I recently received some very bad news that I'm still not quite ready to go public with on this blog. (I will make it its own separate post once I've fully grieved and processed.) My mother, my therapist, Sarah, my kindred, and my friend Eliza are so far the only ones who know. (I have two other friends I also want to tell before I go public, but I want to tell them in person, and haven't gotten an opportunity to do so yet.)
The point is that I just couldn't be in my day-to-day life in New York for a little bit. So it worked out great that Sarah had planned a vacation to Philadelphia, a city I had long wanted to visit. And with Philly so close to New York (only 2 hours by bus, about the same amount of time it'd take me to get from my apartment to the Bronx) it worked out surprisingly well.
And you guys. You guys.
Philadelphia is wonderful.
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| THIS STREET DOES NOT EVEN LOOK REAL DOES IT? |
Now this is going to be one of those "look at all this cool stuff I did!" travel posts. If that's not your jam, I will not be at all offended if you skip this one. (My viewcounts have been low since facebook censored me - yeah that's still not fixed - so I've made my peace with the fact that not everyone will read every post.) But if you wanna see what Sarah and I did, read on!
We stayed at the Thomas Bond House
The Thomas Bond House is not a place for those on a super tight budget. I am extremely lucky that I have someone like Sarah who was able and willing to cover my stay there, though, because this really elevated the trip from fun to fabulous - we were staying in a historic house! From 1769! This house is older than our country! And so cute inside!!!
I met Sarah there on Saturday evening a few hours after I arrived (before that I was eating dinner with a kindred friend of mine who also happened to be in Philadelphia, coincidentally. The innkeeper and her were chatting in the parlour when I arrived, and he gave us a brief history of the house. Thomas Bond was evidently an acquaintance of John Adams when Adams was in Philadelpia. (Adams reportedly wrote that Bond's oldest son had too much of a fondness for "drink and paid women". Adams was a salty bitch.)
The room we stayed in was called, naturally, the "Benjamin Franklin room".
Mütter Museum
This was the one on my bucket list. I have wanted to see the Mütter Museum since I was 13 years old and I saw it on some Travel Channel show about "the ten spookiest museums" or some 2003 shit like that. I am 28 now and finally got the chance. It was horrifying and disgusting and I loved every second of it.
For those few poor souls who haven't heard of it, the Mütter Museum is a medical history and oddities museum, with preserved human specimens dating from the early 19th century to today. Some of their more famed artefacts include a skeleton of someone who suffered with giantism, preserved foetuses that had severe deformities, the conjoined liver and death cast of conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, and a saponified corpse nicknamed "the soap lady".
Out of respect for the dead, photos weren't allowed inside, but even if they had been I wouldn't share them here. I have a pretty strong stomach when it comes to this stuff - as I have worked with human remains in the past - but I know a lot of people cannot handle it. If you can, though, this museum is well worth a visit.
The highlight of the visit for me, though, was a security guard who I struck up a conversation with while Sarah was perusing the drawers of objects people have swallowed or inhaled. (Yes, seriously!) His name was Bill and I asked him what his favourite artefact in the museum was.
His response was the death cast of Chang and Eng. And he won me over by taking me back to the case and pointing out some of their hair still in the cast, then telling me about how they were rich and lost all their money after the Civil War (they had supported the Confederacy) - at which point he looked directly at the death cast and exclaimed, "you chose the wrong side, you racists!" Like, good on you, Bill.
He then told Sarah and I some ghost stories from his time working at the museum! I hadn't thought about this before, but it isn't terribly surprising that a building filled with human remains would of course have ghost stories. He told us two:
- One of his coworkers once saw a full shadow figure walking down the stairs in the main gallery. It disappeared at the bottom.
- Once when he himself had the night shift, he heard someone say "hello" from the next room. He checked to make sure no one had broken in, but no one was there. He checked the whole building. No one was there. Nothing was out of place. No windows or doors were unlocked. He never could explain it.
Creepy, right?!
City Tavern
Founded in 1773, burnt down once or twice, and rebuilt in the 1970s, City Tavern is... honestly what I think I imagined Fraunces Tavern would be like. I'm glad both Revolutionary-era taverns are exactly as they are though. City Tavern is great fun to visit but I doubt I'd ever become a regular here if I were local.
