A federal tax deduction is familiar enough; a federal tax credit is something else, it's tax-exempt federal money directly into your pocket. If you don't have any income, you can still get a federal check for a tax credit if it's a refundable tax credit. Some students of taxation are a little uncomfortable about refundable tax credits, because of the history that a great many people have become very wealthy from tax credits, building low-income housing projects. However, all federal subsidies merely seem good or bad, depending on your opinion of the social worth of what is subsidized.
In 1976 President Gerald Ford signed a tax provision which was the enthusiastic pet of Senator Lugar of Indiana. It created a federal subsidy for the rehabilitation of historic buildings, taking the form of a 20% refundable tax credit for project costs. To condense the rules to their essence, any building which is on the National Register of Historic Places is eligible for this tax cr
Although New England was colonized fifty years before Philadelphia's founding, as was Virginia, the earliest schools and colleges everywhere were in some sense created to train ministers. The Quaker churches of the Delaware Bay had no ministers, of course, but the idea that everyone is a minister led the three Quaker colonies to universal education even sooner. It also led to questioning about education: what's the purpose of all this, anyway? To some extent, that's the farmer mentality showing through, although it shows up in a different light when you reflect upon the pervasiveness of Quaker education. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting alone has fifty-five private schools and three highly selective colleges under its care. That's pretty remarkable for a church of only ten thousand members, competing with universal free public education. The main exception to the original religious intent of higher education was the University of Pennsylvania, founded by the deist Benjamin Franklin.
The New York Times boasts it contains all the news that's fit to print, implying it does not print what isn't fit -- while maybe occasionally printing it. Sensationalism definitely sells newspapers. "Tabloid journalism", "Yellow Journalism", label newspapers which print nothing but sensationalism.
On the other hand, detective novels continue to be the books most noticeably in demand at the Atheneum and other upper-crust bookvending establishments in our town. In other circles, detective novels are called murder mysteries. One even suspects that the scholarly pursuit called Sociology derives a sizeable part of its attraction from the sort of discussion which makes City Editors of family newspapers -- squirm.
Anyway, if you want to know Philadelphia you want to know this side of it. Recorded criminal justice in Philadelphia seems to date back to Charles Pickering, who was convicted of counterfeiting in the Seventeenth century. Literary allusions to c
Haddonfield sits right on the PATCO High Speed Line into Philadelphia, so it's perfectly convenient for commuting and culture. Haddonfield has blocks and blocks of magnificent houses dating from before the Revolution to the present with Queen Victoria's era well represented.
Founded by the Quaker Elizabeth Haddon shortly after her arrival from England in 1701. The Quaker meeting continues in operation to this day and Haddonfield Friends School has taught hundreds of students over the years.
Architects quickly tell you that spending extra money to make a building "green" is most popular with institutions, like hospitals, schools, and museums which expect to remain functionally unchanged for the next fifty years. It costs extra money to build a building which will last, and extra investment is needed to introduce a
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| British Parliament |
In 1604, the British Parliament considered the issue of w hat it should mean if Parliament remained silent on a topic. The English Civil War, King Versus Parliament, was soon to begin, so it was almost inevitable that Parliament wo
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| Webbed Toes |
It probably took me twenty years to notice that, unlike most people, I had an incomplete separation of my second and third toes. I thought my toes were like everybody else's, but once you start peeking, you see that webbed toes are not normal, although they are not really rare, either. After another thirty years, it became apparent that most of my numerous descendants had the same kind of toe; it was obviously an inherited condition. When the family clan gathered at the beach, it was a source of mild amusement, possibly even a little pride. A
Burlington County used to be called Bridlington. It once contained Burlington City, the capitol of West Jersey, which is how they styled the southern half of the colony which belonged to William Penn. In colonial times, the developed part of New Jersey was a strip extending from Perth Amboy, the capital of East Jersey, to Burlington. To the north of the fertile strip extended the hills and wilderness mountains, to the south extended the Pine Barrens loamy wilderness. The strip was predominantly Tory in sentiment, while the remaining 90% of the colony consisted of backwoods Dutch farmers to the north, and hard-scrabble "Pineys" to the south, except for the developments farmed by Quakers. The Quakers had ambiguous sentiments during the Revolution, while the rea
