Big City, Intimate Settings: Center City Philadelphia

I became fascinated by Philadelphia long ago for the simplest of reasons: in my youth, I was a Pennsylvanian to the core. I was enthusiastic about the state's beautiful topography, proud of its industrial accomplishments, and eager to learn its history. I grew up in the opposite corner of Pennsylvania from Philadelphia, first in Greenville, a manufacturing and college town where my father was city editor of the local newspaper, and then, after he died at age forty-seven, in the Erie area when my mother remarried and we moved in with her new husband. I remained in northwestern Pennsylvania through graduation from Allegheny College in June 1969. Five days later, I started my first full-time job, as a reporter for the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, 250 miles to the southeast.

Philadelphia, then the fourth-most-populous city in the nation (it is now fifth), lay only 100 miles farther east. So, on one of my first weekends off, I headed for the city that had been home to Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, and other history-making figures. In the years since, I have returned countless times.

My first impression of Philadelphia was that everything was crammed together. The city's 142 square miles were densely filled with buildings of all kinds, but especially with rowhouses: attached dwellings two, three, and sometimes four stories high. Philadelphians erected their first rowhouses near the banks of the Delaware less than a decade after William Penn's 1682 founding of the commonwealth, and they never stopped building them. There was block after block after block of rowhouses, confining in their narrowness, I thought at the time, yet economical, efficient, and comforting in their own way. In a rowhouse neighborhood, many of the things a person needs are within walking distance.

In Center City Philadelphia — the business and historic hub between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers — the typical rowhouse is 12 to 16 feet wide. The most luxurious, called townhouses, are 18 to 22 feet wide. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the rows of attached houses come within 6 to 10 feet of the street, as if part of their job is to keep watch over the public realm. The streets themselves are compact, some so narrow that they accommodate only one lane of moving vehicles.

For a long time, I wondered how a city so densely populated — at its peak in 1950, Philadelphia had more than 2 million inhabitants — could function with streets so minuscule. The street network seemed antique, and traffic often moved slowly. I had spent the first 22 years of my life in the northwestern part of the state, however, where things were more spread out and people took it for granted that you would have an automobile. Perhaps I needed to start viewing things from a different perspective.

Eventually, I realized that judging a big city like Philadelphia — indeed, any city — by the speed at which motor vehicles cruise the streets made little sense. In Philadelphia, people got around on foot and in Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) buses, subways, streetcars, and commuter trains, not solely in automobiles. Today they continue to use all those modes of transportation, except now many of them also bike. In a well-functioning city, the automobile is just one means of transportation, and it is not the best.

I learned that narrow streets and continuous rows of buildings can give a neighborhood intimacy. In most of the central neighborhoods, stores, cafes, and parks are within walking distance. People circulate on foot, which helps them make friends with people nearby. Compactness helps breed tight-knit neighborhoods.

When population density is high enough, a neighborhood can support commercial enterprises within walking distance, such as coffee places, cafes, taverns, dry cleaners, and convenience stores. Some are likely to be franchises, but Center City has many locally owned businesses that reflect the proprietor's personality. One evening, a friend and I dined at a little restaurant in Washington Square West. It was a BYOB establishment with no liquor license, so I stopped beforehand at a corner store that packed a large variety of beers into a very small space and took some to the restaurant. The idiosyncrasies of the neighborhood made it fun. It was a far cry from the experience of driving along a suburban roadside and choosing from the same chain restaurants you have seen in a hundred other locales.

In cities and towns that were laid out for automobiles, distances dull the experience and make it unlikely you will see someone on the street and launch a conversation then and there. Center City, by contrast, fits everyday activities into walking trips along streets where you can meet people. Because of its human scale, Center City attracts a growing number of people who are tired of cars and the car-dependent lifestyle. Ivelisse Cruz, in her midtwenties, moved to Southwest Center City because, she said, "I got a job at the University of Pennsylvania and I wanted to walk to work. I didn't want to deal with the frustrations of traffic. Walking, it's about 25 to 35 minutes to my office on the western edge of UPenn. I have a car, but I use it once a week, if that."

Jason Duckworth, president of Arcadia Land Company, a real estate developer, moved from Narbeth, a century-old railroad suburb in Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, to the Logan Square section of Center City because he and his wife wanted to be in an urban setting, wanted to walk, and thought the move would benefit their school-age daughters, who are both now enrolled at Masterman, a public magnet school they reach on foot. "These city middle-schoolers know how to ride SEPTA, where to find the best chocolate chip cookie, where to hang out with a friend over a slice of pizza," Duckworth said. "They get to have more independence than was possible in Narbeth, though Narbeth is pretty darn good as far as suburbs go.

"It was especially important for us," he said, "that they live with people different from them — different races, different economic situations, different religions — and, through that, perhaps be more empathetic and more open to experience. It reminds me of the famous Louis Kahn line about kids and cities: 'A city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do with his whole life.'"

Some gravitate to walkable neighborhoods even when their jobs are miles away. Ajinkya Joglekar, who works in Wilmington, Delaware, and his wife, Joanna, who works in a northwest Philadelphia suburb, bought a newly built three-story rowhouse in Southwest Center City...