Sub / Urban Saturday

I had a very unusual Saturday morning, one that allowed me to see my city from a different point of view. Todd called me Friday night and asked me if I wanted to go on a mural tour Saturday morning. If you don't know Philadelphia is the mural capital of the known world and there are over 2500 of them spread throughout the city in good neighborhoods and bad (mostly bad) Todd is crazy for the murals and has pictures of them on his alternate photo blog. http://www.alcibiadesphoto.blogspot.com

Anyway, he had an extra ticket because his wife Laura couldn't make it due to the fact that they now have a dog (which is not named Tippy) but which needs contsant attention. I can't substitute for Laura in most cases, I know I couldn't keep up with the Diet Coke consumption, but I thought I could keep Todd amused on a mural tour and lunch. Oh yeah - did I mention free lunch at the White Dog Cafe?

Of course, to go on a city mural tour you need to go out to the suburbs, so Todd and Laura picked me up at about 8:00 am to take me out to Radnor. It was only the start of one of their crazy marathon Saturdays which are apparently required in the suburbs. The tour was planned by "Mainline School Night" which is kind of like Temple Center City for the burbs. We went out to their headquarters in a great Victorian house in the midddle of a nice park. It was mostly a dog park, and since it was the first nice day in over a week the place was packed with pooches.

On the way out to Radnor we stopped in Wynnewood to have breakfast (free breakfast!) in a really cool spot I'd never been to before. Its a Pharmacy in a non-descript strip mall but when you walk inside its like being transformed back to the 1950's (I'm just guessing here - I've never been to the 1950's). There is a lunch counter up front with a bunch of stools and an ancient soda fountain and milk shake machine. The menus were dog eared and carried an ad on the front for the "Perfume and Cosmetic" department (Which I could see from my seat). There were also faded poster ads lining the wall for generic things like "Burgers" and "Fries". Some one could start a chain of those nostalgia restaurants with all the kitsch in here, but they are absolutely without pretense or irony - they must like the place the way it is- they haven't tried to make it look old - it just is. Food was good too, but it wouldn't matter.

When we get on the bus for the tour it is pretty obvious that Todd and I are about 20 years younger than most of the other people. I certainly didn't care - nothing like a big bus of nice main line ladies. I'm sure I've seen most of them at the Orchestra too. It did bring back memories of the infamous "Engelbert Humperdinck" incident of 1998 in Las Vegas, but that's a whole other blog. We made our way into the city by a way that Todd said was wrong. Todd was as upset as the rest of the 70 year olds at the route the driver took (and he was late too). We picked up our tour guide - a nice young man who is an art student at PAFA. Most of the murals we saw were in Mantua, which is a neighborhood in West Philadelphia next to Powelton Village and University City. Mantua is still one of the poorest areas in town and it was certainly surreal to be in a bus filled with older main line residents touring this mostly black neighborhood with many abandoned crumbling row houses and few stores. There are spots of amazing beauty, renewal and hope however - in large part due to the murals. The murals are usually next to a vacant lot where a wall is visible. Many of these lots are now park like- very well maintained with nice green lawns and even some benches. Kepping these lots clean is no easy task. They become dumping grounds for all manner of garbage -always a lot of car tires for some reason. The murals are usually done with neighborhood input, so many of the subjects are African American themed in this area. They cover subjects like heroes and Icons, reading, drugs, respect for elders. They are uniformly colorful -I guess murals always are- no need for much subtlety here.

We even got off the bus to look at a few of the murals - remarkably this didn't take too long. I felt a bit weird touring around and invading these neighborhoods like a bunch of sociologists making a study of the inhabitants- but nobody seemed to mind. I suppose they are used to people coming to check out the murals and it was too nice a Saturday morning to be annoyed at anything. The guide explained how some of the murals are created with "parachute" type cloth that is painted in a studio - sometimes by computer - and then pasted up to the wall in sections like a big puzzle. You certainly couldn't tell just by looking.

There are obviously many problems in these neighborhoods that murals won't solve- but having a true work of art instead of a grafiti filled wall and a nice green park instead of a garbage dump is at least a start.

We finished off the tour with a great lunch at the West Philly landmark the "White Dog Cafe" - one of the most pleasant and certainly the most politically aware places in the city. We had a great lunch and then Todd was off to catch a train to continue with his next big suburban saturday adventure. Like most of the other people on the tour I was headed home - I needed a nap.