Word: philadelphia
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Street and over to Brooklyn through a pipe fastened to Brooklyn Bridge. Curiously, a private company owns and operates the system with the Post Office as its sole customer. It is, with a two-mile stretch in Boston, the last survivor of similar lines that once operated busily in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago. Last week it looked as if Manhattan's system might also succumb...
When it was first suggested in 1833 that Philadelphia's streets be lighted by gas instead of oil, a group of such prominent citizens as Benjamin Chew, Horace Binney and Jacob Ridgeway wrote in consternation to the city council. They protested against the use of "an uncertain light, sometimes disappearing and leaving the streets and houses in total darkness." Despite these dire predictions, the city council spent $100,000 on a municipal gasworks which began supplying 46 street lights and two homes in 1836. Last week hundreds of Philadelphia housewives telephoned the city hall to find out whether...
Since 1836 Philadelphia's gasworks has often been a political football. The price of gas was reduced from $3.50 to $2.70 per i ,000 cu. ft. and its quality reduced to a point where it corroded stoves, when, in 1880 a reform movement ousted a city administration that was known as "the gas house gang." In 1897, however, when gas was down to $1, an era of peace set in with the granting of a 30-year lease on the gasworks to United Gas Improvement Co., first U. S. public utility holding company. In 1926 the city council...
...that time Samuel Davis Wilson was an investigator for a zealous religious group engaged in prosecuting concessionaires who stayed open Sundays at Philadelphia's Sesquicentennial Exposition. Getting into politics in the city comptroller's office, Sam Wilson soon rocketed to fame by attacking "the utility-banking-political combine." In 1935 he was elected mayor on a platform whose three major planks were 5? carfare, tax reduction and 50? gas, Philadelphia carfare is still 7?, but Mayor Wilson did cut taxes and last year, at a banquet celebrating the gasworks centennial, he fired the opening gun of a drive...
What their convention missed in frivolity it made up in interest. Most of the leading U. S. economists were there and No. 1 topic was naturally the current depression. Against the full blast of such Governmental brasses in Philadelphia as Assistant Attorney General Robert Jackson (see p, 12), the murmurings of the economists in Atlantic City formed a quiet counterpoint...