The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
... William Penn's Quaker Colonies
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Philadelphia Revelations
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George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
No other city in America is remembered for an epidemic; Philadelphia is remembered for two of them. The Yellow Fever epidemic, for one, that finished any Philadelphia's hopes for a re-run as the nation's capital. And Legionnaire's Disease, that ruined the 1976 bicentennial celebration. One is a virus disease spread by mosquitoes, the other a bacterial disease spread by water-cooled air conditioners. Neither epidemic was the worst in the world of its kind, neither disease is particularly characteristic of Philadelphia. Both of them particularly affected groups of people who were guests of the city at the time; French refugees from Haiti and attendees at an American Legion convention.
In 1976, dozens of conventions and national celebrations were scheduled to take place in Philadelphia as part of a hoped-for repeat of the hugely successful centennial of a century earlier. Suddenly, an epidemic of respiratory disease of unknown cause struck 231 people within a short time, and 34 of them died. Every known antibiotic was tried, mostly unsuccessfully, although erythromycin seemed to help somewhat. The victims were predominantly male, members of the American Legion of a certain age, somewhat inclined to drink excessively, and staying in the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, one of the last of the grand hotels. Within weeks, it was identified that a new bacterium was evidently the source of the disease, and it was named Legionella pneumophila. Pneumophila means "love of the lungs" just as Philadelphia means "city of brotherly love", but still that foreign name seemed to imply that someone was trying to hang it on us. Eventually, the epidemic went away, but so did all of those out-of-town visitors. The bicentennial was an entertainment flop and a financial disaster.
Since that time, we have learned a little. A blood test was devised, which detected signs of previous Legionella infection. One-third of the residents of Australia who were systematically tested were found to have evidence of previous Legionella infection. A far worse epidemic apparently occurred in the Netherlands, at the flower exhibition. Lots of smaller outbreaks in other cities were eventually recognized and reported. It becomes clear that Legionnaire's disease has been around for a very long time, but because the bacteria are "fastidious", growing poorly on the usual culture media, had been unrecognized. And, although the bacteria were fastidious, they were found in great abundance in the water-cooled air conditioning pipes of the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. Even though the air conditioning was promptly replaced, everybody avoided the hotel and it went bankrupt. When it reopened, 560 rooms had shrunk to 170, and it still struggled. Although there is little question that lots of other water-cooled air conditioning systems were quietly ripped out and replaced, all over the world, the image remains that it was the Bellevue, not its type of plumbing, that was a haunted house. There is even a website devoted to its hauntedness.
MEETING OF THE SHAKSPERE SOCIETY OF PHILADELPHIA AT THE FRANKLIN INN CLUB, NOVEMBER 19, 2003
Dean Wagner in the chair. Other members present Ake, Bartlett, Binnion, Cramer, Di Stefano, Dobson, Dupee, Fallon, Fisher, Griffin, Hopkinson, Mabry, Peck, Pickering, Pope, Simmons, Warden. We were glad to welcome Victoria Dawson of Washington, DC, goddaughter and guest of Bishop Bartlett, and the daughter of Giles Dawson, for many years a senior curator at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a famous Renaissance scholar of the past generation. We also welcomed Mr. Griffin's guest, local lawyer John Chesney, an Edinburgh native, an Oxford graduate, and a member of the Orpheus Club, who regaled us with a spirited and expert performance of a British music hall classic of yesteryear, "The Night I Appeared in Macbeth." He was greeted with raucous laughter and loud applause.
The Dean circulated a photocopy of a passage about the early days of the Society discovered by Mr. Rivinus in the new Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. The passage implies that our Society in its infancy was a very lightweight affair. Not so! Your scribe has read all the minutes of the meetings of our first thirty years, 1852-1882, and can assure the members that our forebears were serious, scrupulous students of the Bard throughout this period, guided as they were by two men of great scholarly accomplishment: Asa Fish, Dean from our genesis until his death in 1879, and H. H. Furness, Jr., an internationally renowned Shaksperian of that epoch. Furness became Dean on Fish's death, but was often absent; the office of Vice Dean was instituted at that time (1879), and Mr. Ashhurst, the Treasurer, was elected and took the chair at most meetings in the next few years. (Another frequent attendee from 1876 on was C. Stuart Patterson' my wife's great-grandfather! Her grandfather, CSP Jr, was elected in 1903.)
