I
It was not only the change that oppressed me those first days of my
return. As bewildering, as discouraging, were the signs everywhere of
the horrible haste with which it has been brought about: a haste foreign
to the Philadelphia habit. But the aliens pouring into Philadelphia have
increased its population at such a prodigious rate that it has been
obliged to grow too prodigiously fast to meet or to adapt itself to the
new conditions without the speed that does not belong to it.
I had left it a big, prosperous, industrial town--Baldwin's, Cramp's,
Kensington and Germantown mills all in full swing--but it carried off
its bigness, prosperity, and industry with its old demure and restful
airs of a country town. The old-fashioned, hard-working, Philadelphia
business man could still dine at four o'clock and spend the rest of the
afternoon looking out of the window for the people who rarely passed and
the things that never happened--nobody would be free to dine at four
now-a-days, nobody would have the leisure to sit at any hour looking out
of the window, except perhaps the Philadelphia clubman who clings to
that amiable pastime, as he does, so far successfully, to his Club
house, threatened on every side as it is by the advance of the
sky-scraper. The old-fashioned busy Philadelphia crowds, as I remember
them, could still take their time in the streets, so that I remember,
too, my friend, George Steevens' astonishment because a passer-by he
thanked for information could linger to say "You are very welcome." The
old-fashioned Philadelphia business, going on at a pace that only New
York and Chicago could beat, was still accomplished with so little fuss
that the rest of America laughed at Philadelphia for its slowness and
sleepiness, and told those old time-worn stories that have passed into
folk-lore. It was just this that gave Philadelphia such a distinct
character of its own--that it could be laughed at for slowness and
sleepiness by the other towns, and all the while be sleepy and slow to
such good purpose as to make itself into one of the most prosperous and
influential in the country: to be able to work at the American pace and
yet preserve its dignity and sedateness.
But the old stories have lost what little point they had. Philadelphia
does not look slow and sleepy any longer. Things have changed, indeed,
when a modern traveller like Mr. Arnold Bennett can speak of "spacious
gaiety" in connection with Philadelphia--with its spacious dulness the
earlier traveller was more apt to be impressed. At last, however, it has
given up its country-town airs for the airs of the big town it is--given
up the calmness that was its chief characteristic for the hurry-flurry
of the ordinary American town. And there is scarcely a Philadelphian
who regrets it, that is the saddest part of it--scarcely a Philadelphian
who does not rejoice that Philadelphia is getting to be like New York.
[Illustration: THE MARKET STREET ELEVATED AT THE DELAWARE END]
I think, of all the innovations, this was the one that distressed me
most, though I could understand the difficulty of calm in the face of
the multitude of new housing and traffic problems it has had to tackle,
at a rate and with a speed that the Philadelphian, left to himself,
would never have imposed upon it. Somehow, it has had to keep on putting
up those rows of little two-story houses in sufficient numbers to
shelter the too rapidly increasing population if it is to maintain its
reputation as the City of Homes; somehow, it has had to provide subways,
and elevateds, and new suburban lines with no level crossings, and new
central Stations and Terminals, and big trolley cars out of all
proportion to Philadelphia's narrow streets, and taxis too dear for any
but the millionaire to drive in, if the too-rapidly increasing crowds
are to be got to work and back again; somehow, new bridges have had to
cross the Schuylkill, new streets have had to be laid out, so many new
things have had to be begun and done in the too-rapidly growing town,
that there is small chance and less time for it to take them calmly or,
alas! to keep itself clean and tidy.
II
In my memory Philadelphia was a model of cleanliness under a clean sky,
free of the smoke that the use of soft coal has brought with it. Every
Saturday every servant girl--"maid," Philadelphia calls her now--turned
out with mops and buckets and hose, for such a washing up of the front
for a week that, until the next Saturday, Philadelphia could not look
dirty if it tried. But I do not believe that a legion of servant girls,
with all the mops, buckets, and hose in the world, could ever wash
Philadelphia clean again, to such depths of dirt has it fallen. It could
not have been more of a disgrace to its citizens when Franklin deplored
the shocking condition of its streets, especially in wet weather, or
when Washington had to wade through mud to get to the theatre where he
found his recreation. It has become actually the Filthydelphia somebody
once called it in jest. Not even in the little Spanish and Italian towns
whose dirt the American deplores, have I seen such streets--all rivers
and pools and lakes when it rains, ankle-deep in dust when it is dry,
papers flying loose, corners choked with dirt, tins of ashes and garbage
standing at the gutter side all day long--even London, that I used to
think the dirtiest of dirty towns, knows how to order its garbage better
than that. We Americans are supposed to be long-suffering, to endure
almost anything until the crisis comes. But I thought that crisis had
long since come in the Philadelphia streets. Everybody agreed with me,
and I was assured that a corrupt government having been got out and a
reform government got in, already there was tremendous talk of schemes
for garbage--bags to be hauled off full of garbage, dust-tight on the
way, and hauled back empty, old paper to be bought up by the city so
that no thrifty citizen would throw a scrap of paper into the
street--and as tremendous talk of experiments in garbage, ten patriotic
citizens promising to contribute one thousand dollars each to make them.
