meeting-house of the Friends back the pike a way, is cursed with
modernity. It can only claim sixty years of hospitable existence. Mine
host can tell no fascinating yarn of General Washington having slept
beneath his roof, even though his tavern is named after no less a
personage. Instead he relates mournfully how a tavern over on the
Bristol pike has a tablet in its tap-room telling of the memorable night
that the members of the Continental Congress moving from New York to
Philadelphia tarried under that roof. Two good anecdotes and a corking
name almost make a wayside inn. But the anecdotes are not always easy to
find.
After lunch and a good rest the last stages of the journey. The little
towns grow more closely together; there are more houses, more
intersecting cross-roads. It will be worth your while not to miss the
signs upon these. The very names on the sign-posts--Plymouth Meeting,
Wheel Pump, Spring House, Bird-in-hand--seem to proclaim that this is a
venerable country indeed. More closely do the houses grow together, the
farms disappear, an ancient mile-post thrusts itself into your vision.
It is stone, but, after the fashion of these Pennsylvania Dutch,
white-washed and readable. It tells you:
P
10-1/2
C.H.
1 M.
But Philadelphia in reality is no ten miles away. For here is Chestnut
Hill, the houses numbered, city-fashion and the yellow trolley cars
multiplied within the busy highway which has become a city street
without you having realized the transition. The smart looking policeman
at the corner will tell you that Chestnut Hill is today one of the wards
of Philadelphia.
The city at last! You may turn at the top of a long hill and for a final
instant confront the country beyond, rolling, fertile, prosperous, the
gentle wooded hills giving soft undulation to the horizon. Then look
forward and face the busy town. For a long time yet your way shall be
down what seems to be the main street of a prosperous village, with its
great homes set away back in green lawns from the noisy pavement and the
public sidewalk. There are shops but they are distinctly local shops and
the churches bear the names of the brisk towns that were submerged in
the making of a larger Philadelphia--Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy,
Germantown.
And down this same busy street history has marched before you. Some of
it has been recorded here and there in bronze tablets along the street.
In front of one old house, one learns that General Washington conferred
with his officers at the eve of the battle of Germantown and on the
door-steps of another--set even today in its own deep grounds--Redcoat
and Buff struggled in a memorable conflict. For this was the mansion of
Judge Chew, transformed in an instant of an autumn day from
country-house to fortress. It was from the windows of this old house
that six companies of Colonel Musgrave's Fortieth regiment poured down a
deadly fire upon Mad Anthony Wayne and his men even as they attempted to
set fire to it. The house stood and so stood the Fortieth regiment.
General Washington lost his chance to enter Philadelphia that autumn,
and Valley Forge was so writ into the pages of history.
History! It is spread up and down this main street of Germantown, it
slips down the side-streets and up the alleys, into the hospitable
front-doors of stout stonehouses. Here it shows its teeth in the
bullet-holes of the aged wooden fence back of the Johnson house and
here is the Logan house, the Morris house, the Wend house, the Concord
school and the burying-ground. Any resident of Germantown will tell you
what these old houses mean to it, the part they have played in its
making.
After Germantown--Philadelphia itself. The road dips down a sudden hill,
loses itself in a short tunnel under a black maze of railroad tracks.
Beyond the railroad track the city is solidly built, row upon row of
narrow streets lined with small flat-roofed brick houses, the monotony
only accentuated by an occasional church-spire or towering factory. In
the distance a group of higher buildings--downtown Philadelphia--rising
above the tallest of them Father Penn poised on the great tower of the
City Hall. No need now for more tramping. The fascination of the open
country is gone and a trolley car will take you through tedious city
blocks--in Philadelphia they call them squares--almost to the door of
that City Hall. They _are tedious_ blocks. Architecturally Philadelphia
is the most monotonous city in America with its little red-brick houses.
Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who has known it through all the years of his life
has called it the "Red City" and rightly, too.
