Designed by  Max Rosenthal
 

         PHILADELPHIA:     The   American   City

AN  HISTORICAL  AND  DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH  BY  TALCOTT  WILLIAMS
 

  Philadelphia was  the first of American  cities to reach the permanent charac¬

ter which it was to keep for all time.  For cities, like men, have their youth and

their maturity,  their temperament and their character, their  careers and  their

destiny, their triumphs and their failings, those who hate  and those who  love.

There  has  been  no  moment for 3,000 years when Damascus has not been  rapt

among its  waters and sat in its tender green.  The Roman camp  about which

the  Parisi gathered differed no  whit in the letters of  Julian a millennium and

a half  ago  from Paris in the letters of Balzac.  There has  been no moment for

3,000 years when Singan-fu  has not held  its solitary state in its narrow, walling

mountain, a city of dignities and ranked palaces, be they empty, as for centuries

past, or full, as in the last twelvemonth.

  Our  American cities come but late to their historic right.   No  one confounds

the  Boston of Faneuil Hall and the Common with the Boston  of the Public

Library and of open squares, thronged streets and brilliant and builded  ways.

The  New York  of Wall  Street  and  the  Battery is not the  imperial city which

queens  it  over a harbor  full of  gathered  boroughs.   Even  in  Chicago,   they

draw their  sharp line between the city "before the  fire," frame, low, squalid, and

the growing splendors which have piled the business town of  the modern Babel

on the trembling morass.   These all change.  Philadelphia  remains stanch and

American  from its start, through all its spreading thousands between the rivers

and beyond.

  This city had no frontier youth.  It had won  its charter twenty years  after

the  first house had been  built on its  city  site and the gap  between the  first

Swede settlement and a  Mayor and Burgesses dealing  with  all  city evils  was

briefer than for  any other of our Atlantic municipalities.  It grew like a mush¬

room,  2,500 houses in  a  score of years.  No other colonial city saw the  like.

The  thin  line of gabled  houses, perched on the  steep river  bank in 1720, up
 

which Franklin climbed a few years later, had bloomed into towers and steeples,

the State House  and Christ Church, the square residences of South  England

and the double-gabled roofs of the Palatinate before he  had reached middle life.

  Its  very colonial days alone of our  early cities  drew  together all  the  fore¬

runners of national  greatness.  It had  at its western gate the wheat-fields of

Lancaster and first sent out corn to feed other lands. On its  very soil the pine

and oak,  cypress  and chestnut met, and on  the  Delaware  began the larger

American shipbuilding on  sites  where the greater yards  of the future were to

launch the warships of Czar and Mikado with the serried fleets of the  Republic.

It had its Germantown when all the other colonies were English and insular,

and all  the arts of Central Europe were brought here by  the artificers of the

Rhine.  Here tanning began, and here  shoes were earliest made  for more than

local use, the wool trade  began here  and here the lesser arts of life. Here beer

was first brewed,  here  the  printing-press began in more than  one  tongue.  Iron

was first made about it, and arms and  the Conestoga wagon—the wain of Central

Europe—began  Western trade and prefigured the  Philadelphia  locomotive, whose

voice  has gone  through the earth and the sound  thereof,  from the Southern to

the Northern seas.

  When  the Revolution  came the city  was  compact of all  the strands of  later

national life.  Foreign  tongues were spoken in its streets and the stream of its

life was enriched by German and Moravian, by Huguenot and by Spanish Jew,

the long-lineaged  aristocrat of his race,  whose  descent  makes all  other  seem

of yesterday.  It  was the natural center of the colonies,  the  keystone of  their

arch.  Here were the  great bankers, Morris  and  the  rest.  In  their banking

parlors  the debts of the infant  Republic  were funded,  for European  financiers

knew  no other  American  credits.   Its  State House  was  the   one  imposing

secular  building of the  Thirteen Colonies,  and  it  remains ni^h  two  centuries
 

              WILLIAM PENN'S SUPPOSED TREATY  WITH THE INDIANS  AT SHACKAMAXON (NOW KENSINGTON), NOVEMBER 30  1682

Though there is doubt whether Penn made the particular treaty as commemorated in Benj. West's painting, after which the engraving is made, the chronicles in the affirmative say that Penn wore on that

    occasion^ sky-blue sash, and that Chief Tammanend (Tammany) conveyed lands to him, giving as a token of friendship a bundle of deerskins.  The site of the treaty is marked bv a monument