The Building

Arch Street Meeting House is a symmetrically balanced three-part structure built of Flemish-bond brick.  The center pavilion, which contains the lobby and a committee room to the rear of it, has a gable-front roof and a central entryway.  It is flanked on each side by large five-bay wings with low-hipped roofs.  The east wing contains a men’s meeting room and the west wing contains a women’s meeting room, each with its own centrally placed entry.  

 

The Meeting House is elegantly understated and therefore, despite its Georgian architectural styling and refined construction, is in keeping with Quaker plainness.  The original section erected in 1804 consisted of the existing east meeting room and the existing center pavilion of two stories, making an L-shape configuration.  The construction of another meeting room in 1811 completed its U-shape as originally planned.  A monthly meeting room was added inside the U in 1968, behind the centrally located committee room.  

 

The windows are twelve-over-twelve light sash with paneled shutters on the first story; on the second story there are eight-over-eight-light windows (no shutters).  The rear elevations of the flanking meeting sections are lit by oversized twenty-over-twenty-light sash windows centered on the wall and lighting the area behind the facing benches.  Each section of the three-part structure has a double-door entryway at the center of the front façade, covered by a portico.  The doors are batten (vertical board) and hung by large strap hinges.  There are doorways at the exterior side elevations of both the men’s and women’s meeting room wings, also covered by porticos, and a doorway on the opposite side of these rooms opening into what was, before the 1968 addition, the rear U-shaped courtyard back of the committee room.

  

The Flemish-bond brick facades include a water table and an exposed coursed ashlar stone foundation; the water table is broken to either side of the doorways to allow the open doors to rest against the wall. The site slopes from east to west at a height of about three feet, which meant that the 1811 west floor levels, windows, and doors had to be dropped to relate to the lower grade.   The roof, originally covered by cedar shingles (replaced in 1851), was covered with tin in 1874.  In the center of each section of the three-part north wall there is double-door entryway covered by a portico.   The Tuscan order columns that support the porticos have all survived.  The doors are hung by large strap hinges, closed with bar latches, and locked with rib locks or sliding bolts; those on the wings are each eight-paneled with flush boarding on the inner face.  In the gable front roof of the central pavilion the cornice forms a pediment that contains the date stone (“1804”).  The hipped roofs over the flanking meeting room sections are topped by lanterns.  There is a single dormer located to the rear of the western section.  The large number of doorways was needed to accommodate the throngs of Friends gathering in the building and to provide access to the “necessaries” outside at the rear (no longer extant).

 

As with the doorways, the fenestration on the east, north, and west facades remains as it was designed in 1803.  The south rear, which was not considered a prominent façade, bore the renovations and additions that seemed appropriate, from windows and necessaries in the nineteenth century to kitchens and restrooms in the twentieth; for example, the earliest renovation to Biddle’s building was a window in the south side of the west wing, added in 1815.  The windows in the other facades, by comparison, are notable not only for their preservation and size but for their large, intact collection of crown glass, a blown and imported glass considered superior to the ordinary windowpanes of the day.  Most original hardware and shutters are also intact.   Paneled shutters on the ground floor assured security, while louvered shutters on the second floor of the wings—none were needed on the north façade—controlled light.

 

The interior reveals elements specific to Quaker architecture.  The two meeting rooms were built with facing benches (raised benches for elders and other meeting leaders) at the south end, a center aisle running north-south and dividing the main floor seating, side and rear galleries built on raised platforms for better sightlines, and stairways leading to a youth’s balcony above the north end.   A sounding board, an early acoustical device adapted from the work of Benjamin Latrobe, arched over the facing benches.  In 1820, east and west balconies and other features were added to the east room. Above them is an attic with four unusually long east-west oak king-post trusses supporting the gabled roof and two queen-post trusses holding up the north and south roof hips.  The attic above the west wing contains similar trusses.

