limestone plain just beyond the low primitive rocks. Trade flowed in from
the West Indies and Europe. In thirty years the place was bigger than
any in the provinces. The Proprietor’s square house set the fashion,
built from imported brick. Farmsteads on the road out to the German town
of the new immigrants were built of the gray schists of the region.
Ship-building began. Pirates lurked in the river below. The Proprietor’s
official residence, now gone, fronted on the fouling pool where boats
came, and matched the English country-house of South England. A little
State House, which closely resembled in outer look the market-house
of the same period on Second Street to the south, was built on Market
Street, near the open rising ground on which Letitia Penn’s dwelling
stood. Merchants’ homes were on its low hill; some of those still there
are probably of this period when of imported brick. There is a row of
houses on Swanson Street recalling the mechanics’ homes. In green quiet
still held, the Friends’ meeting-house was erected—the present building
far later. Low houses and warehouses clustered about what is now Dock
Street—probably not one left. The swarm of some two thousand houses
stretched along the river for what is now a square or two. Beyond were a
few fields. Dense forests stood to the Schuylkill, and crowned all the
little hills about, save that Fairmount stood bare, as is indeed the
fashion of the sterile, rocky height. Schools were opened, of which one
survives in the “Penn charter” school on Twelfth and Market. The city
began its chartered existence, and the portraits of its first mayors,
whose descendants are still part of the active life of the city, recall
those of Guildhall, not as with like New England iconography, the
Puritan remonstrants of James and Charles. An almanac was issued from
the press of Bradford, whose solitary copy in the Historical Society
begins printing for the State. A polyglot literature was in progress,
apparent in more than one collection. The long, low, brick-built town
left its image in 1720 in the picture in the entrance of the Philadelphia
Library. Market stalls filled the river end of the street to which they
gave a name, and these the civic organization, the peak-towered State
House, the courts, the brick houses, the Proprietor’s residence, the
city ordinances, the entire machinery of life, followed and imitated as
closely as might be, on the edge of the wilderness, the market borough
of an English shire. The town had had its first big boom and was near
wallowing in its first reaction,—houses empty, more money in demand,
debts oppressive, and all hope gone, when (1723) the great genius,
Benjamin Franklin, who was to be its second founder and save it from
Friend and Precisian, Palatinate Dutch, German, and Pietist, walked up
Market Street and turned down Fourth in early morning. He was to give
Philadelphia its better civilization. For near seventy years, he was to
be, so far as the civilized world was concerned, the city and all in it
worth knowing. By supreme good fortune all his past, or at least as much
as it is desirable to know, is laid bare to the visitor. The houses in
which he is said to have had his lodging as apprentice—old enough for
this, at least—look down from Lodge Street on Dock Square. His old home
on Market, between Third and Fourth, is long since gone, but it stood
back from the street and was doubtless of the type of the roomy old
houses now on Third south of Walnut, or the house of Hamilton in Woodlawn
Cemetery. The letter-books of Franklin, with his correspondence for over
twenty years, are at the American Philosophical Society which he founded,
which first commemorated his death, and, a century later, the centenary
of his obsequies. The best of his portraits is there, Houdon’s bust of
the old man, and the roomy-seated chair of “Dr. Heavysides.” His dress
buckles are in the Historical Society, and the teacups over which he
bowed his compliments, and some speeches which Madame Helvetius rightly
held more dearer than compliments, frowsy as Mrs. Adams found her. There,
too, is the dubious portrait, which, whether it is Franklin in his youth
or no, looks the youth of his male descendants. Part of his electric
machine, and his printing-press, are in the Franklin Institute, part
in the Philadelphia Library, which he also founded, and a Leyden jar,
perhaps of the great experiment, at the American Philosophical Society.
