MOST GUYS WILL TELL YOU that they wish they could go slower. But a man's got to do what a man's got to do. What a man doesn't appreciate are highway signs telling him how fast to do it. Fifteen minutes -- I mean, miles per hour -- what are they dreaming?
What used to be called "Bumps" are now called what we always called them. At least in Whitpain Township, Montgomery County.
SO FORGIVE ME FOR NOT NOTICING after all these years that specific detail in the upper right of the the fantastic mural on the south side of the fantastic building next to to the fantastic ApuVille MiniMart at Broad and Lombard looks like a hash pipe. Without the hash. Or smoke. But what is it?
Continue reading "It's not a hash pipe, it's, um, artistic" »
I HAVE SEEN THIS VIEW a thousand times, but never so spectacularly as Tuesday night when I stood in line around City Hall to meet the new mayor. The man on the horse is Gen. George B. McClellan, the two-time commander of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. He is famous for having done so little with the finest looking army ever assembled on American soil. Boy, could those Union soldiers parade.
Continue reading "How's this for the Grand Army of the Republic" »
I STOOD IN LINE more than two hours yesterday afternoon and evening to shake Mayor Michael Nutter's hand, and this is what I saw: City Hall in all its magnificence. I was not alone. In a receiving line of more than 4,000 people that snaked around the Hall from south to north, there wasn't much to do on a balmy January dusk except stare in wonder at the architectural soul of Philadelphia, this mountain of marble and granite among us, this defining structure that we see all the time but rarely, if ever, spend a couple of hours contemplating and appreciating.
SYMPHONY HOUSE IS THE TALLEST building on Broad Street south of Pine Street. If you are travelling north on Broad from South Philadelphia, the 31 story-condominium tower is the first Center City skyscraper you notice. Although it seemed like construction on the project took forever, it wasn't until it opened last month that the buildings true impact on the skyline was noticable. That's when the night lights were turned on. Suddenly, from certain perspectives, it seems as if Center City had taken a giant step southward.
CONTRARY TO RECENT REALITY, the sun does shine in Philadelphia in December. As recently as Dec. 4 this was the brilliant dawn over Belmont Plateau looking down on Center City. Of course it clouded over within hours to become a uniformly gray day which we've become accustomed to since our unbelievably long and beautiful autumn finally gave up the ghost.
ADMIT IT. YOU THOUGHT this fall would never end. I mean, what do you call an autumn that doesn't begin until November. This is my Autumn Runs Out Of Time photo I took on the second day of December on 13th Street near Cypress. What looks like snow is actually ging-ko. Leaves. I think. They're ginkho, right?
At any rate, this is what the ground looked like just a few days ago. All ginkhoed up!
SEE WHAT YOU MISS when you don't stop to smell the roses. You miss a November sky like this over 30th Street just before the city drops into the night. Is it just me, or do we live in a beautiful city? Or WHAT?!!!
COME ON, PATTI, give it up. Is that you I saw on the corner of 34th and Mantua this morning bringing color to the sunlit clouds? I could hear the music. I could feel the glory of a new day. I just had to take your picture. Patti Labelle has been singing on this corner for years. Of course, she changes her clothes from time to time on this mural. But sometimes she's dressed perfect for the day.
Continue reading "Is that who I think is singing glory to the day?" »
THIS IS GREEN AWARENESS WEEK in Philadelphia and where in America would it be more fitting to promote green solutions than in the City of Brotherly Love, so named by William Penn because he encouraged brothers to sleep in the same bed to cut down fuel costs on cold winter nights.
BACK IN THE DAY my friend Tony Wood, the Inquirer's weather columnist (yes, it's a good gig if you can get it) wrote a piece predicting that this autumn would be particularly spectacular vis-a-vis the changing colors of the trees-a-trees. "Back in the day" wasn't that long ago, but I gotta tellya, I think Woods left us hanging. (And if you write to him, call him Woods. He loves that.)
