A review (of sorts) of Travels in Philadelphia, by Christopher Morley
Though not much discussed anymore, in his time Christopher Morley was a wildly prolific literary figure of high reputation. Though he ultimately wound up in a small town called Roslyn Estates, on Long Island in New York, his regional bona fides are wide and well-established. He was born in Bryn Mawr and educated at Haverford College – where his father had been a math professor – before heading to Oxford for three years to study history as a Rhodes scholar.
Then, after all that, he wound up in New York. But before finally heading up the north to stay, he came back down to Philadelphia for a couple of years, at the tail end of the nineteen-teens. While he was here, he spent some time rambling around the city and writing about it for the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, at the time the city’s largest newspaper. Technically, all his wanderings occurred in 1919 – by 1920 he and his wife were installed in “Green Escape,” their place in Roslyn Estates – but 2020 does mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Morley’s Ledger columns in book form, as Travels in Philadelphia.
Morley’s style is not exactly what you’d call modern: for example, can you guess what he’s talking about here? “Like a battered citizen who has fallen upon doleful days, Callowhill Street solaces itself with the amber.”* Reading even a little of Morley’s book pretty quickly transports you back to the Philadelphia of a century ago, and, language differences aside, it’s a really intriguing look back through the window of history. When was the last time you heard someone refer to Neshaminy Creek as a “bright little river,” or heard anyone talk about the Ronaldson Cemetery?
(I’ll grant that I’m a fairly recent transplant to Philadelphia, so it’s entirely possible that I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. Maybe the Neshaminy is a placid shoelace of a stream that threads its way through verdant hillsides and wouldn’t dream of flooding even in the fiercest rain. I’ve heard otherwise, though. And about the Ronaldson Cemetery I know nothing, other than that a quick Google search tells me it was closed, and all the graves moved, long before my father was born.)
Whatever the case may be, it’s a fascinating little book and well worth the time to at least take a look at. Inside, you can find out the 1920 price of a bowl of Irish stew with two “vegatables,” or learn what a “cider saloon” was, and you can marvel along with Morley at “what… poetry there is in the names of our streets – Nectarine, Buttonwood, Appletree, Darien, Orianna!”
And you can’t beat the price: the entire book’s available free. Read it in your browser or download it via the Internet Archive here.
*This refers to the fact that Callowhill Street, at the time, was home to a lot of bars and saloons. Really. Maybe amber refers to the amber color of some whiskeys. But don’t quote me on that.