Today Benjamin Franklin and Philadelphia are conjoined, as inseparable as cheese and steak, but that was not always the case. They nearly missed hooking up. The love affair happened by chance. Never distrust providence.
When the ship docked in New York, Ben looked for work as a printer. William Bradford, one of the few printers in town, dashed the seventeen-year-old’s hopes. There was no work to be found in New York. Philadelphia is where he should go. And so he did.
Whew, I think, as I read about this close call. At the time, New York was the lesser city. Comparatively uncultured, it was a haven for pirates and plunderers, smugglers and slave traders. Money was the only metric that mattered. As one pamphleteer said, “The wisest man among us without a fortune, is neglected and despised… while every wealthy dunce is loaded with honours.” Had Ben found work in New York rather than Philadelphia, he probably would not have flourished, and today we may not know the name Benjamin Franklin. History is not only shaped by great people like Benjamin Franklin but also by great coincidences.
To reach Philadelphia, Franklin needed to traverse New Jersey, as treacherous an undertaking then as it is today. Everything that could go wrong, did. The crossing from Manhattan to Perth Amboy normally took two hours. Ben’s journey took more than thirty, as the gusty winds and rough seas nearly “tore our rotten sails to pieces.” A passenger fell overboard and would have drowned had Franklin not rescued him. Franklin and his shipmates spent a sleepless night off Long Island, the spray from the water soaking everyone onboard. There was nothing to eat or drink except “a bottle of filthy rum.”
He reached Perth Amboy the following day, but then endured a fever and a fifty-mile trek to Burlington, New Jersey, today a suburb of Philadelphia. It rained the entire way. He arrived soaked and despondent, “beginning now to wish I had never left home.”
Franklin nevertheless soldiered on. In Burlington, a local woman took pity on the filthy and disheveled Ben, serving him a hearty meal of ox cheek and accepting only a pot of ale for payment. So began a pattern that would repeat throughout Franklin’s life. He always welcomed kindness but never counted on it. That evening, he climbed aboard a small boat heading to Philadelphia via the Delaware River. There was no wind, so the passengers took turns rowing. Exhausted, and with darkness coming, they stopped for the night along a creek, huddling by a fire on the cold October evening. The next morning, the boat docked at Philadelphia’s Market Street wharf. Young Ben felt as if he had arrived in the promised land.
Just as each of us has a soulmate, we also have a soulplace. Your soulplace is where you know, just know you were meant to be. Like a soulmate, your soulplace brings out the best in you and nurtures abilities you didn’t know you had. Just as you can have many partners but only one soulmate, you can love many places but have only one soulplace.
You don’t find your soulplace any more than you find your soulmate. It finds you. Timing is essential. So is luck. For me, both aligned unexpectedly, miraculously, one autumn day a long time ago.
I was working for NPR as an economics reporter. I didn’t want to be an economics reporter. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and I reminded the network’s foreign editor, a sanguine woman named Elizabeth Becker, of this every chance I had. One day, she called me into her office.
“So you want to go overseas?” she asked rhetorically.
“More than anything,” I replied.
“Okay, let’s see,” she said, gazing at a world map taped to her wall. Her eyes alighted on London. Oh, yes, London, I thought, that would be great. Then her gaze traveled south, across the English Channel to Paris. Paris would totally work, I told myself. I don’t speak French, but I’ll learn. Her eyes, though, were not finished migrating. They hurtled eastward, past Italy and Greece and, picking up speed, traversed the entire Middle East before coming to an abrupt and unexpected stop at the Indian subcontinent.
“How about Delhi?” she asked.
I had never been to India, never been anywhere near India. I did not speak any of its hundreds of languages and knew little about the country. As I was thinking about all the reasons Delhi made no sense, would be an unmitigated disaster, professionally and personally, my mouth hijacked my brain. “Absolutely,” I heard my mouth say. “I would love to go to India.”
India, it turned out, was my soulplace. My timing was good. India in 1993 was reforming its economy, opening to the outside world, and transforming how others saw it. Gone were the cartoonish images as a land of snake charmers and swamis. India was a nation on the move, and in transition. Just like me.
My arrival in India was fraught. I had traveled by way of Nepal, where I had agreed to co-teach a crash course in business journalism. It was not until day 5 that I realized my students did not understand much English. The evening before my flight from Kathmandu to Delhi, I felt ill. At first, I had just a few aches, but soon these flowered into severe chills and a fever of 104 degrees. The next morning, I felt even worse, but I was determined to make it to New Delhi. I shivered the entire flight, then shivered at the immigration line and in the taxi and while checking into my hotel. The clerk looked worried and summoned a doctor. I’d spend the next five days bedridden. No matter. I had arrived.
Soulplaces don’t coddle. They make demands of us. India demanded I slow down and practice acceptance on a regular basis. Either that or go insane. The choice was mine.
