Great spot for a windmill
THIS IS GREEN AWARENESS WEEK in Philadelphia and where in America would it be more fitting to promote green solutions than in the City of Brotherly Love, so named by William Penn because he encouraged brothers to sleep in the same bed to cut down fuel costs on cold winter nights.
I kid the Founding Father. But in fact Penn understood better than anyone the human and environmental impact of unrestricted burning of fossil fuels in crowded cities. Penn (and more than three centuries later, Michael Nutter) didn't want Philadelphia to be a smokey city. Unlike his native London, already toxic with air and water pollution, William Penn dreamed of Philadelphia as a "greene country towne." He named the east-west streets after trees -- Cherry, Chestnut, Walnut, Locust, Sprunce, Pine -- and he wanted residents to be within walking distance of green open green space. He laid out his city in a grid pattern of streets, none of which were more than a few blocks away from one of five tree-filled public squares, four of which -- Rittenhouse, Logan, Washington, Franklin -- remain today.
Ironically, there's a huge pile of brick and stone called City Hall filling Penn's central parkland known as Center Square. You could argue that William Penn was America's first "greene." If he were alive today, undoubtedly he'd disapprove of that 37-foot-tall bronze statue of himself atop City Hall, prefering instead, perhaps, a modest Quaker energy-producing windmill.
So how did Penn's green utopia end up covered with red-brick rowhouses? The inconvenient truth is that you can blame/thank Benjamin Franklin. Although he is something of a green icon himself (Franklin not only invented an energy-efficient stove that could warm an entire room, he was the first to recommend Daylight Saving Time), Franklin championed brick as Philadelphia's preferred construction material as a fire prevention measure. Franklin, who invented the lightning rod in his spare time, recommended brick instead of wood to build houses.
And in the year 2007 what could be considered more farsighted and environmentally responsible than a colonial-era decision to build a city of side-by-side brick houses, huddled in winter like penguins on a ice flow sharing their heat and braving the elements in common cause. Franklin was no Al Gore, but he did have uncommon sense.
