The Parkway Central Library: Part 2
1901 Vine Street
This article is the second of two about the Parkway Central Library. The first part is here.
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The Parkway Central Library, like Matthias Baldwin Park itself, is a tremendous neighborhood asset. The library does more than lend books. A good listing of services offered is found in the nine-page brochure and map at the outside link here. You can borrow musical instruments and DVDs. You can work on a sewing machine or take a cooking class. You can get the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times free online from your home. From home you can also watch streaming movies or take a foreign language course. All you need is a library card which is available to anyone who lives, works, pays taxes, or goes to school in Philadelphia, or lives in Pennsylvania.
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An introduction to the building can be obtained by taking a free docent-led tour, offered four days a week. There is also a one-hour tour of the Rare Book Department offered weekdays which gives an appreciation of the history of writing and printing. Researchers can find resources in the map department and in the print and picture department. The 378-seat Montgomery Auditorium is actively used today for author talks and other events, although it is actually smaller than the 500-seat auditorium that was in the lower level of our neighborhood’s Spring Garden Library (1907-1975), as discussed here.
Edwin A. Fleisher (1877-1959), like George S. Pepper, was a childless philanthropist with an enduring effect on our neighborhood. In Fleisher’s case, he donated his collection of over 3,000 musical scores, valued then at $500,000, to the Parkway Central Library in 1929, plus an endowment to keep the collection growing. This collection represents the largest repository of orchestral performance materials in the world. These works, now numbering over 21,000, are loaned to performance organizations throughout the world for concerts and recordings. There were many members of the Fleisher family in our neighborhood and the Fleisher Yarn Works, the source of the family wealth, had a satellite factory at 25th and Hamilton Streets. Elizabeth Hirsh, who designed the Children’s Crisis Treatment Center (demolished in 2016 and now the site of the Baldwin Apartments at 1825 Callowhill Street), had married into the Fleisher family. Helen Fleisher, Edwin’s sister, is discussed in our article about Masterman High School as the namesake of a school building still standing in the near neighborhood.
Hallahan High School girls visiting the Periodical Room in the new library in 1927. The Periodical Room is now Philbrick Hall, which underwent a renovation in 2012.
Hallahan, built in 1911 as Girls Catholic High School, was across 19th Street from the library. In 1927 the school graduated 310 seniors. By 1939 it would graduate 977 seniors. The library was a great resource for the students. Photo credit here.
Main Reading Room, now Social Science and History, in 1927.
The desks, chairs, lamps, card catalogs, doors and cabinets were metal to enhance fire protection. Check out the decorative coffered-plaster ceiling and those chandeliers! Photo credit here.
Same room today, now the Social Science and History Department, as viewed from the other end. Bookcases have now filled the reading area.
The Windsor chairs you see in the library today are a mix of the original steel chairs from 1927 and replacement wooden chairs. The 1927 chair in this photo has been stripped of its paint to show the structural material. This chair is in the Print and Picture Collection room.
This is room 108 in 1927, down the east hallway from the entrance lobby. At the time, it was the Library for the Blind. That specialty library would move into the nearby Carnegie-funded Spring Garden Library in 1957 as described in our article here. The Library for Accessible Material for Pennsylvanians (LAMP), the current more inclusive name for the former Library for the Blind, is still in our neighborhood at 1500 Spring Garden Street in Room 203.
Room 108 in the Parkway Central Library is now used for lectures.
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The carvings in the pediments on the east and west ends of the Vine Street façade are fairly difficult to see from street level. The east pediment shows the history of printing (photo from here). The explanation of the art is here.
The west pediment commemorates the history of writing. The finished pediment on the building also bears the inscription Liber Liberi (free books) on a stone on the central figure’s left. The Free Library’s motto is Liber Liberi Omnibus, or free books for all.
Note the busy little putti on the far right banging away on the typewriter. Higher resolution photo here and explanation here.
Outdoor stone work in Philadelphia is susceptible to freeze-thaw cycles that pull it apart. Water can seep into the tiniest cracks. When water freezes, its volume expands by 9%, putting pressures of up to 30,000 pounds per square inch on its container. In this case that pressure caused the putti’s head to fall off. Not only are construction costs for stone buildings high, but maintenance costs are high as well. This photo is from a 1995 report on necessary repairs to the exterior.
The grand marble staircase with pennants by Alexander "Sandy" Calder.
The bronze statue of Dr. William Pepper is a copy of the one on Penn’s campus, where he was provost. The winged lions on the staircase were carved in place. Carved marble standing lamps flank the statue.
Eight pennants by Calder were placed in 1976 in Centre Square as a Percent for Art project for that building across from City Hall. The giant clothespin by Claes Oldenburg and Jean Dubuffet's statue Milord la Chamarre were also part of the art displayed there. During a renovation in the 1980s the pennants were temporarily lost until relocated in 2000 and given to the Parkway Central Library. After conservation, in 2019 two pennants were placed on the staircase and two in the Heim Center.