The fire-bucket of his company, and the sword he wore in his brief but
not inglorious military service, are in the Historical Society. One
probable site of the field in which he flew his kite is filled by the
present Record building. His statue is on the front of the library at
Juniper and Locust; another—worthy—is to the right on Chestnut Street,
looking on the flow of men and women in the city life he loved, for in
the country he never willingly spent a day. Not a stage of his life but
can still be followed by the historical pilgrim in Philadelphia. He
can follow in Franklin’s steps,—the steep slope up which he walked to
enter—with old landing-stairs still in place south of Market—the Fourth
Street corner, the site of his job office, the purlieus of Dock Street,
from whence came the mire that never quite left his garments, the lots
of the Market Street home where his better years were passed, his pew
at Christ’s Church, the State House he entered for a half-century in
so many capacities—King’s officer, contractor, colonial legislator,
rebellious congressman, signer of the Declaration and Constitution,—his
eye through all the years on the gilded sun one can yet trace on the
back of the President’s chair—and last, when his own sun was at its
setting, as member of the Constitutional Convention of his own State,
and his modest grave at Fifth and Arch, where one may still uncover at
the last memory of the most human of all Americans. Most of us, least
of other lands, prefiguring in life, work, and character our invincible
patience, our good humor, our quenchless curiosity, our careless disorder
in trifles, our easy success in serious affairs, our sluttish phrase, our
high spirit, the even equality of our manners, our perpetual relish for
the simple environment and the homelier joys of our life, our neglect
of means and detail, our perseverance and achievement in the final end,
our self-consciousness and our easy conviction that neither fate itself,
nor our own careless disregard of a less wise past, can rob us of our
appointed place in the advancing files of time.
[Illustration: FRANKLIN IN 1777.
AFTER THE PRINT REPRODUCED FROM THE DRAWING OF COHIN.]
[Illustration: THE PHILADELPHIA LIBRARY.
THE OLD BUILDING ON FIFTH STREET, NOW DEMOLISHED. FROM THE ENGRAVING BY
W. BIRCH & SON.]
Franklin’s busy march through these streets bridged two great periods.
His half-century before the Revolution, fifty-two years from his landing
to Lexington, was a season of prodigious material expansion whose signs
are all about the city. Then were built those pleasant places in the
Park, and homes like that of John Penn’s in the Zoölogical Garden, ending
in the privateer’s house which was later to be Arnold’s headquarters,
to-day Mt. Pleasant. John Bartram built his stone house, set up its
pillars and laid out his Botanical Garden, both happily standing and
city property, his cypress alone dead,—slow failing through the years in
which one lover has each spring sought it,—but much of his sylvan wealth
remains, still a record of his science and of the economic conditions
which gave him means for his long and costly trips. For when there were
neither roads nor railroads the “distance-rent” of farm land near a city
was enormous. The farm hard by swept in all the profit of days of teaming
of which the railroad has long since robbed it and diffused it over a
wide area, levelling up, as is our American way. The home, the life, the
leisure, the acquaintance and the society possible 150 years ago to a man
who farmed suburban acres are all attested when you stand in Bartram’s
garden by the river on the gray rock of the only rock wine-press this
side of the Atlantic, and remember that on this curving path Washington,
Franklin, Hancock, Rittenhouse, Morris, and Kalm, and a score more of the
century’s great, supped in the cool, open evening with a host whom the
first two found at a sudden coming bare-headed, barefooted and plowing.
The Revolutionary houses of the environs tell of the farm-profits of this
period; so do the “clasped hands” and the “green tree” on the fronts of
the olden homes—few or none dating back of the Revolution—which record
the organization of rival insurance companies; the earliest building
of the Pennsylvania Hospital on Pine with quaint old-world aspect, the
little strip of wall at Tenth and Spruce, once part of the almshouse
which Longfellow blended with the hospital in _Evangeline_; Carpenters’
Hall, the only Guild house in the colonies; the bit of wall still
standing of the brewery at Fifth and Wharton; of the first play-house in
the city and, most important of all, the two chief colonial monuments of
the city, Christ Church and Independence Hall.
[Illustration: CARPENTERS’ HALL, PHILADELPHIA.
WHEREIN MET THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS, 1774.]
[Illustration: THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL.
FROM AN OLD ENGRAVING BY W. BIRCH & SON.]
