Identifier: cu31924032492773 (find matches)
Title: Our Philadelphia
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 1855-1936 Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926
Subjects:
Publisher: Philadelphia and London, J. B. Lippincott
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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of them. But it was not until I discovered the Rus-sian Jew that I understood the most important. It isthe Russian Jew who, with an army of aliens at his back—thousands upon thousands of Italians, Slavs, Lithuan-ians, a fresh emigration of negroes from the South, andstatistics alone can say how many other varieties—is push-ing and pushing Philadelphians out of the town—first upSpruce Street, nearer and nearer to the Schuylkill, thenacross the Schuylkill into the suburbs, eventually to beswept from the suburbs into the country, until who cansay where there will be any room for them at all? Withthe Russian Jews genius for adapting himself to Ameri-can institutions, I could fancy him taking possession of,and adding indefinitely to, the little two-story houses thatalready stretch in well-nigh endless rows to the West andthe North, Germantown and West Philadelphia builtover beyond recognition. I remember when, one day in atrolley, I had gone for miles and miles between these rows %v
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CHESTNUT STREET BRIDGE AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY 471 —each little house with the same front yard, the sameporch, the same awning, the same rocking-chairs—^I had ahorrible waking nightmare in which I saw them multiply-ing—as the alien himself multiplied beyond the mostardent dreams of Mr. Roosevelt,—and creeping outfurther and further, across the city limits, across the State,across the Middle West, across the prairies, across theRockies, across the Sierras, until at last they joined Eastto West in one unbroken line—one great, unbroken, un-lovely monument to the enterprise of the new American,and the philanthropy of the old: while only the RussianJew at the door of the State House, Hke Macaulays NewZealander under the shadow of St. Pauls, remained tomuse and moralize on the havoc he had wrought. This may seem a trifle fantastic, but I should find ithard to give an idea of how impossibly fantastic the pre-vailing presence of the alien in Philadelphia appeared tome. To be su

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