History Of Vicinity Of 4062 Ludlow Street, Philadelphia

The History of 4040-60 Ludlow Street-The Backyard of 4025 Chestnut Street Harry Kyriakodis, Esq. My former parking space in the American Law Institute's remote parking lot was the furthest one up (north) and to the right (east) for several years. It was right next to the oddly-shaped warehouse abutting the lot and fronting Ludlow Street. As time passed, I came to wonder why the property line there was slanted and why the building had such a strange trapezoidal shape. See the building above the ALI lot in this overhead shot of the area around ALI headquarters. This structure also adjoins the rear of ALI's main parking lot.

As the 1895 map of the neighborhood indicates, that building is precisely on the site of a graveyard once known as the "Rose Burying Ground." This cemetery dated back to the late-1700s when it served as the private burial ground for the Rose family. The estate comprising the blocks around this vicinity was once owned by a man named Peter Rose (1720-1766). He actually gained possession by marrying Mary Gardner (1729-1796), daughter or granddaughter of one John Gardner, who had purchased from William Penn some 700 acres of land from the Schuylkill River to about present-day 42nd Street sometime in the 1690s. Peter and Mary bequeathed their estate to their descendants, with a tract on the westernmost part reserved "forever to be used as a burying ground and for no other purpose." They were buried there.

At the time, the area west of the Schuylkill was mostly woods with a few clearings connected by meandering footpaths. It was part of what was to become called Blockley Township. Rose family members were buried at the Rose Burying Ground throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1853, they incorporated the cemetery as the "Rose Family Burial Ground Association," apparently operating it for profit (PA P.L. 726, April 18, 1853). The 1895 map also shows another graveyard located on the 4100 block of Chestnut Street, currently the site of the High Tech Car Wash and a UPenn parking lot. This unnamed cemetery was probably part of the originally-larger Rose Family Burial Ground. As West Philadelphia became more developed in the late 19th century, the city's existing grid pattern of streets was extended to this region. Forty-first Street was laid out right through the burial ground, which may be why that street zigzags between Chestnut and Market Streets. Ludlow Street hemmed in the yard on the north, probably cutting off some of the property. Ludlow Street, by the way, was once known as Oak Street.

The 1910 map above shows that one Percival E. Loder—or his estate—apparently owned the Rose Burying Ground around that time. The only "Percival E. Loder" of note during that era was a Philadelphia doctor, dentist and professor of anatomy at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery. Popular, wellknown and wealthy, he died in January of 1908 at age 54 or 55. It's possible that the yard served as the backyard to his home on Chestnut Street, but there's nothing to suggest that he owned a home there. That a professor of anatomy may have owned a cemetery at the turn of the 20th century is intriguing. Whatever the case, the two graveyards were surely closed to new interments by then. Sufficient evidence indicates that the graves were moved in 1922 to Mount Moriah Cemetery, located along Cobbs Creek in Southwest Philadelphia. It did not take long for a brick garage to be built on the site of the main (i.e., Rose) burial ground. The modest one-story building has been heavily modified in the intervening years. The east-facing wall has numerous scars, some of which show that the warehouse once had a peaked roof, as opposed to its current flat roof. The concrete block wall facing Ludlow Street dates from the 1980s. The building's peculiar shape and the skewed property line are a lasting remnant of this long and complex history going back well over 200 years. And this all shows that in Philadelphia, you can't go very far without walking or parking on someone's grave or former grave!

The site today, looking southwest from Ludlow Street.