One day a few months ago, I was walking home from the Ritz movie theatre on Walnut Street. As I passed the rose garden between 4th and 5th Streets, I noticed a barricaded area with a sign in front of it near the entrance to the garden. I walked over to get a better look and saw what the Park Service had apparently determined to be part of a colonial cobblestoned street, which up until now, had been concealed under two feet of dirt. How incredible, I thought, that we are still discovering these relics of the past right in our midst. I continued up Walnut to Washington Square. At the corner of 6th St., I noticed several people sitting on the benches in back of Independence Hall, reading newspapers, playing with children or walking home with grocery bags. Of course, there was the usual contingent of tourists milling around the Hall.
Entering Washington Square, I didn’t notice many tourists but saw that the Square was being used by various people for the same quotidian purposes -- relaxing, reading, dog walking, ball playing. Like me, some people were cutting through the Square on their way home. Being a student of Philadelphia history, I knew that I was walking over the final resting place of many victims of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 as well as fallen soldiers from the Revolution.
My walk ended on the west side of the Square at St. James Street. Other residents of the neighborhood walk home on the same brick sidewalks used by the colonials, past tiny streets and tinier houses dating from the 18th century. Of course, the 18th century structures stand cheek by jowl with modern buildings built in the last several years, as well as buildings dating from significant architectural periods of the 19th and 20th centuries, from the early 19th century PSFS bank building on the west side of the Square to the modern houses on Spruce and Pine, from the artisan cottages sprinkled around Society Hill to the 20th century Art Deco Ayer Condominium.
Philadelphians have lived in the shadow of New York City since being eclipsed by it at the start of the industrial revolution. New York became the boom town, constantly reinventing itself, and in the process wiping away just about every vestige of its architectural history. While it is true that, to its detriment, Philadelphia’s economic progress diminished considerably in the 19th century in comparison to New York, the silver lining in that cloud is that Philadelphia didn’t do much redevelopment, retaining the greatest collection of colonial period houses in the United States, as well as dozens of fine examples of period architecture dating from the early 1700’s to the present, all positioned against the backdrop of Independence National Historic Park. Another felicitous result of Philadelphia’s “stagnation” is that the residential “greene countrie towne” that grew so rapidly in the 18th Century is still just that – a residential town. I know of no other large city in America where one can live in an 18th century setting, amid block after block of 18th century houses, and still be within the present day business district or a short walk away.
Unlike other cities, our history is not barricaded behind bollard and chain barriers (Independence Hall’s barriers are part of another story), sanitized and remote. We live our history in Independence National Historic Park. We live that history in the houses. We walk it by traversing the same sidewalks that Jefferson and Franklin used, along the same streets that were part of Penn’s original grid. We get a free architectural history presentation just by walking through the Park.
We can thank New York for allowing us to retain our historical setting by outgrowing us in the 19th century. And, we certainly can thank the National Park Service for maintaining our legacy, allowing us to truly “live in history.”
~Antoinette Stone
Friends member and Board Member
