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The French Quarter

Friday, May 16, 2025

Philadelphia is the best city in America. And as everyone always says, Philly is a city of neighbourhoods. But what nobody says is that one of these neighbourhoods is the French Quarter. And no, I’m not talking about New Orleans, Philadelphia has its very own French Quarter.

Google Maps screenshot of the French Quarter boundaries

Note: This post was supposed to be completed a few years ago, but delays resulted in me getting scooped. Unlike Billy Penn, I don’t have a Twitter account, so I can’t include any fun Twitter screenshots, but I do think I have a few new things to add, thanks to some on-the-ground reporting and digging through the archives.

Walking the French Quarter

Walking through the neighbourhood you’ll see street signs on some of the corners of the neighbourhood boundaries: Walnut, Sansom, 17th, and 18th (not 19th!).

Photo of the street sign at 17th and Sansom Photo of the street sign at 18th and Sansom Photo of the street sign at 18th and Walnut

Interestingly, the signs at 17th and Walnut are missing. Maybe it should be called the French Three-Quarters.

Photo of the street sign at 17th and Walnut

There are no signs on 19th Street. In fact, most of the sources online that say the Quarter goes between 17th and 19th are wrong, like Google Maps and Wikipedia, along with many sources that use it, including the Billy Penn article. A newspaper article from the day before the French Quarter name was made official in 1999 lists the correct boundaries: “Sansom and Walnut Streets between 17th and 18th”. 1

Photo of the street sign at 19th and Sansom Photo of the street sign at 19th and Walnut

Another thing you might notice walking through the neighbourhood is that it’s not especially French. There is the Sofitel, which is on the north side of Sansom and thus outside the boundaries of the Quarter. Parc, the popular French restaurant, is a little further down the street at 18th and Locust, definitely outside the rectangle. As is La Colombe, at 19th and Walnut, and the nearby Alliance Francaise de Philadelphie, at 15th and Walnut.

So what is French in the boundaries of the French Quarter? The Fleur d’Or Nail Bar, which has a decidedly French name. There is also Anthropologie, which sounds French enough (it’s not). Today, there are far fewer French connections (none?) compared to the first years of the French Quarter.

History

The neighbourhood was given its name on July 14, 1999—Bastille Day 1. I tried to track down some of the official city documentation by going to the city archives, but was told that:

  1. They have never heard of the French Quarter before.
  2. Ed Rendell—who was mayor 1992-2000—is still too recent for his records to be public, so the records are sealed. So we won’t know for many more years who paid for this designation (I suspect a baguette-toting hotel chain—see below).

What we do know is that Mayor Rendell said “There are so many cultural, educational and social connections between Rittenhouse Row and France that it is most appropriate to have an area identified as the French Quarter.” 2

It seems the one who made these connections was Dan Rottenberg in the previous year. On his website he lists his major and minor achievements, and a minor one is “First to identify Center City Philadelphia neighborhood of 17th-18th-Walnut-Sansom as ‘The French Quarter,’ later officially designated as such on street signs (Philadelphia Magazine, July 1998).” 3 At least he got the neighbourhood boundaries right. I found this issue of Phillymag at the library and include some interesting passages here:

And unlike most immigration waves, this French invasion has no apparent downside. Not every Frenchman arrives carrying what instantly becomes America’s greatest art collection, as Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, did when he settled on 9th Street after the Battle of Waterloo. But where other immigrants come here trailing the wretched refuse of their teeming shores, the French tend to tote with them assets, connections, impeccable taste and unlimited quantities of joie de vivre, not to mention a strange and seemingly instinctive talent for creating croissants and soufflés to die for.

Phillymag lives up to the stereotypes.

Thanks in part to this influx, Center City’s Walnut Street/Rittenhouse Square vicinity, which was plagued with vacant storefronts 10 years ago, has lately evolved into an incipient “French Quarter” where every chic Gallic establishment that goes under (Auray, Suzanne Gross Gallery, Descamps, Louis Vuitton, Mephisto) seems immediately to be replaced by an even tonier French business (Rodier, Monique Messin, Mademoiselle de Paris, Vog, La Colombe, Brasserie Perrier) to join the old standbys (Le Bec-Fin, Jacques Ferber Furs and Madeleine Ulitsky’s Happy Rooster).

It seems that there were more French businesses in 1998. Of them, only La Colombe survives to this day.

Wikipedia

The Wikipedia article provides a little information about the neighbourhood, and cites an article from the Philadelphia City Paper4 describing the French Quarter. The talk page has some discussions of confused Wikipedians, all of whom suspect the City Paper article to be fake or an ad.

The article, which I won’t quote as you really should read it yourself, was published in the paper’s “Slant” section. This section was created in 1998 by the newspaper, and was described as a space for editorials, written both by the staff and by readers5. With this context, it becomes more clear that the article by Tom Javian is dripping with sarcasm, and is a work of satire. Unfortunately, this means the neighbourhood was never blessed with the opening of Say Fromage! and Ooh La Yogurt.

The Philadelphia City Paper shut down in 2015, and its archives lived on—for a while—on the website of “My City Paper”, which seemed to be a small online news site that focused on New York City. The now-defunct paper seemed to mostly repost fluff articles and pictures, but amusingly did post a picture on the Rust subreddit.

Sofitel

Prior to the hotel opening in 2000, the general manager of Sofitel at the time said:

It is an upscale, luxurious French hotel with a lot of French touches that most hotels don’t have. For example, all of our guests receive fresh turn downs every night, but we deliver a fresh rose for the bathroom and a bottle of Evian and a weather card telling what the weather will be for the next morning. We have wash mitts instead of washcloths and guests receive a fresh baguette at check out. So really you’re going to get European French service in the hotel. 2

Unfortunately my blog income did not allow me to stay at the Sofitel, and my dignity did not allow me to ask them about the baguettes. I couldn’t find any reviews raving about baguettes at check out, so I assume they no longer do this—if they ever did. I can only imagine they chose to give out the baguettes at check out instead of check in to avoid cleaning up crumbs in the rooms.

My budget did allow for a visit to the Liberté Urban Chic Lounge in the hotel. For this trip in April 2023 I was accompanied by renowned researcher and Francophile Anne-Marie Zaccarin. With her expertise, we were able to make the following observations:

  1. Accents were often wrong on the menu, for example they were missing on liberté and brûlé.
  2. The “French people” at the hotel did not know French.
  3. The “French people” at the hotel had Hydroflasks, the least French water bottle.
  4. The décor featured a prominent American flag.

We concluded that the lounge was not very French at all. Perhaps that went away at the same time as the baguettes.

One of the newspaper articles I consulted actually stated that the area “… will be christened Philly’s French Quarter by Mayor Rendell in honor of the Hotel Sofitel, under construction at 17th and Sansom.” 1 This—along with the date and location of the designation—leads me to believe that Sofitel paid for the French Quarter name.

References

  1. Lessy, Harriet. “Bastille Day on Sansom, Philly’s ‘French Quarter’”. Philadelphia Daily News, 13 July 1999, p. 24. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Crews, Christina. “Hotel will bring French flair to city: Sofitel Philadelphia to open in old Stock Exchange Building”. Philadelphia Tribune, 20 Jul 1999, p. 1D ↩ ↩2

  3. https://danrottenberg.com/wp/major-and-minor-achievements/ ↩

  4. Javian, Tom. “Buddy, Can You Spare a Quarter?”. Philadelphia City Paper, 14 October 1999. ↩

  5. Warner, David. “It’s Different”. Philadelphia City Paper, 29 October 1998. ↩

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Comments

Strawberry: Why didn't you take me there? I wanted a baguette!!

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