Editor's letter.

We may be living with the past here at The Magazine ANTIQUES but that doesn't mean we're entombed in it. I was reminded of the difference this spring during three days at the Philadelphia Antiques Show. Held for the first time at the city's Navy Yard, a cluster of muscular nineteenth-century brick buildings set like a village at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, the show seemed every bit as vigorous as its new location. More than once I found myself talking to second or third generation dealers like the glamorous Jenifer Kindig, who moves swiftly on mile-high Prada heels between our digital world and the fine furniture of eighteenth-century Maryland.

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Philadelphia has always lived easily with history too. Except for the Liberty Bell Center, a drab theme park for which the federal government can probably be blamed, the city's juxtapositions of past and present are full of lively accidents--some happy, some a little messy: eighteenth-century town houses and glass and steel condominiums, small museums devoted to Edgar Allan Poe or Betsy Ross near dive bars and diners, the gracious Fairmount Park hard by the old Eastern State Penitentiary. Better these collisions any day than the mummification of a city by the New Urbanists with their bossy sentimentality.

To my mind the antiques show more than held its own next to the other big ticket events across from the Navy Yard that weekend. The Phillies, 76ers, and Flyers were all playing a little more than a center fielder's throw from Peale family portraits, a burl veneer Queen Anne high chest of drawers, English creamware, and Chinese porcelain. I loved the mix. It seemed just right for a city memorialized in a movie ...