Excerpts

TINA BROCK

What makes it easy is that we’re really able to find people who want to work on this material because it doesn’t get done very often. That also applies to performers. For anyone working on the production, I try to pay those people well to compensate for the fact that our rehearsal schedule is unusual in that we don’t work three weeks, every day, for 40 hours. With our company, we work over a longer period of time to accommodate people’s daytime work schedules. So, there are very few actors, regardless of their talent level, who make a full-time living from acting.

Almost everybody works doing something else, such as I did, working several jobs, or, after my son was born, taking full-time work. With full-time work, it’s easier to have a dedicated place every day and then devote the rest of my day to the IRC. More and more, I see people working in this model. People and funders say you must pay yourself first, but the company can’t possibly pay me what I make at the full-time job I’ve been doing for 25 years. I have a fundamental disagreement because I do it because I’m not driven by the money. There’s some argument for paying yourself something, even $5 a week, but with payroll and Paymasters, you’re paying yourself more to pay yourself than you’re earning.

It's not all or nothing.

Our team devotes every moment we have to the company because we think it’s important. I like to think it’s a bit of a cultural gem here. I don’t think good work has to all come down to money.

LYNN CLOUSER WADDELL

Drexel itself, as an institute, was co-ed from the beginning, with a large proportion of the students being women. I think about a third of the illustration classes taught by Howard Pyle were female - an unheard-of proportion back in the 1890s. Howard Pyle, who was the father of American illustration, taught illustration at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry (now Drexel University) and was very supportive of his female students. He helped women get the big commissions and encouraged them in their fields.

Definitely, some pretty successful female artists came out of Drexel, including Violet Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Willcox Smith, Alice Barber Stephens, Anna and Ethel Betts, and Sarah Stilwell Weber.

SAM KATZ

Philadelphia has had different tensions throughout its life. The heart of Penn vs. the mind of Franklin. Green country town vs. a city. Race and religion. Neighborhoods vs. the city as a whole. You’ve commented elsewhere on competition vs. collaboration. How do you incorporate those tensions in your film?

Yes, all of those tensions have made up the fabric of the city. We try to put an emphasis on storytelling in my feature episodes. I’m conscious that in the 21st century, people watch television with a remote control and with a smartphone. If we lose their interest, even for a second, the viewer will move elsewhere. The tensions are the stories that we try to capture. They’re what make the stories exciting.

BETH KEPHART

At the start of the essay In Between Street by Street (page 53), for example, you write:

Philadelphia streets: They more or less behave, until they bend or break or fold or don’t. I’ve been walking them for as long as I can remember, and when someone asks (as someone inevitably will) what part of Philadelphia I love most, I answer with the truth: I love the surprising, mutable, spontaneous, things that thrive on either side of the red bricks and the marble stoops, the granite pilings and the slate roofs; the glass towers and the storefront signs, the grates and the window frames.

ELAINE LISLE

What is it about the smaller elements that drives the creation of many of your outdoor scenes? 

When I begin a painting, I am always looking for the unusual and the colorful. Awnings and umbrellas have always inspired me for this reason. They help to set up the composition and draw the viewer in. Every painting needs a focal point- sometimes this is a figure; sometimes it is simply the way the light bounces off a brick wall. 

JONATHAN MANDELL

What are the differences between doing representational art and non-representational art?

In my artwork, I strive to create inventive spatial compositions, color compositions, and perspectives. I also enjoy infusing a narrative quality into my art. I believe that once an artist has created a spatial and color composition, one can either choose to leave it at that point or you can offer the viewer even more with the inclusion of a narrative. I believe that viewers desire a narrative as it allows them to connect with the artwork on an anecdotal - psychological level.

PERRY MILOU

Do you need to see the person in front of you, or does it help if they’re not in front of you? Do you draw from photographs, personal appearances, or the imagination?

Every single piece is different. I can often see a painting complete, my vision of it in my imagination, even before I start it. Other times, they just evolve. I usually like to stay one or two paintings ahead in my mind so I can start imagining what is coming next, but I may actually get there and change everything - that is the magic, the spontaneity of creating art.

To be honest with you, I still don't understand how I do it. Just like I really cannot believe that this email actually travels to you through space. But it all starts in the brain, which is the most amazing piece of art there may ever be!

NATHANIEL POPKIN

What makes Philadelphia unique vs. Boston or New York for this experiment?

Maybe nothing. You’re talking about three cities that rose in approximately the same period, in the same nation. Those cities inculcated the basic ideas about the nation as a self-invented nation. Those three cities brought different things. Boston brought an insistence on federalism, puritanism, and notions of intellectual life and education. New York brought a kind of coarse commercial life that was built into our free society. Philadelphia brought a framework for our Constitution and a rational approach that, if you look at the form of those cities, is apparent.

I’m not an expert on Boston. I know a little more about New York. Each city could claim to be a Great Experiment. New York has an easier time claiming a greater hold on the American narrative. It embodies much of it, but it is also a greater outlier of the American character. Boston is much more of a regional outlier – a very specific place. It’s maybe more parochial in its history than Philadelphia, partially. Boston could call itself the Great Experiment, but why doesn’t it call itself the smartest place in the country?

Philadelphia is burdened by negative mythology much more so than those other places, even though New York lost 700,000 net people in the post-World War II period and Boston has suffered through innumerable social crises. Boston and New York rebounded more quickly post-war [World War II] economically than Philadelphia, and are not burdened by negative history.

DAN ROTTENBERG

How did you come to write the biography of Anthony Drexel (The Man Who Made Wall Street: Anthony Drexel and the Rise of Modern Finance) and In the Kingdom of Coal: An American Family and the Rock That Changed the World?

I got interested in business as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal in Chicago (1968-70). After I became a freelancer in Philadelphia in 1975, I discovered that there was a demand for my services because, in those days, most business writers weren’t very good writers, and most good writers knew and cared little about business.

In 1976, the New York Times Magazine asked me to write a profile of the world’s largest institutional investor, J.P. Morgan & Co. In the course of my research, I read several biographies of the great Pierpont Morgan. I grew curious about Morgan’s senior partner, Anthony Drexel, after reading that he was the only person Morgan would defer to. I proposed a book about Drexel to Random House, which had just published my first book (Finding Our Fathers) and was very high on me. They said they’d publish my Drexel biography if I really wanted to, but they weren’t enthusiastic about its sales prospects. I said in that case I’d withdraw the proposal. Enthusiasm is critical to me in any given situation.

It took more than 20 years, but eventually I found an enthusiastic publisher in the University of Pennsylvania Press. I also found an enthusiastic supporter in Constantine (Taki) Papadakis, who became president of Drexel University in 1995. He arranged for a research grant that enabled me to get the book off the back burner.

He also gave me a lesson in inspiration. At our first meeting, he remarked, “I want a book that, when I pick it up, I won’t be able to put it down!” My immediate instinct was to reply: “You can’t commission something like that. Anthony Drexel is what he is. If he’s a boring guy, I can’t make him sexy.” But for some reason, I said nothing of the sort. Instead, I told myself, “That’s an interesting challenge. Let me see if I can meet it.”

The result was The Man Who Made Wall Street, a page-turner (my opinion, to be sure) published in 2001 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. This biography of a most unsexy banker sold 7,000 copies in hardback (an awesome figure for an academic press) and has passed the 15,000 mark in paperback. In 2012, a Chinese-language edition was published in Shanghai. And I, of course, got a work that may actually outlive me. But it wouldn’t have happened without Taki’s prodding, which, to me, is what leadership is all about.