PHILADELPHIA: IMMIGRANT CITY

Fredric M. Miller

From the time of its founding in 1682, Philadelphia has been both an immigrant port and a city of immigrants.  In fact, in 1683 when Dutch and German religious groups founded Germantown  now part of Philadelphia  they established the first settlement of non-British Europeans in any English colony.  But that event proved exceptional, for the Germantown settlers not only landed in Philadelphia, but also stayed in the area.  Historically, by contrast, most people who arrived in the city soon made their way elsewhere while most immigrants who settled locally had arrived through another port, usually New York, just ninety miles to the northeast.  Because the latter group has predominated since the 1800s, the number of immigrants living in Philadelphia has been much larger than the volume of direct migration might indicate.  Philadelphia as a port of entry has been very different from, and less important than, Philadelphia as an immigrant city.

Nevertheless, the history of Philadelphia as an immigrant port is a rich and complex story of peaks and valleys, false starts, and perseverance against natural disadvantages.  The city is 110 miles from the ocean, up a shallow bay and what used to a winding river channel.  The Delaware River froze often, unlike New York's harbor, and the ocean voyage from Europe to Philadelphia is 200 miles longer than the journey to New York.  Even so, between 1815 and 1985 more than 1,300,000 immigrants entered America through Philadelphia about a quarter of a million before 1873, followed by a flood of just over a million during the next 50 years.  And despite quotas and limits, yet another hundred thousand immigrants arrived in Philadelphia since the mid-1920's.  From the settlement of Germantown in the seventeenth century to the arrival of the Koreans in the 1980s, then, William Penn's ``City of Brotherly Love" has played a role in every significant migration to this century.

In national terms, Philadelphia was certainly most important as an immigrant port in the eighteenth century.  Beginning about 1717, when the Provincial Assembly ordered ship captains to submit passenger lists to officials, there were true mass migrations of Germans and of Scotch-Irish directly to Philadelphia.  In 1749, for example, 22 ships with a total of 7000 immigrants from the Rhineland made the seven-week voyage to the city.  In all, about 70,000 Germans landed there before the Revolution and Philadelphia also received the largest share of the over 150,000 Scotch-Irish who migrated from Ulster to the colonies.  In both groups, the majority were so poor that they had come as indentured servants or as ``redemptioners" who had to work off the borrowed price of their passage.  Many were thus forced to stay in the city, helping to make it the largest in the colonies by the time of the Revolution.

Large scale European immigration to the new United States did not begin until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.  By then, New York was becoming the nation's chief port and city while the Philadelphia business community was turning its interest inland.  There were still Philadelphia merchants active in overseas trade, however, and many ships were bringing immigrants to the city.  IN order to prevent them from also brining in contagious diseases such as yellow fever, by 1798 a quarantine hospital, the Lazaretto, had been built a few miles below Philadelphia.  After 1815 it was busy.  In the 1820s alone nearly 20,000 immigrants, almost ten percent of the national total, came to the city as two lines of Philadelphia sailing ships ran regularly to Liverpool, the main center for Irish as well as English emigration.  Steerage tickets cost between five and seven pounds while a good factory wage in the United Kingdom was one pound per week.  Of the two lines, Thomas Cope's was easily the more important.  Cope began his Liverpool service in 1821, and his ships the Tonawanda, Tuscarora, and Wyoming carried thousands to Philadelphia over the next four decades. 

Immigration continued steadily in the 1830s and early 1840s, with the Cope ships joined occasionally by other sailings from British and continental ports.  Between 1830 and the great famine migration of 1847, about 60,000 immigrants landed in Philadelphia.  But many more people were by this time coming to the city via New York, for Philadelphia's share of all immigrant arrivals had fallen to about five percent, where it would stay until the Civil War.  One reason was simply ice in the river.  The city finally bought an iceboat in 1838, but shippers were not confident it would prevail against the five-foot thick ridges of ice.  That same year, moreover, transatlantic steam navigation was proved practicable, but because local  businessmen failed to raise funds for a Philadelphia-based line, the city faced the massive Irish and German migrations of the late 1840s with only its one line of sailing ships to Europe

In any case, demand quickly brought forth an increased supply.  Two new lines of sailing ships were established between Liverpool and Philadelphia; another line plied between Philadelphia and Londonderry and individual ships sailed from other ports.  All told in the eight years from 1847 through 1854, over 120,000 immigrants arrived in Philadelphia, now the nation's fourth largest immigrant port.  The total for 1853 alone  19,211  exceeded the total for the entire decade of the 1820s. 

