Travels in Philadelphia

Front matter

Benjamin and Deborah Franklin (see P. 161)

BY CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

with drawings by Frank H. Taylor

Benjamin Franklin

TRAVELS IN PHILADELPHIA

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Jan. 17, 1919

Benjamin Franklin, sagacious and witty, The greatest of all who have lived in this city, Earnest and frugal and very discerning, Always industrious, bent upon learning, Athlete, ambassador, editor, printer, Merchant and scientist, writer, inventor, None was more canny or shrewder of brain, None was more practical or more humane, None was e'er wiser With common sense ripe, Great advertiser And founder of type.

Troubles he suffered, but he didn't dodge any: Born the fifteenth of a numerous progeny (Seventeen children Josiah had sired, A whole little font of good lower-case types; A fact that the census man must have admired— I think old Josiah might well have worn stripes, But that was in Boston where folks are prolific) He passed through a boyhood by no means pacific. Through most of his teens, young Benjamin lent his Best efforts to being his brother's apprentice, But Jimmy was crusty—they didn't get on, And one autumn morning young Benny was gone. He vowed he would make his sour kinsman look silly, And so he took ship and descended on Philly.

The very first thought that came into his nob (After buying some buns) was to look for a job. So up from the ferry Our Benjamin stalked, And hungrily, very, Ate buns as he walked. A certain blithe flapper, A whimsical lass, Observed the young strapper And thought he lacked class, And so, in the manner of feminine strafing, The superior damsel just couldn't help laughing; But Ben, unabashed by this good-natured chaffing, Although young Deborah Was certainly rude, He thought he'd ignore her And cheerfully chewed. With the best kind of repartee later he parried her, For seven years afterward he went and married her.

Well, you all know of his varied successes, Electrical hobbies and his printing presses. See how his mind, with original oddity Touched and found interest in every commodity: Busy with schemes to domesticate lightning, Inventing a stove for home warming and brightening, Scribbling a proverb, a joke or a sermon, Publishing too (what I am loth to mention For fear of its bringing up any dissension) Printing, I say, a newspaper in German— Also, for which he's remembered by most, He founded the Saturday Evening Post, For which Irvin Cobb has consistently praised him— And its circulation would much have amazed him!

Busy with matters too many for telling— Saving of daylight and simplified spelling— Still his chief happiness, as one may think, Came when he found himself dabbling in ink, And all his writings, though slight he did think 'em, Brought him a very respectable income. His was a mind that was chiefly empirical, Not at all given to theory or miracle— Nothing chimerical, Nothing hysterical,— Though he wrote verses, they weren't very lyrical, And he was touched with a taste for satirical. Though his more weighty affairs were so numerous Yet he was quaintly and constantly humorous, Loved Philadelphians, but when he was one of them Nothing he liked quite so well as make fun of them.

Scarce an invention since his time has burst But Benjamin Franklin had thought of it first; Indeed it would cause me no ejaculations To hear he suggested the new League of Nations. He truly succeeded in most that he tried, he Confounded his enemies, and when he died he Was guiltless of sin except being untidy. He died of old age, not of illness or tumor, And wrote his own epitaph, full of good humor. Every tradition and custom he broke, This first Philadelphian who dared make a joke!

Sauntering

SAUNTERING

Some famous lady—who was it?—used to say of anyone she richly despised that he was "a saunterer." I suppose she meant he was a mere trifler, a lounger, an idle stroller of the streets. It is an ignominious confession, but I am a confirmed saunterer. I love to be set down haphazard among unknown byways; to saunter with open eyes, watching the moods and humors of men, the shapes of their dwellings, the criss-cross of their struts. It is an implanted passion that grows keener and keener. The everlasting lure of round-the-corner, how fascinating it is!

I love city squares. The most interesting persons are always those who have nothing special to do: children, nurses, policemen, and actors at 11 o'clock in the morning. These are always to be found in the park; by which I mean not an enormous sector of denatured countryside with bridle paths, fishponds and sea lions, but some broad patch of turf in a shabby elbow of the city, striped with pavements, with plenty of sun-warmed benches and a cast-iron zouave erected about 1873 to remind one of the horrors of commemorative statuary. Children scuffle to and fro; dusty men with spiculous chins loll on the seats; the uncouth and pathetic vibrations of humankind are on every side.

