I Drive the Line

Take a map of Philadelphia. Point to a blank spot and ask yourself the last time you've been there.

by Duane Swierczynski

We don't all live in the same Philadelphia. We inhabit specific parts of this city, and shuttle between them, wearing invisible grooves in the sidewalk.

Sometimes, our Philadelphias overlap, and the effect can be startling. Like when a familiar El concourse is covered in yellow tape, and there's a chilled pool of blood on the concrete. Or when you're so used to your beaten-down block that it shocks you to see another block, same style of houses, same type of sidewalks, that are kept immaculate. What the fuck happened to my block?

Take a map of Philadelphia and chart it out yourself. Where you live. Work. Eat. Shop. Hang out. Connect the dots. See how little of the city you inhabit.

Point to a blank spot and ask yourself the last time you've been there.

Ask yourself if you've ever been there.

This past Sunday, I took a look at such a map and decided to go driving in the places between. It was a rare Sunday afternoon without the kids, leaving me and my wife free to go driving around.

Yeah, we're still thinking about moving. But it's not like we have this dream ideal in mind. We really don't.

Mostly, we want an extra half-bathroom.

(Two kids, man. And they're only getting older.)

So we drove. We were about 15 minutes from home. "Drive two more blocks, then make a right."

She made a right.

Here was a city neighborhood I've never seen (and no, I'm not going to get into specifics — you guys are offended too easily). It was a slightly Tim Burton-esque sprawl of identical single houses. There was still a lot of snow and ice on the ground, which didn't help the carbon-copy look of the place. A lot of the same basketball hoops perched at the end of the same driveways.

"Oooh, open house," my wife said.

She ducked inside to take a look. I stayed in the car, checking out the neighborhood. Trying to picture myself here. Trying to guess what these homes went for.

My wife came back out, realtor card and Trend report in hand. It was about $120,000 more than I'd guessed.

"It was pretty inside," she said.

We kept driving — this time I took us across the city line into a part of the near-'burbs I'd never seen. Within two minutes — if that — we were in a beautiful, hilly terrain dotted with eye-popping mansions. Some had terraced front landscapes, rendered in such generous widescreen that it looked like you could fit entire Center City blocks on them. Who the hell lived here? Two minutes from the city border?

We started breathing normally again when saw a traffic light and a Chinese takeout joint and a Blockbuster.

A while later, we started down one of the oldest routes in the area, one that took us from the suburbs into the heart of the city. I told my wife the exact street where we crossed from suburb to city, but I didn't have to.

"God, you can tell," she said. "It's as if someone painted a line."

The change was instantaneous. From manicured lawns to I-don't-give-a-shit sidewalk blocks. From Tudor homes to rowhomes that haven't seen a paint can since Reagan.

We drove back into a pretty little inner-city enclave with spacious single-family homes, big lawns and plenty of parking. But it was a temporary mirage, because it took only a block before I saw the first crushed beer can and the blown-out window.

I decided to try something. I guided us back to the edge of the city. We drove down the street cleaving city from suburb.

We turned right just before we hit another city line, and drove up a pretty, leafy winding street — yeah, leafy, even at the tail end of winter — that wound its way just a few hundred yards from the edge of the city.

Out in the distance, I could see the rowhomes of a neighborhood I knew fairly well. A neighborhood some might call bad. You could see the abused tops of the backs of the homes.

You ever look at a map of Philadelphia? The shape of our city, how it's carved out against a nest of suburban counties?

The lines look arbitrary.

But they really aren't, are they?

duane@citypaper.net