Vanishing Philadelphia: Ruins of the Quaker City

Higher education has been a showpiece of Philadelphia culture since before the founding of the University of Pennsylvania in 1756. The Philadelphia Board of Public Education was established in 1818. Its first president, Roberts Vaux, served until 1831. The small tax base of the city provided for meager but efficient school building, as well as very basic education. However, Philadelphia’s method of providing free schoolbooks to its students, which began in 1819, had become the standard for American public schools by the turn of the twentieth century. As the city’s population grew, its public school districts began multiplying. They appeared in random, dotted patterns throughout the incomplete city, where neighborhoods were already developed or were developing.

A new act in the state legislature finally put a solid public school system in place by 1836. The first public high school in the country—the Central High School—opened in 1838 on the current site of the Widener Building at South Penn Square. The school still exists today, four buildings and three locations later. By 1850, a board of trustees of the public schools, whose appointment was decided by Common Court judges, had proved small but effective. The board afforded for almost three dozen new schools to be erected about the city. Quaker influence was not gone from the city, and the new school system showed its charitable roots. Fortunately, graft and corruption would not work its way into the city’s school system for another half century.

Philadelphia had one of the country’s first municipal systems of public education, along with cutting-edge school facilities in which to employ it. These achievements, however, did not come freely to the city. Its endless line of political saboteurs and elected crooks were also part of the reason Philadelphia was financially and legally able to build such a system. Therefore, as the city grew and expanded, this system also matured and reached deeper into its municipal veins. By 1880, Philadelphia’s separate school districts were numbering almost thirty. This homegrown system of tiny districts (some only a few square blocks), each containing simple, small schoolhouses that served only a few dozen students each, surely provided a sense of communal aesthetic that has long since disappeared. Schools built during the flamboyant 1870s and 1880s are almost extinct in Philadelphia. A few managed to survive, such as the rustic Cumberland School (later renamed the David Farragut Public School) at Hancock and Cumberland Streets in Kensington.

Over the years, a succession of school board architects gradually transformed the prototypical “Philly school” design that we know today, and throughout the city, schools became sequentially more uniform. In the 1870s, the official Board of Property Architects—which designed and built all public schools and buildings relating to the school board—was composed of Louis Elsler and Joseph Anschutz, along with their team of assistants. Elsler designed quaint, three- or four-room schoolhouses, most of which contained one outhouse and were heated by coal in the winter. Anschutz’s designs, however, were far more ornate and usually located in wealthier areas. He designed more than seventy schools in Philadelphia, a precious few of which remain. Anschutz’s successor, Henry DeCourcey Richards went a step further with the use of central boiler rooms, roof recreation areas and new fireproof construction methods. By 1911, the new public school building codes required that “all school buildings two or more stories high hereafter erected or leased in any school district of the first class in this Commonwealth shall be of fire-proof construction.”

Richards’s time as architect of public schools stretched into the second decade of the twentieth century, and his work still remains in no shortage throughout the city. By the 1920s, the school district’s budget was at a crest, and the frequency of school construction peaked. Taking over as architect after Richards was Irwin Thornton Catharine. Catharine designed more schools in the city than any other architect, and his work includes the Board of Education Building on the Ben Franklin Parkway. Roughly 60 percent of his school buildings remain in use today. The numerous small districts that made up Philadelphia’s public school system were slowly consolidated in the decades after the Second World War. Small schools were replaced with larger, modern replacements, and the curriculum changed drastically.

Today, Philadelphia’s public school system is in a sad state of operation. Its budget is lower than that of most American cities, and its graduation rates have sharply declined. Life for teachers and educators has suffered as well. Their salaries have dropped, while working hours have increased, and the teacher/student ratio has become more unbalanced than ever before. Sadly, vacant schools in the city today are plentiful, and each has its own interesting history. However, this chapter will narrow in on just one shining example of Philadelphia’s disintegrating pastime of excelsior education. Hopefully, this pioneer of the American school system can regain its standing, and Philadelphia can once again take pride in the quality of its educational facilities.

This aerial view of the old Northeast High School at Eighth and Lehigh shows its deteriorated state in 2010. Visible just above the school is the long-defunct Fairhill Reservoir and its ornate pumping station.

AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, a new concept in public education took form—the manual training school. A concept inspired by the Industrial Revolution, the manual training school would teach skills in science and technology to boys. As one of many new philosophies emerging out of the flurry of emotions that followed the country’s bloodiest conflict, the idea of manual training was born out of war-weary America’s longing to advance as a nation. In 1926, author Paul Monroe, in his publication Cyclopedia of Education, wrote, “Manual training came into being partly as the expression of a new educational philosophy and partly from dissatisfaction on the part of the public with the results of the purely bookish curriculum of the schools.”

The manual training schools were established in Philadelphia in 1885, taking the lead from St. Louis. Their basic course of study was as follows:

Shop Work—carpentry and joinery, wood carving, wood turning, pattern making; Proper care and use of tools

Physics—experimental work in the physical laboratory; Principals of mechanics

Shop Work—forging, welding, tempering, soldering, braising, molding and casting; Proper care and use tools

Elements of Chemistry—laboratory work and lectures; Principals of Mechanics.

Shop Work—bench work and fitting, turning, drilling, planing, screw-cutting, etc.; study of the steam engine, including management and care of steam engines and boilers.

Elementary Principals of the Textile and Fictile Arts, Stone Work and Masonry.

Instruction to be given in the properties of materials—wood, iron, brass, clays, stone, wool, cotton, etc. throughout the course.

On Tuesday, September 1, 1885, the Central Manual Training School opened in the old Hoffman School Building at Seventeenth and Wood. It was praised nationally for its efficiency and the high success rate of its students. By 1889, the modest building had proven insufficient for the student population, not to mention the machinery and technological workshops that a manual training school required. Calls for a new school soon began. The decision to create a second manual training school for the city resulted in the formation of the Northeast Manual Training School. It was decided to convert the twenty-six-year-old Lee Public School on Howard Street (below Girard) into the new school. Its location was in the general northeast quadrant of the still growing city proper.

Along with the first students who took their seats in September 1890 came the birth of the biggest school sibling rivalry in Philadelphia’s history. During its first operating year, Northeast was immediately viewed as an unwanted little brother by Central, and the two manual training schools were soon in competition with each other. After many changes in location, title and student body, they are still rivals to this day. By 1910, the Southern Manual Training School was in operation in South Philadelphia, adding a third branch. Soon the manual training schools in the city became noted for their success, and their futures looked bright.

The sharp rise in population to river ward neighborhoods like Kensington and Fishtown at the turn of the century crammed hundreds of new students into Northeast. As early as 1901, school board members had been pushing for a new building of sufficient size. Northeast’s principal, Andrew Morrison, needless to say, was one of the loudest voices in favor of a new school. Reform governor Samuel Pennypacker signed into law a bill that shifted the public school district from the old ward-based system—which allowed resident children from most wards to attend any school their parents desired—and put a modern parochial plan into structured use. Philadelphia Board of Education member Thomas Shallcross used his political connections to secure a site for the new Northeast. Being a resident of Northeast Philadelphia, Shallcross represented his district well.

In 1901, board of education architect J. Horace Cook—working with his assistant, Lloyd Titus—drew up plans for a Norman Gothic castle. Made of quarried stone and decorated with carved anvils, hammers and books, the new school peaked into a central tower rising a story above the rest of the building. The one-hundred-foot tower spiked into four octagonal turrets, which were crowned by gargoyles, and the school almost alarmingly resembled a European castle or a medieval prison. After some bickering, the chosen site for the new building was one square block on the north side of Lehigh Avenue, between Seventh and Eighth Streets.

This 1910 postcard shows the shining palace of education that Northeast Manual Training School was intended to be. Its design was considered one of the best in the country.

Ground was broken for the new school in 1903, in front of a wide-eyed neighborhood audience. It was completed two years later. Looking to make its opening as high profile as possible, the board called on President Theodore Roosevelt to perform an oration at the building’s dedication. However, he declined due to “duty pressures.” The board then turned to Princeton University president and future U.S. president Dr. Woodrow Wilson, who proudly attended and orated the dedication. The Evening Bulletin reported on the opening:

The building itself stands back from Lehigh Avenue a full seventy five feet, allowing a splendid view of its solid outlines and central tower. The construction of the building is simplicity itself, but it is admirably adapted to the use for which the school was designed. The building is three stories in height, and is built square around a courtyard in the center. On three sides the rooms face towards the outside, while the side hallways are lighted from the courtyard. On the north side, each floor is a single enormous room stretching from window to window. On the Lehigh Avenue front are the offices of administration and the classrooms of the academic departments of the school. On the eastern side, the laboratories of the scientific department rise one above another. On the western end, the assembly room occupies two sides, with the sky lighted drawing rooms above.

