The Middle-Class City - John Henry Hepp, IV

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he moved a somersault. The conductor stopped the car.… I don’t think it was the conductor’s fault.” The accidents, however, could be far more serious, even deadly. One morning, on his way to Penn, Bernheimer “had a close shave from a trolley collision. Cars at right angles almost crashing together, the tracks being slippery.” Other people were not so lucky, deadly accidents were not uncommon on the streets of Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century. Pedestrians were run over when they crossed the often busy streets of the city without being alert for the cars. The same reduction in friction that allowed the horse cars and trolleys to travel quickly also made them difficult to stop. Passengers also died from falls from the open platforms at the ends of the cars.39

      Accidents also plagued the steam railroads that served the city. Trains derailed, ran into each other, and ran over pedestrians at grade crossings. The high train speeds that allowed middle-class Philadelphians to assert control over their environment contributed to these railroad accidents, as did the lack of effective safety regulation. John L. Smith had his “first Experience in R.R. accidents” on a Philadelphia & Reading train for New York in 1880 when “the Engine Broke the Piston Rod it Broke in Half + tore wood work of Locomotive fearful wonder it did not kill the Engineer.” No one was killed and Smith made it to New York only an hour behind schedule. Accidents at grade crossings (where streets met the tracks at level) were also common. On his way to school one morning, Leo Bernheimer noticed a crowd near the Philadelphia & Reading crossing “at 9th and Girard.… A man had been struck by a train. I have since learned that his name was Goldman, Jewish. He died.” These crossings were dangerous in part because the space between the railroad and the pedestrian was poorly defined (a topic that will be revisited in Chapter 2).40

      During the late nineteenth century a number of strikes against the railroads and traction companies also disrupted service. Most of the labor actions were short in duration. In 1887, for example, there was a strike against the Philadelphia & Reading that lasted for only a few days and had little impact on passenger service.41

      On December 17, 1895, however, workers struck the newly formed Union Traction Company (which by then operated most of the trolley and streetcar service in the city) at the peak of the Christmas shopping season and maintained the action for a week. Leo Bernheimer noted by the afternoon of the first day of the strike that “practically none [of the city’s transport services] except the Broad St Bus, and the Hestonville, Mantua RR. cars are going Most of the people have to walk.” Although the labor action did not last long, it was a crucial event in the world of middle-class Philadelphia. By 1895, many bourgeois families had used the trolley to separate home from work and shopping. No longer could they easily walk to their daily destinations, and people coped as best they could. The traction company’s attempt to operate service with police escorts met with limited success because of the combination of union solidarity, public support for the strike, and violence. Leo Bernheimer rode some of these “scab cars” and his experiences were not positive. Early in the strike he “took a car, a Market Streeter then coming along, police fore x aft and four mounted police as escort to the bridge [over the Schuylkill River]. The conductor said he would not make the next trip, had had enough.” Later, Bernheimer rode another trolley “with a ’scab’ conductor. He had no uniform on and did not seem to be a conductor. The remarks made about him were not complimentary. He seemed to be a very poor man, and anything but happy. I felt very sorry for him.” Bernheimer, like other middle-class Philadelphians, also took the steam trains (all three of the railroads serving the city continued to operate) and “huckster wagons” to work and shopping (see figure 7 for the triumph of practicality over bourgeois respectability during the strike) . Mary Smith’s father either walked the two miles to work or took a crowded train on the nearby Pennsylvania Railroad.42

      Despite the violence, many middle-class Philadelphians supported the strike because of their dislike of the new traction monopoly. Albert Edmunds, a librarian at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and no friend of organized labor, recorded, “General strike of motormen and conductors of the Union Traction Company, which has created popular disapproval of late by raising fares and reducing wages.” Septimus Winner, a small-business owner, expressed his toleration of the violence: “A magnificent’ day, splendid for pedestrians, we all had to walk on account of the Great Strike in opposition to the ‘Trolley Grab’ of double fare 8 cents. A very exciting day all over the City big rows, cars smashed and lots of fun.” Another indication of the anti-monopoly feeling was the “people going along with cards on their hats, saying ‘we are walking,’” noted by both Edmunds and Winner.43

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      The strike ended on Christmas Eve with a partial victory for the union. The workers received a small wage increase and a twelve-hour day. Middle-class women and men 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,

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