I was assured also that the reform Mayor has done his best and struggled
valiantly against the evil, but unfortunately it is not he alone who can
vote the money for a wholesale spring-cleaning. It occurred to me that,
in the meanwhile, we might be better off if we returned with much less
expense, to the hogs that were "the best of scavengers" when William
Cobbett visited Philadelphia. Or, at no more than the cost of a ticket
to New York, the reformers might at least learn how to keep garbage tins
off the front steps of inoffensive, tax-paying citizens at five o'clock
in the afternoon when they ask their friends to drink tea in that
English fashion which is as novel in my Philadelphia as the difficulty
with the garbage.
[Illustration: THE RAILROAD BRIDGES AT FALLS OF SCHUYLKILL]
My own opinion was that Philadelphia had lost its head over the
magnitude of the task before it. In no other way could I account for the
recklessness with which old streets were torn up for blocks and repaired
by inches; new streets built and horrible stagnant pools left on their
outskirts--the suburbs quite as bad in this respect, so bad that I
understand associations of citizens are formed to do what the
authorities don't seem able to; boulevards planned and held up when half
finished, a monumental entrance designed to the most beautiful Park in
the world and, on its either side, silly little wooden pergolas set up
to try the effect, by the dethroned government I believe, and, though
nobody, from one end of the town to the other, approves, neither the
time nor the money is found to pull them down again--neither the time
nor the money found for anything but dirt and untidiness.
III
The people, their manners, their life,--everything seemed to me to have
been caught in this mad whirlwind of change and haste. The crowds in the
street were not the same, had forgotten the meaning of repose and
leisureliness; had at last given in to the American habit of leaving
everything until the last moment and then rushing when there was no
occasion for rush, and pretending to hustle so that not one man or woman
I met could have spared a second to say "You are welcome" for anybody's
"Thank you," or, for that matter, to provide the information for
anybody's thanks;--indeed, these crowds seemed to me to have mastered
their new role with such thoroughness that to-day the visitor from
abroad will carry away the same idea of Philadelphia as Arnold Bennett,
who, during his sojourn there, never ceased to marvel at its liveliness.
[Illustration: THE PARKWAY PERGOLAS]
And the crowds have migrated from the old haunts--every sign of life now
gone from Third Street and round about the Stock Exchange, where nobody
now is ever in a hurry--carts and cars going at snail's pace, the whole
place looking as if time did not count--the old town business quarter
deserted for Market Street and Broad Street round the City Hall.
And the crowds do not get about in the same way--no slow, leisurely ride
in the horse-car to a _Depot_ in the wilds of Frankford, or at Ninth and
Green, on the way to the suburbs, but a leap on a trolley, or a rush
through thronged streets to the _Terminal_ at Twelfth and Market, to the
_Station_ at Broad and Market. And it was another sign of how
Philadelphia had "moved" since the old days when, in place of the old
horse-car, which I could rely upon to go in a straight line from one end
of the long street to the other, I took the new trolley and it twisted
and turned with me until the exception was to arrive just where I
expected to, or, if I only stayed in it long enough, not to be landed in
some remote country town where I had no intention of going. I have been
told the story of the stay-at-home Philadelphian as puzzled as I, who
was promised by a motorman, as uncertain as she where he was going, that
at least he could give her a "nice ride through a handsome part of the
town." Worse still, the trolley did not stop at the corners where the
car used to stop so that I, a native Philadelphian, had to be told where
to wait for it by an interloper with a foreign accent. Nor was it
crowded at the same hours as the car used to be, so that going out to
dinner in a Walnut Street trolley I could sit comfortably and not be
obliged to hang on to a strap, with everybody who got in or out helping
to rub the freshness from my best evening gown, which would have been my
fate in the old days.
