# Philadelphia (Repplier)/Chapter 21

THE great wave of emotion which swept over the country with the strife which rent her apart, and with the slow reconciliation which bound her once more in unity, left its traces upon national life. War, the stern foster-mother of arts and letters, wakened the dormant spirit of the people, who responded, as all people do respond, to impulses borne of that strange quickening discord. Even to the South, bearing its heavy burden of humiliation and distress, came the thrill of this tingling renaissance, while the North and West sprang forward with giant bounds. Philadelphia, roused thor​oughly from her long sleep, felt no disposition to drowse again. The nation was fast approaching her hundredth birthday. She was
as Father Punch genially observed, and it was but fitting that the town which had the honour of being her birthplace should joyously celebrate this auspicious anniversary. The Centennial Exhibition has been so far surpassed by the glories of Chicago's exhibition that people speak of it now with patronizing kindness, as of something well-meant, but indifferently executed. It is a point of honour for each world's fair to eclipse the fair before it; and when a summit of splendour is reached which cannot be outclimbed, the diversion must come to an end, and even Paris find another plaything. Philadelphia, always a pioneer, has been almost always excelled by those who followed in her footsteps. She it was, among American cities, who printed the first daily newspaper, and the first magazine. She established the first circulating library, the first corporate bank, and the first medical college. She laid the keel of the first American warship, and unfurled the first American flag. She was the home of the first National Congress, and of the first Supreme Court of the United States. Finally, she organized the first World's Fair that this country had ever seen,—no facile task, as those who bore a part in it can testify.
​Perhaps the most cheering token that the Fair was at least a possibility lay in the success of the Franklin Institute, which in 1874 gave a very brilliant exhibition of the mechanical arts. But the difficulties in the path of the vaster enterprise were well-nigh insurmountable. Lack of money, lack of precedent, lack of knowledge, lack of skill, held back the eager hands. The national government promptly and firmly declined to grant any assistance, save the cost of its own exhibits, and a loan of one million, five hundred thousand dollars, which was repaid in full to the treasury when the Fair was closed. The city did not lend, but gave a similar sum for the erection of Machinery Hall, and the highly ornate Horticultural Hall, which commended itself to the taste of those who liked plenty of colour for their money. The State of Pennsylvania appropriated one million of dollars, which were ruthlessly expended upon Memorial Hall, a squat, clumsy building, sadly destitute of distinction or beauty, and which stands to-day in Fairmount Park, an abiding but unnecessary proof of our boundless waste, and limited artistic development. All the other expenses were borne by the board of finance which, under the able leadership of Mr. John Welsh, struggled and struggled successfully to raise the necessary funds.
Of the interest aroused by the Fair, of the wonder it excited, and of the impetus it gave, not to Pennsylvania alone, but to the whole nation, it is unne​nessary to speak. Nature, indeed, with that grim humour which is so scantily appreciated by her victims, exerted herself to play a part in the festivities; and provided a season of such sustained and unprecedented heat that Philadelphia's reputation as a daughter of the tropics was forever established in the land. From the tenth of May, when the Exhibition opened, to the tenth of November, when it closed, there was little escape from this baleful temperature; and, in the summer days, the thermometer under the spreading trees of the Park, or in the shaded city streets, ranged from ninety to one hundred and two degrees, with a persistence which cost many lives, and can never be forgotten by the survivors. Well did they realize in those dreadful months the meaning of Penn's proud assertion that his province lay "six hundred miles nearer the sun" than England.
One of the immediate results of the Exhibition was the arousing of a patriotic interest in centenaries, which came thick and fast, and afforded plenty of opportunities for demonstrations. In 1882 Philadelphia celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of her Founder's arrival. A little ship resembling the Welcome was towed to the Dock Street wharf on the morning of October 24th, and William Penn's representative, stepping ashore, was duly welcomed, and compelled to play his part in a merciless civic procession which took four hours to pass a given point, ​and was as hopelessly uninteresting as only a civic procession can be. A nation without an army is—unless she wastes her money in less useful and honourable fashion—greatly to be envied on the score of economy; but her parades are seldom things of beauty. Yet, strange to say, the Quaker City has ever dearly loved these dismal diversions. She will now contentedly see her traffic stopped, and her impatient citizens wedged in waiting crowds, while hundreds of policemen and firemen walk stolidly and mournfully through the streets, the effect given being that of a gigantic funeral. At the bi-Centennial there were four whole days devoted to parades. Three thousand Knights Templar, twenty-four thousand tradesmen and artisans, and many companies of militia took turns in honouring the memory of Penn, and commemorating his journey over the sea to the colony he founded and loved.
