Plantings at the Epicenter of Quarantines Past

New plantings around the Lazaretto building in Tinicum feature species known to have been planted in this area in the 18th century. Photo: Bill Menke

Although the award ceremony is put off until September, the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia recently announced its Preservation Achievement Award winners, which include the renovation of the “Lazaretto” in nearby Tinicum. Bill and Carol Menke, of Ogden Avenue, were landscape architects for the project. Bill notes that this was one of the last projects they undertook before closing their business, Menke & Menke, LLC, after a nearly 35-year run. 

The Lazaretto isn’t well known in Swarthmore, although it’s only a handful of miles away, along the Delaware River. It sits atop a grassy slope to the water’s edge, a couple of thousand feet west of the end of Philadelphia International Airport’s westernmost stretch of runway. In our moment of quarantine, the Lazaretto speaks to fears and safety measures in an earlier historical moment. 

This surprisingly stately Georgian building, once the site where ships bound for Philadelphia stopped to be inspected for signs of yellow fever, needed an overhaul after nearly being torn down and turned into yet another remote parking lot for the airport. As part of the refurbishment, which turned the neglected building into offices for Tinicum Township, the building needed fresh landscaping, in addition to substantial work throughout the building itself. Architects and engineers on the project turned to Menke & Menke because of their long experience in landscaping historical landmarks.

“We specialized in historical landscape preservation right away,” Bill Menke says. He and Carol both wrote their graduate theses on the subject. When they opened their landscaping business in 1982, they quickly developed a sideline practice in historical projects — a sideline because preservation often runs on meagre budgets. 

Over the years, Menke says, the couple tackled as many as fifty projects at historic locations, including West Laurel Hill Cemetery and the garden pavilion at the Fairmount Waterworks. They developed expertise, and the Pennsylvania and Delaware chapters of the American Society of Landscape Architects made Bill chair of their joint Historic Landscape Preservation Committee. It was natural for the Menkes to be pulled into the quarantine station project.

The Death of Philadelphia

In the 1790s, Philadelphia was the biggest city in the United States, but this meant only that it had some fifty thousand inhabitants. A scourge of yellow fever struck in fall 1793, leading to 100 deaths daily by October, mass exodus of some 20,000 residents (including the Federal Government, which was being housed in Philadelphia at the time), and an eventual death toll of 5,000 Philadelphians who didn’t or couldn’t flee. Less severe yellow fever outbreaks returned to Philadelphia in 1797, 1798, and 1799. 

The cause of yellow fever wasn’t known at the time and, perhaps more importantly, it wasn’t understood that mosquitoes were the vector for the disease. According to David Barnes, associate professor of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, there were two prominent theories among physicians of the day. 

“One group believed that yellow fever originated in accumulated filth. When the weather got hot and wet, the accumulated filth would emanate miasmas, or disease-causing mists. The other camp believed that yellow fever was contagious, transmitted from person to person, and was brought to Philadelphia on ships from the West Indies.”

Thomas Jefferson, then Vice President, took up the “filth” theory, proposing a kind of pastoral version of city planning: “take for instance the chequer board for a plan. let the black squares only be building squares, and the white ones be left open, in turf & trees. … The atmosphere of such a town would be like that of the country, insusceptible of the miasmata which produce yellow fever.”

Philadelphia’s leaders took a sort of middle road, cleaning up the city and also establishing a strict policy of inspecting every arriving ship. Toward carrying out the inspection regime, a large Georgian-style building was erected on Tinicum Island (only later was enough marsh filled in that it’s no longer an island), along with docks at the bottom of a large, sloping lawn to the Delaware River. As ships headed toward Philadelphia, they were required to stop there, as a doctor and harbormaster sailed out to meet them and inspect the ship. 

Since the late 14th century, European ports have made use of quarantine stations known as “lazarettos.” The name harkens back to leper colonies called Lazar Houses, in turn a reference to the biblical leper Lazarus. Thus, Tinicum’s quarantine facility was called the Lazaretto. 

Symptomatic patients were, unsurprisingly, required to stop there. Suspect cargo (particularly any fruit that had gone a little soft) was unloaded so that it could air out, which was thought to eliminate any disease it was harboring. Depending on the judgment of the moment, the inspected ship might be required to quarantine at that point in the river, or might be allowed to continue. 

The Lazaretto Hospital

The floorplan of the Lazaretto, somewhat altered by different uses over the years, featured a central block of offices that did not communicate except by an outside porch, with a two-story wing on either side. Each floor of each wing had two patient rooms, with six beds apiece, but since there were no hallways, arriving at one room meant walking through the other. The upside to this was that there were windows on opposite sides of each room, so that the breeze could pass through. A good airing out was part and parcel of the medical program. 

According to Barnes, an extraordinary 90% of sick patients admitted to the Lazaretto hospital survived, at least during periods with accurate records. Mortality rates for 19th-century yellow fever epidemics vary widely, but were generally at least twice as high as this. Given that there was no real treatment for yellow fever at the time, Barnes’ theory is that travel on ships of the day was sufficiently terrible that passengers often arrived undernourished, dehydrated, and exhausted. Giving them a hospital bed and regular meals had a remarkable restorative effect. 

Yellow fever wasn’t actually caused either by municipal filth or by ill passengers on incoming ships (though, of course, mosquitoes might have thrived in either scenario), so it’s almost strange that yellow fever epidemics mostly spared the Eastern Seaboard throughout most of the 18th century, though ships bound for Philadelphia continued to be inspected in Tinicum until the Lazaretto was closed in 1895. It wasn’t until 1938 that a yellow fever vaccine was developed.

After it ceased operating as a quarantine, the building was used as a country club facility until 1912, and then as a seaplane docking station. 

The most recent renovation, budgeted at more than $8 million, created space for the offices of Tinicum Township, which transitioned to the new offices in the Lazaretto only a couple of weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything back down. 

UPenn Professor David Barnes says that part of the reason a relatively grand Georgian façade was chosen for the Lazaretto was to convey to Philadelphians that the government had yellow fever threats well in hand. “When they give awards for historic preservation, they tend to avoid landscape architecture. It’s my opinion that the landscape is often at least as significant as the architecture.” Photo: Bill Menke

The Landscape

The renovation work for the Lazaretto was extensive. Landscapers significantly reworked the ground immediately around the building. “The engineers and the architects decided to raise the grade adjacent to the building for flood protection,” Bill Menke says. “So we had to replant with all appropriate plantings for the historic period of the Lazaretto.” Plantings included holly, witch hazel, and shrub roses. 

Swarthmorean readers will know Menke from his regular “Guess the House” feature. 

Menke notes Swarthmore’s long-standing sensitivity to landscape. The borough, he says, “was developed in conjunction with the landscape.” Care was given to preserve existing trees where possible. New plantings took into account the eventual scale the plants would reach — “which is very unusual in American landscape.” 

When Menke sketches Swarthmore houses, he says, “I try to show the relationship of the house in the landscape. It’s not just the four walls of the house, but how it sits in the landscape and how the trees and the shrubs accentuate the character.”