And the crowds were not managed in the old way--the ordinary policeman
used to do his best to keep out of sight, and here was the mounted
policeman prancing about everywhere, and, at congested corners, adding
to the confusion by filling up what little space the overgrown trolleys
left in the narrow streets. I am not sure that it was not this mounted
policeman--unless it was the coloured policemen and the coloured
postmen--I had most difficulty in getting accustomed to. I came upon him
every day, or almost every hour, with something of a new shock. Can this
be really I, I would say to myself when I saw him in his splendour, can
this be really Philadelphia?
IV
The difference I deplored was not confined to the crowds I did not know;
it was no less marked in the people I did know, in their standards and
outlook, in the way they lived. It is hard to say what struck me most,
though nothing more obviously the first few days than that flight to the
suburbs which had left such visible proofs as those signs "For Rent" and
"For Sale" everywhere in the streets where I was most at home--a flight
necessitated perhaps by the inroads of the alien, but only made possible
by the annihilation of space due to the motor-car.
[Illustration: MARKET STREET WEST OF THE SCHUYLKILL]
Once, when a Philadelphian set up a carriage, it was the announcement
to Philadelphia that he had earned the fifty thousand dollars which
fulfilled his ideal of a fortune. In my day Fairman Rogers' four-in-hand
was the limit, and but few Philadelphians had the money and the
recklessness to rival him. Now the Philadelphian does not have to earn
anything at all before he sets up his motor-car, and it is the
announcement of nothing except that he is bound to keep in the swim. Our
children begin where we leave off, as one of my contemporaries said to
me. Everybody has a motor-car. Everybody who can has one in London, I
know, and there also the signs "To Let" and "For Sale" in such regions
as Kensington and Bayswater have for some time back explained to me the
way it has turned London life upside down. But in Philadelphia not
merely everybody who can, but everybody who can't has one, and the
Philadelphian would not do without it, if he had to mortgage his house
as its price. I remember how incredulous I was, one of my first Sunday
evenings at home, when I was dining with friends in the
crowded-to-suffocation dining-room at the Bala Country Club and was
given as an excuse for being rushed from my untasted coffee to catch an
inconsiderately early last train, that ours was probably the only dinner
party in the room without a car to take us back to town. But from that
evening on I had no chance for incredulity, my own movements beginning
to revolve round the motor-car. If I was asked to dinner and lunch at a
distance to which nobody would have thought of dragging me by train in
the old days, a motor was sent to whirl me out in no time at all. If I
went into a far suburb for an afternoon visit, instead of coming soberly
back to town on my return ticket, I would take a short cut by flying
over half the near country, often in the car of people I had never seen
before, as the most convenient route to the hotel. All Philadelphia life
is regulated by the motor-car. It makes a ball or a tea or a dinner ten
miles away as near as one just round the corner was in my time, and so
half the gaiety is transferred to the suburbs and the suburban country,
and, to my surprise, I found girls still going to dances at midsummer.
And the motor has made club life for women indispensable. The woman who
comes up to town in her car must have a Club, and there is the Acorn
Club in Walnut Street, The New Century, and the College and Civic Clubs,
jointly housed at Thirteenth and Spruce, and more clubs in other
streets, probably, which it was not my privilege to be invited to; all,
to judge by the Acorn, with luxurious drawing-and dining-and smoking-and
dressing-and bed-rooms, and women coming and going as if they had lived
in clubs all their lives, when a short quarter of a century before there
had not been one for them to see the inside of. And for men and women
both, the car has brought within their reach those amazing Country Clubs
that have sprung up in my absence. I had read of Country Clubs in
American novels and short stories, I had seen them on the stage in
American plays, but I had never paused to think of them as realities in
Philadelphia until I was actually taken to the Bala and Huntington
Valley Clubs, and until I ate their admirable dinners--at Bala, with the
crowds and in the light and to the music that would have made me feel I
was in a London restaurant, had it not been for the inevitable
cocktail--and until I saw with my own eyes the luxurious houses so
comfortably and correctly appointed--even to brass bedroom candlesticks
on a table in the second-story hall, just as in an old-fashioned English
inn, though as far as I could make out there was excellent electric
light everywhere--until I also saw with my own eyes the trim lawns, and
gardens, and the wide view over the delicate American landscape, and
women in the tennis courts, and the men bringing out their ponies for
polo, and the players dotted over the golf course.
And whether the Country Clubs have created the sport or the sport has
created the Country Clubs, I cannot say, but in the increased attention
to sport I was confronted with another difference as startling.
Philadelphia, I know, has always been given to sport. It hunted and
raced and fished before time and conscience allowed most of the other
Colonists in the North the chance to amuse themselves out-of-doors, or
indoors either, poor things! And the old sports, barring the least
civilized like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, were kept up, and are
kept up, and had their Clubhouses, which, in some cases, have survived.