In 1887 came the centenary of the adoption of the National Constitution, and three days were given over to the customary celebrations. One hundred years before, when the States wheeled into line and accepted the code of laws under which they were to live, Philadelphia expressed her joy by organizing the first great industrial procession that ever marched through her streets, a procession in which her leading citizens masqueraded amiably and picturesquely as cultivators of the soil. She now repeated this enter​tainment without the masqueraders, but on such a gigantic scale that the wagons and floats took seven hours to pass the State House, and imprisoned spectators felt the glow of enthusiasm slowly chill before the pitiless autocracy of hunger and fatigue.
Meanwhile the progress of the city outstripped the ambition of her sons. Burdened by municipal blunders, tainted by municipal corruption, she yet pushed onward, freeing herself now and then from some of the barnacles that clung, and still cling, about her civic skirts. The Bullitt Bill, as the new charter was called, did for her in 1885 what the Consolidation Act did in 1854,—cleared and simplified the complicated machinery of her laws, reduced her twenty-five departments to nine, corrected some staring and unabashed abuses, and made of her mayor—hitherto a figurehead—a very important and authoritative official, upon whose fitness or unfitness for his post depends much of the city's weal. The enlargement of the harbour, the deepening of the river bed, the establishment of the Bourse, the increase of manufacturing interests, the building of many ships and many locomotives,—sisters and brothers of progression,—all have abundantly proved the power of the people to move onward in certain well-defined directions. Whatever remains—and there is much remaining—of inefficiency and faithlessness in office, of discomforts long endured, and dangers unaverted, ​is due to that curious, apathetic good-nature which all Americans share in common, and of which Philadelphians have no more than their even allowance. Good-nature is a dangerous virtue for a nation. Our keen sense of the ridiculous helps us to endure much that should never be endured; and the easy laugh with which an American citizen recognizes the rascality of the men whom he permits to rule him, is a death-blow to the reforms which are essential alike to his well-being and to his self-respect.
The artistic growth of Philadelphia has been a fitful and feverish expansion. When she lost the quiet beauty, the exquisite sense of appropriateness and proportion which lent distinction to her colonial architecture, she wandered through devious paths, now clinging desperately to white marble and Grecian columns,—seeking safety in the definite and ascertained,—now giving free scope to much original and depressing ugliness. Squat, clumsy buildings, presenting a dead level of hopeless, but not actively offensive, mediocrity, gave place slowly to more ornate structures, which revealed both the riotous possibilities of unbridled decoration, and an almost superhuman grasp of whatever was inherently unfitted for its purpose. Nothing is more remarkable than the tireless ingenuity with which an architect will go far out of his way to illustrate the meretricious. Only in late years has there come a change, and new men, masters of their craft, have begun to adorn the old ​Quaker town with graceful homes, and with public edifices, stately, strong and simple, harmonizing as far as possible with their surroundings, and reflecting that fine self-restraint which was the distinguishing characteristic of the early colony.
It must ever be a matter for regret that the City Hall, commonly called the Public Buildings, should represent the most hopeless period in the history of Philadelphia's architecture, and that its only claim to distinction should be the marvellous manner in which it combines bulk with sterling insignificance. Size alone, we are brought up to believe, insures some degree of majesty. It is the bigness of the Pyramids which overawes the puny traveller in Egypt. But the City Hall is very, very large. It covers a wider area than any other municipal building in the United States. It is four hundred and eighty-six feet long, and four hundred and seventy feet broad. It has a courtyard two hundred feet square, and a tower five hundred and ten feet high, as tall nearly as the fair white shaft in Washington. It ought to be reasonably impressive, even though it were not beautiful. Yet the only effect it gives is that of an almost squalid paltriness. The dingy and monotonous façade refuses resolutely to look vast; the tower of marble and lumpy metal-work is equally determined not to appear its proper height. The surmounting statue of William Penn gives to the whole a final, but needless touch of incongruity. On
​every side the decorations are either mediocre or painfully grotesque; and in murky corridors, that look as if they ought to lead to prisons hidden from the light of day, ugly twisted forms writhe in unseemly attitudes, as though struggling to escape from such depressing and melancholy gloom. The thin slabs of marble that form the outer skin of the walls have crumbled here and there in premature decay, and have been replaced by fresh ones, the startling whiteness of which, contrasting with their blackened neighbours, gives the effect of a great patchwork quilt. New windows, not in the original plan, have been pierced where least expected, but where—presumably—the wretched inmates have begged for light and air. Of the millions expended upon this monument of inefficiency, and of the length of years it must stand in the very heart of Philadelphia to bear witness against the people who erected it, even those who profess a truly American unconcern endeavour not to think. As an illustration of what can be accomplished by an irresponsible building commission, the City Hall is not without interest nor without a moral; but if Experience be the best of teachers, she asks terribly high prices for her tutelage, and unambitious citizens are wont to wish that their own town had not selected to take such an expensive course of instruction.
