Of Mysteries and Muntins: Historic Windows in the Elfreth's Alley Museum

Historic houses contain layered stories from the people who have lived there over decades and centuries. Historic house museums often also have additional layers of meaning and mystery created by the process of preservation and restoration. Recently Board Member Emily Taggart Schricker looked back over Elfreth’s Alley Association minutes and the logbook of the restoration of house #126 to learn more about the layers in our museum today.

Symposium: Rowhouse City: History and Adaptation in Philadelphia, October 7 and 8, 2022

Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center.  Temple University Libraries. Philadelphia, PA.

Rowhouse City: History and Adaptation in Philadelphia

Friday, October 7, 2022—Saturday, October 8, 2022

This October, join our Director Ted Maust, alongside leading scholars of vernacular architecture and Philadelphia history at a special two-day symposium about the history, present, and future of the Philadelphia Rowhouse!

Earlybird pricing is available until July 13—use code EARLYBIRD for 20% off your registration.

Share

On Display Now: "The Power of Experimentation at Elfreth's Alley," Photography by Dilmar Gamero

In one piece, artist Dilmar Gamero created pinhole photos from both inside and outside homes on Elfreth’s Alley.

Photographer Dilmar Gamero Gamero has been producing interesting work on Elfreth’s Alley for several years now—check out his experiments to incorporate historic photos into the Alley’s current appearance using rephotography and stereoscopy. Now he has conceived a series of installations in conversation with historic images and archival materials which record the Alley’s history, posing questions about who is included in these collections and who is not. Gamero uses techniques ranging from the very simple—pinhole photographs—to the complex—videos generated from archival material using artificial intelligence—to produce pieces which explore topics such as child labor, domestic labor and which interrogate patterns of power and privilege.

Gamero (front), discussing his piece “Feme Sole” (on easel).

The show comprises seven pieces which are on display in museum spaces and in the museum garden. The show will remain up through June 2022 (at least). Viewing the entire show requires paying regular museum admission ($3, we also have a free day coming up), but one of the pieces can be seen in the Museum gift shop for free.

Share

We're Looking for Volunteers!

Hey! Here at the Elfreth's Alley Museum, we’re looking for volunteers who are eager to chat with visitors from all over the world and learn about the history of Philadelphia's best-preserved street.

Volunteers will perform duties such as welcoming and orienting visitors to the museum, answering their questions, and engaging them at our interpretation station. Staff will provide orientation/training materials and work with volunteers to place them in positions where they are both comfortable and confident in carrying out the tasks asked of them.

We are especially looking for volunteers with fluency in languages other than English and with an interest in history.

The Museum's season begins in April this year and runs through October, but we are open to volunteers with temporary or periodic availability!

You can fill out THIS FORM or email director@elfrethsalley.org for more info.

Share

Save Our Sills!

Houses require maintenance, and our museum windows are in dire need of repair. A good coat of paint and fresh glazing will provide a first line of defense against the elements and protect our houses' interiors. The windows, like the rest of the building, are not just physically important to our museum, but are also critical in our mission to see the past and look towards our future on the Alley.

The Elfreth's Alley Association has set aside funds for projects like this, but this coat of paint will exceed our preservation budget line for 2021--we need your help!

Windows to be painted.png

There is a lot of work to do!

This project will involve painting:

  • 14 windows (including reglazing)

  • 2 doors

  • Metal flashing and wood siding

Help us meet our goal of $6,000 to fund this project by donating at the link below.

https://pages.donately.com/elfrethsalleyassociation/campaign/save-our-sills

Each increment of $500 raised through this campaign essentially pays for one of the doors, and each $350 paints another double-hung window. Follow along as we track our progress on this campaign and the painting itself right here on this blog post!

*UPDATES!*

October 15th: In our first day, you have already contributed $846! Thank you! Already, we have enough funds for one door and one double-hung window—let’s keep it going, spread the word!

