The Personality of American Cities Part 7

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-s.h.i.+p _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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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'hote_ 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 a.s.semblies 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 gra.s.s-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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sing mention, however. One might never write of Philadelphia and forget her university--that great inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sets 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 inst.i.tution, 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 wars.h.i.+p, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sisted 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 G.o.d 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 inst.i.tutions. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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-fas.h.i.+oned Sabbath and it seems very good indeed to old-fas.h.i.+oned Americans.

But upon the other six days of the week she offers a plenitude of comfort and of amus.e.m.e.nt. She is accustomed to good living--her oysters, her red-snappers, and her sc.r.a.pple are justly famous. She is accustomed to good playing. In the summer she has far more than Fairmount Park.

Atlantic City--our American Brighton--is just fifty-six miles distant both in crow-flight and in the even path of the railroads, and because of their wonderful high-speed service many Philadelphians commute back and forth there all summer long.

For the old Red City is a paradise for commuters. Those few blocks aroundabout Rittenhouse square that her social rulers have set aside as being elect for city residence, long since have grown all too small for a great city--the great monotonous home sections north of Market and west of the Schuylkill are hot and dreary. So he who can, builds a stone house out in the lovely vicinage of the great city, and when you are far away from the high tower of the Public Buildings and find two Philadelphians having joyous argument you will probably find that they are discussing the relative merits of the "Main Line," the "Central Division" or the "Reading."

And yet the best of Philadelphia good times come in winter. She is famed for her dances and her dinners--large and small. She is inordinately fond of recitals and of exhibitions. She is a great theater-goer. And local tradition makes one strict demand. In New York if a young man of good family takes a young girl of good family to the theater he is expected to take her in a carriage. She may provide the carriage--for these days have become shameful--but it must be a carriage none the less. In Philadelphia if a young man of good family takes a young woman of good family to the theater he must not take her in a carriage, not even if he owns a whole fleet of limousines. Therein one can perhaps see something of the dominating distinctions between the two great communities.

But what Philadelphia loves most of all is a public festival. It does not matter so very much just what is to be celebrated as long as there can be a fine parade up Broad street--which just seems to have been really designed for fine parades. On New Year's Eve while New York is drinking itself into a drunken stupor, Philadelphia masks and disguises--and parades. On every possible anniversary, on each public birthday of every sort she parades--with the gay discordancies of many bands, with long files of stolid and perspiring policemen or firemen or civic societies, with rumbling top-heavy floats that mean whatever you choose to have them mean. Rittenhouse square does not hold aloof from these festivals. Oh, no, indeed! Rittenhouse square disguises itself as grandfather or grandmother or as any of the many local heroes and rides within the parade--more likely upon the floats. The parades are invariably well done. And the proletariat of Philadelphia comes out from the side streets and makes a double black wall of humanity for the long miles of Broad street.

There is something reminiscent of Bourbon France in the way that Bourbon Rittenhouse square dispenses these festivals unto the rest of the town.

It is all very diaphanous and very artificial but it is very sensuous and beautiful withal, and perhaps the rest of the town for a night forgets some of its sordidness and misery. And the picture that one of these celebrations makes upon the mind of a stranger is indelible.

Like all of such _fetes_ it gains its greatest glory at dusk. As twilight comes the strident colors of the city fade; it becomes a thing of shapes and shadows--even the restless crowd is tired and softened.

Then the genius of electricity comes to transform workaday land into fairyland and all these shapes and shadows sharpen--this time in living glowing lines of fire. It is time for men to exult, to forget that they have ever been tired. Such is the setting that modern America can give a parade. Father Penn stands on his tall tower above it all, the most commanding figure of his town. Below him the searchlights play and a million incandescents glow; the shuffling of the crowds, the faint cadences of the band, the echoes of the cheering crowd come up to him.

But he does not move. His hands, his great bronze hands, are spread in benediction over the great gay st.u.r.dy city which he brought into existence these long years ago.

5

THE MONUMENTAL CITY

If you approach Philadelphia by dusty highway, it is quite as appropriate that you come to Baltimore by water highway. A mult.i.tude of them run out from her brisk and busy harbor and not all of them find their way to the sea. In fact one of the most fascinating of all of them leads to Philadelphia--an ancient ca.n.a.l dug when the railroad was being born and in all these years a busy and a useful water-carrier. If you are a tourist and time is not a spurring object, take the little steamer which runs through the old ca.n.a.l from the city of William Penn to the city of Lord Baltimore. It is one of the nicest one-day trips that we know in all the east--and apparently the one that is the least known.

Few gazetteers or tourist-guides recommend or even notice it. And yet it remains one of the most attractive single-day journeys by water that we have ever taken.

