As Smart worked in the flower bed, he began to cultivate a book idea fed by many of his passions - the centennial, which was this country's first World's Fair; the newspaper life; the rich strata of Philadelphia history.
He toyed with writing a period novel, but fiction was not so easy for a man who for 60 years has traded in hard-won fact. So he compromised and spent most of the next decade trying to evoke a real centennial-era Philadelphia through the eyes of an imagined scribe named Adonijah Hill, a widower and Civil War vet with an appreciation for detail and an eye for a wellborn journalist and early suffragist named Amanda.
The Philadelphia that 18 daily papers covered in 1876 was a metropolis in bloom. Construction had begun on City Hall, destined to become the world's tallest building. The Academy of Natural Sciences and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were finding new homes.
Technology drew the vast world within reach. That April, express trains would quicken the journey from Philadelphia to Boston from six days to 12 hours. Steamships would bear fresh oranges, which to a reporter from Fishtown were as exotic as diamonds.
To re-create this world, Smart spent months at Temple University's Urban Archives, where the Bulletin's morgue resides. He pored over old Harper's magazines and at the Free Library used a real estate atlas to bring alive the city's gaslit byways.
When his protagonist complains that it's not easy getting from Fishtown to the Wagner Free Institute of Science at 17th and Montgomery, know that Smart has studied the streetcar routes of the day.
