Once, when a Philadelphian set up a carriage, it was the announcement to Philadelphia that he had earned the fifty thousand dollars which fulfilled his ideal of a fortune. In my day Fairman Rogers' four-in-hand was the limit, and but few Philadelphians had the money and the recklessness to rival him. Now the Philadelphian does not have to earn anything at all before he sets up his motor-car, and it is the announcement of nothing except that he is bound to keep in the swim. Our children begin where we leave off, as one of my contemporaries said to me. Everybody has a motor-car. Everybody who can has one in London, I know, and there also the signs "To Let" and "For Sale" in such regions as Kensington and Bayswater have for some time back explained to me the way it has turned London life upside down. But in Philadelphia not merely everybody who can, but everybody who can't has one, and the Philadelphian would not do without it, if he had to mortgage his house as its price. I remember how incredulous I was, one of my first Sunday evenings at home, when I was dining with friends in the crowded-to-suffocation dining-room at the Bala Country Club and was given as an excuse for being rushed from my untasted coffee to catch an inconsiderately early last train, that ours was probably the only dinner party in the room without a car to take us back to town. But from that evening on I had no chance for incredulity, my own movements beginning to revolve round the motor-car. If I was asked to dinner and lunch at a distance to which nobody would have thought of dragging me by train in the old days, a motor was sent to whirl me out in no time at all. If I went into a far suburb for an afternoon visit, instead of coming soberly back to town on my return ticket, I would take a short cut by flying over half the near country, often in the car of people I had never seen before, as the most convenient route to the hotel. All Philadelphia life is regulated by the motor-car. It makes a ball or a tea or a dinner ten miles away as near as one just round the corner was in my time, and so half the gaiety is transferred to the suburbs and the suburban country, and, to my surprise, I found girls still going to dances at midsummer.
And the motor has made club life for women indispensable. The woman who comes up to town in her car must have a Club, and there is the Acorn Club in Walnut Street, The New Century, and the College and Civic Clubs, jointly housed at Thirteenth and Spruce, and more clubs in other streets, probably, which it was not my privilege to be invited to; all, to judge by the Acorn, with luxurious drawing-and dining-and smoking-and dressing-and bed-rooms, and women coming and going as if they had lived in clubs all their lives, when a short quarter of a century before there had not been one for them to see the inside of. And for men and women both, the car has brought within their reach those amazing Country Clubs that have sprung up in my absence. I had read of Country Clubs in American novels and short stories, I had seen them on the stage in American plays, but I had never paused to think of them as realities in Philadelphia until I was actually taken to the Bala and Huntington Valley Clubs, and until I ate their admirable dinners—at Bala, with the crowds and in the light and to the music that would have made me feel I was in a London restaurant, had it not been for the inevitable cocktail—and until I saw with my own eyes the luxurious houses so comfortably and correctly appointed—even to brass bedroom candlesticks on a table in the second-story hall, just as in an old-fashioned English inn, though as far as I could make out there was excellent electric light everywhere—until I also saw with my own eyes the trim lawns, and gardens, and the wide view over the delicate American landscape, and women in the tennis courts, and the men bringing out their ponies for polo, and the players dotted over the golf course.
And whether the Country Clubs have created the sport or the sport has created the Country Clubs, I cannot say, but in the increased attention to sport I was confronted with another difference as startling. Philadelphia, I know, has always been given to sport. It hunted and raced and fished before time and conscience allowed most of the other Colonists in the North the chance to amuse themselves out-of-doors, or indoors either, poor things! And the old sports, barring the least civilized like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, were kept up, and are kept up, and had their Clubhouses, which, in some cases, have survived. But, in my time, these sports had been limited to the few who had country houses in the right districts or the leisure for the gentlemanly pursuit of foxes and fishes, and their clubs were primitive compared to the palatial Country Clubs, whose luxury women now share with men. If you were in the hunting or fishing set, you heard all about it; but if you were not, you heard little enough. But you did not have to be in any set to keep up with the great Philadelphia game of cricket, which was popular, exclusive as the players in their team might be—all Philadelphia that did not play scrupulously going on the proper occasions to the Germantown Cricket Ground to watch all Philadelphia that did. The one alternative as popular was the pastime of rowing, the exclusiveness here in the rowing men's choice among the Clubs with the little boating clubhouses on the Schuylkill where boats could be stowed. And now? The cricket goes on, as gentlemanly and correct a pastime as ever. And the boating goes on, but with a delightful exclusive old Colonial house, for one Club at least, hidden in thickets of the Park where the stranger might pass within a stone's throw and never discover it, but where the boating party can dine with a privacy and a sumptuousness undreamed of at Belmont, where boating parties dined in my young days. And, in addition, time has been prodigal with golf and tennis and polo; women, who had begun tennis in my time, now beginning golf, games which, I might as well admit, I have no use for and can therefore say little about. And I am told that the University foot-ball matches are among the most important and lavishly patronized social functions of the year. And in town is the big Racquets Club, in a fine new building, big enough to shelter any number of sports besides. And the Natatorium, in moving from the unpretentious premises in South Broad Street, where it has left its old building and name, to the marble palace that was once George W. Childs's. Oh, the sacrilege! the house where his emperors and princes and lords and authors were entertained,—has converted the swimming lesson into the luxury of sport. And all told, so many, and so exhaustive, and so universal are the provisions for sport that I might have believed the Philadelphian had nothing in the world to do, save to invent amusements to help him through his empty hours.
