A Philadelphia flaneur
Photograph courtesy of Girard College.
This is not a walk on the wild side, though it will take you to three Philadelphia sites much less visited than Elfreth’s Alley, the Liberty Bell, or Rittenhouse Square. If I find them more intriguing than those picturesque spots it is simply because this is where the city’s history lives on in some interesting twenty-first-century ways. The neighborhood, called either Spring Garden or Fairmount/Art Museum, is close enough to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the walk to begin at the museum’s Perelman Building. (You can also start at the Barnes Foundation on Benjamin Franklin Parkway and walk north, though that will take somewhat longer.)