It is entrancing to walk in such places and cata all that may be seen. I jot down on scraps of paper a list of all the shops on a side street; the names of tradesmen that amuse me; the absurd repartees of gutter children. Why? It amuses me and that is sufficient excuse. From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the most of my chance. Just as Thoreau compiled a Domesday Book and kind of classified directory of the sights, sounds and scents of Walden (carefully recording the manners of a sandbank and the prejudices of a woodlouse or an apple tree) so I love to annotate the phenomena of the city. I can be as solitary in a city street as ever Thoreau was in Walden.

And no Walden sky was ever more blue than the roof of Washington square this morning. Sitting here reading Thoreau I am entranced by the mellow flavor of the young summer. The sun is just goodly enough to set the being in a gentle toasting muse. The trees confer together in a sleepy whisper. I have had buckwheat cakes and syrup for breakfast, and eggs fried both recto and verso; good foundation for speculation. I puff cigarettes and am at peace with myself. Many a worthy waif comes to lounge beside me; he glances at my scuffed boots, my baggy trousers; he knows me for one of the fraternity. By their boots ye shall know them. Many of those who have abandoned the race for this world's honors have a shrewdness all their own. What is it Thoreau says, with his penetrative truth?—"Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once and a half witted with the half witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit." By the time a man is thirty he should be able to see what life has to offer, and take what dishes on the menu agree with him best. That is whole wit, indeed, or wit-and-a-half. And if he finds his pleasure on a park bench in ragged trousers let him lounge then, with good heart. I welcome him to the goodly fellowship of saunterers, an acolyte of the excellent church of the agorolaters!

These meditations are incurred in the ancient and noble city of Philadelphia, which is a surprisingly large town at the confluence of the Biddle and Drexel families. It is wholly surrounded by cricket teams, fox hunters, beagle packs, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. It has a very large zoölogical garden, containing carnivora, herbivora, scrappleivora, and a man from New York who was interned here at the time of the Centennial Exposition in 1876. The principal manufactures are carpets, life insurance premiums, and souvenirs of Independence Hall. Philadelphia was the first city to foresee the advantages of a Federal constitution and oatmeal as a breakfast food.

And as one walks and speculates among all this visible panorama, beating one's brains to catch some passing snapshots of it, watching, listening,imagining, the whole hullabaloo becomes ex precious. The great faulty hodge-podge of the city, its very pavements and house-corners, becomes vividly dear. One longs to clutch the whole meaning in some sudden embrace to utter some testament of affection that will speak plain truth. "Friday I tasted life," said Emily Dickinson, the American Blake. "It was a vast morsel." Something of that baffled exultation seizes one in certain moments of strolling, when the afternoon sun streams down Chestnut street on the homeward pressing crowd, or in clear crisp mornings as one walks through Washington Square. Emily utters her prodigious parables in flashing rockets, that stream for an instant in the dusk, then break and sink in colored balls. Most of us cannot ejaculate such dazzles of flame. We pick and poke and stumble our thoughts together, catching at a truth and losing it again.

Agreeable vistas reward the eye of the resolute stroller. For instance, that delightful cluster of back gardens, old brick angles, dormer windows and tall chimneys in the little block on Orange street west of Seventh. Orange street is the little alley just south of Washington Square. In the clean sunlight of a fresh May morning, with masses of green trees and creepers to set off the old ruddy brick, this quaint huddle of buildings composes into a delightful picture that has been perpetuated by the skilful pencil of Frank H. Taylor. A kindly observer in the Dreer seed warehouse, which backs upon Orange street, noticed me prowling about and offered to take me up in his elevator. From one of the Dreer windows I had a fascinating glimpse down upon these roofs and gardens. One of them is the rear yard of the Italian consulate at 717 Spruce street. Another is the broader garden of The Catholic Historical Society, in which I noticed with amusement Nicholas Biddle's big stone bathtub sunning itself. Then there is the garden of the adorable little house at 725 Spruce street, which is particularly interesting because, when seen from the street, it appears to have no front door. The attic window of that house is just our idea of what an attic window ought to be.

