Yellow Fever

Deep in the recesses of Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Society Hill, 40 visitors gathered yesterday at the tomb of its first bishop, Richard Allen. "Touch the crypt," urged Charles Blockson, one of the nation's preeminent scholars of African American history. "Touch history. " Black and white history. During the yellow fever epidemic that scourged the city in the summer of 1793, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones headed a cadre of volunteers who went street by street, house by house, tending the sick and burying the dead.

WASHINGTON - A solemn final moment came Wednesday for Walter Reed Army Medical Center when Army commanders rolled up maroon and green flags, symbols of the soul of the military unit that ran the hospital, and placed them in cloth cases, never to be unfurled again. Hundreds of soldiers and staff gathered under a white tent on a beautiful morning to observe the symbolic and funereal end of what Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker called "the most treasured military medical center in the world.

Azuka Theatre's production of Hope Street and Other Lonely Places by Genne Murphy is exactly the kind of show I want to like. A small theater company, a new script by a local playwright, and under the direction of Kevin Glaccum, who runs the company. I arrived with my cheerleader pom-poms at the ready. And then the play began. About halfway through Act 1, I whispered to my friend in the next seat, "Did it start yet?" Hope Street , set in Philadelphia, is built on so many cliches, so much inaction, with so pointlessly inconclusive a plot, and performed in a style of acting so naturalistic that it seems to be anti-acting, that the answer to my question was both yes, obviously, and no, not really.

Thousands of schoolkids and camera-happy tourists flock each year to Carpenters' Hall, the Georgian treasure in Independence National Historical Park, and many of them have the same question: Is this what it looked like when the First Continental Congress made history there in 1774? From the outside, yes. But on the inside, Patrick Henry and the other colonial-era VIPs wouldn't recognize the place. "This building started as a plain meeting hall that was just about finished when the Continental Congress walked in the front door," curator Ruth M. O'Brien says.

DOLLEY Rita Mae Brown (Bantam / $22.95) Philadelphia, the City of Firsts, has yet to send a native son to the White House. But one of its adopted daughters, Dolley Madison, has more than compensated for that deficit. The first lady from Philadelphia, by way of Virginia, is brought to life in a vivid novel by Rita Mae Brown. The book is the product of Brown's lifelong fascination with the early American heroine. "I think my affinity for Dolley started because of her incredible courage," Brown said in a recent interview.

If Harvard president Lawrence Summers thinks women lack innate scientific abilities, he may want to check with the girls of Springside School in Chestnut Hill. Students in teacher Kim Eberle-Wang's environmental-science class at this private girls' school accounted for eight of the 41 finalists and semifinalists in the 11th- and 12th-grade divisions of the recent Young Naturalist Awards sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "Over the years, Kim's students have done very well," said Christine Economos, administrator of the awards program.

Anita Batman says she takes patients with her when she attends meetings as the mid-Atlantic region's top public health official. Not literally, of course. But memories of them. There's the 12-year-old prostitute whose first three babies were delivered by Batman, who worked for years as a Mississippi country doctor. There's the mentally retarded girl who was molested by her father. There's the mother and daughter whose legs were severely injured by the woman's husband. She has happier memories, too, such as the premature baby who thrived and came to think of the "M.D.

It's a big task for a group short on time, but the Friends of the Lazaretto are still scrambling to pull together the $3.5 million to buy the 10-acre site that some have dubbed Philadelphia's Ellis Island. Grant money has yet to be secured, but the group has reason to be hopeful of saving the 18th-century Lazaretto, now that a buyer with preservation plans has matched the asking price and is talking with the site's owners. The owners, Island Marine Partners, have four development plans for the site on the Delaware River waterfront, but the township's zoning board has denied three of them, prompting an appeal to Delaware County Court.

It's the 18th century and we're taking a walk down Walnut Street from - oh, say, around the Penn Mutual Building to the Ritz Five theaters, then on to Penn's Landing. We've rented a tape cassette for Nancy Gilboy's do-it-at-your-own-pace AudioWalk & Tour, so we know that we're walking on cobblestones, through horse manure and garbage (the habit being to throw waste in the streets, a tradition that will continue), and past a peach orchard in Independence Square, known as State House Yard.

Psssst. Hey, buddy, want to buy the Walt Whitman bridge? No? Then how 'bout a piece of the English Chunnel? You know, the English Chunnel. The project those guys in London and Paris are talking about. The one they're calling the Eurotunnel. It's supposed to be a tunnel under the English Channel. That way, if you're in England, you'll be able to sort of drive to Europe. And if you're in Europe, you'll be able to sort of drive to England. You don't actually drive.