And by the time in the 1990s that the long-delayed Parisian cafe culture did blossom, it sprouted all across Center City, except on the Parkway.
So it was with great satisfaction that, one day last week, you could rest your bones at the new Cafe Cret, and over a decent roast-turkey panini and a cup of coffee watch the world go by: a gaggle of schoolgirls in jumpers headed home; a young man with a guitar case strapped on his back chatting up a young woman over a table next to the patio; Lance Neckar, a professor from Minneapolis, studiously snapping pictures.
Neckar was in town for a convention of landscape architects. And if the cafe's namesake, Paul Cret (pronounced Cray), is no longer a household word here, among designers of public spaces - he laid out the original Parkway - he remains a landmark as familiar as Rittenhouse Square, for which he also did the overhaul in 1913.
The square was to be, by his lights, "a calm and elegant oasis in the heart of the city." But if the cafe, spearheaded by the Center City District as a step in the return to Cret's original Parkway vision, does not quite match that Rittenhouse ideal, it is an island nonetheless, and a heroic revival of what had become, northwest of JFK Plaza, a forlorn and lifeless triangle.
One could wish, as always, for more. A more distinctive structure, perhaps, looking less like a glorified subway entrance. A take-out case less reminiscent of a Starbucks, a branch of which is across the street. And on-premises coffee (Would it be too much to ask?) served in ceramic, not only paper, cups!
One could wish for Danny Meyer's burger-heaven Shake Shack in New York's Madison Square Park, an open-air cafe in the heart of Galway, or the more flavor of the Parkway's role model - the Champs-Elysee.
Except that here is here, and you start where you're at.