October 20th: After a few more donors chipped in, including one for $1,000 (!) our fundraising for this project stands at $1,948! So let’s say we’re at both doors, two double-hung windows, and one of the smaller windows! Still just over two-thirds of the way to go!

January 3, 2022: Matt Valentine of MVPaint has nearly wrapped up the work and our windows are looking so much better! (see photo of work in progress below)

We are still hoping to raise the full cost of this project; currently we’ve raised a little over 50% of the $6,000 goal. Please consider donating!

Elfreth's Alley Shirts Available! *Update*

elfrethsalley.orgshirts.png

Whether you are headed out on the town or working from home, you can wear your support for the Elfreth’s Alley Museum! This design features measured drawings of some of the homes on the Alley (including the museum houses) created in 1931, just a couple of years before the Elfreth’s Alley Association was founded (1933).

Our museum receives a portion of every purchase through Bonfire and the shirts get shipped right to your door. This “batch” of orders is open through October 17 and orders should arrive between October 26th and November 4th. (We now have these set to be on sale constantly) The design is available on a variety of different shirts to suit your fit and style, and we also have shirts with the logo of our podcast, The Alley Cast! The more shirts we sell, the better our share of profits, so tell a friend, or, better yet, surprise a friend with a shirt!

elfrethsalley.org/shirts

Share

The Street Beneath Our Feet

I have sometimes heard tour guides repeat the story that the Belgian block paving some Philadelphia streets was brought across the Atlantic as ballast in ships--ballast is basically heavy stuff loaded onto a ship to weigh it down as though it was holding cargo. While it is possible that some ships coming to the British colonies in North America did require ballast, and even that some of that ballast, in the form of stones, was put to use in building and/or paving, this story is largely a myth….I realized that while I am confident in the debunking of the ballast-to-paving myth, I know next to nothing about early street surfaces in Philadelphia. So I set out to find out more! Here are some of my preliminary discoveries, and I hope to find out more when I have the time to read up further on this topic.

Season 2 of 'The Alley Cast' is Underway!

ElfrethsPodcastArt-small.jpg

We’re three weeks into the new season of The Alley Cast and it’s exciting!

The first episode of this season introduces the theme of this new batch of episodes—work!—and also tells the story of Andrew Adgate (aka Absalom Aimwell), a choral teacher and small-scale manufacturer who published an ode to workers in 1789 just about a block away from Elfreth’s Alley!

The next two episodes tackle the story of house construction in the city over three centuries, from the early impact of the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia to 19th and 20th century cycles of speculation, and the enduring legacy of systemic racism.

Yet to come in this season: episodes about working children, boarding house operation, cabinetmaking, the food service industry, and common laborers. Find the podcast here on our website or subscribe to it on your favorite podcatcher (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.) to get each episode when it is released!

Revisiting Season 1 of the Alley Cast

In anticipation of Season 2 of The Alley Cast, which premieres June 23rd, we will be revisiting Season 1 in weekly installments over on our Facebook page. Each week we will listen to one or two episodes and provide a little more context through research that we began as we worked on the show and which has continued since then. We hope you’ll follow along!

Elfreth's Alley in 'The Public Historian' and on 'Tales from Old Houses'

The Alley Cast is now a scholarly-reviewed podcast! In the most recent edition of The Public Historian, available (but paywalled) online now and headed to National Council on Public History (NCPH) members soon is a lovely review of our podcast by Lydia Mattice Brandt.

In an incredible coincidence, I reached out to Stacy Grinsfelder of True Tales from Old Houses a few weeks ago to share my admiration for her show, and our conversation led to an episode, out today, featuring our museum as well as two of our neighbors on Elfreth’s Alley, Sue and Rob Kettell.

