It seems a long way from the UAE to Philadelphia – that is, until I meet Beth. My doorbell rings unexpectedly one evening in Abu Dhabi. “I hear you’re going to Philadelphia,” a woman says by way of introduction. It turns out that Beth and her family, who live upstairs in my building, are from the City of Brotherly Love. Beth’s husband is Dave Rupp, the project director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi with Turner Construction Company and previously of the Gate at Shams Abu Dhabi on Reem Island. With Hill International, he also designed what sounds like half of Philadelphia, from high-rise office buildings to museums and courthouses.
I tell Beth I’m thinking about going. “Go,” she says, from the comfort of my sofa. “The city has so much to offer: architecture, the arts, innovation, education. The people are friendly and helpful, it’s manageable – and the restaurant scene is good.”
And so it is that I’m sitting in the restaurant of the gorgeous Ritz-Carlton hotel, at 10 Avenue of the Arts, a hotel housed, like many Philadelphia institutions, in a grand, Palladian-style bank building dating from 1908. I’m eating a Philly cheesesteak: a crusty roll filled with chopped, sautéed rib-eye beef and melted cheese (I top mine with fried onions, mushrooms and peppers). The snack is tasty and, like the city and its population, thoroughly solid, American, unassuming and unpretentious – and thus, to me and a growing number of appreciative visitors, genuinely cool.
So often overshadowed by New York just 130 kilometres away, Philadelphia is also the “birthplace of America”, thanks to its crucial role in the signing of the Declaration of Independence there in 1776 and the anti-slavery movement of the late 18th century. While New York was the capital of the United States for just five years, from 1785 until 1790, Philadelphia was the capital from then until 1800, when the mantle was passed to Washington.
The city’s fascinating historical role ironically came out of the founding of the province as a British colony in 1682 by William Penn, an English Quaker who espoused freedom of religion, speech and assembly. As I make my way round the brilliantly well-preserved collection of 18th-century buildings, centred by Independence Hall close to the city’s downtown area, I learn, among dozens of other intriguing facts, that Penn was born in Tower Hill, east London, and jailed in the Tower of London for his beliefs. I’m amazed to learn that the Liberty Bell, the enormous cracked bell around which a whole museum is built, was cast in 1753 at Whitechapel Foundry – very close to where I used to live in London and still in existence today.
Notwithstanding the displays of guns and other weapons used during the independence movement, the transition of this bell from a symbol of colonial law to one of liberty is just the most obvious of the many non-violent elements of the movement towards democracy. Less inspiring yet equally telling of the country’s nature is the frightening idealism with origins in the country’s founders, who believed in the “expansion of liberty to new peoples and into new aspects of life”. If only, I think, these ideas had not been pursued quite so literally.
It's not far from here to Philadelphia's "old city", a collection of neat, redbrick, cobblestoned streets that contain residential town houses, churches, meeting houses, the oldest post office in the US and its two oldest banks. We stop for lunch in Pennsylvania 6 (www.pennsylvania6philly.com), a trendy, Prohibition-style restaurant and bar specialising in seafood. In the upstairs dining room, I order East and West Coast oysters (I'm sorry to say, the West Coast ones are better) and a delicious skate wing served with clams, charred scallions and squash, and doused in garlic butter sauce (US$24 [Dh88]).
From there, it's only a few blocks west on the city's immaculate grid system to Reading Terminal Market (www.readingterminalmarket.org), a vast covered "market" containing dozens of shops and sit-down open restaurants and coffee shops (think: dairy products, bakeries, housewares, books, plants, meat, seafood, poultry, a whole section dedicated to Dutch items and the full gamut of restaurants rolled into one venue). The queue for Old City Coffee, a fantastic local roastery, goes round the corner.
