I am, and I don't want anything to change her.” “My wife says I'm married to this place,” Mr. Paglioni, the maitre d' hôtel at the restaurant, still one of the city's favorite, has worked at the Barclay since 1934. Christine Ewell, for instance, has been the parlormaid since 1932, and Domino L. That would please its patrons as well as its staff of nearly 200, many of whom have been here long enough to regard the Barclay as their home, too. Sheer economics dictated the move, the management explained, promising that the essence of the hotel would not be altered. As a result, people who have looked on the Barclay as home for years-people like Eugene Ormandy, the conductor of the Philadephia Orchestra-must now decide whether they wish to own a part of the building. Last month, it was announced that its 312 permanent apartments would be converted to condominiums at prices ranging from $30,000 to $175,000. Like the rest of Rittenhouse Square, though, even that is changing. It is a large but not unfriendly structure built in 1929 of a chewing gum gray granite with both permanent and transient accommodations. The Barclay Hotel is like that-a kind of haven for those whose hearts belong to yesterday. Sullivan said, tipping the gleaming brim of his hat instinctively to a passing banker and stepping back inside the hotel where he has worked for the last 40 years. Their children were married an gone, and their own numbers have diminished as the cost of living quickly ascended until just last month, a local magazine's listing of the city's wealthiest residents was almost completely void of old Rittenhouse names. They were no longer young, no longer attractive, no longer so vibrantly healthy. Their nurses used the Square as a playground for the babies, and when their daughters grew up, their costly debuts and weddings were often just next door at the Barclay Hotel. Their maids shopped for them just around the corner and picked flowers for their tables on the way home. On Sundays, they brunched on its lawn with champagne, and strawberries and caviar from wicker baskets. They walked beneath its giant elms and oaks after their dinner parties. They were after all, Philadelphia, and they were, after all, eminently pleased with themselves and the city.įor many of them, Rittenhouse was a fortress. John O'Hara's fictional scorn or the derision inherent in W. Once the city was kneedeep in old money families -the Biddies, the Dukes, the Cadwalladers, a few duPonts and dozens of others-who were the spine of its social and cultural traditions. But they are saddened more by a demise of larger dimensions-the final passing of the blue‐blooded, stiffly starched, socially registered Philadelphia epitomized by Rittenhouse Square. He and many others who are disturbed by what is happening to the Square are pained by its immediate alterations-the increased litter, the noise, the nocturnal crime. Sullivan's pique seems especially polgnant. Nevertheless, in a city like this, where change comes on like a glacier and third‐generation natives are often seen as newcomers, Mr. The fabric of society here and across the country has been so thoroughly rewoven over the last two decades that hardly anyone has not voiced a similar complaint. I tell you, sir, it's like watching something beautiful die.” “They've moved away, or the money's all gone, or they're old like me, or dead or dying, and the kids-those damned kids and the rest of the weirdos -they're taking over. The address was synonymous with wealth and prestige. They lived luxuriously in sprawling apartments or lavish townhouses close by, and Rittenhouse became their common, exclusive estate. Sullivan's hotel, which is about to become a partial condominium, the Square is indeed changing, and that is what saddens him.Ĭonceived by William Penn and named for an early founding family, the Square became in the latter days of the 19th century the very hub of an aristocratic life‐style created, subsidized, enjoyed and perpetuated by Philadelphia's elite minority. The object of his pity was the Square itself, a onceserenely elegant, all‐white oasis of trees and grass and fountains and benches and statuary wedged into the southwestern fringe of the downtown area-now a favorite of young idlers-black and white-old wastrels and homosexuals of all ages. It's like watching a flower just wither and die.”

“It's like watching something beautiful die,” he mused, brushing lint from a gold‐braided epaulet. PHILADELPHIA, April 3-Frank Sullivan, the venerable bell captain at the aging Barclay Hotel, was standing outside its front doors one recent morning, staring morosely across the street at the park‐like expauses of Rittenhouse Square.

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