AS A WHITE MAN in the city of Philadelphia I have the confidence of walking down the street without the same fear as a black man walking down the same street or a cop walking into a Dunkin' Donuts. I don't expect to get shot by a white man or by a black man or by a cop in the ordinary daily business of my life. I live in that dreamy reality of being a white man walking the streets of Philadelphia where the odds are that I will come home safe to my family today, tomorrow, next week and next year. And all because of the color of my skin and the color of the uniform that I do not wear.
THAT QUACKING SOUND you hear is actually the clucking of federal prosecutors counting their eggs before they are convicted. Today the feds dropped the net over one of Philadelphia's biggest turkies -- First Brother Milton Street -- who is accused not only of cashing in on his brother's election as mayor seven years by luring businesses seeking city contracts, but of not paying taxes on the two million dollars that fell into his pockets since Mayor John Street was inaugurated.
Continue reading "Milton Street: If he looks like a duck . . ." »
IF I HAVE TO BE UP this early, I'm going to show you what you missed this morning around 6:45. You know this is my favorite view of Center City framed by Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park and dominated by that huge (OK, I admit it. I need your help. What kind of tree is that?) oak tree in the foreground. This view of Philadelphia always makes me think that William Penn's dream of 1683 continues to live. He wanted his city to be a "green countrie towne" with a glowing pink sky overhead.
I'm speaking at the Union League tomorrow (Wednesday) to a group called the Building Owners and Managers Association, BOMA, which is an organization representing the interests of commercial real estate owners and managers. This is a picture of the the type of public residential housing being built in the shadow of Centrer City high rises. Maybe I'll get a word in. Or two.
Continue reading "And the beat goes on. . .and the beat goes on. . ." »
YOU KNOW HOW to add 40 minutes to a one-hour commute to work? Trying overturning a trash truck on northbound Rte. 476 in the middle of the morning rush hour. I was just about at Conshohocken on the Schuylkill Expressway about 7:20 Monday morning on my way to teach at Montgomery County Community College, when I heard the radio traffic report that there could be some delays on the Blue Route due to an overturned trash truck. I had the option of exiting at Conshohocken and taking Butler Pike, but I figured, "How big can a trash truck be?"
IS IT ME or does the arrival of full-blown autumn color seem to come later and later each year in these parts? I don't know if it's global warming or mild weather or what, but I seem to recall as recently as a decade ago the leaves changing color beginning in late September and peaking in mid October. Here we are in the first weekend in November and the leaves have finally given us the "Tah-DAH!" stage of see-ya-next year color (followed quickly by the rake-em-and-weep stage of relentless brown on the ground.)
THIS WAS THE VIEW of the sky shortly after dawn Friday morning right where the Blue Route meets the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Plymouth Meeting. True to the old nautical saying, this red sky was soon followed by clouds, rain and high winds that lashed the area all night Friday and Saturday morning.
Continue reading "Red sky in morning, sailors take warning" »
TALK ABOUT A TOUGH CROWD, the band Himalaya looks like it's about to be devoured by inflatable Tyranosaurus-Barneys during Saturday's Friends of Clark Park Volunteer Picnic and Celebration (and to think that this West Philly open air concert used to operate under annual titles like "Feast of the Drooling Love Dog.") Despite corporate sponsorship and three enormous -- 35 foot, 30 foot, and 25 foot father-son-holy-ghost dinosaurs -- and eight musical acts that performed from 11:30 a.m. until 7 p.m., the numbers of the audience at Clark Park barely exceeded that of daily dog walkers.
GENTLEMEN, START YOUR windshield wipers. Weather-wise, this has been a Good Cop-Bad Cop week. Soaking rain one day, sunny and seventy the next. We haven't had an extended period of what I consider to be glorious October autumn days -- sweater weather under brilliant sunshine. So far the trees seem to be changing from green straight to brown. I'm waiting for the big Ka-BOOM of color. It'll happen. But not today.
FACE IT, WE LIVE in a beautiful city. A city where sometimes you can't see the skyline for the trees. This east-facing view of Center City was photographed from Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park Monday morning.
