Schwartz - From Philly to the Big Apple

My immediate post-university situation in Philadelphia simply was no longer tenable. From May 10th through June 13th I lived in South Philly with one of my best friends from school, a brilliant fellow by the name of Todd Whelan. Todd made his living by working in the Philadelphian tourism industry as a horse carriage driver and he got me into the profession. During March I trained, in April I worked part-time, and then for the month following my graduation I worked full-time.

Since I was one of the newest drivers, my valiant steed was a rotund drafthorse by the name of Bubba, the slowest but one of the sweetest and intelligent horses in my company's fleet. Bubba was so slow that little old ladies using strollers moved faster than him -- I kid you not! The other drivers and I had a theory: we figured that unlike most of his compatriots in the stables, Bubba long ago realized that no matter how fast he walked, he still kept going around the same four or five blocks, day in and day out.

Unfortunately, even though I managed to make good cash with Bubba, our efforts were always thwarted. First off, my boss -- Bubba's owner and the company's dictator, er, director -- was a crook. His favorite hobby was to find ways to steal money from his workers. Since we were paid in off-the-books cash and most of the carriage drivers were junkies desperate for any money, there was always some way he could find to swindel a person out of his or her hard-earned percentage. Second off, the fact is carriage-driving is a dead-end job, and seedy to boot. Third off, the city of Philadelphia has regulated the tourism industry to the point of near extinction. Fourth and finally, this summer is experiencing a tourism "drought," so even the high rollers in the carriage job were making a pittance.

Then there was the living situation. Todd had four boarders: me, his girlfriend, one of his best friends, and a cokehead -- all in a house barely large enough for two people. I'll leave it at "'nuff said."

Finally, there was Philadelphia itself. Philly is one of those places that sounds more amazing on paper than it truly is, and looks stunning from a distance. Take for example the skyline. The truth is, once one finds their way into downtown "Center City" Philly (a task comparable to wandering lost in a Tolkien dwarves' mine), one discovers that all those lovely skyscrapers are in fact very short and spaced out from each other. No less, the entire downtown is lopsided: all the impressive modern architecture is on the side of the Schuylkill, a secondary American river. The Old City -- Philly's casbah, if you will -- is quite tiny and removed from Center City. I don't know about you, dear reader, but I sort of fancy urban sprawl, so long as it is not sprawl within the city. All that space between avenues and buildings is not only aesthetically displeasing, but very irritating.

Yet, what has always bugged me about Philly was its impermanence. Believe it or not, I only fully realized this after I saw the film The Day After Tomorrow. I am an avid fan of desolation and eschatology. I am fascinated by scenes of ruin and age; where eternity is king, there shall I be, Polaroid in hand. It's been a fascination of mine since childhood, with a concomittant passion for immortality: the more durable the ruin, the more fascinated and prouder I am of its human makers. Roland Emmerich's film, incredibly flawed though it may be, struck that secret nerve within me. I found myself suddenly impressed with New York City, a metropolis I had known since my youth (my hometown Yonkers is shoved up against the Bronx, one of the Big Apple's burroughs) but had never truly appreciated. It donned on me that were human civilization to end suddenly, Manhattan would remain. New York City would be our testament to the universe: that we once lived and we onced reached high, so high, maybe too high, but high nevertheless, crawling and clawing and straining and yearning and building up up up.

But Philadelphia?

After all these years in that city, all I could think was, 'Where are the trees?' It was the very first thought I had when I arrived for university four years ago; four years later, it was my last thought. I always felt naked in Philly, as though the tepid Pennsylvanian sun roasting in the bland Pennsylvanian sky might burst like a hog on a stick and its sizzling juices would drown me and the city.

So about three weeks ago I quit -- quit the job, quit the house (but not my friendship with Todd) and quit Philly.

When I arrived in the New York City area, I understood something else: both cities were planned on grids, but for very different reasons.

In Philly the grid was crafted in the names of fire insurance and God. You see, William Penn, the man who started Philadelphia, had survived the Great Fire of London. He was determined to make sure that no such inferno could ever consume his city; hence the grid: Philly is divided into four quarters, the idea being even if three out of the four corners burned to the ground, so long as that last corner remained, there would be no need for a Christopher Wren for the city could be said to have "survived." (I do find it ironic that despite this ingenius attempt to insure the city's immortality, most Philadelphian architecture from the colonial period to today, crafted as it is from Delaware brick, is tiny and fragile.)

He and his followers the Quakers had another agenda, namely, to build a trial Heaven upon Earth ("a holy experiment," to quote Penn), a demographic atempt to embody what the Quakers believed to be God's Plan of global socioeconomic and religious liberty. Ever hear of Edward Hicks' The Peaceable Kingdom? Yep, that was supposed to be Pennsylvania and Philadelphia! Hard to believe when one looks at the Philly of today: a racially segregated and impovershed bunch of shacks that for the last twenty years has whored itself to transnational corporate pimps. The Quakers' ideal was indeed a worthy one: unlike the other English colonies on the North American coast at the time, Philadelphia was the only settlement where religious tolerance was an overarching legal and societal principle, for in Heaven, at least to the Quakers, all God's children are equal and free to worship as they will. Yet, somehow the execution went wrong, horribly wrong, and rightly or wrongly, I hold Philadelphia responsible for this.

Manhattan's grid, however, was built for a very different reason: to carve Man's Order out of Nature's Order. New York City was to be a testament to Mankind. If civilization ended tomorrow and Philadelphia were to survive, I feel that this would not be an impressive feat because the city was built to parasitically latch onto that which is already immortal: God. Manhattan, on the other hand, has brazenly chosen to pick a fight with Time itself. Manhattan's survival would be a true triumph, for humanity is not immortal, and yes, eventually all our witty artifice decays into dust, but even if those skycrapers were to last a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years beyond you and I, our species would have accomplished something.

* * *

So, the last three weeks I've been working in Midtown Manhattan (that's the Empire State Building behind me in the photograph), within eyeshot of the Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, New York Public Library and Grand Central Station. I should note that New York City is far from perfect itself; indeed, it is a quite brutal and greedy place. Those amazing skyscrapers were built as much in the celebration of money and materialism as they were in the spirit of humanity -- and doubtless their architects would say that there is no difference! Yet, I feel more at home here, forty stories into the sky, in a land trying to beat Time at its own game.

However, I am not totally at home here. I left the New York City area four years ago precisely because I am an alien to this place. I am still an alien.

And so, this Sunday, July 11th, I leave for Israel. Ben has already begun his journey into the wild. I will soon follow my friend to the ends of the Earth.

I burn with anticipation.