Squadrone Volante

The expert history of Philadelphia street names is Bob Alotta's Mermaids, Monasteries, Cherokees and Custer. According to Alotta, Christian Street, as Queen Street, was named for the girl queen, Kristina, who was also the last of the Vasa kings. Christian was used instead of Christina for reasons of sexism, Alotta suggests. But was she king or queen, man or a woman — or hermaphrodite? I look at her face as it appears in the portraits, standing as a girl dressed as a sugar plum fairy, sitting as a man at the table with Descartes, her nose piercing, straight, ambitious, her eyes dark, recessed, melancholy. I'm drawn to the inscrutability — after all we Philadelphians honor her with a street, a street which in my mind's eye holds a key to unlocking the Geist of this city.

According to Swedish folklore, Kristina the queen took the oath as king and spent her reign pursuing the vainglorious life of a nobleman, often dressing as a man, confounding suitors, and ordering Descartes to court as tutor. She gave Descartes the promise of an institute in Stockholm but the Swedish winters did him in. He died just as the queen — or king — was losing interest. Our Kristina was a philistine who renounced her religion and carried on a love relationship with a countess, or so the letters suggest. Her reign devolved into a spate of royal handouts — she dubbed nearly 500 as nobleman — draining the treasury and mortgaging royal property. All the while the value of Swedish copper plummeted. Thus, Sven Svenssen of old and the other colonists of New Sweden, without resources or vision, were left to the mercy of Peter Stuyvesant and, later, William Penn.

She certainly wasn't interested in converting the Lenape to Lutheranism. That went on anyway as Martin Luther's Small Catechism became the first book written in the Lenape language. But having renounced Lutheranism in favor of Catholicism, Kristina was paid a visit by an emissary was from Rome. It seems the Vatican didn't believe her. Perhaps this doubt caused her to attempt an alliance with Spain, the failure of which ended her reign. She left Sweden as a man — Count Dohna. She arrived in Rome as Maria Christina Alexandra.

It's for this ambiguity that Kristina has become an icon of the transgender crowd. (Her body was disinterred in 1965 to find out if she was really a hermaphrodite. The investigation was inconclusive.) But isn't there something more intrinsically important to us about Kristina? Her eyes may be melancholy, but they are not resigned. I see in her face the astonishing, almost mocking determination of self-creation. She chose her gender, her religion, her country, her education at a time when women, even queens, had no such consciousness. If to us her life is inscrutable (as it appears historians have had a hard time pinning her down) and indeed she has been portrayed as impulsive and changeable — then it was also open, free, and willful. She left conservative, infinitely modest Sweden to join the radical Catholic movement Squadrone Volante (Flying Faction) in order to think freely, to obey passion, to ask questions, above all to believe that one can and should transcend.

If this is the true iconography of Kristina, then Christian Street stands for the exact opposite of what Christian, in this historical/political moment, has come to mean. Kristina, who we honor with a street of 34 blocks (26 east of the Schuylkill and eight west to Cobbs Creek), is the ultimate little-c-catholic ideal. Emigration, which she herself endured (the flight under cover of darkness), may be the highest representation of that liberal instinct. People have come to Christian Street for 370 years to reinvent themselves on these shores. It is with that image in mind, and with the twin Philadelphia ideals of Brotherly Love and tolerance, that we must approach this street.



From the delicious white stone face of the Municipal Pier 40, the Dredging=Jobs sign, Tugboat Annie's, and the Budget truck rental, Christian Street leaves the Delaware River and brings you under I-95 and into the city. But there on the left before the de facto city wall is Old Swedes, the oldest church in Pennsylvania, founded by those sent by Kristina on the ships Folgel Grip and Kalmar Nyckel on a site given to the church by Sven Svenssen.

The Swedes were, of course, master shipbuilders and seamen. Their ships made the journey from Stockholm to Göteborg to the Canary Islands, to Florida, and then the mid-Atlantic coast. Though many perished here from disease, the colony endured, made alliances, and held fast to the pledge to not destroy the Lenape. But because of disease, in effect they did so anyway. Thus we may add involuntary manslaughter to the fog of Kristina's legacy (though she did murder a courtier once, in the case of the spread of disease in the new world this term seems too harsh). One man's freedom, they say, is another man's prison and so it is with the ambition of the immigrant: the movement of people across continents always brings unintended consequences.