 Although quilting can be found in the tombs of ancient Egypt, American farm women are correct that they invented an art form.  |
| Dr. Fisher |
In the days when transport was primitive, art forms were invented in many places at once, mostly responding to new materials and new technologies. It's irreleva
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| Ben Franklin's Glass Armonica |
Everyone knows Ben Franklin spent a lot of time holding a wine glass. Evidently, he noticed a musical note emerges if you run your finger around the open mouth of the drinking glass, and systematically studied how the tone can be varied by varying the level of liquid in the glass. The same variation in emitted tone relates to variations in thickness of the glass. So, he set up a series of different sized glasses impaled on a horizontal broomstick, enough to cover three octaves, rotated the broomstick with a treadle like those used for spinning wheels
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| North Philly |
Slum creation, while occasionally deliberate, is most typically caused by an area's abandonment by previous owners, at lower prices, to bargain hunters. When a large employer moves or closes, the employees seek work elsewhere and sell their houses for what they can get. When the influx of new ethnic groups threatens to weaken real estate prices, panic may be created that waiting too long to sell may find the property worthless; nobody wants to be the last one out the door. During the 20th Century, the driving force in Philadelphia was the flight to the suburbs by people who found better value in suburban
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| Potemkin |
Someone who has traveled in modern China -- and is at all observant -- knows that the extensive slums and trashy wastelands of the Inner Kingdom are systematically hidden from tourist eyes by fences and plantings of tall trees. In a few years, the trees will grow a few feet taller and fully conceal what is behind them, but today modern tourist buses are high enough so you can see over the tree tops if you look. When American tourists notice this, they are very smug.
The term Potemkin Village is a somewhat exaggerated term for the process Gregory Potemkin used to clean up the villages that his girl friend
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| Fannie Mae Corp. |
It would be pardonable to say that since securitization of home mortgages is a generally good thing, we might overlook any minor differences in approach between Fannie Mae (FNMA) and CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations), and let the customers decide which approach is preferred. Unfortunately, they both encompass a fatal flaw that has somehow escaped adequate notice. As mortgages pass from one holder to the next in sequence, both the buyer and seller seek to avoid the worst-risk mortgages and retain for themselves the best-risk ones. Get stuck with too many bad-risk properties, and you will go broke. When the credit markets suddenly woke up to this real
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| George W Bush |
Christmas, 2005.
My Quaker Friends are comfortable with the firm position that no war can be justified. This sometimes leads to feeling it's unnecessary even to consider the justifications or the mitigating circumstances of any war, since nothing can be said which will lessen their opposition. My Democrat friends seem to have an equally closed mind, one which leads them to emotional denunciations of George Bush which I know cannot be completely reasonable. However, George Bush and I went to the same sort of schools, feel passionately a
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| howe |
Philadelphia had only 25,000 inhabitants during the Revolutionary War. Now, nearly that many British soldiers of Sir William Howe poured into town, victorious. Victorious, except for being cut off from their supplies on the warships in the Chesapeake. Men o'war soon sailed up the Delaware River, but found the narrow channel between Fort Mifflin and Fort Mercer in New Jersey blocked by strange contraptions called chevaux-de-frise. These instruments consisted of heavy timbers sunk to t
To understand the dynamics of the following medical anecdote, the reader should know the meaning of Miriam's First Rule of Management. Miriam is my oldest daughter, with long experience managing many firms, large and small. Her rule is that when an employee starts misbehaving for no good reason, eliminate the position. Invariably, well almost invariably, an employee who starts acting out doesn't have enough work to do. If you are managing a large organization, you should also consider firing the supervisor of that person, on the grounds the supervisor should have noticed there was not enough work for the employee to do, and is probably covering up.
