Living with history | Scene Through the Lens

This section of 33rd Street is named in honor of saxophonist and jazz pioneer John Coltrane, who lived there in the 1950s. The home is a National Historic Landmark.

One of the best things about working in Philadelphia is living with history. From my first night in the city on my job interview when the photo director put me up in an old hotel above a bar two blocks from Independence Hall (Instead of a downtown corporate hotel. How cool was that?) I have loved walking the very same streets as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Meriwether Lewis.

I have driven past Coltrane’s house dozens of times to and from assignments. I wish I could have included it in my frame, but it was just a little too far away from the big puddle - off a bit to the right.

Not all the history is worthy of landmark designation. I was reminded of that just this past week, as I made one of those “today’s office” photos.

It’s in a new grocery store at the corner of Broad and Spring Garden Streets.

I was at a table in the dining area, near the beer and wine section, killing time on my day off, waiting for my grandson to finish Saturday morning rehearsals of the Philadelphia Boys Choir & Chorale, across the intersection. Before the choir made the building their home, it was the local headquarters of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5.

I covered press conferences there, walking over from the Inquirer’s old offices just a block away, which is now the new headquarters of the Philadelphia Police Department.

Continuing on the history of my relationship with this intersection, before the grocery store was constructed (with apartments above) it was a surface parking lot, across the street from what used to be a state office building (now apartments with adjacent retail). It might very well have remained a parking lot, or become restaurants or a plaza or maybe even a Percent for Art sculpture garden across from a Phillies ballpark. It was one of three or four proposed “downtown sites” before the the team ended up staying in the South Philadelphia sports complex, building Citizens Bank Park.

Going back even farther than my few decades worth of memories of the neighborhood, there have been even bigger changes.

The intersection was also the site of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, once the most successful builder of steam locomotives in the world. During the Golden Age of railroading the plant on that site occupied eight city blocks covering 19 acres. In its best year (at the turn of the 20th Century) some 20,000 workers made 3,600 steam engines (almost 10 a day). All that’s left today is a statue of Matthias Baldwin outside City Hall.

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column