For mile after mile of the older Philadelphia is mile after mile of
those flat-roofed red-brick houses. They seemingly must have been made
at some mill, in great quantities and from a limited variety of
patterns. For they are almost all alike, with their two or three stories
of narrow windows and doors; steps and lintels and cornice of white
marble and invariably set close upon the sidewalk line. There is no more
generosity than individuality about the typical side streets of
Philadelphia.
A single thing will catch your eye about these Philadelphia houses--a
small metal device which is usually placed upon the ledge of a
second-story window. The window must be my lady's sitting-room, for a
closer look shows the device to be a mirror, rather two or three
mirrors, so cunningly placed that they will show her folk passing up and
down or standing upon her doorstep without troubling her to leave her
comfortable rocking chair. There must be a hundred thousand of these
devices in Philadelphia. They call them "busy-bodies" quite
appropriately, and they are as typical of the town as its breakfast
scrapple and sausage.
* * * * *
Even a slow-moving Philadelphia trolley car eventually accomplishes its
purpose and you will find yourself slipping from the older town into the
oldest. The trolley car grinds around an open square--Franklin square,
the conductor informs you and then tells you that despite its name it is
not to be confounded with that aristocrat, Rittenhouse square, nor even
with the more democratic Logan square. You see that for yourself. There
are mean streets aroundabout this square. Oldest Philadelphia assuredly
is not putting her best foot forward.
And yet these sordid streets are not without their fascination. The ugly
monotony of flat-roofs is gone. These roofs are high-pitched and bristle
with small-paned dormer windows and with chimneys, for the houses that
stand beneath them are very, very old indeed. And they are typical of
that Georgian architecture that we love to call Colonial. A brave show
these houses once must have made--even today a bit of battered rail, a
fragment of door or window-casing or fanlight proclaims that once they
were quality. Fallen to a low estate, to the housing of Italians or
Chinese instead of quiet Quakers, they seem almost to be content that
their streets have fallen with them; that few seem to seek them out in
this decidedly unfashionable corner of Philadelphia.
"Arch street," calls the conductor and it is time to get out. It is time
to thread your way down one of the earliest streets of the old Red
City, time to pay your respects at the tomb of him who ranked with Penn,
the Proprietor, as the greatest citizen. You can find this tomb
easily--any newsboy on the street can point the way to it. He is buried
with others of his faith in the quiet yard of Christ church at Fifth and
Arch streets. And in order that the passing world may sometimes stop to
do him the homage of a passing thought, a single section of the old
brick wall has been cut away and replaced by an iron grating. Through
that grating you may see his tomb--a slab of stone sunk flat, for he was
an unpretentious man--and on its face read:
"Benjamin and Deborah Franklin. 1790."
Beyond that graveyard you will see a meeting-house of the Friends, one
of the best-known in all that grave city which their patron founded. It
is the meeting-house of the Free Quakers, and to its building both
Franklin and Washington, himself, lent a liberal aid. And you can still
see upon a tablet set in one of its faded brick walls these four lines:
"By General Subscription,
For the Free Quakers.
Erected A. D. 1783,
Of the Empire 8."
That "Empire 8" has puzzled a good many tourists. In a republic and
erected upon the gathering-place of as simple a sect as the Friends it
provokes many questions.
"They must have thought it was goin' to be an empire like that French
Empire that was started by the war in '75," the aged caretaker patiently
will tell you with a shake of the head which shows that he has been
asked that very question many times before and never found a really good
answer for it.
A few squares below its graveyard is Christ church itself--a splendid
example of the Georgian architecture as we find it in the older cities
close to the Atlantic seaboard. Designed by the architect of
Independence Hall it is second to that great building only in historic
interest. Its grave-yard is a roster of the Philadelphia aristocracy of
other days. In its exquisitely beautiful steeple there hangs a chime of
eight bells brought in the long ago from old England in Captain Budden's
clipper-ship _Matilda_ freight-free. And local tradition relates that
for many years thereafter the approach of Captain Budden's _Matilda_ up
the Delaware was invariably heralded by a merry peal of welcome from the
bells.
