SUNDAY, August 13
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
I woke up at 7:00 and walked around the hotel neighborhood. It described this sterile neighborhood of nothing but hotels earlier, and I must say this was far from the most enjoyable walk I've ever taken. After walking I had breakfast at the hotel. Many hotels offer continental breakfast these days, but Fairfield Inn seems to have one of the better ones. This morning I enjoyed flaky cream puffs and danish, instead of the usual half-frozen bagels.
We checked out of the hotel about 9am. There was more rain predicted for today, but it held off. The weather was overcast, but not rainy, as we wheeled our luggage down Bartram Avenue to the Eastwick station. On Sunday morning there was very little traffic (actually it seemed as if there never was much traffic there), and we made it to the station without incident. We rode to 30th Street and got off at the Amtrak station. There we checked our main bags through to Mt. Pleasant and paid a dollar to drop our carry-ons at their "left luggage" desk. (Actually I have no idea what the place was called here; I remember my mother using that British term, and I this is the only place in America I've ever seen that service offered.)
We had most of the day to kill before our train left. Since nothing much was open yet, we spent a bit of the morning just riding around on the subway. Just a couple stations west of 30th Street the trains surface on an elevated structure that runs across the west side of the city. I remember back in 1983 when my father and I joined Paul when he came out here for a convention of the National Education Association. We camped west of the Philadelphia, and there was no good route into the city. On one of the routes we took we drove under this very el. It seemed decrepit to me then, and the neighborhood it ran through certainly wasn't anything to write home about. The neighborhood hasn't changed; it's still mostly cheap rowhouses--many of which are boarded up--and even from twenty feet up I could see litter all over the streets. The el, however, has definitely improved. While the residential stations haven't been scrubbed to the point the downtown ones were, they did come across as relatively pleasant.
Just riding on this el brought back memories of that trip in '83, which was one of the most memorable trips I've ever taken--probably since it was the last time I spent any significant time with my father before he was killed. He was still getting over my mother's death the previous year, and a lot of the places we visited (like Atlantic City and the other resorts on the Jersey Shore) held bittersweet memories for him. The last time he had been to those places was on the marathon honeymoon he and my mother took right after World War II. He really loosened up, though, when we visited Thomas Edison's workshop and factory in West Orange, as well as the day we spent in midtown Manhattan (where we managed to park right on 42nd Street--legally--and then proceeded to leave the lights on in the car all day long). My dad and I were never especially close when I was a child, but we grew closer on that trip than we ever had been.
Each day on that trip we'd drop Paul off at the convention center and head off on day trips around the area. We saw Valley Forge and the place where Washington crossed the Delaware at Trenton, and we saw one of the oldest industrial sites on the continent at Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site. We visited Edgar Allen Poe's home in Philadelphia (which was closed for restoration when Margaret and I were here this summer), as well as Walt Whitman's home across the river in Camden, New Jersey. In Camden I had my first experience with people in America who didn't speak English. I remember going to a McDonalds in one of Camden's many slummy neighborhoods. All the signs were in English, but everyone behind the counter spoke only Spanish. My dad seemed impressed that I had actually learned something in my Spanish classes (and it's a good thing I did, since I started teaching that subject at Garrigan the following fall), and I was impressed at having my first real encounter with this "foreign" language right here in the U.S.A. It was a fascinating trip, and replaying it in my head was certainly more pleasant than watching the grim rowhouses pass by from the el.
The scenery got better as we reached the Philadelphia city limits. At the next-to-last stop the rowhouses gave way to utter mansions. Rather abruptly the ethnic make-up of the people below us changed, too; from ebony to lily white. Writers criticize how segregated Chicago is, but it's a veritable ethnic stew compared to Philadelphia.
69th Street (which is actually in the suburb of Upper Darby) is the end of the line for the el. We stopped here, but for some reason the doors to our car didn't open. We saw people getting out of other cars, but we just stayed put. Suddenly the train started moving again. A black woman dressed for church pressed the emergency intercom button. The driver responded, asking her what was wrong, and she said "you've got a whole car here that needs to get off". He kept going forward. We went around a big loop at the end of the line, and then came pulled up on the opposite platform. This time the doors did open, and everyone except Margaret and I got off. We just stayed there and rode back east. This time we went past downtown to Spring Garden station, which is in the middle of I-95, right next to the Delaware River. By now things would be starting to open downtown, so we just waited on the platform for the next westbound train (which was detoured to the eastbound platform due to construction), and went back downtown again.
