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 fêtes 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 sturdy 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 multitude 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 canal 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 canal 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 canal 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 canal 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.