An Old City archeologist writes an opera for a murdered 19th century woman
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Alice Tierney, of Old City, entered the historical record in 1880 by the way she died.
According to a Jan. 28, 1880, account in a Philadelphia newspaper, The Times, the 45-year-old "dissipated woman" was indulging in a night of drinking and singing with friends. Tierney reportedly left the premises of her boarding room at 105 Callowhill Road, a house of a "cheap and nasty order," to get more alcohol and never to return.
She was discovered the next morning dead in the backyard, strangled and tied to a fence. Police at the time ruled it an accident, claiming her clothes rode up around her neck while trying to climb the fence, strangling her as she fell.
It's an explanation Jacqueline Goldfinger finds altogether unlikely.
"It's not the way physics works," said the playwright and librettist of the new opera, "Alice Tierney." "Your pantaloons just don't go up around your neck."
"It would be the most freak accident," said opera composer Melissa Dunphy, suspecting foul play. "It doesn't make sense."
"Alice Tierney," the opera, is having its regional premiere on Nov. 15 and 16 at West Chester University . It had its world premiere last year at Oberlin College, Ohio, which commissioned Dunphy to write it.
The opera tells the story of a group of archeology doctoral students at a dig site, hoping to find something interesting enough to be the basis of a dissertation. They discover artifacts associated with Alice Tierney, but their constructed stories about her become reflections of their own lives rather than historic truth.
The story of the opera is, in many ways, a reflection of the composer's life.
Dunphy stumbled upon the tragic death of Tierney while researching the history of her house at 103 Callowhill, which has become something of an obsession ever since she and her husband Matt discovered the property's privy almost ten years ago. A privy is the pit of an outhouse, where historically residents would throw trash which later becomes a treasure trove of pottery, glass and even bones, dating to the 18th and 19th centuries.
The footprint of 103 Callowhill now contains the site of the boarding room where Tierney last lived 144 years ago. Until recently, it was Grasso's Magic Theater, a small performance space with an even smaller apartment above it. The Dunphys bought it in 2015 after discovering it on Zillow at a surprisingly low price. They later found out why: the proprietor of the magician's theater, Joseph Grasso, had been convicted of molesting a 13-year-old girl in Montgomery County.
The Dunphys began an extensive renovation of the building involving new foundation footings. That is when two privy pits were discovered, ushering in a new chapter of their lives as amateur archeologists.
The Dunphys have since dug into their own property and those of a half-dozen of their immediate neighbors and found an enormous amount of historic objects. Their newly constructed third-floor apartment is crammed floor to ceiling with shelving to hold the thousands of artifacts they have dug up, mostly pieces of pottery that have been puzzled together into nearly intact bowls.
Melissa said they have been asked by property owners in other parts of the city to excavate, but have refused. There is more than enough on this one block of Callowhill to keep them busy. They also produce an ongoing podcast about their digs, "The Boghouse ."
The collection attracted the attention of Scott Stephenson, CEO of the Museum of the American Revolution, who said the Dunphys enthusiasm for digging has proven that the ground under Old City is brimming with history, all you have to do is scratch it.
"It is both wonderful and incredibly tragic," he said. "The sad thing — and it intersects with the Dunphys' experience — is that Philadelphia has a shameful lack of any kind of requirement for archaeological surveying. Even the laws that did exist were gutted by the Pennsylvania legislature back in 1995 . Most famously back in 2016 on Arch Street, right across from the Betsy Ross house, literally plastic buckets with human bones in them being dumped into dumpsters at the First Baptist Church ."
Although Dunphy lives surrounded by the history she has unearthed, she never found any physical artifacts that she could associate with Alice Tierney; she only read about her during library research.
"I realized that I was reading about a murder that had never been investigated," she said. "Every time I heard a creak in the building or a little tinkle of glass, the archaeology settling, I would half-jokingly call up to the ceiling: 'Alice, I know, and I'm going to figure out how to do something about your story. I'm gonna figure out how to get you some form of justice.'"
Dunphy and Goldfinger, a prolific Philadelphia playwright who had not done much writing for opera, met for months to figure out how to work together. A commission from Oberlin set them on the path to Alice.
Their opera does not tell the story of Tierney, about whom almost nothing is known, but rather puts her at the center of a group of archeologists who project their own lives onto Alice's ghost.
"For example, someone discovers a shoe with a broken heel," Goldfinger said. "Someone with one worldview might say, 'Maybe she threw it across the room at her lover.' Another person might say, 'No, she probably broke it while running down the stairs, because we think she may have been a sex worker and maybe she had to run away from a customer.'"
"Someone who is a feminist, they are pushing a story one way that maybe the story doesn't want to go, as opposed to someone who may have more misogynistic tendencies who's pushing the story another way," she said. "As they find the objects, they summon their Alices."
There are three Alices in "Alice Tierney," each coming forward as the archeologists shape her imagined story. The opera reflects a conundrum of history: What does our interpretation of history tell us about the past, and what does it tell us about the present? And where is that line drawn?
Dunphy said it's an historical question that is always contemporary.
"The way American history gets taught in school becomes part of the way we define ourselves as American," she said. "When evidence emerges that changes that historical story slightly, you see people get really upset because it's part of their identity , part of the way they define the world and part of the story they've told about who they are as Americans."
"Alice Tierney" will be performed at West Chester University as a fully-staged opera featuring students studying voice in its music department, with piano accompaniment.
As for Dunphy's archeological haul stuffed into her apartment, she is considering opening her ground floor, what used to be the magic theater, as a museum of her artifacts put in a densely packed display to show the sheer volume of material discovered on a single block of Old City.
If all goes to plan the museum of broken pottery will open in time for the national Semiquincentennial celebration in 2026, which Stephenson at the Museum of the American Revolution thinks is a great idea.
"When you see the scale of a collection like that, you think about the sheer mass of the history that was lived here, and all the kinds of people, many of whom are not represented in the written record," he said. "Their portraits are not hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art or the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The objects that they treasured often ended up in the ground. If you believe in an inclusive, broadly diverse understanding of American history, the way to deepen our appreciation is actually looking underneath our feet."
