On vacation I started reading A Prayer for the City by Buzz Bissinger. The book recounts the history of Philadelphia from 1992-1997 while then-Mayor Ed Rendell (now Governor Rendell of Pennsylvania) held office. The book was published in 1997, one year before my graduation from Penn. Though I was largely unaware of Philadelphia politics aside from the fact that Mayor Rendell presided over a city run largely by corruption, I certainly experienced Philadelphia’s rough exterior as described by Bissinger while I was a student.
I distinctly remember the metal bars on my freshman dorm room windows that made it look more like a prison than the start of a bright college career. And of course I will never forget the homeless man just beyond those bars screaming vulgar obscenities as I rolled my suitcases through the doorway. My mother was horrified. The next day a graduate math student was shot and killed right in the middle of campus, just outside The Castle, which ironically served as Penn’s Community Service House where I was part of a pre-matriculation service program. Freshman women took a self-defense class as part of on-campus programming in the dorms. Locust Walk, the main campus thoroughfare, was lit up by an abundance of blue light phones and Penn Escort Service was heavily encouraged and fully utilized when students needed to walk around the perimeters of campus after midnight. Welcome to Philadelphia circa 1994.
My sophomore year I was mugged in the subway station at Walnut and 37th at knife point by a guy who wanted the cash in my wallet and politely handed it back to me completely intact otherwise. Looking back I think he was more frightened than I was. I remember scrambling up the stairs and running smack into a naval officer who helped me to get to a blue light phone to call for help. The Philadelphia police arrived in moments, storming down into the station, and I never rode the subway again until the very end of my senior year, and only then because my boyfriend at the time was with me. I was sadly not a unique case – I knew countless students who had incidents far worse than mine.
Once I moved into the high-rises at the north end of campus, it was routine to hear gunfire and watch the violence unfold out my window at Billy Bob’s Cheesesteaks as I studied in my apartment very late into the night. A solo walk past 40th Street was unheard of and a trip to the only grocery store, a Safeway dubbed “Scaryway”, had to be a group outing to increase our chances of actually making it back to campus with our groceries. Even that grocery store looked like a fortress – they had built a gate around it so the shopping carts could not be taken from the immediate perimeter of the store, forcing us to grab our groceries from the cart and then squeeze between the bars to get out.
So it was especially heartening to get back to Philly last weekend and see the change that has swept the city. Its rebound is nothing short of miraculous. The Saint Albans area, where Dan and I stayed a few weeks ago, would never have been a destination for me as a Penn student. Nearly every house on that block used to be boarded up, full of loitering by people I’d hope to never run into in any alley, whether at night or in broad daylight. Dan’s friend, Jeremy, drove us through neighborhoods that didn’t even exist 10 years ago. I was overwhelmed by the change, and Dan could scarcely believe the stories I told of vacant lots, littered with broken glass and drug dealers, now made over into Barnes & Noble, Sephora, and restaurants of every variety. It’s as if someone took a bulldozer to Philadelphia and started over.
After I left Penn, I moved to D.C. for 6 months and then headed for New York City, which became the center of my world, leaving Philadelphia as a distant memory. I don’t know much about what happened between 1992 and 1997 that laid the groundwork for all of the change that I could see taking shape when I graduated from Penn in 1998 that has now come to fruition over a decade later. I’m looking forward to finding out what Philadelphia did to turn itself around and I’m grateful to Mr. Bissinger for setting it down in print with such elegant description. What I know for certain is that Rendell fulfilled the promise he made during his 1992 inaugural speech, “Change must surely come…this city cannot only survive; it can come alive again…I cannot and will not falter. We cannot and will not fail.” From my vantage point, the people of Philadelphia have passed with flying colors.
Christa Avampato 