# Travels in Philadelphia/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 estopped 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!