Travels in Philadelphia/Marooned in Philadelphia
MAROONED IN PHILADELPHIA
If a Philadelphian of a hundred years ago could walk along our streets at night, undoubtedly the first thing that would startle him would be the amazing dazzle of light that floods from all the shop windows. Particularly during the few weeks directly preceding Christmas city streets at night present a panorama that would cure the worst fit of the blues. What a glowing pageant they are, blazing with radiance and color! Here and there you will find a display ornamented with Christmas trees and small red, blue and green electric bulbs. Perhaps there will be a toy electric train running merrily all night long on a figure-eight-shaped track, passing through imitation tunnels and ravines with green artificial moss cunningly glued to them; over ravishing switches and grade crossings, past imposing stations and little signal towers. Perhaps you may be lured by the shimmer of a jeweler's window, set with rows and rows of gold watches on a slanting plush or satin background. There, if you are a patient observer, you will usually find one of the ultra-magnificent timepieces that have an old-fashioned railroad train engraved on the case. We have always admired these hugely, but never felt any overwhelming desire to own one. They are sold for $14.95, being worth $150.
Sometimes even the most domestic man is marooned in town for the evening. It is always, after the first pang of homesickness is over, an enlarging experience. Instead of the usual rush for train or trolley he loiters after leaving the office, strolling leisurely along the pavements and enjoying the clear blue chill of the dusk. Perhaps the pallid radiance of a barber's shop, with its white bowls of light, lures him in for a shave, and he meditates on the impossibility of avoiding the talcum powder that barbers conceal in the folds of a towel and suddenly clap on his razed face before they let him go. It avails not to tell a barber "No powder!" They put it on automatically. We know one man who thinks that heaven will be a place where one may lie back in a barber's chair and have endless hot towels applied to a fresh-shaved face. It is an attractive thought.
But the most delightful haunt of man, about 7 o'clock of a winter evening, is the popular lunch room. This admirable institution has been hymned often and eloquently, but it can never be sufficiently praised. To sit at one of those white-topped tables looking over the evening paper (and now that the big silver-plated sugar bowls have come back again there is once more something large enough on the table to prop the newspaper against) and consume sausages and griddle cakes and hot mince pie and revel in the warm human glitter round about, is as near a modest 100 per cent of interesting satisfaction as anything we know. Joyce Kilmer, a very human poet and a very stout eater, used to believe that abundant meals were a satisfactory substitute for sleep. For our own part, we are always ready to postpone bed if there is any prospect of something to eat. But we do not like to elaborate this subject any further, for it makes us hungry to do so, and we dare not leave the typewriter just yet.
Our marooned business man, after a stroll along the streets and a meal at the lunch room, may very likely drop in at the movies. Most of us nowadays worship now and then at this shrine of Professor Muybridge. The public is long suffering, and seems fairly well pleased at almost anything that appears on the screen. But the extraordinary thing at a movie is hardly ever what is on the screen, but rather the audience itself. Observe the mute, expectant, almost reverent attention. The darkened house crowded with people prayerfully and humbly anxious to be amused or thrilled! One wonders what their evenings must have been like when there were no movies if their present reaction is so passionately devout. A movie audience is a more moving spectacle than any of the flashing shadows that beam before it. If all this marvelous attention-energy, gathered every evening in every city in the land, could be focussed for a few moments on some of the urgent matters that concern the world now—say the League of Nations—it would be a wonderful aid to good citizenship. The movies are blindly groping their way, by means of current-event films, war films and the like, toward an era in which they will play a leading and indispensable part in education and civic life.
It should be a function of every large city government to provide "municipal movies," by which we mean not free motion-picture shows, but reels of film distributed free among all the motion-picture theatres in the city, exhibiting various phases of municipal activity and illustrating by suggestion how citizens may co-operate to increase the welfare of the community. We hear a good deal about street-cleaning evils, about rapid-transit problems, about traffic congestion, about the evils of public spitting, the danger of one-way streets and a score of other matters. All these could be interestingly illuminated on the screen, with serious intent, and yet with the racy human touch that always enlivens the common affairs of men. And when some discussion arises that concerns us all, such as the character of the proposed war memorial, various types of memorials could be illustrated in films to stimulate public suggestion as to what is most fitting for our environment. None of us know our own city as well as we would like to. Let the city government, through some film bureau, show us our own citizens at work and play and so quicken our curiosity and civic pride or shame, as the case may be.
Another public clubhouse which the marooned business man finds delightful and always full of good company is the railroad terminal. A big railroad station is an unfailing source of amusement and interest. From news-stand to lunch counter, from baggage room to train gate, it is rich in character study and the humors of humanity in flux. People are rarely at their best when hurried or worried, and many of those one meets at the terminal are in those moods. But, for any rational student of human affairs, it is as well to ponder our vices as well as our virtues, and the statistician might tabulate valuable data as to the number of tempers lost on the railway station stairs daily or the number of cross words uttered where commuters stand in line to buy their monthly tickets. The influence of the weather, the time of year and the time of day would bring interesting factors to bear upon these figures.
There is just one more pastime that the castaway of our imagination finds amusing, and that is acting as door-opener for innumerable cats that sit unhappily at the front doors of little shops on cold evenings. They have been shut out by chance and sit waiting in patient sadness on the cold sill until the door may chance to open. To open the door for them and watch them run inside, with tail erect and delighted gesture, is a real pleasure. With a somewhat similar pleasure does the marooned wanderer ultimately reach his own front door and rededicate himself to the delights of home.