Being separated from your soulplace is just as traumatic as being separated from your soulmate. In 1864, at the height of the Civil War, Confederate forces captured a Union soldier named Abner Small and held him as a prisoner of war. His fellow captives were dying, though their injuries didn’t seem that serious. In his diary, Small speculated why. “They became homesick and disheartened. They… were dying of nostalgia.”
In his memoir, Salman Rushdie recalls how his family’s nanny, Mary, grew despondent when they brought her from Bombay to London in the 1960s. Her heart ached for home—at first metaphorically, then physically. She developed cardiac ailments. When she moved back to India, her heart problems disappeared and never returned. She lived to more than one hundred. “The idea that you might actually be in danger of dying from a broken heart was something to write about,” Rushdie says. I agree. So is the idea that your heart might break if ripped from its soulplace.
Franklin’s heart ached every time he left “my dear Philadelphia.” Franklin was to Philadelphia as Socrates was to Athens, Dickens to London, and Cher to Las Vegas. Franklin loved Philadelphia, and it loved him. Philadelphia shaped Franklin, and Franklin shaped Philadelphia. Though he left many times, he always returned.
When Franklin first arrived in 1723, Philadelphia was a young city, more of a town, really, with a population of only about six thousand. Like any youngster, it had many needs and made many demands. It was brimming with potential but required someone to unlock it. That someone was Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin arrived, Philadelphia had no fire department, paved or lighted streets, sanitation department, night watch, hospital, or circulating library. Three decades later, it possessed all of these, and more. Franklin had a hand in each of these projects, even if sometimes it was an invisible one.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, greatness depends, in large part, on simply being in the right place. Franklin was and, crucially, at the right time. Philadelphia was the New York of the eighteenth century, a kinetic, quixotic place where anything seemed possible. Boston attracted the devout. Philadelphia attracted the determined. New Englander John Adams grudgingly acknowledged this reality when he called Philadelphia “the pineal gland” of America. (The man could make anything sound unsexy.)
Philadelphia was born as payback, the settling of a debt. The year was 1681. King Charles II owed William Penn’s family a sizable sum. Rather than shelling out cash, the king suggested a barter. How would you, William, like some grade A primo property in North America? Penn, a Quaker, and thus persecuted in England, was looking for new digs. He took the deal.
It was love at first sight. In a letter to a friend, he described the region, now known as Pennsylvania, as a kind of Eden. “The air proveth sweet & good, the land fertile, & the spring many & pleasant.”
If ever there was a city birthed by one man, it was Philadelphia. William Penn named it, chose the site, devised the street plan, and set the tone. A utopian at heart, Penn was determined his would be no ordinary colony. Pennsylvania was a “holy experiment” and its city Philadelphia “a seed of a nation.”
William Penn was as contradictory as his new colony. He was a Quaker but dressed like a dandy—no drab clothes or wide-brimmed hat for him. He preferred tailored suits, accessorized with a blue silk sash and ceremonial sword. And he was ambitious.
Philadelphia was America’s first planned community. Penn laid out his city in a neat grid. He envisioned a verdant country town, a soulplace with elbow room. High (now Market) Street was one hundred feet wide, broader than any boulevard in seventeenth-century London. Streets, initially named for prominent settlers, were renamed for local trees: Cedar, Pine, Spruce, Walnut, Chestnut, Mulberry, Sassafras, and Vine—all part of William Penn’s green, orderly city.
That was the idea. But no urban plan survives first contact with actual people. Within a few years, dozens of alleyways had sprouted. People didn’t build their homes spread out across the city, as Penn had hoped, but clustered along the waterfront. Coveting waterfront property is an ageless pastime. William Penn’s bucolic paradise was soon one of the most congested towns in America.
The other pillar of Penn’s “holy experiment” proved more successful. Philadelphia was to be a spiritual refuge where all Christians—and even non-Christians—were welcome. In keeping with Quaker pacifism, Penn demilitarized the city. There were no fortifications, no city walls, no garrisons or soldiers. At first, there was no municipal government either, and therefore, Penn hoped, no factional politics. William Penn’s city was unlike any other in the world.
But it was no utopia for the Delaware, or Lenni Lenape, the Native Americans who inhabited the site of Philadelphia. Penn intended to live in peace with them, and for a while, he did. Rather than confiscating their land, he purchased it from them and vowed to negotiate honorably. Although Penn was more enlightened than other colonists, he still held a patronizing view of Native Americans and hoped to convert them to Christianity.
The slave trade in Philadelphia was nearly as old as the city. In 1684, two years after the city was founded, the Isabella docked at the waterfront, carrying 150 enslaved Africans. They were sold “to eager Philadelphia buyers.” By 1700, one Philadelphian in ten was enslaved. William Penn himself was an enslaver. Philadelphia was also home to some of colonial America’s most ardent abolitionists. The city contained multitudes.