My anecdote concerns a session at the 2006 annual meeting of the American College of Physicians, ostensibly devoted to conflict between generations of doctors. It didn't take long before the meeting turned into an uproar about the new work rules which prohibit a resident physician from working more tha
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| B. Franklin Parkway |
Philadelphia has straight streets and square blocks in all directions, by the hundreds. Just a few streets slant off at an oblique angle, and most of those, like Germantown Avenue, are following old Indian Trails. The one, cold-blooded, deliberate slant street is the Benjamin Franklin Parkway which essentially runs from City Hall to the acropolis holding the Art Museum aloft. Just whose idea it was is unclear, although the architect Horace Trumbauer gets most credit. The actual design was given to a Frenchman, Jacques Greber
Not only do the attributes in an HTML tag come in random order but many are optional
Here's a regex solution:
<?php function tagAttr($matches) {print_r($matches);} $string = '<img src="/images/picture.jpg" width="300" class="left" alt="alt keywords" />'; $foo = preg_replace_callback( '/<img\b(?>\s+(?:alt="([^"]*)"|class="([^"]*)"|style="([^"]*)"|src="([^"]*)"|height="([^"]*)"|width="([^"]*)")|[^\s>]+|\s+)*>/i', "tagAttr", $string); ?> Produces the following:
Array ( [0] => <img src="/images/picture.jpg" width="300" class="left" alt="alt keywords" /> [1] => alt keywords [2] => left [3] => [4] => /images/picture.jpg [5] => [6] => 300 )
The regex is a series of alternating sequences; so, add http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1350.htm
| The New Jersey legislature began by ratifying the Declaration of Independence, then concerned itself with debts, then the railroads, then corporations, and now -- with debt, again. |
The New Jersey legislature ratified the Declaration of Independence in the Indian King Tavern of Haddonfield, then moved
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| Ghazvinian book |
A journalist, John Ghazvinian, recently toured the many countries of Africa, wrote a book about it and carried his message to the Right Angle Club of Philadelphia. Philadelphia does not think of itself as particularly involved in oil matters, or African ones. But the fact is the refineries on the Schuylkill down by the airport generate two thirds of the gasoline
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| Betsy Ross |
Maria Thompson, the noted historian of Philadelphia's Independence Square area and matters related, recently reported to the annual meeting of the Free Quakers that there was apparently an unrecognized feature to the later years of Betsy Ross. Betsy was one of the two surviving members of the Free Quaker Meeting at the time it was inactivated in the Nineteenth Cen
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| SHAD |
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| BAY OF FUNDY |
S ome day, we're going to clean up our rivers, and then maybe the shad will come back. Since every female shad produces a couple hundred thousand eggs a season, when the shad come back, there could be a lot of them. We now know some things George Washington didn't know about http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1010.htm
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| James A. Michener |
James Michener seemed headed for a recognizably Quaker life until show business rearranged his moorings. He was raised as a foundling by Mabel Michener of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, under circumstances that were very plain and poor. Many of his biographers have referred to his boyhood poverty as a defining influence, but they seem to have very little familiarity with Quakers. When the time came, this obviously very bright lad was offered a full scholarship to Swarthmore College, graduated summa cum laude, went on to teach at the George School and Hill Schools after fellowships at the Br
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| Lindberg |
In 1935, Bruno Hauptmann was executed for kidnapping the baby of America's "Lone Eagle". Swarms of competing police and reporters made chaos of the scene, and Lindbergh made it all worse by dealing directly with the crime underworld. Even today, some question the guilt of Hauptmann, and even whether the baby is really dead.
We are indebted to George Hawke, who went to prep school near the scene of the crime, for becoming an expert, perhaps the preeminent expert, on the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping Trial. Charles Lindbergh, the
The Nov. 23, 2004 Wall Street Journal writes that "Elite High Schools Drop AP (Advanced Placement) Courses," thus taking me back to 1943, when I guess I started the idea now being dropped.
