The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
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Philadelphia Revelations
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George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
For those who just came in, let's explain a normal yield curve, and then an inverted one. In plain English, average interest on short-term bonds is normally smaller than average interest on long-term bonds, so a line drawn between them slopes upwardly. This reflects the reality that the risk of something going wrong is less in a short time than during a long one, so an up-trending yield curve is what emerges when everyone leaves interest rates alone. However the Federal Reserve has for a century adjusted short-term rates according to its view of whether banks should do more or less lending, whether inflation should be encouraged or discouraged, or whether the banking industry needs more or less profitability; sometimes these goals conflict, and sometimes the Fed is merely trying to maintain a stable spread when long term interest rates shift in response to market forces. In average circumstances the marketplace alone controls long term borrowing costs by supply and demand; long term rates are whatever they happen to be. However, Chairman Bernanke has introduced what he calls "Quantitative easing", which is to intervene directly in long term pricing by purchasing and selling long-term bonds. Therefore, the slope of the yield curve can reflect many motives; it's hard to deduce motive from changes in the slope of the yield curve alone. Indeed, suppose it doesn't have much to do with economic forecasting at all. Suppose it just reflects tax cuts.
After all, when federal taxes are reduced, rates can eventually approach the point where bond interest is essentially tax-exempt. Paying more interest, long-term rates are thus normally affected more than short ones by the change. However, a preponderance of U.S. Treasury bonds is now purchased by foreigners who are indifferent to our tax rates. It's clear, however, that cutting taxes will lower bond market interest rates in the general direction of tax-exempts. Although tax reduction is capable of inverting the yield curve, it may no longer do so, and the Federal Reserve may be relieved of lowering short term rates to maintain balance.
If there is anything to this idea, the yield curve might have inverted without a tax cut. That's because a majority of U. S. Government bonds are lately being purchased by Asian governments. The Chinese government doesn't pay U.S. taxes, so to them, all American bonds are tax-exempt. Federal bonds are a little safer than municipal government bonds, so they should command a little lower interest rate, and may eventually depress the yield curve still further.
By this line of reasoning, an inverted yield curve is no longer a reliable portent of trouble, because it no longer primarily reflects American owners of the bonds dumping them. It has some important consequences, however. If interest rates are lower, retired people, insurance companies and pension annuities will be financially worse off. Borrowers, however, will be better off, and within limits, the economy will be favorably stimulated. One can be uneasy about the overall effect on the real estate and insurance markets, and on the temptation to governments to borrow more than they can repay. As different segments of the population are affected differently, the main outcome might well be a political one.
There are, from this example, lots of mixed consequences to be expected from a general readjustment (?reform?) of tax rates. But it shouldn't be a mystery that tax consequences affect yields, yield curves, and politics. That effect may not even be a conundrum.
Judge Edwin O. Lewis
finally got his way, the Pennsylvania State Government acquired four
blocks of Chestnut Street stretching to the East of Independence Hall,
and the Federal Government acquired four blocks stretching to the
North. Judge Lewis was determined that a real revival of historic
Philadelphia required the clearance of a lot of lands. Those who heard
him describe it will remember the emphasis, "It must be BIG if it is to
serve its purpose."
The
open land is rapidly filling in but for a time the movers and shaker
of this town had to scratch a little to find something to put there.
That's fundamentally why the historic district has a Mint, a Federal Reserve, a Court Houses, a Jail,
and a big Federal Building to house various local offices of the
landlord, the federal government. It's where you go to visit your
congressman, or to renew your passport, or to argue with the Internal
Revenue Service. If you have certain kinds of business, there's an
office for the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service. The mission of the Secret Service is a little hard to explain with logic.
The
Secret Service is a federal police organization, charged with
protecting the President of the United States, and enforcing the laws
against counterfeiting money. In unguarded moments, the Secret Service
officers will tell you they only have one function: to guard
three-dollar bills. The President only comes to town from time to time,
but the mandate extends to the President's family, and to the extended
family of official candidates for election to that office. So, there is
usually always a certain amount of activity relating to running behind
limousines with one hand on the fender, or poking around rooftops near
the speaker's platform at Independence Hall, or talking apparently to a
blank wall, using the microphones hidden in their ear canals. The rest
of the time is taken up with counterfeiters, but even then the
excitement is only occasional, depending on business.