[Illustration: Where William Penn looks down upon the town he loved so
well]
Philadelphia is rich in such treasure-houses of history. To the
traveler, whose bent runs to such pursuits, she offers a rare field. In
the oldest part of the city there is hardly a square that will not offer
some landmark ripe with tradition and rich with interest. Time has laid
a gentle hand upon the City of Brotherly Love. And no American, who
considers himself worthy of the name, can afford not to visit at least
once in his lifetime the greatest of our shrines--Independence Hall.
Within recent years this fine old building has, like many of its
fellows, undergone reconstruction. But the workmen have labored
faithfully and truthfully and the old State House today, in all its
details, is undoubtedly very much as it stood at the time of the signing
of the Declaration. It still houses the Liberty Bell, that intrepid and
seemingly tireless tourist who visits all the world's fairs with a
resigned patience that might well commend itself to human travelers.
* * * * *
Around these landmarks of colonial Philadelphia there ebbs and flows the
human tides of the modern city. The windows of what is today the finest
as well as the largest printing-house in the land look down upon the
tree-filled square in which stands Independence Hall. A little while
ago this printing concern looked down upon the grave of that earlier
printer--Franklin. But growth made it necessary to move from Arch
street--the busiest and the noisiest if not the narrowest of all precise
pattern of parallel roads that William Penn--the Proprietor of other
days--laid back from the Delaware to the Schuylkill river.
One square from Arch street is Market, designed years ago by the
far-sighted Quaker to be just what it is today--a great commercial
thoroughfare of one of the metropolitan cities of America. At its feet
the ferries cross the Delaware to the fair New Jersey land. Up its
course to the City Hall--or as the Philadelphian will always have it,
the Public Buildings--are department stores, one of them a commercial
monument to the man who made the modern department store possible and so
doing became the greatest merchant of his generation. Department stores,
big and little, two huge railroad terminals which seem always
thronged--beyond the second of them desolation for Market street--a
dreary course to the Schuylkill; beyond that stream it exists as a mere
utility street, a chief artery to the great residence region known as
West Philadelphia.
Arch street, Market street, then the next--Chestnut street. Now the
heart of your real Philadelphian begins to beat staccato. Other lands
may have their Market streets--your San Francisco man may hardly admit
that his own Market street could ever be equaled--but there is only one
Chestnut street in all this land.
The big department stores have given way to smaller shops--shops where
Philadelphia quality likes to browse and bargain. Small restaurants,
designed quite largely to meet the luncheon and afternoon tea tastes of
feminine shoppers show themselves. Upon a prominent corner there stands
a very unusual grocery shop. That is, it must be a grocery shop for
that is what it advertises itself, but in the window is a _papier-mache_
reproduction of the _table-d'hôte_ luncheon that it serves upon its
balcony, and within there are quotations from Shakespeare upon the wall
and "best-sellers" sold upon its counters.
And after Chestnut street, which runs the gamut from banks to retail
shops and then to smart homes, Walnut street. We have been tempted to
call Walnut "the Street of the Little Tailors," for so many shops have
they from Seventh street to Broad that one comes quickly to know why
Philadelphia men are as immaculate to clothes as to good manners.
Between the little shops of the tailors there are other little
shops--places where one may find old prints, old books, old bits of
china or bronze. Walnut street runs its course and at the intersection
of Broad is a group of four great hotels, two of them properly
hyphenated, after modern fashion. Beyond Broad it changes. No shops may
now profane it, for it now penetrates the finest residential district of
Philadelphia. Here is the highway of aristocracy and in a little way
will be Rittenhouse square--the holy of holies.
Just as Market street in San Francisco forms the sharp demarking line
between possible and impossible so does Market street, Philadelphia,
perform a similar service for William Penn's city. You must live "below"
Market street, which means somewhere south of that thoroughfare. "No
one" lives "above Market," which is, of course, untrue, for many
hundreds of thousands of very estimable folk live north of that street.