There are thousands of murals all over the city – some counts put the number at 3,500 – yet they're merely a prelude to what is probably Philadelphia's greatest surprise: its fine arts. I begin at the Barnes Foundation (www.barnesfoundation.org), a $25 billion (Dh91.83bn) collection of mostly French post-Impressionist works, which leaves most visitors agog at its audacity. Dr Albert C Barnes grew up poor in a tough part of the city, but his success in pharmaceuticals generated a fortune that allowed him to become one of the first formidable investors in art in the US. On display are room upon room of works by the likes of Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, Rousseau. The display is also unconventional and cramped, with the feel of an eccentric person's home. Just when you think you've finished looking at Van Gogh's The Postman and the handful of giant Cézannes, you're eye-to-eye with that Modigliani you've only seen on postcards, unprotected by glass or guards and just centimetres away.
Next door to the Barnes Foundation on the statesmanlike, Washington-style Pennsylvania Avenue, is the Rodin Museum (www.rodinmuseum.org), home to the biggest collection of Rodin sculptures outside Paris, courtesy of Philadelphia entrepreneur and philanthropist Jules E Mastbaum. The Thinker, The Burghers of Calais, Eternal Springtime, The Gates of Hell and 145 others are here.
With my time running out, I rush to the grandest of them all, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (www.philamuseum.org), for a private guided tour (outside are the now-famous "Rocky Steps", depicted in the 1976 film with Sylvester Stallone). With only 90 minutes to spare, and some 80 rooms filled with impressive holdings of Renaissance, American, Impressionist and modern art, my guide, Magdalena Padilla, skips past the Joan Miró and Arshile Gorky works lining the corridor by the toilets. She doesn't even mention the medieval cloister and Hindu temple that have been reassembled here wholesale; she doesn't even stop for Van Gogh's Sunflowers – "Long story short," she says, "he did several of those, and we have most of them." Over a Japanese footbridge and past some exquisite medieval French interiors to the really seminal Cubist and Surrealist works, original, one-off pieces by Duchamp and Dalí – works like the 1936 Premonition of Civil War, in which a body is depicted tearing itself apart.
We stop briefly in front of Cézanne's The Large Bathers: "Again, there are a few of these," Padilla says. "The earlier and middle period ones are in storage, but this one is interesting because it's the largest and the only one he was doing when he died in 1906." Via a massive jungle wildlife scene by Rousseau, and some Degas, we stop, appropriately, at Thomas Eakins' Schuylkill River, which gives a scene of Philadelphia that's still recognisable today.
What creates a feeling of excitement, for me and probably for many others, is that for many years Philadelphia didn't have the money to redevelop like New York or Washington, so many buildings were "repurposed" rather than knocked down. Architecturally, it reminds me somewhat of Chicago, though it seems to have a greater sense of the past. As if to illustrate this point further, I have dinner at Butcher and Singer (www.butcherandsinger.com) on Walnut Street, one of 22 restaurants in Philadelphia owned by Stephen Starr, a former music producer. All the restaurants are different and offer no-nonsense food in interesting environments. In this case, we're seated in the old trading pit of a 1900s bank and brokerage house; suitably dimly lit, Fontainebleau chandeliers hang from the ceilings and the old vault is now a wine bar. The New York Strip steak ($42 [Dh154]) and mashed potatoes ($9 [Dh33]) seem the only way to go. After a walk around the smart streets of Rittenhouse Row, where hip cafes sit next to designer labels, I visit the Club Lounge of the Ritz-Carlton, on the 30th floor. It has its own art-deco-era elevator, ringing quaintly when it reaches its destination. Up there, looking down the city from a fantastical, Gotham City-style centre to its industrial, blue-collar outskirts, and considering its reputation for medical entrepreneurship and its historical and artistic pedigree – as well as its people, who are hard-working and unpretentiously creative, confident and upbeat – this city seems more complete, more three-dimensional, than New York, Washington or Chicago.
It also has tax-free shopping on clothes and shoes, a hangover from the city's Quaker days, so I head for half a day to Philadelphia Premium Outlets (www.premiumoutlets.com), and the country's second-largest shopping mall, the King of Prussia Mall, about 55km from the city centre. It's a pleasant drive, and the savings and choice on brands such as Ralph Lauren, Nike and Nine West are excellent. With giant shopping malls, food courts and generous tax breaks, in the end, the UAE doesn't seem very far away at all.
rbehan@thenational.ae
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