THIS IS THE S.S. UNITED STATES, the fastest luxury liner ever to cross the Atlantic Ocean, wresting that title from the Queen Mary in 1952 when the United States sped from England to America in less than three-and-a-half days what was advertised as "a long weekend to Europe". For more than a decade this famous ship has been rusting quietly on a pier along the Delaware River in South Philadelphia.
THIS IS OUR CITY at dawn on the day before autumn. The view of Center City if from Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park. I've always thought that this view is the epitome the success of William Penn's pledge to make his holy experiment, his new city of Philadelphia, a "green countrie towne."
AMONG THE THOUSANDS who crammed into the green leafy area on the north side of the front steps of the Art Museum Friday evening, dodging rush hour traffic to see and hear Sylvester Stallone speak at the unveiling of the Rocky statue, I must have heard five foreign langages spoken by those who eagerly sought to get a glimpse.
THIS IS THE RISK you take when you dare to perform Shakespeare in the Park (In this case West Philadelphia's Clark Park, which is known unofficially as Dog Park) on a record-breaking hot and humid evening. Maybe 300 hearty culture lovers settled in to watch the show around 7 p.m. on Thursday evening. That day's Inquirer had a story about the Shakespeare in Clark Park's final rehearsals for its first-ever production, Twelfth Night, mentioning an impromptu appearance by three dogs on the grassy stage, one of which proceeded to relieve him/herself.
WITH TEMPERATURES creeping toward 100 degrees Thursday, William Roberts manned the lifeguard stand in the cooling station he set up for neighborhood kids under the spray of a fire hydrant within roped off traffic cones at the intersection of 47th Street and Paschall Avenue near his home in West Philadelphia.
Continue reading "It takes a village elder to cool a city's children" »
Around 16th and Spruce about six-thirty Monday afternoon.
What's Waldo? Waldo is as Waldo does. Find Waldo.
Monday afternoon around 3 o'clock at 16th and Locust Sts. a strange looking machine pulled by a Center City District vehicle stopped traffic as a policeman yelled for motorists to drive around. It looked like a trailer carrying a periscope that rotated in a 360 degree motion with some kind of a flapping motion coming from the eyepiece or camera shutter. Any ideas?
Wet enough for you over the weekend. (Check out "Watching the Storm from a Safe Harbor")
There is something wonderful about a violent thunderstorm, like the one that roared through Center City Saturday afternoon. Even while feeling safe and protected watching the storm lash the streets and sidewalks from an open doorway on the ground floor of a six-story brick and concrete building, I'd back away from a flash of distant lightning and once a thunderbolt directly overhead made my chin involuntarily turtle down my neckhole nearly forcing an entirely opposite bodily phenomenon below my waist. I've always had an entirely healthy human fear of lightning, but like a moth to flame I've had an irresistible attraction to violent acts of nature, whether it be torrential rain, white-out blizzards, hurricaine force winds or enormous surf crashing into shore. I like the feeling of being an insect in the eye of God. It comforts me to know there is a higher power than can reveal itself from the sultry innocence of an overcast Saturday afternoon.
There are times, like yesterday morning around eight o'clock, I can sit on the front steps of our house with a cup of coffee and the morning paper and think to myself without a trace of irony, "I live in the most beautiful city in the world. There is no place I would rather be." And I mean it everytime I think it. And I think it almost as often as I wish the Phillies would win today. I am a total home town goober.
What else do you need for a good time on a Friday night other than what's available at this store near 44th and Lancaster Ave. in West Philadelphia?
I was all dressed up with no one to kill. I had on my best suit a fresh shirt and a new tie. The young man who had shot and killed my best friend was being sentenced for first degree murder. And I was going to read a statement to the court on behalf of the friends and family of the victim. But when I got to Courtroom 1101 at the Criminal Justice Center the morning of June 1, another different murder trial was in progress. The hearing had to be postponed because the court had failed to submit the paperwork to get the convicted out of prison to attend his own sentencing. I was left holding a statement with no one to listen. And I was furious.
