I'm in a strange but good mood right now. Actually, I've felt this way from the time I woke up. I feel like I've become immortal, all the world's problems have been solved, I've achieved what I wanted to achieve, and the public has been dispersed into a multitude of private worlds constructed from objects of comfort and sentamentality. I've begun my own eternal, post-struggle life, retiring into a dreamlike paradise. I almost feel like I'm on drugs. So what did I do? I peeled out of my house, picked up a totally quality hoagie from Hoagie Planet, and got a philly soft-pretzel for 50 cents. I wolfed down my glorious hoagie, savored the preztel, and now I'm sipping on Wawa peach iced tea and getting ready for some Tastykake triple chocolate cakes--chocolate frosting, cake, and cream. I was just now jumping up and down in delight over how much I love Philadelphia. Inspired by my state of mind, and my overflowing love for this area, I'm going to rock a top 10 list. Everyone else reading this blog, if you live or have been to the area, rock your own top 10 list in the comments section.
My Top Ten Favorite Things About Philadelphia
10. Location: this one is somewhat lame because it's only about Philly indirectly, but it's an asset nevertheless, so I'll put it at #10. In an hour and half to two hours you could get to the mountains, the ocean, Baltimore, Washington, the Chesapeake, or NY. Boston is also a reasonable distance away. Philly's right in the middle of everything on the East Coast.
9. Ethnic diversity: like some of the other items in the high numbers of my list, it's something I love about Philly, but it's not unique to Philly. Not to mention a city like San Francisco kicks our ass in this category. However, you can still find a great representative from any cuisine anywhere in the world somewhere in Philadelphia, and I love that. You see people of all different types here, and that definitely enriches the place. People forget this is still the 5th largest city in the nation, and third largest metro area, so we've got all sorts of diversity and human resources. I believe a while ago we had 3rd highest asian population in the states? That was a while ago, and maybe it's changed. Like other cities, we have racial tension, but I'd say it's not nearly as bad as somewhere like LA.
8. Universities: Philly has great universities, but it's not really unique among cities, so I'm placing it high on the list. Still, time as a student at Penn might be in my future, which would be awesome. I should add here that the area does have a uniquely strong intellectual culture. There was some thing I saw a while ago, a search tool on Google, where you can see a breakdown of different places from which people search for various things. I typed in several authors from the Great Books and Philly came up in the number 1, 2, or 3 spot many times, over NY, LA, and Chicago--impressive considering the tool used absolute number of searches.
7. Art: if I was more of an art nut this would be higher up, but I still appreciate it immensely. The main art museum has the third largest collection in the country, and when you add the Rodin, largest collection of his works outside of Paris, and the Barnes, largest private collection in the states, it's kind of incredible. PLUS, and this is a huge plus in my opinion, the mural program here has been the envy of the whole country, and its result has been the replacement of stupid graffiti by gorgeous, building sized murals EVERYWHERE. I believe we have more murals than any other city in America. They also contribute to my number 1 favorite thing about the city.
6. The Sports: ok, so they haven't won a championship in a while, which sucks, but I think a year or two ago ESPN ranked Philly as the city with the second best sports teams overall in terms of wins, quality of stadiums, number of teams, etc., second only to Boston. The fans are so passionate, although I wish they would be less negative and borish, but it's still a rush when we do well and everyone goes nuts. I was in Center City the day after the Sixers won game 1 of the 2001 finals and everyone was in the best mood I'd ever seen. My SEPTA rides on the 101 and El were free, people were honking, waving flags, everyone had the jerseys on--even stupid racial shit seemed to disappear for the day. It's just such an experience, especially the Eagles. It also seems that this is Northest/upper Midwest thing. They don't give half as much of a shit about sports out west.
