Days 22-23: Philadelphia

Philadelphia: The city of brotherly love. And indeed everyone seems very friendly, at least in South Philly where I was staying with my friend Amy. Everyone you pass on the street says hello - rather startling after coming from New York! This is one of Philly's oldest neighbourhoods, with streets and narrow alleyways of little brick row houses.

A house with the ancestor of the video doorphone, a system of mirrors
for seeing who's at the door invented by Benjamin Franklin

Nearby is one of the city's liveliest streets for bars and restaurants, and interesting little shops open until late at night, South Street.

This whole neighbourhood is made even more interesting by the presence of mosaics by Isaiah Zagar, scattered here and there on house fronts and walls.

The street mosaics are only one of the weird and wonderful things about Philadelphia. Having already been to the Art Museum and the Rodin Museum and popped in to see the Liberty Bell the last time I was in the city (20 years ago - but I doubt those things have changed much), I was able to spend my two days there visiting some lesser-known sights, such as the Dream Garden, a Tiffany glass mosaic made in 1914-15 by Maxfield Parrish in the lobby of an art deco style building downtown, the Curtis Center.

It's just there, in the lobby, for anyone to go and see! Like the Wanamaker organ, the world's largest functioning pipe organ, which is, oddly, in the Grand Hall of Macy's department store, right above the women's shoes department. If you go down to Macy's at noon, you can try on footwear while listening to organ music!

I spent a morning in the Barnes Foundation, viewing the picture gallery assembled by eccentric art collector Albert C. Barnes, which has been transported from his home outside Philadelphia to a modern building in the city's museum district reproducing the ensembles exactly as they were arranged in the collector's home. He arranged his paintings not in chronological order, or by artist, but in the way that looked good to him, mixing and matching artworks of different ages with items of furniture and hardware in symmetrical arrangements - it's fun to try and figure out why he put certain items together. He continued to rearrange his collection from time to time throughout his life, swapping paintings around on different walls and in different rooms, and he was particularly fond of the Impressionists, long before everyone else was - he bought literally hundreds of Renoirs, Matisses, and Cezannes long before anyone else was interested in them. The Barnes Foundation exhibits the ensembles as they were at the time of the collector's death in 1951.

An ensemble from the Barnes collection - photo from the website, photography is strictly forbidden!

The Barnes Foundation building

After this adventure I proceeded on to another intriguing destination: Eastern State Penitentiary, the first jail in North America to emphasise reform rather than punishment, which the jail's Quaker founders believed could be achieved through solitary confinement in total isolation from other prisoners with only a Bible to read. Their intentions were good, especially compared with other prisons of the time, but they soon discovered that this treatment actually made the prisoners go mad, rather than reforming them. The conditions were changed over the years, but in 1971 the penitentiary was finally closed, and left to rot and ruin for decades before a group of citizens decided to tidy it up a bit and reopen it as a museum and centre for education about incarceration. A visit to the prison today is fascinating on many levels: as a record of what jails were like in the 19th and 20th centuries, as an aesthetic experience - you can peek into hundreds of cells with crumbling walls and jumbled items of rotting furniture, some of which have artists' installations set up in them - and as a source of information on the prison situation in America today. A multimedia centre provides information, statistics, film segments and an interesting survey in which visitors can volunteer to participate, writing a confession of something illegal that they have done. Anonymous confessions are posted on a board, mixing those of incarcerated criminals with the confessions of visitors touring the jail, and only when you press a button do lights come on that show you which are which. The results can be surprising!

Recreation of what the cells would originally have looked like.
The only door opened onto a small individual exercise yard,
not into the corridor, so prisoners would never meet one another

Downtown Philadelphia is architecturally interesting for its blend of old, new and art deco buildings, some of them with a distinctively Hopper-like feel.

I arrived in front of City Hall just in time for the start of the ceremonies for the raising of the Pride Flag. It's Pride Month all over, and Pride Week was just starting in Philadelphia. There were all kinds of interesting people speaking at the flag-raising event, as well as a rapper, a spoken word artist and a transgender singer - thus ushering in a new theme of my trip, for my next destination is Washington, DC where Pride Weekend is coming up!

Raising the Pride flag at City Hall in Philadelphia