Social Diary: The Great Divide

How can two leafy, beautiful areas that are mirror images of each other — two sides of the same privileged coin — feel so vastly different to those who live in them? Both are dotted with golf courses and a mix of charming older stone homes and comfortable new mansions. Each has its venerated prep schools (EA, Haverford, Baldwin and Shipley vs. GA, Penn Charter, Chestnut Hill and Springside) and excellent public schools (laptop debacles aside). The Guard House and Du Jour restaurants are the Main Line cousins of the Blue Bell Inn and Chestnut Hill’s trendy Cake. If you want a cute, funky and (relatively) affordable town, you have Narberth to the south, and Ambler up north. And if the Social Register serves as your personal Google, it’s filled with folks who populate both sides of the river.

But still, Chestnut Hill/Blue Bell people don’t go to the Main Line unless forced to by a medical emergency. (There are a lot of great shrinks and Botox doctors between Bala Cynwyd and Bryn Mawr.) And people from Paoli and Merion don’t go to Blue Bell, because they don’t know where it is. So is it the topography? The way people speak, dress, eat, the cars they drive? Too much vodka on the one hand, too much gin on the other? Is one side J.Crew and the other Lacoste, one side tennis and the other side lacrosse?

One Main Liner damns Chestnut Hill as being filled with elderly women in Birkenstocks and hippie skirts: “When I go there, I feel like I’m going to a dark village.” Counters a Lower Gwynedd lawyer: “I go to the Main Line, and I see a level of superficiality, and the houses are astronomically more expensive. And the thing that baffles me is that people who live on the Main Line send their kids to private school. Why? Is it worth $40,000?” He pauses. “People say they want to be able to get to their office in 20 minutes, and that’s why they live in Lower Merion. But it’s more than that. Is there a nicer way to say ‘snob appeal’?”

In his 1968 book The Right People, social observer Stephen Birmingham wrote, “Not long ago, a group was formed which whimsically called itself the Society for the Preservation of Cultural Relations Between the East and West Banks of the Schuylkill, in an attempt to bring the Main Line and Chestnut Hill together.” The group for a time held an annual dance, but due to an overwhelming lack of interest, it was soon cancelled.

It seemed only marriage could convince people to river-cross. In 1973, Alfred Putnam, a Chestnut Hill native who now heads the Drinker Biddle law firm, was at Harvard, preparing himself to attend Penn Law; his future wife Kathleen, also at Harvard, was also heading to Philly, to pursue an MBA at Wharton. Wharton arranged for Kathleen to work for a year at duPont in Wilmington during graduate school, so she traveled down from Cambridge to look for an apartment that would be convenient to both Wharton and Wilmington.