The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 8

8-A Tuesday, Nov. 6, 1984 The Philadelphia Inquirer 4 It's time now to bid a fond adieu to Reading Terminal AtTheV- TWELVE CAESARS; Elegant Dinner Parties And Cocktail Receptions as low as $1C95 XJ par person Call Our Party Planners at215-879-3399 TWELVE CAESARS 4200 City Line Ave. Pa. 19131 ffeilLw- jf Iw.Ilc: 0p4T-! -sas- INQUIRER CLASSIFIED L03-5000 Ttw PhiHiSriirinqura McGAHRITY The platforms and tracks under the vast Reading Terminal shed roof will be still for the first New Exciting time in 91 years after tonight sup To FRL NOV. 9 It's Coming that and gave history buffs time to have the property listed in the National Register of Historic Places, thus affording it a considerable amount of protection from the wrecker's ball.

Even so, saving the sprawling plant wasn't easy. There were those who said it couldn't be saved. One such was Harry R. Belinger. then the city's director of commerce.

The place was run down and in an awfu state of decline, he. said. But what about its being listed in the National Register? Wasn't the terminal historic? Said Belinger: "About as historic as an outhouse." In the novel Kitty Foyle, written by Christopher Morley, a Philadelphia native, the heroine remarks, "Reading Terminal, it always seems like such a well-behaved station." By and large, Morley was right. Oh, in recent years, Reading Terminal didn't always behave well, and in its last months of the life for which it was fashioned it had all the charm of a rachitic slum. But in its prime, it was good.

Very good. See Non-Stop Demos Save On Photography, Video, Darkroom Equipment Photograph Live Models On Stage Win A Door Prize Meet The Philly Phanatic Balloons and Cartoon Characters For The Kiddies Don't Miss The Sales, Fun and TERMINAL, from 1-A worse things than being a commuter who used Reading Terminal. From the first train put of the terminal on Jan. 29, 1893, to tonight's last, approximately eight million trains have arrived and departed. Most of them have been commuter trains, operated by the Reading Railroad Co.

and, more recently, SEPTA, but there have been others. "Name" trains, they were. There were such trains as "The Maple Leaf," with sleeping cars for the overnight run to Toronto; "The Black Diamond," a crack express to and from Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, and "The Crusader," the first all-stainless-steel streamliner in the East, which carried hundreds of Philadelphians to their jobs in New York in the morning and brought them home again in late afternoon. In 1926, when Queen Marie of Romania came to Philadelphia' to attend the Sesquicentennial Exposition, she arrived in Reading Terminal. A year or so earlier, when the city played host to David Lloyd George, former prime minister of Great Britain, a great crowd of Philadelphia Welsh-Americans packed the terminal to greet him.

In its day, the terminal was class. That day began in an era when the United States was just beginning to realize its own strength. There were 44 stars in the flag, Grover Cleveland had just been elected president for the second time and one Edwin H. Stuart was mayor of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Reading Railroad, as it was known then, had stations at Broad and Callowhill Streets and at Ninth and Green.

Later, it purchased land occupied at 12th and Market by two establishments: the Farmers Market and the 12th Street Market. 'A market house' A stipulation of the transaction was that the railroad would build a "market house" under the train shed of the proposed terminal facility so that tenants of the previous establishments would have a place to do business. (It was only the most recent move of the city's vendors, who had done business in the 1600s at Second and High Streets. High Street became so crowded with them that its name was changed to Market Street. In the 1800s, city officials wanted the vendors off Market Street, so they moved them into two vending malls fronting on the street.) When the vendors were moved under the terminal, it was the beginning of the Reading Terminal Market, which will continue to do business as usual as the eight-story "head house," or office building, at 12th and Market, and the train shed are redeveloped as part of the One Reading Center project.

When the Philadelphia Reading Railroad announced that it would actively operate a market as well as a railway, particularly sharp reaction came from the rival Pennsylvania Railroad, which published a series of ads joshing the One featured a photograph of A.A. MacLeod, president of the purporting to show him in a huge apron, hawking radishes and carrots. In another, some inventive ad writer termed MacLeod "a purveyor of transportation with foodstuff premiums." The story goes that MacLeod had to be restrained from high-tailing it up to Pennsylvania Railroad headquarters in the Broad Street Station, where the Penn Center complex now begins its western sprawl, and boff-ing somebody in the nose. Associates are said to have talked him out of it by selling him on the idea of turning the Pennsy's advertising to advantage for the by spreading the word that he did, indeed, purvey transportation and offer foodstuff premiums and that nobody could match their quality. Free delivery It worked so well that for years thereafter up to about World War II, in fact the Reading Railroad, as it was known after the early 1900s, provided free delivery, at stations along its branches, of food purchased at the market a few hours earlier.