These buildings mark much. The city from a mere “Front” Street on the
river, and two behind it, had grown up to Seventh and Eighth in a half
ellipse which ran in thriving homes from Kensington, grew thronged
about Chestnut, now passing Market in the race,—so that Market and
Arch have the oldest house-fronts to-day,—and then thinned out again
towards the scene of the Mischienza. In this area are scattered the
mansions of the Colonial and immediate post-Revolutionary period, with
Mrs. Ross’s house on Arch Street as type of the mechanic’s dwelling of
the day, happily preserved and now bought as a memorial of the flag
first made there. Beyond them begins the modern city of this century,
of machine-made brick, of lumber sawed by steam, and house plans fitted
to the growing value of the city lot. The growth which thus expanded
the city of Penn into the city of Franklin was no mere accretion of
population. It came of a profitable trade, of a share in adventures by
sea and land, not always legal, and always dangerous, and of a close
connection between the merchants of this city and those of London, from
which the ancestors of more than one Philadelphia Friend were drawn,
for Penn had borne his testimony in the Grace Church and Wheeler Street
meeting-houses in London. When the richer men of the city came to erect
its chief church, it was Gibbs’s St. Martin in the Fields which suggested
the interior of the building on Second Street, and it was London brick
architecture which was followed in Independence Hall and its open
arches,—now restored,—despoiling the record of recent history to decorate
and sometimes disfigure an earlier period, as is the manner and method
of restoration the world over. These buildings in their size, their
grace, their Georgian flavor, their cost,—for both were extravagant as
times then went,—stood for an opulent mercantile connection between the
metropolis of colonial and of royal England, a connection never quite
lost, as the resemblance of the younger city to the older has never quite
vanished. New York suggests Paris in spots, but no Philadelphian in his
wildest flight ever thought that Philadelphia did.
When the Revolution came, Philadelphia sacrificed its English trade
as promptly as ninety years later the city, loyal to its principles,
sacrificed its Southern trade, and in both times and both sacrifices New
York lagged to the rear in action and came to the front in assertion.
Independence Hall still looked out on green fields to the west, and
Rittenhouse’s little observatory—earliest of American star-gazing spots,
whose telescope, earliest of our astronomical instruments, is in the
American Philosophical Society—still stood in the square where Howe’s
artillery was to be parked. The jail of “Hugh Wynne” was on the southeast
corner of Sixth and Chestnut, on whose site Binney’s home was to stand
later, the hero of another struggle for freedom. In the northeast corner
of Washington Square was the potter’s field, last opened a century
ago for yellow-fever victims. The house, Dutch built, and hence close
to the street edge, in which Jefferson was to write the draft of the
Declaration, preserved by the American Philosophical Society, was on
Seventh and Market, its commemoration tablet on the wrong lot. A tavern
fronted the Hall, and its stables ran opposite to the main door, its
flies worrying the Continental Congress on a hot historic afternoon.
The sharp rise which still ascends between Callowhill and Spring Garden
was crested by the British works, of which the first was at Second and
Poplar. From the Market Street Bridge it is still possible to make out
the hill on which Hamilton planted his field-pieces to engage the British
_tête-du-pont_, held by the 72d Highlanders. The Hessians camped in the
open space at Gray’s Ferry, as the bridge of many years is still called.
The stately house which held the Mischienza has disappeared only within
a few years. The houses on the main street of Germantown still bear the
mark of the battle, and look unchanged on the street whose fogs still
veil it as on the day of conflict. The city now had from the river the
sky-line which it substantially retained up to twenty years ago, when the
steeples and the towers the Revolutionary period knew were dwarfed by the
many-storied steel frames of to-day.
[Illustration: INDEPENDENCE HALL, PHILADELPHIA, BEFORE 1876.]
[Illustration: THE MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN, PHILADELPHIA.]
