Discovering Philadelphia

It's the city of brotherly love, they say. And people here are surprisingly friendly as I'm out walking the sidewalks on Market Street. Sure, some don't look at you, but others give you eye contact and smile. Or maybe they, too, are visiting from the West.
I think it might be best to tell you about this in two posts, one about the city in general, and one about the historical spots I've seen so far. Remember, I'm in meetings here for most of each day, so this is not a comprehensive tour by any means. But I've managed to get out and about a bit. The buildings above are seen from the 33rd floor of the building where we've been meeting. Somehow we lucked out and got our meeting room on that top floor for the first two days. Today I start a different set of meetings, somewhere downstairs from my 19th floor hotel room.Since this town is rather old by American standards (still an infant by European standards), there is a variety of styles in architecture here, from colonial to sort-of rococco to art deco to modern steel-and-glass. I'm always drawn to the art deco (above), which has elements of Egyptian and who knows what else. I think it's the most pleasing to the eye.Then there's this, which is St. John's Catholic church just a block from our hotel. Wow. The outside looks like a castle in Scotland or something; I'm not sure what style you'd call it (and thus ends my pretense at knowing architecture).The first evening we were here, one of the other administrators at our meetings suggested we pop over to Macy's department store, where he said there was an organ concert every evening. Huh? An organ concert at a department store?

Turns out it's one of the largest organs anywhere, originally built for the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1908 and transported a few years later to the Wanamaker building (i.e. Macy's) here in Philadelphia. What you see above is just about 1/5 of the organ, which just goes up and up and even has pipes in the roof. The pipes total 28,500. You can read the history of the organ here, if you're interested.
The current organist is Peter Richard Conte. Can you imagine playing a mini-concert at a console like this one every day? I wonder when he practices. We toured it, and even though I was an organ minor in college and am used to lots of keys and stops and pedals, this setup made me dizzy just to look at it. The organ has what I think of as an American "wah-wah" sound, more appropriate to the music of Franck and Elgar. I prefer the brighter, sharper sound of the French Casavant we have in our university church.
As we stood in the courtyard below the organ, listening to the music, I surveyed surroundings: marble arches, pink lighting against the white stone, grand spaces, spaces soaring high up...and Christmas Shreks around the newly decorated trees over the cosmetics counters. Piles of Christmas Shreks? Rather freaky, don't you think?On the way back to our hotel, I peered into the window of the transportation museum and saw this sign. It cracked me up because I spend so much of my days in committees, and I find that some people are skeptical of how much we get done in those venues (I tell people sassily, "We get a lot done--when I'm chairing"). In case you can't see it, this sign is over a trolley car, and the title reads, "A Success Designed and Built by Committee." See?! It's possible.
One of the cool things in Philadelphia is all the murals on the walls of buildings. They vary widely in style and they go from rich color, to pastels, to black-and-white. I could never show you all of them, but here are two. This second one is on the YMCA building. I'd suppose that each of the murals has something to do with the contents of the building, but I'm not sure how this one connects to the Y.Here's a photo of dessert at the Burmese restaurant on Friday evening. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, better than sticky rice and mangos in coconut milk sauce for dessert. I'm really enjoying all the ethnic food restaurants available this weekend. Time to catch up before heading back to the impoverished restaurant life in my own town.And finally, I could not figure out what this meant. It was a little sign embedded in the sidewalk on a corner across from City Hall. In a city of monuments and historic spots, why would you point out that a space isn't dedicated? Why would you take the trouble to make the sign, and pour a new piece of sidewalk around it? Beats me. But I think there's an object lesson in there somewhere.