The first thing we saw this morning was Carpenters' Hall. The Carpenters' Company is essentially a trade union, patterned after the old English guilds. Their building, which was built in 1744, is a masterpiece that was designed to show off the carpentry trade. It still functions to this day as the group's meeting headquarters. What is most historic about the place is that this was the site of the First Continental Congress. There's really not much to see here; about the most interesting things are a couple of chairs used by the delegates and a bunch of early carpentry tools. It was another of those "must see" things to check off the list, though.
As we walked west from Carpenters' Hall, we passed a group of musicians in period costume who were just finishing a concert of colonial music. They invited the kids in the crowd to join them as they sang "Yankee Doodle" for their finale.
We soon came to Washington Square. Philadelphia was one of the first planned cities, and to this day it rigidly holds to William Penn's original plan. It's really quite odd to see a place so old that has absolutely square blocks throughout; in that respect, Philly is the antithesis of Boston. Part of Penn's plan was a series of small parks that interrupted the grid at regular intervals. The land where City Hall is now located was one such park (though there's little green space left there today), and there are four others--one in each of the quadrants of the city. Washington Square has an interesting history. In its early days it was repeatedly used as a mass cemetery. The bones of hundreds of yellow fever victims, as well as those who were simply too poor to afford private burial plots, lie beneath the square. Hundreds of American patriots were also buried here in the War for Independence, and the park has a lovely Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution to commemorate their service. Except for that tomb, you'd certainly not guess Washington Square's history today. It's a lovely tree-shaded park, and we enjoyed a lovely stroll along its walkways.
We both needed to use a restroom at this point, and we made our way to a Burger King on Market Street where we had coffee in exchange for using the facilities. This restaurant is in a fairly nice part of downtown, but it seems to be frequented by a lot of homeless people. While we sipped our coffee, two down-and-out men were talking with each other at the next table. They discussed another man, who had obviously recently died. From the conversation, it was clear that his death was the result of alcoholism or drug addiction. The men were obviously saddened by the passing, yet they seemed to fail to see an omen for themselves in it. We were both struck by the men, and Margaret especially seemed to notice them. As we left, she commented that one of the man put sugar after sugar and cream after cream into his coffee. She wondered if that might not be getting all his calories for the day in a single cup of coffee.
Like most Americans, I'm perplexed and bothered by the problem of homelessness. It would make more sense to me in a place like Boston, where housing prices are through the roof; yet there we saw almost no one who seemed destitute. Here in Philadelphia, where apartments rented for no more than they do in Iowa, homelessness appears to be a real problem. I can certainly sympathize with people being down on their luck, but I can't understand choosing to be on the street. I say choosing, because here in Philadelphia--as everywhere else in America today--everyone was hiring. No, most of the jobs do not pay well, and most of them are not careers with a future. They are jobs, though, and they do pay real money. I had a lot more sympathy for the homeless in the Reagan years--when unemployment was in double digits and we were closing aid agencies right and left. Today it's much harder to have sympathy for someone who chooses not to work, when jobs go wanting everywhere. There's my Puritan roots again--the good old Protestant work ethic: there's dignity in work, and I do believe everyone who can do it should.
We left Burger King and walked northeast to the corner of 4th and Race Streets. Two historic churches stand just north of this corner--thanks to the efforts of their parishioners a couple of generations ago. One of America's first expressways (what is now I-676 and was then the Pennsylvania Turnpike came over the Ben Franklin Bridge and into historic Philadelphia in 1926). The proposed route would have plowed over both St. George's Methodist Church and St. Augustine Catholic Church. The churches fought hard, and in the end they won--just barely. Today the expressway passes within about two feet of the south side of St. George's before plunging underground just to the west. I can only imagine how noisy it must get inside the building.
St. George's is historic because it is the oldest Methodist Church in America. The church was built in 1763, and Bishop Francis Asbury preached his first sermon in America here. After independence made people question the validity of the Anglican Church (the Church of England), Methodism became the leading church in the newly independent United States, and this was in many ways the "mother church" of the faith. We really didn't see much of the church. Outside it is dwarfed by the expressway and a couple of enormous trees. We walked up the steps and on inside, but church had obviously just gotten out, and the congregation was having coffee in the fellowship hall. Still, it was interesting to see what we could of the place.