A kind of philosophy distills itself in the mind of the saunterer. Painfully tedious as people often are, they have the sublime quality of interesting one. Not merely by what they say, but often by what they don't say. Their eyes—how amazing is the thought of all those millions of little betraying windows! How bravely they struggle to express what is in them. A modern essayist has spoken of "the haggard necessities of parlor conversation." But the life of the streets has no such conventions. It is real: it comes hot from the pan. It is as informal, as direct and as unpretentious as the greetings of dogs. It is a never-failing remedy for the blues.

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Back Garden in Orange Street

Little Italy

LITTLE ITALY

There are three gentlemen with whom I have been privileged, on happy occasions, to take travels in Philadelphia. The first is the Mountaineer, a tall vagabond, all bone and gristle, member emeritus of the Hoboes' Union, who can tramp all day on seven cents' worth of milk chocolate, knows the ins and outs of every queer trade and is a passionate student of back alleys and mean streets. Pawnshops, groggeries, docks and factories make his mouth water with the astounding romance of every day.

The second is the Soothsayer, an amiable visionary whose eye dotes on a wider palette. Soothsayer by profession, artist and humanitarian at heart, he is torn and shaken on every street by the violent paradoxes of his lively intellect. A beggar assaults his sense of pity—but rags are so picturesque! A vast hotel, leaking golden flame at every window against the green azure of the dusk, fascinates his prismatic eyeball—but how about the poor and humble? Treading the wide vistas of the Parkway in a sunset flush he is transported by the glory of the vision. Scouting some infamous alley of smells he would blast the whole rottenness from the earth. He never knows whether the city is a sociological nightmare or an Arabian color-box.

And the third is the Epicure. In person very similar to Napoleon the Third, late emperor of the French, some mysterious tincture of the Mediterranean moves in his strictly Saxon blood. A man of riotous and ungovernable humor, frequently halting on the streets until his paroxysms of outrageous mirth will permit further locomotion, the only thing he never laughs at is food. He sees the city not as a vast social riddle, nor as a network of heavenly back-alleys, but as a waste of irrelevant architecture, dotted here and there with oases of good meals. Mention some spot in the city and his eye will brighten like a newly sucked glass marble. "Oh, yes," he cries, "that's just round the corner from the Cafe Pancreas, where they have those admirable ortolans!" To eat a meal in company with the Epicure is like watching a great artist at work. He studies the menu with the bitter concentration of a sculptor surveying the block of marble from which the statue is to be chiseled. He does not assassinate his appetite at one swoop with mere sum total of victuals. He gently woos it to annihilation, so that he himself can hardly tell just at what point it dies. He eats with the skill and cunning of a champion chess player, forgoing a soup or an entree in the calculating spirit of Lasker or Marshall, sacrificing pawns in order to execute some coup elsewhere on the board. Waiters, with that subtle instinct of theirs, know as soon as they see that delicately rounded figure enter the salle à manger, that here is a man to be reckoned with.

You may imagine, then, my privilege in being able to accompany the Epicure the other day to the Italian market at Ninth and Christian streets, where he purposed to look over the stalls. It was a day of entrancing sunlight, when all that lively district of Little Italy leaped and trembled in the fullness of light and appetizing fluent air. One saw a secret pathos in the effort to reproduce in the flat dull streets of a foreign city something of the color and mirth of Mediterranean soil. One often wonders what fantastic dream or illusion—was it only a steamship poster?—led so many citizens of the loveliest land on earth to forsake their blue hills and opal valleys to people the cheerless byways of American towns? What does Little Italy think of us and our climate in the raw, bitter days of a western winter? Well, now that the letters are speeding homeward telling of the unbelievable approach of prohibition, there will be few enough of those bright-eyed immigrants!

