Report from APA Philadelphia 1
Oh City of Brotherly Love, I have returned! After 25 years, you are new to me, yet strangely and comfortingly familiar. Ben Franklin surveys you from atop a City Hall more gleaming that I every remember seeing. And on an early Saturday evening, your streets bustle with purpose and festivity. It’s great to be back!
And I can only imagine that you who thought you had more important things to do (like schoolwork) are just a little bit sorry that you didn’t make the trip. Philadelphia is one of America’s best examples of urban planning done right. The city radiates from Ben and City Hall south through the Italian neighborhoods and out to the sports stadia, airport, and shipyards; north along Broad Street into some of the toughest neighborhoods you’ll hope to never experience along to Temple University; west through an intimate Central City and across the Schuylkill River to the University of Pennsylvania (one of my alma maters) and West Philadelphia; and east across Independence Mall, over Franklin Bridge, and into Camden.
Out my hotel window I look down over Broad Street the august Academy of Music. I saw my first performance of Handel’s Messiah in 1980 with my best girl and her girl friend. My treat, it was, indeed, a night to remember for us all. Diagonally across I gaze upon the old Fairmount Hotel building, the site of the famous outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease.
Philadelphia was my first big city. Old memories of life in this then foreign land drift back to me. I lived in my first converted warehouse loft here, and then in the demilitarized boundary of West Philadelphia with the unruly city to the west. This is where I was mugged and where we braved the streets of West Philly at night on the lookout for marauding “wolf packs.” Several Penn students were set upon and beaten by these youth. And a guy in the walk-up next door to me was murdered by a shotgun blast through his front door. But at the same time it was welcoming and embraceable. While those were the days, I’m looking forward to learning how the city has change from that of my youth. My other youth, that is.
