Philadelphia has a second great walk, and it could hardly be more different from the colonial lanes of Old City. This one starts with breakfast or lunch at Reading Terminal Market, passes a Masonic temple and the colossal City Hall, then heads up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a broad diagonal boulevard modeled on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, past LOVE Park, Logan Circle and two of the finest art collections in the country. It finishes at the top of the Rocky Steps, with the whole route laid out behind you. The walk is just under three kilometers, a little under two miles, flat all the way until the final seventy two steps, and it is one of the most satisfying self-guided walking tours in any American city. Watch for one family name as you go. Three generations of a single family of artists left their mark along this one straight line, and by the end you will have met all of them.

Before you set off

The walking takes under an hour, but plan on two or three hours with time to eat and look around, and a full day if you want to go inside the museums. The route is flat and paved, with wide sidewalks along the Parkway, and the only climb is the grand staircase at the end. Reading Terminal Market is at its best in the morning or midafternoon; it gets packed at lunchtime, and some of its stalls, including the Pennsylvania Dutch ones, keep shorter weeks than others. The Masonic Temple, the City Hall tower, the Barnes Foundation and the Rodin Museum all have their own hours and tickets, and the Barnes in particular often sells timed entry, so check before you go. The Parkway is wide and open, with little shade in summer and a sharp wind in winter, so dress for the weather and carry water. Big festivals, races and concerts are sometimes held on the Parkway, closing parts of it to traffic and filling it with crowds, which can be fun or frustrating depending on your mood.

Reading Terminal Market

Step into the hall and let the noise and smells hit you: frying onions, fresh bread, coffee, cinnamon. Reading Terminal Market opened in 1893 underneath the train shed of the Reading Railroad's grand new terminal, the same Reading Railroad you may remember from the Monopoly board. For generations farmers had sold their produce from long market sheds down the middle of the city's main east to west street, which is why it is called Market Street, and when the railroad bought land for its terminal here, it built this market to house the traders it displaced. Trains ran on the level above your head until 1984, and the old train shed is now part of the convention center next door. The market survived some lean decades and today it is one of the busiest food halls in the country, with dozens of stalls under one roof. Look for the Pennsylvania Dutch counters, run by Amish and Mennonite families from Lancaster County, where soft pretzels are rolled by hand in front of you, and for Bassetts, a family ice cream maker founded in 1861 that has been scooping here since the market's early days. You can find a cheesesteak, but locals will point you just as often to a roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and greens. Eat something here, because the rest of the walk is about feeding the eyes. Then leave by the Arch Street doors, turn left and walk west along Arch Street for two blocks to Broad Street. The granite temple stands on the corner on your left, about four minutes away.

Masonic Temple

Across from City Hall stands the Masonic Temple, home of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, and from the outside it looks like a Norman fortress dropped into the middle of downtown, all rough granite, round arches and a tall tower. It was built between 1868 and 1873 to a design by James Windrim, a young architect and Mason whose plan won the competition when he was still in his twenties. The real surprise is inside. The building holds seven lodge halls, each decorated in a different architectural style: Egyptian, Ionic, Corinthian, Italian Renaissance, Norman, Gothic and Oriental, the last inspired by the Moorish palaces of Spain. Walking from one to the next is like flipping through a history of architecture, and the Egyptian Hall, with its painted columns and hieroglyphs, is especially striking. Freemasonry runs deep in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin joined a lodge here as a young printer, rose to become Grand Master of Pennsylvania, and printed one of the first Masonic books in America, and George Washington was also a Mason. The temple's library and museum hold Masonic treasures from those early days. The building is still a working lodge, so the interiors are seen on guided tours; check before you go. When you are ready, cross Broad Street at the lights and walk into City Hall through one of its great arched entrances to reach the courtyard in the middle, about two minutes away.

Philadelphia City Hall

Philadelphia City Hall tower Stand in the courtyard and look straight up. Above you rises the tower of Philadelphia City Hall, and on its very top stands William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, a bronze figure about thirty seven feet tall. The building took three decades to finish, from 1871 to 1901, and with around seven hundred rooms it is one of the largest municipal buildings in the country. Its walls are massive masonry, many feet thick at the base, carved with some two hundred and fifty sculptures by Alexander Milne Calder, who also made Penn. Remember that name. When the tower was completed it was briefly the tallest occupied building in the world. You are standing on Center Square, the middle of the street plan Penn and his surveyor drew up in 1682: a grid stretching between two rivers, with this square at its heart and four more public squares around it. Penn faces northeast, toward the spot by the Delaware River where tradition says he made a treaty of friendship with the Lenape people. For most of the twentieth century, a gentleman's agreement kept every building in the city lower than the brim of Penn's hat. When the first skyscraper broke that rule in 1987, the city's sports teams went through a long championship drought that fans called the Curse of Billy Penn, until ironworkers fixed a small statue of Penn to the top of the new tallest tower in 2007, and the Phillies won the World Series the following year. Leave through the north arch, turn left, and cross JFK Boulevard and 15th Street toward the northwest. LOVE Park is on the corner, about three minutes away.