Christian street breathes the Italian genius for good food. After lunching in a well-known Italian restaurant on Catharine street, where the Epicure instructed me in the mysteries of gnocchi, frittura mista, rognone, scallopini al marsala and that marvelously potent clear coffee which seems to the uninstructed to taste more like wine than coffee, and has a curious shimmer of green round the rim of the liquid, we strolled among the pavement stalls of the little market. It seems to me, just from a cursory study of the exhibit, that the secret of Italian gusto for food is that they take it closer to nature, and also that they are less keen than we about meat. They do not buy their food already prepared in cardboard boxes. Fish, vegetables, cheese, fruit and nuts seem to be their chief delights. Fish of every imaginable kind may be seen on Christian street. Some of them, small, flattened, silver-shining things, are packed cunningly in kegs in a curious concentric pattern so that the glitter of their perished eyes gleams in hypnotizing circles. Eels, mussels, skates, shrimps, cuttlefish—small pink corpses, bathed in their own ink—and some very tiny ocean morsels that look like white-bait. Cheeses of every kind and color, some of them a dull yellow and molded in a queer gourd-like shape. But the vegetables and herbs are the most inscrutable. Even the gastrologer Epicure was unable to explain them all to me. Chopped bayleaves, artichokes, mushrooms, bunches of red and green peppers, little boxes of dried peas, beans, powdered red pepper, wrinkled olives and raisins, and strange-smelling bundles of herbs that smell only like straw, but which presumably possess some strange seasoning virtue to those who understand them. In the windows of the grocers' shops you will always find Funghi secchi della Liguria (Ligurian dried mushrooms) and Finocchio uso Sicilia (Fennel, Sicilian style), which names are poems in themselves. And, of course, the long Bologna sausages—and great round loaves of bread.

The Italian sweet tooth is well hinted at in the Christian street pasticcerias (pastry shops), where cakes, macaroons, biscuits and wafers of every color beckon to the eye. Equally chromatic are the windows of the bookshops, where bright portraits of General Diaz, King Victor and President Wilson beam down upon knots of gossipers arguing on the sunny side of the street, and a magnificent edition of the Divina Commedia lies side by side with Amore Proibito and I Sotterranei di New York. Another volume whose title is legible even to one with scarcely any smattering of tongues is Il Kaiser All'Inferno!

Some of the shops in Little Italy seem to embrace a queer union of trades. For instance, one man announces his office as a "Funeral agent and detective bureau"; another, "Bookbinder and flower shop." In one window may be seen elaborate plans of Signor Menotti Nanni's Ocean Floating Safe, in which transatlantic passengers are recommended to stow their valuables. The ship may sink and likewise the passengers, but in the Ocean Floating Safe your jewels and private papers will float off undamaged and roam the ocean until some one comes to salve them. The Italian name for this ingenious device is Cassaforte Galleggiante, which we take to mean a swimming strong-box.

No account of Christian street would be complete without at least some mention of the theatres between Eighth and Seventh streets. The other afternoon I stopped in at one of them, expecting to see moving pictures, which are comprehensible in all languages; but instead I found two Italian comedians—a man and a woman—performing on an odd little stage to an audience which roared applause at every line. I was unable to understand a word, but the skill and grace of the performers were evident, also the suave and liquid versification of their lines. The manager walked continually up and down the aisles, rebuking every sound and movement other than legitimate applause with a torrential hiss. Every time a baby squalled—and there were many—the manager sibilated like a python. The audience took this quite for granted, so evidently it is customary. It is a salutary lesson in modesty to attend a performance conducted in a foreign language: there is nothing that so rapidly impresses upon one our stupid provincial ignorance of most tongues but our own.

Little Italy is only a few blocks away from Chestnut street, and yet I daresay thousands of our citizens hardly suspect its existence. If you chance to go down there about 1 o'clock some bright afternoon, when all the children are enjoying the school recess, and see that laughing, romping mass of bright-eyed young citizens, you will wonder whether they are to be congratulated on growing up in this new country of wonderful opportunity, or to be pitied for losing the beauty and old tradition of that storied peninsula so far away.

