Searching for Philadelphia’s Trinities

When I visited Philadelphia in April 2007, I stayed with my friend Emily in an improbably tiny house. She had explained that it was off a pedestrian alley off an alley – itself an unusual description – but when I entered I discovered the house had, apparently, just one room.

A tiny, twisting staircase led up one floor to another tiny room and bathroom, and the staircase led up again to a bedroom. Instead of conveying claustrophobia, the house exuded a comfortable, almost nautical sensation of functional smallness. The style was known as a “trinity house,” Emily explained, a uniquely Philadelphia invention. My interest piqued, I turned to the web and library for more information on these unique structures. My search eventually led to one of the city’s most famous residents, Benjamin Franklin, and offered a window into the city’s early history. Many trinity houses turned up for sale or rent on Craigslist, often along with photos of their interiors. A discussion forum operated by a local blog describes residents moving beds in through second story windows, and the unique quirks of living in such small homes.

Few websites could describe their origins, number, or typical form. One real estate website described the type as some of the city’s oldest houses, generally over 100 years old, cozy, and located off shared courtyards. A Frommer’s webpage describing the architecture one might encounter during a walking tour provides just one short sentence, contrasting them with their larger neighbors, “The less wealthy lived in ‘trinity’ houses — one room on each of three floors, named for faith, hope, and charity.” However, other sources contradicted the name’s origin. The introduction to a collection of stories about the 19th century working class neighborhood Flatiron reports residents of the Catholic section called their 14-foot-wide homes “Father, Son and Holy Ghost houses” for their three-room makeup.(1)

Early examples of the buildings dating from the 18th century have been preserved in a National Historic Landmark called Elfreth’s Alley. A nonprofit educational organization sponsors tours of the alley and boast it’s the oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood in America. While the official website doesn’t use the term, another unofficial website describes the architecture as Georgian and “trinity.”

A 1986 Philadelphia Magazine article by Stephen Fried points out the homes are precisely what city founder William Penn hoped to avoid when he founded a city he envisioned would be a “greene Country Towne” filled with homes set amid gardens. The article describes the homes usual form, reporting they are “much in demand” among the well-to-do, and that sometimes several are combined to form “quadities” or “quantities.” For an example of the form, the author suggests Elfreth’s Alley, or the 1900 block of Waverly Street. The author also describes a typical layout: a kitchen in the basement, and the homes often had two front entrances, one leading up to the living room and another providing access to the basement.(2)

An essay on housing for the poor provides additional insight into the origin and early history of the homes. The author describes how property speculators built long rows of identical row homes, and even how the city took possession of small alleyways and subdivided them. The process of what he calls back-alley dwellings is described:

The back-alley dwellings represented a particularly difficult problem. They took several forms. Owners of houses fronting on main streets might simply add on buildings in the rear to the end of the lot, creating a dark, unpaved, unsewered alley. A more famous Philadelphia rear-dwelling was the band-box, or “father, son, holy ghost” house. These houses rarely fronted the streets, but instead were built in the back yards and formed little courts, which were often invisible from the street. Of three, or less frequently two, stories, they contained only one room per floor, with an unenclosed stairway leading from one floor to another. They could be suitable for one small family, but they were unfit for the poor who often crowded into them. These real courts multiplied as the city’s original large lots were subdivided. They were probably built both for speculation and for servants’ quarters. Of great significance is the fact that they were rear dwellings, often obscured from the view of passers-by.(3)

This description is accompanied in the text by a diagram from W. E. B. DuBois’s text The Philadelphia Negro. However, a simple aerial photograph of the trinities above can illustrate the ingenuity of Philadelphia’s alley developers:

Sutherland describes how these houses afford home ownership to the city’s ethnic communities and avoid the problems of high-density tenements like in New York. However, the overcrowding and substandard sanitation caused high rates of typhoid and tuberculosis. His analysis of tenant owners reveals they generally did not hold extensive properties, and often lived in the building itself or nearby.

Sam Bass Warner’s classic account of Philadelphia’s growth suggests one of the city’s most famous residents was responsible for several trinity homes.

