The one and only: City Hall

I snagged the last ticket of the day - a tourist in my own town. Take a left and then another one, the ticket seller said. Pass the bronze John Wanamaker. Enter the door, ride the elevator to the seventh floor, ascend with the escalator to the ninth, then wait. Someone will escort you to the top.

There were the dimensions of City Hall to ponder, in the meantime - 470 feet long one way and 486.5 feet long the other, more than 14 acres of floor space, home of the mayor, the Department of Records, the Office of Public Property, the Orphans' Court, the Common Pleas Court, the Register of Wills, marriage licenses, and that stern-faced clock with the 15-foot-long minute hand that has been my guide through too many years, my personal calendar master.

More than 30 years in the making, still the largest masonry office building in the United States, this wild stew of concrete, stone, brick, granite, marble, glass, and iron has gone by many names - monster, quaint, iced birthday cake - but it's still standing, a fact that has never actually been preordained. It has a bunker quality down below and a radical exuberance above. It appears abundantly gray on overcast days and castle-esque when it catches the light.

When I, by now on City Hall's ninth floor, am called for my 10-minute tower tour, I am led, along with a family of three, through a pair of glass doors (keyed in, keyed out) and into the narrow cage of the tower elevator. We rise through what feels like subterranean space. The elevator door opens. Philadelphia emerges. South. West. North. East. The City of Brotherly Love.

The city seems, at first, crammed and conglomerated - a fabric of grays and blues, valves and spires, a progression of chipped heights and hardened glass, old brick, raw concrete, mechanical penthouses, and golden domes, a landscape of antennas and signs. Aramark. PSFS. PNB. Frank Gehry. I have to fight the false, fleeting impression that the buildings came first and the country green later - pickaxed out of a relentlessly constructed city.

There are ships on the Delaware and rowers on the Schuylkill, both rivers running bulbously out of view. There is the enduring nob of Memorial Hall, the tower farm of Roxborough, the hooped skirts of the Convention Center roof, a helicopter perched like a dragonfly on a helipad. There are the buildings that eventually surpassed the height of City Hall - the Libertys, Comcast - and the supreme slice of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the burble of the Logan Square fountains, construction cranes, the Linc, I think that's the Linc, way off in the southern distance.

The family of three is naming the landmarks. The tour giver has gone incognito. I crane my neck and look up through the clear wedges of Plexiglas to see the 53,000-plus-pound, 37-foot-tall William Penn, with his nine-foot-wide hat and his five-foot-four feet and his mythology. He's worn a Phillies cap, this Alexander Calder statue. He's been dressed up as a Flyer. He's been buffed and cleaned, and his 12-inch-wide eyes have never so much as winked or wrinkled or flirted. Our William Penn has stalwartly seen it all.

Across the city now, indecisive clouds and reappearing sun are convoluting the colors, hues, tones. A passing plane brings the skyline closer, and music plays from an invisible venue. The people way down below seem suddenly nearer, caught up in their private hurry, their conversations, their transitory preoccupations on the sidewalks, the reinvented Dilworth Park, the traffic-anxious streets. They are unconcerned by the family of three and the one middle-aged woman spying down on them; they are caught up in their own patterns. They are haphazard and determined. They wear saris, running shoes, suits. They push strollers and lean against lampposts and juggle the bags of today's purchases. They, too, change the colors of the city. They guarantee that, despite all that seems fixed and crammed and stuck, Philadelphia is fluid; it's changing.

The tour guide reappears, tells us the time. Only minutes, now, to gather our final impressions, zoom our camera lenses, decide that that really is the Linc in the hazy distance, and that perhaps the music, still so pressingly near, is coming from the urban heavens. The above instead of the below. The anonymous and absolute and thrumming.

Our time is up. Our viewing done. We crowd back into the elevator with the guide who goes endlessly up and endlessly down, who doesn't, he says when pressed, have a favorite view of the sun- and cloud-stoked city. It's out there. It is porous. It lies at our feet. It takes us in. Its music falls upon us.

Beth Kephart is the author, most recently, of the Berlin Wall novel "Going Over"