The Vice Dean reminded us that we begin reading a selected scene from Timon of Athens at our next meeting on December 10, and he praised the dramatic vigor of this play, even though it lacks great poetry. Dean emeritus Hopkinson recalled the praise won by Brian Bedford as Timon in New York a dozen years ago. The play will be performed next summer at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.
Two members heartily praised the recently ended performances of Julius Caesar by the Shakespeare Festival of Philadelphia at 21st and Sansom Streets. This group will stage As You Like It early next year, just in time for members to supplement our reading of the play at dinner meetings.
The Vice Dean asked us why Lady Macbeth changes as she does from the iron-willed accomplice to murder of earlier scenes to the frantic sleepwalker and suicide of the fifth act. Macbeth does not confer with her after the play's midpoint; we do not see them together after 3.4. Her focus is still completely on her husband in her sleepwalking speeches, calming and encouraging him, but distraught with fear. Is she, in one aspect, a kind of alter ego to her husband, a reflection of his anguished subconscious? Does she help to humanize the monster who seems so callous a killer in the last two acts? Many of us feel close to Macbeth, almost sympathetic with him, even at his worst. Our fellow member Alfred Harbage (your scribe's mentor) wrote years ago, "If Macbeth were other than he is, less like ourselves, he would be a less powerful symbol of our own worst potentialities and the abyss we have escaped. There is nothing of him in Cornwall or Iago." (Would that today's Shakespeare scholars wrote such clear, crisp English).
Act Five, Scene One' Lady Macbeth, asleep, jumps from topic to topic' as we all do mentally, a member remarked, especially when perturbed. We discussed her strange rhyme, "The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?" We noted the resonance of such clipped, monosyllabic language, common at moments of great emotional intensity in this play. ("She should have died hereafter." "I have supped full of horrors." "He has no children." "The time is free." "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst.") A member claimed that here the "fiendlike queen" of early scenes shows her dual nature, lingering tenderly over the memory of the murdered wife of Macduff. Others find little tenderness in the Lady at any time. Fear, perhaps, a member suggested: "Where is she now?" may suggest "Am I next?"The Vice Dean recalled the Lady's desire earlier to lose her feminine impulses to nurture and heal and feel remorse at wrongdoing. What is left now?
Macbeth, the Vice Dean declared, is now wholly a callous killer, constantly abusing his subjects rather than protecting them as Duncan did, with almost none of the pangs of conscience he felt so powerfully in earlier scenes. But his enemy Menteith memorably claims that the monster is in inner agony: "Who then shall blame/ His pestered senses to recoil and start,/ When all that is within him does condemn/ Itself for being there?"(5.2)
5.3'Macbeth urgently asks the doctor to "minister to a mind diseased" so as to restore his wife to him. But of course, he knows that there is no cure to "pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow." This great speech applies as much to the husband as to his wife. Do we have another text that renews sympathy for Macbeth? Or is he too secure in the witches' promises to win such sympathy? A member spoke of the "Sophoclean confidence" of the tragic hero whose hubris makes him cocksure that the fates are his friends. Macbeth is eager to fight his enemies; a member Bushily paraphrased, "Bring it on!" Do we admire his spirit or sneer at his machismo? Is Macbeth evil, members asked, or is that diagnosis too simple or absolute?
5.5'Macbeth cannot respond to his wife's death; after hard work to kill conscience, he has few feelings left of any kind. He remembers when he would have reacted with proper anguish to this terrible news. Now all life seems meaningless to him: a feeling not uncommon to the grief-stricken, but here linked to the moral desert that Macbeth has created as his inner landscape. Your scribe notices the collapse of the stricken man's language, as distorted and dead as his feelings: "Direness'cannot once start me." No rhythm, no metaphor, no anguish, no vision.
Members debated our responses at play's end. Oedipus, full of pride, kills, suffers, punishes himself, gains moral vision. Does Macbeth gain moral insight? He dies in action, imitating the great warrior who won fame defending his country, but he loses. Did he at least understand before he died what he had done to himself? A member saw a paradox in his own response: he "likes and respects a man who is hateful."
Members ended the reading exclaiming to each other about how lively and stimulating a discussion we had just finished of this astonishing play. Long live the Bard!
WE WILL MEET NEXT ON DECEMBER 10, THREE WEEKS HENCE, AND COMMENCE OUR READING OF TIMON OF ATHENS. We congratulate the Librarian for having laid in a bountiful supply of copies of the play for members in need!
