Cities and towns -- Middle Atlantic States; Middle Atlantic States -- History
The development of civic institutions in the first quarter of the century
was accompanied by the founding, each to-day housed in conspicuous
recent edifices of the past decade, of State-aided institutions for
the Deaf and Dumb, 1820, for the Blind, 1833, and the House of Refuge,
1828. This philanthropic impulse came, as such generally does, as part
of a rapid material development which, in a score of years ending
with the commercial crash of 1837-39, had laid the foundations of the
manufacturing activity and the internal commerce of Philadelphia. It was
in this period that the Music Fund Hall (1824), Eighth above South, was
built. The Exchange, 1832, the most pretentious building of its day, was
erected near the close of the period, and the pillared row, following a
London model, was built on Spruce between Ninth and Tenth, the largest
and most costly private dwellings of its day. The next Colonnade row,
nearly twenty years later, occupied the site, and gave the name to the
Colonnade Hotel, Fifteenth and Chestnut. St. Mark’s and St. Luke’s
stood for opposite extremes of the church edifices of the forties. The
taste of the Federalists and Whigs of the day filled the city with the
pseudo-classic, from which Europe was just departing—the United States
bank, now the Custom-house, the Mint, the building in which Girard had
his bank, back of the Exchange, and lastly Girard College, not easily
forgot, however unfit for its purpose, if once seen from St. George’s
hill on its airy height. The ship-building firm of Cramps was established
1830, and Baldwin’s Locomotive Works 1837, both products of the same
period of activity. Ten years later began the Pennsylvania railroad
comparable to a kingdom in revenue power and the ability of chiefs like
Frank Thomson. The city flowed across Broad Street, and solid blocks
pushed their way in brick and white marble, turning later to New York’s
brown-stone, up each flank of the city on Pine and on Arch, spreading
out in an area beyond Broad Street, which the crash of credit, and the
failure of the State for a season to pay the interest on its bonds, left
tenantless, often roofless, covered with mortgages and the prediction,
heard first under Governor Keith, 1725, repeated within this decade, that
the city would never need the houses which a boom had erected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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