Exploring Center City

Today I decided to explore the city a bit by walking east through Center City (I live at the west edge of the neighborhood). As an end point for my walk, I planned to go to the Curtis Center to see a mosaic recreation of a Maxfield Parrish design that I'd been wanting to see for years. Parrish, trained here in Philadelphia in the early twentieth century, has been one of my favorite artists for years. But more about Parrish later.

I began my walk in Rittenhouse Square, which was designated as a park in William Penn's plan for the city in 1682. The square was full of people and dogs, as were all of the cafes surrounding it. I crossed the city on Sansom and Walnut streets, which run parallel to each other, to try to get a sense of things. At first, I was passing fancy boutiques and cafes, but as I got closer to Broad Street, it became a little run down with a smattering of cool places starting to open.

The neighborhood went through two quick shifts before I got to the Curtis Center--first through the glbt neighborhood (which I really only realized because the street signs had a rainbow border on the bottom), and then through the campus of a medical school. When I reached the Curtis Center, I was surprised to find that it was an office building. I had some trouble finding even a sign for the mosaic, but finally I saw an arrow pointing towards the "Tiffany mosaic." I hadn't realized that this had been a collaboration between Parrish and Louis Comfort Tiffany.Titled "Dream Garden," Parrish and Tiffany's work is a dreamy landscape spanning nearly 50 feet in one of Center's lobbies. All of the usual elements of Parrish's landscapes are here--grand, orange and mauve mountains, a vivid blue sky, spindly trees, and overflowing flowers (painted from those in his own garden). Tiffany used different textures of glass for the flowers, as you can see in this photo (click on it to zoom in).I realized as I left the building that I was right across from Independence Hall, so I'd walked most of the way across the city in not much time. I took a different route back so that I could get water ice on the way home (I'd looked up the location online, I can't help the ice cream obsession). There were blocks that were charming, and others so surrounded in tall buildings and dinginess that I felt as if I were in New York City. At one corner, I passed a mural called Philadelphia Muses--I discovered the title through the Mural Arts Program's online database, which lets you search the city's many murals by location.This is a city where the mood seems to change every few blocks, some streets are as narrow as sidewalks, and early 19th century buildings abound. Nothing like DC--which means I have a lot more to learn and explore.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, in person and online

After three days in Philadelphia, I was already eager to get to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I hadn't been there for at least 15 years, so I didn't remember much of anything about it. I discovered a bus that runs up there from right near my place. When I got there, I was distracted at first by all of the people imitating Rocky on the museum steps (there's even a recent book chronicling the people who do this). But then I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the building.

My pre-visit browse of the museum website didn't show any images of the building, which seems incredible after being confronted with the sheer mass and lines of the place. It's a fabulous setting for art, with classical architecture and high ceilings. The website, sans images, explains that the building "is considered one of the crowning achievements of the 'city beautiful' movement in architecture in the early part of the twentieth century." The way it perches at the end of a long avenue with a view down to City Hall and the downtown is breathtaking (I forgot my camera, but grabbed this pic from Britannica.com).

The place seems huge, but I was able to wander through 3 of the 4 major installations in 2 hours to get a sense of what I wanted to come back to see. The strength of the museum's collection is clearly the full-room installations from around the world, including a medieval cloister, a Japanese tea house, and British drawing rooms. The more traditional collections, though, I found a bit lacking. The early American painting collection was just okay, with the exception of a room of Eakins paintings (which aren't really my thing), and the European paintings in the 16th-19th century wing weren't overly impressive. I'm hoping that the one wing I missed--the 20th century European and American wing--has some show-stoppers.

Criticisms aside, I feel like I have a lot left to explore, both in person and online. The website has lets you see what is on display in each gallery, and has tours available as podcasts to download, so you don't have to pay for the audio guide. As you explore online, you can listen to an audio stop when you get to an object's web page, so you can tour from home, too. You can also add your own tags to any object in the collection online, which in the web 2.0 world is called "social tagging" or "folksonomy." It's a big step for a museum to let visitors classify things instead of curators, so I'll be curious to see how it plays out (the government is even funding a big experiment in this area called Steve).

After a weekend of moving and unpacking, I've gotten most of my stuff in order in the new apartment. Fortunately, I had diagrammed how the furniture would fit in my bedroom, because it's a very small space. All of the furniture is packed in there--particularly my bed, which is wedged between the desk and the chest of drawers. As you can tell from the pic, it actually turned out looking quite nice (although I haven't hung the artwork yet).



And yes, that's a fan in the left corner--the apartment doesn't have central AC. That's not really surprising, considering it's in a building constructed in 1856. That's fairly old by DC standards, but Philadelphia had already been around for over 150 years. While it was once America's largest city--and the second largest in the British empire after London--New York had already surpassed it by the 1850's. So, what was happening in Philadelphia at that time? Apparently, it remained the industrial center of the country with a focus on textiles.

The drive into the city from the south is still surrounded by factories and refineries, but in my new neighborhood, it's mostly boutiques and restaurants with the occasional high rise apartment building. Being an older city, the streets are very narrow in places--it kind of reminds me of Boston. I've been able to do all of my errands so far within a few blocks' walk from here, but I need to try to figure out the public transportation soon!