Philadelphia is a city with a fantastic collage of peoples and cultures
from the Italian Market to the Museum of Art and Boathouse Row.
China's recent rise to prosperity is the biggest, fastest industrial revolution in human history. Otherwise, however, it is not at all unique, but typical. A developing country has low wages because its people are poor; its people are poor because they have low wages. Once it develops the means to produce quality goods, they are in demand because they are cheap, and profits flow from producing goods more cheaply than more advanced countries. The exporting and importing countries split the profits, but in time wages begin to rise in the importing country and eventually the game is over; the new economy has to compete like a developed country, with the same wage levels.
So, a developing country is just in a phase that will not last indefinitely, although the leaders and managers of that country will likely try to slow the rise of wages in order to prolong the profit from it. Go too far with that, and you'll get a revolution. In the meantime, problems of readju
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.
William Penn called his real estate management company the "Society of Free Traders". Very early, the high ground to the south of Dock Creek (now Dock Street) was called Society Hill and became residential. The commercial and shipping businesses tended to settle on the north side of Dock Creek. Eventually, Spruce, Pine and Locust Streets were residential, Walnut Street had the lawyers, Chestnut Street the banks, and Market Street the stores. With the building of the Quaker meetinghouse at 4th and Arch, the Quakers tended to settle along Arch Street. As the city built westward, these patterns persisted. The more prosperous and ostentatious residents tended to live along Spruce Street, while the simpler but not necessarily poorer Quakers lived "North of Market".
When Charles Peterson the architectural historian moved his own house into the deteriorated slum of Spruce Street
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
Philadelphia is a city with a fantastic collage of peoples and cultures
from the Italian Market to the Museum of Art and Boathouse Row.
Quakers, or the Society of Friends, originated as a dissenting religion during the Sixteenth Century. George Fox founded the religion in the region near Manchester, England. Interestingly, the Industrial Revolution began in the same place, at about the same time or only slighly later. Quakerism borrowed some features of German Mennonites, particularly pacifism and simplicity of speech and dress. Quietism, with totally silent meetings as a religious experience, may have been centuries older in monastaries, but it is fair to surmise that it came to the Quakers from the Mennonites. It is still common to hear Mennonites referred to as German Quakers. Fox was an evangelist among the poorly educated classes of society, many of them made newly-aware of their own ideas by translations of the Bible. A handful of well-educated and well-born converts to the religion, led by William Penn, wrote down, softened, and intellectually strengthened the ideas of the quietist movement into
The new Constitution Center is an imposing anchor to the north end of Independence Mall, almost as large as an airplane hanger. Unlike the other main components of the Mall, it is neither an antiquity itself nor mainly devoted to displaying relics, and it lacks the National Park Service image of relentless custodianship. Rather, it seems to strive for public diversity and involvement, and probably would not mind an occasional wiff of controversy. Somewhere there lurks a trace of that ancient controversy between Jefferson and John Adams, the controversy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, ultimately reflecting the distinction between spontaneous town-meeting democracy and reflective republican governance.
Some even worried that the Supreme Court might be uneasy about a center telling the world what the Constitution is, because the Justices s
Although Carl von Clausewitz wrote his book On War in 1832, the British in 1776 anticipated his doctrine of winning a war by invading the enemy's heartland and capturing his capital. Using that reasoning, Admiral Howe and his brother General Howe circled and centered on capturing Philadelphia, always hoping that loyal British subjects among the Americans would regain power from the rebels. George Washington, on the other hand, seemingly anticipated all future guerilla warfare. You win by not losing, so the enemy eventually loses by not winning.
Philadelphia at that time was a village of 30,000 inhabitants, surrounded by at least a hundred miles of wilderness in all directions. With vastly superior naval power, the British first unsuccessfully tried to attack Philadelphia from New York harbor down the narrow waist of New Jersey. Then they tried and abandoned getting their ships up the shallow Delaware River, filled with underwater obstructions. Finally, the
It would take William Shakespeare to do justice to the nobility, shrewdness, heroism and tragedy of Pennsylvania's founder. Somehow, William Penn was better appreciated during the 19th Century, as the statue atop Philadelphia's City Hall attests. For example, it almost defies imagination to understand how this intellectual religious dissenter could persuade the devious and licentious King Charles II to give him land which exceeded the size of England; remember, Charles had fourteen illegitimate children and no legitimate ones, often bringing multiple mistresses to social occasions. Willing to go to jail rather than surrender pacifist beliefs, Penn had been famous as a swordsman. He persuaded followers from several nations to take the dangerous ocean passage to settle in America, and persuaded speculators with strong gambling instincts to invest in property there. He wrote thousands of pages of insight into theology and significantly revised the loose Q
The weather on the eastern slopes of the Zagros rarely had been hotter and drier this early in the summer. All but a few of the normally full runoff streams were now dry or slowed to a trickle. Sparse vegetation at this elevation offered little resistance to the searing mid-day sun, with reflected glare burning-out even the shadows cast by the rocky overhang bordering the rutted trail. However primitive, this twisting road through the mountain range was the shortest passage connecting the village of Deheq in the north with the trading center at Najafabad, more than a days journey southeast.
