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PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Grand Assembly Centre
Here we have a Dead-Ass Proposal that would have could have either changed the city for generations or completely flopped and be a ruin today.
PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Grand Assembly Centre
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
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| Holy dogshit on a flagpole. Image from the Philadelphia Architects and Building Project. |
East Fairmount Park above Girard Avenue aka Snyder's Woods aka The Cliffs -- Here we have a Dead-Ass Proposal that would have could have either changed the city for generations or completely flopped and be a ruin today. This project was so huge that it was considered excessively ambitious by the same Philadelphia that had just spent 30 years building their 88-million brick, 548-foot-tall City Hall. Now that's ambitious.
In 1909, Philadelphia, like many other cities at the time, was in the thick of planning massive overhauls of huge sections of the city. The City Beautiful movement, a philosophy toward creating natural beauty and monumental civic architecture in American cities, was in full effect. Plans for what would become the Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art were moving full steam ahead.
Mayor John Reyburn, impressed with San Francisco's plans for a Civic Center, pushed the city on building a Convention Hall. Despite the fact that the city's business leaders were already committed to building a $1.92 million Convention Hall that would straddle the Schuylkill River between the Market and Chestnut Street Bridges, Reyburn wanted a much larger civic meeting and achievement space that would be an extension of the northwestern momentum of the upcoming Parkway.
The 56-acre area of Fairmount Park known as both "The Cliffs" and "Snyder's Woods", east of the Schuylkill above Girard Avenue, would be the location. Reyburn envisioned a space so grand that the entire citizenry of Philadelphia would be drawn there at once. The city got approval by the Fairmount Park Commission to use the land in November of 1910. On March 31, 1911, $50,000 was appropriated for plans and specifications. John Torrey Windrim, son of the architect of the Comprehensive Plans Committee, was commissioned to design it. Windrim went completely balls-to-the-walls with the idea.
Windrim's plan came to be known as the Grand Assembly Centre. Not only would there be a monumental 624-foot-by-450-foot, 18,500-seat Convention Hall, the largest in the world, there would also be a stadium, an aviation/athletic field, a music coliseum, a water sports arena on the river, an arboretum, a 700-car parking lot (considered quite the amenity at the time), and a train station that served both the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads.
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| Whooooooooooooa. Image from the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project. |
Once the drawings were put on display in City Hall in the Spring of 1911, they created massive excitement in some and massive disappointment in others. Business leaders were extremely pissed that their plan for a downtown Convention Hall was being snubbed in favor of the Cliffs site. They got engineers to deem the plans structurally deficient and sent postcards to citizens calling the site "Snide Woods".
Reyburn, who was in his last year in office, made the Grand Assembly Centre his primary agenda. He did everything he could to get it constructed right away, with hopes that enough of it would be completed in time to host the 23rd Annual Saengerfest of the Nord Oestliche Sangerbund of America (basically a German Chorus Convention) in June of 1912.
City Council approved the plans in the Fall of 1911 and voters approved the city taking out a $1.5 million loan to begin construction. The final budget was projected to be $4.43 million and a completion date for the entire complex was set for January 1915. The Charles McCaul Company was given the construction contract in October of 1911. In order for the site to be ready for the Saengerfest, the $1.5 million loan was appropriated toward clear-cutting the forest, laying foundations, and construction of a temporary structure that would host the convention.
Back then, ordinary citizens of Philadelphia had the right to sue the city if they saw government funds being incorrectly distributed. It was called a Taxpayer's Suit. Could you imagine if we had this today? Five citizens sued the city, claiming that the loan was for a permanent structure, not some temporary piece of shit... and WON! The Common Pleas Court smashed the gigantic project, which was days away from groundbreaking.
Nonetheless, the project was not yet completely dead. Reyburn left office at the end of 1911 and Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg replaced him. Blankenburg was into Reyburn's plans for the city but restaffed pretty much every city office there was, delaying the shit out of everything that was going on. Saengerfest was still on its way, so Blankenburg pushed through a plan for a temporary Convention Hall at Broad and Allegheny. It was hastily constructed, just a wood frame covered in a shitload of plaster.
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| The short-lived Broad/Allegheny Convention Hall in 1914. Pic from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Public Records. |
The temporary Convention Hall performed way better than anyone prophesied, turning a profit almost immediately. The success of the temporary location revived the idea of a permanent Convention Hall. This time, three different business groups were vying for three different locations. One was the site straddling the Schuylkill (commonly known as "the Bridge"), one was on the Parkway at Green Street (also designed by Windrim), and one was the plan for the Grand Assembly Centre (commonly known as "the Cliffs"). Blankenburg was trying to stay cool with all three business interests so he refused to divulge which one he preferred.
On April 26, 1915, a gigantic conference was held in City Hall to determine which plan would be the winner. Each group vehemently presented their cases and wore pins proclaiming which one they preferred. The proponents of the Parkway site and the Bridge site made the majority of their arguments about the impracticality (from a business perspective) of the Cliffs site. No site ended up being chosen at the meeting.
On May 7, 1915, the Select Council chosen to determine the Convention Hall site officially threw the Grand Assembly Centre into Dead-Ass Proposal status. Their primary reason, despite the many they were given by its opponents at the conference, was that they didn't want the slimy-ass Fairmount Park Commission to have anything to do with the Convention Hall project.
After 16 years, TWENTY-TWO other sites considered, four more mayors, and more Taxpayer's Suits, Convention Hall was finally completed in September of 1931. The project was in development hell for a total of 22 years. The Hall would stay in use until 1995 and was demolished in 2005 in favor of some HUP and CHoP expansions that are still under construction.
It's hard to say that the Grand Assembly Centre would have been successful if built. Some of the concerns of its opponents, though self-serving, were somewhat valid. Though accessible by water, road, rail, and air (dirigibles), all the fine hotels and restaurants of the period were 2.5 miles away. It's very possible that the entire place would become a ghost town, just like the Centennial Exhibition grounds were in the very time period this thing was being proposed.
You also have to think about how the Grand Assembly Centre would have made it through the mid-20th Century. Renovations/repairs would have been required on a constant basis and Hurricane Hazel would have smashed the shit out of it in 1954. Intended to serve over 100,000 people at once, those 700 parking spaces wouldn't have been adequate. If this thing survived the decades to this time period, it would probably look exactly like the South Philadelphia Sports Complex. One of those is enough.
Today's openly criminal city government, leaps and bounds more corrupt than the Gilded Age political machine (which was pretty damn corrupt), doesn't have the stones to propose a civic project of this magnitude without state or federal involvement. Something like this will never be seriously proposed or considered for Philadelphia again. Bollocks.
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| It IS pretty damn cool-looking. Image from the 1911 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Fairmount Park Art Association |
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