Morrison Hall—the large two-story auditorium at Northeast—had more than seven hundred seats. It was named for the school’s first principal, Dr. Andrew Morrison.

All the power for the various machines in the manual department is supplied from two great dynamos whose wires convey electricity to the motors which hang in the various rooms. These dynamos are run by two Corliss engines of a sufficiently simple type to enable the senior pupils to study their construction.

By 1910, Philadelphia’s population was close to 2 million. The city’s giant arms of social and political mobility, headed by its industrial hands and long, residential fingers, stretched farther north and west. A restructuring of the district plan was undertaken, and more new schools were built. In 1912, the school board, in response to fast-filling budget perimeters, consolidated the manual training schools with their regional district’s academic high schools. The Central, Northeast, Southern and Western Manual Training Schools became simply Central High School, Northeast High School, South Philadelphia High School and so on. Although they still provided the same manual training curriculum as before, the focus of trade-based study was less blatant. As part of the same restructuring plan, the district high school policy was slightly revised. As listed in A History of the Northeast High School, Philadelphia by A.O. Michener, the new district alignments were as follows:

Northeast—Between Allegheny Avenue and Susquehanna Avenue, east of the Schuylkill River.

Central or Northeast—Between Susquehanna Avenue and Montgomery Avenue, east of Schuylkill River.

Northeast or Frankford—Forty-fifth Ward, Thirty-third Ward, north of Allegheny Avenue.

Germantown or Northeast—Twenty-first Ward; Thirty-seventh, Thirty-eighth, and Forty-third Wards north of Allegheny Avenue.

During the First World War, many students in Philadelphia enlisted in the military or were drafted. Northeast lost almost half of its student body to the draft. Encouraged to fight by their principal, as in most high schools at the time, the boys of Northeast were sent off with a song by a patriotic Dr. Andrew Morrison:

Let every son of Northeast

His voice uplift in song.

That all may know her honor

Above all stain or wrong.

And when the strife is over,

And we are called to rest,

There still shall come forth others

Thy worth to manifest.

Just before the war, in September 1916, Morrison—along with school board member Thomas Shallcross and its vice-president, Simon Gratz—were able to gain an appropriation of $450,000 for expansions and improvements at Northeast. The war held up construction until 1919, when work began on two large additions. One was on the east side of the building facing Seventh Street, and the other was on the west side facing Eighth. In February 1920, the first of which—the large gymnasium on the east side, called Shallcross Hall—opened to a very excited class of freshmen. Later that year, Dr. Morrison passed away. His replacement was Dr. George Stradling, who oversaw the completion of the western addition—the large, decorative auditorium. Stradling saw to it that the magnificent new assembly hall, with seating for more than seven hundred, was named Morrison Hall for his friend and former colleague.

The middle-class community surrounding Northeast continued to fill up fast, and the school again became overcrowded. The new board appealed to the federal government for financial assistance in building another large addition. In 1935, the Federal Works Administration (a branch of the WPA) granted the board $414,000 of the needed $940,000 for new construction. By 1936, the remaining funds had been raised, and the project proceeded. Architect Ralph S. Herzog’s Art Deco design for the four-story yellow brick annex contrasted with the old stone castle noticeably. It’s façade fronted Somerset Street, attaching to the original structure’s rear. Above the entrance was placed an artistic terra-cotta carving. The roof was encaged by fencing and used as an outdoor recreation area, as the original athletic yard, nicknamed “cinder park” by students, was taken up by the new addition.

No longer swarming with students, a classroom at Northeast appears frozen in time in this 2007 photo.

The full-sized Northeast High School accommodated 1,500 students per year, and its rivalry with Central High expanded to sports. The two schools’ football teams battled each other ferociously at every annual Thanksgiving Day game, a tradition that continues today. Beginning in the 1940s, the neighborhood around the school slowly diversified. Its German majority was thinning out as the population escaped the crowded, unclean conditions of the city for the comforts and space of the developing neighborhoods of Northeast Philadelphia. Known as “white flight,” this migration had led almost half of the neighborhood’s population up to the “great northeast” by the late 1940s. In their place came eager working-class folks from other industrial neighborhoods, including African American and Irish families. Servicemen returning from the war found the old neighborhood crowded and more ethnically diverse than when they left and followed the pattern of relocation to the northeast. Their speedy departure caused property values to drop.

