Philadelphia

I wanted to see Philly.

They say the best way to see any city is to walk it. I guess there is something about going through a metropolis on foot that’s radically different from going through the same place in a car.

So I asked a friend of mine to pick me up from the hotel where I stay in Center City and drop me off anywhere close to North Philly. I was scheduled to meet several people in nearby neighborhoods, and I decided to walk from there.

I read somewhere that there is something vulnerable about walking. And I never quite understood …until today when we got to North Philly and I stepped out of the car.

Walking through North Philly (as opposed to driving or not going through it at all), you feel…naked… Fully exposed and unarmored.

But in the end, the city unfolds in a reciprocal manner: fully, without cover.

That’s when you really get to see.

I walked by people’s homes, sometimes right up to the porches where they were hanging out, cutting through backyards, close enough that I could see a woman washing dishes at her kitchen sink, smell a family’s dinner (fried fish) or strike conversations with children on their bicycles.

In a sense walking brought me closer to the city and its people.

Today, It seems that I saw the city for the first time.

And I saw it mainly through the eyes of five generations:

A nephew named Caleb.
A son named Thomas.
A mother named Phyllis Young.
A grandmother named Lorraine
A great-grandmother named Ethel.

Ethel, the great-grandmother, has seen it all.
She has seen the aforementioned apocalyptical side of some of Philly’s most notorious neighborhoods: the deserted streets; the factories, massive, low-slung structures of concrete and corrugated steel that squats among the many overgrown lots; the barren tenements that sit conspicuously above the factories; the rundown storefronts and food joints with boarded-up windows and faded price signs…She’s seen it all. That’s where she lives. No big deal.

She saw “bigger” things than that.

She saw “The Promised Land.” Ethel was born in 1919. She was among some six and half million African-Americans who left the South from 1910 to 1970 in what became know as the Great Migration. At the time technology and the mechanization of agriculture (especially the invention of the cotton picker), had made it tough for Blacks to find work in the South.
She made her way to Philadelphia in 1935 where she came from rural Virginia.

She lived in a different time and refuses to change.
She doesn’t know what Facebook is; she only uses a landline telephone that doesn’t have call waiting options (she thinks it’s rude).

At 90 years old, she is startlingly hale, hearty (she’s never drank a drop of alcohol) and independent (she lives by herself!)

She’s something of a family matriarch; she’s had 6 children.
She’s buried three children and two grandchild.
Tough.

Ask Lorraine about it.

At 66, she has seen her fair share. Good and bad.
She saw the 1960s.

I ask her about technology back then.
She smiles.

She remembers the family’s first TV. It had only one channel and it broadcasted in black-and-white. One day her father brought home sheets of colored plastic. He taped the sheets of colored plastic over their black-and-white television so that they would get “color TV.”

“Things were simpler back then,” she said. “People were happy.”
She saw the 1970s with its grimy industries and factory-fouled air. That’s when her second daughter, Phillys was born.

Phillys saw the 1990s; crime rates spiraled, while the quality of schools and services plummeted and the number of crack houses multiplied. A city police officer, she raised her only child Thomas, the way her family has always raised all its kids: with tough love.

But watching her and her son debate Shaq’s trade to the Cavs, you couldn’t tell they were mother and son. They are more like sister and brother; she had Thomas when she was 17, and now they are ‘friends’ on Facebook, have access to each other’s account, and often share updates on friends/people’s status.

“Oh yeah, My mom’s cool as hell…” Thomas is talking to me.
But he is also talking on his Nextel, using the cell phone’s push-button walkie-talkie function to carry on a different conversation. We were sitting in a cheese steak restaurant on South Street, watching Michael Jackson’s memorial and Lance Armstrong in stage 4 of the Tour de France.
At 22, Thomas is your typical college student: he has two cell phones syatematically clasped to his belt and one Blackberry he’s “always playing with”. I’m not exactly sure yet which phone is use for what…

But I will find out and write more about the Young family on my next post.

The entire family will meet at Phyllis’ house. I was invited to come and see.

I plan on walking there.