CHAPTER 4

FINANCE

For more than two centuries, the City of Brotherly Love has embodied a sense of neighborhood hospitality that has often been regarded as unique. It is aptly named for a reason. The way the city’s planners followed the founder’s general idea of community-rich relations truly shows in the patterned row homes and corner stores of the streetcar neighborhoods. These factors combined to create a habitat for social mobility. A little imagination conjures up a block full of happy middle-class residents. Some are sweeping off their front steps, while others are perched out upstairs windows, their arms crossed as they survey the activity on their block.

The changing environment of the growing city was getting only more complex. But Philadelphians liked it that way. They never had to stray far to shop, eat, work or play. The “walking” city was easier to navigate before the age of the automobile, and the sense of commonality was stronger. The rise of the streetcars provided access to new residential areas and sculpted the layout of the present city. The “streetcar suburbs” forced businesses to expand as well. In some cases, being pushed farther out of the city by the growing neighborhoods ended up being a blessing to businesses by necessitating outreach. Philadelphia’s banking firms, however, some of the oldest in the country, had become the true backbone of the city by the end of the Civil War.

As the multitudes of new industries developed innovative technologies that made Philadelphia the manufacturing mecca of the nineteenth century, the second and third generations of the city’s hierarchal banking aristocracy found themselves in almost invincible positions. Firms like the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS), the Philadelphia National Bank (PNB) and Guarantee Safe and Trust Company kept their management and ownership within their own tightknit financial families. Those who controlled Philadelphia’s money would, in turn, control its businesses and then its government. The banks’ strong hold on Philadelphia would last until the mid-twentieth century, when they were legally disbanded, along with their many branches of effect, such as the utility companies. This chapter will focus on two financial firms that remain—in body only—in Philadelphia.

Although heavily altered at its street level façade, the upper floors of the Hale Building remain in mostly original condition, inside and out.

Keystone National Bank/Hale Building

PERHAPS TODAY, PHILADELPHIA can be defined by fine architecture and grand, monolithic structures like city hall. Its modern skyscrapers neatly shape its unique skyline, and its iconic monumental buildings like Independence Hall and the Art Museum are known worldwide. But back in the age of social and technological experimentation, Philadelphians’ ideas of tasteful architecture were quite skewed. The roughly laid framework of the city’s government after the Civil War, combined with its unprecedented corruption, may have lent Philadelphia the appearance of a city with some weird priorities. Compared to other cities that existed during the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, Philadelphia had an almost unique role. Its long-stretched family bloodlines had, for almost two centuries, been digging the city’s roots deep, and a solid system of banks, businesses and bureaucracy seemed to only strengthen after the war.

This picturesque 1887 drawing shows the Hale Building before its southward expansion to Sansom Street. The city’s busy Victorian financial district once rivaled Wall Street. Courtesy the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

There was comparatively little social reconstruction kicking off in the City of Brotherly Love after the bloodiest war Americans had yet seen. The Quaker City had always maintained a sober, plain look in its buildings and houses. The Friends were strongly against extreme wealth and believed in penitence and humble uniformity. Therefore, Philadelphia’s architecture remained very modest, and its red brick houses and factories created a drab maze. However, from the malaise in which Philadelphia found itself during the years following Lincoln’s famous funeral procession, a daring new form of architecture was born. It would be a refreshing slap in the face to the dull architecture of the city.

Drafting student Frank Furness was the youngest son of a Unitarian minister. His upbringing in Philadelphia made the aspiring designer well aware of its architectural void. When Furness returned from the Civil War, however, he was a focused and humorless man. He became a student and assistant to eclectic New York architect Richard Morris Hunt. But after his training, Furness came home to Philadelphia with big lessons to teach, as well as a few to learn. Through his recent war experiences, his frustration with the old Quaker powers that controlled the city’s building projects and his outlandish and unapologetic personality, Furness changed Philadelphia architecture forever. His totally unique style, called “Furnessque” by his critics, was a wild, satirical caricature of traditional architectural forms such as Gothic or Queen Anne. Furness threw them all into his designs, while adding his own touches. His buildings broke almost every architectural ethic and showed Philadelphia his anger with its customs. He once commented on his strong desire to gather together all of his clients at the Academy of Music so he could “get up on stage and tell them all to go to Hell.” Sadly, today most of his work is demolished.

In the 1890s—before the age of the skyscraper—this perspective from Hale’s fifth-floor front office would have revealed quite a view, overlooking Wanamaker’s Grand Depot.

