The Franklin Fountain, Philadelphia

At the end of the line on Market Street, in the shadow of the iconic Penn’s Landing sign, is an ice cream parlor known as The Franklin Fountain. In the summer of 2004, brothers Ryan and Eric Berley transformed a building once home to Eroticakes into a business not quite like anything Philadelphia had experienced in nearly a century.

With an aesthetic straight out of the 1920s, this homemade ice cream stop features antique wall décor, a snowflake-patterned, tiled parlor floor, and even mustachioed servers in soda jerk-style bowties, aprons and paper caps.

While the lines can be long on a hot summer day, the spoils outweigh the pains of battle. Patient patrons will be rewarded with enormous mountains of ice cream, each served in a vertical glass dish. Although the rich one-of-a-kind taste of each flavor can be enjoyed on its own, the Fountain offers a number of decadent toppings, from homemade caramel and hot fudge to light, fluffy whipped cream and fresh strawberries. The overwhelming tower of cold, sugary goodness might drip down the sides of the glass, but it’s nothing that a few extra napkins won’t fix.

The Franklin Fountain also offers a variety of beverages, like old-fashioned glass-bottle sodas, milkshakes, floats and even phosphates. To save a few extra dollars, visitors can take a complimentary paper cone and drink from the curbside waterspout outside, completing the early-20^th-century experience.

In the winter months, the corner shop abandons the cold dishes and transforms into a bakery selling warm goods like fresh fruit pies and chocolate fudge brownies, as well as hot chocolate and hot milkshakes.