But the Parkway got car-jacked on the way to that future, its six lanes of traffic shooing away pedestrians as surely as an air cannon clears crows off a cornfield in July.

And by the time in the 1990s that the long-delayed Parisian cafe culture did blossom, it sprouted all across Center City, except on the Parkway.

So it was with great satisfaction that, one day last week, you could rest your bones at the new Cafe Cret, and over a decent roast-turkey panini and a cup of coffee watch the world go by: a gaggle of schoolgirls in jumpers headed home; a young man with a guitar case strapped on his back chatting up a young woman over a table next to the patio; Lance Neckar, a professor from Minneapolis, studiously snapping pictures.

Neckar was in town for a convention of landscape architects. And if the cafe's namesake, Paul Cret (pronounced Cray), is no longer a household word here, among designers of public spaces - he laid out the original Parkway - he remains a landmark as familiar as Rittenhouse Square, for which he also did the overhaul in 1913.

The square was to be, by his lights, "a calm and elegant oasis in the heart of the city." But if the cafe, spearheaded by the Center City District as a step in the return to Cret's original Parkway vision, does not quite match that Rittenhouse ideal, it is an island nonetheless, and a heroic revival of what had become, northwest of JFK Plaza, a forlorn and lifeless triangle.

One could wish, as always, for more. A more distinctive structure, perhaps, looking less like a glorified subway entrance. A take-out case less reminiscent of a Starbucks, a branch of which is across the street. And on-premises coffee (Would it be too much to ask?) served in ceramic, not only paper, cups!

One could wish for Danny Meyer's burger-heaven Shake Shack in New York's Madison Square Park, an open-air cafe in the heart of Galway, or the more flavor of the Parkway's role model - the Champs-Elysee.

Except that here is here, and you start where you're at.

The tenant in Cafe Cret is Capriccio Cafe, which was once at the Warwick Hotel. In its abiding favor is this: It is offering, mostly, high-quality local fare - La Colombe espresso (the brewed coffee, on the other hand, is from Fairwinds, a West Coast roaster); Bassett's ice cream; bread from Le Bus; Gilda's superior biscotti; and chocolate-covered pretzels from Lore's.

Even so, that fare could be more memorably presented. The design, too, could be more whimsical, less generic. The overall aspect, finally, more iconic - or stylish, or somehow Philadelphian.

In that regard, it is useful to ponder the panoramic vintage photograph mounted on the wall. It depicts the Parkway in 1919, in all its raw-boned, fresh-hewn infancy.

It confers little sense of its eventual, flag-lined grandeur in that view, its street trees spindly saplings, Logan Square flat, bald and fountain-less.

A defining boulevard, it reminds you, isn't built in a day, nor is, presumably, a new cafe's persona.

The missing whimsy can surely come with time. And maybe the romance, too: Not long after they shared their table, the boy with the guitar and the girl he'd engaged sailed off together on their bicycles, City Hall to their backs, the Art Museum looming ahead.