File:Our Philadelphia (1914) (14595480419).jpg

Identifier: ourphiladelphia00penn (find matches)
Title: Our Philadelphia
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 1855-1936 Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926
Subjects: Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 1855-1936 Lithography, American
Publisher: Philadelphia and London : J. B. Lippincott Co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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changed less perhaps than any other part of the town—haschanged less to-day in mere bricks and mortar. It hadpreserved the appropriate background for its inheritanceof history and traditions. Numerous Colonial houses re-mained and upon them those of later date were modelled.It had kept also the serenity and repose of the QuakerCitys early days, the character, dignity, charm. Manyold Philadelphia families had never moved away. It wasclean as a little Dutch town with nothing to interrupt thequiet but the gentle jingling of the occasional leisurelyhorse-car. And what did I find it?—A slum, captured by theRussian Jew, the old houses dirty, down-at-the-heel; theonce spotless marble steps unwashed, the white shuttershanging loose; the decorative old iron hinges and catchesand insurance plaques or badges rusting, and nobody cansay how much of the old woodwork inside burned forkindling; Yiddish signs in the windows, with here a JewishMaternity Home, and there a Jewish newspaper office; at
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ST. PETERS CHURCHYARD AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY 463 every door, almost every window, and in groups in thestreet, men, women and children with Oriental faces, hereand there a man actually in his caftan, bearded, with thelittle curls in front of his ears, and a woman with ahandkerchief over her head, and all chattering in Yiddishand slatternly and dirty as I remembered them in South-Eastern Europe, from Carlsbad and Prague to those re-mote villages of Transylvania where dirt was the sign bywhich I always knew when the Jewish quarter was reached.A few patriotic Philadelphians have recently returned hop-ing to stem the current, and their houses shine with cleanli-ness. In Fourth Street the dignified Randolph House,which the family never deserted, seems to protest againstthe wholesale surrender to the foreign invasion. In PineStreet, St. Peters, with its green graveyard, has surviveduntarnished the surrounding desecration. But I couldonly wonder how long the church and these few houses

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