Oh, what a July! It is not as often as it used to be that so many eyes – those not only of the nation but of the entire world – are fixed upon our Philadelphia. This summer they were, with good reason: exactly 250 years ago our fathers brought forth, upon the 500 block of Chestnut Street, a new nation, and that Promethean spark blazed right through the centuries. If there were ever an act worth remembering, this was it.
Accordingly every institution I frequent – that is, every museum and club and society worth its scrapple – held its own semiquincentennial celebration, from our great civic powerhouses all the way down to the smallest and most mysterious of our heritage societies. I attended as many as I was invited to: no small feat.
The Union League, for one, hosted an all-day open house for members and guests that included hourly readings of the Declaration of Independence from the grand front stairs; everyone’s favorite party games including “Sign the Declaration of Independence” and “Sing God Bless America”; and more bunting than a deadball-era baseball game.
Not to be outdone, the St. Andrew’s Society of Philadelphia, that old Scottish refuge for wayward Jacobites, hosted a bonnie period-accurate church service – literally the same service, verbatim, as the one held that same day in the same place in 1776, heat and all – at St. Peter’s Church, followed by a cocktail reception at history-rich Carpenters’ Hall. (Both of these buildings – among our finest colonial-era survivors – were appropriately designed by the Scottish architect Robert Smith; slàinte mhath, and all of that).
In one of the more intellectually – and, indeed, logistically – ambitious commemorations, the Science History Institute staged a period-accurate fireworks show in the Centennial District of Fairmount Park. These were not fireworks in the modern aerial sense, but an eighteenth-century ground display: a tremendous Rube Goldberg contraption of wheels, fountains, suns, serpents, and Sixers logos; fiery whiz-bangetry that proceeded from one lit fuse all across the intricate scaffolding like some Edisonian gizmo of the World’s Fair era.
There were more events still: the Independence Day Regatta on the Schuylkill, a 250th-themed classical concert hosted by the Italian Consulate – too many, almost, to count.
And here I will also say: historical reenactors never had a better season, nor indeed a finer hour. You could throw a rock and hit a Ben Franklin, but it did not end there. Walking around the League celebration, for instance, was an uncanny John Hancock whom I later learned was not hired at all but simply a member’s friend who happened, like the real deal, to be visiting from Massachusetts. Meanwhile at the St. Andrew’s event was my personal favorite: the lesser-known (though of course not by the membership) James Wilson, the Scottish-American jurist who has rightly come to be known as a primary architect of the United States Constitution. (There are many mind-boggling stories about Wilson, but here is one: upon being ruined financially by land speculation, he had to escape Philadelphia – and the state entirely – to avoid debtor’s prison while still a Supreme Court justice; if only he had held out for the age of the Book Deal).
An aside on this score: a few months back I got into a protracted conversation with a woman in full period dress. When she broke from conversation with Abraham Lincoln himself I asked, quite reasonably under the circumstances, “Are you Mary Todd Lincoln?” She knew her stuff, knew enough to be befuddled: “Excuse me,” she replied, “am I who?” She went on: “But you know, I am a Todd.” By this I judged her to be Dolley Madison (properly Dolley Todd Madison from her first marriage to Philadelphia Quaker John Todd), the famed hostess born in the 1760s; she would not have known Kentucky-born Mary Todd (no relation), who would not become first lady until twelve years after Dolley’s death. But her commitment to the precise period did not end there: standing in front of the Union League’s largest portrait – Washington astride a warhorse – I gestured: “Then surely you know this man. It is quite a likeness, after all, having been painted by the inimitable Thomas Sully!” But she would not miss a trick: “By whom??” Dear God. “In my day all the fashionable people were painted by Gilbert Stuart!” Of course Sully was still a child when Dolley left Philadelphia, and therefore belonged to a later period than the one she had chosen to inhabit. Give this woman a raise.
On top of this somewhat arcane array of society, club, and museum events, there were bigger blockbusters: the sixteen-day Wawa Welcome America festival; six World Cup matches and the thirty-nine-day FIFA Fan Festival on Lemon Hill (the most attended of any such festival in the country on account, no doubt, of its physical and financial accessibility); MLB All-Star Week at Citizens Bank Park; the PGA Championship at Aronimink; and, on July Fourth itself, a Celebration of Freedom before Independence Hall, the separate One Philly concert and fireworks on the Parkway, a World Cup knockout match, and so much more.
Grand schemes require grand plans, but details too: and it is in these that our Mayor Cherelle Parker and her administration deserve immense praise. The large-scale planning required for the events themselves was head-spinning enough, and it is easy to imagine all the ways in which things could have gone wrong. But there was also an incredible array of proactive improvements, many of them permanent: the bombed-out sidewalks around Logan Square were completely replaced; dramatic plantings appeared outside the Academy of Natural Sciences (courtesy of the Garden Club); old trash receptacles were replaced with new ones bearing messages of unity and – one can scarcely believe it – patriotism, while additional cans were installed in places that before had none; the astounding Civil War monuments flanking the Parkway were painstakingly cleaned and now gleam like new; every one of the 109 international flags lining the approach to the Art Museum was replaced with a brand new one; large map installations were added for wayfinding around the city’s historic and cultural sites; clever markers were installed all throughout the city to identify its many national “firsts”; almost every downtown street was completely repaved; and more street sweeping vehicles now pass down my block in one week than did in my entire life before. Beyond this, many historic sites that had been closed for years or even decades reopened to the public, including the First Bank of the United States, the Second Bank portrait gallery, and the historic surgical amphitheater at Pennsylvania Hospital. These were just things I happened to observe with my own two eyes. They sure add up.
The best book about the Constitutional Convention is Miracle at Philadelphia by the biographer and bona fide Old Philadelphian Catherine Drinker Bowen. That, of course, is about another hot summer – that of 1787, not 1776 – and hopefully in eleven years we will be holding another semiquincentennial celebration on that score. But the wonderful title insists on reminding us that what happened was indeed a kind of miracle. This summer was one too.