My resolve is tested to its limits, when I have to get out of the house on a cold weekend. I am tropical to the core; like a plant that creeps towards sunlight, I seek out the sun, break a happy sweat. I droop in the winter, slithering back into the nest of a comforter, curling up with a novel. But being in the last leg of my stay in Philadelphia, I have sworn against hibernation, promised myself one exploration every week, and have failed more often than not.
Elfreth Alley in Old city dates back to 1703. This little street is an outdoor museum with houses and buildings from between 1720 and 1836. William Penn, the Quaker founder of Philadelphia planned the city as a rectangular gridiron with numbered and lettered streets run perpendicular to each other. Incidentally the state of Pennsylvania, gets its name from Penn, who christened the colony he carved out of the homeland of many indigenous tribes, after his father, as Penn’s Woods. As with the best laid out plans, it had a flaw. Not everyone wanted to be in the grid. People started carving out forays into Penn’s grid. John Gilbert and Arthur Wells decided to cut a pathway between their properties, between Second and Front streets, for easy access to the wharfs of the Delaware River.
This autumn day, the alley was dotted by little knots of tourists pausing, in front of this doorway or that window. The brightly painted doors and windows, bouquets on windowsills, flags fluttering above the awnings, the warm sun emerging from behind the clouds washing the brick and stone paved alley and the orange red walls of the houses in a golden glow- Elfreth Alley had a quiet magic.Dolly Ottie, a young woman, opened a sandwich shop at No 128 Elfreth Alley in 1934. Soon she learned that many of the buildings on the street were demolished by the paint factory that owned them at the time. It was the conservation efforts of the 1930’s spearheaded by Ottie and others that led to the preservation of this little group of buildings, homes first to artesans and then to industrial workers.
I had gone to Elfreth’s Alley expecting a touristy dip into time, frozen at an artificially imagined moment, separate from the city around. To my pleasant surprise the difference was not as stark as I expected. Many parts of Philadelphia, including West Philly continue to have residences from the 19th and 20th centuries still standing-row houses and modest twin brick buildings with their little porches and front gardens. The interiors of these houses are transformed, quartered and sectioned into modern habitations. My studio apartment is in Webster Manor in Osage Avenue, a residence for dental students built in the 1920s. The illusion of lingering past disappears the moment I step inside my door, into the little white box with its modular kitchen, and thin walls of board. So is Elfreth’s Alley. Life is imotion behind the faces of those houses, transforming their interiors. The exterior remains static. A dilettante of historic architecture would perhaps be able to point out the slight variations in architectural styles over time, but not I.
What was different at Elfreth Alley was that the occasional external additions and signs of delapidation were absent from these facades. I walked the street up and down, unhurried, stopping in front of each house, listening to the audio guide I had downloaded earlier. The corner house with its bright red windows and shutters, belonged in the 18th century to Jermiah Elfreth, a blacksmith, turned silversmith, turned developer, from whom the street gets its name. Numbers 124 and 126 were owned by dressmakers Sarah Melton and Mary Smith, who lived and worked there. The little museum currently housed in these two buildings, display the tools of trade and custom made mantua gowns like the ones the two women might have produced. When houses number 120 and 122 were built by Andrew Edge and Thomas Potts in the 1720’s.After moving in they discovered that they had somehow switched their deeds with each other…These are the kind of stories that Elfreth’s Alley tells- nothing dramatic, ordinary lives, neighbourhood tales. They contrast with the grand narratives told at the Liberty Bell or the Independence Hall, just a few blocks away, teeming with tourists, celebrating the nation. In comparison, my leisurely stroll through this narrow lane made more sense in Philadelphia.
With autumn reds and yellows, complementing Philly’s brick exteriors, and animating the gray side walks, the last of the warm sun peeping through the still standing leaves, these few days are my final chance to know a city that I have already come to like. Philadelphia, despite being one of the unsafest cities I have lived in, has grown on me. I love how it has sustained its early layout of streets in grids, allowing me to wander yet not be lost; allowing the city to contain its growth and maintain its green squares. I have become habituated to the silent elation I feel at the moment Trolley no. 34 that I boarded from one of the dingy, underground stations in the central city that smells of cannabis, despair and fear, emerges out of the tunnel into sunlight, warmth and green of the 40th street trolley Portal. Like every home in a foreign city, my refurbished studio in Webster manor, a few steps from the trolley stop, is dear to me; mostly because I set them up to leave them behind. Unlike the facades of Elfreth street that store memories from centuries before, these one room homes hold on to my memory fleetingly, only till the next resident arrives. It is almost as if I was never there.
