Philadelphia Inquirer 12-13-2005
A place where the past is still alive
There's a community just east of Swarthmore that sits in a time
warp, a neighborhood where each home is a wrap-around jewel. Its
families have lived on the same blocks for generations. Here,
friends and strangers talk to each other. Parents make a pact to
watch one another's children, and strolling husbands and wives greet
and linger with you as you're hanging holiday lights.
The borough's name is Rutledge.
In June, my family and I moved from a busier neighborhood into a century-old house there, a three-story dwelling full of memories on a big, deep lot. I didn't realize how much history there was in Rutledge. But when a beautiful white-haired lady named Helen Van Trieste opened the door of her Florentine home - a sage-colored building of brick accents and white scalloped shingles - I looked down her long corridor and saw the past.
The streets are unbelievably quiet in Rutledge. As I walk, I'm reminded that the borough was established by employees of the Mundell Shoe Manufacturing Co. in 1885 - during Grover Cleveland's presidency and Queen Victoria's reign. The town has kept marvelous records of its history. Writers, artists, businesspeople, policemen, and garden club members lived here. And still do.
"Rutledge has always been the best-kept secret," said Lee Morrisey, a graphic designer who served on the town's Centennial Committee. "When we began preparing for the centennial, there was a lot of discussion about how much we should let people know about our town," Morrisey said.
Today, there's a hush in early mornings and at night; no ambient traffic noise, no speeding, except for an occasional teen showing off in a white convertible. The quiet is so gorgeous that I'm convinced Rutledge is a movie set, a four-block chunk of the 1950s transported to our century as a reminder of what often feels lost.
But even before I learned that Rutledge was named after a popular romantic novel, Rutledge by Miriam Coles Harris, and even before I had met the families - the Mecouches, Warmerdams, Borsches, Hansers, Martins, McGaugheys and others - and even before a cadre of neighborhood boys met our moving van and cheerfully carried in our boxes, I knew this place was guarded with love.
"Oh, that's our memory tree," Van Trieste said of a tree on her porch adorned with ornaments and photographs of herself with husband Robert, a WWII pilot and electrician and the five children they raised. She had lived for 41 years in the house she was showing me - offering me - along with its history.
It's not that everything is perfect here. Because of bureaucratic squabbling, the borough was unable to save a beautiful historic school, the Rutledge Institute, from being razed. In the late 1950s, on the eve of his move into quiet Rutledge, George T. Raymond saw his home destroyed by fire. Raymond, then president of the Chester branch of the NAACP, rebuilt and moved in anyway. Today his granddaughter Justine Keyes lives in that same rebuilt house with her daughters and grandchildren.
Paul Mecouch, the town's 82-year-old manager, told me Rutledge was changing too quickly. Two-wage earner families, rising property taxes, and a drop in volunteerism come right along with a boom in home renovations. "We're starting to lose the old timers," Mecouch said. "The new people don't participate readily in activities like the fire company. We need more involvement."
But Dollie Miles, a third-generation Rutledge resident who runs a beauty salon in her home, still loves the place. "Even with the young people trying to change the rules, eventually they come around and understand why they're here to begin with," she said. "Rutledge is an old-fashioned neighborhood. If you need anything, people will help."
As for me, I bought the Van Trieste home. When my son climbed the stairs to the third-floor loft with its hidden attic room smelling of cedar and open trunks, children's toys, and captain's ships, he got lost in it and never wanted to leave.
Arielle Emmett lives and writes in
Rutledge.
