Vol. 151: Reinventing Philadelphia

The Kimmel Center’s struggle (and mine)

Shortly after he was elected mayor of Philadelphia in 1991, Ed Rendell was searching for strategies to revive his city’s moribund economy when he noticed a forgotten 1979 study by the Central Philadelphia Development Corporation. The report argued that, with a little creative window dressing, the city’s legendary Academy of Music, the storied Shubert Theatre, and a proposed spectacular new concert hall for the Philadelphia Orchestra could be promoted in tandem as the nucleus of a “cultural corridor” along South Broad Street, the city’s decaying spine.

This world-class critical mass, the study suggested, would provide a magnet for tourists and suburbanites, whose presence, in turn, would rejuvenate Broad Street’s rapidly emptying office buildings with more theaters, as well as new hotels, restaurants, and cafés. And unlike intimidating fortresses such as New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, this “Avenue of the Arts” would be human-scaled and accessible.

As a former New Yorker, Rendell was already convinced that cities could produce what he called “an excitement in the air that no suburban mall, no rural area, no idyllic resort can ever compete with.” But Rendell at this point was unaware that the Philadelphia Orchestra was already struggling to build itself a new concert hall— had been struggling off and on, in fact, almost since the Orchestra was born in 1900. It had made its home since then in Philadelphia’s celebrated Academy of Music, an 1857 opera house which, for all its legendary elegance and warmth, was never intended for orchestral music. Its acoustics were “too dry” for an Orchestra, as its music director, Riccardo Muti, had pointed out upon his arrival in 1980. By 1986, the Orchestra board had voted on its own to construct a new concert hall on South Broad Street and was desperately trying to raise the necessary $60 million from its own loyal if aging patrons.

‘Tar and feathers’

Rendell himself was never an arts connoisseur (at concerts, his wife Midge joked, he referred to intermission as “halftime”). Nor did Rendell anticipate the fury with which many Philadelphians reacted to his plan, and the Orchestra’s. Those plans called for the Philadelphia Orchestra to abandon the beloved Academy of Music. And there was no arguing with those who objected.

Yes, those devotees argued, the Academy originally may not have been intended for an orchestra. But no other American city offered anything quite like “this marvelous place to sing,” as Luciano Pavarotti once described the Academy. In an age of cold glass and steel, the Academy of Music offered the warmth of all-wooden interior walls that seemingly refused to tolerate an echo or a dead spot. Unlike today’s huge, box-like concert halls, where artists play to what seems an impersonal void, the Academy had three balconies shaped in friendly, intimate horseshoes— not the deep, distant horseshoes of La Scala in Milan, but horseshoes that kept the audience close to the stage, enabling performers to feel they were being embraced by 2,900 spectators simultaneously.

No modern developer could afford to replicate the ornamental gold that adorned the Academy’s proscenium boxes, the reclining sculptured figures of the muses, and the giant, kneeling statues of Atlantis seemingly holding up the ceiling. Nor were American concertgoers ever likely to see anything to equal Carl Heinrich Schultze’s romantic frescoes on the Academy ceiling, depicting poetry, music, dance, comedy, and tragedy. But even if all of this grandeur could be had for a price and plunked down in, say, Houston or Chicago, no amount of money could purchase the Academy’s most valuable asset: the audience’s awareness of all that had taken place within that building over the previous 140 years.

To older Philadelphians, any effort to move the Orchestra into a new concert hall would mean the death of the Academy of Music. “If any serious effort is made to move the Orchestra out of that hall,” declared C. Wanton Baylis, a former Academy president, in 1987, “the good people of Philadelphia would rise in their wrath and tar and feather whoever tried to do it.”

Tracking down the survivors

Thus, the stage was set for a classic battle between old money and new money for the soul of a city. The crowning achievement of this new city— I conjecture— was the opening in 2001 of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. Here the Philadelphia Orchestra found a new, acoustically suitable home for the first time in its long history. Here seven other resident theater and musical groups also found homes. Meanwhile, one block to the north, the ancient Academy of Music, defying expectations, continues to thrive as a venue for opera, ballet, and (most important financially) traveling Broadway shows.

But what started as a $60 million concert hall project of the Philadelphia Orchestra somehow mushroomed into a $265 million civic performing arts center with three performance venues, vast public spaces, and restaurants, all funded by a public/private partnership that included donors as well as the city and state governments. In the process, the Orchestra withdrew as the lead developer, and its chosen architect was scrapped in favor of a sexier architect favored by its lead donors.

Precisely how this miracle came to pass has preoccupied me since early this year. Because I’ve written about Philadelphia culture for half a century, a book about the struggle to build the Kimmel Center seemed a logical capstone to my career. I had thought such a project might take a year, but now it’s dawning on me that tracking down dozens of the surviving participants (so far, I’ve interviewed 14) and plowing through mounds of unpublished documents may take at least as long as the construction of the Kimmel Center itself.

In search of Muti

One small example: I much prefer to conduct interviews live rather than via Zoom or telephone. Riccardo Muti is obviously an important player in this saga. These days the maestro spends most of his time in Ravenna, Italy. But early in November, he did a two-week guest-conducting gig with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I resolved to fly out from Philadelphia to see him.