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| Allen Heely |
The then Head Master of The Lawrenceville School, Allan V. Heely, came around to Yale to visit recent graduates in their college freshman year. For secondary school principals that would, in itself, be quite a novelty today. We certainly considered it a novelty to have him actually buy us a beer, since six months e
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| Pennsylvania Hospital |
There is a painting of the region around 8th and Spruce Streets in the 1750s, depicting a pasture, with cows, and three or four buildings between 8th and 13th Streets. When the Pennsylvania Hospital moved there in 1755 from its temporary location in a house located a block from Independence Hall, there w
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| The Ritz Carlton |
New Orleans is famous for its cooking, and its residents claim it is impossible to get a bad meal in NOLA. New York is famous for its restaurants, where you can get things to eat that are available nowhere else, even though there is lots of bad cooking in that city. Philadelphia is famous for its food, which puts a slightly different twist on the matter. The Delaware Bay provides sea food, the Garden State of New Jersey provides fresh fruit and vegetables, the Pennsylvania Dutch Farm area provides meat and produce, the Diamond State of Delaware is famou
William Penn became interested in the Colonies when he acquired New Jersey as an investor, mainly concerned with selling real estate. When he later received Pennsylvania and Delaware from the King of England ( Charles II,the Stuart King restored with the help of his Admiral father), he owned them and ruled them outright. But by then his main future intention was to found a refuge for Quakers and other religious dissenters, so he became the real estate Prioprietor, after satisfying himself about the government and other arrangements in a general way. At least half the original 13 colonies were proprietorships, but the terms of their grants had a lot of variation. Penn's intention for the proprietorship was to sell off as much of the property as possible, sort of benignly watching the process unfold in the parts he had sold. T
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| Caesar Rodney |
If you have a quarter minted in 1999, you can see a depiction of Caesar Rodney riding through the rain, mud and heat, all night, to cast his July 2 vote for independence at the 1776 Continental Congress. There are no known painted portraits of Rodney, probably because his face was badly mutilated by the cancer which ultimately killed him.
On July 1, Thomas McKean and George Read had split Delaware's votes in a tie, and McKean had urgently sent word to Rodney, the absent third vote, that he must come to Philadelphia qu
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| the Rittenhouse family (Rittinghuysen, Rittenhausen) |
The flood of German immigrants into Philadelphia after 1730 soon made Germantown, German indeed. From 1683 to 1730, however, Germantown had been settled by Dutch Quakers, and some Swiss ones. They may have spoken German dialects, but belonged to distinctive cultures which were in fact more than a little anti-German. This curiosity becomes easier to understand in the context of the mountainous Swiss, the wine-growing Rhinelanders, and the seafaring Dutch all sharing the same Rhine River. These earlier immigrants were townspeople of the artisan and business class, ra
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| Canden RiverSharks |
Just about the cutest baseball park anywhere is Campbell's Field, best seen out the windows of the PATCO highspeed train as it crosses over the Ben Franklin Bridge into New Jersey. It's a regulation-size playing field with gleaming green grass, but comparatively small seating capacity. It's a great novelty to sit in the front row and have the umpire come over to chat, or to scold one of the players for spitting chewing tobacco. As told by http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1416.htm
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| John Dickinson |
John Dickinson (1732-1808) would probably be better known if his abilities were less complex and numerous. It would have been particularly helpful if he had consistently remained on only one side of the important issues of his day. Born in a Quaker family and buried in a Quaker graveyard, he was for years a notable Episcopalian and soldier. He outwitted John Penn, the Pennsylvania Proprietor who was trying to keep Pennsylvania from sending representatives to the Continental Congress, by having the Pennsylvania representatives hold a meeting in the same sm
Captain John Smith of Virginia, sometime friend of Pocahontas, wrote a letter to Captain Henry Hudson that he understood there was a big gap in the continent to the North of the Virginia Capes, and maybe this was the Northwest Passage to China. Hudson set out to look for it.
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| Hudson |
Smith's misjudgment now seems like a credible story if you take the ferry from Lewes, Delaware to Cape May, New Jersey. You are out of sight of land for half an hou
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| The Global Interdependence Center (GIC) |
The Global Interdependence Center (GIC) holds an annual monetary conference of considerable eminence, and this year it was held on the grounds of Drexel University. A featured speaker was Henry Kaufman, who has long been the voice of Salomon Brothers, a New York investment bank. Since one of the main activities of that firm has long been bond trading, what Mr. Kaufman has to say about the current credit situation is of considerable
| Markets cannot clear without transparency. |
| Vikram Pandit |
Lots of people, perhaps far too many, borrow money. Many fewer are involved in the institutional lending of money, although still quite a few; but only a handful of those few have much familiarity with the mechanics of bank panic. Meanwhile,
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| Cecilia Beaux |
Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was certainly the most famous woman portraitist of her time. She had the misfortune of being a contemporary of Mary Cassatt, who enjoyed the reputation of the finest woman Impressionist at a time when the Art world disdained traditional painting techniques in an Impressionist stampede. So, although these two temperamental artists might never have been chums, much of their famous rivalry was probably invented for them by art world politicians.
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| General Robert E. Lee |
It's quite a long drive from Philadelphia to Gettysburg, but General Lee was attempting to disrupt supplies to the "Arsenal of the North" by capturing the railroad center at Harrisburg. Furthermore, Philadelphia reacted as if Lee's advance was aimed straight at us, creating hysterical preparations for an invasion which had to be stopped before it got here. And finally, http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1436.htm
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| Cecilia Beaux |
mother died two weeks after she was born. Cecilia rejected many offers of marriage, was never brushed by scandal, devoted her life almost entirely to pursuit of excellence as portraitist of women and children. It does not take much of an amateur psychoanalyst to surmise she was dominated by fear of pregnancy, and possibly guilt about causing her mother's death. But living in the Victorian era before Lister and http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1374.htm
Philadelphia Reflections consists of several hundred essays on the general subject of Philadelphia ... the greater Philadelphia area extending, roughly, from Delaware to Trenton, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the Allegheny mountains.
These were Wiliam Penn's Quaker colonies, an important part of the founding of America and involved in all of America's history before and since.
The organization of this site is very simple ... the middle of the main page contains a few essays that change every time you visit and periodically refreshes itself, providing an overview of the whole body of content.
On the right is a list of individual essays, called Reflections. This list is constantly growing and the essays are frequently modified. If you click the word http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1106.htm
Stephen P. Mullin recently addressed the Right Angle Club of Philadelphia about assorted economic subjects; he is certainly qualified. He was once the only Republican in Mayor Rendell's cabinet, acting first as Finance Director and then as Commerce Director. At first he doesn't appear extroverted enough to be a politician, but quickly demonstrated that he knew the first names of more of the members of the club than the president did, so maybe he does have the innate talents of a politician. Urban political machines don't usually respond cordially to graduates of Exeter and Harvard, so he probably also knows when to keep his mouth shut.
Econsult, of which he is a senior vice-president, is an economics consulting firm located near the campus of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A number of University professors are consultants to the firm, which offers statistical economic advice to the many law firms in town, to philanthropic organizations
Mary Scott was recently introduced to the Right Angle Club by Buck Scott her father and last year's program chairman. Mary is fluent in Mandarin, lives in Beijing, and has a PhD. from Princeton. Although her luncheon talk had some of the features of a very polished travel talk with slides, it was considerably deeper than that.
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| Forbidden City |
We learned the exiting news, easily confirmed by Google Earth, that the streets of both Beijing and Philadelphia are laid out in north-south, east-west squares. As we have noticed, Philadelphia was laid out wi
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| Please Touch Museum |
There have been rumors for some time that the Please Touch Museum was planning to move from 21st Street to larger quarters, but recently its Executive Director Laura Foster appeared at a luncheon at the Franklin Inn Club to announce definite plans. The Museum plans to move into Memorial Hall in West Fairmount Park in the fall of 2008.
