Essays
More Than Intimacy
from The City Paper
8 June 2006
Why city avenues matter.
I spent a recent day in Frankford, Germantown and Mt. Airy, and experienced a warm dose of Philadelphia’s true charm: the intimately framed moment. The stucco and stone walls, the old variegated streetscape, the villagelike character—one wonders if there isn’t anything so cute and old outside of old Europe.
In Frankford we went past the bar at Castor Avenue (in the rich part of Frankford) where that police officer was shot and killed, then down to Frankford Avenue at Orthodox Street, where some kid was shot a few days later. Beneath the El, at the foot of a perfectly scaled alley, we walked in on a friend’s jazz club/restaurant still under construction. The gorgeous steel sign with the restaurant’s name—Mozaic—was descriptive enough of the scene. In this spot, where even veteran detectives are nervous on the street, a kid rescued from the ruins of New Orleans will be the chef.
Down across the Avenue, among streets named Mulberry, Meadow and Plum, we found a family of woodworkers gathered around a broad wooden table in the shade of an elm tree eating takeout Chinese. The grounds and the mill itself are a monument to the idea that what is once hard and harsh and ugly might someday seem beautiful, and I felt transformed, fooled even, by the lissome air and attention to craft.
We zipped across Roosevelt Boulevard and found ourselves at Carpenter Lane, amidst the streetscape and goodness around the Weaver’s Way Co-op, now surrounded with a cafe and bookstore, and the classic public school, and strange, yet workable suggestive old storefronts. The Germantown streets are as lovely and authentic as Montmartre. I visited with a lady who makes violin bows and has a handsome store there on Germantown Avenue in Pelham, on the Germantown end of Mt. Airy. She showed us the oldest schoolhouse in the city, with its thick stone walls and shutters recalling a Norman tavern—all this across from a gabled, rambling, exuberant Flemish composition (with a new life as condos and stores), seemingly lifted from the Grote Markt in Haarlem.
Philadelphia is a million charming, intimate spaces, all those interiors of blocks and hemmed-in corners, and special renovations with stone and stucco and bright colors. Germantown itself is being saved, its lovely ornamental finials scraped and repainted. This is special, because really you can count on one fingerless hand the number of other real cities in America that reveal this depth of age and evolution, but what about the edges of these blocks where they meet the wide commercial avenues? So many of those edges are chopped, abandoned and repulsive—and empty, of course.
Then I hopped on the 23 bus back to 12th and Bainbridge streets from Germantown Market Square, and it took about 50 minutes, but I got to look carefully at the remains of Germantown Avenue. Here are the solid bones of a broad, thoroughly commercial promenade, with storefronts for 40 blocks.
God knows the Avenue isn’t charming. It’s filthy and abandoned in places and any new development betrays a hatred for urbanity. Yet here is the muscular scale I fear is disappearing from the narrative of life in this city, outside of Center City. There are probably 15 of these avenues, which on paper probably connect half the city’s population in one way or another.
Most of them have been attacked by demographic changes and a shift in shopping patterns. We’ve forgotten how critical they are to the life of the big city. Philadelphia isn’t just Center City. Nor should it just rely on its neighborhood charm and intimacy.
The city without its avenues is small and isolated, and perhaps not a city at all. Unless the avenues are pleasant and useful again, we won’t ever be the sort of city that really makes us say, “Jesus, Philly!”
I’m captivated by neighborhood banter and narrow, antique blocks, but I also want my city to feel open and powerful. I want it to carry me away, not just get in my face.
I’d like to consider a Philadelphia where Baltimore-Lancaster-Broad Street-Passyunk-Snyder-Oregon-Olney-Lehigh-Allegheny-Ridge-Germantown-Girard-Castor-Frankford-Bustleton meet the urban potential of their scale and diversity. This is the only way Philly serves our dreams. Let a place like Frankford Avenue drift to a bullet-ridden death, and no matter how lovely Center City continues to become, Philadelphia won’t ever be the big city it actually is.
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