The City of Brotherly Tough
Our neighbors to the east are strutting like peacocks at this moment. In case you haven’t heard, sports can really tie a place together.1
Consider these stats as I write on October 12th:
The Sixers are 3-0 in their pre-season games.
The Phillies crushed the spirits of dedicated St. Louis fans, beating the Cardinals 2-0 in their wildcard series, pushing them into the real playoffs. And they beat the Braves in their opening of the division series.
The Eagles, may they ever fly, are 5-0 in the NFL, their best start in history, and the only club with a perfect record.
The Philadelphia Union leads the eastern conference standings of Major League Soccer.
I can only hope that many more sports teams in colleges and neighborhood lots are enjoying banner years, too, swept up by the existential fervor of their big teams’ ascendancy.
Whether you’re embedded in Philly culture today, or raised adjacent to it (as Becky was), or hold a perverse fascination with its gritty, chip-shouldering, warm-in-the-center doughnut bombasity, you’re happy, but you’re not stupid. You know what can happen.
The other shoe could drop.
The rest of the chickens may not hatch.
The footing under you could become suddenly rugless.
All the above scenarios are familiar to Philadelphians, building up that chip that fuels their perennial Phanaticism. It’s a heavy burden, one that only makes you stronger the more you run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Taking It to City Hall
Becky and I had the enormous privilege of watching our firstborn’s firstborn over the weekend in West Philadelphia.
When her parents returned from a birthday overnight in NYC, they both commented on how overwhelming that city is: not only the crowds but also the relentless, stimulating activity.
This is typically how Lancastrians feel, even city ones like us, who visit Philly.
Their neighborhood on the west side of the Schuylkill reminds me of Lancaster: tree-lined and lived-in, cozy like Brooklyn. It’s inhabited by a wide variety of people, from academics to refugees and generational Blacks to white hipsters.
Compared to Lancaster (which is either a small city or large town; no one’s sure), Philadelphia is simply more of everything: people, of course, but also history, monuments, neighborhoods, institutions, trash, diversity, and stuff-going-on.
The point is, how we feel about towns is largely relative to what we prefer or have become accustomed to.
A couple of months ago I rode my bike all around my hometown of 2,300 souls, recording five-and-a-half miles of alley exploring, hill climbing, and sidewalk plying.
I didn’t see one person out and about on a Wednesday night. It was soothingly peaceful. But it lacked the energy of more populated places. Over the years, I’ve heard this refrain from Watsontonians:
And we like it that way. So, you can keep your big cities!
It’s Not Good for Us To Be Alone
Towns, be they bustling or nestling, share one thing: they were built on a human scale of walkability.
Most “new” towns are not towns at all but planned developments that were built solely to an automotive scale.
In a true town setting, dwellers have choices for how they’ll go about a place: driving, biking, walking, public transportation, or some other wheeled conveyance.
Townies, because of the built environment, are not constrained to live in their cars, always zooming past others. A slower, more human-scaled pace is possible.
Towns give us an opportunity, if we dare, to practice the presence of people.
Admittedly, with bigger towns comes bigger potential for bigger problems.
Double Vision
When our granddaughter was running around in a straw maze in Center City at Dilworth Park, panic nearly set in. Becky and I each found ourselves thinking—
Where’d she go?
Without consulting each other, we set out to put our fears to rest. Before we even had a chance to call her name, there she was, lying on the ground enacting some kind of story.
I dusted her off, thankful to be clutching her hand.
On one hand, the crowds contributed to our losing sight of her for two seconds. On the other hand, many more eyes were present to help us find her if necessary.
Jane Jacobs was the first person to help me see that one of the strengths of the presence of people is more eyes on the street.2
More of Everything
There’s a lot about Philly that would make a citizen uber-proud: a little piece of paper called The Constitution of the United States of America, The Liberty Bell, and you should know where I’m going next—Rocky and his statue.
Yo, Adrian!
Let’s not forget the dynamic duo of our two Founding Fathers, one with a peaceable vision for all dwellers of Penn’s Woods, the other a badass general who stood up the the Red Coats.
Both are memorialized throughout the region, especially in the historical sections between the two rivers.3
There’s also a lot to feel humble about. Any passer-through will notice the trash, emblematic of generations of despair for many who live just to survive in cycles of poverty, depression, and the deleterious effects of racism and late 19th century industrial “prosperity.”
Add in gun crime, drug addictions, homelessness, corruption, and greedy opportunism, as evidenced by some of the obscene gentrification alongside crippling urban blight.
Philly is a city of contrasts, a co-mingling of human glories and tragic mistakes. In that way, it’s just like Watsontown, Lancaster, or any other place humans call home.
But for now, this tough town has something to shout about, albeit with the nagging tap on the shoulder reminding it that things could go south quickly on South Street.
It’s happened before on many occasions.
But not this year!
News from Town
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Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
The Delaware: pronounceable by all who can read. The Schuylkill: impossible to pronounce without aural familiarity; impossible to spell without help or concentrated powers of memorization.