But what is City Tavern? The simplest way I can put it is that it's a Colonial-themed restaurant. There was live harp music when we went. The rooms are decorated to look as they did in the 1770s, and you are served your food on porcelain plates with pewter cups. The staff is dressed in period clothing and the recipes are based on historic recipes. (For example, you can get sweet potato biscuits that Thomas Jefferson was reportedly quite fond of.)
Me, I had raspberry shrub based on a recipe from a cookbook owned by Martha Washington, mushroom toast (pictured above), and tofu based on a recipe Ben Franklin wrote down.
Yes, I'm serious. We tend to think of tofu as a modern thing in the west. But loveable eccentric Benjamin Franklin, among his many other accomplishments and essays about fucking old ladies and farting, once sent a friend of his some soybeans (which he called "Chinese caravances") and said "Father Navarrete's account of the universal use of a cheese made of them in China, which so excited my curiosity, that I caused enquiry to be made of Mr. Flint, who lived many years there, in what manner the cheese was made, and I send you his answer. I have since learned that some runnings of salt (I suppose runnet) is put into water, when the meal is in it, to turn it to curds. [...] These ... are what the Tau-fu is made of."
The "tau-fu" he spoke of was, of course, tofu!
Honestly, though, I actually liked the mushroom toast appetiser better.
National Constitution Centre
I have a confession to make and you all have to promise not to judge me. (Though I doubt longtime readers to this blog would be terribly surprised.)
The only reason Sarah and I went to the Constitution Centre was to check out their temporary Hamilton exhibit, which was about how Hamilton disagreed/picked fights with everyone around him. There were displays of "Hamilton vs Jefferson", "Hamilton vs John Adams", "Hamilton vs Madison", "Hamilton vs Aaron Burr", and even "Hamilton vs Himself" (primarily about the Reynolds affair and ensuing pamphlet - which to be fair was such a bad idea Ham, what on earth were you thinking?!). Alexander Hamilton was impulsive, argumentative, hot-tempered, and extremely sensitive to insults, so you can imagine how entertained we were. As a little taste of what we experienced, here is a quote from a letter Jefferson wrote to Madison complaining about him:
"For god's sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the eyes of the public!"Oh, Jefferson...
The exhibit also had Hamilton's lap desk on display. His actual lap desk, though the Grange has a replica.
This museum also had a "Hamilton trivia game" which we signed up for. We formed a team of just us two. The other team had twelve people on it. Guess who had the unfair advantage?
Actually, you better have guessed me and Sarah. Because those twelve were middle schoolers who knew little and I knew almost every single answer, even the "hard" questions like "where are the actual dueling pistols now?" (At the J.P. Morgan Chase headquarters here in NYC.) The few I didn't know were musical related - which is where Sarah knew everything! I... may have gotten a little too competitive in the moment. I'm sorry, middle schoolers, I wasn't trying to be an asshole, but also I totally beat your little asses. (We won by a very large point margin...)
Tadeusz Kościuszko National Memorial
Thank the gods Sarah was willing to humour me when I dragged her here. (It's okay, in return I let her take me to the Betsy Ross House afterwards - where we ran into the same middle school group we'd beaten in the Constitution Centre! Oops...) Actually, she hadn't heard of Kościuszko. Which, sadly, isn't surprising - when I walked in to the site, the park ranger there straight-up asked me, "by any chance, are you of Polish descent?" When I admitted I was, he told us that Polish people are mostly the only guests they get there! It was kind of funny but mostly sad. Kościuszko certainly deserves more recognition. Maybe someone should call Lin-Manuel Miranda to write him a musical, I guess. (I say that in jest, don't @ me.)
For those not in the know, Tadeusz Kościuszko was a skilled engineer with a military education by the time he arrived in the American colonies from Poland in 1776. Offering his services to the revolutionary cause, he masterminded a key British defeat at Saratoga and oversaw the building of military fortifications at West Point. At war’s end, he returned to Poland and led a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful uprising against Russia to try and free his beloved Poland from Russian partition and abolish the serf system there. Catherine the Great had him imprisoned, but after her death, her son freed Kościuszko out of respect - on the condition that he never return to Poland. So Kościuszko returned to the United States, where he was welcomed as a hero and counted Thomas Jefferson among his close friends. (An ardent abolitionist, Kościuszko tried multiple times to get Jefferson to free his slaves, even offering to leave money in his own will for Jefferson to put towards their freedom and education.) He lived at this house in Philadelphia for a couple years before going to Switzerland. With Poland still under foreign control throughout the rest of his life, Kościuszko never returned to his native land, and died in exile in Switzerland in 1817. He never got to see his homeland free. And he never succeeded in convincing Jefferson to free his slaves.
