The Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry: A History of Misery and Medicine (Landmarks) (PA)
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Blockley’s designer, William Strickland, took care to include every modern feature. It contained wooden pipes taking in water from the Skullkyll River. Its grand façade gave the look of permanence and safety. Featuring four rectangular buildings connected on the corners, the hospital formed a giant square. In the center of the square were courtyards that contained greenhouses, athletic areas and a central fountain. Each of the four wards pertained to a different class of treatment. The males and females were separated on opposite ends of the hospital.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the Quaker city was cliquish and parochial. Its citizens were black and white, rich and poor, and its governing body was not unlike that of other cities. The “us and them” mentality was prevailing. America feared anything that it didn’t understand. Mental illness was only one of the many stigmas America placed on its citizens. As a result of this social system, the almshouse began to take on its own stigmatism. It became the place for any and all of the city’s discarded citizens. This was the birth of Philadelphia’s biggest public health problem: the overcrowding of its public facilities. The hospitals and houses of betterment built by the city were, by nature and forethought of planning, charitable and heartfelt causes. But the overcrowding presented other problems in itself, and neglect and abuse was the result. Overcrowding would prove ultimately fatal to Philadelphia’s public health system.
At the close of the Civil War, a middle-class Philadelphian would have had no shortage of access to medical care of all kinds. There were many medical hospitals throughout Philadelphia County, as well as several asylums. The mentally ill, depending on social class, actually had some of the best options in the United States. The Friends Hospital for the Indigent Sick-Poor was one of the first hospitals in the country built for the care of the mentally ill, but it was not free. The Pennsylvania Hospital still offered care to mental cases, but also for a price. Thomas Kirkbride’s Hospital for the Insane in west Philadelphia, built in 1856, was another option. A charity hospital, Kirkbride’s offered decent custodial care. As superintendent, Kirkbride’s strict methods of “moral treatment” did not allow the hospital to become overcrowded, and the generous donations the hospital ran on ensured that it wasn’t understaffed.
The Consolidation Act of 1854 was a move by the city’s elite politicians to ultimately gain more votes by bringing more voters into its wards. It expanded the city of Philadelphia from 8 square miles in size (the Delaware river to the east, Schuylkill river to the west, Vine [originally North] street to the north and South street to the south), to its current size of 135 square miles by combining city and county. The farmers who lived in Philadelphia County’s northern and western townships did not want to pay city taxes. But as fate would have it, every township in the county was consolidated. This meant that Blockley was no longer in the “outskirts” of the city. The rise of the railroad brought steady traffic through what was once farmland in west Philadelphia. Blockley became harder to avoid as new houses and factories sprang up around it.
The sixteen-acre structure, which contained within it a smallpox hospital, a lunatic asylum, a children’s home, a lying-in department, a nursery and a medical-surgical hospital, was run by the Gaurdians of the Poor. A parent of the Department of Public Charities, the Guardians of the Poor became known as the “board of buzzards.” It was made up simply of unelected businessmen and wealthy, influential citizens who took up the cause of helping the city’s paupers. But often its members seemed more interested in helping their own reputations. They soon earned their nickname, as stories of their shady dealings began to circulate and Blockley became more notorious.
By 1858, the hospital’s hideous conditions had been in the headlines enough times to inspire reform. It had become commonplace to sell off dead patients to medical students, who paid handsomely. A legislative act supposedly put an end to the trafficking of corpses by the end of the Civil War, but the practice continued. One superintendent defended the sale of the dead, claiming the hospital received more funds from that than it did from the city. An 1870 investigation into the hospital’s conditions revealed a large amount of whiskey stored in the hospital’s basement. The superintendent claimed it was used to keep the dead from decaying as quickly in the summer months. The public was stewing. The University of Pennsylvania’s move to West Philadelphia in 1871 was another hindrance to the city government in its attempt to hide conditions at Blockley.
In 1882, after the resignation of then superintendent Major Phipps, it was discovered that Phipps had been defrauding the city and the hospital of thousands of dollars. He helped himself to portions of employees’ wages that he was in charge of dispersing. In some cases, even patients’ property found its way into Phipps’s pockets. A police search of his Walnut Street home turned up $5,000 worth of hospital property stored away in his basement, but no Phipps. He was finally apprehended almost seven months later in Hamilton, Ontario, and returned to Philadelphia for trial. The trial of Major Phipps brought many more injustices to light, and other hospital staff were removed or arrested. Another reorganization was undertaken, and the top staff were almost all replaced.