Meeting the Gods for a Dime

MEETING THE GODS FOR A DIME

If we had to choose just one street in Philadelphia to the exclusion of all others, probably our greatest affection would be for Ludlow street. We have constituted ourself the president, publicity committee and sole member of the Ludlow Street Business Men's Association and Chamber of Commerce. We propose in this manifesto to make known to the world just where Ludlow street is, and why it is so fair.

Ludlow street is not in any sense a thoroughfare. It does not fare through, for its course is ped by several bulky buildings. It reappears here and there in a whimsical, tentative manner. We do not pretend to know all about Ludlow street, nor have we charted its entire course. But the pith and quintessence of this runnel of culture is trod almost daily by our earnest feet.

Our doings with Ludlow street begin when we turn off Eleventh street and caress the flank of the Mercantile Library in an easterly gambit. Then, with our nose cocked for any wandering savors from the steaming roast beeves of a Tenth street ordinary well known to epicureans, we dart along until our progress is barred by the Federal Building. This necessitates a portage through the Federal Reserve Bank on to the roaring coast of Chestnut street. We double back on Ninth and find Ludlow reappearing just above Leary's Book Store.

Here it is that our dear Ludlow street finds its mission and meaning in life. From the tall-browed facade of the Mercantile Library it has caught a taste for literature and against the north wall of Leary's it indulges itself to the full. Perhaps you would think it a grimy little alley as it twists blithely round Leary's, but to us it is a porchway of Paradise. How many hours we have dallied under that little penthouse shelter mulling over the ten-cent shelves! All the rumors and echoes of letters find their way to Ludlow street sooner or later. We can lay our ear to those battered rows of books as to a whorled conch shell and hear the solemn murmur of the vast ocean of literature. There we may meet the proud argosies or the humble derelicts of that ocean for ten cents.

Yes, they all come to Ludlow street in the end. We have found Wentworth's Arithmetic there, old foe of our youth; and George Eliot, and Porter (Jane) and Porter (Gene Stratton). There used to be a complete set of Wilkie Collins, bound in blue buckram, at the genteel end of the street among the twenty-five centers. We were buying them, one by one (that was before the days of thrift stamps), when some plutocrat came along and kidnapped the whole bunch. He was an undiscerning plutocrat, because he took the second volume of "The Woman in White" while we were still reading the first. When we went gayly to buy Volume II, lo! it was gone.

Clark Russell is there, with his snowy canvassed yachts dipping and creaming through azure seas; and once in a while a tattered Frank Stockton or a "Female Poets of America" or "The Mysteries of Udolpho." We have learned more about books from Ludlow street than ever we did in any course at college. We remember how we used to hasten thither on Saturday afternoons during our college days and, fortified with an automatic sandwich and a cup of coffee, we would spend a delirious three hours plundering the jeweled caves of joy. Best of all are the wet days when the rain drums on the little shelter-roof and drips down the back of the fanatic. But what true fanatic heeds a chilled spine when his head is warmed by all the fires of Olympus?

Ludlow street has quiet sorrows of its own, however. At the end of the ten-cent shelves, redeemed and exalted, even intoxicated by these draughts of elixir, it staggers a little in its gait. It takes a wild reeling twist round behind Leary's, clinging to that fortress of the Muses as long as it may. And then comes the thorn in its crown. Just as it has begun to fancy itself as a highbrow pathway to Helicon, it finds itself wearing against its sober brick wall one of the Street Cleaning Department's fantastic and long-neglected ash piles. This abashes the poor little street so that when it strikes Eighth street it becomes confused, totters feebly several perches to the north and commits suicide in a merry little cul-de-sac frequented by journeymen carpenters, who bury it in their sweet-smelling shavings.

O blessed little Ludlow street! You are to Philadelphia what the old book stalls on the Seine bank are to Paris, what Charing Cross Road is to London. You are the home and haunt of the shyest, sweetest Muses there are: the Muses of old books. The Ludlow Street Business Men's Association, in convention assembled, drinks a beaker of Tom and Jerry to your health and good fortune!