George Washington had two hundred slaves, Benjamin Chew had five hundred. It wasn't lack of wealth that restrained the size and opulence of their mansions, particularly the ones in the center of town. The lack of central heating forced even the richest of them to keep the windows small, the fireplaces drafty and numerous, the ceilings low. Small windows in a big room make it a dark cave, even with a lot of candles; a low ceiling in a big room is oppressive. Sweeping staircases are grand, but a lot of heat goes up that opening; sweeping staircases are for Natchez and Atlanta perhaps, but up north around here they aren't terribly practical. Building a stone house near a quarry has always been practical, but if there is insufficient local stone, you need railroads to transport the rocks.
Early Victorian
So to a certain extent, the advent of central heating, large plates of window glass, and transportation for heavy stone and girders amounted to emancipation from the cramped little houses of the Founding Fathers. Lead paint, now much scorned for its effect on premature babies, emancipated the color schemes of the Victorian house. Many of the war profiteers of the Civil War were indeed tasteless parvenu, but it is a narrow view of the Victorian middle class to assume that the overdone features of Victorian architecture can be mainly attributed to the personalities of the Robber Barons. This is not the first nor the only generation to believe that a big house is better than a small one. The architects were at work here, too. It was their job to learn about new building techniques and materials, and they were richly rewarded for showing the public what was newly possible. Frank Furness was as flamboyant as they come, a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism, a man who wore a revolver in Victorian Philadelphia and took pot-shots at stuffed animal heads in his office. He affected the manners of a genius, and his later decline in public esteem was not so much disillusion with him as with the cost of heating (later air-conditioning), cleaning, and maintenance which soon exceeded provable utility. The simultaneous arrival of the 1929 financial crash and inexpensive automobile commuting to the suburbs stranded square miles of these overbuilt structures. It was the custom to build a big house on Locust, Spruce or Pine Streets, with a small servant's house on the back alley. During the Depression of the 1930s, there were many families who sold the big house and moved into the small one. Real estate values declined faster than property taxes and maintenance costs; incomes declined even faster.
Delancey Street
It thus comes about that large numbers of very large houses have been sold for very modest prices, and the urban pioneers have gentrified them. You can buy a lot of house for comparatively little if you are willing or able to restore the building. We thus come back to Frank Furness, who was the idolized architect of the Rittenhouse Square area, in addition to the massive banks and museums for which he is perhaps better known. Unfortunately, most of the Furness mansions on the square have been replaced by apartment buildings, but one outstanding example remains. It's sort of dwarfed by the neighboring high-rises, but it was originally the home of a railroad magnate, a few houses west of the Barclay Hotel, and it holds its own, defiantly. Inside, Furness made clever use of floor-to-ceiling mirrors to diffuse interior light and make the corridors seem wider. Although electric lighting made these windowless row houses bearable, modern lighting dispels what must have been originally a dark cave-like interior on several floors, held up by poured concrete floors. Furness liked to put in steel beams, heavy woodwork, and stonework, in the battleship school of architecture. If you were thinking of tearing down one of his buildings, you had to pause and consider the cost of demolition before you went ahead.
Frank Furness Window
There are several others of his buildings around the corner on the way to Delancey Street, one of them set back from the street with a garden in front. That's what you expect in the suburbs, but the land is too expensive in center city for very many of them; this is the last one Furness built before rising real estate costs drove even him back to the row-house concept. On Delancey Street, there is a house which he improved upon by adding an 18-inch bay window in front. The uproar it caused among the neighbors is still remembered.
Doctor Home and Office
A block away on the part of 19th Street facing down the street, Furness built another reddish brownstone house to glare back at the neighbors. The facings of the front suggest three-row houses, and it was indeed the home of a physician who had his offices on one side, entrance in the middle, and living room on the right. The resulting staircase in the middle is used to good effect by opening a balcony on the landing overlooking the parlor below. As befits the Furness style, the wall is thick, the wooden beams heavy. And, in a gesture to the lady of the house, the room adjoining the living parlor is a modern kitchen so the kids can play while mama cooks or guests can wander by as she gets dinner ready. Times have changed, the servants quarters once were plain and undecorated. The lady of the house never set foot in the kitchen so she could care less what it looked like.
