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.
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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.