Speaking of Calders, Alexander Stirling Calder, Sandy's father, sculpted The Fountain of the Three Rivers that was placed in Logan Square in 1924. He also designed the Shakespeare Memorial sculpture in front of the library. It was placed close to Vine Street in 1928, then moved in 1953 to accommodate the construction of the Vine Street Expressway.
The Shakespeare Memorial right before its move 30 meters south in 1953.
There is a Shakespeare First Folio on display in the rare book room in the library.
In 2003 Moshe Safdie was selected as architect for an addition to the north of the building. Initial plans were for 180,000 square feet at a cost of $120 million. Plans changed as budgets tightened. From 2013 to 2019 the library underwent a $36 million renovation of the current building, with no addition. The six levels of stacks on the north side of the building were demolished and replaced with two levels of public gathering spaces, meeting rooms, administrative offices, and underground storage for 300,000 volumes. You can find The Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron’s review here.
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The original library was constructed at a cost of $7 million ($122 million inflation adjusted to today), plus another million dollars for books. The 2019 renovations were in lieu of the $120 million addition off the north side of the building and proposed renovations to the main building in conjunction with the addition.
Just five years later there were new plans to fill in the block of surface parking north of the library. Early in 2024 designs were proposed for a library addition to the north of the library, adjoining a new and larger African-American Museum. Two new apartment towers would rise along Callowhill Street between 19th and 20th Streets. Wrapped into the plan was a conversion of the Family Court building into a hotel to the library's east. As of this writing, the plans appear to be dead due to inability to make the combined project work financially.
2003 proposed addition to the north of the library
2005 proposed addition.
The models were all for nought, as the final decision was based on finances.
Fourth floor stacks in 2008 before the six floors of stacks were removed. There were 20 miles of book shelves in the stacks. Most of the books were removed to the Regional Operations Center in Gray’s Ferry. These can be ordered for delivery to any library branch through the library website. Photo credit here.
This is the space that was, until 2017, occupied by six levels of stacks holding a million books. The stacks were a free-standing structure within the library building. This space is now two levels of public gathering space and meeting rooms.
Photo credit and summary of renovation at outside article here.
Two photos taken just inside the Wood Street entrance.
The photo on the right shows the pneumatic tube communication system within the library. It is no longer in use. The dumbwaiter on the left allows books and documents to be transported to the three levels of stacks in the Senior Center and also to the ground floor below, where the bindery was, and to the basement. These types of dumbwaiters connect mezzanine levels to the main rooms throughout the library. The larger dumbwaiter system in Pepper Hall, right above the former six floors of the original stacks, was the main retrieval access for books from the stacks.
Library mascot, Knee-Hi, in 1938 on the left. You can follow Knee-Hi down to the Children's Department today as seen on the right.
To complete the story of the Free Library in the neighborhood, I will mention three other sites with connections to the library.
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Two houses at 310 and 312 North 19th Street are used as administrative offices by the library. House 312 has a Mural Arts mural from 1999 on its north side.
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The Book Corner is the used book shop at 20th and Wood Street. This building is what remains of the Eavenson Soap Factory, as discussed here. The City owns the whole block between Wood and Callowhill Streets between 19th and 20th Streets. These three buildings would be demolished with any future large construction project.
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Library administration and development offices also occupy two partial floors in Rodin Place at 2000 Hamilton Street.
Other neighborhood buildings with library functions.
Also in our neighborhood is another branch of the Free Library, the Library of Accessible Media for Pennsylvanians (LAMP), on the second floor at 1500 Spring Garden Street. It provides free braille and accessible media service for people with low vision, blindness or a physical disability that impairs reading or holding a book.
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Two extant 19th -century institutions with Free Library connections have been mentioned in the two articles about the library. The Wagner Free Institute was the first branch in the Philadelphia Public Library system. The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia vacated its three-story building at 13th and Locust Street to become the third home of the Central Library. Both the Wagner and the Mütter are “museums of museums,” in that the physical setting of the exhibits has been unchanged for 160 years. A stroll past the dark-grained wood cases, gazing at what were exotic 19th-century specimens, captures not just the content of the exhibits but also the ambience for the 19th-century visitor. Wouldn’t it be nice for the Parkway Central Library, in honor of its centennial in 1927, to restore one of the reading rooms to its 1927 look? Libraries are certainly not just books and reading rooms today, but it would be a joy to capture the grandeur of the 1927 building in even a small restored reading room.
The manuscript room in 1948.
The Windsor chairs, tables, lamps, and book shelves are all of metal construction to reduce the risk of fire.
The manuscript room is now chock-full of storage items, with a floor built at mezzanine level to accommodate more storage.
State of Pennsylvania Historical Marker at the Vine Street entrance. This is one of only three State historical markers in the neighborhood. The others are for the Baldwin Locomotive Works at 19th and Hamilton Streets and for helicopter pioneer Frank Piasecki at 1937 Callowhill Street.
Further Resources
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​306 historical images of the library collected for the 75th anniversary here.
published July 2024