Our Philadelphia . r of things that could open the big new departmentstores into ^Market Street and make it the rival of Chestnutas a shopping centre, or that could send other stores up towhere stores had never ventured in my day: stores inWalnut Street as high as Eighteenth, a milliners inLocust Street almost under the shadow of St. Marks, astock-broker at the corner of Fifteenth and Walnut,Hughes and Miiller—I need tell no Philadelphian whoHughes and Miiller are even if they have unkindly madetwo firms of the old one—within a stones throw of Mitchells house; when I saw that I felt th
Our Philadelphia . r of things that could open the big new departmentstores into ^Market Street and make it the rival of Chestnutas a shopping centre, or that could send other stores up towhere stores had never ventured in my day: stores inWalnut Street as high as Eighteenth, a milliners inLocust Street almost under the shadow of St. Marks, astock-broker at the corner of Fifteenth and Walnut,Hughes and Miiller—I need tell no Philadelphian whoHughes and Miiller are even if they have unkindly madetwo firms of the old one—within a stones throw of Mitchells house; when I saw that I felt that sacri-lege could go no further. For sentiments sake, I might eat my plate of ice-cream at the old little marble-topped table in the oldLocust Street gloom at Sautters, or buy cake at Dextersat the old corner in Spruce Street, but Mrs. Burns with herice-cream, Jones with his fried oysters, had vanished, goneaway in the Ewigkeit as irrevocably as Hans BreitmannsBarty or the snows of yester-year. And Wyeths and. WANAMAKERS AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY 459 Hubbells masqueraded under other names, and Shinn,from whom we used to buy our medicines, was dead, and thenew firm sold cigars with their ice-cream sodas, and myPhiladelphia was stuffed with saw-dust. Not a theatre was as I had left it, new ones I hadnever heard of drawing the people who used to crowd theChestnut, which has rung down its curtain on the last actof its last play even as I write; the Arch, given over now,alas! to the Movies and the Movies threaten theend of the drama not onh^ at the Arch but at all theatresforever; well-patronized houses flourishing in North BroadStreet; the staid Academy of Music thrown into theshadow by its giddy prosperous upstart of a rival up-town. Vanished were old landmarks for which I confidentlylooked—the United States Mint from Chestnut Street;from Broad and Walnut the old yellow Dundas Housewith the garden and the magnolia for whose blossomingI had once eagerly watched with the
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectlithographyamerican
