Several prominent Grosse Pointe women, including Mrs. John McNaughton (“Her husband’s sister is Mrs. Benson Ford”) and Mrs. Kirkland Alexander have journeyed to Detroit to work with the Detroit Artists’ Market in the center of town—a nonprofit gallery for local artists, staffed by volunteers. But women like these are the exceptions. The Detroit Symphony, too, has its “set” of supporters in Grosse Pointe, but opening nights are nowhere near the social events they are in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or San Francisco. Subscription seats are seldom more than partially filled. “No, we didn’t go,” one woman said of a recent Symphony opening. “There were riflery lessons at the club that night.” Similarly, the large charity balls given in hotels in downtown Detroit are well-subscribed to by Grosse Pointers, but scantily attended by them. No one goes to Detroit for restaurants or nightclubs—“There aren’t any.” If, as one young woman explained, “there’s nothing going on at the club, there’s always Al Green’s”—Grosse Pointe’s own restaurant-nightclub. It is not that Grosse Pointe is uninterested in the arts. “Practically every women here goes to her painting class—it’s the thing to do.” Paintings done at these classes run heavily to views of Grosse Pointe. As for the Symphony, “Grosse Pointe now has its own symphony orchestra.”
As Grosse Pointe has turned its back on Detroit, it is perhaps not surprising that Detroit, in return, shows little cordiality to the suburb. “I did some volunteer work downtown once,” one woman says. “When they learned I was from Grosse Pointe, the secretaries in the office stopped speaking to me. They were actually hostile. They hated me. I was the enemy.”
Around itself, Grosse Pointe has built an invisible wall. The brawny, violent city seems to heave against it. So far, the wall has seemed secure and impregnable. If it ever comes tumbling down, of course, all Detroit will come tumbling in. One Grosse Pointe man, a long-time resident, says, “You know, there’s so much potential here. There’s so much essential decency. Most of them are nice people, and there is a great deal of wealth and power. If only—some day—in some way—this potential could find a means of expressing itself in some important way. Then—” His voice trailed off.
Meanwhile, Grosse Pointe floats among the restless seas outside.
12
The Main Line Eternal
While the social attitudes of Grosse Pointe seem to be in a state of nervous flux, those of Philadelphia’s Main Line seem to have come serenely to rest.
Not long ago a guest from out of town was rushed late at night to the emergency room of the Bryn Mawr Hospital for treatment of a sudden and mysterious intestinal complaint—the result, it turned out, of a heavy and gravied Main Line dinner. While the doctor was quieting the lady’s stomach, she supplied a nurse with the vital statistics hospitals require—patient’s age, place of birth, and so on. This done, the lady asked the nurse anxiously whether she thought everything would be all right. “Oh,” said the nurse, “since you weren’t born here you couldn’t possibly die here. We wouldn’t permit it.”
This is not to say that none of the inexorable rules of time and tide, which plague such places as Grosse Pointe and Westchester, do not apply to the Main Line. But in the jagged-edged seventeen-mile-long stretch of townships that together make up the Main Line (townships which, on the map, follow a broken line leading out of Philadelphia), there are actually two Main Lines. There is the visible Main Line—the various and burgeoning suburban spread with its new highways, tract houses, and, recently, the discreet invasion of some light industry. Its population is mixed—white and Negro, poor and well-off, old and young; some residents have moved to the Main Line recently, others have lived there all their lives; some are executives, some are laborers; some are permanent, some are transient.
But there is also the old, or inner, Main Line—the legendary rampart of Philadelphia Society, composed of families who have been there and have known each other, as they will tell you, “always.”
But the situation is not really so cut and dried. For one thing, quite a few people of the outer Main Line would like very much to be taken in by the inner—and, just possibly, they could be. The outer Main Line is divided, according to one woman, “between people who take the Main Line seriously, and people who don’t give a damn—between people who believe in the Main Line, and people who just live here because of the good schools, the fresh air, and the quick commute to Philadelphia. Some people are here because it’s a suburb, but some are here because it’s the Main Line, and it stands for something they want to have. What do they want? Eventually, it’s dinner with the Cadwaladers—any Cadwaladers. Me, I don’t give a damn.”
