An Homage to North Philadelphia

I'm taking a travel writing course, and the first assignment was to write a brief travel journal about the place where we live. I thought I'd post it here too:

In the five years I’ve been in Philadelphia I have lived in some pretty interesting situations. There was the eight-bedroom house I shared with six women and three cats, where the rent was only $189 dollars per month; the shoebox of a studio in Center City's Gayborhood; and the gigantic loft space in the converted coffin factory. If I add in the places my various and sundry boyfriends have occupied, the list grows longer. There was the unconverted warehouse where the bike courier boyfriend squatted with a group of punk kids and their pit bulls; the musician boyfriend’s South Philly apartment across from a neon bedecked plaza where every tourist to Philadelphia comes to buy a cheese steak from one of two rival vendors – Pat’s and Geno’s; and the barely converted warehouse where the aspiring photographer boyfriend lived with his aspiring artist friends.

If I squint at the trajectory of my living situation over my five-year tenure in Philadelphia, it vaguely resembles the trajectory of neighborhood revitalization and gentrification that is gradually reclaiming Philadelphia’s blighted neighborhoods. First the punks, then the artists, then the gays, then the yuppies, and then it’s time to find another place because you probably can’t afford to live there anymore.

The trendy neighborhood I barely afford living in now is north of Center City, just south of North Philly. If I had the balls, I might move further north because I am fascinated by North Philly. North Philly is the part of the city that a tourist will never see, even though its entirety is within sight of the city skyline. North Philly is not beautiful. It could be described as post-industrial, but in some places it looks downright post-apocalyptic. Bombed out block follows bombed out block. For Sale signs seem hopelessly optimistic, even accidental, strewn about haphazardly in the vacant lots along with empty soda bottles, moldy furniture, broken television sets, and old tires, like so much junk in a junkyard. Filthadelphia.

But there is something I love about North Philly nonetheless. It’s an underdog neighborhood in an underdog town. And like a good Philadelphian, I love an underdog – our sports teams almost never win, we are constantly losing population to New York, and we’ve been losing our industries to the South and West for what seems like forever. But like any Philadelphia sports fan, no matter how much I might rail against my team when it’s losing, I still believe in its potential to win. There is space here for whatever one might dream up – space for urban farms and orchards, space to turn an old warehouse into an art gallery. There are people with heart, and there are layers and layers of history. If you have a good imagination, it is possible to see the rows of vacant houses, the abandoned factories, and the empty lots, not as the end of something old but as the beginning of something new.