But, in my time, these sports had been limited to the few who had
country houses in the right districts or the leisure for the
gentlemanly pursuit of foxes and fishes, and their clubs were primitive
compared to the palatial Country Clubs, whose luxury women now share
with men. If you were in the hunting or fishing set, you heard all about
it; but if you were not, you heard little enough. But you did not have
to be in any set to keep up with the great Philadelphia game of cricket,
which was popular, exclusive as the players in their team might be--all
Philadelphia that did not play scrupulously going on the proper
occasions to the Germantown Cricket Ground to watch all Philadelphia
that did. The one alternative as popular was the pastime of rowing, the
exclusiveness here in the rowing men's choice among the Clubs with the
little boating clubhouses on the Schuylkill where boats could be stowed.
And now? The cricket goes on, as gentlemanly and correct a pastime as
ever. And the boating goes on, but with a delightful exclusive old
Colonial house, for one Club at least, hidden in thickets of the Park
where the stranger might pass within a stone's throw and never discover
it, but where the boating party can dine with a privacy and a
sumptuousness undreamed of at Belmont, where boating parties dined in my
young days. And, in addition, time has been prodigal with golf and
tennis and polo; women, who had begun tennis in my time, now beginning
golf, games which, I might as well admit, I have no use for and can
therefore say little about. And I am told that the University foot-ball
matches are among the most important and lavishly patronized social
functions of the year. And in town is the big Racquets Club, in a fine
new building, big enough to shelter any number of sports besides. And
the Natatorium, in moving from the unpretentious premises in South Broad
Street, where it has left its old building and name, to the marble
palace that was once George W. Childs's. Oh, the sacrilege! the house
where his emperors and princes and lords and authors were
entertained,--has converted the swimming lesson into the luxury of
sport. And all told, so many, and so exhaustive, and so universal are
the provisions for sport that I might have believed the Philadelphian
had nothing in the world to do, save to invent amusements to help him
through his empty hours.
[Illustration: MANHEIM CRICKET GROUND]
And, apparently, it is to provide for the same empty hours that those
elaborate lunch places have multiplied on Chestnut Street, some
delightful where you feast as only Philadelphia can, some horrible where
you sit on high stools at counters and fight for your food; that little
quiet discreet tea-places have sprung up in side streets; that gilded
restaurants, boasting they reproduce the last London fads and fashions,
have succeeded the old no restaurant at all; that hotels as big and
strident as if they had strayed off Fifth Avenue increase in number year
by year, culminating in the Adelphia, the latest giant, which I have not
seen; that the old poky hotels of my day have branched out in roof
gardens where on hot summer evenings you can sit up among the
sky-scrapers, a near neighbour to William Penn on his tower, and get
whatever air stirs over the red-hot furnace of Philadelphia; that a huge
new hotel has appeared up Broad Street where it seems the Philadelphian
sometimes goes with the feeling of adventure with which he once
descended upon Logan Square. Even business hours are broken into; the
lunch of a dozen oysters or a sandwich snatched up anywhere has gone out
of fashion; the chop, in the Philadelphia imitation of a London
chop-house that seemed luxurious in my Father's day, has become far too
simple; and disaster was predicted to me for the Stock Exchange by a
pessimistic member who knew that, from the new building that has
followed the Courts to the centre of the town, brokers will be running
over to lunch at the Bellevue and to incapacitate themselves more or
less for the rest of the day, and business will go on drifting, as it
has begun to, to New York and will all be done by telephone. And as if
the feasting were not enough of a pastime, everywhere lunches, teas and
dinners are served to the sound of music, so that distraction and
diversion may be counted upon without the effort to talk for them. When
I was young, the best Philadelphia could do in the way of combining
music and eating--or principally drinking--was at the Maeennerchor Garden
at Ninth and Green, where a pretzel might be had with a glass of beer,
or a sherry cobbler, or a mint julep--"high-balls" had not been heard
of--and the Philadelphia girl who went, though it was under the
irreproachable charge of her brother, could feel that she was doing
something very shocking and compromising. But in the new Philadelphia,
it is music whenever the Philadelphian eats or drinks in public, which
seems to be next to always.