The don’t-give-a-damn Main Line is the real Main Line.
Still, it isn’t that simple. The inner Main Line knows well who its members are. But just who, or how many, of the outer Main Line would like to be inner is hard to say. The Philadelphia Social Register lists some two thousand families with Main Line addresses, but the Social Register has never been a reliable guide, and is even less so in Philadelphia. Many are listed who do not “deserve” to be. “It’s a telephone book,” says Mrs. Samuel Eckert, who very much belongs in it (her father was a Longstreth, an old Quaker name). “Still, it’s better to be in it than out of it,” she adds. Better for what? “Just—better.” Polarized around Main Line Society, there are many groups at varying distances from its magnetic core. Some of them are in the Social Register, and some are not. There are some who think they have joined the inner group, but in reality have not. There are those who once did not care about joining, but now are beginning to somewhat. There are those who could never get in, but nonetheless go right on trying. On the Main Line, Society is like a lovely but stern old grandparent of whom everyone is a little frightened, but whose vagaries and peccadilloes everybody smiles at, and whom everyone in the long run respects and admires. Society here is such a solid and imposing affair that it may sometimes seem as though its pinnacle must be scaled because, like Everest, it is there.
People talk of how drastically the Main Line has changed—for the worse, needless to say—particularly people who have been away from it for a while, and have returned. “I just can’t believe it,” one young man said. He had been born and raised on the Main Line, and was visiting it again after a few years’ absence in another city. “It’s terrible. All the big estates have been broken up, or turned into schools or convents, or rest homes. There’s hardly a tree left on Lancaster Avenue—nothing but apartment houses and subdivisions and shopping centers, nothing I remember any more.” On the other hand, William Mirkil, a successful young real estate man from Ardmore who has not been away from the Main Line, looks startled at such a suggestion. “Of course the Main Line hasn’t changed,” he says. “What’s more, I don’t think it ever will change. The tone of the place has been preserved better than in any other area in the country.” And a woman, also of the old Main Line, says, “But Lancaster Avenue never was a good address!” To those who believe in the Main Line, the more it changes, the more it remains the same.
Unlike Grosse Pointe, the physical look of the Main Line is not readily apparent. One certainly cannot see it from a window of the Paoli local as it clatters its way westward from Philadelphia, carrying all those commuters on whom the line loses so much money. All one can see from the train is the succession of railroad stations with their painted signs of red and gold. “Old Maids Never Wed And Have Babies, Period” is the phrase one must memorize to keep track of the first few station stops—Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, with “period” standing for Paoli at the end of the line. Between Bryn Mawr and Paoli, the phrase makes less sense: “Really Vicious Retrievers Snap Willingly, Snarl Dangerously. Beagles Don’t.” (Rosemont, Villanova, Radnor, St. Davids, Wayne, Strafford, Devon, Berwyn, Daylesford). But there are those who say that those communities themselves don’t make much sense. The Main Line breaks a number of rules, among them the rule that suburban addresses generally become “better” the farther aw
ay from the city one goes.
Nor can the Main Line be seen from Lancaster Avenue, the wide street that runs roughly parallel to the railroad tracks through most of the above communities. It is along Lancaster that the developer’s hand has been the most savage and arbitrary, and a rigid corporation style has been imposed. One passes automobile showrooms, the tall and prison-like apartment houses, the motels giddy with glass and gassy with neon, the bunched gas stations—often engaged in furious price wars—and the ubiquitous shopping centers. As is the unerring way of such “centers,” they have not been placed in the real centers of the towns at all, but out along the highway. While the new centers create a traffic problem, the real centers show the economic effects of this deployment, and look shabby and discouraged and embarrassed. “And the diners,” says Mrs. Hugh Best, a relative newcomer to the Main Line. “Don’t you think we have beautiful diners? We have them in every shade of chrome. When I first came here from California, I drove out to see what the Main Line was like. I got to Ardmore, which I’d heard was nice, and it was hideous. I drove on to Bryn Mawr, which I’d heard was even nicer, and it was worse. I couldn’t imagine what all this ‘Main Line’ talk was all about.”
