Today is Under Construction: Exploring the Victory

Recently, a friend of mine went out of town and offered her place to me so I could have some space to myself and spread out with my thoughts. She happens to live in a building I have been ogling since I moved to Philly 4 years ago. The Victory building at 10th and Chestnut has a long and twisted history, most likely an ironic victim of it's own name. It was built in 1873, designed by architect Henry Fernbach, and is the city's second most famous example of French Second Empire masonry. City Hall is the first. I love them both, but the Victory has a bit of a dark side and is harder to get into, just how I like my architecture.
The Victory used to house a night club on the first floor until 1982 when a four alarm electrical fire started in the basement and destroyed large portions of the interior. Fortunately, the building is as solid as they come. The staircases are cast iron and marble, the walls are 3' masonry and granite, and the whole thing is bolted together pretty solidly. I stayed there for a total of about a week and a half and never heard a footstep, a tv or a conversation from another condo.
The building was owned by sleazy porn king Sam Rappaport, who let it rot on Chestnut street and sprout trees from the roof line. He requested a permit for demolition, but luckily thanks to a few savvy historic preservationists and then Mayor Ed Rendell, he was denied. The building managed to outlive him, and was sold by his estate to a developer who had a better plan in mind than a surface lot.

For 25 years the building was bordered up and known only to the hippie/punk squatter crowd that roamed it's bulk in the darkness. One of my best friends, Cat, was one of those lost teens and tells some amazing stories about the things she saw and heard in her time there. Cat found her way out of both her troubled teenage years and the abandoned husk of the Victory, but the building still finds a way to haunt her dreams. With her husband, some good friends, and a few bottles of red wine in tow, Cat was ready to make peace with some old ghosts and revisit the halls she could once navigate from memory in pitch darkness.

Cat, my Brother Dusty, and Jude

First, it was up the grand staircase to look for roof access. It was surprisingly easy and in a few minutes we were face to face with the menacing lion heads on the cornice 10 stories up. It was raining pretty steadily, but we were undeterred and spent the evening climbing ladders, crawling near the edges and being careful to prop doors open behind us.

Cranky Cornice Guardians

Facing North West from 10 Stories up

The old elevator shaft and crank access from the roof (no longer in use)

Cat abandoned the two hands on the ladder rule in favor for one hand on the beverage.

We took the fire escape stairs to the basement all stealthy like...

And here it begins

We found a myriad of strange things in the basement. First, let me say that these pictures do not do it justice. There was no light in most areas of the basement, so the flash from the camera gives a much clearer view than what we saw most of the time in the narrow beam of our flashlights.

Some of the smaller rooms were filled with debris, defunct plumbing, cobwebs and rats. At one point I followed my brother into a small corridor, mostly because he had my flashlight. We both heard the tell tale screeching noises associated with rats, but of course I thought he was making the noises, and he thought the same of me. When he turned to tell me to shut up, the throw of the flashlight revealed the movement on the floor. We left quickly, with me matching the rats' shrieking noises on the way out.

One of these rooms was piled 5 feet high with old rusting office equipment: typewriters, calculators, metal chairs and stools, and some things I couldn't identify through the rust. Oddly, this room must be under the street or the sidewalk because the rain was leaking through the ceiling even though we were in the basement of a ten story building.

Rusting Typewriter. Can anyone identify how old it is?

Key pad from an old calculator

It 's hard to describe the size of the basement and its varying states of decay and repair. Some of the levels had lights and had been cleared while others looked like they hadn't been seen since the fire. One of the cleared rooms housed this amazing old staircase. It seems the fire robbed it of its wooden banister and spindles, but the cast iron structure and detail remains in tact. The basement had at least 4 levels, and just when we thought we had found the deepest section, we came upon another unused elevator shaft door labeled 'level 5'. It seems everything else below us had been sealed off, or we could just be lousy explorers that gave up when our wine glasses needed refilling.