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.

Urban Exploration

It’s a shame Google doesn’t update their satellite imagery more often. I live about a block and a half from the Delaware River, which, for those who don’t know Philadelphia, is the city’s (and the state of Pennsylvania’s) eastern border. According to Google Maps, there should be a large tract of undeveloped land along the river about a half mile north of where I live. Today, I set out to find it.

I was expecting the land to be inaccessible - maybe there would be a razor wire fence around it. I wasn’t expecting it to have already been completely churned up by bulldozers. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised, as this supposed green space is directly north of Donald Trump’s waterfront high rise condominium development.

Undaunted, I changed my project to that of finding a place where I could get right next to the Delaware River without the interference of fences or piers or anything else. I walked a few more blocks north to Penn Treaty Park, which is the site of the “Treaty Ground of William Penn and the Indian Natives, 1682”, as the engraved message on the obelisk at the front of the park proclaims. I guess the agreement was that the Indian Natives would piss off and make room for the settlers and their descendents to trash the place. ‘Cuz that’s what they did.



As parks go, Penn Treaty is kind of pathetic. Its northern neighbor is a former Pennsylvania Electric Company plant. Oddly, there are actually benches at the north end of the park that face the power plant. The park does come right up next to the Delaware, but getting to the river takes some work. All along the river are rocks, and in between the rocks are piles of trash – plastic Shoprite bags, broken glass, water bottles, remnants of firecrackers, waterlogged swatches of carpet, and rusted car mufflers. I scrambled over the trash-strewn rocks and hunks of concrete and red brick at the southern end of the park. I walked as far as I could before a high fence stopped me. Then I stopped and sat and listened to the water. The spot I found seemed to be a sort of middle ground, not exactly part of the park, but not exactly part of the industrial zone next to it either.


I sat there and looked around and thought about how sad it is, on the smallest and most personal scale, how disconnected I am from the land around me. I have lived here for over a year and have never before tried to make contact with the river. On a slightly larger scale, only a people who have no recognition of their connection to their environment could so flagrantly fill it with ugly, destructive debris.


I continued to sit, and as I did, I began to notice small elements of beauty – the sound of the water, the small shoots of what looked vaguely like strawberries sneaking out of a water-smoothed log, the cloudy broken glass mixed in with pebbles at my feet. I thought about the amazing capacity of the natural world to create beauty from ugliness, given the space and time. I thought about the ability of living things to heal and about my own ability to change and grow. As I sat there, I felt some of my sadness disappear.