Incidentally, Polish people adore him - he's mentioned in the Polish national anthem! There's a part in one of the later verses "Na to wszystkich jedne głosy Dosyć tej niewoli! Mamy Racławickie kosy Kościuszkę Bóg pozwoli," which translates to something like "All exclaim in unison, Enough of this captivity! We've got the scythes of Ratswavitse and Kościuszko, if God wills."
His Philly home is one of the smallest sites in the National Park system, but it was really important to me to be able to visit and pay my respects to yet another revolutionary I admire so greatly. Also it was fun that everything there was bilingual in English and Polish. I've seen English/Spanish and English/Chinese bilingual signs before, but it was thrillingly validating to see English/Polish ones!
Elfreth's Alley
Like a ten year old I couldn't miss the opportunity to do the cheesy dress up photo they offered...
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| Does this count as a couples cosplay? |
Our first day wrapped up with dinner at a local Mexican food place followed by a ghost tour with the title "Ghosts, Sex, and Vampires" or something like that. My one disappointment with it was that despite touching on some really raunchy Philadelphia history, it did not once mention the Reynolds Affair, which did happen when Hamilton was living in Philadelphia, despite what the musical would have you believe.IT IS OCTOBER 26TH, 1776, AND PHILADELPHIA IS ALIVE WITH EXCITEMENT...The American Revolution has ignited the colonial town into a fervor. Crowds are pouring into the streets singing songs and firing guns, nervously awaiting the invading British from across the sea. Benjamin Franklin has just been elected as ambassador to France and he has a monumental task ahead of him - convince France to join the colonies in war and secure a 10 million dollar loan from the French government. The only tools at Mr. Franklin’s disposal are his skill with the written word and your help...Mr. Franklin has just raced away to board the final ship to France before the British naval blockade arrives. As Mr. Franklin’s invaluable assistants and fellow rebels, he has entrusted a critical task to you: search through his study and secret print studio to find the Seven American Reasons. These Seven Reasons inspired him to write the document that will convince France to give us 10 million dollars and join the fight! Quickly locate the Seven Reasons and print the document that Mr. Franklin needs for his journey. The future of the rebellion and American independence is in your hands! Do you have what it takes to complete your Quest for Freedom?
We did get to see the ruins of the presidential mansion where George Washington and John Adams lived while Philadelphia was serving as the makeshift US Capital, which I had photographed earlier in the day:
The next morning after breakfast at a local diner Sarah and I split up for the morning. She wanted to go to Eastern State Penitentiary. And me?
Museum of the American Revolution.
I. LOVED. this museum. Strap in because I have so much I want to say about it!
First off - this is something I always notice in museums due to my own background in it - but the exhibition design was phenomenal. It flowed really well and had a good mix of historical artefacts and interactive elements. They even have Washington's tent that he used for the duration of the war. I have mixed feelings about Washington but I admit to getting a little emotional when I saw it.
My one complaint was that despite there being a whole exhibit about the loss of NYC to the British for the duration of the war, not once was my bae Nathan Hale mentioned. (I mean... John Laurens wasn't mentioned by name either, but his portrait did come up in the video they play.)
However one thing I do need to praise the museum about is that it spends ample time telling the stories you don't usually hear about the revolution. Yes, you can learn loads about General Washington, about the Howes, about Cornwallis, and all those other familiar names. But there were exhibits about Native Americans during the war, about slaves and free blacks (many of whom sided with the British loyalists), about women.
I was particularly taken with the section about the Iriquois Confederacy and how they handled the war breaking out! I have never heard this story before - American history is usually very quiet when it comes to Native voices. But not this museum (who even cast actual tribe members in the video segment). I learned that at first they tried to remain neutral, but ultimately pressures from both sides tore them apart. Most of the tribes chose to back the British, under the assumption that King George would stop the colonies from expanding westward into native territory. The Oneida and the Tuscarora were the only members of the confederacy to support the Patriots.
Meanwhile closer to where I live, the Lenape were also divided on the issue. Many sought an alliance with the British, but others allied with the United States, and even asked Congress to admit the Lenape nation as the 14th state. That's not a story I've ever read before, and I'd like to learn more about it.
Also damn was the film about it in this section well done!