The city's first steamship line, known officially as the Liverpool and Philadelphia Steam Ship Company, was owned by William Inman and his partners the Richardson Brothers, who were Liverpool Quakers.  In 1850 Inman convinced the Richardsons to buy a new steamship named the City of Glasgow, which left Liverpool on December 17 with 400 passengers and arrived only ten days later in Philadelphia.  Within a few years it had been joined by more ``City" ships, named after Manchester, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.  A steerage ticket cost eight pounds eight shillings  several months' wages for a laborer  and business was brisk.  In 1854 the City of Manchester made five trips to Philadelphia, with as many as 532 passengers each time.  But that year saw disaster as well.  The City of Glasgow disappeared in March on its way to Philadelphia with 430 passengers.  In September, the City of Philadelphia, went aground on Cape Race, Newfoundland.  The passengers were saved but the ship was lost.  The next year, the Richardsons withdrew from the business when Inman leased their ships to France for use in war, and early in 1857 Inman dropped service to Philadelphia in favor of New York.

Of course, many sailing ships continued to bring immigrants to the wharves lining the Delaware riverfront.  Some companies tried to offset the extra travel time by reducing fares below those to New York.  But the tedious two-week voyage around Cape May and up the river  all the more frustrating since land was always in sight  continued to limit immigration through Philadelphia.

One company which operated a profitable, if small, sailing operation was McCorbell & Co. of Londonderry, in what is now Northern Ireland.  In July 1851, the Emigration Officer at Londonderry, Edward Smith, offered a Parliamentary inquiry a detailed account of the migration to Philadelphia.  He noted that in the first half of 1851, with the effects of the great famine still evident, thirteen ships from Londonderry had gone to Philadelphia compared to four to New York and five to Canada.  The year's total migration to Philadelphia was probably around 2500 already, he explained, and there likely would be seven more voyages to that city before sailings halted in the early fall.  The Emigration Officer thought that Londonderry emigrants were somewhat wealthier than the Irish who left from Liverpool since fares from the latter city were even lower.  Nevertheless, the money that recent arrivals in America remitted for the passage of others was central to the whole link between Londonderry and Philadelphia.  According to Smith, one firm  probably McCorbell  had received from America 24,000 pounds for tickets in 1850 alone.

The season for emigration to Philadelphia lasted from April to October, and the trip took about a month, Smith continued.  On the McCorbell ships, which accommodated up to four hundred passengers per voyage, a bulkhead divided their one deck into intermediate and steerage classes.  The steerage berths were six feet by six feet and held four people each.  While single men and single women were separated, two married couples were sometimes berthed together.  On the return trip to Londonderry, the passengers were replaced by ``Indian" corn.

The McCorbell line continued to service Philadelphia until about 1870, transporting 1359 immigrants from Londonderry as late as 1865, but the days of immigration by sail were clearly numbered.  The Cope line was also winding down by this time.  Its ships had been busy in the 1850s bringing English and Irish emigrants from Liverpool to Philadelphia, but after 1868 they could no longer compete against the steamers.

The next five years were the low point in the history of Philadelphia as an immigrant port.  Between 1855 and 1864, more than 50,000 immigrants had come to the city, but in 1872, when 400,000 people migrated to America, Philadelphia's officially recorded share was only 154, including 48 Spaniards, 19 Frenchmen, and a hardly credible two immigrants from Ireland.

The decline of direct immigration was in marked contrast to Philadelphia's emergence as one of the great immigrant cities of the mid-nineteenth century.  What had been a mercantile city of about 30,000 during the Revolutionary War had grown into a leading industrial metropolis of over 400,000 people by 1850.  The urban area stretched all the way to the Schuylkill River on the west and beyond William Penn's old boundaries on the north and south to include the working-class and immigrant neighborhoods of Kensington, Southwark, Moyamensing, and the Northern Liberties.  As a result of the immigrant wave of the previous decade, in 1850 three out of ten Philadelphians were foreign-born, the highest proportion ever recorded.  The Germans and Irish accounted for more than three-quarters of the total, as about 20,000 of the former and 70,000 of the latter lived in Philadelphia.