Wild Words We Have Known

WILD WORDS WE HAVE KNOWN

About noon on Saturday the city heaves a sigh of relief. Indeed, it begins a little earlier than that. About eleven-forty even the most faithful stenographer begins to woolgather. Letters dictated in that last half hour are likely to be addressed "Mrs. Henrietta Jenkins, Esq.," or "Miss John Jones." The patient paying teller has to count over his notes three times to be sure of not giving a five instead of a one. The glorious demoralization spreads from desk to desk. No matter who we are or how hard we have worked, it is Saturday noon, and for a few hours we are going to forget the war and spend our pocketful of carefree fresh-minted minutes. As Tom Daly, the poet laureate of Philadelphia, puts it—

"Whenever it's a Saturday and all my work is through, I take a walk on Chestnut street to see what news is new."

Every Jack and Jill has his or her own ideas of a Saturday afternoon adventure. Our stenographer hastens off with a laughing group to the Automat and the movies. Our friend with the shell-rimmed spectacles, tethered by a broad silk ribbon, is bound to the Academy of the Fine Arts to censure the way Mr. Sargent has creased John D. Rockefeller's trousers, and will come back bursting with indignation to denounce the portrait "a mere ." We ourself hasten to the Reading Terminal to meet a certain pair of brown eyes that are sparkling in from Marathon for lunch and a mobilization of spring millinery. And others are off to breast the roaring gusts of March on the golf meads or trundle baby carriages on the sunny side of suburban streets.

But there is another diversion for Saturday afternoon that is very dear to us, and sometimes we are able to coax B—— W—— to agree. That is to spend two or three glorious hours in the library mulling over the dictionaries. Talk about chasing a golfball over the links or following Theda Bara serpentining through a mile of celluloid, or stalking Tom and Jerry, mystic affinities, from bar to bar along Chestnut street—what can these excitements offer compared to a breathless word-hunt in the dictionaries! Words—the noblest quarry of the sportsman! To follow their spoor through the jungles and champaigns of the English language; to flush them from their hiding places in dense thickets of Chaucer or Spenser, track them through the noble aisles of Shakespeare forest and find them at last perching gayly on the branches of O. Henry or George Ade! The New Oxford Dictionary, that most splendid monument of human scholarship, gives moving pictures of words from their first hatching down to the time when they soar like eagles in the open air of today.

We know no greater joy than an afternoon spent with dear old Dr. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published after seven years' patient labor in 1755. Probably somewhere in Philadelphia there is a copy of the first edition; but the one we know (at the Mercantile Library) is the revised fourth edition which the doctor put out in 1775. One can hardly read without a lump in the throat that noble preface in which Doctor Johnson rehearses the greatness and discouragement of his task. And who can read too often his rebuff to the Earl of Chesterfield, who, having studiously neglected to aid the lexicographer during the long years of his compilation, sought by belated flattery to associate himself with the vast achievement? "Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?" And who does not chuckle over the caustic humor of the doctor's definitions of words that touched his own rugged career? "Lexicographer: a harmless drudge;" "book-learned: versed in books or literature; a term implying some slight contempt"; "Grub street: a street in London much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems."

O. Henry was a great devotee of word-beagling in dictionaries, and his whimsical "review" of Webster deserves to be better known:—

"We find on our table quite an exhaustive treatise on various subjects written in Mr. Webster's well-known, lucid and piquant style. There is not a dull line between the covers of the book. The range of subjects is wide, and the treatment light and easy without being flippant. A valuable feature of the work is the arranging of the articles in alphabetical order, thus facilitating the finding of any particular word desired. Mr. Webster's vocabulary is large, and he always uses the right word in the right place. Mr. Webster's work is thorough, and we predict that he will be heard from again."

What exhilaration can Theda Bara or the nineteenth putting green offer compared to the bliss of pursuing through a thousand dictionary pages some Wild Word We Have Known, and occasionally discovering an unfamiliar creature of strange and dazzling plumage?

The Enchanted Village

THE ENCHANTED VILLAGE

It was a warm morning. Everybody knew it was going to be hot later on and was bustling to get work well under way before the blaze of noon. The broad vista of Market street was dimmed by the summer haze that is part atmospheric and part gasoline vapor. And as I strolled up Sixth street I kept to the eastern side, which was still in pleasant shadow.