The mile-long Benjamin Franklin Parkway, known as Museum Row -
or, less convincingly, as "America's Champs-Elysees" - sweeps
northwest from City Hall to the colossal Museum of Art in
Fairmount Park , an area of countryside annexed by the city
in the nineteenth century. Spanning nine hundred scenic acres on
both sides of the Schuylkill River, this is one of the world's
largest landscaped city parks, with jogging, biking and hiking
trails, early American homes, an all-wars memorial to the state's
black soldiers, and a zoo - the country's first - at 3400 Girard
Ave (daily 9.30am-5pm, hours vary in summer; $10.50; tel
215/243-1100). In the late 1960s, local residents Muhammad
Ali and Joe Frazier all but brought the city to a standstill
with the announcement one afternoon that they were heading for
Fairmount for an informal slug-out.
Sylvester Stallone later immortalized the steps of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art (Tues & Thurs-Sun 10am-5pm,
Wed 10am-8.45pm; $10, pay what you wish all day Sun), 26th Street
and Franklin Parkway, by running up them in the film Rocky ,
but he missed out on a real treat inside: one of the finest
collections in the US, with a twelfth-century French cloister,
Renaissance art, a complete Robert Adam interior from a 1765
house in London's Berkeley Square, Rubens tapestries, Pennsylvania
Dutch crafts and Shaker furniture , a strong
Impressionist collection, and the world's most extensive
collection of the works of Marcel Duchamp . Exhibits are
displayed in an easy-to-follow chronological order. On Wednesday
nights, there are excellent programs of live jazz and classical
music along with film showings and artistic debate - all included
in the admission price.
A few blocks away at Franklin Parkway and 22nd Street (Tues-Sun
10am-5pm; donation; tel 215/763-8100), the exquisite Rodin
Museum , marble-walled and set in a shady garden with a green
pool, holds the largest collection of Rodin's Impressionistic
sculptures and casts outside Paris, including The Thinker, The
Burghers of Calais and The Gates of Hell . Among the
rare books at the Free Library of Philadelphia , 19th and
Vine streets (Mon-Thurs 9am-9pm, Fri 9am-6pm, Sat 9am-5pm, tours at
11am; free; tel 215/686-5322), are cuneiform tablets from 3000 BC,
medieval manuscripts, first editions of Dickens and Poe, and such
intriguing titles as the 1807 Inquiry into the Conduct of the
Princess of Wales .
Over the road in the vast Franklin Institute Science
Museum (N 20th St and Benjamin Franklin Parkway; Sun-Thurs
9.30am-5pm, Fri-Sat 9am-9pm; tel 215/448-1200) are a
Planetarium ($6), the four-story OMNIVERSE movie
theater ($7.50) and the Mandell Futures Center ($9.75) -
a state-of-the-art facility filled with entertaining gadgets such
as a hugely popular machine on which you can see (disappointingly
hazy) images of your face aged by 25 years. A combination
ticket ($14.50) covers admission to all three. Continuing the
educational theme, the nearby Academy of Natural Sciences
exhibits dinosaurs, mummies and gems (Mon-Fri 10am-4.30pm, Sat
& Sun 10am-5pm; $9; tel 215-299-1000), while the Please
Touch Museum , 210 N 21st St (daily 9am-4.30pm; $6.50), is a
hands-on adventureland aimed at youngsters.