NOBODY EVER CALLED the West Philadelphia portion of Lancaster Avenue pretty, let alone beautiful. Chaotic, tumbledown, hardscrabble, frustrating Lancaster Avenue is anything but pretty even on a gorgeous day. It's all tire stores and barber shops, lumber yards and church steeples, rave-seeking hipsters and three old black men with canes sitting in the shade watching the trolleys roll by.

Lancaster Avenue has its charms, but charming it is not, especially in that stretch of urban frontier between 40th and 60th, that graceless twenty blocks of commerce and rude temptation flanked by poverty and despair. It takes imagination to find beauty amidst such unrelenting grimness, imagination or perhaps, a brush stroke from God. A sunset painted amid the wires overhead and the trolley tracks below. A glow of promise as solid as concrete. A reason to believe. And if not believe, a reason to hope.

It is a beautiful city we live in, even on its tattered edges.