601 Walnut Street, Philadelphia PA 19106
(block bounded by Walnut, Sansom, 6th and 7th Streets)
© Helene Schenck & Michael
Parrington, Workshop of the World (Oliver Evans Press,
1990).
Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar
Curtis chose to come to Philadelphia at the end of the
19th century because "he liked it better than New York,
because he admired Childs so much 1
and because
printing costs were so much cheaper". 2
Curtis started
the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1883, and under editor
Edward Bok it became "probably the most continuously
successful woman's magazine the world has ever
known". 3
Curtis bought the
Saturday Evening Post in 1897 for a thousand dollars and
eventually installed George Horace Lorimer as editor. By
1908, each magazine had achieved a million subscribers,
an unheard of circulation at the time.
To house these two highly successful periodicals, the
Curtis Building rose on the west side of Independence
Square, overshadowing Independence Hall, but echoing it
in the choice of materials: red brick and white marble.
Edgar V. Seeler was the architect, Frank C. Robert &
Co. the engineers. The cornerstone was laid in 1911.
The building occupies the entire city block between 6th
and 7th and Walnut and Sansom Streets, and was built in
successive stages between 1911 and 1921. It is divided
into four distinct structures: the publication building,
facing 6th Street; behind it what was called the
convenience belt; then the manufacturing building in two
sections facing on both Walnut and Sansom Streets; and
the power building facing on Sansom Street. The interior
of the block is reserved for an center court to provide
light and air. All parts of the building except the
power house and convenience belt (which had an extra
story) rises ten stories.
The publication building is entered through bronze gates
set back behind fourteen monolithic columns of Vermont
marble. It housed the bookkeeping, circulation,
administrative, and advertising departments, with the
editorial offices of the Journal and the Post on the
sixth and seventh floors. The upper floors were taken up
with the women's lunchroom, library, hospital, and so on.
The convenience belt was located so as to prevent the
noise of the manufacturing building from being
communicated to the publication building; it also
provided a continuous firewall between them. It contained
the elevators, toiletrooms, stairways, shafts for steam
pipes, water pipes, and electric wires, heating and
ventilating ducts.
In the manufacturing building, the basement was used for
paper storage, the first floor for the mailing division,
the upper floors by the binderies, pressrooms, melting
and castingroom, engraving department, and the like.
1 George W. Childs was
Philadelphia's greatest newspaper publisher; he brought
the Public Ledger (which he purchased in 1864) to its
preeminent position as the Philadelphia paper.
2 Nathaniel Burt,
The
Perennial Philadelphians, (Boston, 1963), p. 419.
3 Burt, p. 420.
Update May
2007 (by
Harry Kyriakodis):
Still standing. The one million square-foot building was
the nation's largest historically certified office
building renovation when it was refurbished in 1986. Now
known as the Curtis Center, its six-story atrium contains
faux Egyptian palms and one of the finest
fountain-waterfalls in the city. Furthermore, the
building's lobby contains The Dream Garden, a sparklingly
conceived mosaic installed around 1916. It was made by
Louis C. Tiffany, and Tiffany Studios and is based on an
original painting by Maxfield Parrish. In 1998, The Dream
Garden was sold to someone who planned to move it to Las
Vegas. After Philadelphia historians and artists fiercely
protested the proposed move, the Pew Charitable Trusts
agreed to provide $3.5 million to the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts to purchase the work and
maintain it on site. The mural and the Curtis Center
lobby were featured in an important scene in the popular
film The Sixth Sense (1999).