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There is St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Locust Street, around which a great legal battle raged right after the Centennial because some of its neighbors objected to the sound of its bells. There is a drinking fountain in Fairmount Park with a marble figure of Moses striking water from the rock, erected by the Catholic Total Abstinence Union. There is the old Walnut Street Theatre that assorted eager-beaver presidential publicity agents from Washington, D.C., chose for the staging of the televised presidential “debate” in 1976 between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, with the respective staffs hauling in carefully apportioned “audiences” who served as theatrical props, mechanically applauding now one candidate and then the other. In the true tradition of Philadelphia—remember the wreath that threatened Washington’s noble head?—an electrical failure cut off the sound toward the end of the debate, whereafter George Washington’s august successors stood for twenty-seven minutes numb and dumb, facing the nation (and the world) without saying a word, not daring to turn toward or to talk to each other; standing uneasily behind their lecterns, they looked as if they were unable to move because their trousers had fallen down. There is, even more recently, a statue of Sylvester Stallone, entitled Rocky . The producers of the movie succeeded in placing it in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. After painful debating, a compromise was made: it was moved to the front of a sports stadium in South Philadelphia.

For nearly a hundred years the highest peak of the Philadelphia skyline was the big statue of William Penn on top of City Hall. There could be no taller building in Philadelphia, according to civic custom and tradition but not, alas, to law. Alas—because it has just been topped by an office skyscraper put together by an ambitious developer.

And yet, no matter how things would change—I wrote several years ago—Philadelphia would not lose its peculiar flavor: “the gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the respect for law would remain.” What George Orwell wrote about England during the storm of the Second World War may apply to Philadelphia: “an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.” Even now.

This Year in Philadelphia