Architecturally, I really liked St. Augustine better than St. George's. This Catholic church dates to 1796 and is the founding church of what would later become Villanova University. It's a lovely old building that looks a lot like Independence Hall. We didn't go in here either, since mass was just starting. We did see a fascinating sign outside St. Augustine. They noted that each student in Catholic schools saved taxpayers some amount of money (between $5,000 and $6,000). The sign had obviously been produced by the diocese, and there was a space for the parish to fill in how much money they had saved taxpayers. Looking at the figures, it wasn't hard to deduce that exactly four students from St. Augustine attended Catholic schools. I'm not sure if this is a very small parish, whether the parishioners are quite poor, or whether there are a lot of elderly people in the church--but it certainly speaks well for places like Whittemore and St. Benedict that this big city church has so few Catholic school students.
We walked for a while through the area that locals call "Old City", past such noteworthy places as Betsy Ross' home. We stopped for lunch at a place called Old City Pizza, which occupied the bottom floor of a corner rowhouse. The pizza place was operated by a Greek family (who flew the flag of Greece in their window), but they knew their Italian food. The pizza was delicious, and we thoroughly enjoyed our lunch.
While we were eating, a foursome of actors costumed in Colonial garb walked into the place on their lunch break. One of the most amusing sights I've ever seen was a man in a tricorn using an ATM--which one of the members of this group did.
We walked back to 2nd and Market and took the subway back to 30th Street station. We still had a bit of a wait for our train, so we killed some time having coffee at a McDonalds in the station. This was certainly not your everyday McDonalds. It was designed to blend in with the station's art deco decor, complete with streamlined fixtures, hardwood chairs and booths, and art prints on the walls. McDonalds, like pretty much everything at the Philadelphia Amtrak station, was very nice.
30th Street Station has one of those enormous old departure boards with letters that flip around to spell out the destinations. We entertained ourselves watching it for a while, until a track number was assigned to our train. We then were first in line at the stairway. We waited for the passengers arriving from New York to get off the train and then went down to the tracks to board. The train eventually left the station at 3:04pm--roughly on time.
We had dismal views of run-down rowhouses as we left Philadelphia. Just as on the el, though, those eventually gave way to much nicer homes as we reached exclusive suburbs like Bryn Mawr and King of Prussia. Our first stop was at 3:30 in Paoli. This was the quickest stop yet, barely longer than it would have been on a commuter train.
Our car attendant on Amtrak's Three Rivers could only be described as "efficient". I mentioned to Margaret that she reminded me of the flight attendants on Aeromexico who were constantly in motion the entire flight. In addition to taking tickets and passing out pillows, she came down the aisle with a carpet sweeper--twice, and on several occasions she brought a trash bag around to pick up passengers' garbage. In between she filled time by cleaning the toilets, something no other Amtrak attendant ever seemed to do.
The suburbs gave way to forest, interspersed with little towns that seemed to go on forever. We were paralleling US-30, a route I remember taking decades ago when we went out to Delaware to visit my Aunt Max and Uncle Harvey. All across Pennsylvania, US-30 is three lanes wide. There are the two main driving lanes, plus a turn lane for the constant homes and businesses that line it all the way across the state. While the city centers are distinct (and many are quite handsome), you really can't tell on the fringes where one town ends and the next begins; it's just a constant string of development.
I went to the cafe car to pick get a drink. At the same time I also blew $7 for a souvenir Amtrak blanket. This was money well spent. While it wasn't that necessary for warmth (indeed it was almost too warm in our coach), its padding made a much better pillow than the freebies we were provided.
Quite suddenly we were in farm country. This was the Pennsylvania Dutch area, and Margaret (almost always more observant than I am) noticed that it had to be Amish country, because there were no electric poles. Until she said that, I really hadn't noticed that there was no power. Other than that, the area looks a lot like eastern Iowa.
We made another very quick stop at Lancaster at 4:20pm. I remember being amused to see a factory in Lancaster called "Acme". It reminded me of those old Roadrunner cartoons, where every contraption the coyote orders came from Acme.
