Hit the road: Secrets of Germantown Avenue

PENNDOT HAS been tearing up swaths of Germantown Avenue in Northwest Philly recently in a $17 million roadwork project. Inspired by the effort, we at the Daily News put on our hard hats and grabbed our pickaxes to dig for some secret finds along the avenue.

Eureka! Did we ever hit paydirt!

Did you know that George Washington's granddaughter, whose father attended the old Germantown Academy just off Germantown Avenue, was married to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee?

During his presidency, Washington himself lived right on the avenue for two stints during 1793 and 1794, at the Deshler-Morris house in Germantown. It was his refuge from yellow fever.

Did you also know that some of Barack Obama's ancestors — from the German branch of his crazy-quilt lineage — lived up near Cresheim Cottage, an avenue landmark?

Their surname was Goodnight, and University of Pennsylvania archivist James Duffin says they could well have watched from their house as Gen. Washington proceeded along Germantown Avenue during the ill-fated Battle of Germantown. "They probably waved at him as he ran by with the troops," Duffin says. "Either that or they were hiding in the basement along with everyone else that day."

Did you also know that there's a fishmonger on Germantown Avenue in Mount Airy with fried platters so sublime you'd wish every day were a Friday in Lent? It's called Groben's Seafood, and the Northwesterners have kept its takeout stand a secret to themselves for too long.

Ye olde pavement

Before you go, a brief orientation:

Germantown, the southernmost of the three Northwest neighborhoods, is the richest in history. In the 1700s, it was the be all and end all of country living.

Today, the stretch of Germantown Avenue between Wayne Junction and Washington Lane offers a jarring contrast of important Colonial history and gritty urban life. (Also, because of monster potholes, a jarring ride.)

We're guessing it's the only cobblestone street in America with an auto-transmission garage at curbside. But it's also the only street in Philly where you can buy heirloom vegetables from a 319-year-old garden — at Wyck (6026 Germantown Ave., near Walnut Lane), a National Historic Landmark.

"Once they start harvesting, they're there every day," says Germantown Historical Society volunteer Gene Stackhouse, who lives nearby.

Crunchy: The next gen

Moving up the avenue, we come to Mount Airy. There's no denying the stereotype: "This has been a granola community for a long, long time," says Lesley Seitchik, gadabout-about-town and spokeswoman for the neighborhood Valley Green Bank.

Still racially integrated after all these years, Mount Airy is attracting some new shops and restaurants to its stretch of Germatown Avenue (officially from Washington Lane to Cresheim Valley Road). It's also enjoying a new influx of young homeowners who'd probably go naked before they wore Birkenstocks.

Farah Jimenez, a rising star in city power circles and a sparkplug for neighborhood redevelopment as executive director at Mt. Airy, USA, points to Dan and Melissa Muroff as a couple of new homesteaders who don't fit the socks-and-sandals mold.

He's a lobbyist. She's in the green-roof business. "They wear, actually, leather motorcycle jackets," Jimenez says. "They go biking."

Hilltop shops

Chestnut Hill, the loftiest precinct of Germantown Avenue (but secretly jealous of Germantown's richer history, confides local architect Larry McEwan), is also the most amenable to daytrippers.

The Chestnut Hill West stop on SEPTA's R8 regional line puts you at the top of the hill, a pleasant point of embarkation for a stroll down a 10-block pedestrian shopping district that's the envy of urban planners throughout America.

Streetscapes and urban design are something of an obsession in these parts. In an ongoing rift of the only-in-Chestnut-Hill variety, a proposed expansion to the Woodmere Art Museum by Philly's international architects Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates has been held up for years in zoning and court appeals by some locals.

Along with traffic, parking and size concerns, one neighbor who's against it has called the design inappropriately "iconographic."

Rumors and detours

If you spend time on Germantown Avenue, you may hear a persistent rumor that its signature cobblestones were laid by slaves in Colonial times. Not true, says Stackhouse.

In Colonial times, Germantown Avenue (then known as Main Street) was a dirt road. One account describes it as such a muck pit that the townsfolk would mount their horses to cross the street.

The cobblestones arrived in the 1800s and were laid mainly by Italian laborers.

There's also a notion that, given the PennDOT roadwork along the avenue — slated to continue through November, with some block-by-block closures to come as work continues — you can't get there from here.

Also not true. Yes, through-traffic (and the SEPTA Route 23 bus) is being sent on a tortuous detour between East Mount Airy Avenue and Willow Grove Avenue. But for the duration of the project, local traffic will be able to drive to any block except the one that's closed for construction. *