Elfreth's Alley Museum

This guide to the Elfreth's Alley Museum in Philadelphia centers on Fete Day, the one afternoon a year Philadelphia's oldest continuously lived-in street throws open all thirty-two doors to strangers. It traces the block party's rituals since nineteen thirty-four, then stops at house number one twenty-six, home to two dressmakers, Mary Smith and Sarah Melton, who bought it together in seventeen sixty-two, ran a silk-gown shop from the parlor, and shared a life together for more than fifty years. Listen for what their ordinary front door only reveals once a year.