Old City, Philadelphia

 I truly haven't had a day off for a month, but my wife's work was taking her to Eastern Pennsylvania, so it made a nice opportunity to reacquaint myself with one of my favorite cities.

I love all the architecture from the late Stuart and early Georgian eras.  Elegant, symmetrical, airy, with lots of natural light.

 With the wife and kids in tow, we stuck to the historic sites in Old City, which is admittedly a pretty cool part of town: the juxtaposition of old on new is what I like.

 We saw the typical attractions, most of which I'd seen before: Independence Hall, The Liberty Bell, the Betsy Ross House, Christ Church, and of course City Tavern, the 1773 alehouse and restaurant pictured just below, where so many of the Founding Fathers used to gather.  We had lunch there; the menu is all 18th century and it includes some unexpected items--even if it's nothing to write home about.

Philly is a great town with that whole East-Coast-hurried-feel to it.  It's got a gleaming glass and steel skyline to the west and lots of interesting neighborhoods.  Even on a Sunday morning, the sidewalks here in Center City are abuzz with fashionably dressed WASPs rushing from place to place and looking very concentrated.  Philly has an international flare found nowhere else in the Commonwealth, even though most tourists never see anything but Old City.   

In the 1700s, Philly was the largest and richest city in North America.  Not only was it bigger than New York, but after London, it was the largest city in the English-speaking world.  It remains the only "World Class City" in Pennsylvania--which is to say, a city with more than one million inhabitants.  And Philly is growing again!  Although most of the historic old cities in the Northeast are losing their populations to the suburbs, Philly's city population has been increasing for about a decade.

I love my country, of course, but I'm embarrassed by patriotism.  And yet, I've got to admit that there's something kind of moving about these ancient buildings where our nation was forged.

Independence Hall is shown in the top photo.  It was originally the seat of government for the Colony of Pennsylvania, and it's more than 280 years old.  This bottom picture is the room in "Congress Hall" where the US Congress used to meet during the ten years when Philadelphia was the capital of the nation.  I gotta say, the tour guides around here really seem to love their jobs.