Yet even while Philadelphia was learning bitter lessons, she was also acquiring rich gifts,—gifts, artistic, ​scientific, educational, which were to enable her to compete with other great cities in the race for all that makes life pleasant, and of value. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is the oldest institution of its kind in the United States. Founded and chartered in 1805, it had its birth in still earlier days, when Charles Wilson Peale and Guiseppe Ceracchi struggled to maintain their school of painting and modelling, and when modest exhibitions were held in the State House, exciting scant interest in the community. The first Academy building stood back from Chestnut Street, with a courtyard and green trees between its portico and the grime of the city's highway. Old Philadelphians who associate it lovingly with their childhood's days; who, when they were little boys and girls, walked round and round the group of "Centaurs and Lapithæ," trying vainly to disentangle the combatants; who stood, thrilling with terror, before West's vast canvas, "Death on the Pale Horse," and wakened at midnight from awful dreams wherein that ghastly rider followed them, cannot well criticise the merits of these familiar objects. Perhaps decorous and inartistic citizens were a long while escaping from the mental attitude which bade them cover up the antique casts from women's curious eyes. Perhaps they have not laid it wholly aside even now, being pardonably perplexed by the contentiousness of their many teachers, and by the variance in the lessons taught.
​But that we have grown in knowledge and in wealth since those primitive days, who shall be found to question? The little white edifice, with its Ionic columns and its graceful air of detachment, has been replaced by the present structure on Broad Street; the small museum of paintings, which included, however, valuable specimens of early American art, has expanded into a gallery of which the city may be justly proud. Private collections, containing pictures of exquisite beauty, have been acquired by bequest or by purchase. A generous endowment enables the Academy to buy year by year works of recognized merit; and the wisdom of the directors has saved these pictures from being covered with glass, a barbarous fashion, necessary only in soot-stricken England, and inexcusable in clearer, cleaner air. The exhibitions of early winter have grown from insignificance into a wide repute which promises even greater results in the future. It is a striking characteristic of Americans that the profoundly discouraging attitude of the government they sustain cannot wholly stifle their love of art. They are willing to look upon her merely as an industry, and to hold that she can be regulated, like other industries, by the law of supply and demand, and by an adroitly repellent system of taxation. They still believe that "money makes masters," and that it lies in the power of wealth to quicken the genius it is prepared to patronize. But to covet pictures, and good ​pictures, to covet even a sight of them if possession be denied, is the first step to a wider knowledge; and it would be hard to overestimate the artistic education derived by Philadelphia from her yearly exhibitions, when from east and west and over the seas come the canvases which hang for two short months upon her spacious walls.
If the development of the Academy of the Fine Arts be a matter for wonder and delight, what shall be said of the development of the University of Pennsylvania, which, within a score of years, has expanded in so marvellous a manner that none can now limit her future ambitions and achievements. A century and a half have passed since Franklin's "Proposals" went the round of sedate little Philadelphia, and found favour in many eyes. The college established by the Philosopher has led a checkered life during these hundred and fifty years, with much of honour and much of shame to give it light and shade. The high resolves and brilliant promises of its impetuous youth were chilled after the Revolution into ashes, which barely kept alive a tiny spark of fire. Through long periods of degrading inertia, when the blight of mediocrity lay upon Penn's city and all within her walls, the University—its very title a reproach—drowsed with its somnolent neighbours. When the town awakened, the old college awakened too, and wholesome humiliation pricked it into action. Seventeen years ago the first
​buildings were erected in West Philadelphia, a modest quartette, substantial, but far from beautiful, and with only fifteen acres they could call their own. From this new birth came swift and steady growth. The spirit of strenuous, insatiable progress moved forward with over-mastering zeal. Even placid self-satisfaction, which wanted to feel that it had done enough, was rudely undeceived, and structure after structure rose to give outward and visible sign of the restless power within.