Similar conditions were reported in other institutions. Hospitals and asylums of all sorts—public and private—throughout the state were examined. However, more time and money were given to Pennsylvania’s taxpayer-run facilities. In 1887, the state legislature passed an act that officially reorganized its public health system: the Bullitt Bill. The bill essentially brought the state’s disorganized system of public institutions into the civilized age and established basic steps toward a modern system. Named for the senator who created it, the bill called for, among other things, a “Board of Charities and Corrections.” Although a single city municipality, the two divisions of the board were controlled by rival ward bosses, and a schism was already forming. The Board of Charities was in charge of all public hospitals and asylums, and the Board of Corrections was responsible for the prisons and jails. What resulted was the constant shuffling back and forth of dangerous mental patients between the prison system and almshouse.
Philadelphia rang in the new century with pomp and pizazz. On January 1, 1900, the nearly complete city hall tower was decorated by hundreds of electric lights. The Mummers marched up Broad Street for the first time in their parade. The Ancient Order of Elks and other fraternal organizations held symbolic ceremonies. Philadelphia was proud of itself. Only recently having been surpassed by New York City as the nation’s largest exporter, it was still very much a world-class city. Its political force was beginning to emerge as a national powerhouse. Philadelphia lawyers had for decades been known throughout the United States as some of the best, and the city government still consisted of factions of elite businessmen who, in most cases, were loyal more to their businesses than their political careers. For these figures, the Victorian period in Philadelphia was a very productive and profitable one. It made millionaires of middle-class men.
Blockley Almshouse, front façade. Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
At the turn of the century, Philadelphians were full of excitement, angst, regret and remorse. The bustling city was never more alive…or crowded. Public health was becoming more of a concern as more diseases and health threats were discovered. The city did its part to keep a clean and healthy environment for most. Classes of citizens multiplied. A few got rich, but the poor stayed poor or got poorer. Simultaneously, the city was showing off its expensive, modern examples of urban progress. The new Spring Garden sewage disposal plant was an example of a government that took steps toward better health for its citizens.
The new Torresdale Filter Plant, when completed, would provide clean water to almost half the city. But behind the curtain, there were flaws. As the population grew, the city’s public institutions were bloating. Ironically, while some of the biggest advancements in medical science were being discovered at the University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson Medical College, the city’s public institutions offered mediocre medical
care. Blockley’s conditions continued to deteriorate as the number of its patients doubled and then doubled again. By 1902, the institution was in the middle of a thriving and growing urban neighborhood. Its presence became a real threat to the surrounding area. A new place to hide the stigmatized insane of the city was clearly necessary.
Chapter 2
THE BLOCKLEY COLONY AT BYBERRY FARMS
Philly’s Funny Farm
With Philadelphia’s population rising every year, it was clear that overcrowding was its number one public health problem. In 1903, amendments were made to the Bullitt Bill to allow the Department of Charities and Correction to split, creating two separate departments. It also required each county to erect new hospitals for each of its newly formed classifications of social medicine. In Philadelphia, the effect was the compartmentalization of the city’s departments, which ultimately spread thinner its ability to successfully supervise them. The newly created Department of Charities was, for a short time, an independent department. It soon merged with the Department of Health, ultimately creating the Department of Public Health and Charities (DPHC).
Throughout most of the commonwealth, sharing the cost of public care with the State helped a great deal. Philadelphia however, being the most populated county, dealt with the most turmoil. Under the new system, the Department of Health and the Department of Charities were still two separate entities that were merely funded as one. The Department of Health controlled the state’s public medical hospitals, which accounted for about two-thirds of its budget. The Department of Charities controlled what the State considered its “charitable” institutions—hospitals for the insane, the indigent, the “pauper type.” Although under the same umbrella, the two departments were not above political sibling rivalry.
Efforts by the City to get more support from the State began in 1904 and would continue until 1938. However, the rerouting of the funds the State did provide—and the fact that some always found its way into the pockets of the city’s corrupt elite—did not encourage the State to give more. The fate of Philadelphia’s indigent and insane was tossed and shuffled around during the battle that ensued as reformists, the city’s elite and the State all duked it out over how much funding Philadelphia should receive from the commonwealth. In the end, the elite won, and the State’s funding remained moderate enough for them to skim from it with little conspicuity.
To understand the story of Byberry, it is important to understand the governing body that created it. As a presence in the city since before the Civil War, political corruption was nothing new to Philadelphians, but the laws and general practices of the city government made it inevitable that new cliques would form as technologies were born and new industries blossomed. The elite players in city hall did battle over the city like a chessboard. The new public hospitals were, like many other projects, pawns to these players. The Republican faction that ruled Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century gave the whole country a lesson in graft. The key figures who made up that faction became known as the “the Gang.” Led by the hardened Philly powerhouse Israel “Is” Durham, the Gang had complete control of the nation’s third-largest city.