In the absence of significant public transportation, most Philadelphians of all origins and classes lived near their jobs, and the immigrants were thus spread around the city far more than later groups would be.  There were some ethnic concentrations, generally based on job specialization and related income levels.  The Irish were initially much poorer than the Germans as a group.  In 1850, nearly half of them worked in day labor, handloom weaving, or carting, and less than a third of them in skilled trades.  The construction laborers, especially, lived in alleys and sidestreets all over Philadelphia although there were some Irish concentrations in Southwark, Moyamensing, and Grays' Ferry along the southern borders of the city.  Two-thirds of the Germans, by contrast, were employed in trades, such as tailoring, shoemaking, and baking, and the groups had settled fairly heavily in the Northern Liberties and other newer manufacturing districts to the northeast of the old city.  Even so, those areas were neither predominantly German nor home to a large proportion of the city's German immigrants.

Over the next two decades, Philadelphia's immigrant population continued to increase steadily though its ethnic mixture remained stable.  By the mid 1870s Philadelphia, having frown by another 350,000, was home to about three-quarters of a million people, and its economy was firmly based on dozens of major enterprises in the textile, metal products, machine goods, printing and chemical industries.  Over a quarter of the population was foreign-born; 100,000 Irish and 50,000 Germans accounted for more than five-sixths of the city's immigrants, while almost all of the other immigrants were from England or Scotland.  Philadelphia's physical expansion matched its population growth.  In 1858 horse car lines had begun running on iron rails, and soon after the Civil War, developers had started to build large tracts of uniform row-houses east of Broad Street in North and South Philadelphia and across the Schuylkill in West Philadelphia.  Farther to the northwest, Germantown became a middle-class commuter suburb.

In the 1870s, as at mid-century, German and British immigrants were much more common the skilled trades than were the Irish.  True, more of the Irish now had good factory jobs, but many remained in unskilled labor, largely as a result of their European background.  There, most Irish emigrants, unlike their German and English counterparts, had been farm laborers or domestic servants.  Overall, however, a wide range of skilled workers had been drawn to Philadelphia.

Unable to afford either the horsecar fare or the new houses, most laborers and industrial workers remained tied to the neighborhoods in which they worked, while more affluent Philadelphians of all ethnic groups were moving out of the old parts of the city and into the northwest and west.  German-born Philadelphians now lived all over the city. Although the concentration of German population in the Northern Liberties and Kensington had expanded into other parts of north and northeast Philadelphia.  The Kensington mill district also had a significant population of British and Irish immigrants.  AT the same time, a large community of Irish skilled workers and middle-class families had developed west of Broad Street near South Street, but that was by no means a predominantly Irish area.  Likewise, there was no Irish ghetto - or German ghetto - in the later sense of the term.  At the opposite end of the social spectrum, some Irish businessmen and professionals had moved to suburbs while others were living downtown in the traditional style of wealthy Philadelphians.

The glaring contrast of the early 1870s between Philadelphia's immigrant-based expansion and its moribund immigrant port did not last long.  In 1873 the establishment of two modern steamship companies ushered in a fifty-year period of active immigration, during which just over a million immigrants arrived in the city and Philadelphia resumed its place as the fourth largest immigrant port in the country. 

The more important of the two companies, the American Line, was founded with support from the Pennsylvania Railroad and opened the city's first immigrant station at a railroad-owned pier at the foot of Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia.  Having been built at Philadelphia's Cramp's Shipyard, the line's first steamer, the Ohio, began regular service to Liverpool via Queenstown in Ireland in 1873.  Three other modern iron steamers, the Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois soon joined the fleet, each carrying about 400 passengers.  The line also leased up to a half-dozen other ships in the 1880s so that it could offer three sailings between Liverpool and Philadelphia per week.  In 1882 alone the American Line brought 17,342 passengers to Philadelphia.

Although it began serving New York in the 1890s, the American Line never abandoned Philadelphia, adding ships with such local names as the Kensington, Southwark, Haverford, and Merion to the Philadelphia run around the turn of the century.  By then the American Line's prosperity was firmly based on the new waves of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who sailed to America from British ports.  It transported most of the roughly 20,000 immigrants arriving at Philadelphia each year between 1880 and 1910.  After World War I the line briefly resumed immigrant service from Liverpool, but when the United States severely curtailed immigration in 1924, the service came to a halt. 