The next point of interest--at least for me--was passing Three Mile Island. (I say "me", because Margaret was in the restroom at the time.) Those my age or older will remember America's greatest nuclear disaster back in the '70s. Three Mile Island is located in the middle of the Susquehanna River east of Harrisburg. The cooling towers really loom over the suburbs, and it was a bit incongruous to see kids playing baseball in their shadow. (It reminded me of the cityscapes of fictional Springfield that they have at the beginning of The Simpsons, with everyday life happening in the foreground and cooling towers in the background.) Apparently the part of the plant that had the meltdown is permanently closed. They still use two other reactors on the island, though--and like all nuclear plants, they store forty years of spent fuel on site in the middle of the river.
The Susquehanna is really beautiful. Three Mile Island is one of countless islands that dot it, and its tree lined shores made for a lovely ride. We eventually crossed the river--which is nearly as wide as the Mississippi--and before long we were in Harrisburg proper.
We had paralleled SEPTA commuter trains all the way from Philadelphia to Harrisburg, which the atlas tells me are 114 miles apart. We reached Harrisburg at 5pm, and I tried to imagine people making that trip (which would be much longer than two hours with all the intermediate commuter stops) on a regular basis. I suppose what really happens is that people in the intermediate towns commute to both Philadelphia and Harrisburg; hopefully there's not many workers who go all the way from one to the other.
We had a scheduled half-hour stop in Harrisburg, which appears to be a major Amtrak hub. The rail yard here was full of Amtrak equipment. It's an old station, with all platforms covered by wooden canopies.
We left the commuter trains and entered a freight right-of-way at Harrisburg. Shortly west of there it was farm country again. I had a light dinner of tossed salad and a bagel as we rode westward. Before long the sun was starting to set--at an angle that shone directly in our eyes through the window. It was still quite pretty outside (foothills of the Appalachians), but we had to close the curtains to keep from being blinded.
Finally the sun got low enough that we could look out again. We were obviously much higher, and the land was much more heavily forested. We looked out at gorgeous wildflowers right beside the tracks. Then, just as it was getting dark we came to Horseshoe Curve, a 3/4 mile-long stretch of track that makes curves for 240 degrees--or two thirds of the way around a full circle. The curve was carved out of a mountain to make the pass for the first railroad to directly link the East Coast and the Midwest. Today the curve and its surrounding area are a national historic site. Apparently this rail link was considered so important that the Nazis had plans to sabotage it during World War II. Today the route is little used. Most of the freight traffic follows the much more level route we had taken earlier on the Lake Shore Limited (which was, of course, why were so far behind schedule on that train). The mountain route really is beautiful. I just wish we had gone through it about an hour earlier, so we could have seen things better.
The next stop past Horseshoe Curve was supposed to be Johnstown, famous for two massive floods--one shortly after this railroad was completed and the other in the 1970s. The conductor announced the Johnstown stop, and we obviously slowed down as we went through an old industrial town. We never did stop there, though. I suppose they knew from the seat tags that no one wanted off there and they probably radioed ahead and found out that no one wanted to get on at Johnstown either. I must say, though, that I was a bit confused when we bypassed Johnstown and the conductor then announced the next stop was Latrobe.
I closed my eyes but never really slept as we passed Latrobe and the rest of western Pennsylvania. For most of this part of the trip it was pitch black outside the train, as we drove through the heavily forested mountains. Then suddenly it got much brighter, and we passed residential and industrial areas in Pittsburgh. I'd love to know just where the Pittsburgh station is in relation to the city. We seemed to go through an urban area forever before we finally stopped. When we did, we were obviously nowhere near downtown. Instead we seemed to be in the middle of a rail yard somewhere in the middle of nowhere. We pulled into the station around 11:15pm (about 15 minutes late), but ended up leaving roughly on time at 11:30.
The train crew switched at Pittsburgh, and the passenger mix changed almost as much as it had in New York on the Northeast Direct train. Our car had been full across Pennsylvania, but there were a number of empty seats for the rest of the journey.
MONDAY, August 14
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Cedar Rapids, Iowa
I slept across Ohio. I remember leaving Pittsburgh, and the next thing I knew it was dawn and we were in Indiana.
CONCLUDED IN PART 8
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