My birth certificate tells me that I was born at Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce Streets in Philadelphia, but my earliest childhood memory of Philadelphia remains that of John Wanamaker’s department store during a Christmas season of the 1960s. My mother, my brother, and I rode a Reading Railroad commuter train from our suburban home in Feasterville to the Reading Terminal on Market Street one gray December morning, our destination being the Christmas Village, the seasonal holiday display at Wanamaker’s. At that time, I am given to understand, the store was in an economic decline, but Wanamaker’s — along with Lit Brothers, Gimbel’s, and other Philadelphia department stores — still attracted hordes of Christmas shoppers. The Wanamaker store, though, was unique: the toy department featured a train, the Rocket Express Monorail, that chugged uneasily around its ceiling; on the main floor, also known as the Grand Court, a brightly-colored Christmas tree presided over one end of the cavernous building and, at the other, the Wanamaker Organ merrily tooted out holiday standards. Near the center of the Grand Court itself stood the Wanamaker Eagle, a huge bronze sculpture reportedly cribbed along with the Organ from the St. Louis World’s Fair at some point, which became a meeting place for shoppers and, I assume, many lost children and their parents. “Meet me at the Eagle,” the saying went. It must have made an impression, obviously, for I still remember it well.

I look warily upon Wikipedia, but it tells me that the organ “is the largest fully operational pipe organ in the world, with some 28,750 pipes.” I doubt that somehow, having seen and heard a lot of pipe organs in my time; like many things that have been called “large organs,” the size was probably exaggerated. I saw it most recently when I visited the building last month to sign papers for our purchase of a new home in Philadelphia. After years of ownership changes and slow decay, the store itself closed in 2025, and now the building is home to an array of offices and apartments, among them one of those WeWork-style shared office businesses, which is where we closed on the house. On my way up to the office, though, I had a chance to see the Grand Court, cleared now of display cases and shoppers. But the Eagle and the Organ were still there, and I understand that organ concerts take place occasionally through the year. On that afternoon, though, nobody else was to be seen.

Another Philadelphia institution I’ve been revisiting lately is Philadelphia magazine, which I originally read in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the publication was under the editorship of Maury Z. Levy. Like those of other magazines of the time, the editorial vision there leaned toward snark, but Philadelphia did its share of investigative reporting too and over the years it’s won several National Magazine Awards. Originally owned by the Lipson family and Metrocorp, it was purchased recently by some non-profit do-gooder tax dodge called the Citizen Media Group, and just this month the magazine launched its new redesign under CEO/Chairman Larry Platt and editor Christine Speer Lejeune. “We are a love letter to Philadelphia,” runs an “About Us” column on the masthead page, and Lejeune goes further in her opening editorial about this “love”:

It’s love when we’re talking to chefs about what they’re serving up; love when we’re profiling Philly characters. It’s love when we’re holding power to account and when we’re celebrating Best of Philly (rest assured, that’s not going anywhere). It’s love when we shoot a portrait or snag an exclusive; it’s even love when we land the occasional jab. (Philly can take it.) …

Only in Philly.
Nothing but love.

Emphasis in the original.

Philadelphia magazine remains extraordinarily well-written, as I mentioned in 2024, and I read each issue cover to cover. Tom McGrath’s long-form essay about Philadelphia in the June issue is the best thing I’ve read about the city in years. (I wish Lejeune had taken more of a red pen to Platt’s 5,000-word deification of former Sixers owner Pat Croce.) But there’s something … well, un-Philadelphian about this emphasis on love, “City of Brotherly Love” beside the point. This kind of 21st-century Babbitry skids hard against Philadelphians’ natural tendency to deadpan skepticism, even cynicism, as much a part of a native Philadelphian’s genetic makeup as the accent. One of the differences between the city and New York is Philadelphia’s rejection of any expression of boasting and self-importance, a rejection once reflected in that “Best of Philly” feature that Lejeune promises she’ll keep. Under Levy, the feature was known as the “Best and Worst of Philly,” providing not only an opportunity for the magazine’s writers to flex their snark muscles but also an admission that you have to take the bad along with the good, that some seemingly popular people and things deserve not only jabs but comic eviscerations. If Philadelphians love their city, it’s a form of tough, not unconditional, love. It’s W.C. Fields, not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Maudlin nostalgia notwithstanding, you can go home again, but you can’t expect it to be the same as you left it. Lit Brothers and Gimbel’s, too, closed years ago, to be replaced by a succession of chain-store-ridden shopping malls of various kinds which seem to be ekeing out a precarious existence along the Market Street mercantile corridor. Of course I am different as well, having left Philadelphia for New York more than thirty years ago; I’m also somewhat the worse for wear. Which raises the question: What remains of Philadelphia and the genius loci that led to documents like the Declaration of Independence and buildings like the French Second Empire style City Hall as well as the rest of its extraordinary architecture? And what remains of a repatriated Philadelphian?

Time will tell, of course. But on several visits back to the city over the past few years, I have sensed some Philadelphian characteristics that make for a vivid contrast to New York. Along with that lack of self-importance, there is a self-conscious spirit of “We’re all in this together” in Philadelphia that eases the anxiety of a multicultural community, a sense that we’re all somewhat better off if we make room for each other on good and bad days. In a short essay in the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Richardson Dilworth, a professor at Drexel University and the grandson of the Philadelphia mayor of the same name, put his finger on the unique features of Philadelphia’s sense of tolerance and, if not respect, then indifference; in that essay he was discussing the “Place that Loves You Back” city slogan that Philadelphia offered as a riposte to New York’s “I Love New York” in 1997:

Since the city’s antisocial reputation also defined some of the city’s perceived virtues of tolerance and acceptance, it seems worth asking what shared sense of community we gave up in selling ourselves more successfully to tourists. “The Place that Loves You Back” suggests that we offered to welcome tourists into a warm and intimate community. We want you to have fun; in fact, we’re going to insist that you have fun, because we love you and we care. But in making this new offer, have we forsaken the mixed history of tolerance and indifference that allowed anyone to come here and do what he or she wanted while the rest of us didn’t care?

As Dilworth suggests, that admixture of tolerance and indifference gives rise to a kind of personal freedom that for me is the essence of Philadelphia. (Forgiveness is a virtue, too, even if it’s increasingly rare in our selfish age.) A recent history of the city notes that, for all the efforts the city government and its boosters undertake to assign specific civic functions to public spaces, Philadelphians will generally do with those spaces what they want, as they will do with their lives.

On my way to Philly’s new bus terminal earlier this week for my return trip to New York, I stopped for lunch at Pearl’s in the Reading Terminal Market to enjoy a fried shrimp basket — just downstairs from the train shed where my train from Feasterville arrived sixty years ago. With a few minutes to spare, I wandered through the busy lunch-time market, marvelling at the wildly mixed ethnicities of both the food on offer along with local stalwarts like Tommy DiNic’s and the Termini Brothers and the people who were enjoying it, who like me tolerated the crowd and overlooked the occasional bumps and rudeness that such a large crowd engenders. Some things don’t change. The food was terrific, as good as I remembered it. So was the vibe.

I loved it, sure. Did it love me back? That I don’t know, but it made room for me, which makes all the difference.