Encouraged by the success of both the American Line and its major local competitor, the Red Star Line, which connected Philadelphia with the Continent directly through Antwerp, Belgium, larger companies extended service to the city although only the American Line offered weekly sailings.  In 1898 the major Germany company, the Hamburg-American Line, started a run between Hamburg and Philadelphia which drew directly on the great Jewish and Polish migrations.  Previously, few German passengers or immigrant ships had come to Philadelphia, but by the eve of World War I, four Hamburg-American ships regularly sailed through to Philadelphia after stopping in Boston.  They were joined by ships of the Holland-America, Italia, and North German Lloyd lines as Philadelphia's immigrant arrivals rose to a peak of over 60,000 in 1913.  Between 1910 and 1914, at the height of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Philadelphia was the third most important immigrant port in the country.

The First World War put an abrupt end to this growth.  By 1923, only the old Haverford, now leased to Britain's White Star Line, carried large numbers of immigrants to Philadelphia.  The restrictive immigration quotas implemented the next year ended even that activity, reducing the booming immigration of only ten years earlier to nothing more than a memory.

The fifty years of large scale immigration naturally had a profound effect on the city's immigration facilities.  In the nineteenth century, Philadelphia required almost all ships coming to Philadelphia from abroad between the spring and the fall to stop first for a health inspection at the Lazaretto in Essington, eight miles down river from the city.  There vessels carrying passengers with infectious diseases could be isolated for up to several months at a complex that included a hospital capable of housing 500 patients and a steam disinfecting plant able to heat contaminated clothing and baggage to 220 degrees.

Nevertheless, in 1884, the federal government established a quarantine station of its own at the moth of the Delaware Bay to check ships coming from ports with reported infections and supplemented it nine years later with another national station - mainly for disinfecting - at Reedy Island, some forty-five miles below Philadelphia.  The duplicate examinations by state and national authorities continued to annoy passengers until 1913 when inspectors were centralized at Marcus Hook, 20 miles from Philadelphia docks.  Finally, in 1919 the state ended its inspection service.  In any case, Philadelphia had been more than adequately protected against imported diseases and after 1865 experience no epidemics of the cholera prevalent in many European ports.

Very few people, however, were kept out either by health precautions or by the federal laws that from 1882 on barred paupers and criminals.  By various means, not all of them strictly legal, immigrants passed inspection.  In 1901-02, for example, of 17,175 arrivals in Philadelphia, only 26 were detained for diseases and only 81 were held in the federal center for illegal aliens at Second and Christian Streets - 80 as paupers and one as a convict.  As in New York, the ``Golden Door" was still open in Philadelphia. 

Almost all immigrants made their first contact with America at the piers and immigrant stations and according to all accounts, for most who came through Philadelphia that was their only contact with the city, for relatives or employers quickly took them elsewhere.  From the 1870's through the early 1920's the waterfront was a bustling place, especially around the Washington Avenue wharves where the American and Red Star Lines docked.  This was an area of warehouses, factories, sugar refineries, freight depots, and grain elevators, all connected to the vast yards of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  The railroad owned the wharves, and because it effectively controlled the immigrant traffic, in the 1870's it had constructed a two-story facility for receiving immigrants.  Having already had their medical examinations downriver, at Washington Avenue the immigrants passed through customs inspections and then went downstairs to a ticket office and reception area from when they could board trains and leave the city. 

As immigration increased, it outgrew the capacity of the Washington Avenue building.  In 1896 the railroad spent $10,000 to expand that capacity from 300 to 1,500 people and to modernize the whole facility, equipping it with electric lights and steam heat.  Passengers now disembarked directly into the building's second story for what may have been their third medical examination and questioning.  The first floor had a ticket office, money exchange, women's dressing room, waiting room, and travel information bureau.  As up to eight inspectors greeted each ship, it was estimated that 300 English-speaking or 150 non-English-speaking passengers could be processed each hour.

The station naturally became one of the most colorful places in Philadelphia.  Inside, for example, was apart of the examination room called the ``Altar."  Since under some conditions single women were prevented from landing, many hurried unions were celebrated on the spot.  Outside, there was usually a crowd of entrepreneurs eager to charge the newcomers exorbitant rates for a variety of needed and unneeded services.