If you will only scan your atlas you will find that nature has offered slight aid to such a single-day voyage. She builded no direct way herself but long ago man made up the omission. He dug the Chesapeake and Delaware ca.n.a.l in the very year that railroading was born within the United States. For remember that in 1829 the dreamers, who many times build the future, saw the entire nation a great network of waterways--natural and artificial. They builded the Chesapeake and Delaware ca.n.a.l bigger than any that had gone before. No mere mule-drawn barges were to monopolize it. It was designed for river and bay craft--a highway for vessels of considerable tonnage.

You arrive at this ca.n.a.l after sailing three hours down the Delaware river from Philadelphia--past the Navy Yard at League island, the piers and jetties at Marcus Hook that help to keep navigation open throughout the winter and many and many a town whose age does not detract from all its charm. The river widens into a great estuary of the sea. The narrow procession of inbound and outbound craft files through a thin channel that finally widens in a really magnificent fairway.

Suddenly your steamer turns sharply toward the starboard, toward another of the sleepy little towns that you have been watching all the way down from Philadelphia--the man who knows and who stands beside you on the deck will tell you that it is Delaware City--and right there under a little clump of trees is the beginning of the ca.n.a.l. You can see it plainly, with its entrance lock and guarding light, and if the day be Sunday or some holiday the townfolk will be down under the trees watching the steamer enter the lock. It is not much of a lock--scarcely eleven inches of raise at the flow of the tide--but it serves to protect the languid stretch of ca.n.a.l that reaches a long way inland. This gateway is a busy one at all times, for the Chesapeake and Delaware is one of the few old-time ca.n.a.ls that has retained its prestige and its traffic. An immense freight tonnage pa.s.ses through it in addition to the day-boats and the night-boats between Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Moreover, the motor boats are already finding it of great service as an important link in the inside water-route that stretches north and south for a considerable distance along the Atlantic coast.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In Baltimore Harbor]

Engines go at quarter-speed through the thirteen miles of the ca.n.a.l and the man who prefers to take his travel fast has no place upon the boat. Four miles an hour is its official speed limit and even then the "wash" of larger craft is frequently destructive to the banks. But what of that speed limit with a good magazine in your hands and a slowly changing vista of open country ever spread before your hungry eyes? You approach swing-bridges with distinction, they slowly unfold at the sharp order of the boat's whistle, holding back ancient nags of little Delaware, drawing mud-covered buggies; heavy Conestoga wagons filled with farm produce for the towns and cities to the north; sometimes a big automobile snorting and puffing as if in rage at a few minutes of enforced delay.

On the long stretches between the bridges the ca.n.a.l twists and turns as if finding its way, railroad fas.h.i.+on, between increasing slight elevations. Sometimes it is very wide and the tow-path side--for sailing-craft are often drawn by mules through it--is a slender embankment reaching across a broad expanse of water. You meet whole flotillas of freighters all the way and when edging your way past them you throw your Philadelphia morning paper into their wheel-houses you win real thanks. All the way the country changes its variety--and does not lose its fascination.

So sail to Baltimore. At Chesapeake City you are done with the ca.n.a.l, just when it may have begun to tire you ever and ever so slightly. Your vessel drops through a deep lock into the Back creek, an estuary of the Elk river. The Elk river in turn is an estuary of Chesapeake bay and you are upon one of the remote tendons of that really marvelous system of waterways that has its focal point in Hampton Roads and reaches for thousands of miles into Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina.

You sweep through the Elk river and then through the upper waters of the Chesapeake bay, just born from the yellow flood of the Susquehanna, as the day dies. As the sun is nearly down, your s.h.i.+p turns sharply, leaves the Bay and begins the ascent of the Patapsco river. Signs of a nearby city, a great city if you please, multiply. There are s.h.i.+pbuilding plants upon distant sh.o.r.es, the glares of foundry cupolas, multiplying commerce--Baltimore is close at hand.

And so you sail into Baltimore--into that lagoon-like harbor at the very heart of the town. The steamboats that go sailing further down the Chesapeake that poke their inquisitive noses into the reaches of the Pocomoke, the Pianatank, the Nantic.o.ke, the Rappahannock, the Cocohannock, the Big Wicomico and the Little Wicomico--all of these water highways of a land of milk and honey and only rivaling one another in their quiet lordly beauty--sail in and out of Baltimore. There are many of these steamers as you come into the inner harbor of the city, tightly tethered together with noses against the pier just as we used to see horses tied closely to one another at the hitching-rails, at fair-time in the home town years ago. And they speak the strength of the manorial city of Lord Baltimore. For the city that sits upon the hills above her landlocked little harbor draws her strength from a rich country for many miles roundabout. For many years she has set there, confident in her strength, leading in progress, firm in resource.