In fact, two-thirds of the entire population of Philadelphia live north
of Market, which runs in a straight line almost east and west. But
society--and society in Philadelphia rules with no unsteady
hand--decries that a few city squares south of Market and west of Broad
shall be its own _demesne_. You may have your country house out in the
lovely suburbs of the town, if you will, and there are no finer suburban
villages in all the world than Bryn Mawr or Ognotz or Jenkintown--but if
you live in town you must live in the correct part of the town or give
up social ambitions. And there is little use carrying social ambitions
to Philadelphia anyway. No city in the land, not even Boston or
Charleston, opens its doors more reluctantly to strange faces and
strange names, than open these doors of the old houses roundabout
Rittenhouse square. And for man or woman coming resident to the town to
hope to enter one of Philadelphia's great annual Assemblies within a
generation is quite out of the possibilities.
Rittenhouse square may seem warm and friendly and democratic with its
neat pattern of paths and grass-plots, its rather genteel loungers upon
its shadiest benches, the children of the nurse-maids playing beneath
the trees. But the great houses that look down into it are neither warm
nor friendly nor democratic. They are merely gazing at you--and
inquiring--inquiring if you please, if you have Pennsylvania blood and
breeding. If you have not, closed houses they are to remain to you. But
if you do possess these things they will open--with as warm and friendly
a hospitality as you may find in the land. There is the first trace of
the Southland in the hospitality of Philadelphia, just as her red brick
houses, her brick pavement and her old-fashioned use of the market,
smack of the cities that rest to the south rather than those to the
north.
* * * * *
To give more than a glimpse of the concrete Philadelphia within these
limits is quite out of the question. It would mean incidentally the
telling of her great charities, her wonderful museum of art whose winter
show is an annual pilgrimage for the painters from all the eastern
portion of the land, of her vast educational projects. Two of these
last deserve a passing mention, however. One might never write of
Philadelphia and forget her university--that great institution upon the
west bank of the Schuylkill which awoke almost overnight to find itself
man-size, a man-sized opportunity awaiting. And one should not speak of
the University of Pennsylvania and forget the college that Stephen
Girard founded. Of course Girard College is not a college at all but a
great charity school for boys, but it is none the less interesting
because of that.
The story of Stephen Girard is the story of the man who was not alone
the richest man in Philadelphia but the richest man in America as well.
But among all his assets he did not have happiness. His beautiful young
wife was sent to a madhouse early in her life, and Girard shut himself
off from the companionship of men, save the necessity of business
dealings with them. He was known as a stern, irascible, hard screw of a
man--immensely just but seemingly hardly human. Only once did
Philadelphia ever see him as anything else--and that was in the yellow
fever panic at the end of the eighteenth century when Stephen Girard,
its great merchant and banker, went out and with his own purse and his
own hands took his part in alleviating the disaster. It was many years
afterward that Girard College came into being; its center structure a
Greek temple, probably the most beautiful of its sort in the land, and
its stern provision against the admission of clergymen even to the
grounds of the institution, a reflection of its founder's hard mind
coming down through the years. Today it is a great charity school,
taking boys at eight years of age and keeping them, if need be, until
they are eighteen, and in all those years not only schooling but housing
them and feeding them as well as the finest private-school in all this
land.
And as Girard College and the University of Pennsylvania stand among the
colleges of America, so stands Fairmount Park among the public pleasure
grounds of the country. It was probably the first public park in the
whole land, and a lady who knows her Philadelphia thoroughly has found
many first things in Philadelphia--the first newspaper, the first
magazine, the first circulating library, the first medical college, the
first corporate bank, the first American warship, the unfurling of the
first American flag, not least of these the first real world's fair ever
held upon this side of the Atlantic. For it was the Centennial which not
only made Fairmount Park a resort of nation-wide reputation, not only
opened new possibilities of amusement to a land which had always taken
itself rather seriously, but marked the turning of an era in the
artistic and the social, as well as the political life of the United
States. The Centennial was, judged by the standard of the greatest
expositions that followed it, a rather crude affair. Its exhibits were
simple, the buildings that housed them fantastic and barnlike. And the
weather-man assisted in the general enjoyment by sending the mercury to
unprecedented heights that entire summer. Philadelphia is never very
chilly in the summer; the northern folk who went to it in that
not-to-be-forgotten summer of 1876 felt that they had penetrated the
tropics. And yet when it was all over America had the pleased feeling of
a boy who finds that he can do something new. And even sober folk felt
that a beginning had been made toward a wider view of life across the
United States.
