1941 Mayfair
gets defensive

Living in the Past
By Dr. Harry C. Silcox
and Jack McCarthy
For the Times

The Mayfair community stands in marked contrast to Tacony in its reaction to federal intervention at the start of World War II. Government-funded improvements to the Disston Saw Co. were supported enthusiastically by Tacony citizens while government funding for workers’ housing was resisted by the Mayfair community.
The controversy began in 1940 when government officials realized that if war came, additional workers would be needed for the factories located along the Delaware River. Disston’s new Armour Plate Plant would require an additional 100 workers. The projected need for the Disston Saw Co. and the Frankford Arsenal was 8,000 workers. Workers moving into the area would need affordable housing in Mayfair if the factory jobs were to be filled.
There were laws on the books, used during the Depression, to fund low-cost housing. These laws were amended in October 1940 to include wartime defense workers’ housing as well. Lawrence Westbrook, director of the Federal Works Agency’s Mutual Ownership Defense Housing Division, used this act to initiate the construction of homes for defense workers.
One of the sites chosen was Northeast Philadelphia. The specific location was to be on the grounds of the Lower Dublin Poor House, in the newly formed community of Mayfair. The government secretly received a go-ahead from the city to use this Fairmount Park land as a building site. However, news leaked out to the public, and community organizations in Mayfair planned a public protest for June 18, 1941.
Much of the talk in the community was about the loss of property values. The claim was that the homes residents had paid more than $5,000 for (the actual cost was a little over $4,000) would be competing against $3,000 public-housing units. Renters would be charged $22 a month, a fee that included taxes and all utilities. This seemed unfair to Mayfair homeowners who got no such relief.
Rumors about who was going to live in the homes, and what it would mean to the lifestyle of the community, also surfaced. Word-of-mouth spread these fears throughout the community, guaranteeing a large turnout for the protest meeting.
On the morning of June 18, more than 1,200 people gathered at the Mayfair Athletic Association baseball field at Ryan and Rowland avenues. Presiding over the meeting was John T. Ginhart, of 3521 Aldine St., president of the athletic association.
Ginhart thanked the people for their support and then introduced John J. Nesbitt, president of the Mayfair Improvement Association, who professed his dislike of public housing no matter what the reason for its use.
City Councilman Clarence Crossan followed with a forceful speech against the project. He pointed out that the "government would pay only the equivalent of fifteen percent of tax paid by Mayfair householders," adding the government did not need the Mayfair site.
Councilman Frank Egan followed, further inciting the crowd. "National defense housing is needed but doesn’t mean that self-respecting communities and self-respecting Americans must pay for projects to support other Americans!" he yelled to the crowd.
Jacob Boonin, chairman of the Mayfair Improvement Association’s transportation committee, outlined the community’s objections to the proposal, stating that "thousands of rowhomes, mostly new, in this section, pay more taxes per square foot than any other section of the city."
In an effort to calm the situation, federal housing representative G. Gersham Griggs invited all parties to lunch at the Torresdale Country Club after a tour of Mayfair, which had been previously scheduled.
At the lunch, Councilman Crossan, clutching petitions from the community, told Griggs that he would sponsor a law to prohibit the federal government from using the land at Ryan and Rowland avenues to house defense workers.
Two days later, the federal government announced that 1,000 homes for defense workers would be built in the sparsely developed area on Frankford Avenue between Holme Avenue and St. Dominic Church. The people of Mayfair were ecstatic. The project was to begin within a week, with a completion date set for six months.
The people of Mayfair had saved parkland for future use. In 1948, it would become the site of Abraham Lincoln High School.
Construction of the government project was yet another issue. Labor supplied by the federal Work Projects Administration, the largest agency of the New Deal era, was assigned to do site grading, layout of streets and curbs, and all other outside work.
The city issued no building permits because the process would have slowed the project. That angered Carroll Shelton, president of the Philadelphia Builders Association, who charged that the project of wood-frame units was a "firetrap and in violation of municipal codes."
Another builder complained that the plumbing used for the project had "a code all its own."
But none of this mattered after Dec. 7, 1941, when the necessities of war overrode civilian concerns. However, all these issues remained when the property was taken over by the Pennypack Woods Homeowners Association after the war.
Of most interest in this story is that the Mayfair community was not convinced that war with Germany was inevitable. Mayfair opted for a community unchanged by federal projects. To the Mayfair residents, open space and protecting the value of their property were more important than national defense efforts by the federal government.
They wanted to keep what they had rather than prepare for a war that might not happen. Yet less than a mile southeast of Mayfair lay Tacony, the national flag-waving "poster community" for all-out war. ••
To reach Harry C. Silcox, send e-mail to silcoxh@axs2000.net