The Ghost Theaters of Callowhill Street

124) The Ghost Theaters of Callowhill Street

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Hello, and welcome to Adventures in Theater History, where we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. Today we’re going off an adventure together, as we explore the Ghost Theaters of Callowhill Street.

Those of you who’ve come along with me on one of my Philadelphia theater history walking tours in the past know that I often jokingly say: “I See Dead Theaters”. In fact, almost anyone unlucky enough to be walking or driving along a Philly street with me these days gets to hear that same joke. I’ve been studying Philly theater history so much that I can point out literally hundreds of places that were once playhouses or theaters. 

Well, some are still there, of course, but most are long gone now. Sometimes these long vanished venues existed only for a few months, and sometimes they’ve been gone for two hundred years! Sometimes the buildings - or at least the theater’s original exterior walls - are still there, just turned to a different purpose. Sometimes they’ve been totally razed and replaced. But I still see them, in my mind’s eye. I can’t seem to help it. A hazard of the profession, I suppose. This happens especially when I walk along the classic historic corridors of Philly theater: South Street, or Broad Street or Chestnut Street.

But that’s not where we’re going to walk today, you and I. We’re taking a different route, one I’ve never covered in any actual walking tour, but let’s talk about the Near North Side, and the Ghost Theatres of Callowhill Street?

Callowhill was named after Hannah Callowhill, William Penn’s wife, who after his death in 1718 was technically the Proprietor of the colony until her own death five years later. This was not originally Philadelphia proper. Remember the city’s northern border was Vine Street. The eastern part of Callowhill street was in the independent borough of Northern Liberties - some call it the Quaker City’s first suburb. Though at first it was designed to be filled with small gardens and green spaces, its grid of streets was quickly filled with tightly packed houses, churches, warehouses and tenements. To the west of Sixth Street, Callowhill ran through another independent borough with a similarly bucolic name: Spring Garden. By 1854, during the Great Consolidation which put the entirety of Philadelphia County into one sprawling metropolis, these were heavily German neighborhoods. Some Irish as well. After the Civil War there came Latvian, Slovak and Romanian immigrants, too. Many of their Orthodox churches and social clubs can still be found there. 

In the late 19th and early 20th Century the neighborhood became increasingly industrial, as capitalists razed whole blocks of houses to create mills and warehouses. Philadelphia factory owners and brewers, especially, valued the proximity to both the Delaware River docks and the Reading Railroad tracks leading out of the city. The Reading tracks fanned out at the Delaware waterfront, leading to freight terminals and the docks where huge quantities of Pennsylvania coal went out to the ships and piles of lumber came in. To the north of that were built the huge Cramp Shipyards, turning out merchant and marine vessels. In the middle sat the Betz Brewery. Over the far western borders of the neighborhood, beyond Broad Street, arose the huge Baldwin Locomotive Works. 

But during dislocations following World War One and the Great Depression, the neighborhood’s economy slowed down. Plus it got literally stomped on when the Ben Franklin Bridge to New Jersey built huge stone footings and entrance ramps, just to the south. Fleet of trucks and cars coming off the bridge swept through the narrow o=ld streets, or else got stuck in traffic jams. 

Then in the mid-twentieth century, cars won, and folks got in them and drove off, the factories and breweries closed, and jobs left for elsewhere. Even faster than it had grown, the population quickly emptied out. Ripe for “urban renewal” highway projects, a huge swath of its city blocks were wiped out to build that cross town highway connector between I-95 and the Schuylkill that we now call the Vine Street Expressway - 676, if you’re nasty. Even today, if you know the area at all you’ve seen it, and wanted to forget it. It rises like an aqueduct along Callowhill Street, and then bends a little south, and runs along closer to where Vine Street used to be, before it plunges down into the excavated canyon, roaring along below street level under Broad Street, before bursting free and rising up over the bridge across the Schuylkill River. 