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| It is highly likely that Washington's aides drank out of these cups. I was way too excited about that fact. Someone help me stop being such a teenage fanboy about it. |
The museum is young. It only opened two years ago. So I look forward to how it'll grow and what it'll show us in the future. I'll definitely be back as soon as I can, especially with Philadelphia being so easy to get to from New York...
Benjamin Franklin's Grave
Having a bit more time to kill, I decided to visit Franklin's grave. I wanted to pay my respects. While he is not as important a figure in my life as Hamilton (who actually does have a place on my ancestor altar, as I did work in his house), I still like the guy and it was important to me to be able to do this.
Franklin was, like, the dirty old grandpa of the Revolution. Also a highly respected genius. These two things are simultaneously true. I sat there before his grave, liberally decorated with pennies that people leave in reference to his famous Franklinism "a penny saved is a penny earned" (though one wonders if tossing a penny away goes against that), and talked to him a little about my current situation. About what's been depressing me as of late. I wanted his advice.
I am not delusional, I didn't expect him to rise from the grave then and there and give someone as unimportant as me his advice. It was more... a weird way to get some sort of catharsis and perspective. I tried to imagine what he would say to me. What I imagined he would have said was something like...
"You are still quite young. I didn't get most of my best work done until I was near fifty. You have time, child."
In that moment, imagining that felt helpful.
The Bourse and Franklin Fountain
Having been a vegetarian for many many years now, I haven't had Filipino food for almost two decades, as it's traditionally very meat-heavy. So imagine my delight when I walked past this stall and saw they had a vegan kare-kare on the menu! My mind was already made up and I was completely delighted to taste such flavours again. I apologise to the staff of the Bourse and of Lalo for getting weirdly emotional over your delicious food.
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| Ben Franklin in a flower crown at the Franklin Fountain |
I'd made up my mind to try their teaberry flavour, as it's unique to Pennsylvania. I... did not like it. Sarah and I both tried it and I couldn't put my finger on what it was reminding me of. (The answer later ended up being those candy conversation hearts, but at the point that I figured that out, the following alternate association had already been made.) Sarah commented that she thought it tasted like Pepto Bismol and I just couldn't untaste it. I'm sorry, Pennsylvania. I really did try but after that I just couldn't do the teaberry.
I ended up getting mint chocolate chip and enjoyed that flavour very much.
The Franklin Institute
My original plan had been to go back to New York after the Museum of the American Revolution, but of course I'm super glad Sarah asked me to stay longer with her. The downside, however, was that I had no real plans for what I was going to do with my Monday afternoon, and there were so many options I was a bit too overwhelmed to choose one. It was Sarah who suggested we go to the Franklin Institute, a world-class science museum named after, like so many other things in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin.
Like any good science museum, it's divided into sections where one can learn about different branches of science like astronomy, engineering, biology, and more! Sarah and I saw a show in the planetarium, viewed the Foucault pendulum, and walked through a giant model of a human heart.
Surprisingly the museum had an extremely high number of Hasidic families visiting that day. I suspect this was because it was Pesach so they were likely off school and needed something to do. It did make it take longer to get to do a lot of the interactive elements of the museum, as we were competing with a bunch of kids.
I actually forgot to take a lot of photos in here, oops... I did get a photo of the giant heart, though:
The Gayborhood
We chose to have dinner at a place called Bud & Marilyn's. Sarah had actually suggested it earlier in the day, and I'd initially shot it down, but I was wrong to do so because it was shocking how damn delicious it was! Walking into this place was like walking into the 1970s - it's decorated in the style of a swanky seventies-era lounge, and after a few days gallavanting around the 1770s, eating in the 1970s seemed appropriate. I had a cheese plate, pictured below, and it was one of the best cheese plates I've ever tasted. Sarah had a Southern-style fried chicken and biscuits meal which she enjoyed immensely. It was... a great choice for our last dinner of our vacation.
Back to New York
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| Ah, tastes like home |
There is still so much left in Philadelphia that we didn't get a chance to get to. The Magic Gardens, the museum at UPenn... top of my list is actually a trip to nearby Valley Forge, specifically to see the bedrooms shared by Washington's aides-de-camp. (Yes it is to see where my boys Hamilton and Laurens and Tench Tilghman slept. Shut up, you have no right to judge me for this.)
But as for this year, next on the travel list is Boston!
Until next time, Philly. Thanks for showing us such a wonderful time,
Nym
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