Tom Huntington - Ben Franklins Philadelphia

The late Dean Bennett as Franklin

Enjoy a taste of history! reads the chalkboard on the side-walk outside Philadelphias City Tavern, a reconstruction of the inn John Adams called the most genteel in America. My waiter refers to it as a culinary museum. Chef Walter Staib uses period recipes and ingredients; the goblets, plates, and cutlery are pewter; and the servers wear eighteenth-century costumes. I even spot a harpsichord in the front room.

The original City Tavern opened in 1773 and was demolished following a fire in 1854. The National Park Service built this one in 1975, just in time for the nations bicentennial. Its perfectly appropriate, then, to dine in this re-created inn with a re-created Benjamin Franklin.

The late Dean Bennett began performing as Franklin in 1981, taking the role for the first time right here in the courtyard behind City Tavern. He appeared in character at the White House and the National Archives in Washington, D.C., in Las Vegas, and even in France, when an airline flew him and a Thomas Jefferson impersonator to Paris for inauguration of service there. With his wig, glasses, gold-topped cane, frock coat, and vest, he bore a striking resemblance to our most lovable founding father. Hes like everybodys favorite uncle, said Bennett, who told me the role had been an educational experience. Here in Philadelphia, everyone knows something about Ben Franklin, so theyd come up and check to see if you knew what you were supposed to know. I found that I couldnt bluff itI didnt want to bluff itso ultimately I went ahead and got some books, and now I can talk for quite a length about Franklin.

One topic people often raise is Franklins reputation with women, especially his relationships while serving as American commissioner to France from 1776 to 1785. That is a very hot topic, the ladies of France, Bennett said, though he thought it was a shame that Franklin had earned a reputation as Americas founding rake. Actually, when he went over there, he was seventy years old, he had gout, he had stones of the bladder, and he had shingles. So he was not in the very best of health. Furthermore, Bennett added, Franklins wife had died in 1774. It wasnt like he was sneaking off trying to have a fling with some young chick. I always explain that they should keep in mind that he was sent there by Congress, so anything he did with those ladies he did as a patriot.

City Tavern

138 S. Second St. (215) 413-1443

citytavern.com

It may not be the original, but this reproduction City Tavern will give you a good taste of eighteenth-century dining. In its day, City Tavern was in the latest London mode; the appeal of the current version is that theres nothing of the latest mode about it at all. Some of its specialties include West Indies pepperpot soup and a chocolate mousse made from Martha Washingtons recipe. It also serves beer made from recipes handed down from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. City Tavern is open for lunch and dinner daily. Reservations are recommended.

City Tavern

Yet Franklin was a man who savored what life offered him. It would not have been unusual to find him at an inn like the City Tavern, for he enjoyed eating and drinking. His claim to have been brot up in such a perfect Inattention to these matters as to be quite Indifferent what kind of Food was set before me wasnt necessarily true. In France, he left behind a wine cellar with twelve hundred bottles. He composed drinking songs. While in England, Franklin wrote to a friend, the botanist John Bartram, that he would prefer a traveler to Italy send him a recipe for Parmesan cheese rather than translations of ancient inscriptions.

For a man who enjoyed wine and song (and, yes, women), Philadelphia was a good place to live. Its Quaker founders disapproved of taverns, but they couldnt prevent them. By 1750, Philadelphia had 120 drinking establishments. There was a public house to suit every purse and every taste, from innumerable sailors groggeries down by the wharves to Daniel Smiths famous City Tavern, note Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh in Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin.

The late Bennett arrived at City Tavern on that day dressed as Franklin, and visitors did double takes as they entered the dining room and saw that the lunch specials included a Founding Father. They shouldnt have been too surprised, though, because Franklin is a familiar sight in todays Philadelphia. Founder William Penn has a higher perch atop City Hall, but Franklin has superiority in numbers. Far below Penns gaze at Broad Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard, Franklin the printer works his press in a statue by Joseph Brown. Another sculpted Franklin lounges on a park bench reading a newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, an institution he helped found. A thirty-ton, twenty-foot-tall Franklin dominates the rotunda at the Franklin Institute.

Franklin is a staple in the local gift shops. At the Franklin Institute, you can buy a Ben Franklin action figure, complete with tiny kite. The National Constitution Center offers a Franklin bobblehead.

Bennys Place and Bens Shoes

Elsewhere in the old city, you can shop at Bens Shoes or buy an ice cream at Franklins Fountain. Near Independence Hall on Chestnut Street, a cartoon Franklin scampers across the sign for Bennys Place. Franklin peers from the logo for a concert venue called the Electric Factory, and he wears leiderhosen and brandishes a beer stein in ads for the Independence Brew House. You can visit Franklin Square, cross the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, or drive down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

The funny thing is, Franklin wasnt even from here. He was born in humble surroundings in Boston on January 6, 1706. (The date was changed to January 17 when the calendar was adjusted in 1752.) His father, Josiah, had arrived in Massachusetts from England in 1683, shortly after William Penn received a royal charter for an American colony called Pennsylvania. Josiah had seventeen children by his two wives. Benjamins mother, Abiah, was Josiahs second wife, and Franklin was his fifteenth child and youngest son. As Franklin learned when he visited England, he was the youngest Son of the youngest Son for 5 Generations back.

In Boston, Josiah began making candles and soap for a living. He took Ben out of school at age ten to help him make candles, an occupation the boy disliked. Worried that his headstrong youngest son might run away to sea, Josiah decided to apprentice him to his son James, a printer.

Ben was already demonstrating the active, questing intelligence that would characterize him throughout his life. When he found bound copies of the English literary magazine the Spectator in his brothers shop, he used them to polish his own writing. He rewrote the essays, cutting them apart and putting them back together again. He practiced turning prose into verse, and then back into prose. Then I compard my Spectator with the Original, he wrote years later. I discoverd many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the Pleasure of Fancying that in certain Particulars of small Import, I had been lucky enough to improve the Method or the Language and this encouragd me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English Writer, of which I was extreamely ambitious.