Frank Furness Home
As a matter of fact, that's the remaining problem for these places, the rate-limiting factor as chemists say. Automatic washers, microwaves, electric sweepers, spray-on cleaning fluids and similar advances are the new industrial revolution which makes these hulking mansions almost practical. What's still lacking is the social structure of Upstairs and Downstairs, the servant community overseen by the lady of the house, who once was sort of the Mayor of a town. The lady of the house is now a partner in a big law firm, or similar. It simply is not wise to leave a big expensive place unattended by someone constantly supervising the domestic help. It is never entirely safe to leave the financial affairs of the household in the hands of someone who is not a central member of the owning family. Perhaps the father of the family can be brow-beaten into spending some quality time with the children once in a while.
Structure of Upstairs and Downstairs
Perhaps an accountant can for a fee be trusted with the finances; perhaps a butler can be found who will whack the staff when they get out of line. But the plain fact is these monster houses were built around the assumption that the lady of the house would run them, and the old style of manorial life cannot return unless the house is completely redesigned for it. Someday, perhaps a genius of the Frank Furness sort will make an appearance, change everything, and make everybody want to have it. But it is asking for something else when you insist on this happening in an old stone fortress that was designed to house a different style of life.
Plans for a precedent-setting survey providing work for 1,200 architects and anesthetic review of practically all of America’s antique buildings and bridges have been laid before the Civil Works Administration by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, it was announced yesterday.
The survey, the first ever attempted, will cost about $500,000 and last at least two months. Approval of it is expected before the end of this week and work will start immediately.
Charles E. Peterson
Charles E. Peterson, chief of the Branch of Plans and Design, eastern division, in the Office of National Parks, Buildings and Reservations, originated the scheme to study, measure and draw up plans, elevations and details of the Nation’s disappearing architecture.
“The ravages of fire and the natural elements, together with the demolition and alterations caused by real estate changes, form an inexorable tide of destruction destined to wipe out the great majority of the buildings which knew the beginnings and the first flourish of the Nation,†he said.
“It’s is the responsibility of the American people that if the greater number of our antique buildings must disappear through economic causes, they should not pass into unrecorded oblivion.â€
Public buildings, churches, residences, bridges, forts, barns, mills, shops, rural, outbuildings, and any other type of structure of which there are good specimens extant will be recorded. Proposed Virginia studies include St. Peter’s Church, in New Kent County, where George Washington’s marriage is said to have taken place; “The Mansion,†at Bowling Green; Christ Church, in Lancaster County and “Mayfield,†at Petersburg. A Maryland list is under consideration.
Historic associations all over the United States will be invited to suggest buildings for study. Six persons already have been detailed to the Library of Congress, compiling data under the supervision of Dr. Leicester B. Holland, chief of the fine arts division. A photographer has been assigned to make pictures of antique structures along the old National Pike between Fredrick, Md., and Zanesville, Ohio, and Erling H. Pederson, chief assistant on the restoration of Stratford, has been tentatively selected as special assistant to Mr. Pederson, pending an allotment by the C.W.A.
St. Lukes Church
Seventieth-century houses and ninetieth-century masonry bridges will be given particular emphasis the canvass will include structures erected from earliest times to about 1860. Period, type and locality will be important factors. This would include the best examples of the succeeding styles followed on the Atlantic seaboard and adjoining States, roughly grouped as Jacobean, Georgian, Early Republic, and Greek revival.
Mr. Peterson proposes to include also aboriginal Indian pueblos and villages in the Southwest; Russian remains in Alaska; birthplace of Presidents, statesmen, inventors and other important characters in American history; mining settlements and, if proper archeological supervision is available, excavation of ancient ruins such as Henricopolis, seventieth century settlement on the James River in Virginia, or Indian mounds in the Midwest.
Had such an enterprise been conducted in Colonial times, said the head of the planning unit, fewer difficulties would have been met in the restoration of Wakefield, George Washington’s birthplace.
Upon approval of the project, an advisory committee of seven will be established. Four members will be architects, appointed by the American Institute of Architects, and three, representing civic and patriotic organizations, will be appointed by Arno B. Cammerer director of National Parks, Buildings and Reservations. They will receive traveling expenses but no salaries.
It is planned to divide the work by States with a branch office for each division. It is estimated 60 offices will be needed, each to be manned by one architect of associated grade and one or two clerk stenographers.
Virtually all of the men employed will be recruited from the architectural profession and organized into squads of two, four or six.
The Fine Art Commission and the American Institute of Architects have endorsed the project.
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