http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1217.htm
Thomas Edison gets credit for inventing the phonograph around 1880, but what he invented was a concept of scratching a roll of tin foil with a needle. The approach wasn't really feasible, and Alexander Graham Bell modified it to scratching a wax cylinder. That was somewhat better, becoming the basis for the Dictaphone single-use system which persisted for several decades. But both Bell and Edison went on to more promising things. Meanwhile, a man named Charles Cros wrote an article in 1887, quite astutely describing the whole process we now know as the phonograph record.
Meanwhile, a young machinist from Dover, Delaware was puttering around with various steps in the sound recording process, and in 1900 was ready to found the Victor Talking Machine Company at 10th and Lombard Streets in Philadelphia. But while Eldridge Reeves Johnson had big trouble patenting Charles Cros's prior discovery, he was n
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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 the bo
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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 Phila
Creative destruction seemed a violent driver for the past two centuries, injuring a lot of harmless occupations and provoking their resistance to progress. The Industrial Revolution was bad enough, arousing Engels and Marx. But the computer revolution works faster, putting the pedal to the floorboard in a lot of ways, changing almost every life in some way, only faster. We could be approaching a violent second Luddite reaction if we don't keep our heads.
The legitimate complaint about the electronics revolution is that it is going in the right direction, but exceeding a reasonable speed limit. Elegant novelties that function smoothly deceive us into expecting perfection too soon, developing a habit of depending on innovations which are still a little shaky. But the banking industry, which presently bemoans securitized mortgages, swaps and other products of the computer age, could not possibly have coped with the vast expansion of bank transactions without co
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| Jolly Roger |
The Delaware takes a ninety degree turn right at about the place where the Salem nuclear cooling towers are visible, and great quantities of silt have piled up in the river there, making marshes and swamps. There is a rumor that Captain Kidd tied up among these marshy islands, and much better evidence that Blackbeard the Pirate used the Delaware marshes as a hideout. Since a high-speed highway, with limited access, now rushes visitors to the slot machines of Dover and the beaches of Lewes, no one much notices that th
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| Georgetown |
Early in November, two days after each election, Georgetown Delaware puts on a festival called Returns Day. About two hundred years ago, there was a law that all ballots had to be cast in person at the courthouse in the county seat (Lewes, at that time), and it took two days to count the votes. Everyone, candidates included, would hang around at the courthouse to learn who had won. After a few elections, except in wartime when the ceremony was temporarily skipped, the popular tradition has continued even though of course the election resul
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| Henry Hudson |
When you take the ferry across the mouth of Delaware Bay from Lewes to Cape May, you are out of sight of land for half an hour. But the Army Corps of Engineers have thoroughly dredged it out. By contrast, when Henry Hudson first discovered the river while searching for a Northwest passage to the Indies, it was so full of snags and shoals that he just gave up and sailed on to what is now New York harbor. So, for centuries the river pilots were an essential part of oc
 It seems like kicks just keep getting harder to find...  |
| Paul Revere and the Raiders |
Mezzanine is a French word for a balcony, derived from Italian and Latin. It is familiar in architecture when it describes a balcony floor or elevator stop, using up spare space below the high ceilings of the ground f
| America can learn about itself from the E.U. |
To see the economic power of unifying the currencies of Europe, and the political attractiveness of its results among the people of those countries, makes it suddenly more clear why our own Civil War is so often said to be about the Union and not about sla
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The American culture does not begrudge neighbors their success; the achievements of someone else take nothing away from me. In that spirit, we rejoice in developing countries rising up out of poverty, satisfied their good luck will make for a safer more prosperous world.
Rising international prosperity does, however, change matters in several disruptive ways. Developing countries first become producers. subject to the risks of inflation because then they have more money than they know how to spend. The wiser ones know inflation and huge internal income disparities often lead to revolutions, so they sterilize their money by exporting it. The history of coups and dictatorships shows what happens if a developing country doesn't export its inflation. Conversely, our recent dot-com and sunbelt real estate bubbles show what happens if inflation gets exported to us. Eventually, of course, developing countries both produce and consume. Never mind denouncing the rubb
William Leonard, a distinguished lawyer retired from the distinguished firm of Schnader, Harrison Segal and Lewis addressed the Right Angle Club recently about his adventures running the new and improved Mann Center in Fairmount Park. A member of the board, he was suddenly asked to act as interim CEO when Peter Lane went on to another career. His task was to hold the organization together, while a permanent replacement was recruited. It turned out that directing an organization and actually running it are two entirely different things. It was necessary to learn about show business programming, the problems of rock groups, the whims of donors, the headaches associated with food vendors, and lease renewals with city governments, not to mention the rigidities of state and federal rules. Leonard obviously enjoyed the challenge, although most of us wouldn't.