The business of Philadelphia was business. A visitor from my home state of Maryland—apparently a land of loafers—marveled at how Philadelphia shops opened at 5 a.m. and how the central market dwarfed those found in other colonies. Andreas Rudman, a Swedish pastor, observed in 1700 that anyone first stepping foot in Philadelphia “would be astonished beyond measure” that it was founded less than a decade ago. “All the houses are built of brick, three or four hundred of them, and in every house a shop, so that whatever one wants at any time he can have, for money.” Philadelphians could order newspapers, books, and pamphlets by mail.
Quaker Philadelphia was a lot more fun than Puritan Boston (an admittedly low bar to clear). Billiards and bowling were allowed. There was a dance school. The playful spirit was even evident in the city’s barbershops, as visiting physician Alexander Hamilton (not that Alexander Hamilton) attests: “I was shaved by a little finical, humpbacked old barber, who kept dancing round me and talking all the time… and yet did his job lightly and to a hair.” Competent and fun. That was the Philadelphia way.
William Penn’s Philadelphia was far more tolerant than John Winthrop’s Boston. Here was the true city upon a hill. All were welcome: Germans, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Swiss, Swedes, Huguenots, and, of course, the English. Philadelphia was one of the most multicultural cities in the world. Dr. Hamilton describes dining at a local tavern and admiring how religiously diverse the clientele were. Sitting side by side were Roman Catholics, Methodists, Quakers, Seventh Day Adventists, “and one Jew.” Said one resident: “We are a people, thrown together from various quarters of the world, differing in all things—language, manners and sentiments.” And yet somehow it worked.
It worked especially well when the ale was flowing. Philadelphia was a city of taverns. More than one hundred dotted the streets, or one for every dozen adult men. There was a tavern for every taste and budget, from the sailors’ dive bars by the wharves to the elegant City Tavern. Book lovers convened, naturally, at the Library Tavern, artists at James’s Coffee House (which served more than coffee), explorers at the Bull’s Head. For a while, there was even a tavern attached to the local jail. One visitor said an hour at a tavern taught you more about Philadelphia than a week walking its streets.
Philadelphia was no paradise, though. Crime was rampant. Waste disposal consisted of hogs gorging on trash. A stench hung in the air. Punning on its name, some people began to call the young town “Filthy-dirty.”
Not Franklin. He loved the city, loved every bit of it from the moment he stepped onto Market Street that sunny autumn day three centuries ago. He had no clean clothes. His pockets were stuffed with dirty shirts and socks. He smelled. Tired and hungry, he had only a single Dutch dollar and a shilling’s worth of copper. When Ben offered the shilling to the owner of the boat that carried him from New Jersey, he declined to accept it; after all, Franklin had rowed. But he insisted the boat owner take it, “Man being sometimes more generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty,” he recounts in his autobiography. This generosity of the impoverished, Franklin speculated, might be because the destitute want to retain some scrap of pride. Perhaps, but there is another explanation: those poor in money are often rich in empathy.
Franklin walked up Market Street and, in one of the most iconic scenes of American letters, approached a bakery and asked for threepenny worth of bread. In Boston, that sum would buy a single roll, but the Philadelphia baker handed Franklin “three great puffy rolls.” Walking away, one roll under each arm while he nibbled on the third, Franklin marveled at the generosity of spirit, the overflowing abundance that was Philadelphia. This was home.
He passed by the door of the Reed family and caught the eye of young Deborah Reed, his future wife, knowing he made “a most awkward ridiculous appearance.” Returning to the Market Street wharf, where his boat had docked, he splashed himself with water from the Delaware River. Refreshed, he spotted a line of people streaming toward somewhere, so he followed them. They were headed to the great Quaker Meeting House, the largest building in town. Sitting among the worshippers, in complete silence, he dozed for several hours. “This was therefore the first house I was in or slept in, in Philadelphia,” he recalled.
And so went the Philadelphia adventures of Franklin the Possibilian. He found work as a printer’s assistant with a grouchy oddball named Samuel Keimer and lodging next door with the Reed family. He soon found friends, like-minded leather-apron men and bibliophiles. They went for long walks, swam in the Schuylkill River, and held poetry contests.
Life was good, even if the work was less than satisfying. His boss, Keimer, was a second-rate printer working with “an old shatter’d press.” He passed himself off as a Quaker (he was not) and had strange ideas about religion. He even schemed to found his own sect, attempting to recruit Franklin. Ben demurred and, instead, toyed with Keimer, suggesting his new faith include a vow not to eat meat. The two men abstained for three months. “I went on pleasantly,” recalled Franklin, “but poor Keimer suffer’d grievously, tir’d of the project, long’d for the flesh pots of Egypt, and order’d a roast pig.”
