PHILADELPHIA -- The bedraggled teenager had just arrived in Philadelphia, a young boomtown in 1723 compared with old, established Boston, the city of his birth. He had little money, few clothes and no friends here. As he walked by a young woman standing in her father's doorway, she thought he made "a most awkward, ridiculous appearance."
The 17-year-old wandered the streets, eating a loaf of bread, until he saw a group of well-dressed people walking with purpose. He followed them into the main Quaker meetinghouse and sat down.
"Being very drowsy thro' Labor & want of Rest the preceding Night, I fell fast asleep, and continu'd so till the Meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to rouse me," he recalled several decades later in his autobiography. "This was therefore the first House I was in or slept in, in Philadelphia."
Things turned out all right for Benjamin Franklin. The young woman, Deborah Read, became his wife, and his printing business was so prosperous that he was rich enough to retire at age 42. He devoted the rest of his life to philosophy, science, civic improvements and the cause of American independence.
Things haven't turned out too badly for Philadelphia, either. True, it has suffered its share of blows. After a brief spell as the nation's capital and largest city at the end of the 18th century, it has steadily moved down the column of America's biggest cities, now ranking fifth with a population of 1.5 million.
But compared with the frayed and fusty city of the 1980s and early 1990s, today's spiffed-up Philadelphia is enjoying a renaissance of sorts, thanks, in part, to such recent additions as the National Constitution Center and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. The city whose gaze once seemed permanently fixed on the past is in the midst of installing a wireless computer network that will knit its neighborhoods together into one big hotspot. And in stark contrast to decades past, it has developed a sophisticated and diverse restaurant scene that goes far beyond the traditional standbys of seafood and cheese steaks.
Birth of a nation
As much as the city seems to be embracing the 21st century, however, Philadelphia's chief claim on the national imagination still rests on its role as the nation's nursery. This was where Americans declared their independence July 4, 1776, at the graceful Colonial statehouse on Chestnut Street. And, meeting in the same hall 11 years later, here was where the delegates of the 13 original states figured out how the young country should govern itself, producing the U.S. Constitution during a long, hot summer of contentious negotiations.
