Dan,
Boy, now it’s really coming down. Serious snow, not just that hissy stuff that the weather bozos recently decided to call “wintry mix” (which made me wonder if I would find it on the snack food aisle, next to the party mix). Looks like I made the right decision staying home today.
Of course you’re right; if we lived in Center City, we might be less worried about getting to school and work. (Although I note from the KYW Web site that Philadelphia is closing its schools early this afternoon as well.) And I wouldn’t argue with you for a minute about Philadelphia’s urban charms. The community you describe is indeed a gem, blessed with lovely old buildings, walkable streets, and interesting restaurants. The problem, as you know, is that the 70,000 residents of Center City are a bubble, a tiny minority in a city of 1.4 million (and shrinking). Indeed, in a lot of ways, people in neighborhoods like Society Hill and Rittenhouse Square are as far removed from the “real” Philadelphia as those of us who live outside the city proper.
You follow your generous praise for my column by asking how I keep my perspective. A big part of the answer is that I commute to work every day down Broad Street, which runs from my leafy suburban enclave through some of the toughest parts of North Philadelphia. Fred Siegel, the New York urban historian who wrote about a former Philadelphia mayor, Ed Rendell, in the City Journal, told me he’d never seen slums as bad as North Philadelphia’s, anywhere. No matter how many Starbucks and Borders books may pop up downtown or in the tonier ‘burbs, there are huge chunks of our community that can only be described as in crisis. Of course, when we’re not pandering for suburban readers (with not a lot of noticeable success, I might add), my colleagues at the Inquirer do write about the inner city’s problems. How many series on crack, welfare, blight, etc. can we count over the years? Seems like a lot to me. Clearly, there are areas we haven’t hit or hit hard enough. I personally think the city’s political culture would be a ripe target; not just the facts of graft and corruption but the myriad ways that culture has served to take much of Philadelphia out of the economic mainstream.
I don’t just mean the city’s insane wage tax, which has done so much to help develop those suburbs you dislike so much. I’m talking also about the isolationist mindset that sees anybody who doesn’t keep a city address as slightly traitorous. It’s interesting that this feeling exists at all class levels in Philly: Did you notice the other day, after a bunch of drunken low-lifes wrapped up their “Mardi Gras” celebration by trashing stores on South Street, the local city councilman responded by blaming it all on parents across the river in New Jersey? It’s sadly typical of the city’s us-vs.-them mentality. The same thing has applied to the recent sports stadium boondoggle. Any amount of tax subsidy is fine for the Phillies and Eagles, as long as it involves taxing the suburbanites.
I love Philadelphia’s historic center and would move there in an instant if I thought I could my kids would be safe and get a decent education. But even here in leafy Elkins Park, I think we can still count ourselves as part of the city. And that’s only partly because we’re actually closer to downtown than people in Chestnut Hill or the far Northeast. It’s really because I don’t think political boundaries matter, except to politicians.
More tomorrow, assuming our power lines stay up.
Andy
