Essays
The Wizard of Swampoodle
26 March 2007
To get to Lubinville from my part of town it’s easiest to transfer to the 33 bus. Mid-morning northbound makes this powerhouse of a people-hauler a lonely carriage. The bus stumbles across Girard into unplowed territory. There’s no revenge shooting this time, no chaos, no blood on the floor.
Snow covers the vacant ground. There are furnished rooms to let and deranged Venetian blinds exposed to the wind. Bay windows reach nowhere but the brilliant sky.
The driver shimmies the bus cheek-to-jowl with another going opposite. He opens the door to shout salutations. Their voices are sweeter than Butterscotch Krimpets.
Insolent tract houses with driveways appear on desolate blocks in groups of four or eight. Nineteenth century scribe George Lippard would say the houses are shivering, miserable, suicidal. I tell myself they are the last asthmatic gasp of the social engineers. I am the only one on the 33 who cries.
Old friends, a man and a woman, in their forties, catch up on babies, extra pounds, grown children, a cousin released from jail. You think he gets it? she wonders. There’s nothing like freedom.
Then a knowing silence emerges between them. Violence, shootings, life during the scourge of the gun. Finally, she goes on. I just get up, go to work, go to the grocery store, come home and go to sleep, I don’t even have time, anyway.
Near Lorene Cary’s church we turn left then right to cross the Glenwood Avenue tracks. Twenty-second Street greets us with people, their shadows shortening as the day grows, rows of row houses and porches, silk flowers.
At Lehigh we reach the plinth once exalted by Shibe Park and the scale shifts.
This was the nineteenth century city lunging headlong into the twentieth. 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, alongside Connie Mack, came the optician and peddler Lubin, the first to dream of the shadows of the silver screen.
Bald and blind in one eye, Siegmund Lubin, who will be honored at last by the Philadelphia Film Festival on April 11, was our Faust. He was the maker of the Cineograph, perfector of film stock, the vertically-integrated maven (World’s Largest!) who made more popular films than any early filmmaker. He busted Edison’s balls, saved Samuel Goldwyn and Cecil B. DeMille’s careers, built the most advanced equipment, and recreated famous events on his roof. He opened the Auditorium, Palace, Savoy, and Victoria and made The Quaker City into Hollywood, which was the most incredible feat of all.
Philadelphia was his open studio. In Fairmount Park he fought the Spanish-American war, on Broad Street the Revolution, in Chinatown the Corbett-Fitzsimmons boxing match (which had actually been contested in Carson City, Nevada). Never mind history. Lubin sold you his dreams – along with the projection equipment (for as little as $70 in 1897). Until he opened his theatres – the original was in West Philadelphia in 1899 – the first movie screens were the long walls of row house living rooms.
Now I’m in front of Lubinville, where directors would make five motion pictures at one time. The sun is making puddles of the snow. The sky is periwinkle, the ground is bare and rocky. Matching the scene in front of me to the parcel maps of the time, I guess that despite the fire of 1914 the main studio building still stands, without the massive glass curtain walls and roof.
From the exterior Lubinville resembles any factory, wrote film industry observers at the time, until inside, beneath the glass ceiling, you found yourself standing beside a Hessian soldier or a head-dressed Indian. Then you had to watch out or be placed under the spell of the wizard. He might cast you as a plantation owner — or a fugitive slave — or a belly dancer.
But Magic Man’s gone – his empire collapsed in 1916, the year he made 128 films. Here in the earliest spring, I stand before the factory of dreams in the unsettling silence of Swampoodle, amid row houses with iron balconies and porches covered by Astroturf guarded by concrete lions once painted white. Like many of our neighborhoods, this one seems to stumble ahead into darkness.
Is it still possible to imagine the race of technology, the nervous confusion, the chatter of the beehive? Early film writer Esther Pennington said it was enough to shake the city from its century-long slumber. For two decades Lubin made us into his goofy fantasies. And we, in turn, consumed them. Perhaps we believed.
Perhaps we still believe. Philadelphia, without revolution, industry, or influence lives on by invention. With no other convincing reason to inhabit the banks of our rivers, we turn to our dreams and project them — unevenly, haphazardly — onto the street.
I walk east now on Lehigh Avenue, under the trestle, below the old tobacco factory, beyond the smoke towers and carved pediments. The metaphor nags at me. Yes, Philly is the result of many dreams criss-crossing at once. Some of us who dream big have the backing to build what we see in our minds. And so certain places are booming. But here in Swampoodle? There are dreams aplenty, god knows, but as far as I can see, there is no wizard, no projector, and the walls are crumbling. There’s the Reverend Spaulding, who leads the mega-church built on the old ballpark. There are the folks who keep the 22nd Street shopping district afloat. There’s state representative Shirley Kitchen, whose office is on Lehigh Avenue, and the other city politicians who represent thi spart of town. But Temple – University and Hospital – are over there – and over there. Center City? Looks good in the view from Reyburn Park. Tasty Cake? Pep Boys? Really, how long do you think they’ll stick around?
I head down the Byzantine temporary stairs of the subway. It’s good to see the old North Philadelphia Station getting a facelift but I know it’s only a surface repair. If you have a look at the street and transit map, you’ll see in the jet black of the spider’s legs that this is Septa’s true rail hub. All seven regional rail lines converge here, plus the Broad Street Subway and Amtrak in a sprawling multi-station complex. On seeing this so clearly I begin to dream…And yet the Governor, our only true wizard, can’t find the money to keep the basic, already pared-down system in operation.
Forget the dreams.
Lubin! You gave us The Light at Dusk, A Night in Old Spain, and Bags of Gold. After all these years, on Wednesday night the 11th we’ll come to the International House to pay our respects, to glance once more at those old dreams. We don’t care that you failed to see the feature film coming. We don’t care that you turned on your radical beginnings to form the monopoly. We only wish to kiss your ring, wait for the bags of gold.
There’s a recorded voice on the subway now, tells the stops, the connecting routes. It isn’t Michaela Majoun but some woman with a genteel British accent. We’re to believe, I suppose, that Buckingham Palace is just overhead? The London Bridge? The Thames?
Lubin! It isn’t enough.
(Mayoral candidates are you listening?)
We need an awful lot more.
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