Naturally enough, for decades, along Callowhill Street, the remaining neighborhood was left shattered. It was literally bracketed by massive concrete pilings, and oppressed by traffic sounds. Drug customers could easily slip into town via the highway, meet their dealers, and then jump right back on the highway and drive off. Seedy bars and derelict buildings were everywhere.

This was around where David Lynch hung out in the late 1960s when he was an art student at PAFA, ironically enjoying the creepiness, the graffiti, the emptiness, it’s brutality. He told an interviewer in 1987: "Yes, (Philadelphia is) horrible, but in a very interesting way. There were places there that had been allowed to decay, where there was so much fear and crime that just for a moment there was an opening to another world. It was fear, but it was so strong, and so magical, like a magnet." 

Today, I’m happy to report that the area has changed since Lynch lived there fifty yers ago. In recent decades it has become filled with hip new apartment buildings, converted warehouses and such, as young professionals and developers take advantage of its proximity to Center City. Someday it will change again - into who knows what.

But you ask me: This part of town has a theater history? Why yes, yes it does. Amazingly, impressively, it does.. Come with me, as I see dead theaters along Callowhill Street . .  to visit the lost historic Philadelphia theater district of the near north side.

Our first stop is in that weird little strip of buildings that somehow survived the highway construction, in between the river and and 95, north of the Ben Franklin Bridge. Though it’s mostly gentrified now, this was once a working class area, part of the docklands of Philadelphia - between some buildings you can still find old stone steps leading down to what was once the Delaware River waterfront.

If we stop in front of 103 Callowhill St., we can see a series of three black French doors with curtained glass panels. Beside them to the right is a red door with a little sign above it that reads “The Hannah.” This is not to be confused with “The Hannah,” a large new apartment complex about five blocks away. This, in fact, is the Hannah Callowhill Theatre. I’ve been privileged enough to see inside it once, on a tour. But in fact there’s no theater there, right now. The lower level of this building is mostly an archaeological site, where its owners, Matt and Melissa Dunphy - who live on the upper floors - dig into the old 18th Century privy pits beneath. They found some amazing pottery and glass there.

I don’t want to tell too much of their story because they have done it so much better themselves! If you ever have time, find the early episode of their podcast called “The Boghouse” - it’s quite a treat.

But to summarize it quickly. There was ONCE a theater here. In the early 2000s, the ground floor rather rickety old 18th Century building had been renovated by a guy named Joseph Grasso to become “Grasso Magic Theatre” - and it was open from about 2009 to 2014. Judging from photos of the place in newspaper articles I can still find, a small foyer led to a seating area where folks could sit around, and there was a little proscenium stage with curtains and lights. Here, Grasso and various other local magicians would have shows, featuring them doing little sleight of hand tricks, and sometimes accompanied by raunchy burlesque dancers.  It made a minor sensation in Philly nightlife, I guess, until 2014, when Grasso was charged with sexually assaulting a teenage girl at his home out in Montgomery County. Turned out that some of the other magicians he had been hosting were sex offenders, too. All pretty alarming and revolting. Anyway, he went to jail, and then I think died, and that was the end of the Grasso Magic Theatre!

When Matt and Melissa bought the place a few years afterwards, thinking they would turn it into a cool little offbeat performance space - Melissa is a composer of some note, and works often in edgy Philly theater circles - it turned out that the construction of the theater was all terrible, not up to code. Dangerously so, in fact. They had to rip it all out, build a new apartment above it. And while they were doing that they discovered the privy pits. And then they both became archeology buffs and Philly history sleuths. Again - I wont tell their story, they do it much better themselves.

Some day, I hope they will finally put a theater in there again. It’s a nice spot for it.

Okay, now we head up the hill, walking under the roaring clamor of I-95, which has an overpass here. It’ll take us about ten minutes, leaving the highway behind us. Our next stop is 415 Callowhill Street. As we pause here to catch our breath, look to the northwest corner. You are looking at the parking lot for the recently constructed “Gift of Life Howie's House,” a little farther up 4th street. Howie’s House is a charitable/healthcare/housing concern that serves as a “home away from home” - temporary housing for patients and their families who travel to Philadelphia hospital, and are waiting for kidney and liver transplants.

