©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Memorial Hall: a huge, rotting memorial to what?
by JIMMY J. PACK JR.

Memorial Hall stands in Fairmount Park, presently abandoned and waiting for the Please Touch Museum to give it a new life. (Photos by Jimmy J. Pack Jr.www.shutterfly.com/pro/Jimmyj/ChestnutHillLocalWork.))

Any visitor to center city is aware of the obvious: Ben Franklin’s privy hole, Ben Franklin’s Print Shop, Betsy Ross’ house. But there is a forgotten history that lives within Philadelphia that if we took the time to give it one thought, one glance, just one second of our time, we might be forced to wonder: what has happened to our world?

This is the question that popped into my head a few weekends ago when I took a ride over the mighty Schuylkill, up into Fairmount Park to take a few photos of Memorial Hall, one of a very few select buildings that are still intact from the 1876 Centennial Exposition, the first major World’s Fair held in the United States. It was a celebration of an international experiment — look how great we’ve become by letting the entire world influence us, give us manpower and help us realize our dreams.

Memorial Hall now is wrapped in chain-link fence, front doors partially boarded up and littered with dried, dead leaves that rot with the smell of mildew from a cool basement and the slight scent of an empty beer bottle. A sign in front reads, “New home of the Please Touch Museum.” But right now, it’s abandoned and waiting for something to happen.

The statuary that adorns Memorial Hall symbolizes something, but who really knows what? More importantly, does anyone care?

So I walk around the perimeter of the fence, snapping photo after photo of the winged horses with potential riders standing astride. The figures with hollowed-out eyes stare into the oblivion in front of them, pointing to what is to come.

And what was to come? In the minds of the nine million people who visited the fair, what potential future awaited them? A future where steam engines improved the life of mankind? A future where artists and inventors would take the world into the millennium with thoughts of eternal peace and cornucopia baskets of juicy fruits and fresh vegetables, tables full of freshly butchered lamb and steaks, bottles of rare wines, so that not one person would ever go hungry again?

But Memorial Hall is now empty, which begs the question: it is a memorial to what? An empty memorial to an empty promise that was the future, which is millennium.

And so Memorial Hall will be the home of a new-born museum for children. They’ll crawl and play and learn in this great hall of promise, and moms and dads will walk in clutching their children’s hands, some fumbling with strollers that refuse to open, others digging into their pockets for cash, and this great hall will mean little more than a way to keep the kids busy for a few hours.

Winged horses with riders standing next to them greet visitors to Memorial Hall. The horses stand in shock, awe, while their riders point to an unknown future.

And maybe, if the heart of this great hall starts to beat again after hearing the laughter of growing voices and the churning of the small cogs in developing brains, Memorial Hall will fulfill the promise of Millennium.

But there’s a part of me that knows this is not true. As every year passes, the history of places and events becomes more and more forgotten. Will anyone even ask what the history of the building is? Will anyone even care? Does it matter?

This is where dreams were made. This is where people looked forward with hope, with the possibilities of life; the grounds surrounded by visitors dressed in their best silks and topcoats talking of how great America was to become. The Centennial Exposition was a walk into the future, the possibilities of what can be when people work together, and Memorial Hall was to be the one lasting tribute to the event — a memento of promise. But that promise clearly has been forgotten. It’s just a skull to hold another dream.

The fair officially opened on May 10, 1876, exactly 130 years and eight days ago. As I try to walk around to the other side of the building, I wonder if I am retracing the steps of Ulysses S. Grant, the President who had to deal with the antebellum South and the high-and-mighty North — a country in the process of healing after years of bloodletting into the fertile soil of the United States, from Georgia all the way to Pennsylvania.

Was this fair part of the healing? Was that bloodshed necessary to help create the arts and products of the soil and the mine? Is man destined to recycle his events over and over until there is nothing left to bleed, to exhibit, to manufacture?

I can’t get to the other side of the building. The entire grounds surrounding Memorial Hall are fenced off, and I can’t get in. I’m cut off from history, from the dreams of America that Americans have let die. This building is no longer a memorial to anything — it’s a forgotten elegy of America’s past, a shell waiting for rehabilitation. It’s discarded, obsolete. In the millennium, it no longer holds the past because no one remembers the Centennial Exposition. And as I get back in my car, I can’t help but feel sad for the loss of this bit of Philadelphia history — American history.