Not Far from my Home
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| January 1, 2025. |
There is a large garage in Center City Philadelphia, just a few blocks south of City Hall on Broad street, the main north-south street in William Penn's 1682 plan. The garage has closed and is awaiting redevelopment. It is less than a block from the Kimmel Center, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and several other theatrical venues are nearby, but this is hardly the only garage in the immediate vicinity, and all of Center City has been shedding underutilized garage space at an impressive rate, usually replacing parking stalls with condos.
Aside from the empty garage, this is a very nice neighborhood.
However, Philadelphia has difficulty sustaining its performance from beginning to end. There is a strange affection for the squalid, and it's never hard, even in the best neighborhoods, to walk a few feet and revisit our recent history as a dying town. The French call this syndrome nostalgie de la boue.
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| November 14, 2024. |
The side wall of the garage, on Pine street, has adopted a relatively clean, but still louche, persona as a place for posters of all kinds. As with the Lennon Wall in Prague, there is jockeying for limited space. Posters get overlain, and there is a certain amount of ripping and tearing that seems to come with the territory.
The poster above, like many others, was pasted up in multiple copies. Several copies of this one were torn carefully from the wall. This is unusual. I can't tell you if this was done by people unhappy with the poster, or people who were so happy with it that they wanted to take a copy home. In Philadelphia, both motives are possible.
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| December 31, 2024. |
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