Philadelphia
"This city of 200,000 souls resembles none of those that I have seen up to now.
It is of a regularity that one is tempted to find too perfect. Not a street but
traverses the entire city in one direction or another; and all of them are laid out
with geometric precision. All the edifices are neat, kept up with extreme care,
and have all the freshness of new buildings. It's a charming city, very favorable
to those who have no carriage, since all the streets are bordered with wide side-
walks; and its sole defect, I repeat, is to be monotonous in its beauty."
Beaumont (Pierson 457)
"Philadelphia is an immense city. You can convince yourself of it for it occupies the entire space between the Delaware and the Schuikil [sic]. All the houses are of brick, and without portes cocheres following the English custom, and the streets straight as a string. The regularity is tiresome but very convenient. Philadelphia is, I believe, the only city in the world where it has occurred to people to distinguish the streets by numbers and not by names. The system of streets is so regular that, starting from the Delaware where it is Street No. 1, one goes up number by number all the way to the Schuikil.
I am living at Street No. 3. Don't you find that only a people whose imagination is frozen could invent such a system? Europeans never fail to join an idea to each external object, be it a saint, a famous man, an event. But these people here know only arithmetic."
Tocqueville (Pierson 457-458)
Itinerary