Essays
The First Hollywood
from The Philadelphia Inquirer
16 April 2007
To get to Lubinville from my part of town, it’s easiest to transfer at Market to the 33 bus. At Lehigh we reach the block once exalted by Shibe Park, and the scale shifts. This was the 19th-century city lunging headlong into the 20th. Here was baseball as popular entertainment for a city that was one-quarter foreign-born. Here, just across the tracks, was the world’s largest radio factory. Here, in 1909, came the optician and peddler Siegmund Lubin, the first to dream of the shadows of the silver screen.
Lubin was honored April 11 at International House by the Philadelphia Film Festival. That same day, at 1608 N. 15th, where Lubin lived for years, his third state historical marker was unveiled (the others are at Eighth and Market and in Montgomery County at the site of his Betzwood estate and studios).
This man was Philadelphia’s Faust. A peddler worthy of Babel and Bellow, he came here with a degree from Heidelberg in 1882. About that time, Eadweard Muybridge was at Penn conducting groundbreaking photography of animals in motion. After meeting Muybridge, Lubin began to experiment with moving pictures.
By 1897, he had turned his Eighth Street optical shop into the factory of the Cineograph, a calcium-lit, manual-winding projector that showed flickering, sometimes blurry short movies spliced together on 50-foot films. Until he opened his theaters – the original was in West Philadelphia in 1899 – he sold the Cineograph, 50-foot films, and preprinted tickets as a package to small-time entrepreneurs who charged to show the movies on the walls of rowhouse living rooms, barns and storehouses.
As a filmmaker, he made Philadelphia his open studio. In Fairmount Park he fought the Spanish-American War; on Broad Street, the French Revolution; in Chinatown, the Corbett-Fitzsimmons boxing match (which had actually been contested in Carson City, Nev.).
Never mind history. Lubin sold you his visions – The Preacher and the Gossip; The Dream of a Lobster Fiend; The Nicotine Conspiracy; Angel Cake and Axel Grease, among the hundreds of titles – in ever-crisper black and white. In an industry dominated at first by Thomas Edison, by the turn of the century Lubin had duped and copied his way to the top.
Then, in 1909, with Connie Mack polishing the brilliant new diamond two blocks away, our wizard built Lubinville at the corner of Indiana and 20th and turned the Quaker City into pre-Hollywood Hollywood.
Now I’m standing at the entrance to Lubinville, where directors would make five motion pictures at one time and eager young men sweating in dinner jackets would jostle for the sidewalk view of the stars. “From the exterior, Lubinville resembles any factory,” film industry observers wrote at the time. But inside, beneath the glass ceiling, you found yourself standing beside a Hessian or a head-dressed Indian. Lubin might cast you as a plantation owner or a fugitive slave or a belly dancer.
But Lubin’s gone. With the yellow flash of the old calcium projector, his empire collapsed under the weight of lawsuits and war in 1916, after having made 128 films that year (half of what he’d made in 1915). Holdings then worth about $11 million vanished in months. Lubin returned to the optical shop. The real Hollywood took off.
As I walk east on Lehigh Avenue, under the trestle, below the old tobacco factory, beyond the smoke towers and carved pediments, the dream metaphor nags at me. Like all cities, Philly is the constantly changing result of countless dreams crisscrossing all at once. But every so often someone comes along with a vision powerful enough to reinvent us. Perhaps Franklin was the original. Our Philadelphia remains in significant ways his invention.
Writing at the turn of the century, early film industry scribe Esther Pennington conjectured that only Lubin, after Franklin, had the audacity and force of vision to make us think of ourselves and our city as something new.
Lubin arrived as foreign immigration surged. He was only one of many streetwise entrepreneurs who en masse adopted the city and changed it forever. But in the 70 years that followed, immigration to Philadelphia quite nearly ended. Today, at last, that’s changing. And so – for all our ambivalence over immigration – we all have reason to hope. From all over the world, they’re coming to Philadelphia again. I’m willing to bet there’s a handful of wizards among them. May they bring strong magic.
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