[Illustration: DOCK STREET AND THE EXCHANGE]
It may be said that these are harmless innovations, part of the change
in town life as lived in any other town as big. But the marvel to me was
their conquest of Philadelphia, the town that used to pride itself on
not being like other towns, and there they exaggerated themselves in my
eyes into nothing short of revolution. The craving for novelty--that was
at the root of it all: of the restlessness, the willingness to do what
the old-fashioned Philadelphian would rather have been seen dead than
caught doing, of the deliberate break with tradition. Nothing now can be
left peacefully as it was. I felt the foundations of the world crumble
when I heard that the Dancing Class has taken new quarters over in
Horticultural Hall and the Assembly in the Bellevue, that Philadelphia
consents to go up Broad Street for its opera, quieting its conscience by
the compromise of going in carriages and motors and never on foot. There
surely was the end of the old Philadelphia, the real Philadelphia. And
it made matters no better to be assured that so rapidly does
Philadelphia move with the times that the Philadelphian who stays away
from home, or who is in mourning, for a year or so, finds on coming
back, or out of retirement, that Philadelphia society has been as
completely transformed in the meanwhile as Philadelphia streets. Nor did
it make matters better to discover the different prices that different
standards have brought in their train. I could see the new pace at which
life in public is set, I heard much of the new pace set for it in
private--servants' wages prohibitive according to old ways of thinking,
provisions risen to a scale beyond belief, every-day existence as dear
as in London--in Philadelphia, as elsewhere, people threatened with ruin
from, not the high cost of living, but the cost of high living.
V
And the change is not simply in the outward panoply, in the parade of
life, it is in the point of view, in the new attitude toward life--a
change that impressed itself upon me in a thousand and one ways. I have
already referred to my astonishment at finding Philadelphia occupying
itself with art and literature. But really there is nothing with which
it does not occupy itself. Universal knowledge has come into fashion and
it makes me tired just to think of the struggle to keep up to it. Once
the Philadelphian thought he knew everything that was necessary to know
if he could tell you who every other Philadelphian's grandfather was.
But now he, or I should say she--for it is the women who rule when it
comes to fashion--is not content unless she knows everything, or thinks
she does, from the first chapter in Genesis to the latest novelty on the
Boulevards, the latest club gossip in Pall Mall. And how she can talk
about it! I have made so many confessions in these pages that it will do
no harm to add one more to their number, and to own my discomfiture
when, on finding myself one of a group of Philadelphia women, I have
been stunned into silence, in my ignorance reduced to shame and
confusion by their encyclopedic, Baedeker-Murray information and their
volubility in imparting it. It is wonderful to know so much, but, as the
philosopher says, what a comfort, to be sure, a dull person may be at
times.
On the whole, it was the new interest in politics that most astonished
me. That just when Philadelphia has plunged into incredible frivolity,
it should develop an interest in problems it calmly shirked in its days
of sobriety--that is astounding if you will. When I left home, politics
were still beneath the active interest of the Philadelphian--still
something to steer clear from, to keep one's hands clean of. A man who
would rather live on the public than do an honest day's work, was my
Father's definition of the politician. I remember what a crank we all
thought one of my Brother's friends who amused himself by being elected
to the Common Council. It was not at all good form--who of self-respect
could so far forget himself as to become part, however humble, of the
machine, a hail-fellow-well-met among the Bosses and liable to be
greeted as Bill or Tom or Jim by the postman on his rounds or the
policeman at the corner. Better far let the city be abominably governed
and the tax-payers outrageously robbed, than to submit to such
indignities. The Philadelphian who realized what he owed to himself and
his position was superior to politics. But he is not any longer. I
found him up to his eyes in politics--taking the responsibility of
municipal reform, waging war against state corruption, running meetings
for Roosevelt and Progress at the last Presidential election. And not
only this. The women are sharing his labours--the women who of old
hardly knew the meaning of politics, might have been puzzled even to
know how to spell the unfamiliar word--they too are busy with civic
reform, and turn a watchful but unavailing eye on the garbage, and run
settlements in the slums, and qualify as policemen, and demand the
vote--parade for it, hold public meetings for it, hob-nob with coloured
women for it, run after the discredited English militant for it,--and
talk politics on any and every occasion. There were days when I heard
nothing but politics--politics at lunch, politics at tea, politics at
dinner--think of it! politics at a Philadelphia dinner party, politics
over the Soft Shell Crabs and the Shad and the Broiled Chicken and the
Ice-cream from Sautter's and the Madeira! It is better and wiser and
more improving, no doubt, than the old vapid talk--but then the old
vapid talk was part of my Philadelphia, and my Philadelphia was what I
wanted to come back to.
[Illustration: THE LOCOMOTIVE YARD, WEST PHILADELPHIA]