Branly Cadet’s “A Quest for Parity”, September 2017.
Towns with a long and storied history tend to be big on statues and sculptures. Nothing brings great Americans to life more robustly than three-dimensional stone doppelgängers. We concluded Day Five with one last stroll through Center City Philadelphia, surrounded by art on all sides as the sun retreated into the west.
In the shadow of Philadelphia’s Masonic Temple is a big red Sorry piece. (Some sites think it’s a Parcheesi piece. Not from any Parcheesi set I ever played.)
Wouldn’t it be awesome to have board game pieces that you could never, ever possibly lose? Philly has just the place for you.
“Keys to Community”, a 2007 work by James Peniston, is a one-ton bronze Benjamin Franklin covered in casts of 1000 kids’ keys, funded by the local fire department and 1.8 million donated pennies.
Yep, we’re still in Philadelphia. While Anne had her own objectives to pursue on our second foray into the City of Brotherly Love — largely centered around American history — my own to-do list was simple: I just wanted to see Philly up close — roam the streets, feel the vibe, see downtown up close, and just plain experience it instead of merely driving through it with the doors locked…or as we’d done on our first go-around in 2010, when we rode a trolley past several highlights without the power to stop and appreciate at will.
So on Day Five we wandered a bit, we shopped a little, we took a plethora of photos. This set is the daytime half.
Once again we didn’t make it to the official Rocky Balboa statue in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His smaller, more colorful twin would have to do.
Our second time in Philadelphia wasn’t meant to be a total retread of our 2010 visit. Just the same, we couldn’t resist walking past a few of the major highlights. We also couldn’t help walking past them — the parking garage underneath Independence Mall was the most convenient place to leave the car for our first few hours in town, adjacent to several new sights we wanted to see. This year we had slightly more time, somewhat better cameras, and far better maps at our fingertips, given that neither of us owned a mobile phone till 2012.
That time in December 1775 in Harvard Yard when an insult match between soldiers turned into a snowball fight, which turned into a big brawl that George Washington had to break up. That escalated quickly.
In our long, long drives through 32 states and counting, we’ve seen a version of Jamestown, Civil War battlefields, the National World War II Museum, and memorials honoring the individual casualties from America’s last 105 years’ worth of wars or so. We still have a few official war museums to cross off, which we expect will follow the pattern — lots of artifacts from the era, probably some writing samples, and of course plenty of photos where applicable.
Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution features 18,000 square feet of exhibits covering the trials and tumults of our nation’s infancy, but begins with a severe disadvantage: 240 years ago, no one thought to take photos, or bothered to invent the camera in a timely manner. If a nation rises but no one Instagrammed it, is it still free?
Historically accurate recreation of actual flag treatment In the 18th century before the invention of the United States Flag Code. For stricter modern audiences, you can just barely seen the extra cloth placed beneath the flag technically keeping it off the floor.
The American flag was a recurring motif on our 2017 road trip to Baltimore. We’d visited Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” in between cannon fusillades; and we’d visited the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House, where seamstress Mary Young Pickersgill sewed the very flag to which Mr. Key wrote his long-lasting ode.
Before Mrs. Pickersgill, and before Mr. Key, there was the trailblazer they followed, the grand dame of Old Glory herself — Betsy Ross.
Well…allegedly. Historians dispute the veracity of some or every aspect of the classic tale of Betsy Ross sewing our first flag at the behest of George Washington Himself. We weren’t at the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia to examine the evidence and settle the debate once and for all, or to dispel our illusions and tremble at discovering Everything You Know Is Wrong. The truth is, the House just so happened to be along the path we’d chosen to walk down downtown Philly. It was a second-tier option on our to-do list, ranking mostly because we’d read that Betsy Ross’ own grave is on the premises. Ross wasn’t a solid fit into our “Presidential gravesite” theme, but for history’s sake Anne was mildly interested. And I was game.
In the spirit of the House’s presentation, I shall now refuse to type “allegedly” for the remainder of this chapter lest I bore myself out of writing it. Mentally insert if wherever you feel it should fit for your level of comfort and/or dedication to truthiness.