MANHEIM CRICKET GROUND
And, apparently, it is to provide for the same empty hours that those elaborate lunch places have multiplied on Chestnut Street, some delightful where you feast as only Philadelphia can, some horrible where you sit on high stools at counters and fight for your food; that little quiet discreet tea-places have sprung up in side streets; that gilded restaurants, boasting they reproduce the last London fads and fashions, have succeeded the old no restaurant at all; that hotels as big and strident as if they had strayed off Fifth Avenue increase in number year by year, culminating in the Adelphia, the latest giant, which I have not seen; that the old poky hotels of my day have branched out in roof gardens where on hot summer evenings you can sit up among the sky-scrapers, a near neighbour to William Penn on his tower, and get whatever air stirs over the red-hot furnace of Philadelphia; that a huge new hotel has appeared up Broad Street where it seems the Philadelphian sometimes goes with the feeling of adventure with which he once descended upon Logan Square. Even business hours are broken into; the lunch of a dozen oysters or a sandwich snatched up anywhere has gone out of fashion; the chop, in the Philadelphia imitation of a London chop-house that seemed luxurious in my Father's day, has become far too simple; and disaster was predicted to me for the Stock Exchange by a pessimistic member who knew that, from the new building that has followed the Courts to the centre of the town, brokers will be running over to lunch at the Bellevue and to incapacitate themselves more or less for the rest of the day, and business will go on drifting, as it has begun to, to New York and will all be done by telephone. And as if the feasting were not enough of a pastime, everywhere lunches, teas and dinners are served to the sound of music, so that distraction and diversion may be counted upon without the effort to talk for them. When I was young, the best Philadelphia could do in the way of combining music and eating—or principally drinking—was at the Mäennerchor Garden at Ninth and Green, where a pretzel might be had with a glass of beer, or a sherry cobbler, or a mint julep—"high-balls" had not been heard of—and the Philadelphia girl who went, though it was under the irreproachable charge of her brother, could feel that she was doing something very shocking and compromising. But in the new Philadelphia, it is music whenever the Philadelphian eats or drinks in public, which seems to be next to always.
DOCK STREET AND THE EXCHANGE
It may be said that these are harmless innovations, part of the change in town life as lived in any other town as big. But the marvel to me was their conquest of Philadelphia, the town that used to pride itself on not being like other towns, and there they exaggerated themselves in my eyes into nothing short of revolution. The craving for novelty—that was at the root of it all: of the restlessness, the willingness to do what the old-fashioned Philadelphian would rather have been seen dead than caught doing, of the deliberate break with tradition. Nothing now can be left peacefully as it was. I felt the foundations of the world crumble when I heard that the Dancing Class has taken new quarters over in Horticultural Hall and the Assembly in the Bellevue, that Philadelphia consents to go up Broad Street for its opera, quieting its conscience by the compromise of going in carriages and motors and never on foot. There surely was the end of the old Philadelphia, the real Philadelphia. And it made matters no better to be assured that so rapidly does Philadelphia move with the times that the Philadelphian who stays away from home, or who is in mourning, for a year or so, finds on coming back, or out of retirement, that Philadelphia society has been as completely transformed in the meanwhile as Philadelphia streets. Nor did it make matters better to discover the different prices that different standards have brought in their train. I could see the new pace at which life in public is set, I heard much of the new pace set for it in private—servants' wages prohibitive according to old ways of thinking, provisions risen to a scale beyond belief, every-day existence as dear as in London—in Philadelphia, as elsewhere, people threatened with ruin from, not the high cost of living, but the cost of high living.