Israel Wilson Durham was born in Philadelphia in 1856. A man who appreciated personal connections, Durham worked as a bricklayer until he was elected a judge in 1885. Through his judgeship he made more connections. In 1897, he was elected state senator and thus began building himself an empire in Philadelphia. By the time he was succeeded in the senate by Boise Penrose in 1899, Durham had a firm hold on the City of Brotherly Love. Headlines joked of how the city could not function if Durham was not in town. But as more Philadelphians came to learn, these were not jokes. Mayor Samuel Ashbridge, whom Durham got elected, was merely a puppet. It was rumored that upon his election, he was not allowed to enter the mayor’s office until Durham had finished an “important meeting” there. Durham’s reputation as “the boss” was clearly solidifying. In 1900, Durham took the position of insurance commissioner, which allowed him to remain mostly in the backdrop of the political stage while he ran Philadelphia as the leader of the Gang.
Middle-class Philadelphian Philip H. Johnson was working for the city’s Department of Engineering as a rodman when he met Durham’s youngest sister, Margaret. Johnson married Margaret in 1902 and was thus interred into the Machine. As his brother-in-law, Durham saw to it that Johnson would make a good living for his sister. He gave Johnson the lifelong position of city architect through a “perpetual contract.” On March 30, 1903, Mayor Samuel Ashbridge signed the contract, sealing the fate of Pennsylvania’s public hospitals, as Johnson would be guaranteed the job for the rest of his life. Johnson was a perfect choice for the Gang. He had no problem taking payoffs from contractors or using cheap, out-of-contract building materials and labor to cut costs. His blatant acceptance of payoffs and attempts to muscle landowners and subcontractors out of their share of profits made him a known accomplice of the Gang. During his position as supervising architect of the new state capitol in Harrisburg, his several subpoenas and eventual testimonies in court made headlines. The construction of the capitol ended up costing the State more than five times the original estimate. The State received bills such as $200 for a doorknob or $500 for a “new electric light-bulb.” The outnumbered reformists in city hall and in Harrisburg tried time and again to get to the bottom of the corruption, but as the Durham Gang’s official architect, Johnson was untouchable.
In the midst of the new legislature, the Gang’s reach extended into almost every department. From its inception, the new system of public health began to spoil in the hands of its executors. The mayoral term of Samuel Ashbridge was known to Philadelphians as the “Reign of Ashbridgism.” During his term, several important events occurred. Ashbridge pushed through Johnson’s eternal contract, leaving the mess for the next man to clean up. In 1902, Durham chose John Weaver as mayor. Weaver and Durham had been longtime friends and business partners, and Durham was sure he could puppet Weaver as he had done other mayors for twenty years. But in 1904, Weaver turned on Durham and exposed his corruption and history. After a bitter legal fight, Weaver succeeded in expelling Durham from politics. Durham moved to his summer home in Atlantic City for the last four years of his life. He died in 1909 during a luncheon and was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery. But even after Durham’s death, Johnson held onto his “perpetual contract.”
The city’s original idea was to erect its new insane asylum on land it planned to purchase just north of the new Torresdale Filter Plant, on the city’s extreme northeastern border. This tract—the Brown tract—included the area south of Glen Foerd Mansion. This plan, however, turned out to be too costly for the city and did not afford the necessary space required to build a decent facility, not to mention its proximity to the developed community of Holmesburg, which contained over eight thousand residents at the time. Holmesburg residents voiced their concerns to the mayor. Already unhappy about the new House of Correction the city erected in their neighborhood, they were not about to allow a mental hospital to be built. The grueling battle over where to erect the new hospital began.
Under the Weaver administration, new policies were enacted and many old ones were overturned. Weaver was determined to solve the Blockley problem, but most of the successful construction firms in the city were members of the Gang and worked against Weaver’s attempts at reform. However, under Weaver’s direction, the city purchased the Townsend tract in Byberry for use as the County Prison Farm, an inmate-run farm for the supply of vegetables for most of the city’s public institutions. The Townsend tract consisted of approximately 350 acres of farmland that bordered the Poquessing Creek to the north. Inmates from the House of Correction were utilized, and the “chain gang” worked the fields. The first inmates began work on the farm in 1906. It soon became known as Byberry City Farms. The vegetables and other produce harvested by the inmates were sufficient to provide for all the city’s public institutions, as well as some private buyers.
In the matter of the purchase of the site at Byberry for a new insane hospital I am told that there is a rumor that you intend to oppose the ordinance. Of course if you do you will have some good reason for it, and it would then be your duty to do so. I ask you however, not to permit an opportunity to go by for the city of Philadelphia to get large tracts of land at a reasonable figure unless you can give the city something as good for as reasonable a price. It is such a marvel that the city should have a piece of property offered at a reasonable figure that I think we ought to jump at it. I do ask you, however, to keep in mind the poor insane in the charge of the city, and crowded into the inadequate quarters at Blockley.