"Philadelphia is a depressing intellectual slum."
--Dr. Albert C. Barnes
PHILADELPHIA--In 1984 there was a murder at a rest stop off the New Jersey Turnpike near Ocean City. A rich and powerful Toms River insurance guy had allegedly hired a couple of mobbed-up good ol' boys from Louisiana to kill his wife. So the Shreveport Journal sent me there for a week to snoop around, to talk to the police and interview whoever I could interview. (Turned out one of the people I could interview was a real estate magnate named Donald J. Trump, but he didn't have any relevant information and his quotes didn't make it out of my notebook.)
Anyway, in the course of my investigation, I contacted a Philadelphia lawyer who agreed to meet me face to face to provide some background. So I nervously piloted my rented car across the Delaware River and exited onto Franklin Square. I pulled into the first available parking place to check the map and orient myself and discovered I was sitting directly in front of my source's office. Beginner's luck. I was in and out of the city in an hour.
I hadn't been back, unless you count a couple of times when the train from D.C. to New York paused here. And I hadn't really wanted to; my impression of Philadelphia was that it was a dangerous and mean place. After all, this is where they blew up the Chicken Man; where in 1985 the police dropped a bomb on a row house occupied by members of a black liberation group and ended up burning down about 60 houses. They did not mess around in Philadelphia.
The common assumption is that W.C. Fields hated the city, but if you look into it you find he didn't hold any real animus toward his birthplace. Throughout his vaudeville career he was based there, and though he once joked that his epitaph should be "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia"--which some people consider a slight--his tombstone doesn't mention the town. And there's a kind of sweet moment at the end of My Little Chickadee where he allows that while he'd like to see Paris before he dies, "Philadelphia will do."
That's not to suggest Philadelphia isn't the municipal equivalent of a tough room.
In 1968, at the end of miserable season, Philadelphia Eagles fans not only booed Santa Claus but pelted him with snowballs. Ed Rendell was a young fan at the game; he'd grow up to become governor of Pennsylvania. "I actually remember feeling a twinge of anxiety that they might really hurt Santa," he told ESPN years later.
(In this era of "fake news" it seems important to be clear--while Rendell's comments were used in a spoof trailer for a fictitious 30 for 30 film about the Santa incident, he was at the game. "He was the worst-looking Santa Claus I ever saw," Rendell told radio station WNYC in 2011. "They put him up on the sled, I guess they must have paid him something, and carted him around. And everyone, myself included, threw snowballs at Santa." Santa did get booed. He was a bad Santa.)
Yet we've perceived nothing nasty about this city at all.
We've walked the three miles from our hotel near the University of Pennsylvania to Front Street and back again down three different parallel routes (Chestnut, Walnut and Market streets) and not once have we felt ourselves in anything approaching a seedy neighborhood. I suspect to the south and the north are areas that might give us pause but there is no sign of decay or economic slippage in our core sample. The cafes seem lively, pedestrian traffic is brisk and encouraged. And Philadelphians may be disappointed that we find them, above all else, to be "nice" people.
I expected something more like sprawling Chicago where I learned to bustle with my head down, where someone tried to mug me; a patchwork of safe and no-go zones where store clerks hide behind bullet-proof glass. Instead, this is urban friendly, with echoes of Paris and Montreal, a place more inviting than New York but decidedly less provincial than D.C., a place where no one seems to object to the diminutive: Philly is cool, y'all.
Even if it did manage to snake away the $25 billion art collection of the gentleman whose quote serves as this column's epigraph; Dr. Barnes never meant for his collection to end up with the cultural barbarians in Philadelphia--he meant to keep it in his house in Merion. (See the alarming 2009 documentary The Art of the Steal.)
He meant for only the right sort of people to see it, and only in the way he contextualized it. It took awhile but Philly eventually broke Barnes' will and now the Barnes Foundation sits just down the street from the steps Sylvester Stallone ran up in Rocky. (They say the statue of Rocky, cast for one of the sequels, draws more visitors annually than the Liberty Bell. If so, maybe the spirit of Dr. Barnes receives some cold comfort.)
After being stunned by the collection, I'm left with the sense that Barnes was a didactic and difficult snob with some eccentric but not uninteresting ideas about the ways we look and see. But I'm still not sure the dead should have any control over us.
We've come on one of those vacations we specialize in: We have credentials for the Philadelphia Film Festival and I want to visit with our freelance film critic Piers Marchant--one of the best critics writing in the country today--who lives here. American Airlines changed our flight so we arrived later than we thought, and we meet up with Piers after dark. Though we assume it's too late to pick up our festival passes, he suggests we try the festival lounge anyway and, wow, they actually have someone there who can give us our passes.
And does so cheerfully.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 10/31/2017