Before the Threshold

I was ground before I was an address. Twenty-two feet across the front, ninety feet running back to the little street behind, and a slab of white marble set at the edge to take the weather. What I learned first was mortar — the whole row going up at once, filling in westward from the corner. Cart ruts. Lime dust turning to paste in the rain. Then, one autumn, boots that wiped themselves before coming in.

Ground, and What Stood on It

On April 21, 1854, a merchant named John Roset bought a lot on the south side of Pine Street, two hundred and thirty feet west of Eighteenth: twenty-two feet of frontage, ninety feet deep, running south to Waverly Street. The abstract recites only the ground and its measurements — the form's standard wording, which tells us nothing either way about the house. Whether brick already stood there that April or rose in the months after, the deed leaves open. The direction of travel is plain enough. The city directory for 1853 lists no Pine Street number anywhere near this stretch; a year later they begin appearing, filling in from the corner like teeth. By 1855 the block is full.

All that certain lot or piece of ground, two hundred and thirty feet west of Eighteenth.

The marble belonged to a handsome speculative row: nineteen four-story, two-bay brick houses in the late Greek Revival taste, drawn identically on the atlas — a four-story front block, a three-story back building, and open ground behind it running down to Waverly. Nineteen versions of the same door, the same window rhythm, the same white step. Individuality arrived with the people, and the people arrived fast.

The Number That Moved

For its first years the house answered to another number. The directory for 1855 prints Roset John, merchant, at 756 Pine. The 1858 volume prints the same man, same trade, at 1822 Pine. Between those two books the city renumbered itself, adding 1,066 to every door on the block at once. Sixteen households shifted in step; 756 became 1822, and its neighbours moved with it. The man who printed the directory lived a few doors east and renumbered his own house in it.

Coal smoke in the winters, and the sound a new house makes — joists settling, plaster giving up its water, one stair tread finding its complaint and keeping it. I could tell hired feet from invited ones by the hour and by the pause. Invited feet hesitate. Hired feet never do.

The Drexel Family Connection

Four years before he bought this ground, Roset's daughter Ellen Bicking Rozet married Anthony J. Drexel on August 13, 1850. That marriage is the house's Drexel connection: a family relationship, rather than a claim of ownership. From about 1867 Anthony's younger brother Joseph W. Drexel held a house on the opposite side of the street, at 1829 Pine — by which time the Rosets had long since let this door out to tenants.

A Fashionable Address, To Let

Here the story turns, because Roset did not stay. He held the property thirty-nine years and lived in it four. The directories hand the door along like a coin: a man they give no trade at all, then an engineer and a widow sharing one entry in a single volume, then a glassworks man, then a grocer with a Market Street counter. Each of them paid rent to somebody else. By 1871 the tenant is Howard Spencer, a company president with an office on South Third, who had brought his household in from Burlington, New Jersey.

The address carried its own weight regardless of who paid for it. Two blocks from the Square, on a street the city had decided to take seriously, the number alone was worth printing — and merchants printed it, in lists of the households they wished to be seen supplying.

John Roset died on August 9, 1870, in his seventy-sixth year, not here but out in West Philadelphia. The notice the next evening remembered him briefly: in his active days Mr. Roset was a prominent merchant. The property passed by will, and then by will again, and then into a trust company's keeping, and went on letting.

Thirty-nine years under one name and a new set of feet every few of them. I stopped expecting permanence early. What I kept instead was the shape of an evening: the door held open a beat too long, cold coming in at ankle height, someone in the hall saying goodnight twice because the first one did not take. Nineteen houses went up on this block in a single gesture. Only one of them has this hall, and the goodnights in it still take two tries.