by Kimberly Haas | Hidden City Philadelphia

The enormous profiles of the Robin Hood Dell East and its younger sibling the Mann Center for the Performing Arts are major, familiar landmarks in Fairmount Park on their respective sides of the Schuylkill River. They have held court there for so long, few Philadelphians ever consider how they got there. Now, historian and archivist Jack McCarthy reveals the origin stories of the legendary performance venues in a new book, A Century of Music Under the Stars: A History of the Mann Center for the Performing Arts and Robin Hood Dell published by Temple University Press.

In the late 1920s, the Philadelphia Orchestra wanted to have a summer venue, and many civic-minded individuals wanted to make the orchestra accessible to everyone and more affordable than its regular season at the Academy of Music. To keep up with orchestras in other cities such as Chicago and Boston, an outdoor venue was envisioned.

When the fundraising for the project began in earnest, it faced competition from other major campaigns by the Franklin Institute and Settlement Music School. Not to mention the launch date of early 1930, mere months after the 1929 stock market crash. “If it had happened a year or two later, it never would have gotten done,” noted McCarthy.

Despite the headwinds, the Philadelphia Bureau of Music, which was a department of municipal government, and the Orchestra’s board of directors spearheaded the effort, securing a location with the Fairmount Park Commission and enlisting everyone from the musicians’ union to various women’s clubs, which used their social networks to sell subscriptions. “It’s a real Philadelphia story,” McCarthy said. “To build and run these places took incredible ingenuity and efforts by all these people, from the political realm, philanthropic, the musicians—all played critical roles in making these places possible,” he said. “They faced a lot of challenges, but they got it done.”

At the center of it all, from the earliest plans for the Robin Hood Dell right up to the building of the Mann Center for the 1976 Bicentennial, was the powerful figure of Fredric Mann. “He was such an outsized figure in Philadelphia society and politics,” explained McCarthy. “He was a huge Democratic donor. He was such a politically engaged figure who wielded such influence. The Dell was his passion.” That power was on display in 1959 when the peaceful soundscape of the Dell was interrupted by increased commercial jet traffic. Mann, who was the City’s director of commerce at the time, had the airport reroute flights around the venue during concert times.

Although both amphitheaters are familiar sights in Fairmount Park, their architecture was not always beloved. Walter H. Thomas designed the Robin Hood Dell while serving as City’s architect. All its seating was open-air, so bad weather necessitated the postponement of concerts. The Mann Center, on the other hand, had about a third of its seating under a roof, leaving the lawn seat attendees to grapple with the elements. The latter, designed by New York architects John MacFadyen and Alfredo DeVido, whose credits also include the Saratoga Performing Arts Center and the Wolf Trap Center, was criticized for its aesthetics and charged with elitism owing to the two-tiered seating arrangement.

McCarthy’s book is full of remarkable narratives throughout the history of the two venues, which sheds a great deal of light on Philadelphia politics and society as well. It’s a virtual who’s who of the city in the mid 20th century: philanthropists, industrialists, artists, arts promoters, and more than a dozen mayors.

Indeed, the fortunes of the two sites mirror those of the city, such as when it evolved from a strictly classical music entity to include rock and pop musicians as audiences changed and later, laboring under a large deficit during the Ed Rendell years.

“One of my favorite stories is how the musicians’ union in 1930 agreed to the payment arrangement for the opening seasons of the Dell. The building’s planners said they could raise the money to build the Dell, but didn’t have the funds to pay the musicians, so the union allowed them to be paid based on attendance,” McCarthy recalled. “I learned that, in the late 1920s, the national musicians’ union was promoting live music because recording technology had been improved and recorded music sales were taking off. The union led a campaign against ‘canned music,’ feeling they needed to combat this infiltration that was threatening their livelihood. So they were eager to help a new live concert series.”

McCarthy had previously conducted research for the Mann Center, writing blog posts and creating a backstage timeline display of the history of the venue, which was completed in 2021. “The book was originally envisioned as a coffee table book, with lots of pictures, but not much text. Yet, as I researched it, I realized there were stories that were important, but largely unknown.”

(via Hidden City Philadelphia)