To-day the University covers upwards of sixty acres, and finds this space too small. A library, where the twenty thousand books carried over the river have increased to nearly a hundred and fifty thousand; a museum under the same roof containing valuable collections of Egyptian, Babylonian, and American antiquities; hospitals for men, women, dogs, ​and cats,—for the medical school, which formerly outstripped its rivals, still stands abreast with all competitors; an unequalled institute of anatomy; a botanical garden; dormitories, which have even the grace of beauty to recommend them; halls, laboratories, buildings wherein all things may be taught and learned, are grouped around the earlier foundation. The students have doubled and trebled in these years of advancement, the faculty has been proportionately enlarged. Better than all, the Graduate School, made adequate by liberal endowments, raises the University to a higher educational plane than seemed attainable a few years ago, and enables her to give her sons benefits they have hitherto sought from afar. When, in the future, the "Free Museum of Art and Science" stands fair and complete, it will be the crowning glory of a college, old as we count age in this young land, and a connecting link with that colonial period whose work we reverence, and whose influence and importance we realize more keenly day by day.
Other institutions of learning has Philadelphia, though of less paramount importance. The venerable Academy of Natural Sciences bears the weight of many years and of past honours. The Drexel Institute, the School of Industrial Art, and the School of Design for Women, open their doors to give what practical aid they can to the great unanswered prob​lem of education. Within a dozen miles from the city's gates stand the Quaker colleges of Haverford and Swarthmore, built and endowed by members of that religious body which has laboured so successfully for the material and intellectual welfare of Pennsylvania. And near at hand is Bryn Mawr College, founded by
a Friend, Dr. Joseph W. Taylor, in 1880, for the advanced education of women.
If old age, with its traditions, and its curious record of right and wrong, attracts us keenly to an institution, youth, brave, unabashed, triumphant, dazzles us a little by its splendour. Bryn Mawr was opened for scholars in 1885. It is thirteen years old,—a child among colleges; yet its group of buildings with their ​adjacent lawns, courts, and athletic grounds, cover fifty acres. The infant library—a lusty babe—has already twenty-five thousand books, and three thousand dollars are spent annually in enlarging it. Over three hundred students are accommodated in the four halls of residence,—Merion, Radnor, Denbigh and Pembroke. The Graduate School offers admirable advantages, and has been enriched with eleven resident and three European fellowships. Were Philadelphia wont to boast, even as much as a wise city should, she would vaunt long and loud the achievements of this young college, which in a few years has attained so fine a record, and set so high a standard of scholarship before the world.
But Philadelphia does not boast. She occasionally remembers that she might do so if she pleased, and she remarks now and then, half apologetically, that her Park is the largest in the United States, and the most beautiful in the world. Only the Prater of Vienna excels it in size, and no other approaches it in loveliness. Nearly two hundred years ago, when the little Quaker colony never dreamed of possessing a great pleasure-ground of its own, Mr. Richard Castelman, who spent the winter and spring of 1710 in Penn's town, records the delight he felt in walking with friends on clear afternoons to Faire Mount, in looking at the river, and breathing the wholesome country air. It was not, however, until a century later that the city made ​its first modest purchase of Morris Hill, five acres in extent, as a site for the proposed waterworks. A little garden shaded by trees, with grass plots, gravelled walks, and a fountain, lay at the feet of the steep incline. Rush's denounced statue of the "Nymph and Swan" was placed picturesquely on the rocks, where the tall jet of water from the bird's slender throat fell into the pool beneath, and where the maid's clinging draperies, wet with spray, no longer offended the decorum of Centre Square. The same sculptor executed two reclining figures, which were placed over the doorways of the wheel-houses where they still remain. One of them, a venerable and dejected old man, symbolizes the Schuylkill, fettered by human ingenuity, and chained in locks and dams. The other, a square, severe female of the Roman empress order, typifies water, and was broadly and comprehensively described by enthusiastic critics of the day as "unequalled in its kind throughout the world." The only exception taken to the work was that the vase against which the figure leans, and which represents the reservoir, is so full it overflows, the little lumpy streams falling over the sides with painful regularity, and hanging suspended in mid air. This was held to be "picturesque, but not appropriate, as a reservoir should never overflow." It was certainly far from veracious. A vase half full of liquid mud would have been nearer truth.
