The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 16: Construction with Larry

Contractor Larry Alice joins Matt and Melissa to chat about post-privy-digging construction.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 15: Intermission

When a planned interview falls through, Matt and Melissa give a quick State of the Podcast.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 14: Conversation with a real archaeologist

Historical archaeologist and materials specialist Debbie Miller talks about her experience in the field.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 13: Murder and Mayhem in the Messuages

Stories of true crime in 19th century Philadelphia's Tenderloin district.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 12: Supplement to Antoine Probst

A dramatic reading of The Life, Confession, and Atrocious Crimes of Antoine Probst.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 11: The Atrocious Crimes of Antoine Probst

Antoine Probst, America's first true crime media sensation, drank lager right under I-95 after committing mass murder.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 10: Quakers and Slavery

As Daniel Williams sells 103 Callowhill Street, it becomes apparent he is behind the curve on Quaker attitudes towards slavery.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 9: War and Ennion

Continuing the story of Daniel Williams and his son Ennion during the Revolutionary War.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 8: Introducing Daniel Williams

Daniel Williams: baker, merchant, man about town, and owner of 103 Callowhill Street.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 7: Mifflin and Carpenter

Exploring the quirks of two colonials who first developed 103 Callowhill Street.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 6: Hannah Callowhill

The Boghouse becomes a history podcast: first subject, Hannah Callowhill Penn.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 5: Ceramics in America

Melissa and Matt get a visit from experts in the field of ceramics, and learn more about what they've found.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 4: Dig

Melissa and Matt unearth old pottery, and make a strong effort to stop unearthing old pottery.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

Podcasting is the new blogging

Four years ago, Melissa created a blog entry on this page introducing the world to our latest project: a theater with an apartment above it. Even as she clicked "publish", it was with the understanding that this wasn't an effort to make a big splash - we were simply leaning on a familiar, easy-to-use tool to document as much as we could as we crash landed next to the Delaware waterfront. In between doing all the things we were doing, Melissa pushed beyond exhaustion to assemble photographs and stories about a story that seemed to grow exponentially every time turned through to each new chapter. But blogs and websites had, by 2015, been largely replaced by the new walled gardens of Social Media. But while these new age advertising giants masqueraded as communities, with record engagement across broad demographic spreads, people were also embracing a Frankenstein of Web 1.0 technologies like RSS and MP3, brewed together and filtered onto our handheld always-on internet comm devices: podcasts.

Serial, arguably the series that truly introduced podcasting to the mainstream, was released the year before we started this blog. In the time since, several professional podcasting networks have self-assembled to assimilate this last vestige of the old internet, racing to build collections of content, or as an old co-worker at the York Newspaper Company once described it, "the stuff that goes around the ads." Those same media consumption devices could just as easily be utilized as media creation devices, and the rush was on to get a couple of friends to get together at the dining room table and talk in the general direction of a Macbook, in the hopes that sweet, sweet Squarespace and Caspar affiliate cash would play pilot to the Patreon flame. Celebrities and public radio defectors joined in, industry veterans turned their skills towards a new frontier, and with our cultural tacit acceptance of mobile surveillance, trackable advertising attribution is waking up the streaming music giants from their gluttonous sleep, with rumors of Spotify seeking to acquire Gimlet, the podcasting landscape is about to shift dramatically.

In the first weeks of this year, Melissa and I recorded three episodes of an idea she'd been talking about for a while now: a podcast about our adventures at the Hannah Callowhill Stage. We sat down and outlined a high level overview of exactly what it is we've been up to over the last five years, designated Sunday as Podcast Day, and on January 27th, released the beginnings of the story into the wild. The reaction has been humbling, and we haven't even got to the really good parts of the story yet. I don't think we're trying to catch the podcast wave, but at the rate of growth we're seeing, I'm not sure we have much choice in the matter.

 

Our podcast is called The Boghouse - an old euphemism for a toilet, or outhouse, because a couple of privies that pre-date America changed our lives. We've had hundreds of conversations with friends, family, and strangers about how that came to be and about what's happened since, and we hope this podcast will provide a better record of that, and as a side effect, save our voices, so that instead of monopolizing people's times at parties, we can say, "Oh yeah, we've got a podcast all about it, check out The Boghouse on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play Music."

So check it out. If you like what you hear, do that thing all the podcasts tell you to do - rate us, like us, subscribe. We are planning to record on a weekly basis, and this is a finite series that follows a (somewhat non-linear) story arc, so you'll want to listen in order, starting with the first episode.

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 2: Money

Melissa and Matt are frustrated by architects and banks. Will they prevail?

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 1: Introduction

Melissa and Matt consider investing in a live/work space and discover a real estate listing for a theater with a sordid past.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

The Boghouse Podcast, Episode 3: Demolition

Melissa and Matt tear down walls and make surprising discoveries.

More information about the Boghouse at boghouse.thehannah.org

Front and Callowhill Streets, in pictures

Over the last few years, as we dug into the history of the property we accidentally bought, I was really taken by all the uses it had, and the shapes it took, but became rather frustrated at trying to find any photographs of 103 Callowhill Street. As evidenced by the last couple of stories, by the mid 19th century, the neighborhood got pretty rough, and by the mid-20th century, the powers that be famously decided to bulldoze their troubles away, halting the eastward demolition precisely at the side of our building. Even after that, the "River's Edge" neighborhood had a roughness to it - stories about homeless folks setting fires in vacant buildings right up into the 21st century. By that measure, it's not terribly surprising that finding photographs of the building in its various states proved difficult. Christ Church in Old City has been illustrated from various angles for about as long as it's been built, but the working class fabric of the city barely captured any attention from artists and photographers, and of those that did preserve visual record of what was at the time mundane, few had their works survive into the modern era.

 

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.

Murder and Mayhem in the Messuages Next Door

If a property has been around for long enough, someone is going to die on it. Given enough human habitation, the chances that someone has been murdered on the premises are pretty decent, because humans are shitty creatures that murder each other a lot. Some locations, though, seem to attract violent crime more than others. While I was researching the history of 103 Callowhill Street (a.k.a. 21 Callowhill Street before the Ordinance of 1856), I noticed something odd: in the Philadelphia newspapers of the late 19th Century, there was a disproportionate number of mentions of the houses next door, 105 Callowhill Street and 400 Front Street (the corner of Front and Callowhill Streets). As it turns out, during this period my poor building was sandwiched between a flophouse and a saloon in one of the worst parts of Philadelphia.

As an aficionado of true crime since puberty, I want to bookend this history with two contemporary Philadelphia-related incidents which became media sensations, one that you probably haven't heard of and one that you probably have (or at least, will probably hear of soon). Public fascination with murder and true crime was really coming into its own in America around this time.

Engraving of Antoine Probst, from The Life, Confession and Atrocious Crimes of Antoine Probst

Benjamin Mifflin, shady-ass property developer

I have more things to blog about than I have time to blog, but here's a quick hilarious thing.

If you have been following closely my research into 103 Callowhill Street and you have a very good memory, you might recall that in my first history post, I wondered if the original deed contained a measurement error. In 1745, the width of the property was listed as 20 feet, but in all subsequent deeds, the property is described as 16 feet wide. Why? After hunting down early deeds for the lot next to ours, I finally have an answer!

Benjamin Mifflin's original four lots on the north side of Callowhill Street, 1745.