Railroads of Pennsylvania

by Treese, Lorett

  Since the Broad Street Station handled 530 trains and eight thousand passengers each day, the Pennsy needed a new station to replace it. The railroad planned for its new Suburban Station to be located on a site just north and west of the old Broad Street Station. The commuter train lines to the suburbs, whose trains would dominate this terminal, had by that time been electrified. Thus the incoming tracks could be built underground and the old Chinese Wall could be demolished, allowing the city’s new “Parkway” to extend to City Hall. Above the train station concourse, there would be a building with office space that could be leased or occupied by Pennsy executives.

  Construction began in 1927, and the building opened for service in September 1930. Underground tunnels linked it to the city’s subway system, while pedestrian passages made it possible to walk underground between Eleventh and Eighteenth Streets. But because construction coincided with the onset of the Depression, not all the ambitious redevelopment plans were realized immediately. According to Burgess and Kennedy in their 1949 history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, “The city’s finances came to such a pass that it was unable to proceed with its portion of the work. The old Broad Street Station remains, and is still used for the New York–Philadelphia trains and certain others, and as a terminal for the Pennsylvania Greyhound Lines. The ‘Chinese Wall’ remains and the new boulevard has not been built, nor the Parkway extended.” The Chinese Wall remained until 1953, when it finally succumbed to the project that created Penn Center Plaza but retained the earlier Suburban Station complex.

  When Suburban Station first opened, it was described as classic in design. Today its gray limestone façade ornamented with black and red marble and bronze is an excellent example of the Art Deco architectural style. During the second half of the twentieth century, the station’s concourse suffered from renovation efforts that obliterated much of its interior Deco décor, and it gradually took on a grubby, neglected appearance. The beginning of the twenty-first century brought a multimillion-dollar improvement project to restore the 1920s ambience while also addressing the needs of modern commuters.

  If you have not visited Suburban Station in a while, the first thing that will strike you is its brightness. Better lighting has vanquished its former perpetual gloom. Brighter, too, is the repolished original brass of the station’s stair rails and the trim around the ticket sale windows. There are now more retailers, most of them fast-food franchises, but some are purveyors of tempting gourmet fare, like the spiffy new Au Bon Pain. The renovation project seems to have overlooked the floors, however, which retain the cracks and patches of the former years of neglect.

  Originally described as “classic” in design when it opened in 1930, the Pennsy’s Suburban Station is an excellent example of the Art Deco architectural style.

  Signage is in a color that recalls the Tuscan red exterior paint of the old Pennsy passenger cars and matches the red marble of the original baseboards. Newer passenger benches of a similar color are interspersed with older original dark wood benches. The station also acknowledges its predecessor, the Broad Street Station, with a large sign bearing an image and description of the building.

  It’s a little jarring when the red-white-and-brass color scheme abruptly ends on the stairs that lead down to the train platforms. Down there, the walls and support columns are still the cream and pea-green colors that have been there for years. One can only hope that the next renovation will extend the old PRR Tuscan red to this level of Suburban Station.

  Thirtieth Street Station

  In their 1949 history of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Burgess and Kennedy write, “It was finally decided to locate the main passenger station on the west side of the Schuylkill, where it had been prior to 1881. At this location, the New York–Washington trains would pass directly through the station, and it would be possible, if found desirable, to bring the New York–Western trains and turn them on a loop track, so that no back-up movements would be necessary.”

  Thirtieth Street Station and its recently restored ceiling.

  In 1925, the PRR joined with the city of Philadelphia in what was called the Philadelphia Terminal Improvements Project to significantly change the city’s transportation infrastructure and give Philadelphia two train stations. The second, which was initially called Pennsylvania Station, came to be known as Thirtieth Street Station, though its location in West Philadelphia made it more suburban than the Pennsy’s Suburban Station, which was in the heart of town.

  Thirtieth Street Station was designed by the architectural firm Graham Anderson Probst and White after more than 130 plans were considered. It opened to the public in 1933 with the intention that it was to be more than a train station: it was supposed to be a state-of-the-art transportation center with facilities for taxis and buses, as well as a flat roof where someday helicopters could land.

  Thirtieth Street Station is one of the best places in the world to experience the excitement of arriving in or departing from a really magnificent place. Its coffered ceiling rises about a hundred feet above a marble floor, making the main concourse an elegant cavern, lined with gilded Corinthian columns, where passengers can hear the drumbeat of hurried footsteps and the booming reverberation of loudspeaker announcements.

  The dimensions of the main concourse are dramatized by a towering sculpture by Walter Hancock, installed in 1952, that is popularly called the Railroad War Memorial. The figure of an angel with wings stretching skyward is holding a corpse, as if to lift a soul to heaven. Around its base in alphabetical order are the names of all the Pennsylvania Railroad employees who lost their lives in World War II.

  Thirtieth Street Station harbors yet more works of art in what used to be the main waiting room behind what still functions as the ticket lobby. Here one wall is dominated by a bas-relief titled The Spirit of Transportation, by Karl Bitter. This sculpture depicts humanity on parade, contrasting older forms of transportation with the trains and riverboats of the nineteenth century. It also includes an innovation that may have seemed to be the wave of the future when this work of art was installed in Broad Street Station in 1895: a child leading the parade is holding what appears to be a zeppelin dangling a boxcar. Elsewhere in the old waiting room are plaques commemorating the service of J. Edgar Thomson, William Wallace Atterbury, and George Gibbs, whose work led to the development of the Pennsy’s distinctive class of streamlined electric locomotives called GG1s.

  Since Thirtieth Street Station handles a passenger volume second only to Pennsylvania Station in New York, Amtrak recently spent millions restoring it. Its walls and ceilings were cleaned and repainted. New lighting features were carefully chosen to blend with the interior. A few movable panels sometimes positioned in the old main waiting room provide information on the building’s history and restoration. Two major universities nearby have done much to improve the area lately, and both Amtrak and Philadelphia hope for its continued development as “Center City West.”

  Reading Terminal and Its Market

  After the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, Philadelphia’s most popular tourist destination is the Reading Terminal Market, which is visited by eighty thousand people every week. There they find merchants selling all kinds of food and cooking ingredients, from sushi and Peking duck to homemade shoofly pie. Sometimes visitors even pause to ponder the name of the place. What does the market have to do with the town of Reading, and why is it called a terminal market?

  Back in 1889, officers of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad decided to build a new train shed and office building in Philadelphia at Twelfth and Market Streets, to be named the Reading Terminal. City residents loudly protested the loss of the markets that had long been operating in that very location, where they had regularly purchased their meat, dairy products, produce, and other foodstuffs. For the sake of good community relations, railroad executives announced that rather than displace the markets, they would relocate them under the new train shed.

  The new market opened in 1892. Its unique location
was a lucky coincidence that made it the perfect place to receive and store food products and attract customers. The Reading Terminal Market became famous as the largest American food market under one roof, and in short order, it also became a Philadelphia tourist attraction, one that has outlived its sponsoring railroad.

  The Reading Terminal Market has outlasted the Reading Railroad. Part of the Pennsylvania Convention Center occupies the former train shed.

  Cars where there used to be trains. The 2011 Auto Show at the old Reading Philadelphia terminal, now the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

  By the 1970s, the market had suffered several years of neglect, while bankruptcy had overtaken the railroad that owned it. For a while, it was rumored that the market would be closed and the building sold. But once again, public outcry saved the market, and in the late 1990s, a massive renovation project was successfully carried out.

  Today scores of merchants do business in the Reading Terminal Market, which can claim to be one of the best food markets in the nation, drawing visits from world-famous chefs and cookbook authors. Speakers and cooking demonstrations, along with the first-rate food at great prices, keep the locals coming back. The old train shed has been incorporated into the new Pennsylvania Convention Center. As for the adjacent granite Italianate head house of the Reading Terminal, opened in 1893, it is still standing and is now occupied by an avant-garde restaurant and other businesses.