The returning tide of prosperity after the Revolution has left one mark
in the Morris dwelling on the south side of Eighth, between Locust and
Walnut, type of the wealthy home of the day. The biggest of the period
was Robert Morris’s, on the site of the Press Building, left as his
“folly.” The peak-roofed house in roomy squares now gave way for thirty
years to the house built flush to the street, which in the generation
between 1790 and 1820 spread the growing city up to Tenth Street or so,
and of which many are left. With this growth dwellings pushed beyond
South on one side and beyond Vine on the other, the fringe of the city
limits becoming an Alsatia still apparent, mechanics’ homes crowding
just beyond as they still do, until met north and even south by more
pretentious dwellings. In this thirty years the city grew from 42,000 to
108,000, and it faced first the problem to which only the American and
Australian city has proved fully equal in all the round of semitropical
summers north or south of the equator. The city, as it inherited from
England its city government, had also inherited from there its well-water
supply, its surface drainage, its slovenly streets, its practice of
crowding the homes of the poor on back lots, so as to fill the area
on which they stood with unsavory wynds, and its habit of intramural
interment and intramural slaughter-houses, all which, even the Latin
cities of two thousand years ago, taught by hotter summers, had outgrown.
In the tepid temperature and light but even rain-fall in England these
worked few ills until the middle of this century. Under our torrid
summer, our tropical rain-fall, and our swift changes, all these things
meant disease and death, and the unconscious problem which faced the city
a century ago and left its mark on the map was recorded in yellow fever,
born of water-supply and filth together with overcrowding, and all the
evils of bad water and overcrowding.
Water-works were at last built, the most considerable then known, their
site where the Public Buildings stand and their picture in the Historical
Society; a systematic street scavenging began, building on the back of
lots was prohibited, years before New York, and two generations before
the European city; a fixed yardage, small, but sufficient to transform
the city map, was required of each dwelling; paving and sewerage
commenced, the almshouse was moved, a city hospital was established,
and a most important legal decision made easy the purchase of house
lots by the poor and frugal. The solution was not complete. Typhoid
lurks where yellow fever once raged, but crowding was prevented and
the city has no slums in the region outside of the area which has been
built over since the ordinances of the first twenty to thirty years of
this century stopped overcrowding and saved its poorer citizens from
the awful fate inflicted by the titled avarice and civic mislegislation
of London and Glasgow. Nor ought any one to look across the Schuylkill
from the Zoölogical Garden at the lovely and related group which houses
the Fairmount Water-works without a thrill of pride that this was the
beginning of the problem of preserving health in heat and rain, which
since the world began had meant pestilence to the city in like climes.
As is the American habit, the supply looked first to quantity, and later
to quality; and as is also the American habit, both will be secured in
the end. So the large provision for the almshouse of seventy years ago
has given the space for the University and its buildings, its cognate
institutions, hospitals and museums, taken collectively, one of the most
liberal grants made by any modern city to the work of higher education
not under its own control, a grant which owed its initiative and early
success to Dr. William Pepper, whose statue overlooks the site he secured
to learning and to science. There the University has grown, covered its
site with a score of buildings, added department to department, doubled
its students in a decade, received more in gifts under its present
Provost, Mr. Charles C. Harrison, than had come to it in all the
century and a half of its history, knit the community to it and given it
intellectual leadership by a group of affiliated societies, linked itself
to the public schools by municipal scholarships supported by the city,
opened courses for teachers, spread its lectures over the State and in
all ways made itself not only an institution of learning for students,
but of teaching for the community.
[Illustration: DR. WILLIAM PEPPER.]
[Illustration: FRANK THOMSON.]
The development of civic institutions in the first quarter of the century
was accompanied by the founding, each to-day housed in conspicuous
recent edifices of the past decade, of State-aided institutions for
the Deaf and Dumb, 1820, for the Blind, 1833, and the House of Refuge,
1828. This philanthropic impulse came, as such generally does, as part
of a rapid material development which, in a score of years ending
with the commercial crash of 1837-39, had laid the foundations of the
manufacturing activity and the internal commerce of Philadelphia. It was
in this period that the Music Fund Hall (1824), Eighth above South, was
built. The Exchange, 1832, the most pretentious building of its day, was
erected near the close of the period, and the pillared row, following a
London model, was built on Spruce between Ninth and Tenth, the largest
and most costly private dwellings of its day. The next Colonnade row,
nearly twenty years later, occupied the site, and gave the name to the
Colonnade Hotel, Fifteenth and Chestnut. St. Mark’s and St. Luke’s
stood for opposite extremes of the church edifices of the forties. The
taste of the Federalists and Whigs of the day filled the city with the
pseudo-classic, from which Europe was just departing—the United States
bank, now the Custom-house, the Mint, the building in which Girard had
his bank, back of the Exchange, and lastly Girard College, not easily
forgot, however unfit for its purpose, if once seen from St. George’s
hill on its airy height. The ship-building firm of Cramps was established
1830, and Baldwin’s Locomotive Works 1837, both products of the same
period of activity. Ten years later began the Pennsylvania railroad
comparable to a kingdom in revenue power and the ability of chiefs like
Frank Thomson. The city flowed across Broad Street, and solid blocks
pushed their way in brick and white marble, turning later to New York’s
brown-stone, up each flank of the city on Pine and on Arch, spreading
out in an area beyond Broad Street, which the crash of credit, and the
failure of the State for a season to pay the interest on its bonds, left
tenantless, often roofless, covered with mortgages and the prediction,
heard first under Governor Keith, 1725, repeated within this decade, that
the city would never need the houses which a boom had erected.