  

The many stairways in the building, almost all products of the original construction, show only subtle differences:  they are uniformly “dog-legged” (flights to and from the landings head in different directions) and closed-string (with the tread and riser ends hidden by friezes and architraves), with elongated classic balusters, based on rectangular plinths, straight hand rails, and square newels topped with turned flat knobs.   In keeping with Quaker plain style, these and other interior features were left unpainted until the early 20th century: the doors and columns alone were painted, and the walls whitewashed.  The center committee room originally had fireplaces on the east and west walls, while the meeting rooms were heated by “Franklin-type” stoves.  The fireplaces were closed in 1814 and an “air furnace was installed in the cellar.  The west fireplace was reopened in 1902.

 

The west wing, or West Room, followed the design of the East Room and is the least altered interior in the building, with its only obvious addition a glass-sash partition built under the north balcony in 1868 to reduce the size of the room (and conserve heat) as membership waned.  It hosts the now combined yearly meeting and other Quaker events and serves as an interpretation and outreach center for the many visitors who are attracted to the building.  Interesting features for tourists, besides the sounding board and the modesty panel along the stairway to the girls’ (east-side) balcony, include crown glass, the original never-varnished plank flooring, two 17th-century benches brought from older meeting houses, and traditional horsehair cushions on the benches.  Muted colors lend the large room a distinctive Quakerly appearance.

 

Over time, the Arch Street Meeting House has been modernized to meet the needs of contemporary Friends.   Kitchen additions were made in 1902 and 1908, built between the west wing and center building.  Owing to the decline in the Quaker population and an increasing number of visitors, the East Room became a dining and exhibition space in 1954 with only the facing benches and balconies intact.  In 1968, a new monthly meeting room filled in the U-shaped south courtyard, and this portion of the building was air-conditioned.   Repairs and rearrangements continue; inevitably, such an old building needs constant attention.  The West Room, however, despite heating and lighting changes, remains virtually the way it was meant to be.  And the facades—north, east, and west—also appear as they did in 1811, Quaker in style albeit influenced by the Federal architecture of the day.

 

The second floor is occupied currently by meeting rooms used by various committees and for special events.  The original layout of this floor is not known.  According to an 1873 survey, the area was divided into five rooms by stud and board partitions; there were three rooms on the south side and two rooms and a passageway on the north.  The rooms were referred to originally as “committee rooms” although by 1808 one was being used as a library.  In 1878 one of these rooms was converted for use as a small dining room.  In 1902, the second floor was altered significantly; the partitions were removed and a large dining room was created.  New flooring was also added to the second floor at this time.

The attic remains unfinished and the entire 1804 (and 1811) roof structure is intact. Six east-west trusses carry the attic floor joists, rafters, ridge beam, purlins, secondary rafters, shingle lathing, and wood shingle roof.  Modified queen-post trusses with center post and intermediate diagonal bracing are found at the north and south ends.  The remaining bays are supported by modified king-post trusses with intermediate posts and bracing.  These trusses are identical to those illustrated in architect/builder Owen Biddle’s Young Carpenter’s Assistant.

 

The Arch Street Meeting House sits on a 2.21-acre lot, surrounded by Flemish-bond brick walls, built to enclose the burying ground before the construction of the Meeting House.  Construction began on the current walls in 1795, to replace the crumbling walls erected soon after the burying ground was deeded to Friends in 1701.  As a result of Friends’ plainness testimony, graves were traditionally unmarked, making the construction of walls to establish boundaries and protect the graves that much more important.  Despite the lack of marked burial sites, the vault at Arch Street Meeting House contained records of the interments (the records of the Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia, which include the records of interments, were transferred to the Quaker Collection at Haverford College in 2008).  Most of the burials now lie beneath the parking lot to the rear of the Meeting House.  Entryways from the street to the property pierce the boundary wall: one in the center of the Arch Street side aligned with the main entrance to the Meeting House; a second nearer to the Fourth Street corner, now altered to an entrance for wheelchairs; a third in the center of the Fourth Street side, giving access to the south side of the Meeting House; and a fourth at the southern end of the Fourth Street wall, giving access to the parking lot.  The entryways have decorative iron gates.

 

 

                     The Arch Street Landmark Working Group and Catherine Lavoie