Steven Ujifusa

By Steven Ujifusa

Dr. Willliam Pepper, Jr. "The most persuasive man in Philadelphia."

William Francis Gibbs spent the later part of his childhood in a big yellow mansion on the corner of 18th and Walnut Streets.  In 1900, Rittenhouse Square was Philadelphia’s “silk stocking district,” an address that announced one had truly “arrived” in Gilded Age, industrial Philadelphia.  This is a snapshot of the vanished world of this exclusive enclave, inhabited by men such as the famed provost of the University of Pennsylvania: Dr. William Pepper, Jr.  This seemingly secure, “money-insulated” world proved all too fleeting.

After his retirement as Provost of the University of Pennsylvania in 1892, the patrician Dr. William Pepper  made the construction of of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology his pet project.  Founded in 1887, the museum housed a growing collection of art and artifacts gathered on university-sponsored expeditions to Polynesia, Latin and South America, Africa, and the Far East.   The collections needed more space.  Architect Wilson Eyre Jr. had drawn up a magnificent set of plans for a massive, brick Byzantine-style building to be erected at 32^nd and South Streets, on the eastern edge of the university’s West Philadelphia campus.

From his townhouse at 1811 Spruce Street, in the heart of Philadelphia’s fashionable Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, he organized the fundraising campaign for the proposed Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology with missionary fervor. His obsessive searched for beautiful objects for the museum’s grand halls once took him to Mexico, where Pepper dined with a Mexican millionaire whose most prized possession was a Moorish vase. An American woman visiting the afternoon of Pepper’s visit glanced at the vase and remarked, “Now if Dr. Pepper sees that vase, he will want to have it, so look out.” “No one that lives can have that,” the vase’s owner snorted in reply. “It is dearer to me than any other possession.” A few days later, the American lady made another call on her host. “How was that vase?” she asked. The millionaire nearly burst into tears. “Oh, he has taken it for the University Museum; I must have been hypnotized, but alas, it is so.”

In his quest to finance the construction of an edifice worthy of such treasures, Pepper spent much of 1896 sitting at his desk scrawling lists of rich men from Philadelphia and New York. Pepper not only went after men with distinguished Philadelphia names such as Pepper (his relatives), Biddle, Gratz, and Newbold, but also a new crop of industrialists who had never stepped foot in a university but had made their millions by sheer will and drive. Many became rich using skullduggery and skirting the law. They had names like Vanderbilt, Widener, and Carnegie. In his notes, he often added descriptions of his potential targets, underlining some for emphasis: “Write Andrew Carnegie re: Museum” “Horace Magee is rich and has no occupation.” “Would not Sawyer 4243 Walnut St. help both Museums.” “Jno. Gill is rich—2036 Spring Garden Street, Joseph Caven West Phil. is rich.” “Rich Jew Blum—Market Street Nat. Bank” He would pay a visit, usually to their place of residence, and make his pitch. Most of the time, he walked away with a check in hand.

Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood boasted one of the greatest concentrations of wealth in America. It was the undisputed epicenter of Philadelphia’s old money aristocracy, a serene residential enclave far from the noxious factory smoke and impoverished squalor that blighted so much of the city. The square and its adjacent streets were lined with grand, stately, yet restrained townhouses of brownstone, brick, and marble standing four to five stories high, with sweeping stoops leading up to polished walnut front doors. Their rooms resonated with the sounds of the clocks ticking on marble mantelpieces, the clink of crystal and silverware, and the shuffling feet of Irish maids and liveried footmen.

According to Philadelphia sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, Pepper and other residents of Rittenhouse Square prided themselves not just being wealthy, but as being part of a special, insular, and unchanging world:

The “Anglo-Saxon” ladies and gentleman who developed the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood during and after the Civil War (even the new rich that at that time were primarily of colonial stock) definitely felt themselves to be different, aloof, and apart, part of the rapidly developing heterogeneity of the rest of American society. While their ancestors in the days of the new republic came to the fore in public and military affairs, the Victorian gentlemen tended to withdraw from the world of public service into the counting house and factory. Their wives and children lived in a money-insulated world of the great houses, private schools, and fashionable churches surrounding the Square.

Every Sunday, accompanied by the tolling of the church bells, a parade of rippling horseflesh and glittering carriages would proceed down Walnut Street. Famed lawyer George Wharton Pepper, who grew up a few blocks from his uncle at Sixteenth and Locust streets, would later recall that the Sabbath day parade of wealth “made upon the onlooker an impression of urbanity, of social experience and of entire self-satisfaction. If during church-time they had confessed themselves miserable sinners, by the time they appeared on parade their restoration to divine favor was seemingly complete.”

During the hot summer months, the residents of Rittenhouse Square closed their townhouses and decamped to secluded estates on the Main Line, the Jersey Shore, or Maine to pursue cricket, golf, and equestrian sports, far away from the sweltering masses living in the city’s row houses and tenements, and a world away from the noise and smoke of the shipyards and factories crouched along the Delaware River.

The Wilstach-Drexel-Gibbs mansion at 18th and Walnut. Built 1847, demolished 1913.