It’s kind of historically apt, in fact, that this is a place for those who are making a journey. Because we are standing right along the terminus of what was once a very old Indian trail dating back to the time of the Lene Lenape, who used it for foot journeys heading up and across the Delaware Valley and over to the Hudson River. In the 18th Century it became the Old York Road, which in colonial times expanded the old Indian trail - though it was called the Old York Road it was in fact the way to New York.

It was quite busy, the major highway north of Philadelphia, leading to Trenton and then across New Jersey to Hoboken, where you could get a ferry to Manhattan. Our old friend George Washington came this way with the retreating Continental Army in 1776, as did our friend George Frederick Cooke in 1811, as he came down from doing shows in New York to appear at the Chestnut Street Theatre.

But eventually as Philly grew, the city itself started traveling up this way, spreading houses and taverns and warehouses, as we mentioned at the beginning.

A church was built here in the 1840s,  and then in the early 1850s the house of worship was converted into a temple of culture: a theater. In its new form, the facade was given tall arched (rundbogenstil) windows - so typical of German architecture of the mid 19th Century, like its contemporary the Academy of Music. But unlike the still living and glowing Academy, this is a story of a zombie theater, which was filled with theatrical life for a few decades and then went out of business.

As this neighborhood boomed and filled with immigrants in the 1850s, all traces of the Lenape were disregarded. And if there was ever a Philly theater that really needed to have a Land Acknowledgement statement in its programs, this was it. But it didn’t, and perhaps it was a little cursed as a result. I’ll remind you that I mentioned it too, in our Episode 12, “Stage of Fire” because during the time it was known as the Atlantic Garden, it almost burned down. But its story is even more fascinatingly complex than that:

I found a clipping from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, dated November 28, 1939. It tells the story of the

“The Concordia had started life as the City Museum and Star Hall in 1854,” it says. “It was opened with a performance of “As You Like It.”  . .  Samuel Ashton and Co. were listed as the proprietors, who stated that they proposed to offer only ‘first class attractions for the edification of lovers of the dramatic art.’”

“For those who weren’t quite up to Shakespeare, the lower floor of the two-story building was given over to [what the managers called] ‘an elegant temple of science and pleasure.’  This looks to have been mostly stuffed birds, seashells and rock collections but there was also “an Indian cabinet, where the handicraft of aborigines was on view at 25 cents a look.”

“Through the Civil War period the theater was one of the city’s most fashionable playhouses, until it was swept by fire in 1868. It was rebuilt the next year, and a gallery was added. Thereafter it led a checkered career . . It was [renamed the Concordia] and it was the home for a number of years of light operas in German. Most of the Gilbert & Sullivan operas were presented in German [translation] at the old Concordia. Many foreign stars played here [as well] including Madame Januschek.”

“After 1880 . . the theater went into a decline. For a period it hosted Lew Simmons’ minstrel company. After that it was used intermittently for the entertainment of various German and Jewish societies of the neighborhood - until it passed into the hands of [the Philadelphia Beer King] John Betz, some time near 1890.”

“For [fifty] years it had been [a bottling plant, a small] part of the [huge redbrick Victorian pile of the massive] Betz brewery. Bottling machines filled the lower floor. In the peanut gallery where the ‘gods’ of 1870 looked down upon the world of fashion in the parquet circle and munched candy as they watched “East Lynne”, empty beer cases were stored.” During the Prohibition of the 1920s, the brewery mostly closed, and empty cases just stayed there, gathering dust.