By 1950, the predominant white middle class made up just over half of the area’s population. Northeast High had not necessarily lost any of its quality education standards or any of its revered specialty training accolades. Unfortunately, like many cities at a time before civil rights, Philadelphia’s “brotherly love” was conditional, and restrictions did apply. As early as 1951, talk loomed among school board members about a way to “handle the situation” at Northeast. In an attempt to “save the school’s reputation,” the school district would build a new school in a new community. Its stated reasoning, which one could say is quite logical, was that the new school was built to serve the new and quickly expanding communities in the northeast section of the city. Sensibly, the new communities were to the northeast of the old school, and therefore a new Northeast High School was needed. But an all-too-clear pattern of systematic prejudice was not hard to link to the city’s move.

In 1953, the experienced engineering and architectural firm of Ballinger & Company, which also constructed Budd’s Hunting Park plant, received the contract for the new school to be located on Cottman Avenue, between Algon and Summerdale Avenues. The ultramodern school took advantage of the abundance of open space that the northeast provided. Instead of stacking its floors and using its roof as an exercise yard, the new building itself sprawled out over ten acres. Its grounds took up an impressive one hundred acres, containing several baseball fields and a runners’ track. By the time the new building opened in 1957, the school district had already been the focus of criticism and anger over the move. Parents who were Northeast alumni themselves and wanted their boys to attend the school complained to the school district and city hall.

On February 1, 1957, Northeast High School’s five-decade trophy collection was taken from the building at Eighth and Lehigh and put on display in the new school, which was receiving its first graduating class. The last piece of the old school’s identity—its name—was finally removed and given to the new building on Cottman Avenue. The formidable old castle of learning on Lehigh was given the new title: Thomas A. Edison High School. In November 1957, its principal, Robert Wayne Clark, issued a pamphlet to its students, faculty and parents entitled A Report to Our Community. In it, Clark attempted to emphasize the importance of the old building and its unchanged faculty. His positive words helped boost the morale of the downed school:

We believe our community will agree that the change in name is the only significant change that has taken place. Whether we are right in this belief or not, we want our community to know exactly what Edison is and exactly what Edison offers our boys. Here at Eighth and Lehigh, the new school will occupy one of the most beautiful—if one of the older—of Philadelphia’s school buildings—a building rich in the fine tradition which has grown up through almost seventy years of educational service to Philadelphia boys. It is true the Northeast name has been taken away and the name Thomas A. Edison will soon appear over the entrance; but the spirit and the tradition are as inseparable parts of this location as are the stones, the stained-glass windows, the high fretted ceilings and the quiet, cool corridors of the old building.

The boys of the Edison community lift their heads with a new pride in the certainty that a good world is theirs—that they need only claim it through the process of hard work. Already this process has begun. When the first consciousness of the loss of an ancient and respected name left them bewildered, the boys reacted as boys are likely to do when they are deprived without what they consider good reason. In their disappointment some of the upper classmen fixed their eyes on the Northeast name and tried to the end to keep the association which was denied to them. In closing, the pangs of birth—while sharp—are short, and Edison High School is today a new, independent and proud institution saluting the community it serves.

The Thomas Edison High School did indeed keep up its stellar tradition of higher learning and quickly developed its own identity. However, the days of battling Central High for the unofficial “best of Philly” status were over, and Edison’s secondhand crown of acclaim was certainly lighter. Its ethnically polarized yet oddly unified student body of middle-class boys maintained the status quo, although racial disparity played an obvious part in the school’s stained reputation. Nonetheless, Edison’s students continued to represent the city’s educational opportunities well, and the school did its best to hold on to its inherent strengths.

The tall institutional hallways of Northeast began their state of water-induced decay shortly after the theft of its copper roof exhaust fans. In this 2010 photo, colorful graffiti stubbornly demands to be noticed.

Philly’s skyline stands tall over the rotting remains of Northeast in 2012. The school’s gargoyle-studded medieval turrets contrast boldly against the ever-progressing urban landscape.

This 2014 photo shows the current state of Northeast. The original portion has been demolished, but the 1936 Herzog addition is to be integrated into public housing.

By the 1960s, Edison was feeling the squeeze as a true inner-city school. With a population of almost 2,400 students and nearly 80 faculty members, the building was pushing its limits. Amid the civil rights battles of the 1960s, however, Edison pulled through comparatively well. As the community endured more sweeping ethnic and sociopolitical changes, Edison’s student body became even more intricately diversified. Waves of Latino immigrants—mostly from Puerto Rico—flooded into the yet again deserted neighborhoods of Fairhill and West Kensington, surrounding Edison. By 1970, the waves had become deluges, and the city literally did not have enough schools in the area to send the new immigrant children, most of whom spoke no English.

