Part 7

It is more than playground--Prospect Park. It is history. There are no historic buildings in Brooklyn--unless we except the Dutch Reformed church out in Flatbush--but all of Prospect Park was once a battlefield--the theater of that bitter and bloody conflict of July, 1776, when Washington was routed by British strategy and forced to retire from the city that he needed most of all to hold. Through its great meadows Continental and Briton and Hessian once marched with murder in their hearts. In those great meadows today the boys and girls of the Brooklyn of today play tennis; the older men, after the fashion of the Brooklyn of other days, their croquet. And annually down the greensward the little children of Brooklyn march in brilliant June-time pageant.

The Sunday-school parade of Brooklyn is one of the older institutions of the town that still survives. Annually and upon the first Thursday afternoon of June the children of all the Sabbath-schools of the borough march out upon its streets. There is not room even in Prospect Park for all of these--for sometimes there are 150,000 of them marching of an afternoon; and the great distances within Brooklyn must also be brought into consideration. But the largest of the individual parades always marches in the park--marches like trained troopers up past the dignitaries in the reviewing stand, and the mayor, and the other city officers, the Governor of the State, not infrequently the President of the United States. There is much music, great excitement--and ice-cream afterwards. Sharp denominational bars are let down and the ice-cream goes to all. And the boys and girls who are to be the men and women of the Brooklyn of tomorrow and who are to face its great problems march proudly by, knowing that the loving eye of father or of mother must be upon them.

The problems of the Brooklyn of tomorrow are not to be carelessly dismissed. Nor is the problem of Brooklyn's future in any way hopeless. The changing of conditions, the changing of habits, the changing of institutions does not of necessity spell utter ruin. Cosmopolitanism does not mean the end of all things. We have called her dull and emotionless and provincial, and yet many of her residents are quick and appreciative--well-traveled and well-read--anxious to meet the new conditions, to solve the problems that have been entailed. And we have not the slightest doubt that in the long run they will be solved, that Brooklyn will be ready and willing to undertake the great problem that has been thrust upon her--the fusing of her hundreds of thousands of foreign-born into first-rate Americans.

4

WILLIAM PENN'S TOWN

To approach Philadelphia in a humble spirit of absolute appreciation, you must come to her by one of the historic pikes that spread from her like cart-wheel spokes from their hub. You will find one of those old roads easily enough, for they radiate from her in every direction. And when you have found your pike you will discover that it is a fine road, even in these days when there is a "good-roads movement" abroad in the land. You can traverse it into town as best suits your fancy--and your purse. If you are fortunate enough to own an automobile you will find motoring one of the greatest of many joys in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania. If your purse is thin you can have joyous health out of walking the long miles such as is denied to your proud motorist. And if you have neither money nor robust health for hard walking, you will find a trolley line along each of the important pikes. Philadelphia does not close her most gracious avenues of approach to you--no matter who you are or what you are.

* * * * *

Here we are at the William Penn Inn at dawn of a September morning waiting to tramp our way, at least to the outskirts of the closely built part of the city. And before we are away from the tavern which has kept us through the lonely chill of the night, give it a single parting glance. It has been standing there at the cross-roads of two of the busy pikes of Montgomery county for a full century and a half. In all those years it has not closed its door against man or beast, seeking shelter or refreshment. There is a record of one hundred and fifty years of hospitality for which it does not have to make apologies.

Sometimes you will discover small inns of this sort along the roadsides of New England, but we do not know where else you will find them without crossing the Atlantic and seeking them out in the Surrey and the Sussex of the older England. Yet around Philadelphia they are plentiful--with their yellow plastered walls, tight green shutters hung against them, their low-ceilinged rooms, their broad fire-places, their stout stone out-buildings, and their shady piazzas, giving to the highway. Some of them have quite wonderful signs and all of them have a wonderful hospitality--heritage from the Quaker manner of living.

So from the William Penn Inn one may start after breakfast as one might have started a century ago--to walk his way into the busy town. The four corners where the pikes cross stand upon a high ridge--a smooth white house of stone, a meeting-house of the Friends, and the tavern occupying three of them. The fourth gives to a view of distant fields--and such a view! Montgomery is a county of fat farms. You can see the rich lands down in the valleys, the shrewder genius required to make the more sterile ridge acres yield. And, as you trudge down the pike, the view stays with you for a long while.

At the bottom of the hill a little stream and the inevitable toll-gate that seem to hedge in Philadelphia from every side. But your payment to the toll-keeper upon the Bethlehem pike this morning is voluntary. His smile is genial, his gate open. A cigar is to his liking and if you would tarry for a little time within the living-room of the toll-house he would tell you stories of the pike--stories that would make it worth the waiting. But--Philadelphia is miles away, the road to it long and dusty. You pick up your way and off you go.

Little towns and big. Sleepy towns most of them; but occasionally one into which the railroad has thrust itself and Industry flaunts a smoky chimney up to the blue sky. Quaker meeting-houses a plenty, with the tiny grave-stones hardly showing themselves through the long grass roundabout them. But those same neat stones show that the Friends are a long-lived folk, and if you lift yourself up to peer through the windows of one of these meeting-houses you may see the exquisite simplicity of its arrangement. The meeting-house is modern--it only dates back to 1823--and yet it is typical. Two masses of benches on a slightly inclined floor, the one side for the men, the other for the women. Facing them two rows of benches, for the elders. No altar, not even a pulpit or reading-desk; there is an utter absence of decoration. You do not wonder that the young folk in this mad, gay day fail to incline to the old faith of "thee" and "thou," and that no more than forty or fifty folk, almost all of them close to the evenings of their life gather here on the morning of First Day.

Between the villages and the meeting-houses the solid, substantial farmhouses. And what farmhouses! Farmhouses, immaculate as to whitewash and to lawn, with cool porches, shaded by brightly striped awnings and holding windsor chairs and big swinging Gloucester hammocks. This is farming. And the prosperous look of the staunch barns belies even thought that this is _dilettante_ agriculture. It is merely evidence that farmers along the great pikes of Montgomery and Bucks and Berks have not lost their old-time cunning. And if the farmer no longer drives his great Conestoga wagons into market at Philadelphia, it is because he prefers to run in with his own motor car and let other and more modern transportation methods bring his products to the consumer.

Lunch at another roadside tavern. Bless your heart, this one, like the 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.

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.