To accommodate as many families in so little space some of the blocks for the ward had been cut by alleys so that little houses might be crowded onto the back lots of the houses facing the main streets. Strawberry Alley and Elbow Lane cut through the first block, Petty’s alley divided the third block, and Benjamin Franklin had begun the alley process with his house lot off Market Street in the second block of the ward. He had built a row of three houses on Market Street, thereby turning his home yard into an interior lot. … In the early nineteenth century Franklin’s home parcel became Franklin Court, an alley lot which opened up the interior of the block.(4)

Warner reports the tremendous density and low sanitation caused periodic epidemics of yellow fever, typhoid, small pox, and dysentery. He finds the 1774 census reported 1,401 people and 337 dwellings in the city’s middle ward, composed in turn of five developed block of “slightly less than five acres of land.” Erring on the generous side to assume the ward was composed of 25 acres of developed land would yield the density of 13.5 dwelling units per acre (more than 55 people per acre), considered a high density today, let alone in an era without modern sanitation. He reports that street railways opened up “cast tracts of cheap suburban land and thereby destroyed the market for new alley construction.” Noting many of the old alleys remained standing for years “giving discomfort to Philadelphia’s poor for many generations.”

It is no small irony that the extremely dense urban fabric that constituted an urban problem in the 18th century is precisely the antidote to 21st century ones: sprawl, housing un-affordability, and auto dependence. Now may be the right time to learn from Philadelphia’s trinities, to study their dimensions and construction, as we seek to learn how to build more humane, resource-efficient urban homes and neighborhoods.

> See also my post on “An Architectural Aesthetic of Efficiency,” about how the “forced austerity” of the third world can result in a fundamental re-evaluation of residential architecture

(1) Gerard, Shields. Flatiron. Hilliard & Harris Publishers: 2006.
(2) Fried, Stephen. Philadelphia Magazine. April 1986. “The Trinity House – Last Thing Founding Father Thought He’d Be Remembered For.”
(3) Sutherland, John F. “Housing for the Poor in the City of Homes: Philadelphia at the Turn of the Century.” Chapter 9 in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790-1940. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds. Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 1998.

A Brief History of Public Participation in Urban Planning

This post is Part 2 of my public participation in urban planning series, adapted from my urban planning final paper, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning.

In order to describe the potential uses of the Internet in public participation in planning, this section will begin with a short history of public participation in planning. The history seeks to challenge the profession’s view of participation as simply the public processes designed and controlled by planners. Public participation includes not only the deliberate hearings, but also the role of politicians, civic activists, business leaders, the media, and others in engaging in or forcing public conversation about planning topics. Before the advent of modern urban planning regulation, American urban planners directly communicated with the public in order to implement their plans. The framers of early zoning laws sought to engage the public through an open and transparent process. Given the increasing power of citizen groups and growing complexity of urban development, contemporary planners crafting outreach strategies can learn from this history to achieve consensus about and the coordination of new urban development.

Participation to Realize Burnham’s Plan of Chicago
The Plan of Chicago of 1909 is an important document in the early history of American city planning. A group of Chicago business leaders commissioned architect and planner Daniel Burnham to create a plan for the city’s development. The plan reacted to the congestion and pollution created by industrialization and rapid urban growth by calling for new infrastructure, parks, and establishing a framework for future development. Noted for its comprehensive approach, the plan was adopted by city government, who created one of the country’s first city planning commissions to oversee its implementation. Although the plan’s creation is widely cited for helping to spark the planning movement in America, it is also associated with an important early example of public participation in urban planning.(1)

In 1909, city governments did not yet have the legal authority implement plans through zoning and an official planning commission. As a result, plan advocates turned to an unprecedented publicity campaign to win public support for the plan. Although the plan was commissioned by elites and presented to citizens through a propagandistic publicity campaign, plan advocates viewed public education as integral to the practice of planning itself. Voting citizens held direct power over the plan, since plan implementation depended on the approval of public bonds at the ballot box for road expansions, parks, and other initiatives. Therefore, before planners obtained the legal authority and institutionalized power to implement plans, the success of the nascent field depended on voluntary public and private coordination, created through broad public communication.(2)
Read the rest of this entry »

Remembering 1968

I thought I would post a short note commemorating two anniversaries, one significant to the nation and the other the city of Washington. Forty years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. That event sparked civic disturbances in over 100 cities including Washington, D.C.

This map, published in the book Ten Blocks from the White House shows the extent of fires and looting. The event lay the groundwork for both the large number of subsidized housing projects along these corridors and new private developments like U Street’s Ellington and DCUSA in Columbia Heights.

