -- but just barely. The building type is entered as "Carpenter's Shop" - which could refer to it originally being used for carpentry, or it may be a reference to the original owner, Abraham Carpenter. I bring up this possibility because the drawing itself lists the building as housing a tailor.
In reality, the house was sandwiched between other buildings, necessitating that alleyway, and the city block was already growing in density, despite the best intentions of William Penn's original plan for spacing buildings out (a reaction to growing up during the era of the Great Fire of London). To the west, four other 16-foot-wide 3-story brick buildings of similar build had been erected in the 1740s, and to the east, a tavern on the corner of Front and Callowhill had extended all the way back to share walls with 103 Callowhill, as seen on this detail from an 1858 map by Hexamer and Locher. Fences and horse stables separated the back lots, the "New Market" had already failed, and these small factories were quickly becoming flophouses as industrialization revolutionized the way people created and consumed things.
What was once a forested hilltop overlooking a marshy creek was now jam-packed with factories, coal yards, warehouses, and breweries. Pegg's Run was so filthy, it was converted into an underground sewer line, and overlaid with Philadelphia and Reading Railroad tracks. The Delaware river had been dredged, and the resulting soil and silt was used to extend the shoreline out, creating Delaware Avenue, setting Water Street a block further away from the feature that it was named after. Below is a detail from Baist's Property Atlas, circa 1895.
In 1916, they were breaking up Front Street, pouring new concrete footers, and dropping in steel beams to support an elevated electric train, and documenting every step of the way. Not every photo is online, but there are some pictures that are, and once again, they're just around the corner from my point of focus.
This is looking north from the intersection of Front and Callowhill. You can just make out the Philadelphia Warehouse & Cold Storage Company building in the back - the company still operates out of the same building today, which was adorned with a giant American flag mural after the September 11th attacks. I found the above photo at the Temple archives, where it's labeled "First section of the Frankford Elevated." Around this time, Sanborn Fire Insurance is printing maps based on new surveys, and this is where we get a look at the first major modification of 103 Callowhill Street, as well as all the growth surrounding it.
In 1905, the owners of the building demolished the second floor of the "court dwelling" in the backyard, extended the back of the building nearly all the way to the end of the lot. A pair of skylights were installed, and this became a cold storage warehouse. An iron awning encompassed nearly the entire block, terminating at this property. That's just about all the information I have on the look of the building from this era, so based off that, I put the following model together.
Again, this representation is not really an accurate portrayal of what things really looked like. The block added even more density over the last decade or two, and with that Sanborn map, I put together a rough model of the entire block, which came to be very helpful as I parsed the aerial photography that I'll get into below.
There's a human standing outside of 103 Callowhill, to give a sense of scale. Here's an overhead view, showing the rear of the building, and the mess of rear alleyways, dwarfed by three and four story buildings ringing the block, and a soap factory (already vacant & dilapidated by 1919) filling the subdivided interior. Here's a rendering of the same Sketchup model from a different angle, using Twinmotion, a tool that uses the Unreal engine.
We're so close to seeing an actual photo of the building, but before we get there, I'm going to point out Sweatman's Malt House. This architectural curiosity sat on the opposite side of Callowhill Street through the early 20th century, and makes the area very easy to spot. It can be seen in the background of this 1919 sketch by Frank Taylor, again sourced from Bryn Mawr. More of Taylor's work can be viewed online at the Library Company of Philadelphia's website.
Somewhat maddeningly, if ol' Frank here would have been facing north instead of south, he might have included 103 Callowhill in his sketch, but to be fair, the skyline is much more interesting when you've got two massive smokestacks poking out of a tall building like that. It's quite the standout feature, clearly visible from the Camden side of the Delaware river on the right, below.
Taking what we know about the Market Frankford Elevated line, Sweatman's Malt House, and the 3D model of what the block looked like in 1919, if we zoom into the right place...
That's my neighborhood! Almost entirely unrecognizable compared to what it looks like today, from roughly the same angle.
Compared to a rendering of the full block at a similar angle...
There it is! Three and a half stories with a dormer window!
I was unreasonably excited about what is, in effect, a smudge on a huge picture. But it was a start! Here's detail from a different photo, from 1925.
And in 1927, from a different angle.
There are several variations of this - a small portion in the background of a photo of a bridge. The most detail is from a 1937 photo, looking almost directly north.
You can make even make out the shutters! Keep in mind, this is a small section of a much larger photo - the full size scan is available here. Two decades pass between this image and the next one I can find, and in that time, Philadelphia, like most American cities, begins to tumble down a post-war decline.The photo on the left, by Dennis Linski, was taken in 1959 from the Ben Franklin bridge, and in the distance you can just make out the mansard roof of 400 N Front Street, painted yellow - which seems to have happened between 1927 and 1937, based on the shades of the photos above.Many of the buildings in these photos, by the middle of the 20th century, are over two hundred years old, and they've been put through their paces, without care being paid toward maintenance. The wonderful PhillyHistory.org turns up the photo below, dating from 1963.
