October 8 2011, 9:38 AM
I've read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford so many times, at least four, because it's on my phone and whenever I idly start reading it I can't stop, and yet I just saw this. The main character is a Philadelphian, and he writes this about his wife:
Florence was singularly expert as a guide to archaeological expeditions and there was nothing she liked so much as taking people round ruins and showing you the window from which some one looked down upon the murder of some one else. She only did it once; but she did it quite magnificently. She could find her way, with the sole help of Baedeker, as easily about any old monument as she could about any American city where the blocks are all square and the streets all numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth.
This is clearly about Philly because the blocks are all square and the streets are all numbered -- and because the narrator refers at another point to
the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets.
So the Philly he knows is Center City Philly.
And you can't go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth there, because the Schuylkill River is in the way.
KA POW.
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