The city of the period before the war had now been built and the suburbs
had grown close to the consolidation of 1854. Railroad access had
created, across the Schuylkill, the village of Mantua, which was to
become West Philadelphia as it extended southward and was reached by new
bridges and street-car lines. To the north, just beyond the old British
redoubts, factory owners, managers and foremen, mechanics and operatives,
with the retailers they required, had built their homes on the higher
ground, north of the great industries growing on the low and lightly
taxed land, easily accessible by railroads from the coal-fields, beyond
the old city limits at Vine, and extending to Callowhill and beyond. This
created the city of Spring Garden. The river settlements, the Northern
Liberties, Kensington, Richmond, grew under the triple influence of
manufacturers and cheap coal, out of the villages whose farm-houses,
taverns and mechanics’ dwellings of the early years of the century still
dot the raw newer dwellings of the past forty years. Like settlements had
grown in Southwark and Manayunk. The gaps and sutures still remain to
mark the old divisions. The squalid stretches of South Street from river
to river, for nearly a century the resort of cheap stores which sought
city trade, and avoided city taxes. The like ragged selvedge along Vine,
influenced, too, along much of the line by low, open ground. The gap
fringing both banks of the Schuylkill, marking days when the railroad and
the Market Street bridge made the more distant uprise of Fortieth Street
more accessible than the lower region nearer. The bare and vacant patches
about Germantown Junction, over which the old village has never quite
grown down to meet the approaching city, where for various reasons of
grade, access was not easy, and where institutions like Girard College
and the Penitentiary, with a cemetery or two, like rocks in a moving
stream, have stopped and divided the glacier-like spread of the city.
These things have made Philadelphia, like London, a city of accretions
from divers centres, and not, like Paris or New York, a steady,
symmetrical and continuous growth from one organic centre.
The war found a city which, united, had more than the area of London
(Philadelphia, 82,807 acres; London, 74,692), and at almost every stage
of the growth of the two a quarter of the population of the vaster
metropolis. Since room is the chief factor in civic comfort, there has
never been a year in which the average man has not been just about four
times as comfortable in Philadelphia as in London, and he has always had
higher wages by a quarter to a half, paid less for food and lodgings,
and paid more for clothing, light and coal. He has lived here, a family
to a house, where a quarter of London has been a family to two rooms.
Most of all, for twenty years past has this growth of the small houses
of labor gone on, their number swelling faster than the tale of families
seeking them. These conditions, secured by a wise civic policy early
in the century, had reached the full development, which they have since
maintained, at the opening of the war. Inexpressibly dull was the
extension the city now made, the dreary reaches of homes, which oppress
the stranger west of Eleventh Street, and appear in unvarying blocks on
the North and South Streets, the building operations of the ’40s and
’50s, in whose even rows were the last, worst expression of the dull,
utilitarian spirit of the pre-war, pre-centennial period. Napoleon LeBrun
built the Cathedral and the Academy of Music, a brick shell holding a
shapely and grandiose interior, and Walton and McArthur added to the
pseudo-classic. When the Jayne Block went up on Chestnut, east of Third,
it was believed to be the largest single business building yet erected
on the continent. The Girard, 1852, was one of its largest hotels, and
echoed the Italian palace front which Barry had taught London in his
Reform Club.
[Illustration: THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.