Field Trip!

Today I woke up full of energy. Today, class was not going to be held in a classroom, but in the actual city of Philadelphia. The whole day scheduled out for us to visit a number of museums and historical sites. I went through my daily rituals, and then to the classroom, where we met before we got another chance to experience the Philadelphia subway. Instead of paper cards, the subway system uses small dime like coins. While on the subway, you could sense that notorious Philadelphia atmosphere, which is not pleasant.

The first stop we lost a few people, but when they caught up we stopped and analyzed a few things about the building structure. There were old churches and even old hotels that had been around since 1885. We discussed how this was one of the first hotels to actually integrate blacks and whites into one hotel. One of the many ways that the owner did this was through feasts. These feasts were open to basically anyone but when they came to sit, he arranged it by black, white and so on. This was very fascinating that an actual artifact of history was just there sitting in the middle of town. We than walked a few blocks towards the local jail that was also in function around the same time as the hotel.

Jail Model

Parts of the Jail were failing apart due to it not being taken care for 20 years, but now that it was there were plenty of opportunites for us to learn more about the evolution of jails. In the beginning of jails there were no individual cells; rather everyone was in the same room together without supervision. Many things occurred in these situations, such as violent fights and even the passing of criminal “advise”. The next step to the jailing system was to make individual rooms along with supervision. The doors to the jail cell seemed very small, but we all know people weren’t midgets back then. In analyzing the situation, we could tell that the creator of the prison wanted to implement a sense of going down or bowing to a greater force into their head to trigger a response which would be them not committing crimes anymore. The inmates were in a small little room with a small vertical window that only viewed the sun. The only experience with being outside, was a small square block outside of the quarters, which they had an hour to enjoy. After the jail we headed to get something to eat at a local pizza place and then we went to a museum for liberty, where we viewed past history of glass art.

Today was the first day that I decided to do laundry. I have previously had experience doing laundry so it was not so much of a big deal. The big deal was finding an open washing machine, because almost all of them were taken by clothes being washed or clothes that were finished. When David and I finally found open washers, we went to eat dinner and actually try to find the 12 Benjamin Franklins. We didn’t have much luck as we only found two of them and decided to go back and check on our laundry. “Today was a good day” and there are much more to come as I am very excited to be going to New York city this weekend.

Another Historic Site