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Fringe's New Deal walking tour
Steve Cohen
In the footsteps of W.E.B. DuBois and Bert Bell:
A New Deal Philadelphia walking tour
STEVE COHEN
It’s Labor Day weekend. My friends are hanging out at the pool, at the shore, at picnics. Or shopping for school essentials. I am alone as I trek to the opening events of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
My attitude is: These shows had better be good, to justify my breaking up a holiday weekend with friends and family.
Why do the Fringe organizers persist in starting these festivals on such an inconvenient weekend? It appears that some companies have noticed the problem and they’ve scheduled more performances for later weeks, during the September 4-13 period.
While the event is colloquially called "the Fringe," it’s really two simultaneous festivals. Twenty-two events are labeled "Live Arts." These are the offerings of well-known individuals or groups whose plans were vetted and approved by the festival’s sponsors. When Geoff Sobel, Nichole Canuso or Pig Iron Theatre propose something, their past achievements help to gain them official recognition. The 191 "Philly Fringe" happenings, on the other hand, haven’t been seen and consequently constitute a crapshoot.
How the cheese steak was born
I made my first visit on August 30, picking an event that illustrates the festival’s openness to new ideas and its erasing of the artificial lines that separate art, theater, dance and community. I joined a walking tour of Queen Village and Bella Vista buildings that were significant in social activism, especially in the New Deal era. This so-named “ActivisTour” was led by volunteers from Design For Social Impact.
Highlights include the Foremost Building on the 500 block of South Fourth Street, a center for Jewish social groups as well as the home of a Yiddish-language newspaper and, later, a hot dog factory. This last fact points the conversation towards the founding of Pat’s Steaks a few blocks south of there in 1933, the first year of the New Deal. Pat couldn’t afford hot dogs, so he bought the cheapest roast beef, ground it up and disguised its taste by adding onions and cheese. Thus was born the Philly cheese steak.
The tour takes participants past the earliest Settlement Houses, founded to help immigrants, and the country’s first free community art school, the Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial on the 700 block of Catherine Street. We also inspect America’s first African Methodist Episcopal church, founded by Richard Allen.
A Jewish playground basketball team
At the corner of Seventh and South we passed a mural depicting W.E.B. DuBois. The black educator and activist lived a half block from there, next to a park with sports connections. In 1917 three teenagers from this neighborhood— Eddie Gottlieb, Hughie Black and Harry Passon— formed an all-Jewish basketball team that came to be known by its initials as the SPHAs (for South Philadelphia Hebrew Association). In later years Passon became known as the owner of a sporting goods store, Black founded Pine Forest Camp, and Gottlieb, of course, owned the Philadelphia Warriors.
Those boys held their first planning sessions in a meeting hall on the southwest corner of Fourth and Reed. Then they played at Starr Garden, the park between Sixth and Seventh Streets on the south side of Lombard, where wire fencing prevented balls from going out of bounds and bouncing into street traffic. There the ballplayers became champions in a league where all games were played in similar wire cages. These venues produced a style of play that resembled racquetball.
How the Eagles got their name
Our tour guide revealed that another local sports team started in the first year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Bert Bell bought the football’s financially distressed Frankford Yellowjackets, moved them downtown and renamed them the Eagles after the symbol of Franklin Roosevelt's National Recovery Act (a tidbit unknown to most football fans).
During our 90-minute walk the leader spoke of the community’s history of activism. I noticed numerous window signs opposing gambling casinos, many American flags, many Obama ‘08 banners and no signs for McCain.
So here was a pleasant, educational and healthy way to spend part of the Labor Day weekend– walking two miles on a sunny day, learning new things about our town and its socio-political history.
A New Deal Philadelphia walking tour
STEVE COHEN
It’s Labor Day weekend. My friends are hanging out at the pool, at the shore, at picnics. Or shopping for school essentials. I am alone as I trek to the opening events of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
My attitude is: These shows had better be good, to justify my breaking up a holiday weekend with friends and family.
Why do the Fringe organizers persist in starting these festivals on such an inconvenient weekend? It appears that some companies have noticed the problem and they’ve scheduled more performances for later weeks, during the September 4-13 period.
While the event is colloquially called "the Fringe," it’s really two simultaneous festivals. Twenty-two events are labeled "Live Arts." These are the offerings of well-known individuals or groups whose plans were vetted and approved by the festival’s sponsors. When Geoff Sobel, Nichole Canuso or Pig Iron Theatre propose something, their past achievements help to gain them official recognition. The 191 "Philly Fringe" happenings, on the other hand, haven’t been seen and consequently constitute a crapshoot.
How the cheese steak was born
I made my first visit on August 30, picking an event that illustrates the festival’s openness to new ideas and its erasing of the artificial lines that separate art, theater, dance and community. I joined a walking tour of Queen Village and Bella Vista buildings that were significant in social activism, especially in the New Deal era. This so-named “ActivisTour” was led by volunteers from Design For Social Impact.
Highlights include the Foremost Building on the 500 block of South Fourth Street, a center for Jewish social groups as well as the home of a Yiddish-language newspaper and, later, a hot dog factory. This last fact points the conversation towards the founding of Pat’s Steaks a few blocks south of there in 1933, the first year of the New Deal. Pat couldn’t afford hot dogs, so he bought the cheapest roast beef, ground it up and disguised its taste by adding onions and cheese. Thus was born the Philly cheese steak.
The tour takes participants past the earliest Settlement Houses, founded to help immigrants, and the country’s first free community art school, the Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial on the 700 block of Catherine Street. We also inspect America’s first African Methodist Episcopal church, founded by Richard Allen.
A Jewish playground basketball team
At the corner of Seventh and South we passed a mural depicting W.E.B. DuBois. The black educator and activist lived a half block from there, next to a park with sports connections. In 1917 three teenagers from this neighborhood— Eddie Gottlieb, Hughie Black and Harry Passon— formed an all-Jewish basketball team that came to be known by its initials as the SPHAs (for South Philadelphia Hebrew Association). In later years Passon became known as the owner of a sporting goods store, Black founded Pine Forest Camp, and Gottlieb, of course, owned the Philadelphia Warriors.
Those boys held their first planning sessions in a meeting hall on the southwest corner of Fourth and Reed. Then they played at Starr Garden, the park between Sixth and Seventh Streets on the south side of Lombard, where wire fencing prevented balls from going out of bounds and bouncing into street traffic. There the ballplayers became champions in a league where all games were played in similar wire cages. These venues produced a style of play that resembled racquetball.
How the Eagles got their name
Our tour guide revealed that another local sports team started in the first year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Bert Bell bought the football’s financially distressed Frankford Yellowjackets, moved them downtown and renamed them the Eagles after the symbol of Franklin Roosevelt's National Recovery Act (a tidbit unknown to most football fans).
During our 90-minute walk the leader spoke of the community’s history of activism. I noticed numerous window signs opposing gambling casinos, many American flags, many Obama ‘08 banners and no signs for McCain.
So here was a pleasant, educational and healthy way to spend part of the Labor Day weekend– walking two miles on a sunny day, learning new things about our town and its socio-political history.
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