It is nearly forty years since the Centennial sent the tongues of a
whole land buzzing and the two huge structures that it left in Fairmount
Park have begun to grow old, but the park itself is as fresh and as new
as in the days of its beginning, and there are parts of it that were
half a century old before the Centennial opened its doors. There are
many provisions for recreation within its great boundaries, boating upon
the Schuylkill, the drives that border that river, the further drive
that leaves it and sweeps through the lovely glen of the Wissahickon.
The Wissahickon Drive is a joy that does not come to every
Philadelphian. That winding road is barred to sight-seeing cars and
automobiles of indiscriminate sort because the quality of the town
prefers to keep it to itself. So runs Philadelphia; a town which is in
many ways sordid, which has probably the full share of suffering that
must come to every large city, but which bars its fine drive to the
proletariat while Rittenhouse square blandly wonders why Socialism makes
progress across the land. Philadelphia does not progress--in any broad
social sense. She plays cricket--splendidly--is one of the few American
towns in which that fine English game flourishes--and she dispenses her
splendid charity in the same senseless fashion as sixty years ago. But
she does not understand the trend of things today--and so she bars her
Wissahickon Drive except to those who drive in private carriages or
their own motor car, and delivers the finest of the old Colonial houses
within her Fairmount Park area to clubs--of quality.
Personally we much prefer John Bartram's house to any of those splendid
old country-seats within Fairmount. To find Bartram's Gardens you need a
guide--or a really intelligent street-car conductor. For there is not
even a marking sign upon its entrance, although Philadelphia professes
to maintain it as a public park. Little has been done, however, to the
property, and for that he who comes to it almost as a shrine has reason
to be profoundly thankful. For the old house stands, with its barns,
almost exactly as it stood in the days of the great naturalist. One may
see where his hands placed the great stone inscribed "John-Ann Bartram
1731" within its gable; on the side wall another tablet chiseled there
forty years later, and reading:
"Tis God alone, almighty Lord,
The holy one by me adored."
Neglect may have come upon the gardens but even John Bartram could not
deny the wild beauty of these untrammeled things. The gentle river is
still at the foot of the garden, within it, most of the shrubs and trees
he planted are still growing into green old age. And next to his fine
old simple house one sees the tangled yew-tree and the Jerusalem
"Christ's-thorn" that his own hands placed within the ground.
* * * * *
Philadelphia prides herself upon her dominant Americanism--and with no
small reason. She insists that by keeping the doorways to her houses
sharply barred she maintains her native stock, her trained and
responsible stock, if you please, dominant. She avers that she protects
American institutions. New York may become truly cosmopolitan, may ape
foreign manners and foreign customs. Philadelphia in her quiet, gentle
way prefers to preserve those of her fathers.
One instance will suffice. She has preserved the American
Sabbath--almost exactly as it existed half a century ago. As to the
merits and demerits of that very thing, they have no place here. But the
fact remains that Philadelphia has accomplished it. From Saturday night
to Monday morning a great desolation comes upon the town. There are no
theaters not even masquerading grotesquely as "sacred concerts," no open
saloons, no baseball games, no moving pictures--nothing exhibiting for
admission under a tight statute of Pennsylvania, in effect now for more
than a century. And it is only a few years ago that the churches were
permitted to stretch chains across the streets during the hours of
their services. A few bad fires, however, with the fire-engines
becoming entangled with the chains and this custom was abandoned. But
the churches are still open, and they are well attended. It is an
old-fashioned Sabbath and it seems very good indeed to old-fashioned
Americans.