The late 1960s events are also usually said to be related population decline. Like most cities, its population peaked around 1950 — 18 years before the civil disorder. Population decline should be understood as an interplay not only of urban problems causing middle class “flight,” but also the draw of the suburbs in the form of superior public services and inexpensive housing subsidized by government highways and mortgage programs.

Here are just a few links, please feel free to contribute more in the comments.

> Previous post: Understanding the 1960s’s ‘Civil Disorders’
> History News Network: April 4th, 1968
> W. Post: 40 Years After King, Legacies of the Riot

Chicago Maps Exhibit Closing Soon

A diverse collection of some of the world’s most famous and interesting maps is now on display at the Field Museum of Chicago. For those in Chicago hoping to see it should hurry, as the exhibit closes January 27th. Fortunately for the rest of us, the exhibit features an elaborate online exhibit showcasing some of the cartographic treasures.

Maps featured in the exhibit include a 1300 B.C. town plan, the world’s oldest map drawn to scale (right), the world’s oldest surviving road map, a 1500 map of the road to Rome, Dr. John Snow’s famous 1855 Cholera map of London, as well as beautiful Chinese and Japanese maps.

The exhibit website and impressive 3D virtual gallery contains lots of information on these maps. My only complaint: the images are too small to examine the maps’ finer details.

>> Maps: Finding Our Place in the World
>> Maps Virtual Gallery

AHA Conference Schedule

I’m attending the American Historical Association Conference this weekend, held in the Woodley Park hotels here in Washington, D.C. A list of the sessions I’m thinking of attending is below, and the asterisked ones I’ll be at for sure.

Readers may also be interested to know I’ve also applied to five PhD programs to start next fall. They are programs in history at University of Pennsylvania, University of Maryland, Northwestern and the University of Michigan, and also to the HASTS program at MIT.

Thursday, January 3

3:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Teaching Urban History

Friday, January 4

9:30 - 11:30 a.m.

Historicism and Its Limits

Tech Tools for Historians

The People’s House Roundtable

Managing Everyday Risks in the Twentieth Century: Pedestrians, the AUtomobile, and the Enclosure Movement

* De Facto Segregation: Regional Fallacies, Racial Myths, Historical Practices (M. Lassiter)

2:30 - 4:30 p.m.

Closing the “Passion Gap”

5:30 - 6:30 p.m.

Graduate Students Forum

Saturday, January 5

9:00 - 11:00 a.m.

* Hurricane Katrina and the History of Disaster (L. Vale)

Economic History of the Book in the US

11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Learning to Teach: History Education for the 21st Century

2:30 - 4:30 p.m.

* Secure … for Whom? Campus Violence in Historical Perspective, from the Bell Tower to Blacksburg

Sunday, January 6

11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

* Historians Going Public: Taking History to Newspapers, Radio, TV, Film, Public Libraries, Web Sites, and Blogs

19th Century Scots and Your Regional Sewer Authority

At the recent Society of American City and Regional Planning History conference I attended in Portland, Maine, outgoing president historian Greg Hise gave a lecture on the declining interest among academics in regions and regional planning.

In a post for Planetizen’s Interchange blog, I suggested that contrary to the views expressed at the conference there actually is a good deal of regional study and planning taking place in the U.S. I argue the reasons regions are not well studied by the academy include the exploding scale of “metropolitan” areas, the organization of records, intellectual preoccupation with the city, and and yes, the waning influence of regionalist thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes.

A somewhat eccentric figure, Patrick Geddes’ theories about the relationship between cities and their regions was highly influential among early planners. His “valley section,” a version of which appears below, conveys the geographic and economic scope of his theories.

However, his work is generally abstruse. Project Gutenberg’s copy of his 1904 text “Civics: as Applied Sociology” and his illustration below offer a taste to the curious.

Needless to say the profession has gained a much richer perspective by moving beyond such early thinkers, however the insistence on a regional scope has been diluted.

Read more or offer your own thoughts on my Planetizen post: “Whither the Region? Good Question.”

Upcoming Conferences

I am planning to attend the following upcoming conferences:

Society for City and Regional Planning History Conference
October 25-28 - Portland, Maine ($150 for students)

Washington, D.C. Historical Studies Conference
Nov. 1-3 - Carnegie Library, Washington, D.C. (free)

American Historical Association Annual Meeting
Jan. 3-6, 2008 - Woodley Park, Washington, D.C. ($75 for students)