History Nerds blitz Philadelphia

From what I write here, you would think that work only sends me to interesting places, and that my adventures when not travelling for work are frequently nearly as interesting. It's a classic case of selection bias; if I don't think it was interesting, I don't write about it. When I am given an opportunity to explore someplace interesting... well, it ends up here. In January, I was sent to the center of old town Philadelphia. It was too much history and cool stuff to explore on my own, so Dad flew out half way through the week, and joined me!

 Thanks to my class's early start times, the passing of the Solstice, and a southerly latitude, I had a few hours of daylight each day to wander about the historical core of the city. The print house, the military museum, Independence Square and Hall, the brick row houses that were built between the colonial and Victorian eras... I can imagine myself living happily in one of those narrow brownstones, sharing a courtyard with neighbors and a wooden gate, tall windows and shutters. They are all just a little incongruous with the backgrounds of 60's or 80's or 00's constructions towering over what was once grandeur; buildings of brick and neat paint in a town still yashgummed out of the brush, hewn from virgin forest.

Find the bison! 

 One of my favorite buildings in Philadelphia is the Carpenter's Hall. To this day, it is maintained by a guild of builders and civil engineers, and remains the example of exemplary building technique it was designed to be. The dimensions are regular; a 30'x30' square, each side jutting out another 10' to create a cross-shaped hall. The Georgian architecture has neoclassical porticoes scaled up and repeated by the pediments on the four gabled roofs.

Besides the history, Dad and I have a sort of magnetic draw to bookstores... we found a delightful labryinth of stacks and sloping bookshelves, battered and almost-new pages, at the Book Trader. The corner of Market at 2nd Street is a history-steeped corner... loaded with history books. Dad came out with close to a half dozen new explainers and descriptions for the Israili-Palestinian situation!

 The next day, we packed up and left Philadelphia for the surrounding hills and forests, parking at Valley Forge. The new visitor center is going in, but the helpful, khaki-clad rangers in the portables suggested some hikes and a tour route. The site is roughly the size of the civil war battlefields I've visited (see: Sharpsburg/Antietam), and for a time was the largest city in the Colonies. 12,000+ people, on a hill, for an entire winter, just a day's travel (in the 18th century) from the metropolis of Philadelphia. I was surprised at how snug the reconstructed huts were, with stone hearths and bunk beds. Regardless of how leaky, muddy, and squashed they might have been, there would have been worse places to spend the winter of 1777, and the jump-start that it gave for spring military drilling resulted in an American army ready to face down the professional British forces.

 After a hike along Valley Creek (which gave the Forge its name), we made a final stop at the Washington Memorial Chapel. I was impressed by the  Victorian era, Gothic revival architecture. Except that it was on a smaller scale, and looked unfinished in spots, I could have blinked myself back to England.

Easter Egg- there's a Buckley hidden in several of the pictures in this post!