The Streets of Philadelphia

The City of Brotherly Love Saturday, March 7, 2026

Poor Philly! Can’t get no respect. Mocked by WC Fields, who wanted his epitaph to read “I’d rather be in Philadelphia”, ironically dissed by the TV series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, and even badmouthed by a favorite musical, 1776, complaining it’s hot as hell in Philadelphia, and later referring to it as foul fetid fuming foggy filthy Philadelphia. Knocked off the list of the nation’s five biggest cities by the likes of Houston and Phoenix. Oh the shame!

My mother‘s favorite movie was The Philadelphia Story, but that was really about its glitzy suburbs along the infamous Main Line. Another Oscar winning movie, Philadelphia, was all about AIDS. At least on the bicentennial itself, the Best Picture winner was Rocky.

Yeah, well. It’s still Philadelphia, and this is the semiquincentennial. 50 years ago I tried to bike from Boston to Philadelphia in time for the festivities on July 4, 1976, but only got as far as Hartford. Just as well, I heard the shindig was so commercialized that people called it the Buycentennial. Today I was in my sister-in-law’s house in Gladwyne, a full-fledged member of the Main Line, and figured I might as well “complete” those plans by visiting the city before it got too crowded for the date itself.

My tour took me down the beautiful Schuykill River bike path, past the storied Boathouse Row, home of some of our nation’s great crew rowing clubs

to my first stop, the Calder Gardens. I balked at the steep admission fee, and caged a few glimpses of his signature stabiles and mobiles visible from the outside.

One of my most vivid images of Philadelphia was in the movie Witness, where a little Amish boy, in the city for the first time, is transfixed by a statue of the Archangel Michael in the 30th St. Station, right before he witnesses a brutal murder. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nPvELimqLTg&si=aJnNcN2pVXmFvoC_ This is a memorial to Pennsylvania Railroad workers who were killed in World War II, the angel is lifting a fallen soldier out of the flames. I rarely pass through the city without taking the time to see it. Haunting, even with the backdrop columns obscured by scaffolding.

On to the ivy-covered campus of the University of Pennsylvania, with its quirky sculptures

and the oldest building, hoary College Hall, faced with green marble, used for the exterior shots for the Addams Family mansion

I’ve mentioned Simon Firth of Firth and Wilson Transport Cycles in Philadelphia in previous posts, the sole North American service provider for the great Brooks saddles, a number of times, but never met the man. Here was my chance. His shop is in the Bok Center, deep in gritty South Philly, a repurposed high school founded by the grandfather of Derek Bok, Harvard president during my Cambridge years. Urban renewal in the best sense. https://www.buildingbok.com/about. It took miles of dodging potholes and inner-city blight to reach it, but was serenaded by Springsteen’s anthem en route. https://youtu.be/aViW5QQoVko?si=Ah_2180wZCz2B88z. Great fun visiting with Simon

a Birmingham native who has saved my hide (literally) countless times as my beloved leather Brooks saddles succumbed to my corpulence. His shop and the Bok Center was classic enough, but he directed me to an even more iconic bike shop, Via Cycles nearby.

you don’t get much more “authentic” than that.

Back to tourist mode. On this dreary March day, Independence Hall was oddly peaceful in apprehension of the mobs to come in July, ranger Jack Collins had lots of pity anecdotes about security, commercialization, and what really happened back in 1776.

he convinced me to eschew the overhyped museums nearby, but I couldn’t resist glimpses of Nutty George in front of the famed edifice

and the Bell itself, thronged by sightseers even today, instead catching a peek through the bulletproof glass.

For almost 90 years, an unwritten gentlemen‘s agreement forbade any skyscraper from rising above Billy Penn’s hat atop City Hall,

Now surpassed by the Liberty Place towers in the background

which stands at the end of Philadelphia’s Champs-Élysées, The Benjamin Franklin Parkway

I was only able to partially expunge the people in the foreground.

which passes the Franklin Institute and Barnes Foundation museums, en route to the neoclassical Philadelphia Museum of Art, designed in part by my brother-in-law Scott’s grandfather,

and sporting not one but two statues of Rocky, the second surrounded by a fan mob in white sweatsuits.

The trip home on the Schuykill River bike path took me by the “Manayunk Wall”, one of the steepest streets in America, with maximum grades of 17%, famous as a key feature in the Philadelphia International Cycling Championship. The view is foreshortened and doesn’t really capture how steep it is, but I didn’t want to try it, even on my e-bike.