'Object Lesson': Woodworking in Old City

On April 2, 2021, I was lucky enough to be invited by the Center for Art in Wood to present as part of their ‘Object Lesson’ series. Each speaker in this series selects a piece from the Center’s collection and brings their perspective to it. I chose to use Skip Johnson’s piece “The Itinerant Turner’s Toolbox” as a framework to examine the history of woodworking (especially furniture making) in the neighborhood surrounding Elfreth’s Alley. This presentation is sort of the starting point of the research which will become an episode in the second season of The Alley Cast, so stay tuned for that in a few months time.

Remembering Ed Mauger

In the recent history of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum, no single person has loomed larger than Ed Mauger, who passed away a year ago, after a battle with cancer. Mauger served as the museum director in a volunteer capacity for several years and covered utility bills himself, keeping the doors of this institution open when its future was in doubt. He was also active with the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides and recruited many volunteer docents who still staff Philadelphia’s historic sites today. Near the end of his life, Mauger campaigned to rename stretches of Market Street and 6th Street to commemorate the historic events which took place along those avenues.

This past weekend, friends and family gathered at Laurel Hill Cemetery, Little Pete’s Diner, and finally, at the Elfreth’s Alley Museum to remember Mauger in story and song. See the video below of the memorial in the Elfreth’s Alley Museum garden.

5 Local Black History Sites and Museums

During Black History Month we have been sharing, on social media, links and information on several local museums and historic sites. This is not at all an exhaustive list of the institutions in the Philadelphia area doing work to preserve and interpret Black history, but I wanted to capture the information from our posts in one place.

The Mortons, the Wilsons, the McCraes: Black Factory Workers ca. 1930

House #135 is the largest on Elfreth’s Alley, taking up 26 feet of the street frontage. Its size is partly due to the fact that it was built over top of a cartpath, incorporating it into a tunnel.

It is the home’s history in the 20th century that I want to explore a little bit today. In 1930, the home was rented to three Black families, then the only Black residents on the street: Robert and Gladys Morton and their daughter Goldie, Charles and Elinore Wilson, and Nettie McCrae and her infant son Robert. We talk a lot about these folks in episodes 5, 6, and 7 of The Alley Cast, but I wanted to explore what we know about these folks a little more here in this series of blog posts about African American residents of Elfreth’s Alley over the years.

Cuff Douglas, Free Black Tailor

In 1787, a man named Cuff (sometimes “Cophy” or “Cuffee”) Douglas sat down with a Quaker named Thomas Stapler to tell his story. Douglas was a free tailor, seventy years old, and he recounted how, after four decades of enslavement, he had worked to purchase his own freedom and that of his wife and three children, including his older son, also called Cuff. Stapler also noted that for the previous seven years, Douglas’ father-in-law, who was blind, had been living under his roof. Stapler would send the remarkable, though brief, biography to the London Abolition Society along with other similar accounts as proof that formerly-enslaved Black Americans were becoming pillars of society. That Douglas was chosen for a testimonial suggests that he was, in fact, one of the most prominent free Black Philadelphians of his time.

Wrapping up Deck the Alley

Thank you so much for tuning in! As a final gift of our Deck the Alley 2020 campaign, we have a lovely video from our friends of the Belle Canto ensemble from Council Rock High School South. These singers have filled the back gardens and narrow passageways of the Alley with carols and return with four songs here. I especially enjoyed the images from last year’s Deck the Alley included during the video’s final number.

Holiday Episode of The Alley Cast

As a child, what I looked forward to most was decorating gingerbread houses. My mother baked and assembled ten to twelve gingerbread houses for my family and friends to deck with candies, adding PEZ brick chimneys, vanilla wafer cars with Reese’s peanut butter cup wheels, or other imaginative features.

As an adult, I continued this tradition and took on the responsibility of baking the gingerbread and assembling the houses. Traditions such as these are such an integral part of the season. As part of continuation of the tradition of Deck the Alley, our gift is a special edition of our Alley Cast podcast. In this episode we look at the traditions of the holiday season on Elfreth’s and their evolution.