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| 222 N 17th Street (foreground right) - Rear of Cathedral (background left) Google Maps |
I can remember in the seventh grade going downtown
after school with some classmates to pick up some boxes of plastic icons of the Virgin
Mary down at the Archdiocesan offices behind the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and
Paul in Philadelphia and returning uptown to make delivery to the local convent
of these items before returning home.
I can remember those buildings,
townhouses behind the Cathedral that had many various departments crammed and
housed in Victorian building space.
I can remember when they tore those buildings
down and in a weekend or was it a week it seemed, they put the prefabricated
tinker toy like steel girders snapped into place of the “Archdiocesan Office
Building” out of some kit do doubt sent from overseas.
Then the prefab
sheathing of windows and faux stone filler went up. The resulting 13 story
office building would provide plenty of office space for decades to come in
this new Chancery.
No doubt with Cardinal Krol’s campaign for the
papacy and Cardinal Bevilacqua's grand child abuse cover up schemes with future
bishops Cistone and Cullen and Rigali's follow up with want a be bishop Msgr. Bill Lynn one must take one’s
breath, think of Cardinal Rigali’s using the address as a mere mail drop for
his real full time digs in Rome next to the Swiss Guard’s Barracks (wink, nod), one might
give pause to the thought how isolated and lonely it is at the top of the
Philadelphia Catholic Hierarchy in the 13th floor penthouse suite of
the Archbishop’s office.
In that corner office overlooking the copper dome
of Sts. Peter and Paul’s, the Parisian style grand public buildings of Logan
Square and the magnificent Greek style temple of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
beyond, one might wonder if one was at least on the slopes of Parnassus is not
on mighty Mt. Olympus itself.
Indeed even the five star Four Seasons Hotel
could only be built here on Logan Circle as the premiere gateway to the cultural
heart of the city.
Of course it was not always like this. There was
a time when the Cathedral was first planned for and built, Logan Square was
quite isolated and not a desirable or fashionable part of the W.A.S.P. culture
city further to the east. Logan Square was the ideal out of the way place to
build a Papist temple without upsetting the Protestant elites of Philadelphia.
That and Logan Square was the potters field, one
of several in the city and adjacent to the gallows once there. That like all
things official and or unofficial in the past, the potter’s field, a burial
place for the poor, the low lifes, prostitutes, criminals and executed
prisoners, the boundaries of a designated city square haphazardly overflowed
its boundaries onto the future cathedral site.
The nearby legitimate Quaker
burial grounds would also have had an overflow of graves for the poor who
brought their dead and those in the middle of the night that just dumped dead bodies in the general vicinity of the whole general area of death.
That the present chancery of 222 N. 17th
Street might have been part of a stockade off Logan Square to house the convicted about
to die on the gallows as a staging area to send them off to their fates and a
place to hold or store executed bodies after until a means of burying them
could be organized or arranged.
Sounds a bit odd but I am reminded of the scene
in the movie The Sixth Sense where the psychic child who can supposedly talk to and see the dead sees a place of execution that history does not record but the child
witnesses the dead dangling from the gallows that held even children, those whose
only crime might have been the capital crime of stealing bread to survive back then in the
past.
So it is rumored that before they built the
present day fashionable bits of upscale downtown Philadelphia, in the past, the
dark past, the underside function of a city dealing with death used to be practiced
and had a place here and around Logan Square (now Logan Circle).
It is little wonder that some say the building at
222 N. 17th Street, the Chancery is haunted with death and evil from the past
and passing all the way, reinforced, to the present day there.
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| 1895 Map (PhilaGeoHistory) |
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