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Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
I want to know where the shadow people go
If I drive real fast and the traffic gods are with me (editors note: there are no such things as traffic gods), I can get from my driveway to Philadelphia in 90 minutes. If I decided to take a train, things take longer. First I’m going to have to take a Morristown Line train to Secaucus Junction, which at least takes an hour, transfer to a Northeast Corridor train to Trenton which is going to take another hour, and then a Septa train which is going to take another hour to Center City. Or I can stay on my first train into New York’s god awful Penn Station (editors note: New York’s Penn Station is indeed god awful) and then take an Amtrak Northeast Regional train to Philadelphia, or I guess an Acela if I wanted to waste money. There is also a third train option, which involves three transfers instead and takes a River Line train from Trenton to Camden and then a PATCO train into Philadelphia, but that makes the first option sound good.
For this trip, I forgo the fast drive (I’m always happier if I can take a train instead) and found a cheap enough Amtrak ticket on a Keystone train to justify my second Philadelphia weekend trip this year.
The over the top folk art masterpiece (not sure if the words "folk art" and "masterpiece" ever really belong together) on South Street called Philadelphia's Magic Gardens is where impressive mosaics coexist with lots of glued together crap (pretty sure that the words "folk art" and "glued together crap" do actually belong together).
The Magic Gardens (that weren’t actually magical but still honestly pretty nice) are interesting but probably not reason enough to justify a second trip to Philadelphia in the same year. Maybe this is the reason (actually it’s not), a close up (or two) view of Louis Kahn's legendary (and damn near impossible to photograph) Richards Lab Building at Penn.
There were actually two reasons that I went to Philadelphia this time, and one of them was to visit here, the brand new Barnes Collection on the Ben Franklin Parkway, where generally hard to get reservations are still required to enter.
The new Barnes Foundation building was designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and includes the carefully recreated (and generally kick ass) Barnes Foundation collection. Unfortunately no pictures are allowed in the galleries, but at least they are allowed in the extraordinarily generous public spaces, like this one.
The other reason to go to Philadelphia was actually to go to Camden instead. That weekend I met a friend and attended the WXPN XPoNential Music Festival, in an amphitheater near the Delaware River within sight of the Philadelphia skyline. The concert started with Philadelphia locals Dr Dog (who I love) and then the Avettt Brothers (who everyone loves) followed by headliner Wilco (who one of my friends loves). It’s not that I don’t love Wilco, although come to think of it, maybe it is.
Philadelphia is a consistently underrated city in my mind. If I was rating cities along the Acela corridor (which I guess I am now), I would put it second behind New York and ahead of Washington, DC and then Boston, which I’m being generous as to ranking fourth. After that, I guess it’s probably Baltimore then New Haven, and then Newark ahead of Stamford and Wilmington. Sorry Wilmington, it’s that you are probably fine but you just seem pretty generic.
We’ll close out our second visit to second place Philadelphia with some somewhat random pictures of the city, provided without further descriptions.