The familiar mansard roof of 400 North Front Street has survived, as has the cornice along that building, but the brick structures that Benjamin Mifflin had built in the 18th century are far worse for wear. 103 Callowhill's top was removed in 1942 - a flat roof built over top the floor planks of the otherwise demolished third story. 105 and 107 Callowhill had both been reduced to a single story, and while they retained their brickwork, 103 Callowhill got one of the nastier looking stucco jobs I've ever seen. Three star bolts are keeping the front of the building from shearing off. But this was only 1963. The waterfront still has farther to fall. By this time, plans are well underway to build an expressway along the Delaware River. Following a national trend, the decision was made that crime and poverty should be dealt with using bulldozers. Check out this aerial view from 1972.
Compare that to the photo above taken during the construction of the Ben Franklin bridge. Thousands of displaced lives, the leveling of thousands of historic buildings. The railroads have failed, and large swaths of the population are fleeing to the suburbs. Philadelphia has a plan to re-purpose the Callowhill district into a series of massive industrial buildings and parking lots, hoping to attract jobs that will bring auto-centric suburbanites back into the center of the city, but the timing for this plan couldn't be worse. 103 Callowhill is in that photo above, near the bottom-left where the El crosses Callowhill Street, but there's not a lot to look at. Within three years, most of the demolition is complete, and work begins on the new expressway. I found the following photo on Flickr, and though I reached out to Leroy Demery about a higher resolution scan, he had trouble getting it to me. Right in the center of this picture, the drab, stucco exterior of 103 Callowhill can be seen. You kind of have to squint, though.
The single-story building shells at 105 and 107 Callowhill are still visible as well, but their time is nearly up. Roman Zark posted the following photo to Facebook, and said it dates to 1976 - once again, a tree obstructs our building, but you get a pretty good view of 400 N Front Street.
Aside from one more photograph, these are the last images I could find of the building for three more decades. How I found the next photo of it involved quite a stroke of luck. During my search for older photographs of Philadelphia, I came across an online exhibit at PAFA for a photographer named Will Brown. There's a wonderful story in the Penn Gazette about a chance meeting that turned into the publication of a book of his photos some 30 years after they had been taken, and PAFA had a selection of photos online, including one simply called Ervin's.
I'd spent enough time combing through PhillyHistory.org photos to recognize the building. The mansard roof had been cropped off the top, but that was the corner of Front and Callowhill Street. As with so many other photos and drawings over the centuries, 103 Callowhill was just out of frame. There was another photo in the collection, Izzy's Fried Fish, which I recognized as being directly across the street from 103 Callowhill. It was enough that I reached out to the photographer, who still lived in Philadelphia, and asked if he had any more photos from that day. To my delight, he actually did, and after a quick Paypal transaction, he sent me a high resolution scan. What's below is a crop from that photo, and at a lower resolution than what he sent. The photo is from a little bit later, as evidenced by the new street lamp. (Will, if you come across this and want me to take it down, you know how to reach me. Sorry!)
By this point, the buildings next door have been razed, leaving lots that are still vacant today. You can see the edge of the concrete overpass where 95 crosses Callowhill Street, and it's already been pretty well tagged, so this photo is probably from the early 80s. 400 North Front Street is in sad, sad shape, but the worst is yet to come for that building. The two original windows at 103 Callowhill now have what appears to be vinyl siding covering them, and a window air conditioning unit providing what was likely minimal comfort to what must have been a super dank and terrible second-floor office space.
The first floor had, by now, been extended all the way to the end of the lot. More terrible stucco gets slathered across the 100 foot length of the west-facing side of the building. This building would maintain this look until around 1994, when the owner at that time took a permit out to completely re-do the facade, tearing out the old brick, putting up concrete block structure and a course of bricks out front. (Somehow, during this process, they'll fail to center the windows!)
I managed to find a photo in a report by the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission via CRGIS, where the report on the building states that "...Incompatible alterations to the shopfront of 103 Callowhill Street compromise its integrity... because of the alterations to the architectural and site integrity, this structure is not eligible for the National Register."
Ineligible for the National Register of Historic Buildings? Bring on the rollup metal security doors! Of note, the survey, listing this as "parcel NL29", estimated the construction of the building as being between 1916 and 1948, based on insurance maps. Had they had access to the guts of the building, the walls and floors told another story.
Between 1994 and the mid-2000s, the 90s sash windows were replaced with ill-fitting casement windows, and in its transformation into Grasso's Magic Theater, new brickwork (with old bricks) and woodwork replace the rolling steel graffiti canvas. It's not the worst example of bad 90s architecture in the neighborhood, but it's pretty close.
The photo above is what the building looked like when we first spotted it in 2014. At least, that's what the front of the building looked like. Let's peek around the side for a moment.
To be fair, I'd probably call those tags an improvement. You can still see variations in the rear roofline that indicate where that two-story brick messuage in the back lot had been, and where walls were extended in front and behind it, to build out the warehouse. There's a scar where the chimneys from 105 used to be. The skylights were roofed over, the rear window openings covered in tar muck, which served double-duty, holding the bricks together.
The roof over the second floor probably hadn't been updated since the 1940s, and the Swiss-cheese nature of the roof helped us get the building at the price that we did.
We ended up taking down everything but the walls, in the process of adding a third story to the building. We replaced the casement windows on the second floor with better casement windows, and while we didn't return it to its 3.5 story Georgian look, we did spring for a very modest cornice so that it wasn't just a flat wall of brick.
We redid the entry on the first floor, and painted the rest of it black. There's at least one more revision in store for this part of the building, as we move towards opening a theater on the first floor again. But for now, this is what home looks like.
enjoyed your website. thanks
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