To find what all the talk is about, one must venture off Lancaster Avenue for a little distance. Here you can find yourself in a trim suburb with clipped hedges and manicured lawns, with houses showing a Pennsylvanian regional fondness for brick and local stone. Or you can find yourself in a landscape of rolling, wooded hills, green fields dotted with lakes and ponds (dotted, in turn, with ducks and swans), where roads wind narrowly in and out of shadowy ravines, past old rail fences and stone walls, across ancient bridges and beside cascading waterfalls. It is in these boskier regions that the rich of the Main Line live, and it is easy to understand why this has been called one of the most beautiful residential areas in the United States. Spring and early summer are the loveliest seasons here, when azaleas, rhododendrons and roses offer their abundant blooms, when the sun warms the stone or white-painted brick of the low, rambling, Pennsylvania Colonial, Federal, and Georgian houses (many are actually old, and many more have been built to look old); and when even the newer, split-level houses of redwood and glass seem to blend comfortably into the terrain. Through these sections, the tree-lined lanes twist, turn, change direction so precipitately—and change their names so abruptly—that it is very easy to get lost. One route sign blandly informs drivers that they are, at that point, going both north and south, and newcomers admit that several months of painful experiment are required to learn to navigate the area. (Old Main Liners find their way around with a kind of Main Line radar, honking their horns authoritatively as they approach tight corners and blind intersections.) But it is delightful to the eye, and none of it, as everyone who lives there will soon reveal to the visitor, is more than twenty minutes from the heart of Philadelphia on the new Expressway, or more than ten minutes from the mud-colored shopping centers of Lancaster Avenue.
“The edges of Main Line towns all run together,” says one woman, and so they do, “and all the Main Line towns are pretty much alike, so it doesn’t matter where you live. It’s all Main Line.”
This—like so many other things Main Liners are apt to say about their environment—is not exactly true. There are subtle differences between certain communities, and some that are not so subtle. The most important thing to remember about the Main Line is that it could have only happened in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia is a city with a habit of making up myths about itself which it knows are myths and yet believes. One learns, for instance, not to argue with a Philadelphian when he refers to Philadelphia as “the second largest city in the United States,” even though it is only fourth largest. Philadelphians seem to believe that if they repeat this non-fact long enough it will become true. Philadelphia’s notion of its population is equally surrealistic. It is almost always referred to as “a city of four million,” even though the latest United States census figures indicate only 2,002,512—a decline in population, actually, from the figure of ten years before. Philadelphia is also fond of pretending that everything in the city was founded by Benjamin Franklin—if not by some Cadwalader, Wister, Morris, Ingersoll, Biddle or Roberts a century or so before Franklin. The names of Franklin, George Washington, William Penn, and General Anthony Wayne are so liberally applied to Main Line banks and insurance companies—to say nothing of roadhouses, motels, and diners—that it is easy to suppose that these great men actually lived here. One can also get the impression—so pervasive is the train of thought—that the city of Philadelphia was founded by the Main Line and not, as was the case, the other way around, and that the Main Line has been what it is, where it is, exerting the social force it does, since the dawn of American history.
Actually, the Main Line as a social suburb is not even a hundred years old. The area was conceived, designed and developed by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a real estate venture in the 1870’s and ’80’s when the railroad was pushing its tracks westward and was hoping to stir up freight and passenger business along its route. The railroad built a chain of resort hotels along this “Main Line of Internal Improvements of the State of Pennsylvania,” and declared that these hotels were fashionable. When the hotel venture was not immediately successful, the line added houses and when these, too, failed to sell well, it decreed that all railroad executives of stature must build large estates there—a thing many railroad men, and their wives, were not at all eager to do. At the time, Philadelphia Society lived either on Society Hill, in the city, or in Chestnut Hill (though Chestnut Hill has always looked like a suburb, it technically is not since it is within the Philadelphia city line), or in the Whitemarsh-Penllyn area—all of them on the opposite side of the Schuylkill River from the Main Line. Germantown and West Philadelphia were not, in those days, to be sneezed at either.
