America’s oldest holiday parade turns 100 this year. Gusty winds grounded the balloons, but since the weather was otherwise crisp and clear, and since Philadelphia is a “real city,” with an easy grid of pedestrian blocks, there was no excuse for the View’s crack photographer to sleep in this morning.
Now go eat! Gobble gobble from the View!
The First Thanksgiving (1621) was a highly exclusive affair for the finest people: only those of Pilgrim stock, or Wampanoag descent, could wangle an invitation to that three-day feast.
ABOVE: The Pilgrim, by Augustus St. Gaudens, in Fairmount Park. BELOW: Leni-Lenape (Delaware) as depicted by Alexander Milne Calder, with a girdle of maize ears. Delaware weren’t invited to the Cape that year, but they make a robust capital for a column in City Hall.
Still, Philadelphia has contributed a great deal to the modern celebration that was inspired by that Plymouth wing-ding. Click below for a lively article on Pennsylvania’s contributions to our national holiday. (For instance, America’s first Thanksgiving Day Parade — complete with Santa Claus, and the tie-in to Xmas shopping — was actually sponsored by Gimbel’s in 1920. It was the Gimbel’s Thanksgiving Day Parade! Who knew? Turns out, New York’s R.H. Macy stole the idea in 1924 and used ruthless marketing — another Philadelphia innovation — to make his own store the hero of the the holiday.) https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/thanksgiving/ The august John Wanamaker’s Department Store, just across the street from City Hall, is now “Macy’s,” and preserves the genteel (and profitable) tradition of making Thanksgiving Week the City’s kick-off for Ho-Ho-Ho.
Love is, of course, the reason for the season — the reason for any season, really. The City of Brotherly Love is graced by several versions of Robert Indiana’s famous statue (1975). The original is on Center Square outside CIty Hall — now the site of the second annual Philadelphia Christmas Village. But versions of “Love” crop up all over town. One sees it at the almost deserted Penn campus, and, in an erudite Latin joke, outside the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Ss. Peter and Paul.
Best wishes for the holidays from the Valley Village View!
The next few Views will focus on the City of Brotherly Love.
The Emperor Augustus famously eulogized of himself, that he found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble. William Penn and his Friends, on the other hand, preferred a middle way — so they built for us a city of hard-working brick, but graciously trimmed it with elegant marble (or, even more frugally, concrete.) So tie up thee bonnet, buckle thee boots, and brave the cobblestones of one of the few, if not the only, deliberately egalitarian, deliberately middle-class, deliberately tolerant, and deliberately progressive cities ever founded (1683).
Social-climbing Americans have loved to heckle, shame, shun, deride, or simply ignore Penn’s “Greene Countrie Towne.” But for those whose frequency is tuned to the long broadcasts of history, symphonies for the soul can be picked up, simply by walking though Philly to get a coffee — with encores of hope for a better humanity.
The Fairmount Waterworks (1812) pumped fresh water by steam up from the Schuylkill into a reservoir dug into what Penn called his “Fayre Mount.” The Art Museum (yellow stone) was later built atop the old reservoir; but all Philadelphia still drinks “Schuylkill Punch.” The 200-year-old idea of municipal water piped affordably into peoples’ homes and into public fountains, is, like affordable health care, still dangerously radical in many parts of the world.
Little Tujunga Canyon, as is, and as was: Winter, Spring, Summer (Superbloom), and Fall, 2019
Our front windows look north, and when it’s clear the View is right across the Valley, a blurry tangle of trees and billboards, to the purple mountain majesty of Mendenhall Ridge. It’s just a thin dark line against a blue horizon, but scarcely a day goes by when I don’t gaze up at that smudge the way Maria von Trapp gazed up at her Alp.
San Gabriel Fault, the orogeny of the San Gabriel range, Uplift!, and the resulting alluvial creation of the Valley, can all be Viewed on a scenic drive of just a few miles. And as part of the Angeles National Forest, it is a reserve of native plants. Only a half-hour drive from most spots in the Valley, one can take a lunch hour and get a delightful jolt back into the California Floristic Province.
Consider the bees, above; or the bridge from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World:
Taken this morning, the photo below reveals how striations of the Uplifted! earth, combined with the angle of the sun’s rays produces the habitat arrangement on the north slope.
Surely, Little Tujunga is a Vale For All Seasons.
The Valley Village View 