A few years ago, the buzz around the office was that some very good, even
exceptionally good, fake hundred dollar bills were in circulation in
our neighborhood. The official stance of The Service is that all
counterfeits are of very poor quality, easily detected and no threat to
the conduct of trade. Unfortunately, some counterfeits are of very good
quality, not easily detected, and when that happens, The Service is
made to feel a strong sense of urgency by its employers. These
particular hundred dollar fakes were of very good quality.
One
evening, a call came in. Don't ask me who I am, don't ask me why I am
calling. But I can tell you that a very large bag of hundred dollar
wallpaper has just been tossed over the side of the Burlington Bristol Bridge, near the Southside on the Jersey end. Goodbye.
Very soon indeed, boats, divers, searchlights, ropes, and hooks
discovered that it was true. A pillowcase stuffed with hundred dollar
wallpaper of the highest quality was pulled out of the river. By the
time the swag was located and spread out for inspection, it was clear
that several million dollars were represented, but they were soaked
through and through. Most of the jubilant crew were sent home at
midnight, and two officers were detailed to count the money and turn it
in by 7 AM. The strict rule about these things is that all of the money
confiscated in a "raid" was to be counted to the last penny before it
could be turned over to the day shift and the last officers could go
home to bed. After an hour or so, it was clear that counting millions
of dollars of soggy wet sticky paper was just not possible by the
deadline. So, partly exhilarated by the successful treasure hunt, and
partly exhausted by lack of sleep, the counters began to struggle with
their problem. One of them had the idea: there was an all-night
laundromat in Pennsauken. Why not put the bills in the automatic drier, so they could be more easily handled and counted? Away we go.
Burlington Bristol Bridge
At four in the morning, there aren't very many people in a public
laundromat, but there was one. A little old lady was doing her wash in
the first machine by the door. It was a long narrow place, and the two
officers took their bag of soggy paper past the old lady, and down to
the very last drying machine on the end. Stuffed the bills into the
machine, slammed the door, and turned it on. Most people don't know
what happens when you put counterfeit money in a drier, but what
happens is they swell up and sort of explode with a terribly loud
noise. The machine becomes unbalanced, and the vibration makes even
more noise. The little old lady came to the back of the laundromat to
see what was going on.
As soon as she got close, she could see hundred dollar bills
plastered against the window, and that was all she stopped to see. She
headed for the pay telephone near the front of the door. The secret
Servicemen followed quickly with waving of hands and earnest
explanations, but within minutes there were sirens and flashing lights
on the roof of the Pennsauken Police car. Out came wallets and badges,
everyone shouting at once, and then everything calmed down as the
bewildered local cop was made to understand the huge social distance
between a municipal night patrolman and Officers of the U.S. Secret
Service. Now, he quickly became a participant in the great adventure and was delegated the job of finding something to do with armloads of
(newly dried) counterfeit hundred dollar bills. He had an idea: the
local supermarket was also open all night, and they carried plastic
garbage bags for sale. Just the thing. But who was going to pay the
supermarket for the bags? Immediately, everyone was thinking the same
thing.
Fortunately for law and order, the one who first suggested the
the obvious idea of passing one the counterfeits was the little old lady.
At that, everyone came to his senses. Wouldn't do at all, quite
unthinkable. The local cop was sent off for the bags, relying on his
ability to persuade the supermarket clerk. And, yes, they did get the
money all counted by 7 A.M.
For fifteen years before Medicare, I practiced medicine in Philadelphia. At that time, the backlog of unmet medical care seemed infinite, impossible to satisfy. For one thing, we didn't have enough hospitals to fix all the hernias, gallstone, rotten teeth, festering bad leg veins, positive blood tests for syphilis, and a dozen other matters. But we set about it, doubling the number of medical students in each school's class, and doubling the number of schools. We built or renovated and re-equipped 124 hospitals in Philadelphia alone, as I remember.