Business executives would come into Center City in the morning with shopping lists. They would send their office boys to market to make purchases, and when the foodstuffs were shipped out, servants would meet the trains at the various stations to make pickups. A sort of monument to MacLeod remains in the terminal's head house building. At the third-floor level is an oriel window, which MacLeod had ordered the architect to incorporate. The company president liked to pace up and down at the window while dictating to his secretary, looking down at the crowds crossing the 12th and Market intersection.

Succeeding generations of Reading chief executives did the same thing, and the oriel became known as "the president's window." TOYS BIKES VIDEO FURNITURE adCoLnlSCoCoVJ, U(iDiiQCq)(iI? When the terminal was opened, it was hailed as "the handsomest, most complete railway station in the world" and, with its Italian Renaissance architecture, "one of the greatest adornments in Philadelphia." The balcony at the second-floor level above Market Street was described as "a delightful spot in pleasant weather for patrons who have time on their hands waiting for trains." Inside the building was a layout that was to remain pretty much the same until the terminal waiting room and concourse were modernized in 1948. Women 's waiting room On the first floor were the ticket windows; "Railroad and Pullman Tickets to All Points," the signs read. You came in off Market Street, and after you bought a ticket you either took a cage-type elevator or ascended a handsome, curved stairway to the main waiting room. The room had an arched ceiling, walls of ornamental grain and a floor of white marble. On the east of the main waiting room was the women's waiting room; until about the 1930s, no right-thinking female would sit alone in a unisex waiting room.

On the west of the main waiting room was the dining room, which for years was one of the toniest eating places in the city, and was known nationwide. For 31 years it was operated by George Knoblauch, the Georges Perrier of his time. In 1924, Knoblauch's head waiter, Louis G. Bauerle, former chef Ernest Imhoff and former bookkeeper Elizabeth Metz bought the establishment and continued it as a class operation. In 1939, the Union News Co.

leased the restaurant, and for the first time waitresses were employed there. For opening day, Union News brought in a bevy of show business standouts Helen Hayes, Gertrude Lawrence, Jack Haley and Gladys George, to name a few and the Gateway Restaurant, as it had been renamed, was off to a good start. But never again was the restauarant to attain the eminence it enjoyed under Knoblauch and Bauerle. The modernization of the terminal in 1948 made the first floor available for commercial establishments a Horn Hardart automat and a Sun Ray drugstore became long-term tenants with ticket windows being moved to the train floor and a shopping concourse being built there. Moving stairways were installed and a long staircase that ran directly from the train floor to the 12th and Market corner was eliminated.

Its passing occasioned some sighs of nostalgia; many a Philadelphia male had tested his courage during boyhood by sliding down the center handrail; if you did it properly, you could land practically in the middle of the street. In 1900, F. Roma a tonsorial house with shops in railroad stations in New York, Chicago and New Orleans, opened one in Reading Terminal. It was a glorious thing to behold, with 10 barbers and lights and marble and mirrors, and for years it was a status place for men to get shaves andor haircuts. It lasted until 1970, largely a victim of the long-hair fad, with two barbers doing so-so business at the end.

An innovation in the mid-'SOs was the installation of 300 coin-operated lockers in the terminal. They lasted until three days after the explosion of a time bomb in a locker at New York's LaGuardia Airport late in 1975. It just might be that Reading Terminal wouldn't be here now if the Reading Railroad hadn't gone broke in 1971. The company had been shopping the property around, as they say, hoping for a profitable deal. But the bankruptcy proceedings crimped The Christiana Mall, DE SAT.

NOV. 10 SUN. NOV. be included in this sale! yiteturns? No problem' Simply return your purcnase wnn original carton 1 receipt tour money will oe re-ttinrlert incfanrlui Boarding at the terminal Passengers head for Doylestown train GAMES HOME COMPUTERS BABY Diapers, Baby Food Formula FEASTHVKIE Bustieton Pike Street KENSWCT0N Castor S' Aramingo KMC Of mm Pte at King of Prussia KOSTMEAST BuStletOn Shflmire Ave SOUTH SO Passvunk Ave. SPKtNCRELO WW.0W GROVE mwjmrsrtm: CHEWY K.

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