American sports fans are incorrigibly provincial. The rest of the English-speaking world plays cricket, but Americans play baseball, which is vaguely related. You wouldn't know it in America, but world-wide, cricket is much more widely played and followed. American football is a vague relative of rugby, but here it's a little harder to say which of the two is more popular. The complicated and expensive padded uniforms of football push the game into varsity and professional team
For a long time, the Philadelphia General Hospital was the largest hospital in town, even growing briefly to seven thousand patients during the Civil War, but leveling off at about three thousand at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. It is estimated that over 150,000 Civil War casualties were treated in various Philadelphia hospitals. At the end of World War II PGH had shrunk to about 1500 beds, but it was Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 which finally did it in. By 1977 it was costing the City of Philadelphia about five million dollars a year beyond its revenues to run the place with only 300 patient
Philadelphia still has six cricket clubs, and used to have more. The game of cricket was invented in 1200 AD, and had its rules established in 1749 at the Marylebone Club. Baseball, on the other hand, was established in 1849 by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown New York, with the convention of confining the runners to a diamond infield. Modern rules and established leagues of players only came along twenty years later. Actually, no one disputes that cricket is older. The question is one of manliness. Havi
Philadelphia had ups and downs as a maritime center. Right now, it's rather down, but what's bad for commercial shipping sort of encourages recreational boating. There was once a time when almost everyone in town had some connection with the sea, and there were a hundred sailing clubs, many of them quite rowdy. Out of this environment grew the Corinthian Movement of amateur sailors, sometimes stated as requiring the owner to sail his own boat. Wanamaker, Drexel, and similar names were once associated w
The Fair Plan (sixth and Chestnut, Philadelphia) is a fire insurance company with unusual features. Some day, it is to be hoped some scholar will write a book about the highly mixed motives of the people who created it, compared with the unexpected ways it did or did not fulfill original expectations, of both its creators and its enemies. The Fair Plan only issues fire insurance on houses, when other insurance companies have turned that
In March 2006, the Supreme Court, like a sleeping alligator, suddenly clamped its jaws on the Ivy League. Unanimously and without elaborate explanation, the Court told Universities that they could not block the U.S. Armed Forces from recruiting on their campuses. A number of Ivy League Universities, in this case the Yale Law School, had turned away Army recruiters because the Professors were offended by the Army's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homose WHAT IS RSS? RSS is a collection of several things. WHAT IS A RSS FEED? A feed is a stream of information (in an agreed format), broadcast on the Internet. WHAT IS A RSS READER? A reader is a program on the user's machine, that picks out pre-selected feeds, and displays them for the user to browse. WHAT PROTOCOL IS BEST? Obviously, the feeds and the readers must speak the same language. After a period of development, there are only two main protocols, and there isn't much advantage between them. The arguments are mostly commercial, like the arguments between IE and Netscape. WHAT GOOD IS RSS? Privacy. Although developed for other purposes, the main function is to combat SPAM. The consumer can choose what he wants to get, and can exclude other things. CAN THE FEEDER PICK AND CHOOSE AMONG CONSUMERS? Yes, but this is much harder. It probably will involve some sort of encryption system. But it
"In this yearly-meeting (1758) several weighty matters were considered; and, toward the last, that in relation to dealing with persons who purchase slaves. . . . "Many faithful brethren labored with great firmness, and the love of truth, in a good degree, prevailed. Several Friends who had Negro's expressed their desire that a rule might be made to deal with such Friends as offenders who bought slaves in future. To this it was answered, that the root of this evil would never be effectually struck at until a thorough search was made
Although Quakers have long been famous for good relations with the Indians, both groups strongly prizing simplicity and keeping your word, few Indians converted to Quakerism. Indians would attend the silent meetings and listen respectfully, but in the end Christian converts were far more likely to convert to the Moravian Church. To resist defining your common beliefs creates automatically a problem for explaining what you believe. It becomes acceptable to believe a wide range of things, but it is also acceptable to believe very little. Not surprisingly, the two great religious
