From Common Soil

If you had walked down Market Street on October 5, two months prior, you would have seen a crowd assembled for the ceremonial launch of Matheson Hall’s demolition on a stretch of cement that was once called Woodland Avenue. The angled sun shone an unseasonable 73 degrees that day. Students watched from benches and through windows in Korman. Video cameras, set atop concrete slabs that had been laid in the 1960s, framed a podium to capture history. While the promise of a new building was the occasion, the anticipation centered on a time capsule Keating had found while preparing to knock down the old edifice.

The crowd expected something quintessentially Drexel —  a glimpse at a past that would deliver. Instead, when Keating Superintendant Casey DeFelice opened the shell, there was only a cigarette inscribed with forgotten names, a copy of the Triangle dated April 23, 1965, and miscellaneous Drexel memorabilia. As each relic was extracted, the crowd applauded and laughed at the irony. Back in 1965, just like today, it was business as usual.

Take another walk down Market Street. It’s November 20, 1963. One o’clock; 54 degrees. A similar ceremony — a groundbreaking — is underway at the southwest corner of 32nd and Market. The landscape is vacant, post-industrial. The air smells of petrol. To the north, just across Market at the corner of Lancaster Avenue stands a gas station. Just west, at the corner of 33rd and Market is a parking lot and another gas station. Just south is Woodland Avenue, still a functioning road. There is no Matheson Hall. No Pearlstein nor Hagerty Library. Today’s ceremony is the culmination of seven years of preparation. Residents of Powelton Village and Mantua to the north and west might call it a land grab. Staff and students call it the most forward-looking advance Drexel has made since its 1891 inception.

A May 1957 manifesto penned by the Drexel Institute of Technology’s Board of Trustees titled Redevelopment in the Drexel Area calls this day’s groundbreaking the realization “of Drexel’s role as a catalytic agent.” The document offers a sobering premonition. In 1957, Drexel enrolled approximately 8,000 students. However, management-consulting firm Alderson & Sessions Inc. projected enrollment to increase by 85 percent to 14,000 students by 1970. The increase would necessitate a 180 percent swell in capital assets (from $8 million to $21 million). It wasn’t just expansion; it was total transformation.

The five-story, 68,500-square-foot building was a major step in realizing the trustee’s vision. It would one day become Matheson Hall, home to what will one day be LeBow College of Business. But today, in 1963, it is simply called a “Classroom Building.” It houses 37 classrooms, 10 faculty offices, two lecture halls and an auditorium for students in Drexel’s Colleges of Business Administration, Engineering and Home Economics. It will also accommodate the Evening College and Graduate School of Library Science. The total cost, subsidized heavily by the General State Authority of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,  is $1.5 million.

The building is officially dedicated on October 16, 1965. Beneath the foundation, which rests on caissons so general contractor B. Bornstein and Son, Inc. is not required to dig too deep, is the same soil, scattered with brick, stone and marble — remnants of a forgotten West Philadelphia: a village exiled by the Schuylkill River from Center City that became a railroad hub and a manufacturing Mecca; a home to workers, restaurateurs and barkeeps. Beneath the building lies a time capsule that delivers.

The land that rests on the western shore of the Schuylkill River was established as Blockley Township in the 1670s when William Warner purchased 1,500 acres from the Leni Lenape. The land stretched west to 60th Street and slightly north and south of Market Street. Soon, wealthy Center City landowners, eager for respite from the commotion of city life, began purchasing country estates. Their patronage helped Blockley Township develop as a farming community. Accessible only by the Middle Ferry, the village remained rural until 1854, when all districts and boroughs located outside of Center City were officially consolidated into the city of Philadelphia. Until then, growth was glacial. An acclaimed 1860 map of the area is called Smedley’s Rural Map of West Philadelphia.

There are a couple of milestones in the development of West Philadelphia to consider: the 1805 construction of the Market Street Bridge, which unlocked a revolving door to Center City; and the 1875 opening of the Philadelphia stockyards and slaughterhouses at 30th and Race Streets. It was only then, when industry rode the rails to West Philadelphia, that the 3200 block of Market Street became the row of brick-and-mortar that would eventually collapse to make room for University City.

Casey DeFelice, the man who unlocked the Matheson time capsule, says that unearthing rubble is common in Philadelphia. Wreckage is rarely saved. We tend to look up much more than down and even then it’s difficult to decipher the history from the trash.

On the Matheson site, we found a lot of older brick,“ DeFelice says. “We found medicine bottles, a railroad spike and a couple of marble steps that you’d see on any row house. We even found little octagon tiles from a bathroom or maybe a bar. When they built Matheson Hall in the 1960s, they probably found much more than we did.”

While the specifics are scarce, we do know this: Back in 1963, when construction crews burrowed into what was then a parking lot on the 3200 block of Market Street, they built over crumbled remnants of brick residences (12, in fact) that had been built in the 1870s during the industrial revolution, when West Philadelphia was a thriving post-Civil War boomtown.