Well, we were successful. It is no longer true that everybody's teeth are rotten, or that one Wasserman test in six is positive. Instead of throwing up our hands at infinity of unmet elective surgical cases, we now hear suspicions that perhaps cataracts are being "harvested", cardiac pacemakers becoming universal apparel, tummies being tucked. But professional jealousies to one side, an undeniable statistic emerges. We only have thirty hospitals.
Backlogs are like waterfalls. The level seems limitless until it suddenly disappears from sight. We spent far too much money on new hospital capital construction, and that spending spree has to account for a major portion of the cost of medical care that now doesn't seem to be producing anything worthwhile. These are the training costs of what can now be seen as temporary construction.
These thoughts came to me when a visitor to the Federal Reserve from Kazakhstan talked recently about medical care in that vast wasteland. At a time when petroleum supplies are short, Kazakhstan has discovered it has possession of the largest new oil field in the world. The social scene is like Texas in the Twenties, or perhaps the Yukon fifty years earlier. Whereas today it is questionable whether to spend the money to perform a Wasserman in America, positive tests are widely abundant in Kazakhstan. I daresay the hernias, varicose veins, bad teeth, and whatnot are just as bad there as they were in America in 1960. And they are gunning up their engines to build lots of the biggest most expensive hospitals anywhere because they can afford them.
Prediction: in 2050 nobody will be able to explain why medical costs are so high in Kazakhstan. After all, at that time there will be no positive Wasserman, no hernias, no gallstones.
On St. Patrick's Day, 2008, Bear Stearns became insolvent and was given to J P Morgan. The Federal Reserve assumed all risks. Effectively, the fifth largest investment bank in America was nationalized for $2 a share, because no private bank would buy it at any price. A year earlier it was worth $170 a share, even one trading day earlier it sold for $26.
At the heart of this catastrophe were "repo's", or repurchase agreements. (They should not be confused with repossessions of cars and other hard goods bought on time, which are also called repo's.) Although most people had never heard of the high-finance version of repo's, the volume of these instruments had grown to $5 trillion by January 2005, presumably even several times larger than that when they caused the nationalization of Bear Stearns. Newsmedia accounts offered the guess that 16% of the resources of the whole financial sector were caught in open repo's when the music stopped. Repo's must be awfully good, or awfully bad.
J.P. Morgan
They were both of these things at once. Like so many innovations in the post-computer era, they offered a major cost saving to an inefficient transaction system but were so successful they overwhelmed the institutions which flocked to their reduced cost. The unanticipated difficulties might have been imagined, but they were not adequately guarded against. Essentially, these loans limited exposure to a few days, a feature that made them appear quite safe. Unfortunately, tons of these loans could expire simultaneously if a rumor got started and everyone held off using them for a week. With a run on a bank, at least people have to take action to withdraw their money; but with these things, simple inaction quickly led to massive cash shortages at the bank. Speeding up the loan process had made it cheaper, but made it vulnerable.
Hedge Fund
Consider the inefficient complexities of a bank loan. The bank wants collateral, perhaps 80% of the value of the loan. The ability of the borrower must be investigated, a clear title assured, and papers arranged for transfer in case of defaulted collateral. Lawyers must organize the agreements, and it all takes time, costs money. To go through all this for a one-week loan for anything less than huge transactions is simply not practical. So the idea was devised to sell the collateral to the lender at a discount, together with a repurchase agreement to buy it back at full price. For safety sake, the discount could be greater than the interest cost, and part of it returned if all went well. The collateral could be held by a third party, who essentially guaranteed the details while the collateral itself never moved. Bear Stearns had perfected these variations at such favorable prices they dominated the market for them with hedge funds; the margin for error narrowed when interest rates dropped, cash got scarce when investors got uncomfortable, the whole hedge fund industry was suddenly paralyzed, and everything connected to hedge funds was frozen secondarily. Much of this was handled automatically by computers, so huge volume made it impossible for anyone to know who might be insolvent. It seemed comparatively harmless to decline to play this game for a few days, but it was not harmless if most people decided to do so at the same time. The daily variations of interest rates and/or duration generate a ("Gaussian") normal distribution curve for the risk, predicting serious deviations will occur once every two centuries. But when events --even false rumors -- suddenly get everyone's attention at once, small daily fluctuations no longer bear much relationship to the frequency of violent fluctuations. Once-in-a-century events start to happen every few years. At those times, the public stops speaking with a million voices and shouts in unison. Quite often, there is no cataclysmic event to trigger it. Like the conversational babel of a dinner party, it can all stop at once for no particular reason.