​The little Park became in 1825 a great favourite with the public, and all strangers visiting the city were taken to sit under the trees, and to examine the waterworks, which were not then, as now, a mass of complicated machinery, propelled by steam, and of interest only to the initiated. In the old days, when an afternoon at Fairmount was the keen and crowning pleasure of childhood, huge wheels revolved slowly
in the black water; awful, mysterious wheels, terrifying beyond measure to infant Philadelphians who peered down trembling from the rickety wooden causeway into the abyss below. The vibrations shook the slender balustrade against which they leaned; in the semi-darkness the swirling eddies were churned into foam; their hearts throbbed with a delicious ecstasy of fear; the world seemed turning, turning, with those mighty wheels down into the rushing waters; and ​then—when they could bear no more—came the swift revulsion from terror to exquisite delight, as they climbed back into the sunshine and the warm, soft air, and saw the staid, familiar grass plots, and heard the fountain splashing cheerfully in its marble cup. All is changed in that little old corner of Fairmount, which has been long abandoned for the more beautiful walks and drives beyond. The hall which had such a delightful echo, and in which stood Rush's wooden figures of Justice and Wisdom, has been dismantled. The marble boy, whose shameless nakedness was half hidden by the spouting fountain jets, has disappeared. The Nymph, who seems destined, poor thing, never to find a permanent home, has been lifted from her rocks, and placed in the centre of the garden. Even the children have broader playgrounds now, and no longer run ceaselessly up and down the steep reservoir hill. The world moves on its way, and every city holds spots like this, once prized, and now neglected, once full of life, now empty and forlorn.
The Park grew slowly until it counted its first twenty-four acres. Then Philadelphia began to taste the sweets of proprietorship, and coveted wider lands. Lemon Hill, Sedgely, Lansdowne, and adjacent estates were added from time to time. Some care was taken to improve the grounds, and keep the roads in order. The beautiful Wissahickon Glen, ​where, in the days of the Founder, the German mystics had built their huts, to await, amid the fairest scenery they could find, the coming of the millennium, was purchased in 1868. George's Hill was presented to the city by its aged owners, Mr. Jesse George and The "Solitude" his sister Rebecca, in whose family it had remained for generations. Many ancient landmarks and historic mansions were included in the boundaries of Fairmount; some carried thither, like the little Letitia House, built by William Penn for his discontented daughter; some standing where they had stood for a century or more, like Mt. Pleasant, the home of Benedict Arnold, Belmont, the home of Judge Peters, and the "Solitude," that Liliputian dwelling-place erected by John Penn the younger, when some whim ​for isolation possessed his restless soul. Even the "Castle," the time-honoured abode of the Fishing Company, which is the oldest club of its kind in the United States, was enclosed in the wide confines of the Park.
The Zoölogical Garden was opened in 1874, a handsome, well-appointed garden, perhaps a shade less melancholy than most of these sad prisons for beast and bird;—where the polar bear gasps in our torrid heat; where the caged eagle, motionless as stone, gazes with sombre eyes into the forbidden blue; and the lion paces hour after hour its narrow den, unutterable longing, unutterable weariness in every languid step. The day must come, though it seems far distant yet, when an advanced civilization will question its own right to condemn wild creatures to lifelong captivity, for the amusement which we call complacently instruction.
In Fairmount Park, the crowning glory of Philadelphia, the city has realized in her own way, and as best she could, her Founder's desire for green fields and spreading boughs. Closer and closer creep the houses, even in the suburbs which once had breathing space; higher and higher tower the great business buildings, lifting their stone walls against the sky; fouler and fouler grows the poisoned earth, until the trees, which once lent grateful shade to the hot, glaring streets, wither and die. But near at hand—a recompense for all such evils—lies this vast civic demesne, these ​broad acres that belong to all; with wooded tracts and deep ravines, with hills and dales, and brown streams rippling into shallow pools, and the river winding its leisurely way through the heart of the people's playground. The possession of this park illustrates the temper of the town whose English colonists brought
over the sea a love for the country, and country life; and whose rich citizens built themselves suburban homes, considering, like true Britons, that the great pleasure of prosperity lay in the acquisition of landed estates.