The Philadelphia Orchestra had been playing summer concerts in the park since 1930, eventually adopting th
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| Chinese Symbols |
The main square in Beijing (once called Peking) is pretty big, but the surrounding Chinese buildings are also big, so the size of the square no longer strikes American visitors as terribly unusual. Tiananmen Square has hosted periodic riots and demonstrations for a long time, with four or five notable ones taking place in recent memory during the past hundred years, many more, of course, in the last thousand years, after each of which it settles down to its usual resemblance to a deserted parking lot in a large shopping center. The most recent riot took place on June 4, 1989. Something like a million students from forty universities demonstrated, provoked
The Galapagos islands are on the equator, so the sun comes up at 6 AM and sets at 6PM, every day of the year. There are storms and changes in the currents, but this place comes as close as anywhere to being a constant-weather environment, useful for observing more complex places by comparison. That's part of the scientific method -- limit the variability under study. Jack Nixon just took an extended vacation there, and told the Right Angle Club about it, with slides.
Charles Darwin, the guides relate, didn't spend much time there, and investigated very little, possibly because he suffered from incapacitating migraine all his life. He took home a collection of 13 dead finches, which after study were from different species with subtle differences, and led Darwin to develop his theory and write his book about the origin of species. Although some people will never forgive him for upsetting the conventional view of things, it may help to know that he was a discip
Three Basic concepts at work:
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| Junk Yard |
Let's look at the economics of a junkyard in a business-school way. Derelict auto bodies worth $80 a ton at current prices can be profitably converted into $235 worth of scrap metal, provided the cost of doing so can be kept below $155 a ton. The Camden Iron and Metal company is able to do so for $115 in expenses, and so reaps a profit of $40 a ton . That's not to mention the relief the owner of a useless car feels when the derelict hulk is taken off his hands, or the relief the City feels in ridding itself of thousands of vehicles abandoned in various alleys and public places. Or the worth to the steel mills of being able to produce new metal at a reduced price compared with starting with iron ore and limestone. Or the benefit to our balance of trade from being a
Low-end furniture for America is now mostly made in China. So, truly American cabinet making tends to be high-end, and priced accordingly. That tendency goes to some sort of extreme around Unionville, where a 25-year old company named Kinloch Woodworking holds pride of place. The owner, D. Douglas Mooberry, picked the name Kinloch at random from a map of Scotland, but his selection of southern Chester County was probably not an accident. The influence of nearby Winterthur has infused that whole region with an interest in fine furniture craftsmanship, and museums like the Chester County Museum and others throughout the nearby Pennsylvania Dutch country provide an ample source of authentic pieces to serve as examples. There's one other factor at work. As Doug Mooberry quickly noticed, people with mone
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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.
When William Penn invited all religions to enjoy the freedom of Pennsylvania, he created a home for the first churches in America of many existing religions, and furthermore the founding mother churches for many new religions. Regardless of the local congregation, there is obviously an effort to preserve the oldest churches of the Presbyterian, http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1269.htm Snapper soup, the old Philadelphia stand-by, probably got its name from snapping turtles. But for a century or two the ingredient turtles came from the Caribbean or even further south. The huge tortoises of the Galapagos were once picked up by whalers, stored alive in the hold of the ship, to be used as needed by the sailors. Only the paws were edible. In time, the usual imported turtle had a diameter of two feet and was picked up on South American voyages. By the end of the nineteenth century, the steamship trade was dominated by Moore-McCormack, United Fruit, and the Grace lines, who all sailed much the same kind of steamship, carrying a few passengers and a lot of cargo. Generally speaking, the cargoes going out of American East Coast ports consisted of machinery, while the cargoes coming back were bananas. If a ship carried more than twenty-five passengers it was required to have a physician on board, so passengers were either just a handful or about a hundred
Many of the a older houses in Philadelphia still have Plaques to the front wall, usually between two windows on the second story. These are the symbols of colonial fire companies, signifying that this particular house had paid its dues to a particular company and was entitled to its services if it ever had a fire. There are two exceptions to this rule, one showing four hands gripping wrists (the fireman's "carry" technique), which was the symbol of F
At the moment, the coherence of the motives of Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and the retired military officers who now unite in denouncing him can only be dimly imagined. At best, we can expect future revelations to tell us how close we came to the truth. But let's take a stab at it.
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