Robert N.C. Nix Sr. Federal Building

You're at 9th and Market, in front of Philadelphia's federal building — the Robert N.C. Nix Senior Federal Building, the city's mid-century home of the United States courts. This is the fall. Two weeks after the applause at the Earle, in the spring of 1947, the government's narcotics case against Billie Holiday came due in a Philadelphia federal courtroom, in a proceeding that carried her own name as the defendant: “The United States of America versus Billie Holiday.”

She would write later, “and that's just the way it felt.” Consider what actually happened. On her manager's advice she pleaded guilty — with no lawyer beside her. She asked to be sent to a hospital, because she understood herself to be sick, not criminal. Instead she got a year and a day at a federal reformatory. And here is the detail the biopics soften: that manager, Joe Glaser, is widely believed to have cooperated with the Bureau of Narcotics investigating her. The betrayal, if that's what it was, wasn't a shadowy federal villain. It was closer to home.

But the sentence you served in prison wasn't the real one. The conviction stripped her of her New York City cabaret card — the license every performer needed to work any club that served liquor. For the next twelve years, until her death, she was barred from the Manhattan rooms that had made her famous. That single administrative cruelty is the hinge of this whole tour. Locked out of New York, she turned to the city that had just convicted her. Philadelphia became her working town — not a novelty stop on a Billie Holiday map, but her livelihood.

So this grey building is where the trap closed and, strangely, where the Philadelphia years began. When you're ready, backtrack west on Market to Broad Street, then turn south down Broad. A few blocks along, on your right, rises the oldest opera house in America still doing its job.