Scene ABOVE the Street
It was just a few months ago I was high above street level and here I am again.
This week I was atop St. Peter's Church in Society Hill as steeplejack brothers Frank and John Kenny worked on the historic spire. I first ran into them before Halloween when they were still scraping off the old paint. In the weeks since, they've been restoring and making repairs to the wood. After a week of rain, I was back on a beautiful autumn day as Frank was hanging from his rope applying the primer coat. The spire, designed by William Strickland in 1842 to house bells from the same London foundry that made the Liberty Bell, is being repainted this week, the end of a $250,000 restoration project.
The plastic drop cloths are to protect the historic cemetery. Although, as John says, the birds drop a lot more on the tombstones than he and Frank.
The giant fruit (below) of the church cemetery's Osage orange trees are also falling this time of year. The trees are descendants of those sent back East by Lewis and Clark from Kansas. They ended up with President Thomas Jefferson's friend Bernard McMahon, a nurseryman at Fourth and Pine.
I first became acquainted with St. Peter's while researching local connections to Lewis and Clark for a photo project I completed during the bicentennial of their 1803–1806 expedition.
