Lionel H. Pries (1897-1968) was born in San Francisco and had a long career as an architect, artist, and educator on the West Coast, mostly in Seattle and in association with the University of Washington. Early in his career, after graduating from University of California, Berkeley, he came to Philadelphia to do graduate work with Paul Cret, whose local projects include the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Rittenhouse Square, the Federal Reserve Building, and the University Avenue Bridge. After finishing at Penn, Pries worked from July 1921 to February 1922 in the City Architect’s office, in charge of design work related to the sewage disposal division.
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, a professor of architecture at the University of Washington, contacted me about 20 years ago, looking for photographs of the Southwest Sewage Pumping Station, which Pries designed. I found a couple of 1924 photographs of the building (which has since been remodeled) taken shortly after it was completed. This was the first piece of the Southwest Sewage Treatment Works, located in Southwest Philadelphia adjacent to Philadelphia International Airport, to be built. The rest of the plant was not finished until 1955, after the Great Depression and World War II had run their course and the city (and the world) again had the money, the energy, and the will to undertake major projects of civic improvement.
One photograph was included in Ochsner’s lavishly-illustrated biography of Pries, published by the University of Washington Press in 2007. I later found reproductions of several Pries drawings of the pumping station in the PWD engineering records database. And about 6 years ago I found something even better. Rolled up and forgotten for decades in a plan tube in the PWD Design Department, I discovered four of Pries’s original drawings of this building and the plant. They were fragile, drawn on thin tissue paper, but I was able to carefully unroll them and scan them. I sent copies to Ochsner, and he was as thrilled to see them as I had been to find them.
I am publishing those drawings here, as a colorful adjunct to the black and white photograph in the book, and as an example of the care, craft, and pride once taken even when designing a building whose sole purpose was to pump the city’s wastes.