Furness did manage, however, to start a small local cult following of sorts among other living architects of his day. Brewery architect Otto Wolf designed a bank that still sits on the corner of Ridge and Girard Avenues that smacked so strongly of Furness that his own office had difficulty denying involvement in it. Another architect who rose on the coattails of Furness’s architectural reign was Willis Gaylord Hale. Hale’s buildings definitely display the love of disorganization apparent in Furness’s designs while also maintaining their own identity. His love of the Queen Anne style shows in the many mansions he designed for Philadelphia’s elite, most of which still survive in the Chestnut Hill area. Hale’s contracts came through the political and business connections he’d managed to acquire. Many came from his friends in the financial district of Chestnut Street. One of Hale’s few surviving commercial buildings is the Keystone National Bank (Hale Building) on the southwest corner of Juniper and Chestnut Streets. What’s left of its erratic façade stands out amid its modern neighbors.

In 1886, Hale received the commission for the new bank in the heart of the city’s booming financial district, and the building was completed one year later. The original structure, under the title of the Lucas Building (named for the bank’s former president), extended only to Drury Street. It featured a raised first floor that contained a very colorful lobby and teller area. In 1890, the building was extended to Sansom Street, reaching its current size. Its Chestnut Street façade, made of rock-faced Indiana limestone, shows a sense of aggravation that many architects of the period were experiencing. Furness’s bold new style was simply an easy path to follow, allowing for a reason to break out of the restraints of Philadelphia’s dull prison of architectural plainness.

Having survived the financial panic of the 1880s, the Keystone National Bank was considered a stable institution. One of its biggest depositors was the city government, which entrusted the bank with an unusually heavy $300,000 per year. Therefore, it came as a shock when the bank suddenly collapsed in 1891. An investigation showed that hundreds of thousands of dollars were missing, along with the bank’s president, Gideon W. Marsh, who could not be located for questioning. It also showed that the bank had become a front for the “City Hall Gang” (or simply “the Gang”), a faction of Republican ward bosses and city councilmen that had controlled Philadelphia politics for decades.

By 1892, the investigation of Keystone National Bank had dug painfully deep into the Gang’s corrupt and complicated system of graft. Several arrests were finally made, including that of City Treasurer John Bardsley, most likely the Gang’s “fall guy,” who was served seventeen indictments and a stiff prison sentence. Meanwhile, bank president Marsh was still nowhere to be found. In fact, more than seven years passed before his eventual surrender in 1898. By that time, the calculations were solid. When all was said and done, the Gang had siphoned off about $1.5 million from the taxpayers of Philadelphia through the Keystone National Bank. Lippincott’s publication Philadelphia and Its Environs called the Keystone scandal “a defalcation of and an abuse of public trust not likely soon to be forgotten in the annals of the Quaker City.”

Disassociating itself from the Keystone Bank, the new building owners—the Central Savings Fund, Trust and Safe Deposit Company—changed its name to the Hale Building, after its architect. Hale’s architectural firm moved into the building soon after. It included several notable architects, such as Angus Wade. The budding architectural practice, although short-lived, was very productive and highly successful. Hale’s flagship building, the Lorraine Apartments (Divine Lorraine Hotel), was conceptualized and drawn up there in 1892. Sadly, a fire at the office claimed just about all of Hale’s designs in 1896, bankrupting the architect, and he died of diabetes (and almost destitute) in 1907. Several other members of the firm carried on their own practices at the Hale Building for roughly another decade. By the 1930s, the building housed an array of tenants including detective agencies, insurance companies and, eventually, department stores. By the 1940s, most of the upper floors were vacant. In the 1950s, the New York clothing chain Franklin Simon purchased the building and converted it into a store. This resulted in the loss of the entire first-floor exterior façade. It was covered in favor of a more modern look, contrasting loudly with the rest of the building’s Victorian eclecticism. Its raised rooftop cupola was also removed in the 1950s, when a second elevator was installed.

Stabbing red paint and a gaudy light fixture are stains of the Hale’s later years as various offices.

The Hale’s disorganized form and eclectic detail represent a style that went largely unappreciated for almost a century. Willis G. Hale left no surface undecorated in his bold architectural assault on the senses.

This empty office in the Hale Building has not seen activity for more than thirty years. At left, the unmovable safe is a clear reminder of the building’s days as the Keystone National Bank.

In the 1980s, the short-lived Bellevue Health Spa occupied the fourth floor, offering saunas, steam rooms, gyms and personal training. However, it soon became notorious as an unofficial gathering place for homosexuals, who had been regentrifying the area since the late 1970s. Bellevue was closed in the late 1980s after the discovery of HIV and AIDS put an end to the open sexual behavior that had apparently been taking place there. In the 1990s, the first floor became occupied by a discount store, which operated until 2011. In 2009, a developer submitted solid plans to convert the building into condominiums featuring a ground-floor restaurant and bar. This plan seems to have been discarded, and today the building is vacant, awaiting restoration. Hopefully the rarity of this architectural beauty will not be overlooked. As the last of the eclectic Victorian banks, the Hale shows off the undeniable power with which Philadelphia’s financial institutions held sway over its government. With luck, it will survive for future generations to behold.

