CHRISTIAN AND SARAH ROSS PRAYED THAT IN SPITE OF THE weather, somebody would respond to the Lewis brothers’ reward and return Charley to the doorsteps of one of the family’s seven business locations. Outside of the three designated Philadelphia buildings, during the winter of 1875 steady successions of sleet, snow, rain, and hail glazed the sidewalks. Dozens of sparrows lay dead in the town squares, gas meters froze throughout the city at night, and wind chills contributed to 373 deaths in one week.
West of Center City, an ice block threatened the residents and industrial laborers of Manayunk. The gorge sat just above the Fairmount dam, which regulated the flow of the Schuylkill River. The River had risen five feet above its normal level. Water had flooded the Manayunk mills, causing workers to lose a week’s pay and neighborhood residents to flee north or west for higher ground; they couldn’t go east, as ice blocked the roads leading into central Philadelphia. The Water Department needed to break up the ice, because it kept clean water from freely flowing throughout the city’s water pipes. At the Ross home in Germantown, water looked as brown as lager. It stunk, and it would only smell worse until the river could move through sunlight and aeration. The engineers, however, had to be careful—if the ice blocks broke too quickly, the heightened river would hurl them into the homes and businesses of Manayunk.
Mayor Stokley supervised attempts to blow up the ice pack. Engineers drilled holes in the ice and lowered large tin vessels full of dynamite into the water. Long tin cylinders carried fuses to the powder. The explosions were loud but unsuccessful. At most, small pieces broke away, but without enough water flow to carry them downriver, they became lodged in the dam. Because the City Council would not allot enough money for a more creative solution, Stokley and the engineers had to pray for a gentle March. Only warmer weather could aid their efforts.
A new town ordinance threatened to fine home owners two dollars for failing to remove trash, snow, and ice from the streets, but police found it difficult to uphold. Instead of insisting that officers enforce ice removal, Chief Jones cited the danger of kite flying as a public nuisance and instructed his men to fine offenders five dollars. Throughout the winter, the Bulletin had chastised the force for ignoring the weather-related conditions of the streets, which sent more injuries to area hospitals than did kite flying: “[The] commodious, well-paved, well-lighted, well-policed streets are not only necessary for the comfort, safety, and convenience of the population, but they give a style to any city which nothing else can give. Philadelphia is aiming at a metropolitan position, and she has many of these elements which go to make such a position.”
New York papers frowned upon this “metropolitan position,” questioning whether Philadelphia could handle the lodging needs of the Centennial’s thousands of visitors. Slowly, successful New Yorkers had begun supporting the exhibition, signing and publishing notices that encouraged people to consider its potential for New York tourism. “All the visitors from foreign countries will land here, will find more objects of interest here than in Philadelphia,” wrote the Herald. “It would be as great a loss to New York as to the most important of its suburbs, Philadelphia, if the Exposition should fall short of public expectation.”
This is exactly what Philadelphia feared: sending elsewhere the attention that it deserved. The Evening Bulletin initially defended the city’s accommodation plans, but after the dedication of a new Masonic hall in Center City, local critics worried about the rooming shortage as well. When more than five thousand visitors came to town for the ceremony, less than a fifth of the number predicted for the Centennial, hotels quickly ran out of rooms, and managers had to construct temporary accommodations in hallways and other common areas. Everybody knew more hotels would be needed in less than a year, but there was not enough time, manpower, or funds to construct them properly. Ignoring city ordinances and fire codes, some contractors began building temporary residences from wood.
The city leaders claimed there was plenty of lodging space available, but because so much of it was privately owned, they said home owners needed to allow familiar and foreign guests to stay in their spare rooms. “Nearly everybody is ‘coming home’ in the Centennial year,” wrote the Ledger. “But after all allowances are made for these [visitors], there will of course remain a large number of dwellings with perfectly available quarters for tens of thousands of visitors.” Considering that Philadelphia was still the focus of a famous kidnapping investigation, this request was an odd one to ask of citizens.
Even if families considered allowing strangers into their homes in the wake of Charley Ross’s disappearance, a surge in violent domestic crimes threatened to alienate potential guests. One disgruntled man struck his wife’s head with the edge of a dull axe; another sliced his wife from her throat to her lips with a razor; and a third man responded to his wife’s complaints over his drunkenness by throwing their six-month-old daughter from a third-story window. When one young newlywed took a stand against domestic abuse and reported her husband to the police, he stalked her through Fairmount Park, pulled out a knife, and stabbed her in the jugular vein in broad daylight.
Police also arrested landlords and custodians for abusing their boarders. One South Philadelphia man stumbled drunk into his house one afternoon as his wife tended to their infant twins in the kitchen. After he threatened to kill her, she ran away with one baby while he poured a two-gallon can of kerosene underneath the cradle of the other. A seventy-two-year-old tenant fought to take matches from the man’s hands, but he struck one on the wall behind her, lighting himself and his boarder on fire. Neighbors extinguished the flames and saved the family, but the elderly woman died from shock.
Several blocks away, neighbors contacted the police with concerns about screams coming from the home of two sisters, Catherine and Amanda Troxell. Five officers raided the house. After following an overwhelming stench to the rear of the third story, the police found fifty-year-old Mary Troxell, another sister who had recently been released from an insane asylum. Police sent Mary back to the hospital on the stretcher and reentered her room to stake out the source of the smell. Before long, they came across the corpse of the sisters’ mother, who had been dead for at least three months.
Neither the papers nor the authorities attempted to reconcile the assaults with their request for citizens to offer their homes as hostels for parents and children during the six-month duration of the exhibition.
The city leaders couldn’t resolve Philadelphia’s social tensions, but they could distract taxpayers’ concern by emphasizing the financial capital that the Centennial would bring to Philadelphia. In order to capitalize on the city’s future progress, however, these leaders had to distance themselves from stories that attracted bad press. Charley Ross’s name slipped from the Public Ledger, and an Inquirer editorial lamented the lack of interest in the case. “So little that seemed availing has been done recently in the Ross case that the public have, reluctantly, adopted the idea that the unfortunate Charley Ross was either dead or that, if living, his identity had by this time been forever lost.”