Right next to Haddonfield is another town calledTavistock. It contains four houses, quite large ones, and a perfectly beautiful country club. This geo-political curiosity came about only partly because Haddonfield is dry, no liquor. The present location was created during national Prohibition (of alcohol), when it didn't matter what the local option said. The really devastating local ordinance was prohibition of playing golf on Sunday.It is probably correct that abolishing liquor is a good way to keep the town looking pristine, so that Haddonfield's continuing dryness had something to do with maintaining real estate v
Philadelphians don't dislike New York; to them it's like an occasional visit to Disneyland. One day, a Main Line lady dressed her seven-year old daughter in a little hat, shiny Mary-Jane shoes, and white gloves and the two went off to Gotham. The little girl kept her nose glued to the window of the taxicab. They passed a midtown street corner of Fifth Avenue, where a cluster of young women, all painted up and overdressed, were waving at passing cars with one hand while brandishing a cigarette with the other. The little girl said, "Mommy, what are those ladies doing?" To which her mother replied, "Why, dear, they are waiting for their husbands to come tak
Charitable institutions and other non-profit organizations occasionally assemble an endowment, and thus develop a need for an oversight committee to hire (and occasionally fire) an investment manager, to monitor the fund's management, and to assess the manager's fees. The meetings of the oversight committee could therefore be pretty brief, related to two numbers. How had the endowment portfolio performed, compared with some acknowledged benchmark. To these two numbers might be added a brief summary of the investment management fees, compared with th
In 1662, King Charles II of England signed a charter, giving a strip of land in America to the inhabitants of Connecticut, that land stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. And then, eighteen years later, the same king signed a second charter, giving much the same land to William Penn. As lawyers say, these are the facts. In the many lawsuits, arguments and wars which followed, no one ever seriously raised the point that King Charles was unaware that he was giving the same land twice, so it must be assumed he knew exactly what he was doing, and did it on purpose. In fact, he did this sor
The early settlers of Germantown were Dutch or German-speaking Quakers. They were proudly of the craftsman class but, unfortunately, that made them rather poor subsistence farmers. With a whole continent stretching beyond them, professional farmers would not likely choose to settle on a stony hilltop, two hours away from Philadelphia. Germantown's future lay in religious congregation, in paper making, textile manufacture, publishing, printing and newspapers. Plenty of stones were lying around, so stone houses soon replaced the early wooden
Scientist and statesman, of course. We nod to http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1364.htm
I, Joseph Nicholson of the Township of Woolwich and County of Gloucester, do hereby set free from bondage my Negro Tenor, aged about twenty-two years, and do, for myself, my Executors and Administrators, release unto the said Tenor, all my Right, and all claim whatsoever as to her person or to any Estate that may acquire, hereby declaring the said Tenor, absolutely free, without any interruption from me, or any person claiming under me.
A mile or two south of Pottstown, the Schuylkill River encounters a rocky ridge several hundred feet high, and makes a bend around it. The first Treasurer of the United States, Michael Hillegas, built a colonial mansion on the point of the bend, and it has been lovingly restored and preserved by a noted Philadelphia surgeon and his wife. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury under the Constitution, has his picture on a ten-dollar bill. So it is appropriate that Hillegas, the first Treasurer under the Articles of Confederation, had his picture on many versions of a ten-dollar gold note, back in the days
Fort Mifflin has been restored, somewhat, and gets a surprising number of visitors at Hallowe'en. The explanation offered is that it seems somewhat spooky. A far greater number of people go to Philadelphia International Airport, or the several sports stadia constructed nearby in a project whose financing is described as "borrowing to expand the tax base". In so doing, visitors travel at some height above the edge of the now-closed Philadelphia Naval Base, with a large number of very large naval vessels in storage, the so-called http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1061.htm
T he Philadelphia chapter of the PAL is now almost sixty years old; that means its origins are to be found in the great industrial migrations and urban dislocations of World War II. Philadelphia has experienced many upsurges of crime in its long history, and almost without exception crime centers in new immigrant groups. Commentators on prison conditions over the centuries have always remarked on the over-representation of whatever is the most recent immigrant group among the inmates. Crimes related
