Profiles
Author sings love song about City of Philadelphia
from Courier-Post
4 August 2002
by Kevin Riordan
Nathaniel Popkin says he researched Song of the City “by listeningto people in places like this.” “This” is Anthony’s Coffee Shop on South 9th Street, amid the polyglot pageant the author skillfully brings to life in his newbook about Philadelphia. “I love cities,” says Popkin, whose book is indeed a labor of love, and a love letter, about a city many folks love to hate.
Notwithstanding its unabashed romance with Philadelphia, Song of the City (Four Walls Eight Windows, 210 pp., $24.95) is not a boosterish rhapsody about, say, the charms of Center City. Nor is it a polemic about how people should abandon their plastic havens in the soul-destroying suburbs and move back to the old neighborhood. Instead, Song of the City offers a thoroughly reported, warts-and-all account of the gritty, resilient vitality of neighborhoods like those of the Italian Market, Northern Liberties, Germantown and West Philadelphia. It’s a book about Sudanese immigrants and African-American entrepreneurs, about neighbors fighting a fast-food restaurant and Quakers walking to meetings during an early spring snowstorm. “I love the grime of Washington Avenue as much as I love walking on Delancey Street,” says Popkin, who lives in the Italian Market area with his wife and young daughter.
A 32-year-old Yardley, Pa., native whose family has deep Trenton roots, Popkin began working on the book seven years ago. He eventually interviewed between 25 and 30 people — some of whom he already knew others whom he met along the way — to assemble his vibrant, impressionistic, poetic portrait: “Across the street in a barely lit social club next to the halal market, Southeast Asian women play cards in the front window. A set of Big Wheels sits in the open doorway. A thick heavy odor of starch — the smell of cooking rice — blankets the street. Music comes from both sides of Forty-Fifth. With the door open, rap bumps out of a small row house while on the west side it is Gospel, large and full and furious.” (“Even in the most hellacious ghetto, there are good people, and there are stories,” Popkin says. “I let the people’s stories speak for themselves.”)
“Kathy … is like the gingko trees that grow behind her house.She is like the Victorian houses that line the brick sidewalks. She is like those sidewalks too, part of the bedrock of Germantown. Kathy belongs to Germantown.”
In conversation, Popkin calls Philadelphia “a complicatedplace … an incredibly screwed-up place. But cities are in some ways the greatest human achievement. They represent every side of human behavior.” This includes the behavior of a certain lanky young author who carried his notebook, camera and curiosity into seemingly every corner of Philadelphia. “My city,” Popkin says.
The siren song of Nathaniel Popkin « Profiles » Text in the city
