Philadelphia

There’s a bluntness to Philadelphia that I liked immediately. We came in from the airport, dropped our bags, and the first local we spoke to gave us unsolicited and forceful directions to the correct cheesesteak, along with a warning about the wrong one. Lia found it hilarious; I found it oddly comforting after weeks of polished tourist towns. This is a city that doesn’t perform for you. It gets on with being itself, revolutionary history and row houses and murals all crammed together, and it lets you take it or leave it. We took it.

Where a country was argued into being

We spent our first morning in Old City, where the American republic was quite literally talked into existence. Independence Hall is smaller than I’d pictured, a modest brick building with a white clock tower, and yet inside that plain assembly room men signed the Declaration and later the Constitution. A ranger walked us through it with real feeling, pointing to the very chair Washington sat in, its carved half-sun that Franklin famously called a rising, not a setting, sun. Across the way we filed past the Liberty Bell with its famous crack, quieter than I expected, everyone reading the inscription to themselves.

A museum, and steps worth climbing

The next day we walked the long green sweep of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and yes, we ran up the “Rocky steps,” because you cannot stand at the bottom and not do it. Lia beat me, threw her arms up at the top, and a stranger cheered. Inside, the museum turned out to be one of the great ones, with armor halls and a reconstructed Japanese teahouse and rooms of Cézanne and Duchamp. But it was the view back down the Parkway from those steps, city hall’s tower dead center at the far end, that we kept returning to.

Murals, markets and the cheesesteak verdict

Philadelphia calls itself the mural capital of the world, and after an afternoon of wandering I believed it; whole gable ends of buildings bloom with painted scenes, some abstract, some portraits of neighborhood heroes. We drifted into Reading Terminal Market, a cavernous old train shed full of food stalls, and ate our way slowly along it, Amish pretzels and roast pork and a scoop of Bassetts ice cream older than the building. And the cheesesteak? We tried the one we’d been ordered to try, standing at a counter in South Philly, and the man behind it was right. Thin beef, melted cheese, a soft roll, eaten on the curb. Perfect and unpretentious, exactly like the city.

Getting There

Philadelphia’s airport connects to Center City in about twenty minutes on the SEPTA regional rail, which drops you steps from the historic core; we skipped a car entirely. The old city is flat and eminently walkable, laid out on William Penn’s tidy grid, and the main sights cluster close enough to do on foot in a day or two. Spring and autumn are the sweet spots for weather; we came in summer and found the mornings pleasant enough, ducking into the air-conditioned market or a museum through the heaviest heat of the afternoon.