Ben Franklin would be right at home in today’s Philadelphia

Perhaps more than with any other Founding Father, it’s easy to imagine Benjamin Franklin strolling the streets of Philadelphia today.

This is not simply because, on any given day in Old City, you’ll pass three to five Franklin reenactors in a 10-block radius. It’s just that, even 300 years after he first arrived in our greene countrie towne, he feels timeless.

Other Founding Fathers have been more or less enshrined in bronze, mythologized almost beyond recognition: Washington the soldier, Jefferson the poet. But there’s a fullness about Franklin that makes him feel like a real person, still.

» READ MORE: Ben Franklin created the Philadelphian: Nine weird stories that prove it

Part of this is Franklin’s own design: He was a master at cultivating his own image — Philadelphia’s first celebrity, an 18th-century influencer. Then, as now, he was known as the everyman of the Revolution, the self-taught scientist, quirky inventor, pioneering printer, and elder statesman who charmed kings in a coonskin cap.

He was also deeply flawed, knew it, and tried to be better.

He opens his autobiography with the confession that, if he could have lived his life over again, he would have fixed certain things — not least that he held people in slavery as a young man in Philadelphia. (At the time of his death, he was the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.)

In short, Franklin helped create the idea of the American character — good and bad, said Karie Diethorn, chief curator of Independence National Historical Park.

“He’s very much a symbol, I think, of what Americans, even Americans in the 21st century, believe is a true American character,” she said. “He seems three-dimensional to us because of those qualities.”

Imagine him now, Phillies cap in place of his tricorn, striding down Market Street reading The Inquirer on a smartphone he invented. He might tweet a pithy proverb, followed by a lament about our sports teams. (They’re doing well now, of course, but Franklin is a true Philadelphian. He’d probably be despairing, like the rest of us, that the Eagles are only 4-0.)

Maybe he’d be on his way to take in a Phillies playoff game or wander the idiosyncratic galleries at the Barnes Foundation. He’d probably be as at home people-watching from a streetside table at Parc as he would be holding court at the corner tavern.

“I think that he would be really sincere in his interest in what we’ve done in the 250 years since his lifetime — not judgmental, but curious. And I think, to me, it’s Franklin’s curiosity that is his most attractive quality,” said Diethorn.

So, too, is his capacity for change, his self-awareness. It makes it easier to imagine him grappling with all that’s changed — and all that hasn’t — in the three centuries since he arrived in this city.

It’s not hard to think of the man who insisted on calling himself an improver instead of an inventor tackling some of Philly’s most entrenched problems, ones he would run up against on his daily walks in the 1770s: poverty, inequity, racism.

“I think he would have been trying to figure out an invention for a better street cleaner,” joked Aimee Newell, the director of collections and exhibitions at the Museum of the American Revolution.

In seriousness, she said, he would care about “those issues about making the city a place that people want to visit and live in, wanting to bring people together to listen to each other rather than argue.”

Every once in a while Boston tries to claim our founding father as its own. Let them have dour John Adams and noble Paul Revere. Franklin — in all his brilliance and messiness and humanness — is ours.

“It couldn’t have been Ben Franklin anywhere else,” said Diethorn. “This is where he becomes himself.”