were happy to have their cars—and their lives—back to normal. Albert Edmunds was not the only Philadelphian who had missed “the roar of the street-cars by day and night” during the strike and found the “thunder of electric cars” on Christmas Eve “music.”44
The strikes, accidents, and storms disrupted both Philadelphia’s transportation system and the rhythm of everyday life for middle-class men and women in the city. By the turn of the century, the women and men of the bourgeoisie were dependent on the trains and the trolleys that had given them the physical mobility to remake their mental images of the city. Many middle-class Philadelphians found themselves wedded to a monopoly institution—the Union Traction Company—that they did not like but needed every day to travel the length and breadth of “their” city.
For the bourgeoisie, the steam trains and the electric trolleys represented modern society’s triumph over nature. The middle class used these bourgeois corridors to remake the physical and mental geographies of their Philadelphia. Going from one carefully classified, perceived middle-class space to another within the safety and comfort of the region’s trains and cars, late Victorian bourgeois Philadelphians felt confident in the continued progress of their city by the dawn of the twentieth century. This new middle-class world also included the buildings that served as entrances to these corridors. The next chapter will look at the remaking of space and time in and around Victorian Philadelphia’s railway passenger terminals. But, as will be developed in Part II, the monopoly traction company and the transit workers’ strikes hinted that all was not well in the order created by Philadelphia’s subset of the transatlantic middle class. Caught between a rapacious elite and an increasingly demanding proletariat, the early twentieth-century bourgeoisie would have to resort to politics to defend their carefully classified version of the world.
Chapter 2
Such a Well-Behaved Train Station
I checked my bag at Reading Terminal and suddenly felt like false pretenses. I wondered if anybody had ever done anything dishonest before at Reading Terminal, it always seems like such a well-behaved train station.1
During the Victorian era, the downtown railway passenger terminal developed as a distinctive middle-class place in the multi-classed city throughout the Westernized world. Whether Reading Terminal in Philadelphia, Grand Central in New York, St. Pancras in London, or Central Station in Glasgow, space and time became more precisely ordered for bourgeois passengers during the late nineteenth century. The interiors of the newly constructed stations became more complex and better defined. Both inside and outside the structures, the railroads more clearly divided space meant for trains from that for humans. Time also became more precise and increasingly divorced from its natural setting as the railroads adopted standard time and devised new schedules. Railway timetables—like the depots owned by the same companies—became more detailed and exact as the century progressed. By the turn of the century, middle-class women and men lived by railroad time, traveled on carefully scheduled train paths, and arrived and departed from complex, well-planned central depots. The rhythms of bourgeois life can be found in and around the Victorian trains stations.2
Reading Terminal, built in 1893 by the ever ambitious but often bankrupt Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, is a wonderful example of a middle-class portal to and from the bourgeois city. Usually the structure is seen as a reflection of both the grand dreams and the harsh realities of the Reading’s always unsuccessful attempts to best its crosstown rival, the Pennsylvania Railroad. Reading Terminal was neither as busy nor as palatial as the Pennsylvania’s Broad Street Station three blocks to the west, and the two depots immediately defined the relative importance of two corporations. But Reading Terminal and the other late nineteenth-century stations in Philadelphia indicated far more than just the relative business acumen of their owners. From the very respectable dining room on the second floor (see figure 8 for a view of this facility when new) to the more hectic farmers’ market under the train shed, Reading Terminal mirrored middle-class culture in Victorian Philadelphia. It and the other depots quickly became important parts of everyday life for the bourgeois women and men of the region. For many observers, the buildings themselves took on a middle-class tone. By the early twentieth century, Reading Terminal had become, in the eyes of the novelist (and ex-Philadelphian) Christopher Morley, a “well-behaved train station.”3
Before we enter Reading Terminal, we should step back and consider the evolving relationship between the railway stations and the main commercial district during the nineteenth century. In Philadelphia, this relationship can be divided into three distinct phases. First, during the 1830s and 1840s the small, independent railroads attempted to locate their passenger facilities on the fringes of downtown. Later, in the 1850s, the railways moved their now larger depots farther from the business district and began to rely on the then new horse-drawn streetcars for the final delivery of their passengers. The last phase began in 1881, when the now consolidated lines started to move their facilities back into Center City. The map in figure 9 shows the placement of the railroad termini in relation to the central business district in 1876. Not one of the stations stood within the commercial core. Few were convenient to each other; note the nearly four mile gap between the Kensington depot in Northeast Philadelphia (marked as 7 on the map in figure 9) and the Prime Street station in South Philadelphia (1). The railroads had located their stations to these outlying points in the 1850s for a number of legal and economic reasons, including the cost of land and municipal ordinances and agreements that effectively banned steam locomotives from most of the streets of the original city (from river to river between South and Vine Streets). Because of the distance between the terminals and downtown, almost every passenger had to begin or end his or her railway journey by omnibus or streetcar.4
The streetcars were the key to station location in Philadelphia from mid century on as they allowed the steam railroads to end the expensive and inefficient practice of using horses to propel their trains within the limits of the pre-1854 city. Prior to the introduction of the streetcars, most steam railroads placed their facilities at the fringe of downtown, even though this meant that the last few miles of the journey had to be made on rails laid in the city streets and the trains had to be pulled by horses. After the coming of the streetcars in 1858, the steam railroads withdrew to operationally more efficient terminals that ended this switch from steam to horse power. In 1866, for example, the West Chester & Philadelphia Railroad moved its passenger station from Eighteenth and Market Streets to West Philadelphia (shown at 2 on the map in figure 9) to save the time and expense of the transfer. An 1869 guide to the raihoad makes explicit the importance of the street railways in this process when it notes that the “passenger depot, at Thirty-second and Chestnut Streets, [was] accessible every three to five minutes by Chestnut and Walnut Street cars, and within one square [a city block to Victorian Philadelphians] of those on Market Street.”5
Figure 8. The dining room at Reading Terminal when new in 1893. Courtesy of the Print and Picture Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.
Figure 9. Philadelphia’s central railroad passenger terminals in 1876. Based on an 1876 John L. Smith map of Center City in collection of author.
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| 1 | Prime Street depot | Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore |
| 2 |
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