Energy Origins: The Gasworks

Take a good look at each of those three operating zones. 

While the boundaries of Girard Point and Point Breeze delimit fairly standard polygons, the boundaries of the North Yard outline something a little less predictable. One explanation for the North Yard’s strange geometry is that a CSX Corp. train terminal is located between the northernmost portion of the North Yard and the Schuylkill. There is a longer conversation to be had concerning the relationship between oil companies and rail operators, but for my purposes all you need to know is that most railroads are owned by private railroad operators, which are wholly independent of the industries they serve, and a company called CSX Corp. has tracks that run through and beside the North Yard. 

Between the North Yard and Point Breeze, there is a swath of land that does not belong to PES. That land belongs to the Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW), and it has for 165 years. So, while it is natural to see PGW as interrupting the flow of the refinery’s industrial expanse, technically speaking, it doesn't do that at all. PGW predates the first iteration of Philadelphia’s oil refinery by twelve years. 

PGW was the first fossil fuel industry to set up shop on the eastern banks of the Lower Schuylkill. Until the discovery of petroleum in the late 1850s, ‘coal gas’ (a common form of a larger category of manufactured ‘town gas’) was the primary source of illuminating fuel for American streets and households. Interestingly, despite its present association with petroleum-based natural gas, the name of Philadelphia’s famous municipally-owned utility (Philadelphia Gas Works) dates back to the company’s origins as a coal gas manufacturer. How? Industrial facilities that manufactured gaseous fuels were called ‘gas works.’ (This doesn’t seem strange until you realize that that it is the equivalent of calling Sunoco ‘Philadelphia Oil Refinery.’)

In 1854, twenty years after its first plant was built on 22nd and Market, PGW erected its second gas works at Point Breeze on the northside of Passyunk Avenue.

Fascinatingly, the four nuclear structures comprising the original Point Breeze complex were all built in the Gothic style. According to David Orr in “Philadelphia as Industrial Archaeological Artifact: A Case Study,” this uncanny feature “cloaked the meter house in the image of a small church, masked the retort house in the guise of a grand medieval hall, provided the purifying house with a subtle campanile, and equipped the gas holder with a circuit of twelve pentagonal towers in the form of crenelated Gothic turrets described by the engineer as in the ‘old English style.’”

While I am inclined to argue that PGW’s gothic architecture attests to its grand, old age, it is important to remember that the refinery was built a little over ten years later and was, as far as I can tell, devoid of “ornamental buttresses, lancet windows, and quatrefoil detailing.”

It is certainly hard to imagine modern energy providers being at all concerned with the aesthetic appeal of their operating facilities, but what inspired PGW’s Point Breeze architects to elevate the manufacture of coal gas to ecclesiastical levels? And while we’re at it, when I look at the Gothic meter house, why is the urge to glorify the industry whose menace I’ve set out to expose almost too much to resist? 

One possible answer that David Orr posits is that “the meter house [was] linked to its iron house meters; the entire meter building to the gas plant; the plant tied to the area of South Philadelphia; the South Philadelphian community to the urban plan of the whole city.” Because, in other words, in an age when industry and society are growing evermore estranged, it isn’t all that difficult to look back at PGW’s relationship with the South Philadelphia community and see a relationship somewhat similar to that between church and parish.  

Here’s what I mean: 

Petroleum refineries occupy one point on an interminable continuum of production and transportation, very rarely serving the communities in which they are situated. As I mentioned in the supertanker exhibit, over the course of its transformation from raw resource to refined commodity, oil needs to travel from production site, to storage site, to refining site, and then to another storage site before it is available to the consumer (the consumer, mind you, who is a world away from the first step in the production process). 

During the coal gas era, this was not the case. Coal was mined, sent to gas works, and transformed into gas that was sent to local homes. Unlike PES, which only purports to possess communal value, PGW actually occupied a nexus between industry and community. After all, not only was “the plant tied to the area of South Philadelphia,” but it was also producing a substance called ‘town gas.’

Although it hasn’t produced a cubic foot of coal gas since 1964, PGW still owns the land between Passyunk and Schuylkill Avenue. I don’t know whether the cage-like structure shown below -- the technical term of which is, believe or not, ‘gas holder’ or ‘gasometer’  -- continues to store and help distribute gas. My guess is that it’s out of commission. But the reason I bring it up is twofold. 

First, I think it is commonly perceived to be part of PES. It’s not. As recently as July 8, 2019, an article published in Truthout about protests outside PES’ Passyunk Ave. entrance included an image of a playground with PGW’s defunct gasometer rising through the top of the frame. The caption reads: “A playground in Philadelphia, within a block of PES refinery, visible above.”

Second, it is an artifact that represents one of the few remaining vestiges of Philadelphia's coal-gas era, and, despite its dominating size, its nature and history are hidden from most of us. Fossil fuel industry or not, the coal-gas business is a part of Philadelphia’s history, and, with every passing day, it grows evermore forgotten. For all of my knowledge of the wickedness of fossil fuels, when I think about Philadelphia's coal-gas industry, I can’t help but delude myself on the fantasy that there were once people who just wanted to bring light and warmth into people’s homes, and that places like the gas works made that possible. If that was ever so, things have certainly changed, and no amount of fantasizing will never stop me from advocating for a carbon-free world. 

But there’s just something so sentimental about that sleepy cylinder looming over Passyunk.