2601's Lobby From the Perspective of an Art Historian

           Ever since I first walked through the front doors last summer, long before I knew Paul Cret and Aaron Kolish collaborated in our building’s design or that Nicholas Marsicano and Francis Serber created the ceramic mural in 1940, I took special interest in our building’s lobby. As an art historian who specializes in the history of American design of the 1930s, particularly in relation to scientific ideas of “evolutionary progress,” I could not help but notice the murals that grace the upper portion of the hall. Although I am not closely familiar with the individual artists and designers who created our lobby, I offer this preliminary interpretation based upon close study of similar examples from this period. The mural’s motif of “progress,” and our entryway’s floor and ceiling design, mimic numerous motifs from the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 and the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the year our building was constructed. These fairs also used “progress” as their main theme – the 1933 fair was called “The Century-of-Progress Exposition,” and the motto at New York was “The World of Tomorrow.” Millions of people attended these fairs in the midst of the Great Depression, and their influence on 1930s popular architecture and design cannot be overstated. In fact, Marsicano created mural series for both the San Francisco and New York World’s Fairs of 1939, so he would have been intimately familiar with their themes and imagery. Furthermore, because ideas of “evolutionary progress” at the time were closely tied to ideas about race and class identity, my reading of the 2601 murals therefore includes this aspect and finds our particular narrative to be unusually “progressive” and inclusive for its time.

 

           The evolutionary story begins near the A-Tower elevators, with scenes of “primitive man,” who uses spears to chase down deer and fashions rudimentary tools; the primary female in the scene carries a baby or gourd. The artists used three different colors for the figures’ skin – white, dark tan, and red – an unusual combination for a “primitive” scene made in the 1930s that seems to imply an inclusive racial vision of our human origins. The second panel takes us to Africa, indicated by the presence of rounded huts with conical thatch roofs. Marsicano traveled to Morocco in the late 1930s on a Barnes Foundation fellowship, and likely incorporated into this panel African arts he saw on his travels. The architecture combined with the presence of musical instruments and ceramic bowls mark the onset of the arts and stable human culture, further emphasized by seated females wearing necklaces and the fact that the men, holding spears, are relaxed. Again the artists mixed the skin tones (which in this context can be read as a sign of universal humanity, or perhaps reflects Northern Africa’s colonial domination and subsequent racial diversity). The third panel positions “primitive” human culture across the Atlantic in the Americas, where red-skinned Native American women wash laundry in the stream and carry papooses, while the men conduct diplomacy. The white horse indicates a post-1493 setting, since the Spanish conquistadors brought the horse with them.  

 

Man the Hunter	Africa	Atlantic Exploration

     

     These three panels together represent the “primitive” end of the typical evolutionary narrative, prior to the onset of “western civilization,” which many narratives from the period asserted began in Egypt from a culture with sophisticated writing, mathematics, sculpture and architecture. Our lobby panel fancifully interprets Egyptian culture by emphasizing its sophisticated agriculture through the presentation of diverse foods to royalty.  Next, the Greek scene features highly muscular white male athletes at the palaestra, in various stages of undress. The usual temples symbolizing Greek democracy and religion are placed diminutively in the background, a move that stresses the athletic fitness, cleanliness, and male camaraderie of the Greeks. The last panel in this first half features a Roman centurion resembling the emperor Augustus standing near a conversing couple; the landscape recalls a Di Chirico surrealist painting more than a typical populated Roman agora.

 

Egypt	Greece	Rome

 

         Our evolutionary mural continues just past the B-Tower elevator, with a medieval conglomeration joining a typical eleventh-century healing scene (the priest gesturing to the man on crutches) with a Giotto-esque lamentation of Christ. We continue chronologically into Renaissance Italy, although the roughly accurate architecture is stylistically brought into to the modernist present through the Cubist patterning of the street tiles. Shifting viewers from the Old World to the New (for the second time) is a winter ice-skating scene likely set in an early eighteenth-century New England town, clearly influenced by the Northern Renaissance artist Pieter Brueghel. The Tudor-style building behind the horse-drawn cart resembles some New England barns, while the steeple of the local church dominates the village scene. Although previous interpretations of this panel by residents Michael Biello and Jim LoGiudice place the setting in Holland, the temporal and spatial jump between eighteenth-century Holland and the adjacent panel seems too acute to fit the steady march of progress usually depicted in evolutionary murals from this period.

 

Lower Medieval	The Modern City	New Netherlands

 

         The last three panels situate viewers in the artists’ own time and our own familiar site: the actual building of 2601 Parkway, with the skyscrapers of Philadelphia in the background.  The first of these features the telling yellow brick and angled corners of 2601, with cranes, scaffolding, and working-class men of different ethnicities standing bravely atop the steel I-beams (like Lewis Hine’s amazing photos of the men who built the Empire State Building in 1932). The next highlights our prime location adjacent to Fairmount Park, where families enjoy playing outdoors. The final scene – like so many murals that were installed in U.S. Post Offices during the decade under the auspices of Works Progress Administration – celebrates the progress of industry and technology in producing the modern city. (In fact, Marcisano did work with the Works Progress Administration’s Education and Research Project). These scenes are local: the Ben Franklin Parkway, so recently installed, with City Hall, the Cathedral, and the brand new PSFS (1932) in the background; the Ben Franklin Bridge with a steamship and airplane; skyscrapers downtown viewed from an adjacent rooftop; the hustle and bustle, subways and streamliner trains of, most likely, Suburban Station (1930); and a rather isolated, street-level view that showcases the modern urban landscape.

 

2601 and Yellow Bricks	2601 Inside the Forest in the City	2601 and the National Cultural Boulevard

 

           One other main feature of our lobby deserves mention for its similarity to period designs. Have you ever looked up when you walk through the front doors, to notice a large round light centered in a recessed arc? A raised section around this arc extends in parallel over the security desk to curvaceously open into two perfect circles, each with a centered globe light, just before the B-Tower elevators. Have you noticed that the pattern on the ceiling is mimicked in the alternating brown and black coloration of the floor tiling? Together, the ceiling and floor patterns form a woman’s figure, with the opening curve and light symbolizing her hips and womb (into which we enter), the straight lines forming her torso (with globe light as navel), and the twin ultra-round spheres with lights serving as her breasts. Perhaps she symbolizes fertility or women’s growing freedoms, or perhaps the designers just thought this would add a subtle sexiness to our modernist atrium. No wonder all the security guards are always so cheerful and nice, given their blessed position.

 

           While our modernist mural generally depicts evolutionary “progress” as a western white narrative (which is typical of its time), its imagery is far more inclusive than most I have seen. In fact, when we consider the light whitish color of the ceiling’s female figure (shown in original photos) in combination with the parallel figure in the black and brown floor tiles, the ethnic inclusivity of our lobby’s original artistic designs becomes a hallmark of our building’s history and its ongoing character. This feature is definitely my favorite part of our building, for its celebration of a universal, multi-ethnic, female form seems to be a welcoming gesture that is at once both classical and highly modernist, the two stylistic realms that architect Paul Cret frequently negotiated. Furthermore, numerous gallery websites featuring Marsicano’s work affirm that his artistic career focused primarily on the female form, suggesting he may have been influential in the overall lobby design and not just the mural series.

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