An Archiveadupdate!

Hi Archiveadelphians,

You may have noticed that I did not publish a post last week! There’s a good reason for this: I am deep on deadline for my book about the Bellevue, the remarkable French Renaissance Hotel at 200 South Broad that has inspired my love of all Philadelphia architecture, gossip, city planning, civil rights struggles, and artistic movements…

I am hopefully making the book better (and I’m learning a lot about form, structure, and emotional coping methods for reorganizing chapters), but I must tell you that I am missing Archiveadelphia immensely. This is primarily because of the wonderful letters, nuggets of knowledge, and general encouragement that you have given me as I’ve worked on this Substack over the last eight months. Thank you for being such inspiring readers!

I need a few more weeks to finish up the book’s latest draft, but I already have an extensive backlog of post ideas queued up for autumn. Prepare yourself for deep dives into Lancaster, PA, the country houses of Wilson Eyre, a watch factory in Burlington, NJ, and several underappreciated Brutalist gems (I can seldom resist these). As always, if you have ideas for good Phuildings—particularly ones that other architectural historians or general Philadelphia Phlaneurs have not yet covered—please send them my way!

As anyone who knows me is woefully aware, I love a good list. So…I wanted to send over, in lieu of a post, some of the primary and secondary sources that have informed the edits to my Bellevue draft:

• The largely forgotten, long-suffering Phoet and novelist Algernon Sydney Logan’s Vistas from the Stream, a two-volume diary that covers Philly’s changes between 1881 and 1925. Logan is smart, self-effacing, and incredibly perceptive. He spends a lot of time debating the merits of various European philosophers and critics, but this is all actually kind of fun, too…you can find Logan’s works at Archive.org. Here’s Vol. 1 and here’s Vol. 2. And a special shoutout is due to historian Paul Kahan, whose recent Philadelphia: A Narrative History turned me onto Logan and also has greatly assisted my edits!

• Philadelphia Record publisher J. David Stern crafted an immensely entertaining memoir in 1962 entitled Memoirs of a Maverick Publisher. Stern was close friends with one-time Bellevue owner and Archiveadelphia mainstay Albert M. Greenfield and offers wonderful context about Philly’s Depression-era vibes! You can find his memoir in full at the University of Michigan’s invaluable HathiTrust Digital Library.

• Cultural historian Molly W. Berger’s 2011 Hotel Dreams: Technology, Luxury, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829-1929 has provided crucial background on the grand hotels of Philadelphia before the Bellevue’s 1904 emergence. Her chapter on the Continental, a mammoth hostelry at 9th and Chestnut that was the Bellevue of the 1860s, is just fantastic…

• Matthew J. Countryman’s 2006 Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia has helped me to understand the broader context around how Black Philadelphians engaged with the Bellevue and other elite institutions in the city during the mid-20th century. Countryman, an Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and of History at the University of Michigan (Michigan really representing here) is a remarkable researcher and prose stylist!

I’m going to cut off the list here, as I clearly am eager to just write a whole Archiveadelphia and know that I must remain strong in my resolve for this strategic hiatus!

Enjoy this image of a very cute, late-1980s, “Where’s Waldo”-style, x-ray Bellevue tin, showcasing then-owner Ron Rubin’s ambitious mixed-use renovation…a gamble that helped to transform Center City: