RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

grit and scum

I’ve recently heard that I’m too negative about things. While most of my negativity is really just dark sarcasm, this post is actually just plain dark. You were warned:

A casualty of Philadelphia’s recent popularity and influx of condo buying, BMW driving, $11 martini sipping grown-up Wharton grads, has been the loss of much of the grit that many longtime citizens have come to identify with. I’m not talking about crime, we’ve still got plenty of that to go around… what I am referring to is the feeling you get when you walk by the Forum XXX theatre at 22nd and Market just after the sun goes down. Now imagine it as it was a few years ago. There was no Trader Joes. The old Stetson Hat factory above the future TJ’s wasn’t full of million dollar condos, it just a rotting abandoned warehouse. There wasn’t even a Papa Johns. The 4 corners were a parking lot, an abandoned factory, a Salvation Army thrift store and a giant porn theatre… (and of course skyline pizza, who had no problem bending the ‘law’ and delivering you a 6-pack with your pie.)

I’ve always said that coming home from New York on the Chinatown bus can be a surreal experience. You get on the bus in New York, bustling and electric. 90 minutes later you get off in Philadelphia. Things look almost exactly like they did in New York, but they just don’t feel quite right. The streets are emptier, the air heavier, the people strangely distant. I’m talking about center city here. The neighborhoods all have their own character, and in many cases that character is strong as an abandoned insane asylum; but even still, Philly’s most commanding sense of strangeness and foreboding is strongest in its skyscraper spotted heart.

Sure that sense of scum is still here and it’s still strong, but much of it has been obscured by flashy restaurants, nightclubs and hip new bowling alleys. Take 13th and Sansom. Artisan crafted, organic gelato? Stephen Starr’s El Vez? Not 5 years ago, that intersection was one of the most deeply disturbed places in all of center city. Now it’s dirty and weird, but it’s also unrelentingly trendy.

I was going somewhere with this – I was gonna talk about the lady I see every morning –she’s about 50 years old, dresses in thrift store sundresses, bleaches her hair and it looks like she puts her makeup on with a paint roller (her lipstick, every morning is smeared across her face, 1, 2, 3 inches beyond the borders of her lips) That woman is really beautiful… not in a way that makes me think she’s sexually attractive, because in that sense she’s incredibly unattractive… but she is otherwise beautiful. Today she was with a man who pierced his septum with seashells. He wasn’t being trendy, it looked legitimately ritualistic. How much more interesting is that than an $11 martini? That’s pretty much where I was going with this. That’s all for now.