After much back-and-forth negotiating with his intermediaries, Muti (whom I already knew slightly from his years in Philadelphia) agreed to talk to me on Saturday morning, November 8, at his hotel. I planned to fly to Chicago the day before. But as fate would have it, that was the weekend that the air traffic controllers’ crisis caused the government to cancel or delay thousands of flights.

In my prime, I would’ve hung around the airport for hours if necessary. This time I sent my regrets to Muti with the hope that we can do the interview another time. But he’s 84 and I’m 83, so the window of our opportunity is shrinking.

‘Workshop of the world’

Beyond my interviews and research, I find myself also wrestling with a larger question: So what? The answer, I have concluded in this case, is: How does a city reinvent itself?

Philadelphia has changed its skin itself at least six times in its long history. Having been created by William Penn in the 17^th Century as a utopian community, Philadelphia was the world’s first planned city, but also the world’s only city founded and profoundly influenced by Quakers. In the 18^th Century Philadelphia evolved first into a maritime commercial center and then into the birthplace of American democracy, as well as the nation’s capital. In the early 19^th Century, Philadelphia gained prominence in other guises: as the cultural “Athens of America” and as the nation’s financial center.

But after the Civil War, Philadelphia’s illustrious heritage was largely discarded in favor of the more alluring possibilities of a modern industrial city. By 1900, thanks to Philadelphia unique proximity to the industrial holy trinity of coal, iron, and railroads, William Penn’s “green country towne” had once again reinvented itself, this time as “the workshop of the world,” a manufacturing behemoth whose diverse capabilities had scarcely been matched anywhere before or since.

Conductor as diva

But at that time “Philadelphia,” for most people, meant a dour provincial factory burg known mainly for its Liberty Bell and its repressive Sunday blue laws. As a city founded in 1681 by a religious sect that disapproved of music altogether, this Quaker community had enjoyed no public music whatsoever for its first 75 years or so. And long after symphony orchestras began performing in London (1813), New York (1842), San Francisco (1854), Boston (1881) and even upstart Chicago (1891), Cincinnati (1895) and Pittsburgh (also 1895), Philadelphia lacked its own permanent full-fledged orchestra.

What’s more, the upper-class Philadelphians who finally created the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1900 were motivated not by love for Beethoven and Brahms but by civic boosterism. When the banker Alexander Van Rensselaer became the Orchestra’s first president, he explained through his laughter that he had never heard a note of straight orchestral music in his life. Opera, of course, but… When the Orchestra’s flamboyantly belligerent conductor Leopold Stokowski later scolded society matrons from the podium for stalking out in protest of his modern repertoire, one dowager shouted back, “Young man, you’re hired to lead the band. Play on!”

Needless to add, that band eventually exceeded its founders’ wildest dreams. The Philadelphia Orchestra became the first American orchestra to perform a national commercial radio broadcast (1929), to record on long-playing discs (1931), to tour the U.S. (1936), to perform in movies (The Big Band in 1937) and on television (1948), to employ musicians year-round (1963), and to tour the People’s Republic of China (1973). Alongside Arturo Toscanini in New York and Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, Stokowski, between 1912 and 1936, established the orchestra conductor as a popular romantic figure equivalent to the operatic diva. In 1900, serious music for most Americans meant opera; a century later, thanks in good part to the Philadelphia Orchestra, for most Americans it meant the local symphony orchestra and its soloists.

By the mid-1920s, the New York Herald Tribune’s music critic, Lawrence Gilman, was rhapsodizing about Philadelphia’s “chief contribution to civilization, her incomparable Orchestra,” which suggests that the Orchestra had erased not only Philadelphia’s old dowdy image, but even some people’s awareness of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Robert Caro’s scary example

It also suggests that Philadelphians and even some music critics had closed their ears to the problem of the Academy of Music’s acoustics, thanks to the long leadership of Eugene Ormandy, who worked around the Academy’s acoustical shortcomings by creating the rich “Philadelphia sound,” especially heavy on violins, during his long tenure from 1936 to 1980.

It was left to his successor, Ricardo Muti, to remind Philadelphians that the Academy of Music was never intended to house an orchestra.

Meanwhile, in the course of America’s post-World War II middle-class exodus to the suburbs, Philadelphia emerged as the one U.S. city outside New York to maintain a large, affluent, educated downtown residential community (more than 70,000 strong today in its two-square-mile core). Even traditionally self-deprecating Philadelphians now perceive their city as a worldly center of brainwork, culture, and gourmet restaurants.

Over Thanksgiving, I had the dubious pleasure of watching Turn Every Page, a documentary about the long relationship between the biographer Robert Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb. I say “dubious pleasure” because Caro’s exhaustive and meticulous biography of Lyndon Johnson, originally conceived as a single volume, grew into three volumes, and then five volumes, eventually consuming more than 40 years. It’s enough to make me wonder: At 83, have I bitten off more than I can chew? Stay tuned.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com