  Rittenhouse Square—Home of the Pennsy’s Presidents

  Just a few blocks away from Suburban Station in Philadelphia, the neighborhood known as Rittenhouse Square remains as stylish as it was when several presidents of the Pennsylvania Railroad lived there. The square itself has not changed much, but the elegant homes they inhabited have been generally replaced by apartment houses and commercial buildings.

  After the death of Alexander J. Cassatt’s widow, Lois, the trustees of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Pennsylvania acquired the Cassatt town house at 202 South Nineteenth Street. The brick structure had a plain exterior, but the house had been enhanced by the improvements that the luxury-loving Cassatt had lavished upon it. The property was replaced by an apartment building and given a new address: 1900 Rittenhouse Square.

  It is likely that the residents of the apartment building at 1830 South Rittenhouse Square do not realize that their building occupies the footprint of Thomas A. Scott’s home. Scott had acquired property where a stable once stood and built a four-story brick mansion that covered two city lots. He later purchased the corner property at 1830 South Rittenhouse Square and made his house even larger. After his death, Samuel Price Wetherill purchased the entire parcel and replaced Scott’s residence with apartments.

  J. Edgar Thomson’s mansion at the northeast corner of Eighteenth and Spruce Streets was renovated after the death of his widow, but this elegant residence with classical colonnade and fenced lawn is now the site of a nondescript commercial building. The lot next door, which had been intended for an orphanage for the daughters of slain railroad workers, was disposed of by Thomson’s widow and became the location of a residence constructed by Samuel Price Wetherill. One of the few individual mansions remaining in the vicinity of Rittenhouse Square, it now houses the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

  The Philadelphia Main Line

  Soon after the Pennsylvania Railroad had purchased the old State Works in 1857, the Pennsy began operating six passenger runs daily between Philadelphia and Paoli in cars that were heated with coal and illuminated with oil lamps. It might have seemed hardly worth the effort, since people who lived outside the city and commuted to Philadelphia generally chose to reside north of the city in villages like Germantown. An 1859 history of Montgomery County by William J. Buck notes that Athensville (now Ardmore) then had twenty-eight houses, while Humphreysville (now Bryn Mawr) had only twenty-one. Residences that could be classified as country estates were at that time clustered near the “City Line,” where the train tracks crossed a creek, prompting the locals to refer to the place as “Overbrook.” But by the mid-nineteenth century, some Philadelphia residents were beginning to summer in suburban hotels like the White Hall, which stood opposite the present location of the Bryn Mawr Hospital, or the Wildgoss Boarding House, near the Quaker institution known as Haverford College.

  The passenger station that the PRR named “Bryn Mawr,” as depicted in Philadelphia and Its Environs.

  In The Old “Main Line”, first published in 1919, J. W. Townsend explains that in the 1860s, the Pennsylvania Railroad, “wishing to eliminate a long detour past the old White Hall Hotel, found it necessary to make a deep cut through the high ground covering the proposed cut-off. This was considered to be injurious to the neighboring farms and heavy damages were claimed for the right of way, so it was found to be cheaper to buy a large farm with some adjoining tracts and utilize it for a real estate operation.” The acquired land was divided into building lots. New train stations designed by architect Joseph Wilson were erected at Haverford, Athensville, and Humphreysville.

  These last two communities gradually came to be known by the classier Welsh-sounding names that the railroad had bestowed upon their train stations: Ardmore and Bryn Mawr. The station at Bryn Mawr had a signal tower and elevated footbridge that allowed travelers to cross the tracks safely and watch for trains from a vantage point high above the hill that the trains climbed in their approach from Philadelphia. The name Bryn Mawr means “big hill” in Welsh, and the area was promoted for its cool and healthy “high” air.

  Joseph Wilson was also the architect chosen to design the Bryn Mawr Hotel, constructed in 1871 at the intersection of what are now Montgomery and Morris Avenues. According to Townsend, Pennsy officers were frequent visitors. So were the parents and artist sister of Alexander J. Cassatt. The Bryn Mawr Hotel burned down during the winter of 1889–90, but it was replaced by a structure designed by the firm of architect Frank Furness. The new hotel sported the ornament associated with Furness’s Romantic Revival neo-Gothic style, rather than the blockier appearance of the earlier stone structure, which had more or less resembled the Wilson train stations.

