How Philadelphia's Streetcar Money Built a City of Mansions and Tore Them All Down: North Broad

Drive up North Broad Street in Philadelphia today and you'll pass a fried chicken joint, a couple of parking lots, a college campus, and a few grand old houses boarded up behind chain-link fence. A hundred years ago, this was the most extravagant address in the city, a mile and a half of stone mansions built by the men who owned Philadelphia's streetcars. This is the story of how that streetcar fortune built the boulevard, and how the exact same fortune carried everyone out to the suburbs and tore the mansions down. It starts with Peter A.B. Widener, a butcher who turned a Civil War meat contract into a monopoly on how an entire city moved. With his partner William Lukens Elkins, Widener built a streetcar empire, and then a whole street of palaces to go with it, starting with his own five-story mansion at Broad and Girard. We walk North Broad at its peak, the Divine Lorraine, Oscar Hammerstein's Metropolitan Opera House, and the brownstones that became the legendary Blue Horizon boxing hall. Then we watch the whole thing come apart: the move out to Elkins Park and Lynnewood Hall, North Broad turning into Automobile Row, the wrecking balls, and where all that streetcar money finally ended up, from the Titanic to a library at Harvard. What's strange isn't that North Broad fell. It's that the fortune which built it is the reason almost nothing on it survived. They can restore an opera house. They can't rebuild a boulevard of one-of-a-kind mansions that were torn down decades ago.