The Trocadero

The Arch Street Oprah House, better known as The Trocadero Theatre, or simply "The Troc", opened in 1870 and was designed by Edwin Forrest Durang.

1960

It's various incarnations include The Arch Street Opera House, Park Theatre, New Arch Street Oprah House, Continental Theatre, Gaiety Theatre, Casino/Palace Theatre, Troc Theatre, Slocum's and Sweatman's Theatre, Sweatman's Arch Street Opera House, Simmon's & Slocum's Theatre, and Simmon's Theatre.

1973

Over the years the Trocadero has hosted plays, vaudeville shows, and burlesque. It played a prominent roll entertaining traveling businessmen and military personnel during Chinatown's colorful history as the city's vice district, complimenting nearby opium dens and the adjacent Furnished Room District and Tenderloin.

The Trocadero today

Its most recent use was established in 1986 as a concert and dance venue.

Happy Halloween from Philly Bricks

Laurel Hill Cemetery

Wishing you a Happy, Hauntingly Delicious Halloween!

Halloween Concert

While Macy's is preparing the Wanamaker Building's Christmas light show to be ready for the beginning of the ever-earlier Christmas Season, this year the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ have organized a special Halloween concert performed by Gordon Turk from the Ocean Grove Auditorium. The concert begins on Sunday, October 31st at 2:30 PM and admission is free. Jim Riggs will be performing to Lon Chaney's performance in the 1925 silent film Phantom of the Oprah at 4:30 PM. Admission to the screening is $10.

The New Delaware Avenue

Had it been built, today's economy would have probably left it a ghost town, but what a beautiful ghost town it would have been. It's a shame that of all the grand proposals for Northern Liberties' waterfront area, neighbors managed to NIMBY away all but the most poorly designed of the various proposals. And even in the case of these two, opposition fought so hard against an inevitable casino that they wound up with a suburban warehouse instead of a well designed tower with a landscaped marina.

In a time of optimistic real estate gambling, the post industrial wasteland that is Delaware Avenue was to be the site of a new, and concentrated business, residential, and entertainment district. With skyscrapers rivaling Center City's, the redevelopment of this concrete jungle of vacant lots, rotting warehouses, and abandoned cars promised that Northern Liberties could be more than a hipster's wet dream of ironic blight.

Bridgeman's View

A World Trade Center would redefine this corridor as an international business hub, while sleek, sky scraping condos would tag Northern Liberties as an elite address for Philadelphia's nouveau riche. Hotels and casinos would attract young and old, and Delaware Avenue would become our region's premier address for glitz, glamor, and excess.

Oh, how times change. While just a few years ago, one could envision such a scenario being today's reality, sadly, Delaware Avenue remains a blighted artery, and home to the homeless.

Sugarhouse Casino

Waterfront Square, a poorly designed condominium complex that suburbanizes Delaware Avenue as a gated community that disobeys the grid, is two towers short of its original plan. Developers are struggling to unload the remaining units in the recently completed, and stunted, tower.

Sugarhouse Casino draws a crowd but pays no respect to its surroundings. Like a pig in a prom dress, a large warehouse has been dressed up with a plastic facade. With development tied up in town meetings and neighborhood opposition for over a year, dwindling resources and a sagging economy eliminated a hotel component that redefined the area's skyline and balanced Waterfront Square's jarring presence.

Trump Tower

While many in the neighborhood continue to demonize the projects, the surrounding area and waterfront remain neglected and unused by those who fought so fiercely to preserve them. Certainly the addition of Trump Tower and Bridgeman's View, as well as others, would have led to a much worse real estate situation, one Philadelphia has weathered quite well compared to cities like Miami or Atlanta. But no NIMBY can claim their protest was due to some divine foresight.

While it may have turned into a ghost town, it would have created a badly needed, urban infrastructure in a suffering part of town, one that could save this area from the same mistakes made in South Philadelphia in which a similar landscape was redeveloped into an asphalt oasis of suburban shopping.

Given the current economy and the present state of the neighborhood, it's unlikely this stretch of Delaware Avenue will be thrown any developmental optimism again. If this NIMBY has the foresight it likes to claim, right now they are seeing strip malls and fast food drive-ins.

Philadelphia's Ronald McDonald House

Designed by William Decker in 1893 for William James Swain, founder of the Public Record and son of William Moseley Swain, founder of the Public Ledger, the Romanesque Victorian mansion at 3925 Chestnut Street now serves as Philadelphia's Ronald McDonald House. The charity house which originally operated out of 40th and Spruce, found its way to the Swain mansion in 1981.

From Moses King's Philadelphia and Notable Philadelphians, 1901

William Swain died in 1903 en route to his summer home in Spring Lake, NJ. In 1926 the stone house was sold. It was operated as the Andrew Bair Funeral Home until it was purchased by Philadelphia Eagles' Fred Hill, who donated the home to Ronald McDonald House charities.

Swain House - Spring Lake, NJ

Carved in stone and wood throughout the house, faces of Swain's family can be found, including himself atop the main gable, facing southwest.
The interior of the main house has been meticulously restored by the organization, preserving all original woodwork, built in furniture, and stained glass windows.

Ronald McDonald House charities accommodates the families of ill children receiving care at nearby hospitals. The Philadelphia location was the organization's first. Today there are 300 houses in 30 countries.

The Ronald McDonald House today

Fox Theatre

Designed by Thomas Lamb, the Fox Theatre on West Market Street opened in 1923, featuring Edmund Lowe in The Silent Command.