Shortly before World War I the surging immigrant traffic spread to other Philadelphia piers.  By 1912, the Red Star Line had a pier on Reed Street in South Philadelphia; the North German Lloyd landed north of Washington Avenue at Fitzwater Street; and the Allan Line docked north of the downtown at Callowhill Street.  In addition, a municipal immigrant station on a 571-foot-long pier at Vine Street served the Italian ships.  They city renovated the station between 1909 and 1911 and built an immigrant receiving area on its new upper deck, but because the station had no regular staff, the federal inspectors came over from Washington Avenue only when a ship arrived.

Just as the remodeling at Vine Street was starting, Philadelphia's immigration facilities became embroiled in a three-year-long controversy.  In an attempt to divert some immigrant traffic away from New York's Ellis Island, Congress was funding construction of new immigrant stations around the country.  But the $250,000 it appropriated for Philadelphia in 1909 was not enough to purchase any riverfront site within the city's limits.  Finally, a political boss from Gloucester City, New Jersey, name William Thompson sold his own five-acre estate to the government some two years later, but World War I interrupted construction.  The one building finished before the war was used only for a detention center and immigration service offices.  Meanwhile, since the Washington Avenue station had been torn down in 1915, inspections now took place on the ships after they docked.  With immigration restriction pending in the postwar years, work at Gloucester City was not resumed, and the Delaware Valley never received its anticipated equivalent of Ellis Island.

The immigrant quotas of the early twenties that killed that project brought an end to a half century of direct immigration to the port of Philadelphia, but in the five decades that had begun with the opening of the American and Red Star Lines in 1873, the city had been irreversibly transformed by immigration.  At first, Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany continued to be the chief sources of immigrants to Philadelphia.  The Census of 1880 for example, revealed that more than 90 percent of the city's 200,000 foreign-born residents were from Germany or the British Isles, half of them from Ireland alone.  But the eighties witnessed the start of a massive change, even though most of the city's immigrants continued to come via New York rather than directly to Philadelphia.  As late as 1900, the Germans, Irish, and British still made up well over two-thirds of Philadelphia's foreign-born but close to 30,000 Russian Jews and 20,000 Italians already lived in the city.  Only twenty years later, the Italians nearly equaled the Irish at more than 60,000 while the Russian Jews numbered almost 100,000, and there were now more Philadelphians who had been born in Poland (31,112) than in England (30,886).  By 1930, after the final burst of immigration in the early twenties, immigrants and their children accounted for almost a million Philadelphians including about 200,000 Italians and an equal number of eastern European Jews.  Overall, the city's population had grown from 847,170 to 1,950,961 in the half century between 1880 and 1930. 

Industrial expansion and an abundance of cheap housing fueled Philadelphia's population growth as city boosters dubbed it both ``the workshop of the world" and the ``city of homes."  At the turn of the century Philadelphia led the nation in such diverse industries as the production of locomotives, streetcars, saws, hosiery, hats, leather goods, and cigars, while it ranked second in the manufacture of drugs and chemicals and in the refining of sugar and petroleum.  Because most of these industries relied on skilled and semi-skilled workers rather than on massive concentrations of unskilled laborers, Philadelphia attracted fewer Slavic immigrants than cities such as Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago.  Also, because Philadelphia's relatively-skilled workers were fairly well-paid, they could afford to buy many of the several hundred thousand rowhomes built between 1880 and 1920.  After the electrification of the streetcar lines in the 1890's had greatly extended the practical commuting distance, rowhouse development filled in the areas between the industrial belts that extended for miles along the city's rivers and railroad lines.  By the twenties, nearly half of all Philadelphians owned their own residences, and the city's population density was remarkably low.

A complex mixture of ethnic relationships, customs, occupational specializations, and neighborhood settlements now characterized immigrant Philadelphia.  In the early twentieth century, the Irish and the German remained fairly evenly distributed around the city, relatively few of them in recognizable ethnic enclaves.  Both groups were now substantially middle class, employed in skilled industrial or white-collar occupations.  Along with those of British background, they tended to predominate in the commuter developments along the new trolley and subway lines extending through West Philadelphia and such parts of northern Philadelphia as Olney, Oak Lane, and Logan.  For these groups, ethnic cultural, social, religious and political ties remained important, but were far from dominant in their lives.

