Forks in Our Road: Philly Part 1: Center City, Rittenhouse Square, City Hall

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Philly Part 1: Center City, Rittenhouse Square, City Hall

My oldest daughter Lillie has just graduated from medical school and is now a full-fledged although very green doctor and is on her way to residency in North Carolina. The event of her graduation from Jefferson University in Philadelphia should have been something that Ann and I both attended, but at the time we had to book tickets, our dog Grace needed constant attention and Ann would stay behind to care for her.

Just about every single post on this blog since its inception (in its 11th year now) has been about what Ann and I have done together, probably for the very simple reason that we do everything together. This is the first post that I can remember about something that only one of us has done and it's mainly for Ann's benefit.

Window Box, Rittenhouse Square Neighborhood

We could not foresee that we would end up putting Grace down soon after I bought my tickets, but by then, gas prices had already spiked (thanks to Russia invading Ukraine) and airlines had jacked ticket prices to exorbitant amounts. We just could not justify the cost of tickets for Ann and so I went to Philly alone to play the proud father at the long-awaited graduation ceremony.

Lillie has been in Philadelphia, a town I have not visited since I was a young man, for the past four years, doctoring right through COVID, an incredible strain on her and her classmates. My youngest daughter Ellie has also been admitted to the same medical school in Philly. Her place in school was delayed by a year because of COVID, so she has been living with her sister and working for a medical practice during the interim year awaiting school to start this summer.

As much as I enjoyed visiting the girls on their home turf and seeing some of their now adult lives, it was so hard to be away from Ann, my right hand and alter ego. I don't ever want to travel without her again.

Travel to Philadelphia

All my travel of late, and not very much travel at all in the days of COVID, has been out of PDX. Because we left the sway of Portland in February and moved 3.5 hours away to Bend in Central Oregon, this would be my first experience with our local airport, RDM, in neighboring Redmond.

Not having any experience with this airport, I asked Ann to drop me off at 7am for my 8:05am flight. We loved the 20-minute drive to the airport from our house as compared to the minimum 90-minute drive we used to make to PDX. Once I arrived, however, I could see that I needn't have rushed, being only one of two people in the TSA line. Note to self: arriving 15-20 minutes before boarding will be overkill in the future.

I could have made it through the security checkpoint in under a minute, but I got a new TSA screener in training who was very interested in the camera clip on my backpack shoulder strap. She huddled with a supervisor for a minute or two while I and the other TSA agent chatted at the far end of the xray conveyor. We had a nice chat while the screener figured out that the clip was harmless. I am thankful for all they do to keep us safe and don't begrudge the slight delay.

Then it was on to post-security where I went to look up my flight on the departures monitor because my boarding pass had no gate assignment. And as I scanned the terminal, I thought that I could see the reason for that. At our tiny airport, the concept of a gate is kind of inapt. There are a couple of doorways through which passengers head out onto the tarmac to board the small number of commuter jets arrayed out back. When it is time to board, it is basically just a cattle call, like the very old days of air travel.

It was my luck to draw a flight on a CRJ-700, a small jet whose passenger cabin ceiling is probably 8 inches shorter than I am, a figurative hobbit hole. I am used to it though, ducking and generally being the tallest person wherever I am, short of on the court at a basketball game where I could blend in.

Flying out of Redmond doesn't offer a lot of options for connections and the most cost-effective flight was on American connecting through their hub in Phoenix. I was hoping to go via Denver or Salt Lake on United or Alaska, but their prices were ridiculous, even more ridiculous than American's.

I had a long 4.5-hour layover in Phoenix, so I had plenty of time to get up close and personal with Sky Harbor, which I used to visit on the regular when I was traveling for work. But it is not the same airport that I remember from 30 years ago. Terminal 4 where my gates were located is massive. I took a walk all the way around it to scout for some place to eat lunch; that walk took 45 minutes. And it was really warm inside the terminal with the outside temperature clocking in at 107F.

I discovered that the options for food there pretty much suck. I had a couple of OK hazy beers and a couple of bites of a really shitty burger at a brewpub outpost in the terminal. Had I known that there was no food on the outbound flight, I would have eaten the entire cardboard burger, but alas.... I ended up eating a couple of granola bars at my hotel in Philly.

The flight from PHX to PHL was uneventful, except that I had the misfortune to get a middle seat, thanks to never flying on American and not belonging to their frequent flyer program. Happily, as I discovered walking onto the jet, the plane was a brand new A321 with tons of headroom and ample space even in the middle seat. Bonus points for a USB charging port on the back of every seat!

I had planned to train or Uber to my hotel in Rittenhouse Square/Center City, but Lillie texted me in Phoenix that she and her friends Thomas and Noah would pick me up at the airport. Sweet! They parked just outside my terminal and as I made my way out to find them, I found the exit of that terminal blocked for construction. Of course! I walked down to the next terminal, exited outside, and walked back up to my original terminal to find Lillie waiting on the sidewalk for me.