The Settlement Music School has six branches, fifteen thousand current students, and three hundred thousand alumni. It tells you something about Philadelphia that an organization this large can exist for 98 years, and yet remain almost invisible. So, let's tell a few things about it. The settlement movement began in England around 1880, and was brought to America by a Quaker lady named Jane Addams. Her most famous settlement was called Hull House, in Chicago. But she seconde Let's make this as succinct as we can: The Trader's Option is this: what risks will the trader likely take with his employer's money, when he is placed in the position of getting half of any winnings, but when he fails, he only gets fired. Almost any newspaper reports the millions and millions commonly available to lucky traders. There are indeed some timid souls who refuse to take risks of this sort, but on Wall Street no one wants to hire them. Wall Street wants buccaneers, unafraid of risks. Make your pile as big as you can, take your lumps when you stumble, goodbye. Most of the time, someone else will hire you after six or ten months. No one will ask whether your failures were due to lack of skill or lack of luck. Napoleon once summed it up. He didn't hate unlucky generals, he just fired them. The odds for the trader are not bad: The Trader's Option compensates richly for the turmoil of a sudden short period of unemployment, which tough minded tr
Starting at the Delaware River and walking East-West on Spruce Street, it is possible to envision an architectural museum which begins in 1702 and ends at the Schuylkill River about two hundred years later. As Spruce Street crosses Broad (14th Street), it reaches the level of Victorian architecture, and for this discussion we now face North on Broad Street and visit the string of solid masonry fortresses which exemplify Philadelphia at the height of the Industrial Revolution. At Broad and Locust Streets stands the old lady, the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Now reverted to its original purpose of presentin
The Curtis Publishing Company once covered a full city block of Philadelphia, from Sixth to Seventh Streets, Walnut to Chestnut. The northern half of this complex was the Public Ledger Building, once housing a failed diversification move into newspaper publishing and later rented out as commercial office space after the newspaper died. On the top floor of the Ledger Building was the Down Town Club, quite a palatial meeting place for the whole publishing industry whi Although there is little public gloating from the green environmentalists, the price of oil has finally and decisively soared, with Americans actually taking public transportation to work. Although it would seem that more conservation would result from paying attention to household heating than to automobile mileage, it is summer and vacation driving is more on the public mind than buying sweaters for a lower thermostat setting. The rise of oil prices by 40% in a year has started conspiracy theories, and drags the Iraq war into the presidential election chatter. It's quite true oil consumption could not have risen 40% in the developing world of China and India, and nothing drastic has happened to world oil reserves or extraction. A glance at the accompanying charts shows that oil prices have risen much like commodities in general; it
The ingredients of a pizza pie are so simple it comes as a shock to learn the Italian community of Trenton, New Jersey, is fanatic about putting the cheese on the dough first, and then tomatoes on top. That's the way an authentic Trenton pizza is supposed to be made, rather than the conventional method of tomatoes first, cheese on top. To emphasize the point, these pizzas are determinedly referred to as tomato pies. And to tell the truth, there is a minor difference in the taste of the
Since 1851, jewelers have clustered on Samson Street mostly between 7th and 8th Streets, and for a block or two in all directions. About 150 jewelry and jewelry-related businesses are located in this district, and their outward appearance suggests progressively improving prosperity for them. Perhaps some of this reflects the fear of impending inflation (national budget deficits and all that), or a possible decline in the value of the dollar, which amounts to the same thing. During inflationary times, the value of commodities increases; gold and diamonds are the ultimate http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1071.htm These issues of controlling authority (ultimately quite parallel to the contrast between a monarchy and a republic) came to a head around 1820, when a charismatic Irish priest named William Hogan came to Philadelphia, and soon became the clear favorite of the trustees of the local church. There had previously been difficulty getting anyone to accept the contentious job of Bishop, but when Henry Conwell took the job, he soon decided that Hogan had to go. The trustees nevertheless supported Hogan, and it became necessary to appeal to Horace Binney,
a non-catholic, to negotiate a solution. (Binney's son later became |
