Creeks in Northeast Philadelphia and Cobbs Creek in the city’s southwest. Crawford’s report also endorsed a plan that city officials had already proposed for a new parkway running through the city’s largely undeveloped north. The Northeastern Boulevard, as it was commonly called, promised to encourage residential settlement throughout the area and to provide access to the parks that Crawford wanted the city to build there. Crawford also advocated building new parks and parkways in South Philadelphia and on the western bank of the Schuylkill River, one of the city’s two principal waterways.37
It was an ambitious vision. And as the extensive membership of OAACPS suggests, it was a relatively popular one, at least in corporate and professional circles. Nonetheless, the path toward realizing OAACPS’s plans would be far from smooth.38
In 1905, Iz Durham was preparing to retire. To secure his and his allies’ financial future, Durham concocted an intricate plan to bring millions of dollars into the city’s coffers—money that local lawmakers would then funnel back to Durham and his machine associates through city contracts. To get the funds, Durham turned to one of the city’s leading utility firms, the United Gas Improvement Company (UGI). Durham proposed to cancel UGI’s existing short-term lease on the city’s gasworks, which UGI paid for annually, and replace it with a long-term, seventy-five-year lease that the gas company would pay off in a lump sum of $25 million. By some estimates, this was $100 to $125 million less than UGI would have paid under its existing contract. Independent reformers’ immediately drew attention to the scam.39
To counter the charges of his detractors, Durham contended that the city desperately needed the $25 million from UGI. But the city’s existing budget contradicted his claim, so Durham and his allies resolved to make his assertion true. Soon after the gas controversy began, Durham and his allies on the city council introduced legislation providing for the downtown parkway, the Northeastern Boulevard, the park and parkway along Cobbs Creek, and a number of Crawford’s and OOACPS’s proposals for South Philadelphia.
But Durham’s attempt to inflate the city budget simply fed the opposition. In May 1905, in front of a gallery filled with protestors, city councilmen allied with Durham passed bills providing for the park and parkway projects and soon thereafter approved the new gas lease. Local manufacturers opposed to machine rule reportedly gave their workers time off to protest the so-called gas steal. As public anger continued to mount, Durham and the city council abandoned all of the measures.40
Crawford’s and OAACPS’s City Beautiful plans gained a degree of momentum two years later, but only temporarily. During the administration of Mayor John E. Reyburn—a machine politician who took office in 1907—the city constructed the western tip of the downtown parkway and began purchasing land for the proposed parks along Pennypack Creek and Cobbs Creek. The Reyburn administration also completed large portions of the Northeastern Boulevard—a project that proved to be a boon to Reyburn’s political allies. A number of machine politicians bought property in the path of the proposed roadway as well as in surrounding areas. They then sold the land needed to build the street back to the city for a sizable profit and watched the values of their remaining property rise as the boulevard was constructed. Political power broker “Sunny Jim” McNichol owned the contracting firm that built the road in exchange for $1.4 million in public funds. In antimachine circles, the project became known as the “McNichol Boodlevard.”41
After Reyburn left office, however, friction between the city’s bosses and reformers once again stymied progress on these and other projects. In 1911, independents successfully exploited a power struggle between the two main factions of the Republican machine and elected as mayor longtime independent reformer and manufacturer Rudolph Blankenburg. Even so, machine politicians continued to dominate the city council. The result was gridlock. Blankenburg attempted to squeeze graft out of the city’s political system, while city councilmen allied with the machine clung to the status quo and tried to keep Blankenburg’s legislative achievements to a minimum. Bickering over how the city awarded public contracts held up construction on the downtown parkway for the entirety of Blankenburg’s four-year term. Similar dynamics hampered progress on the art museum project. Hewing to strict budgetary principles, Blankenburg refused to appropriate funds for the building early in his tenure. When he finally bowed to public pressure and did so, the city council suddenly turned against the proposal in an attempt to humiliate the mayor. Major appropriations for the museum failed to make it into the city’s budget until Blankenburg’s third year in office. Architectural challenges then brought further delays. Quarrels between Blankenburg and the city council also slowed work on the proposed library, so much so that in 1915—the third year of Blankenburg’s term—the popular preacher Billy Sunday was able to hold a revival on the empty lot where the library was slated to stand.42
The machine returned to power in full force under Blankenburg’s successor, Mayor Thomas B. Smith. In characteristic machine fashion, Smith funneled money from the city’s treasury to his political allies through contracts on public projects, including the downtown parkway. Just a month before the end of World War I, the parkway finally opened to traffic. The commitment of the city’s most powerful politicians and its wealthiest citizens had easily swept aside resistance among business owners and working-class Philadelphians displaced by the project. The vehicles that christened the new roadway traveled on pavement that “Sunny Jim” McNichol’s construction company had helped to lay just before McNichol died. But they also drove down a street wholly unadorned by the civic structures that local business leaders had hoped to build. Despite progress, the Tacony, Pennypack, and Cobbs Creek park and parkway projects remained unfinished as the nation transitioned from war to peace.43
Independent reformers’ fight against boss rule reaped a similarly disappointing harvest—a fact that had major consequences for business leaders’ political activism in the years that followed. In 1917, another rift developed between the two main wings of Philadelphia’s Republican machine—one controlled by the Vare brothers and the other by Boies Penrose (who ruled on his own after his partner “Sunny Jim” McNichol passed away). The fissure stemmed from a municipal primary in the city’s Fifth Ward, an area in the heart of what was once colonial Philadelphia. Tensions mounted in the lead-up to the election, as policemen allied with the Vares repeatedly harassed supporters of Penrose’s candidate, James A. Carey. As voters cast their ballots, Vare underlings in the city’s police department arrested over two dozen Carey backers and closed a number of polls. When Carey and two colleagues went to check on reports of foul play, a group of Vare-hired thugs accosted them. The Vare henchmen eventually opened fire and killed a police officer who had tried to intervene.44
The outcry that followed the killing suggested that local sentiment had turned sharply against the Vares. In an attempt to capitalize on public outrage, independent reformers established a new political party—the Town Meeting Party—and ran candidates in the November general election against the Vares’ Republican slate. In a rare move, Penrose urged his supporters to vote for the Town Meeting Party’s antimachine candidates. But even murder and Penrose’s endorsement could not bring independent reformers a decisive victory. The Vares survived the 1917 election, yet so did the fledgling partnership between Penrose and the city’s independent reformers. Within a year, Penrose and independents—including leaders of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce—had begun to plot a major reformation of the city charter and with it the Vares’ demise.45
In designing the new charter, independents especially sought to change the composition of Philadelphia’s city council, which at the time was a bicameral body with 146 members elected from the city’s forty-eight wards. Unlike their counterparts in Detroit, municipal reformers in Philadelphia did not attempt to replace the existing city council with one elected entirely at large. Their newfound ally Penrose would have rejected such a proposal since his power was in part ward based. Still, reformers hoped that the new council would feature at least some at-large representation to dilute ward politicians’ strength. They also wanted to reform Philadelphia’s civil service system. Under existing law the mayor had the power to appoint the city’s three-member