They think so still, for, indeed, the city built by Penn has retained many of the characteristics which first distinguished her. It is not so easy as the careless ​believe to relinquish a birthright, to escape from an inheritance. Onward we must move, but our finest development lies along the lines marked out for our first footsteps. The debt Philadelphia owes to her Quaker colonists is no less apparent because she has put aside fashions of speech, and dress, and public worship. It is true that only for a few weeks in the year may the drab bonnets and broad-brimmed hats be seen in the crowded highways, and that they grow less marked with each succeeding spring. Yet, nevertheless, the impress of the Quaker hand lingers still; not only in the simple, dignified old buildings to which time lends an added charm, but in the ineffaceable spirit of the town. A quiet town always, at which noisier communities point fingers of derision, mistaking bustle for advancement. To pass from a great sister city to Philadelphia is like leaving Paris, where every one conscientiously strives to make as much noise as he can, and entering London, where every one conscientiously strives to make as little as he can, the result being a grateful silence, healthy for mind, and soul, and body. Even wealth wears a strange air of modesty in the old streets, where once the prosperous Friends gave little outward token of the fortunes they amassed and enjoyed. Money is the same great power all the world over, but there is ever a limit to its autocracy; and in Philadelphia it is expected to show as little arrogance as it can, which is a virtue that ​must be acquired in the beginning, but becomes a gracious instinct by inheritance.
A strong attachment to whatever has been, an equally strong, and often well-founded dislike for innovations, characterize Penn's city, which has seldom thirsted after novelties. Her prejudices are ancient, deeply venerated, and unconquerable. Strangers within her gates protest vehemently against these prejudices, and explain their absurdity in the clearest and most convincing manner. They waste a great deal of valuable time in this way, and are never quite sure whether they have been listened to or not. If the day ever comes when logic will persuade as easily as it preaches and proves, the face of the earth will be altered, and Philadelphia may change with the changing world.
Above all, the Quaker City lacks that discriminating enthusiasm for her own children, and the work of their hands, which enables more zealous towns to rend the skies with shrill pæans of applause, and to crown their favoured citizens with bays. Philadelphia, like Marjorie Fleming's stoical turkey, is "more than usual calm," when her sons and daughters win distinction in any field. She takes the matter quietly, as she takes most other matters, preserving with ease her mental balance, and listening unmoved to the plaudits of the outside world. This attitude is not wholly wise nor commendable, inasmuch as cities, like ​men, are often received at their own valuation, and some degree of self-assertion converts many a wavering mind. If the mistaking of geese for swans produces sad confusion, and a lamentable lack of perspective, the mistaking of swans for geese may also be a dangerous error. The birds either languish, or fly away to keener air, and something which cannot be replaced is lost. Yet anything is better than having two standards of merit, one for use at home, and one for use abroad; and the sharp discipline of quiet neglect is healthier for a worker than that loud local praise which wakes no echo from the wider world.
A quiet town. Her mobs which once went mad with joy over the Revolution in France, or mad with zeal for a religion, ill-understood and ill-obeyed, have been calmed by age, or by the influence of a community which never, even in moments of folly and degradation, lost the saving grace of sanity. It is true that much that is new and much that is bad have vulgarized and vitiated the old tranquil life; but something that was given to the infant city as she lay cradled between her two rivers remains with her still, some leaven of modesty, some legacy of soberness and self-restraint. Still the tender, pathetic appeal of William Penn, when he bade farewell to the colony he had founded and cherished, rings in our ears, and finds an answer in our hearts:—
"And thou, Philadelphia, the virgin settlement ​of this province, named before thou wert born, what care, what service, and what travail has there been to bring thee forth, and preserve thee from such as would abuse and defile thee. Oh, that thou mayest be kept from the evil that would overwhelm thee; that, faithful to the God of thy mercies, in the life of righteousness, thou mayest be preserved to the end."