I say this to remind ourselves there are two sides to everything. Indeed, Christian Street represents something else of equal measure to the blind promise of the immigrant's self-creation: the weight, practice, and joy of civilization. We might think of this as a dose of Swedish Lutheranism for a shot of the Squadrone Volante.

Thus we will find on this brilliant street two of the largest community art schools in the country, the Fleischer Art Memorial and the Settlement Music School, a YMCA, three public schools, including the high school for creative and performing arts, the Italian Market, the Victorian Philadelphia electric works (now Trigen), the Coast Guard, the consulates of Finland and Norway, the Queen Village-Southwark community garden with the mural by Isaiah that reads, "Let us all dream and build this city together," and nine churches. The churches, as Kristina did in her lifetime, span the realm of Christianity and include, aside from Gloria Dei, the first black Baptist church in the nation, founded 1809, the historic Ebenezer church, now Seventh Day Adventist, St. Pauls and St. Charles Bromeo Roman Catholic churches, the latter with its community center and senior programs, a pillar of that black community for generations, and George Hewitt's medieval fieldstone Shiloh Baptist (originally Church of the Holy Apostles) with its collegiate revival guild house.

Here we are treated to the second, double, meaning of Christian Street most convincingly. If we are to dream, then we must also build. In part, because of these nine Christian churches, but also for the essential society-building role that institutions play, Christian Street reminds us of the power of a great, public society. Immigrants may come to Christian Street, as they continue to do from Mexico and Southeast Asia primarily, but their dreams will be squandered without the breadth of city. When America says it is overwhelmed by immigration, it says so because it can no longer fathom the power of this public realm.

But let's step back a moment to remind ourselves of the immigrant's path. In these pages I wrote that Washington Avenue, which runs parallel one block to the south of Christian Street, is Philadelphia's main immigrant passageway. The markings are there — in the Buddhist statuary, the Mummers museum, the various Vietnamese markets, the pan-Asian aid societies, the Mexican tiendas, and in the faces of those employed in the lumberyards, and the stone, tile, and hardwood warehouses. Taken together with the two historically African-American neighborhoods, Hawthorne and G-Ho, this part of town, as it has been through history, is a patchwork of people and communities. Both Washington Avenue and Christian Street connect people in moving and self-evident ways. This, I imagine, is the third powerful element at play: a street that serves, not as an ersatz barrier, but as a conduit that brings people together. In this regard, we would be remiss in not touting the two-way traffic pattern, which, in the parlance of city planners, is most adept at creating and enhancing community.

Waxing poetic often belies the grim Philadelphia street. But that's half the point: Christian Street, for almost its entire east-of-the-Schuylkill run, is lovely, the institutions (many of them historically and architecturally significant) punctuated by proud Victorian rowhouses lined up like soldiers of the First Pennsylvania Regiment, with carved lintels like golden epaulettes, bay windows crying courage in the face of the enemy.

I am sad to say the enemy has come to Christian Street. In the places where the streetscape has fallen into disrepair, blind and a-social builders have constructed row homes of the lowest quality with vinyl garage doors and curbcuts. Certain blocks have endured more than their share of this infiltration — the 2200 block, where a slew of new houses were recessed to make room for parking in front, more than most. Pull in and disappear is the enemy's mantra . . . you never have to see your neighbors if you never go in your front door . . .



But the traditional streetscape, for all these recent attacks, remains the archetype and gives us reason to demand that it not be further desecrated.

I'm not going to get hung up on building restrictions. Rather I want to urge us to build — create something new here — an historic district of this single street, for the 26 blocks east of the river, signifying its role in the continuous, infinite process of building the city. From the edge of the Delaware, where the Lenape once guided the Swedish ships ashore, I propose transforming the Municipal Pier 40, now used at least in part as storage rental, into the Museum of the American Polyglot. It is often forgotten that for the first hundred years of its existence (roughly from the time of the German-American proclamation against slavery in 1688 to the death of Ben Franklin in 1790), Philadelphia was the most cosmopolitan, open city in the world. Thomas Paine (he's back!), arguing 231 years ago against reconciliation with England, noted that not even one-third of Pennsylvanians were of English descent. They were Swedes and Finns and Dutch and Welsh and Scottish and Irish and Jews and Germans and Africans and Afro-Caribbeans and French and Lenape. This spot — right here but one pier over (where the Coast Guard now stands) — could be called the birthplace of the peculiar American character. [I could go on at length describing the Museum and its purpose and place in Philadelphia and significance in the world, but I'll save that for later. Suffice it to say it was Paine himself, one of the great and often forgotten thinkers in Philadelphia history, who a century before mass-immigration, first envisioned America's archetypal role as polyglot shelter-giver to the world's oppressed.]