The National Bank of North Philadelphia, known as the Beury Building, towers fourteen stories over busy Broad Street. The firm had hoped that its skyscraper would attract other financial institutions to the area, which its members helped develop.

National Bank of North Philadelphia/Beury Building

A DRIVER OR PASSENGER traveling Broad Street—Philadelphia’s main artery—is forced to notice the presence of a tall, disarrayed structure boldly displaying the phrase “boner forever” vertically down its ribcage. Where Broad Street meets Erie Avenue, the eye-catching rot of the tallest building for half a square mile sprouts up from its concrete soil. Every window has been removed, and air rushes through the building like a screen door. The caved-in roof exposes the building’s interior to the elements, and it can be seen for blocks in every direction, sticking up like a middle finger. It’s a message to the new generation, whose parents and grandparents fled the inner city and let this shining tower crumble into a dangerous eyesore. An erratic mess of Art Deco architecture, graffiti and building decay marks the place where middle-class families of the once thriving neighborhood of Franklinville stored their money for safekeeping.

The financial district around the intersection of Broad and Erie was a budding one in the mid-1920s. This predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood, known as Franklinville, was an up-and-coming community. Evidence of the area’s prewar majesty can be seen in the large and elegant four-story “row mansions” that still line Franklinville’s main streets of Erie and Allegheny Avenues. The area already contained several successful banks. But in 1925, amid the slowly cresting wave of American economic combustion, architect William Harold Lee received the contract for the new fourteen-story bank tower of the National Bank of North Philadelphia. In a bold attempt to mark the rising new district, Lee would design one of Philadelphia’s best examples of Art Deco architecture. Lee is known for designing the elegant Conwell Hall at Temple University, as well as several theaters in the Philadelphia area. The National Bank of North Philadelphia, a brazen young firm, clearly did not see any cracks in the shining economy. Its million-dollar skyscraper, the company hoped, would be the easy start of a new financial epicenter, and other banks would follow its lead.

Lee’s design for the building spared little expense in its expression of safety and permanence. Yet the mechanized look of the new Art Deco movement, mostly popular in Europe in these early years, appeared subtler than eclectic Victorian bank designs, such as the Keystone or Furness’s Guarantee Safe and Trust Company. Lee’s main lobby was lined with imported marble and crystal chandeliers. On the exterior, the raised first floor was highlighted in limestone from the rest of the brick structure. The look of the fourteen-story tower was years ahead of its time. Lee’s future work would move almost completely into the Art Deco style. This new building a half century later would be hailed by architectural critics as the first Art Deco skyscraper in Philadelphia, although the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS) building on Market Street holds the official title.

At the head of the National Bank of North Philadelphia was its outspoken president, Dr. Charles Ezra Beury. Beury (pronounced “berry”) was the second president of Temple University, as well as of several newly formed banks and trust companies, and he was a key figure in organizing the new banking district along north Broad Street. Using his network of other young investors, such as future Philadelphia commerce baron Albert Greenfield, Beury was determined to lead his new bank to the top, next to Philadelphia’s prominent Chestnut Street banks. Within just a few years of its opening, the building came to officially bear his name—the Beury Building. The 1920s were very busy years in the financial sector, and patronage at the Beury Building was high.

Beury’s scarred face displays the look of sad longing for a bygone chapter of a complicated city. The Art Deco bank can be seen for miles.

In 1928, the National Bank of North Philadelphia merged with several other firms under the umbrella of the Philadelphia Banker’s Trust Company, whose board included Beury, Greenfield and other future successful Philadelphia bankers. Seen even by financial experts to be too big to fail, the Bankers Trust Company had just gotten on its feet with four other banks under its ownership, and had almost $50 million in deposits, when the Wall Street crash of 1929 sent the bank toppling down hard. In 1930, the bank turned its operations over to the state and never reopened.

Although beaten and bruised, Beury was far from defeated. His varied business interests provided enough stability to allow him to rebuild his bank. With help from colleagues like Greenfield, Beury climbed back into the shaky financial world. Although his efforts were strong, Beury’s banks could not heal the damage from the Great Depression, and they would never again see a profit. Like many other bank owners after the Wall Street crash, Beury began living differently. He devoted his professional efforts to his trust companies, some of which had barely survived the crash. But Dr. Beury put most of his time into his presidency of Temple University.