A “temporary” solution was put in place by converting a number of vacant textile mills and factories into schools. One example is the Roberto Clemente Middle School, which was converted from the seven-story Apex Hosiery Company building at Fifth and Luzerne Streets. Meant only to act as a school until the city built a proper structure for the now swarming immigrant districts, Clemente Middle School—despite its asbestos content and insufficient building features—remained in operation until the late 1990s. As the property value in the area continued to decline, more African American and Latino families relocated there. The neighborhood soon became one of the city’s highest crime districts.

In the mid-1970s, the Frank Rizzo administration took up the effort of demolishing “every last one” of Philadelphia’s estimated 100,000 abandoned row homes. Focusing on high crime areas, Rizzo narrowed in on the connected wards of West Kensington, Fairhill, Hunting Park, Franklinville and Harrowgate. His administration demolished roughly 10,000 vacant row homes in North Philadelphia. However, with no immediate plans to replace the homes, the result was an ugly, barren landscape speckled with crime, trash and graffiti. By the late 1970s, the area had become unofficially known as the “Badlands,” owing to both its desolate environment and high crime rate. The Badlands—needless to say—quickly became an emporium for drugs and guns. Its powerful street gangs became a threatening opponent of the Philadelphia Police Department, and its overwhelming status as a drug market would only expand, making it one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in North America by the 1990s.

By 1979, Edison had finally become coed and was operating over capacity. A sad statistic calculated after the close of the Vietnam War showed that Edison had the highest alumni death count of any high school in America. Fifty-four of its students lost their lives in the war. The 1980s continued the push of more dangerous students into Edison, and its status as a school was on a steady decline. The faculty, too, had diminished. The once proud learning center was now stuffed to the brim, behind on maintenance and increasingly incapable of dealing with the prevalent crime and violence. By 1986, a new Edison High was in the works. Situated on what was once the grounds of the Philadelphia Municipal Hospital for Contagious Diseases at Second and Luzerne Streets, the new Thomas A. Edison High School opened in 1988 and is still in use today.

The tired old structure at Eighth and Lehigh was cleaned out and locked up. It sat until the mid-1990s, when the Julia de Burgos Bi-Lingual Middle Magnet School—a private charter school—began its lease of the building, which was named for the famous Puerto Rican poet. The administration of De Burgos was able to perform enough maintenance to get the school up to building code standards. As its third incarnation, the building served the overwhelmingly Hispanic population, teaching basic courses, as well as specialty studies geared toward adapting to American life. In 2002, the old building no longer met the necessary public building safety codes, and the required repairs were far too costly. Thus, it was closed forever. A new Julia de Burgos was built just two blocks east and was in use by 2003. The old Northeast/Edison, again owned by the school district, was sealed up and locked down in 2003.

Surprisingly, given its location, the building remained remarkably non-vandalized until about 2007, when it was finally discovered by scrappers. The cash-strapped school district was unable to properly maintain security of the square-block property, and before long, its precious metals had disappeared, including the copper exhaust fans on the roof. Water quickly infiltrated the holes, destabilizing the old building’s wooden roof support beams, and began its thorough destruction of the one-hundred-year-old landmark. Squatters and addicts soon took up residence in the school. Two corpses were removed from the building by police in 2008. Animals had scattered the remains of one across two separate floors by the time it was located. The surrounding community became concerned with the presence of the increasingly dangerous (not to mention scary-looking) castle of decadence, and police presence became more frequent.

By 2011, the neighborhood, working closely with city officials, had agreed on a plan for the property’s reuse. However, financial constraints held up demolition for another year and a half, during which time a crippling fire took out the original building’s wooden roof and top floor. Demolition of the tired, scarred old landmark finally commenced in 2013. Today, the site’s new owners—Mosaic Development Partners and Orens Brothers Real Estate—are in the process of constructing the Edison Square shopping center. Their clever concept calls for the rehabilitation of the 1936 Herzog rear addition into apartments. The cornerstone of the original building was transferred to the current Northeast on Cottman Avenue and placed among its rightful namesake. Although its scowling gargoyles no longer pierce Philly’s skyline, its elegant auditorium no longer hosts national dignitaries and the medieval gray stones of its façade no longer instill the seriousness of good education into new generations, the old Northeast High School will remain in the halls of Philadelphia’s distinct history forever.