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Cause You’re The Main Line And I’m Griscom Street

kitty foyle poster

We’re on a roll finding movies filmed in Frankford.  Not only was “Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of Woman” filmed in Frankford, Ginger Rogers repeatedly reminds her man friend “You’re the main line and I’m Griscom Street.”  From IMDB:

Ginger Rogers, a hard-working white-collar girl from a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania low, middle-class family, meets and falls in love with young socialite Wyn Strafford but his family is against her.

Not only is she from Philly, SHE’S FROM GRISCOM STREET!  Unlike Pride of the Marines, we don’t really get any great shots of Frankford save for her going in to her father’s house in one shot below:

Kitty Foyle

I went through Google’s Street View of Griscom Street and can’t find the exact house, but up and down it there are quite a few houses that look similar, especially down around Church Street.  So I dunno, I’m thinking it’s the real Griscom Street but you never know with those Hollywood types.

Update: Via our facebook feed, we got a comment from Heather that said:

It was between Sellers and Unity… my Gram lived at 4442 Griscom. They probably only used the last 2 numbers for the houses back then. My Mom said it was diagonal from her house next to St Marks church lot, behind Bill’s meat market. It would have be one of the houses by where Dan Stoneback lived. Across from Cotter Co where the train came through…

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I’m At Least The Fifth Generation Of My Family To Live Here

family treeThis is what I knew about my family’s history in Frankford.  My grandmother at one time lived on Plum Street and went to Saint Joachims, then to Frankford High School.  My grandfather lived somewhere in East Frankford before he got married and my father grew up in Bridesburg. That’s it.  So having been driving through East Frankford a lot to go see what’s going on in the factories, it got me thinking where my grandfather might have lived.  If the house still stood it might be a cool pic, and something to share.  So I emailed my father and said “Give me the addresses for all our relatives in Frankford”.  Took him forever to get back to me, and when he finally did I realized why.  My ancestors have lived in like 20 houses here!  And it runs back 5 generations.  Now in a perfect world I would take all the stuff I come across and sort it out and do a lot of digging and then turn it all into a perfectly edited narrative.  But I have a day job and new wife so right now I’m just throwing up on the blog what he sent me back and we’ll call it a journey of discovery as time goes by and hopefully we find out more.  Now when he says “my father”, he means his father and my grandfather.  So when he says “my great grandfather” that makes the guy my great great grandfather.  That’s five generations right?

From the Philadelphia City Directories.  Was supposed to list the head of the household so women were not counted unless they were single or widowed.
Addresses before 1900 may have different numbers or even names.  After the great consolidation of 1854 it took another 50+ years to eliminate all the duplicate street names.

Alexander Smiley – my father’s uncle
1223 Oxford in 1896
1922 Orthodox in 1896 and 1897
4831 Frankford in 1898 and 1899
1922 Orthodox in 1900
1924 Orthodox in 1901
1922 Orthodox in 1903
2012, 2003, 1920 Orthodox 1903 through 1911
2027 Pratt 1912
1815 Margaret 1913

John W. Smiley – not sure.  Could be one of the missing siblings.
1924 Orthodox in 1901
1922 Orthodox in 1902
4446 Frankford in 1912
1677 Fillmore in 1913

Robert W. Smiley – my great grandfather
122 or 1640 Tacony in 1889 through 1892
2039 Orthodox in 1893, 1894
1922 Orthodox in 1896 through 1902
1810 harrison in 1903 through 1921

William D. Smiley – my grandfather
2016 Bridge 1910, 1911
1815 Margaret 1913
2028 Bridge 1914, 1915
5021 Melrose(demolished for I95) 1917, 1918, 1919
5211 Ditman 1929

This isn’t the end of this trail, it’s the beginning.  Hopefully we’ll dig a little more, gotta some house pics.  I’d like to find out what they did for a living.  So we’ll see.

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Greenwood Cemetery

greewoodfrontrushhouseTom Waring of the Northeast Times reports this week on the pending move of approximately 2000 burials in Greenwood Cemetery to an unused section to make way for expansion of the Cancer Treatment Centers of America hospital on Wyoming Avenue.

Now that the City Planning Commission, City Council and Orphans Court have given their approval, a company affiliated with Cancer Treatment Centers of America will soon begin the delicate process of moving more than 2,000 graves in a decaying section of the Knights of Pythias Greenwood Cemetery to a more fitting location.

Last week, a multi-denominational prayer service took place at the cemetery, where the ground was blessed in anticipation of the upcoming project.

On hand for the ceremony were three CTCA chaplains – the Revs. Luis Centeno, Robin Childs and Wendell Scanterbury – along with Imam Fathy and the Rev. John Large, of Mater Dolorosa.

Preparation work is underway, and the costly task of moving the graves will begin in a few weeks. The process will last six to nine months.

Included in this deal will be an effort to stabilize and preserve the Benjamin Rush house.  There does not appear to be any funding for more than that but it is better than the ongoing deterioration that we see today.

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We Took A Trip To Tacony For Hidden City’s Exhibit At The Disston Saw Works

Although Tacony doesn’t share any borders with Frankford, we’re covering Hidden City’s Exhibit over at the Disston Saw Works anyway.  It was definitely worth the trip.  Now I’m pissed I waited so long to check out one of the installations until the last weekend, cause I’d have liked to check out the others.  But it was really something getting into a working factory and seeing what industry really means.  While I was going to Drexel, I used to live in Tacony at Edmund and Longshore so I’ve known about the similarities between Tacony and Frankford for quite a while.  Both were titans of Philadelphia commerce and literally workshops of the world.  And while I’ve had the phenomenal opportunity to get into Frankford’s Globe Dye Works to document it’s resurection, Disston’s Saw Works is still churning out product as Disston Precision.

The Disston facility was big as balls, and there were two different buildings open for viewing, one was the machine shop, apparently where most of precision stuff is made, and other was the art installation.  John Phillips and Carolyn Healy really did a nice job.

Here’s Disston Precision:

disston saw mill art installation 6 exported

disston saw works 1 exported

disston saw works 2 exported

disston saw works 3 exported

disston saw works 4 exported

disston saw works 5 exported

And here’s the exhibit:

disston saw mill art installation 1 exported

disston saw mill art installation 2 exported

disston saw mill art installation 3 exported

disston saw mill art installation 4 exported

and of course, rafters.

disston saw mill art installation 5 exported

[link] http://www.disstonprecision.com/

[link] http://www.hiddencityphila.org/events/Disston_Saw_Works

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Preserving the Legacy of Frankford

historical societyYesterday, Plan Philly posted a great piece on Frankford and the issue of the preservation of  our historical heritage.  This includes not only the records, documents and artifacts but also buildings and structures.  The article went on to talk about how the Historical Society of Frankford is meeting this challenge during these tough economic times.

The article was very complimentary in terms of what is being done by the Historical Society and talked about our rich historical past.  Follow the link and give it a look.

PlanPhilly.com is a project of PennPraxis, the clinical arm of the School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania. Praxis, in partnership with the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Center for School Study Councils designed and produced the award-winning 2003 Penn’s Landing Forums and the 2005 Franklin Conference on School Design. In 2005 and 2006, Praxis partnered with the Philadelphia Daily News on Slots and the City, a series that investigated the potential physical implications of casinos on the City of Philadelphia.