“[But now, in 1939] the old Concordia Theater, which turned out its gas lights and lowered its last curtain so long ago that only our grandfathers remember it, came back to life  . . .  Last August, when the Liebman company bought the Betz property at a bankruptcy sale, it   . . planned to raze the whole brewery -  the bottling plant along with the rest. It was then that a survey of the property revealed the proscenium arch of the old theater, and the curved sweep of the gallery railing. Researches were made, and the old Concordi began to re-emerge from its dust. Now a happy ending lies ahead, a career as a furniture warehouse for J.B. Liebman and Company.”

And there the story ends, but of course the reporter for the Evening Bulletin could not see into the future. It’s true it survived for a while as a furniture warehouse. But times kept changing. The old theater building on 410 Callowhill St., which had survived so long, a literal zombie theater in a city with so  many theatrical ghosts, was finally torn down in 1971, when the massive crosstown Vine Street Expressway project forever transformed the neighborhood. 

Let’s keep moving along here, six more blocks to the west. If you look at old maps of the city, Callowhill used to be extra broad here, all the way to seventh street, that’s because there used to be a long strip of market stalls from Fourth to Seventh, replacing the market that once stood along Market Street. It was this wide anomaly that later city planners seized on to drive a highway through here, because it meant they had to knock down less buildings. . . [SFX, FOOTSTEPS. TRAFFIC. CROSSFADE]. As we pass by Seventh Street, we can see to the north, beyond Willow Street, what is now called “Franklin Music Hall,” but to Philadelphians of an older generation it will always be The Electric Factory, a music venue that was carved out of the old General Electric Switchgear plant. At Seventh, Callowhill now takes an odd little jog to the south - again an artifact of that old long gone market area, which ended here.

We head three blocks to the west. Ridge Avenue, that long weird diagonal artery that cuts right across North Philadelphia - a relic of an early 19th Century industrial turnpike that went to Pottstown and Reading  - begins just a block to the South on Wood Street.  On the southwest corner of Callowhill, at 10th and Ridge, you see a large rectangular two-story building, painted gray. This is a gray ghost of a former Philly theater, standing in plain sight. It is, in fact, the old National Theatre.

The corner of 10th & Callowhill Streets in Philadelphia has a long history in popular entertainment in the city. Since it was a bustling intersection and also near the railroad, in the late 1860s it became the first home of the Great National Circus company organized by Adam Forepaugh (1831-1890), the Philadelphia circus tycoon who was a great rival of P.T. Barnum. As we know circuses originally performed in theater buildings, not tents, though this was about to change. (Eventually Forepaugh would establish the winter quarters for his huge touring circus company somewhat farther north in the city, at Mercer & Lehigh, where some former stable buildings remain today.). 

By the 1870s, though, the former had become a real theatre, under the management of William Gilmore. Though it catered to a somewhat downmarket crowd, although once again - in a rather rare image of the theater that I found, we can see it also had those rundbogenstil windows. This was then a German neighborhood, remember. 

Despite these respectable looking windows, the theater at the corner of 10th and Callowhill Streets had been a nuisance to the neighbors, and neighbors complained there was public drinking and rude behavior frequently spilling out onto the street.

Bad language was often heard. "Some of the parties would hail their companions in a boisterous manner, such as 'Halloo, Scuds!', 'Micky!' and occasionally a girl would greet another female in a manner not over polite."

Furthermore, it was reported that "several posters which were displayed on the outside of the building to the gaze of churchgoers on Sunday mornings were offered in evidence. They were printed in glowing colors, and stated that they would produce the original Parisian Can-Can in all its glory by twenty of America's shapeliest daughters."

In March of 1875 the National theater was raided by the police and the owners and dancers all hauled into the Philadelphia Court of Quarter Sessions, Judge Ludlow, presiding.

Several Philadelphia policemen testified that they had seen "High kicking" indulged in that was "shockingly disgusting, and laid over anything they had witnessed before.” It was alleged that a mere boy was seen in the audience, mouth agape, holding "a programme and a pair of opera glasses." However, upon cross-examination by the defense, one of the policemen admitted he often received free tickets to the shows at Gilmore's, but denied that he had once been kicked out of the theater for being drunk and had sworn revenge. "Counsel then asked the witness if had not been refused drinks at the place, and to his query the officer replied, ‘No! They never refuse anybody drinks, not even boys.’"