In 1933, Beury spoke of the financial crash to students at Chester Military College. According to Beury, “wild speculation and allowing the reins of government to be handled by selfish politicians” was the cause of the “economic chaos” that prevailed. “Perhaps the present plight of the American people will bring them back to the principal laid down by the founders of the nation,” he said. “It certainly will chase them away from the worship of the dollar.” Beury continued as the president of Temple University until 1941. He died in 1953 and was buried in his family plot, where he rests among many other prominent Philadelphia figures, at Laurel Hill Cemetery. The fate of the Beury Building was up in the air for several years after the Second World War, with its smaller clientele holding the building together. But more than half of its offices were unoccupied. It began to fill up in the 1950s, and its floors hosted medical, law and real estate offices, as well as branches of other companies and local institutions.

“White flight” began in the 1960s, transforming Beury’s surrounding landscape. By the 1970s, Beury’s tenants had almost all vacated the building, and beginning with its upper floors, abandonment slowly set in. Without maintenance, the fourteen-story tower began to wither. Its plaster walls and ceilings became gradually infiltrated by rainwater, revealing innards of flaking asbestos, which sealed the building’s fate and ensured that its offices would remain empty. Recognized as one of Philadelphia’s premier Art Deco works, the vacant building was added to the National Historic Register in 1985. Although a few other adaptive reuse attempts were proposed, the increasing ferocity of crime in the area kept developers away.

In 1987, Muhammed Mizani—a shady local property investor—acquired the building under a move by the city to sell off its blighted properties. Mizani owned a number of properties in the city, including several homeless shelters and drug rehab centers. He purchased the Beury cheaply, under the condition that he would assume all cleanup costs, including $250,000 for the structure’s abatement. Beginning in 1988, Mizani organized an extremely low-cost labor force consisting of homeless addicts from his other properties and put them to work removing the deadly asbestos. In a clear violation of the Clean Air Act, Mizani’s workers removed hundreds of pounds worth of the cancer-causing fiber from the first floor and disposed of it illegally. However, a visiting city inspector served Mizani with a warning after only a few months, and the process supposedly stopped.

Beury continues to crumble away, occasionally dropping debris onto the sidewalk below. Here, an elevator motor at the building’s summit remains seized and covered in pigeon droppings.

A view from Beury’s porthole-trimmed penthouse shows North Philadelphia’s stagnant sea of row homes.

By 1991, however, it had become clear that the illegal removal of the asbestos was continuing, as more workers from Mizani’s shelter at Twelfth and Vine commenced the cleaning of the higher floors. Another surprise visit by city inspectors in 1992 produced photos of men working without proper safety equipment, and some with none at all. When the photos reached Environmental Protection Agency officials in D.C., a federal investigation into Mizani began. The Federal Bureau of Investigation finally indicted Mizani and three other workers in November 1994. The sixty-year-old maintained his innocence, claiming that he was not aware of the working conditions. He told the judge that he was the victim of a conspiracy and that he was being unjustly prosecuted because he was Muslim. Mizani’s attorney aggressively insisted that the allegations against his client could never be proven. But thirty-three-year-old William Waters, a tenant in one of Mizani’s halfway houses, acted as the prosecution’s key witness. He claimed that he was offered to gather men for the job by Mizani and was willing to testify.

In 1995, Waters was found dead in his home with a gunshot wound to the chest, and the only witness that could link Mizani to the illegal work was gone. U.S. attorney Christopher Hall was aggravated but not defeated, and he pressed his case, bringing to light Mizani’s entire crooked history. Mizani, however, did not seem worried. But when the prosecution played a secretly recorded phone call between Mizani and a city air quality inspector in which he denied ownership of the Beury Building, the case against him became damning. After exhausting every legal option he had, Mizani finally pleaded guilty in 1996, after learning that his three co-defendants had made a deal with Hall and were planning on testifying against him. He was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison, and the Beury Building was put up for sale at sheriff’s auction the following year.

Today, more talk of efforts to rehabilitate the ninety-year-old landmark appears in the local news, but so far nothing has been started. The upper floors of the building are dangerously exposed and structurally unsound. Scaffolding along the building’s frontage on Broad Street and along its north siding on Airdrie Avenue directs foot traffic under a protective ceiling of plywood, since pieces if its rotting brick and terra-cotta flesh occasionally fall to the sidewalk below. Known sometimes as the “Boner Forever” building, old Beury is one of Philadelphia’s most well-known ruins and still attracts visitors. Hopefully, a serious plan of rehabilitation will breathe new life into this beacon of North Philadelphia history.