Since the Pennsylvania Railroad was a social force in itself to be reckoned with, its executives and large stockholders reluctantly did as they were bidden, and the railroad helped out with financing the estates it wanted. It is the only suburb known to have been made fashionable by force.
For the next fifty years, like Grosse Pointe, the Main Line was considered largely a summer resort. It was not until the 1920’s that the Main Line began to be what it so solidly is today, an area with a year-round population including, perhaps, the densest concentration of the upper class in America.
There is some justification for the preponderance of Main Line towns with Welsh names, just as there is a reason for the French in Grosse Pointe. A colony of Welsh Quakers had farmed the region before the arrival of the railroad. But many of the communities—such as Bryn Mawr, Narberth, and Radnor—were given their names Welshly, and rather spuriously, by none other than the railroad. Since then, private builders, developers, city planners and estate owners have contributed to the Welshification process with names of their own devising, until now almost everything on the Main Line that does not commemorate a member of the Continental Congress has a name that at least sounds Welsh. It was apparently too late to do anything about “Paoli,” an incongruous, winy whiff from the shores of Corsica.
As wealth moved to the Main Line, the position of Chestnut Hill declined. But Chestnut Hill has never for a moment felt that it was socially eclipsed by the upstart creation of the locomotive. Chestnut Hill continues to insist that it is where “the real power” of Philadelphia lives, and it enjoys quoting a somewhat elderly (1940) statistic showing that seventy-eight per cent of Chestnut Hill families are in the Social Register, a figure the Main Line can nowhere near approach. Chestnut Hill dismisses the Main Line as “mostly nouveau riche—those railroad builders, you know, were hardly gentlemen,” and calls the Main Line, “Philadelphia’s answer to Long Island.” Chestnut Hill people like to say, “No one but Welsh peasants lived on the Main Line until the railroad came along and built it up.” A certain way to start an argument in Philadelphia is to ask whether Chestnut Hill or the Main Line is better.
/> The railroad, and the railroad men who moved there, also decided that the north side of the tracks was the nicer side. Today, the illusion persists, though there is no basis for it in fact. The wealthy, and the old and good Philadelphia families have established well-tended outposts in both directions. But south-siders are still apt to say defensively, “I live on the south side, and I’m not ashamed of it.” Others point out, “After all, the Merion Golf Club is south of the tracks.” The famous and somewhat more splendid Merion Cricket Club, on the other hand, is on the north side.
And one’s address does matter on the Main Line. Bryn Mawr and Villanova are the two most fashionable places, and Haverford runs a close third. Poor Narberth, however, is at the bottom of the status ladder. “Narberth just never did have any style!” one woman says. Bala-Cynwyd still contains pockets of wealth, but has lost a lot of its once rural charm; now much of it appears to be an extended shopping center. Radnor is considered “very nice.” (“Very nice,” says one man, “is the Main Line way of saying ‘filthy rich,’” and perhaps even a little vulgar.) Paoli is “more horsey.” Wynnewood is “a very nice young community.” So is Penn Valley. But Penn Valley has a heavy cross to bear. It must use “Narberth” as a mailing address. The Post Office Department not long ago dealt a similarly cruel blow to a corner of Wynnewood; its mail, it was announced, would afterward be addressed—of all things—“Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19151.” Devon is fortunate. It has the famous Devon Horse Show to give it the prestige it might otherwise lack. Wayne is a problem. Wayne’s houses are large and substantial, but Wayne is not considered a good “social address.” Wayne is beloved by the people who live there, who call it “the friendliest place on the Main Line” and Wayne people do seem to see a lot of one another and to have relatively few non-Wayne friends. It is considered “a nice family sort of place,” and one Main Liner who owns a chain of movie theatres in the area, says, “It’s mysterious. A Walt Disney movie—and I mean a real lousy Walt Disney movie that’s done terrible business everywhere else—will break all box office records in Wayne.” One reason may be that Wayne’s comfortable old houses appeal to young couples with small children.
The Right People Page 19
