Social Diary: The Great Divide

Can residents of the Main Line and the northern suburbs around Chestnut Hill ever be friends? Or are the waters of the Schuylkill destined to forever be a Philly socialite’s Rubicon?

“She asked me, ‘Where should I live in Philadelphia?’” recalls Putman, “and I of course said ‘Chestnut Hill.’ When she came back to Cambridge, she said, ‘Do you have any idea where Wilmington is?’ I said, ‘Sure, it’s south.’”

Kathleen informed her fiancé that Wilmington was only a 50-minute drive from the Main Line, but an hour-and-a-half-long schlep from Chestnut Hill, and that she had signed a lease on an apartment in Ardmore. Shocking news indeed. “When we got married a couple of years later, I moved into her apartment, and later we bought a house there,” Putnam says. “Of course, my brother and sister stayed in Chestnut Hill, and my mother referred to me as ‘the one who moved away.’”

Then, in 1991, an amazing development took place: After 38 years of planning, then 24 more years of arguing and -eminent-domaining, the Blue Route opened, a miraculous stretch of road that would link I-95 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Sure, it meant that traffic would flow easily around the metropolitan Philadelphia area, but socially, it had a different implication. Now that they were separated by a breezy 10-minute jaunt up 476, couples in Haverford could easily get together with friends who lived in Plymouth Meeting. If your home was in Fort Washington, it would now be incredibly easy to take the kids over to, say, the Devon Horse Show in May.

This being Philly, where change tends to happen at the rate at which legged creatures climbed out of the primordial ooze, no one did any of those things. Even a $760 million road that literally paved the way between the Main Line and the northern suburbs couldn’t bring the two closer together. “That didn’t do much, did it?” observes Putnam.

For one thing, Main Liners still couldn’t figure out what lay beyond that interchange where Ikea used to be. Was Chestnut Hill right there? Was Plymouth Meeting a town, or just a mall? Forget Gwynedd Valley — that was amorphous and confusing, and sounded more remote than New Hope. Breslow, the PR executive, says that when he and his wife invite Main Line friends over, “They get to the Blue Bell Inn, and they call and ask, ‘How much farther?’ Even if they have GPS, there’s heavy breathing.”

“I think Philadelphians have an almost willful refusal to learn other areas,” says Alfred Putnam. Plus, he theorizes, whichever side of the river we’re from, we don’t bother to learn road names, so we can’t offer directions. “I got completely lost when I was living in Chestnut Hill and would try to find Kathleen’s apartment in Ardmore,” he says. “I just didn’t know. And I’d ask my father, who’d grown up in Wynnewood, for directions, and he’d say, ‘Well, you turn left where the old tree used to be.’ And he was serious. It was at the corner of Old Gulph Road or something.”