Time and chain stores have blurred the sharp differences that once distinguished American cities. Today an insipid sameness fuses Seattle and Atlanta, Boston and Philadelphia, at least on the surface. Scratch a little, and the old differences reappear, like discovering a vestigial tail. It’s no coincidence that Boston’s signature dish is clam chowder, a tidy meal you eat slowly with a spoon, while Philadelphia’s is the cheesesteak sub, a messy mélange you gobble with your hands.
Philadelphia’s Old City possesses the same cozy compactness as Boston’s. As in Boston, there is colonial merch to buy here—pointy hats, founder bobbleheads, snow globes—and you might bump into a Jefferson or Washington lookalike. That is where the similarities end. Boston wears its history dry-cleaned and pressed. Philadelphia wears its history like a pair of baggy jeans that haven’t seen a washing machine, let alone a dry cleaner. In Boston, Franklin’s statue is discreetly perched next to a dentist’s office or on the spot of the old Boston Latin School. In Philadelphia, he’s mounted above bridges and on billboards. He sells cheesesteaks and beer and roots for the 76ers.
I walk down Chestnut Street, heading toward the waterfront. I wonder what Ben would think of his “dear Philadelphia” today, three hundred years since his arrival. Would he recognize it? What would he make of the storefronts advertising chakra healing and psychic readings? Dr. Franklin would approve, up to a point. Fascinated by the medicinal arts, he was open to new methods of healing, provided they could be empirically verified. And while he was definitely a futurist, he was less interested in predicting the future than shaping it. Fortune favors fortitude.
Walking farther, I pass a beauty parlor with “handmade artisanal soaps” displayed in the window. I can see Ben cringing, transported to those dark days making soap in his father’s shop. I move on. I pass the “Nauti Mermaid Crab House and Piano Bar. More Oysters, Fewer Clams.” The restaurant is boarded. Out of business. That’s a shame. Ben would appreciate the humor—and the oysters.
What would Ben make of the young man I see on Market Street, wearing a red T-shirt and sneakers, cradling a Styrofoam cup and a cardboard sign that reads, “Homeless and Hungry. Please help?” Franklin would feel sympathy for the man and might offer to help him find work, but he would not drop any coins in the cup. Franklin was opposed to handouts, fearing they create dependency and “encourage idleness and prodigality… thus multiplying beggars, instead of diminishing them.” He fell in the teach-a-man-to-fish camp. “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
If you’re thinking this stance makes Franklin a Reagan Republican, not so fast. He also held views that would tickle a modern liberal’s bleeding heart. He opposed private ownership of “superfluous property.” He thought taxation (with representation, of course) was a good idea and a civil obligation. “He can have no right to the benefits of society who will not pay his club towards the support of it.” He thought elected officials should work for free, and prisons should be humane. There’s something for every political persuasion in Franklin’s words and life.
I turn onto Third Street, around the corner from Franklin Court, and it’s all dogs. There’s an obedience school called Opportunity Barks and another called Ruff Life and, not far away, the Paws Adoption Center. Ben would approve. He liked dogs and was especially fond of his son William’s Newfoundland. He had a soft spot for turkeys. He thought they and not the bald eagle should be the national bird of the young United States. He also liked squirrels. One in particular captured Ben’s heart: Mungo. Mungo was a peripatetic squirrel. With Franklin’s help, he traveled from America to England and the Hampshire estate of Franklin’s friend Jonathan Shipley. There, Mungo led a happy life under the kind and loving care of the Shipleys’ young daughter, Georgiana, at least until Mungo got into a losing tussle with a neighborhood dog.
I turn down an alleyway, and am catapulted clear of the touristy Old City into a working-class neighborhood. Leather-apron country. I spot a ramshackle store—“Mr. Bar Stool. Thousands in Stock”—and a construction site where a melody of salsa mingles with a backbeat of buzz saws and hammers. These are Franklin’s people. Even when he was wealthy and world famous, Franklin still saw himself as a leather-apron man. “He that hath a trade, hath an estate.”
Franklin and Philadelphia were a perfect fit. Placemates. Both were young and in a hurry. Both possessed a generous spirit and boatloads of gumption. Both were scruffy, unpolished. Both craved, but never achieved, orderliness.
Philadelphia provided Franklin what he needed most: anonymity. Having broken the apprenticeship with his brother, Franklin was technically a runaway and could be arrested. But that was unlikely. Not in Philadelphia. No one cared where you came from or what your name was. What can you do? That was the question foremost on people’s minds.
Here was a place where the church didn’t dictate how you lived. Here was a place where a filthy, nearly penniless runaway was welcomed. Here was a place in need of good deeds. The perfect place for a fresh start.