the people” by the time they had arrived at his street.29
After Center City, the next most popular set of destinations for relaxation for middle-class men and women were the various parks in and around the city. Fairmount Park, the large municipally owned green space along the Schuylkill River, offered a number of possible destinations. Although clearly a space shared with the women and men of the working classes, Fairmount Park maintained its bourgeois tone in part because of proximity: in the late nineteenth century, middle-class neighborhoods faced all the major entrances to the park. Starting in the 1890s, there were also a number of commercial amusements parks. Many of these were owned by the trolley companies to encourage patronage on their lines. Philadelphia never had one very intensively developed location like Coney Island in New York City but instead had a number of smaller sites located throughout the region. In general, all these enterprises offered the same types of services: rides, food, picnic sites, and music. More basically, they all offered an escape from the brick-and-stone row-house world of middle-class Philadelphia to a land of green grass and trees. Philadelphia, like most industrial cities, was dirty and crowded and the parks offered some momentary relief from the less enchanting conditions of everyday urban life.30
Finally, during the 1890s the trolley cars themselves were another popular middle-class destination. On beautiful days in the spring and fall many women and men used the trolleys to explore the city and region. For example, after supper one Sunday, Leo Bernheimer took the trolley to German-town just to see a new place. During the hot days and nights of the summer, middle-class Philadelphians used the streetcars to cool off. Eugenia Barnitz took open trolleys with her friends to Willow Grove Park as a teenager in the late 1890s. Because of the high fares that effectively limited working-class ridership, the cars themselves were a safe, middle-class space in the city.31
In the late nineteenth century, the steam trains (and to a lesser extent the trolleys) also linked middle-class Philadelphians more firmly to the city’s hinterland and the nation as a whole. People rode the railroads for both business and pleasure. Professionals and tourists visited New York and Washington for the day and took extended trips to Pittsburgh and New England. Towns along the New Jersey coast became destinations for thousands of middle-class men and women on hot summer days. The rail lines were not just “metropolitan corridors” but bourgeois ones as well in which middle-class men and women sped through the countryside from one bourgeois space to another in comfort and modernity. Not only was Atlantic City part of the world of Philadelphia’s bourgeoisie but so too were the trains of the Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia & Reading that connected the two communities. The illustration in figure 6 of a well-dressed woman being deferentially served by a Pennsylvania Railroad conductor is a window into this world.32
At the most mundane level, the trains and trolleys allowed middle-class Philadelphians to explore for a day the countryside around the city. The women of the West Philadelphia Smith family, for example, often used the trolleys to collect flowers to decorate their home. Edwin Jellett and his friends regularly took day trips to the Pennsylvania and New Jersey countryside in order to “botanize.” Jellett was a particularly active user of the region’s transportation system; he filled his Sundays with trips to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; Burlington, New Jersey; and dozens of other locations throughout the area in the late nineteenth century. Others, like the map-maker John L. Smith, took the trains and trolleys to follow the expansion of the metropolis; nothing seemed to make him happier than to record “the many improvements” he found in some outlying district.33
The trains permitted many middle-class Philadelphians to spend part or all of their summers in the late nineteenth century “boarding” in the surrounding countryside. Escaping the heat of the city for the rural hinterland had long been common for the city’s elite, but the frequent train service meant that middle-class families could now join the summer exodus and still work or shop in the city. Edwin Jellett spent many of his vacations near Schwenksville in Montgomery County. Mary Smith’s family spent a month of the summer of 1896 on a farm just outside Hatboro. Her father commuted to the city on the trains of the Philadelphia & Reading and she, her older sisters, and their mother occasionally went into Center City to shop. Although the Smith family returned to their home in the city, the convenience of the train service first sampled in these summer stays may have helped convince other middle-class Philadelphians of the advantages of suburban living.34
There were many popular summer destinations for bourgeois Philadelphians along the New Jersey shore. From Cape May to Asbury Park, the coast was dotted with towns that catered to city dwellers escaping the heat of the metropolis for the cool sea breezes. Both the Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia & Reading systems linked these shore communities with Philadelphia. By the 1890s, some of the fastest trains in North America plied the rails between Camden (linked by ferry to Philadelphia) and Atlantic City. Both railroads operated express trains with extra-fare Pullman parlor cars, cheap excursion trains for day-trippers, early morning locals full of anglers and Philadelphia newspapers, and “cottagers trains” at the start and end of the “season” to convey families and their possessions to and from the shore. The season for the shore started in late May and continued through early September with its peak in July and August. As was common in many late nineteenth-century businesses, the Pennsylvania and the Reading engaged in an odd mixture of competition and collusion; although they met annually to set fares and rules for excursion traffic, they battled for passengers by offering faster trains, better equipment, and even bribes to Atlantic City hoteliers and cab drivers.35
Figure 6. The bourgeois corridor. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
During the last few decades of the nineteenth century, the trains and the streetcars allowed middle-class Victorian Philadelphians to travel easily throughout the metropolis and to refine their visions of the city and its region. In this way, a new, better-ordered, more controlled relationship developed between middle-class Philadelphians and their metropolis. The trains and trolleys, however, were not perfect and this comfortable relationship could be undermined. Both nature, in the form of adverse weather, and man, in the form of accidents and strikes, could disrupt the city’s transportation system. During the late nineteenth century, snowstorms often shut down Philadelphia. Steam train and streetcar accidents, though usually less disruptive to the city as a whole, were far more likely and more deadly occurrences. Starting in the 1890s, strikes against the streetcar companies became more common and often interrupted the flow of travel in the city for middle-class Philadelphians.
The worst snowstorm during this period was the “Blizzard of ’88” that brought the city to a standstill for a number of days in early March. Although the city only officially received ten inches of snow, the combination of low temperatures and high winds halted all transportation in the region. One Philadelphian recalled, “During the blizzard of 1888, not even four horses could pull the [street]cars up that hill terminating at Poplar Street. Transportation [in the city] stopped.” William Hemsing recorded conditions along the Philadelphia & Reading’s line to Bethlehem. On Monday, March 12, the second day of the storm, he observed: “The storm still continues.… The telegraph wires are down and the local freight was delayed here all day.… The train that passes here at 10 A.M. with three parlor and sleeping coaches and two others, with two engines, one broken, reached here about six o’clock. I watched them as they passed up the road and soon heard that they were stuck in the cut.” Fifty-eight men from Lansdale worked for nearly two days to dig the stuck train out of the drifting snow. Finally, on Wednesday, Hemsing noted that “The unfortunate train at last started off in a snowstorm at 11:30 this morning nearly fifty hours late.” It was not until Thursday that service returned to normal: “Today all the passenger trains are running nearly on time. They had two engines for every train this morning, but this evening it is better We got all our papers today.” In the city, William Armstrong, an engraver, also recorded the unusual conditions: “Snow drift on the