If you walked down the 3200 block of Market in 1878 and gazed eastward from the future site of Matheson Hall to the shoreline, you’d see a bustling city street lined with rowhouses. You’d see marble stoops. You’d see restaurants and saloons, one of which was called The Liberty. At the southeast corner of 32nd and Market is the Centennial National Bank (the future Paul Peck Alumni Center), designed by acclaimed architect Frank Furness and completed just two years prior to finance the first World’s Fair. The air is flecked with acrid, burnt coal. You hear what Walt Whitman, living just miles away in Camden, described as the “madly-whistled laughter” of steam engines. Along the riverbanks are stone, lumber and coal yards. Just west, there is a white lead works, meat wholesalers and the great railcar manufacturer J.G. Brill Co. The Market Street Bridge has opened West Philadelphia to the competing Pennsylvania and Reading railroads and the entire nation — extending westward in one long gulp of smoldering air.

“The 3200 block of Market towards the end of the 1800s was pretty much full,” says Richard Boardman, head of the map collection at the Philadelphia Free Library. “What you have are a lot of structures that are now retail. Lots of bars, offices and restaurants. Sometimes with people living upstairs, which was very common in the city. Things really started to take off in the early-to-mid 1870s.”

Take another stroll past the bustling Matheson site. It’s the spring of 1909 and industry is alive in West Philadelphia. Head south down the corner of 32nd and Market Street. Just west, the Croft and Allen Factory, built circa 1890, has by now added an annex on land that will one day become Drexel’s Korman Center. Just across Woodland Avenue is a police station, surrounded by brick row houses and dual dwellings. The ornate Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry building, opened in 1891, stands imposing between Ludlow and Chestnut streets. Just across Chestnut, to the south, are massive depots for the Pennsylvania and West Chester & Philadelphia railroads. To the west, the Otto Gas Engine Works claims the entire 3200 block of Walnut Street. There is smoke and steam and clanging metal. Walk back up 32nd Street and turn left onto Market. Conversation, laughter and the sweet smell of hops escape through the open windows of the barrooms and eateries. West Philadelphia remains much like this — energetic, brawny, galvanized — for the next 40 years.

Examining E.V. Smith’s 1909 Atlas of West Philadelphia, Boardman traces the pink rectangles on the 3200 block of Market Street. “On this block, back in 1878, there were at least half-a-dozen bars alone. Once you get into working neighborhoods, this is very common. In pre-prohibition Philadelphia, people drank. Work was tough.

“Usually you see one bar on a corner. Maybe another a block away. At one time, the 3200 block of Market Street was a whole row of bars. Maybe they were getting ready for the student influx.”

The academic invasion was inevitable. Education would come to define the landscape of West Philadelphia. Some say  the seed of University City was sown by the start of World  World II. Others attribute it to the natural course of commercial expansion. At any rate, when the war was over, the railroads waned, and the auto industry emerged. By 1942, maps show vacant properties on the 32nd block of Market Street. The  Croft and Allen Factory is gone, replaced by a gas station and automobile salvage lot. There are five vacant lots on the  Matheson Hall site alone.

“Sometimes when it gets too concentrated, people just need more room,” Boardman says. “You can see, throughout the city, the decline and fall of industrial Philadelphia from its Industrial Revolution heights. The city’s population was at its highest in the 1950 census. By 1950, industry was already on the decline.”

By 1957, the Matheson Hall site is a parking lot, bound by open property and heavy machinery. Construction has begun on a Student Union Activities Center just east and the Graduate School of Library Sciences to the southwest. A few brick dwellings — already anachronisms — remain along Woodland Avenue.

Drexel’s 1957 Redevelopment in the Drexel Area proposal values the land north of Market Street and between 33rd and 36th streets at a scant $3.00 per square-foot. This “favorable situation” helps Drexel purchase a total of 938,200 square feet of land at an estimated sum of $4.4 million. What the trustee’s call the “Drexel Redevelopment Area” will go on to become the student dormitories north of Market Street, the Disque building, the Korman Center and Matheson Hall.

During a January 1964 meeting of Drexel’s Trustees, a proposition is made to dedicate the “Classroom Building,” now 18 percent complete, as home of the budding College of Business Administration. The proposal is ratified on March 19, 1964. Business education, like business before it, now has a home on Market Street.

“Drexel was at the right place at the right time,” Boardman says. “I would say it was serendipitous. Drexel has become the new industry of West Philadelphia. The hard industry of manufacturing and service has been replaced with the intellectual industry of education.”

Take one more walk down Market Street. It’s 2013. A 12-story, 177,500-square-foot tower stands at the angle of Market and what was once Woodland Avenue. The glass façade allows you to peer inside — to catch students learning, professors teaching, history happening. Its cost: some $90 million.

Below the building is the same Philadelphia soil, scattered with brick, stone and marble. Perhaps there are some bricks from Matheson Hall, too.

Now, look up.