We'll take the broad space between Delaware Avenue and the pier building itself, and create a pleasing public space, the center of which will be a Monument to the New Philadelphian. Here I imagine not a statue or tower, but a multi-media exhibit large and bright enough to capture the attention of motorists — even on I-95. The monument will tell the story of Kristina and what her life signifies for us, as well as photographs, videos, and interviews with immigrants, past and present, with details of their struggles and contributions. At the top will be a ticker, which counts immigrant arrivals to Philadelphia. Because people are always leaving cities so that no American city can survive without a constant flow of immigrants, this ticker will signify the continuous renewal of the city. We ought to install the ticker as a matter of celebration: a nearly-century long decline in the percentage of foreign-born in Philadelphia has reversed; at present it has increased to the level of 1950.

Indeed there are numerous immigrants among the ranks of architects in Philadelphia. Mr. B Love has reminded me that a few blocks south of the proposed Monument to the New Philadelphian sits several hundred-thousand square feet of Sweden's current emissary to the world, Ikea. The Swedish flag now flies on the shore of the Delaware for the first time in 350-odd years. It is not a homecoming lost on corporate. The old Plymouth Meeting store, which opened in 1985, was the Ikea's first in the U.S — no accident given the historical importance of Sven Svenssen's settlement (ironic given the Quaker role in the undoing of the Swedish settlement). That store had displays about the American Swedish Historical Museum in FDR Park and the first colonists. We'll hold a competition to design the monument and ask Ikea to fund its construction.

After exploring the Museum and Monument and the view of the river, one will then be invited to take a walking tour of Public Philadelphia, with descriptions, explanations, and historical interpretation of the twenty-or-so landmarks that line Christian Street. There are some gems: the first church, the first black Baptist church (1809), the first black YMCA, the Ridgway library (now the high school for the performing arts), not only an architectural monument but an historic one in that the Library Company, which built the building, was the first to open its collections to the public, and the Edwin M. Stanton Public School, whose Egyptian-revival carvings decorate the street.



Despite its (mostly) proud daytime appearance, Christian Street at night belies its richness. All is lost to darkness, trash, and the automobile. We'll need to light the sidewalk well: I propose a change from the Center City District's green lamps to something bolder and more emblematic of Christian Street's role in the history of the city. The Monument competition might also include the design of the lamps and the sidewalk paving (I envision the story of immigration and/or Kristina told in simple iconography.)

The intersection of Broad and Christian will have to be specially addressed. There are 60-80 parking spaces facing the street in front of the McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, and Rite Aid. At this, the most important intersection along the way, all the power of Public Philadelphia, despite the monumental Ridgway library, is lost. Because of this, you might not cross the street: in which case you'll miss half the story. Solutions here will include finding a suitable development for the southwest corner, now a vacant lot in front of Vince Fumo's retro Mickey D (six story tower with retail on the corner) and finding a bunch of Vikings to pick up the Rite Aid and the Dunkin' Donuts and placing them on their respective corners.

As the scale and proportions of the streetscape improve west of Broad, we'll want to be sure the historic fabric isn't lost to that enemy, who uses cheap materials, his fifth grade kid as his architect, who thinks you don't want to live on the first floor of your house. Design guidelines for preservation and new construction would be written as part of the Christian Street Historic District.

It's likely you're asking now who wants to take an historic tour that starts at a Budget truck rental and ends at an electric station. I'll say I've walked through a lot less interesting and many less beautiful places while also risking my safety. The story of a great city is here, one that is equal parts symbolic and real, myth and history, to be told equally to the visitor and the Philadelphian.

So what if we start telling ourselves new stories?

We might just start to believe them.