As a Comcast customer, you can handle most account matters online or over the phone.  But if you ever need to return an old cable box, make payment in person, or just give them a piece of your mind with the help of dramatic facial expressions, you need to visit a Comcast Service Center.  If you live in Pennsport, chances are it’s the one at 1351 S. Columbus Blvd. Flanked by a scary lot of unkempt woods on one side and a scary lot of unkempt grass on the other, this hardly looks like the site of a major industrial operation.  But that it was according to the image below from G.W. Bromley’s 1895 Philadelphia Atlas.

The Delaware Sugar Refinery in 1895

According to engineer George Newhall, whose court testimony is recorded in the 1912 volume, United States of America, Petitioner, Against the American Sugar Refining…

There was a time when Philadelphia was home to hundreds of classic cinema houses and movie theatres.  Shawn Evans of The Philly History Blog tells that during the silent film boom of the 1920s, Philly was prime location for the transporting new experience of movie watching.  Evans tells that 275 movie theatres were opened leading up to 1932.  But as the Great Depression coincided with the end of the silent era, these grand and opulent theatres became an endangered species. Today, mainstream theatre-going largely occurs in hulking multiplexes with sticky floors and Colin Farrell posters.  To wit, the UA Riverview Plaza Stadium 17 stands at 1400 Columbus Blvd. as a testament to just how dramatically the movie-going experience has changed.

Riverview in 2012

It is perhaps appropriate that the Riverview invokes a sense of cinema’s industrialization.  Indeed, for more than a century before its construction, the site on which it currently…