Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/90

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74
WILDEY STREET

Great stripes of black and blue and white were being laid along her hull.

Penn Treaty Park, at the foot of Columbia avenue, would deserve an essay of its own. Here, under a pavilion, the Mountaineer and I sat surrounded by the intoxicating presence of water and boats, watched the police patrol launches being overhauled, watched a little schooner loading lumber (I couldn't read her name, but she came from Hampton, Va.), watched the profile of Camden shining dimly through the rain. For a very smart rainstorm had come up and we sat and felt a pang of sympathy for the good people of Wildey street, whose Chinese lanterns and tricolored tissue paper would be ruined by the wet. We watched the crew of the tug Baltic getting ready for supper and dinghies nosing the piers and bobbling with the rise and fall of the water, and we saw how the gleam of rain and mist on the roofs of Camden looked exactly like a fall of snow. Fishtown uses Penn Treaty Park as a place for lounging and smoking under the peeling sycamores and watching the panorama of the river.


P. S.: I thought a great deal about the block party on Wildey street that night and hoped that the rain would not have spoilt it. So the next morning I got off the 8:13 at Columbia avenue and walked down past that deep violin note of the Columbia avenue sawmills to see how things were going. I found the same old lady on the sidewalk,