Black Swan
The mathematics of this matter could be taught to a tenth-grade math class. It starts to get beyond everybody's anticipation however when two such Black Swan events happen at the same time. In this case, an unanticipated pause for a few days bumped into the rule that non-bank institutions must mark their portfolios to the market every day. But for days at a time in this crisis, there could be no trading in certain issues; there was no market to mark to. How then can you demonstrate your solvency -- what might your competitors be hiding during these unannounced market holidays? And, since banks are in the same pickle but aren't required to mark to market, how can you trust them to pay bills? When you see European banks, who must obey new rules called Basel II, go bankrupt and get nationalized, how can you be sure American banks, who needn't obey Basel II until 2009, are any safer bet?
Progress is progress, but how much of it can we cope with?
The United States government issues lots of different currencies. We issue ones, and twos and fives and tens and twenties. If you need more one dollar bills, you can walk into any candy shop with a five and the shopkeeper will more or less cheerfully make the exchange without charge. But if you want to change the same five dollar bill for euros, yen or drachma, you need to find an agent in a kiosk and pay a fee of about 3%. The booth or shop of the international money changer will have some sort of electronic means to tell what the rate of exchange might be at any given moment. To extend this idea, if the people at the mint run short of ones, they just print some more, meanwhile removing a comparable number of surplus fives from circulation. No matter how extreme the imbalance, it does not affect the price of dollar bills. That's more or less the idea behind the common currency in Europe and a major success. All countries of Europe want to join, nobody wants to leave.
But some things are lost in this obvious simplification of financial transactions; it has enemies. For one thing, the Federal Reserve or other central bankers can change interest rates instantly, but the rest of the economy has a certain amount of inertia. For example, banks typically deal in 90 day Treasury bills, so it takes them a month or two to catch up with the Federal Reserve as the old bills mature; in the meantime, they lose money. Almost all businesses have even longer legs than that. So during the lag periods, the national economy experiences inflation or deflation, which may represent the national interest at the moment, but in time things catch up and rebalance about the way they were before the central bank acted. Except for taxes, that is, and this specific attrition is one of the main arguments for eliminating the capital gains tax, or extending special allowances for banks and others who have short-term gains on price changes without effect on underlying values. The matter gets mixed up in domestic politics. Incumbents long for short-term inflation, nonincumbent challengers denounce it. Everybody welcomes a "strong" currency, everyone recognizes that a weak currency sounds pretty bad. Few, however, could defend their opinion. The people who benefit are the ones who can move fast, because there's usually a brief flurry of inflation or deflation, and then things go backward. People who can move huge amounts of money quickly are apt to make big mistakes in their hurry.
And so it is in the eyes of foreigners. Right now, the American tourist to Paris confronts a taxi charge of $120 for a twenty-minute ride from the airport to the downtown. Everything else, from thirty dollars continental breakfast to two hundred dollar dinners, seems comparably overpriced. Tourists with sticker shock return home to tell their friends all about it, just before the November elections. No doubt it has an opposite effect on Parisian shopkeepers and their acquaintances. But the tourist trade is comparatively minor, compared with major industries. Airbus was once giving Boeing a seriously competitive race for airliners, but now Airbus is contemplating possible bankruptcy if currencies do not soon readjust, and Boeing is laughing all the way to the bank. Stop a minute and consider what happens when you buy and sell a whole company. Now it's the reverse, and a group of European investors is considering buying Anheuser Busch, the largest American brewery. The producer of Budweiser beer seems extremely cheap to Europeans, just as the beer itself is cheap for European beer drinkers. And then just consider a personal note: the wife of Senator McCain, running for President, owns a huge chunk of Budweiser distribution. The pillow talk in that family is likely to focus on the unfairness of hostile foreign take-overs.
So, all in all, tinkering with the currency as a direct or indirect consequence of a banking crisis caused by overbuilding houses in the sunbelt, has potentially fearsome consequences. They must be added to effects on commodity prices, and revolutions in the banking system. Those two issues are next to be considered.
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