Fifteen minutes later and approaching midnight local time, they dropped me at my hotel for which I had already received my digital room key with a note that I could skip check-in and go straight to my room, bypassing the front desk. Gotta love technology! I tailgated another guy into the elevator and saw him pick a lower floor and asked him to select my floor. I did not see that he had to swipe a keycard to select his floor and I did not see that when he selected my floor, the button did not light.

Halfway up the hotel, he got off, the elevator doors closed, and the elevator just sat there dumbly. I pressed my floor button but it would not light at which point I noticed the key scanner. I tried to use my Bluetooth digital key with no effect. Great, gotta love technology! After pressing buttons for other floors to no effect, I finally pressed the lobby button and thankfully, it lit up and the elevator descended. The clerk said, "Digital keys don't work for the elevator." Thanks for the excellent and wrong information Hilton! You guys really know how to cap off a hard day's travel!

Breakfast with a Show

The following morning, after going to bed at 2am local time, I awoke at 5am local time. Let me restate that. I was rudely awakened at 5am local time by several trash trucks collecting glass for recycling, this on top of not sleeping well because of a ton of street noise in Center City. Contrast this with the total lack of street noise at home: there is no reason to drive on our street if you do not live in one of a dozen houses.

At about 8:15, Lillie texted me to check in and I assured her that I was up since 5:00 and that I could meet her and Ellie whenever it was convenient. I promptly fell asleep and when I awoke, it was just after 9:30 and Lillie had texted me four minutes earlier that they were waiting for me in the lobby of my hotel. Whew! I could have slept a lot longer. Good thing something nagged me to look at my phone for the time! I hurriedly brushed my teeth, pulled some clothes on, and staggered to the elevator.

Unbeknownst to me, the girls had mapped out a bit of a sightseeing tour for us in the early part of the day, Ellie having to go to work at noon and Lillie having commitments from 2:30 on. From the lobby, we headed west toward the Schuylkill River, which divides Center City and West Philadelphia (home to UPenn), for coffee and breakfast. Because Lillie could only get us dinner reservations at 5:00pm, I decided to just eat breakfast and skip lunch entirely. There's no way I could eat lunch and then eat again for dinner at 5:00.

First Stop: Coffee

Coming from the coffee crazy Pacific Northwest where we take a good cup of coffee for granted, I wasn't sure about the state of coffee in Philly. My cup of coffee at the little coffee shop just off of Rittenhouse Square was excellent and just what I needed to sustain my morning on 3-4 hours of sleep.

Vamping with Coffee

Next stop after coffee was a little breakfast pastry shop just a block or two further along. We all ordered egg sandwiches and went outside to await them at the café tables on the sidewalk, where double-long SEPTA buses whizzed within 18 inches of me. While the girls ordered their sandwiches on croissants, my incessant food curiosity had me try the bread called a Philly muffin. It turned out to be a rectangular version of an English muffin. Always good in my book to know about a local foodstuff.

So, This is a Philly Muffin

Window Box at the Bakery

Progeny 1, The Graduate

A Rare Smile from Progeny 2

This section of the post is entitled "Breakfast and a Show" for good reason. Sitting on an urban sidewalk is almost always good for some kind of show, such as the Dachshund below with its own stroller. More to the point however, as we were sitting and eating our breakfast, two trash trucks rolled right up on us and the guys proceeded to haul bin after bin of fragrant refuse right by us. It must have taken them five minutes to pull all the trash out of a gated area right by us. City life!

Dachshund, Spoiled Much?

Our Breakfast Show

After breakfast and a second cup of coffee for me, this one not as good as the first from the coffee shop, we started walking. Clearly the girls had an agenda, but with my addled brain, I was just along for the walk. I had my iPhone along for the journey and shot a few hundred pictures, mainly of street scenes that interested me.

Rittenhouse Square

Rittenhouse Square, originally called Southwest Square, is one of the five original square parks laid out by William Penn's surveyor in the late 1600s. A brief list of the things that I noticed on arriving in Philly from Oregon: humidity, deciduous trees, and history. Being from the East Coast, Charlottesville, Virginia in particular and having gone to the university founded by Thomas Jefferson, I am well versed in the history of the colonial US, but that history seems so far away in Oregon, which did not become a state until just before the Civil War.

Southwest Corner of Rittenhouse Square Park

As we passed through the park on the way to coffee and breakfast, we could see vendors setting up for the farmers market, which was underway after breakfast. Compared to West Coast prices, I found the prices at this market to be inexpensive, which is my take on Philly in general. It seems to be a very affordable place to live.

Another thing that I noticed is that downtown Philly really seems to take pride in public works of art, ranging from sculptures to murals. I really enjoyed seeing all the works of art, including the hanging below on a building just on Rittenhouse Square.

Fun Piece of Public Art

This Could be Miami?

City Hall

In our tour of the town, we kept heading east toward the Delaware River and toward the massively ornate and instantly recognizable Philadelphia City Hall, centrally located at the intersection of the main east-west (Market) and north-south (Broad) streets. Its Second Empire styling would not be out of place in Paris. The building itself is located on one of the former squares (Centre) laid out by William Penn and is a massive rectangle of a building surrounding a central courtyard.