5. Fairmount park, and the general greenery of the area: Penn laid out the city as the Greene Country Town, and it still blows my mind going to other cities and seeing the disparity between Philly and other places. Fairmount, I believe, is the largest city park in America,10x the size of Central Park. It has mountain biking, kayaking, swimming, hiking, etc, plus cultural stuff like the Mann music center, the Japanese Tea House, and several panoramic plateaus. The park creeps down into Center City and connects up with the Schuykill River trail and the Art Museum. The suburbs here are lush, and three out of four of Penn's original Center City parks are alive and well, and serve as great places to read, eat lunch, take a nap, or whatever.
4. History: perhaps Boston is the only other city that can compete here. I love that everything I walk past is hundreds of years old and served some historical purpose. I love that the country began here, and that we have the Independence National Historical Park. Plus there's Ben Franklin, whom I'll always consider the greatest American of all time, or at least the one that did the most in terms of shaping the concept of what it means to be American.
3. Food. This is Philly unique. In that book 1000 Things to Do Before You Die, there's one thing for Philly that is just the food. She says it rules in both the high end and low end categories. I don't have enough money yet to know about the high end stuff, although we've got the names to make that seem plausible to me, but on the low end I couldn't agree more. Hoagies, cheesesteaks (GG Special), Tastykakes, regional style iced tea, olde Philly sodas, soft pretzles, pizza--it's all amazing. I miss this so much when I'm living elsewhere, even somewhere as close as Maryland, where you think they'd have comparable stuff, but they don't, at all. No where does. It's wierd to me, but this stuff only seems to be this good here. Maybe it's the Schuykill water.
2. Realness factor: this is both a negative and a positive in my view, but right now I'm thinking about the positive side of it. When I was living in the Southwest and West, people were super mellow and nice in their public interactions. It was almost as if people were having a competition to see who could be the most chill and cool. However, I started to find incedences of major behind the scenes shit talking and underhanded shit aggrevated seemingly by a lack of public outlet. In other words, it wasn't ok to confront someone if you had a problem with them; instead, maybe you would talk a bunch of shit about them, but then when you saw them, you would have to act super nice to them like everyone else. So all this time that person thinks you're cool with them when you're actually not. 90+% of the people I went to college with were from the western region of the states, and I saw this all the time. Sometimes I would be shunned for being too open about shit. Philly, and other northeastern places are the opposite of this. I once saw a cartoon that kind of embodies what I'm trying to say. There were two frames with pretty similar drawings--two guys passing each other on the street. One frame was titled Los Angeles and the other was titled New York. In the LA one, the guys was saying "Hello" but the thought bubble above his head said, "Fuck you"; in the NY one, the two were reversed. People are open and will confront you. Even some roughness is actually not that big of a deal and it can be refreshing in a way. I'll go further though--in the attitude category, Philly is even realer than NY. It's as San Francisco is to LA in my opinion--both in the same genre, but SF is realer than LA. Everyone who wants to be in the "in" place, just in a place with name recognition, goes to NY. Fuck those people. I'm glad they're not in Philly. People who think that LA and NY are the only two cities in America. They're all parrots, apes basically. It's kind of why I hate Vanity Fair, even though they have some good articles from time to time. If you want to be a star, if you want to strut around and be a primadonna and shit, you're infinitely more likely to live in NY than Philly. So for the other cities, i.e., Boston, Philly, Baltimore--you're left with, in my opinion, a better, more loyal crowd, the type of people I want to live with.
1. Timeless, non-Disneyfied, non-new-American style, classic beauty. You can't find this shit anywhere else in America except maybe elsewhere in the northeast. I'm talking about the forests, the creeks, the seasons, the stones in the park with cold water trickling down them; the wooden foot bridges, the marble fountains, the statues and sculptures; the houses--the brownstones and the townhomes in Rittenhouse, the victorians in South and West Philly, the old manors in NW, and of course the rowhouses in all corners of the city, as well as the buildings, from the humble, stately Independence Hall and the other colonial and federalist buildings of old city, to the epic, yet aristic buildings in Center City like City Hall and the Drake Building, as well as numerous others along Market, Chestnut, and Walnut with the sculpted facades and old European styles. Basically, I'm talking about the overall visual aesthetic. It inspires me--it makes me think of the writing of Emerson and the music of Ravel and Debussy.