But on the whole the testimony seemed damning. "The descriptions of sworn witnesses were quite unfit to print, and it seems incredible that any man could have dared to give an entertainment which would have been hissed even in Paris," huffed the Wilmington Daily Commercial.

By April 1st, the jury had arrived at a verdict, and they declared the defendants NOT GUILTY.  According to one juror interviewed later in the Philadelphia Times, the consensus among most of them during the trial was that “it was a put-up job on poor Gilmore” by a rival producer, and that they spent most of their time in the jury room playing cards. 

Those of you who’ve read my book will recognize the National as the place where in 1876, Annie Kemp Bowler, the Original Stalacta, had fallen onto the stage during a performance of The Black Crook, and had died shortly thereafter. We do have one rare photograph of that production, dated November 6, 1876, after Annie had died - which shows a scene from the Black Crook. This is the only source I know of which shows the National’s actual stage. A big proscenium arch is flanked by two sets of theater boxes. Nothing remarkable, but still a glimpse of a lost theater world. I’ll put it, along with all the other places I’ve mentioned in the accompanying blog post.

In 1878 there was more tragedy at the National Theatre, when a haberdasher named Daniel Archer was killed during an argument in the theater's bar by a sometime actor named Augustus Boyle - aka Harry G. Richmond. A heavy beer glass was the murder weapon. If you want to hear the whole fascinating and fairly sordid story, once again I’m going to recommend to you another podcast - my friend Joe Lex told this story in the his show “All Bones Considered” episode #39 - an episode that is rather poignantly titled: “In Heaven There is No Beer.”

In 1917 the National finally closed as a theater, and unlike other similar theaters it did not become a movie house. I guess there weren’t enough people around anymore. The building was sold to the American Ice Company. Most of the interior was torn out and reconfigured. It would remain a site for ice manufacturing and distribution until the mid 1960s. In the 1970s, as the neighborhood underwent an even steeper decline, the empty building was severely damaged by a fire, and then became a food distribution warehouse.

During the recent real estate boom in Philadelphia, this part of the city has become more upscale and desirable to 'urban pioneers' (or 'gentrifiers' if you prefer). Just before the current pandemic struck, it was purchased and remodeled by the The Cliffs Climbing + Fitness Company, who have installed a huge rock climbing and indoor mountaineering complex inside. It suffered during the lockdown,  I suppose, because it no longer has that name it is now Movement - and you can do yoga and take fitness classes there, as well as rock climbing. But as we walk by today, we can see that it seems to be doing pretty well. Lots of folks in yoga pants and fitness gear going in about. I’m not sure if any part of the old stage remains there. Probably not. Possibly the large pillar by the entrance door is original. The tall rounded lobby windows are all gone . .but I would say the exterior walls - well that’s the old National. Still there. A theater ghost in plain sight. Nobody seems to know about it but me - and now I guess you do, too.

As we continue our walking tour to the west, we will pass quickly by Underground Arts, near the corner of Callowhill and 12th Street - from about 2009 to 2019 this hosted quite a few plays and performances during the annual Philadelphia Fringe Festival. I saw a few myself. Although since the pandemic it’s become mostly a club where you can listen to rock bands and rap artists. At any rate we’re leaving Underground Arts for another episode I play to do, when we talk about former industrial sites that have at one time or another become venues for the Fringe.

So we’re going to keep walking right past Broad Street, past 15th Street, until we pass by the big loop of entrance ramps that lead down towards the Expressway. Then come to 16th Street, and there we’re going to make a left, and head south for a hundred feet or so and there I will point you towards the east and show you: Nothing.

Because I can’t point to anything at the former address of 311 S. 16th St. A hundred years ago, of course there was a small building - formerly belonging to the Catholic Total Abstinence Society, and then in the early 1930s converted into the New Theater. (Annoyingly, this is one of at least SIX buildings that have been called the New Theatre in Philly history, but don’t worry about it now, because . . .  it’s not there. Nothing is there. Just empty air.