Fox Theatre tower in the 1920s shortly after its construction

The Fox Theatre was leased by the Milgrim chain in 1959 and purchased in 1961 and was the company's flagship theater. The company also owned the neighboring theater, the Stanton Theatre, and renamed it the Milgrim Theatre.

Outside Fox Theatre in 1956

The building was used to house the local offices of all major movie chains and included a screening room on the 17th floor, making the building the movie exhibition headquarters of Philadelphia.

Fox Theatre 1965

In March of 1980 the Fox Theatre closed after playing Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The Committee to Save Fox concluded that the repairs could be made for less than the owner's appraisal of over a million dollars.

Fox Theatre and the former Stanton Theatre, the Milgram Theatre, in the 1960s

Milgram once proposed including a triplex in the tower that now stands in its place, now home to PNC.

1979, not long before the Fox Theatre's closing

The marble balcony is now used as the communion railing at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Springfield, PA. Fox's ticket booth is in Los Angeles and its chandeliers were used in a Columbus, OH theater restoration project.

Much of the information compiled here can be found at www.cinematreasures.org.

The Furnished Room District and Tenderloin

For decades Philadelphia hosted two of the nation’s most notorious red light districts. Bound by North Broad Street, Market East, Chinatown, and including a wide and industrial stretch of Vine Street prior to the construction of the chasm that now segregates Center City from Callowhill, the Furnished Room District surrounding Reading Terminal and the Tenderloin to the north made up a den of iniquity so lewd that sailors docked in Philadelphia were forbidden from walking its streets.

This post-industrial fallout of large warehouses and rundown hotels used as flophouses housed the city’s homeless, drug addicts, and prostitutes. Chinatown hosted the city’s opium dens and burlesque houses, including The Trocadero, and its eccentric inhabitants called the Furnished Room District and Tenderloin their home.

View of the Furnished Room District and Reading Terminal from atop City Hall

The Furnished Room District's sex themed history spanned a century, with two adult bookstores still occupying the corner of 13^th and Arch until the last decade. While the last sordid businesses lingered into the 21^st Century, city planners began chipping away at this neighborhood’s infrastructure in the 80’s and 90’s.

12th and Arch in 1917

Following The Gallery, the relocation of Reading Terminal’s trains to a new Market East Station required the demolition of several blocks of Chinatown to accommodate underground rail tunnels. While moving the trains underground eliminated the need for the noisy elevated Reading Viaduct, it left Chinatown scarred with a number of large surface parking lots.

1311 Filbert - 1911

During this transition phase, the Furnished Room District became a refuge for Bohemia. Artists and punks occupied the apartments above the remaining storefronts. Nightlife in the district was limited to several small bars including Pentony Tavern which was a gay bar on Filbert Street, several adult themed bookstores, and rampant prostitution. David Lynch lived in the Tenderloin at 13th and Wood in the early 1970's and wrote of it, "Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me. It's the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time."

Breintnall Building's Adult Entertainment Center in the 1990s

The Vine Street Expressway drove a wedge between the district’s hotels and residences and The Tenderloin to the north. It called for the demolition of almost every building on the south side of Vine Street, leaving a street scape lined with narrow parking lots.

While transportation improvements left the Furnished Room District and Chinatown to suffer, the blocks behind Reading Terminal were chosen for the Pennsylvania Convention Center, requiring an expansive clearing of the district’s original architecture. At the same time, politicians were eying Chinatown’s northern annex as the location for a new baseball stadium and had planned to run an expressway exit right through its heart.

Chinatown's Trocadero in 1978

These two proposals were successfully blocked by neighborhood opposition but by then Chinatown had been boxed in by several large civic developments: the Convention Center, The Gallery and bus terminal, The Vine Street Expressway, and a sea of surface parking lots west of Franklin Square.

Near 12th and Race - Demolition for the first phase of the Pennsylvania Convention Center

The final phase of the Convention Center, currently under construction, cleared most of the remaining architecturally significant and historic representations of the Furnished Room District’s eclectic buildings including the Race Street Firehouse, The Lithograph Building, the Metzger Building, and a number of others.

Today, very little remains of this once infamous neighborhood. By targeting blight and ignoring architectural significance, developers have managed to completely erase an entire neighborhood and thus, its history. A small strip of industrial buildings have been restored along the 1200 block of Arch Street and a handful of industrial and small row houses are still maintained on and above Race between 11^th and Broad.

12th and Arch in the 1970s

A portion of the original Tenderloin lives on as Callowhill and Chinatown’s northern annex, sometimes called the Loft District, or Eraserhead by cinema buffs who pay homage to the inspiration of David Lynch's movie of the same name, inspiration that is now a U-Haul parking lot. Meanwhile in the former Furnished Room District, very little movement has been made to develop what remains. Aside from the Convention Center, the district now mostly consists of poorly maintained surface parking lots.

Such projects often attract chain restaurants and retail establishments that cater to tourists and conventioneers and one can hope that it will attract these businesses to the area’s arterial streets such as North Broad and Market East. Unfortunately the Convention Center’s north side pays no respect to what remains of its original architecture. With a wide overhang supporting a garage used to park utility vehicles, its narrow sidewalk devoid of trees; it doesn’t encourage the kind of growth that surrounds most American convention spaces. It remains to be seen if the Convention Center will attract the kind of business the state once promised.