PHOTO VIA SOUTH STREET HEADHOUSE DISTRICT / FACEBOOK.
“The late Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Acel Moore wrote about his memories of Philly’s Easter Promenade during his 1950s childhood.
He and his brother, dressed in the pink shirts and wool-worsted suits their mother would buy for them once each year, ‘couldn’t wait to walk from our neighborhood in South Philadelphia to Center City’ and join in the annual fashion show.
‘You would have to beat me with a stick to tell me that I wasn’t the best-dressed in the city,’ Moore wrote, ‘even when we got downtown and saw hundreds of other boys and men wearing suits of the same design.’
Strutting around in finery on Easter Sunday became common long before Philadelphia had a coordinated Promenade. In East Coast metropolises of the late 19th century, Easter was considered even more of a major shopping holiday than Christmas, so newly well-dressed families were eager to show off their new duds.”