  In his book, Townsend says that “the population of Bryn Mawr and its neighborhood soon began to grow by leaps and bounds. The hotel had made it socially popular and the railroad had added many more trains.” Prominent Philadelphians purchased property, and Lower Merion Township boomed. George W. Childs, editor of the Philadelphia newspaper Public Ledger, built a home in the Bryn Mawr area, as did several executives from the Baldwin Locomotive Works and the Strawbridge and Clothier Department Store. Alexander J. Cassatt, then a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, settled his family in Haverford.

  Once the wealthy had established their residences, the hotels and boardinghouses ceased to be so popular. Starting in 1896, the second Bryn Mawr Hotel leased off-season space to Florence Baldwin for her school students. She purchased the entire structure in 1922 and converted the Bryn Mawr Hotel into the present Baldwin School.

  The first Bryn Mawr Hotel, built by the PRR, as it appeared in Philadelphia and Its Environs.

  Bryn Mawr Station on the PRR Main Line, as pictured in the 1885 Summer Excursion Routes, published by the PRR.

  The Pennsylvania Railroad made a number of improvements to enhance the neighborhood, such as planting maple trees along the wide avenues. Alexander J. Cassatt got the legislature to enact a law permitting townships of a certain size to elect commissioners who could order the construction of amenities like sewers, sidewalks, and streetlights. Cassatt also made it his business to see that local roads were improved.

  In 1880, George W. Childs and Anthony Drexel planned a real estate development in a town west of Bryn Mawr called Louella, which they renamed Wayne. According to Townsend, when Childs was asked why the new development was so far away from the city, he replied that this would give commuters more time to read the Public Ledger on the train.

  By the turn of the twentieth century, Pennsy commuter trains made all the
same Main Line stops that SEPTA’s Paoli-Thorndale Line does today. Commuters on the Paoli Local, as it was then called, waited in attractive brick, stone, or frame train stations. In Strafford, they boarded from a tiny building that had been originally constructed as an information booth for the Centennial Exposition of 1876. After the exhibition closed, the PRR moved it first to Wayne, then to its present location in 1887. Many of the same stations are still in use today.

  In 1996, concerned citizens founded the Wayne Station Historic Preservation Association to solicit funds to refurbish the Wayne Station and save it from possible demolition. In 2010, the restoration was completed, with the historic architecture of the station building cleverly coordinated with a state-of-the-art high-level platform. The station now sports replicas of its original cast-iron station signs, and as of 2011, it is the only Main Line station where passengers no longer have to take a historic giant step to get aboard a train.

  Chestnut Hill

  The Philadelphia Main Line may have nationwide recognition, but through most of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chestnut Hill actually was more exclusive. In his 1958 book Philadelphia Gentlemen, E. Digby Baltzell reports that a Chestnut Hill resident, after having dined on the Main Line, referred to the experience as “slumming.” In a history of Chestnut Hill titled Suburb in the City, David R. Contosta describes how this farm village west of Germantown became such an elegant suburb, currently supplied with two railway lines that go to the same place and terminate within one block of one another: SEPTA’s Chestnut Hill East Line and Chestnut Hill West Line.

  In the early nineteenth century, the few residents of the Chestnut Hill village had to go to Germantown in order to find railroad transportation to the city. The village acquired its own rail service when the Chestnut Hill Railroad opened in July 1854. This line continued to operate as part of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad system after being leased to it in 1870, and its presence encouraged the development of a neighborhood known as North Chestnut Hill (now Chestnut Hill East), where ample houses sprang up in the vicinity of Summit Street, which was also known for its healthful “high” air. Most of the houses, which were designed to resemble the dwellings of the Italian countryside, remain as genteel scenery, inviting visitors to explore this quiet residential street. On nearby Gravers Lane, a railroad station built by Frank Furness is still standing.