The situation of the new immigrant groups was very different.  In the first decades of this century, Italians, Poles, and Jews were much more concentrated in traditional ethnic neighborhoods and streets.   Comprising a large proportion of the city's laborers, unskilled workers, and small merchants, they generally had to live close to their jobs.  At first, both the Jews and the Italians crowded into the old streets and alleys not far from the Delaware while the Poles settled in outlying heavy industrial areas, especially Manayunk, Nicetown and Bridesburg.

After the First World War the groups began to disperse geographically.  The Italians, now well established in the garment, construction, and waterfront industries, enlarged their settlement in South Philadelphia further to the south and west.  In contrast, the Jews moved out to several different parts of North and West Philadelphia, leaving only modest communities in the old part of the city they had shared with the Italians.  Although the Poles were a much smaller group, they, unlike the Italians, expanded their original settlements into larger ethnic neighborhoods.  In addition, the new immigrant groups preserved their unity through family ties, fraternal groups, and religious congregations so that, by the 1920's, Philadelphia had as rich and complex an ethnic life as any city in the country.

Philadelphia, however, was no longer a significant immigrant port of entry.  The quotas limiting immigration from southern and eastern Europe put an end to an already-ailing immigrant business.  The 9,555 immigrants of 1924 were followed by just 731 in 1925, and the total did not again exceed a thousand for nearly twenty years.  Indeed, by 1929 more illegals were being deported through the Gloucester City detention center then were being admitted through the port.  Moreover, Philadelphia's decline was much steeper than the national decrease in immigration.  Although the city had received five percent of all immigrants from the 1870s until World War I, in the postwar years it received less than one percent.

Unlike any previous trough, the decline in twentieth-century immigration to Philadelphia has not been reversed.  Still, the city has received some members of each major modern immigrant group, including up to 16,000 Displaced Persons from eastern Europe after World War II and much smaller numbers of Hungarians in 1956-57, Cubans in the early sixties, Soviet Jews in the early seventies, and Indochinese refugees after 1975.  During the 1950's and 1960's as well, a small stream of immigrants continued to follow the previous waves from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Britain, and after reform of the immigration laws in the late sixties, those newcomers were joined by Greeks, Filipinos and Koreans.  By that time, as in other ports of entry around the country, the international airport had become the center for immigration to Philadelphia.  The overall total of direct immigrants to the city remained low, however, numbering only about 35,000 for the entire decade of the seventies despite the liberalized legislation and special refugee provisions.

Today, the contrast between the immigrant port and the immigrant city still characterizes Philadelphia.  For instance, there were 127,000 foreign-born Philadelphians in 1970, and many more people were being naturalized in the city than actually arrived through the airport.  By 1980-81, when the largest single group naturalized was the Koreans, census figures showed that they city contained over 20,000 persons of Asian ancestry, and over 2,000 Cubans.  Visible Irish, Italian, Jewish and Polish neighborhoods remained in Gray's Ferry, South Philadelphia, Oxford Circle, and Bridesburg respectively.  And there were new communities of Koreans, Vietnamese, and Greeks in areas such as Olney, Logan, and West Philadelphia that had housed earlier waves of immigrants.  As Philadelphia enters its fourth century in the 1980's, enduring ethnic traditions and the establishment of new immigrant settlements have combined to maintain the immigrant city's historic diversity even though Philadelphia is no longer a major American port of entry.

Immigration statistics are unfortunately inconsistent.  In general, local figures from 1820-1867 indicate alien passengers arrived; from 1868 to 1905, they include all new arrivals; after 1906, they include all immigrant and nonimmigrant aliens.  However, the vast majority of all these groups in Philadelphia were, in fact, immigrants.  Sources include William J. Bromwell, History of Immigration to the United States (New York:, 1856); United States Department of the Treasury, Foreign Commerce and navigation of the United States, (1868-1892); Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration and Naturalization Service (1941-).

About the Author: Fredric Miller was at the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He held a Ph.D. (1972) and MLS (1973) degrees from the University of Wisconsin and was cofounder and codirector of the Public History Program at Temple University of Philadelphia.  He coauthored Still Philadelphia: A Photographic History, 1890-1920 and has written several articles about British and Philadelphia social history, archival theory, and management.

The Illustration: Engraving of landing place of European Steamers, and Pennsylvania Railroad Station, Philadelphia, c. 1887.  Reproduced from Tariff of Immigrant Fares from Philadelphia Issued by the Immigrant Clearing House Committee, in Effect April 1st, 1887.  [1887].