Here’s what WAS there, according to that invaluable guide written as part of a New Deal project, the WPA Guide to Philadelphia, in its section about the the theaters of the city:

“To foster greater cooperation between the little groups, the New Theatre . . sponsored a theatre festival in 1936. This marked the third conference of the New Theatre League, at which the Philadelphia center acted as a host to more than 100 delegates from similar organizations across the country.”

“With the broadcast of a scene from Albert Bein’s Let Freedom Ring, in March 1926, the New Theatre made its radio debut. In addition to their dramatic activities, these players also maintain a Film Section, which from time to time has made available to its audiences, at low prices, such screen plays as Ten Days that Shook the World, Broken Shoes, Poil de Carotte, and Thunder Over Mexico. Outstanding achievements in the dramatic field were the presentation of Black Pit at the Erlanger Theatre, Too Late to Die at the Locust, and the only Philadelphia performance of Let Freedom Ring at their own theatre on North 16th Street.”
 
Not just theater, but fine arts too, because we can find this article in the Inquirer for Sunday, January 23rd, 1938: “A mural by Razel Kaoustin created for the New Theater, 311 N. 16th Street will be unveiled there tonight. Speakers will include Dr. Albert C. Barnes . . In the lobby will be an exhibition of painting and drawing by Joseph Hirsch.”

So, evidently, the New Theater must have been quite an organization - and some very interesting and prominent people, like Dr. Barnes, sometimes showed up there..  and  it was quite an active and earnest little theater group of Philadelphia’s left wing intellectuals and theater folk. Jasper Deeter from the Hedgerow worked there, directing a couple shows, as did Lem Ward, a promising young protege of Deeter’s who sadly met an untimely death in 1942. 

Sounds amazing. So . . What happened to the New Theater? Well, it turned out that this was all a front. - in reality the New Theatre was a recruitment arm of the Communist Party of the USA. It  fell apart in 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, as the first its patron the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis, and then was invaded by them. Like other similar theater groups elsewhere in the USA, it was disbanded, and would not have survived the postwar McCarthy Era anyway. 

But it has disappeared so completely! No photos of the theater, no production stills, nothing.  I think if I want to ever find out more about it, I may have to put in a FOIA request for old files from the FBI, because it was probably under a lot of surveillance back in the day. 

But even after the New Theater stopped meeting there, the building at least stayed there for a while - right? Well yes, until the late 50s and early 60s, when this whole block - and many others besides it along Callowhill, Wood and Vine Streets were just torn down and then . . dug up. The entire neighborhood was literally vaporized. Where the New Theatre once stood is not only empty, there’s nothing, just some mounds of earth, shaped by a landscape architect into what perhaps the ground looked like before the Europeans ever arrived here. In fact, here a bit of Philadelphia the Lenni Lenape might actually recognize - if they just ignore all the huge buildings ringing it, like the Mormon Temple complex nearby. It’s a bit of Land Acknowledgement, I suppose. 

In this case, when I wave my hand at where the New Theatre once was,. . I can’t see it in my mind’s eye - I’ve never even found a photograph of it. So far, anyway. Maybe I will someday. There’s an archive somewhere in this city, I just know, where there are photos and letters and newspaper clippings and playscripts and photos of eager people hard at work on their craft. The Dead Theaters and Ghosts of Callowhill Street are just waiting to be discovered - and to haunt us, once again. 

I’m Peter Schmitz. Our opening and closing theme music is by Christopher Mark Colucci, Schumann’s “Etude Symphonique” was played by Shura Cherkasky. I’ll put images of the places I talked about today on the website. Thanks for being a part of my audio walking tour! Thank you for supporting the podcast, and for coming along with me on another adventure in theater history, Philadelphia.

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Text copyright © Peter Schmitz 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED