You Workin'?

by Nathaniel Popkin

Late Saturday morning, the sun is long and low and the snow is melting. On Castor Avenue near Napfle Street a pair of painters are finishing the doorway of a new restaurant, this to serve something called Peruvian-Portuguese cuisine. The restaurant is ochre; it glows.

On a cold morning not long before, a skinny man in work clothes, and carrying a box of tools, stands before the open doorway of a row house at 10th and Lombard. He looks up and then climbs the steep and narrow staircase. There's a day of carpentry before him.

A few days later, another man driving a late model pickup, a load of lumber in the bed, pulls up to the corner of Chew and Locust in East Germantown. He jumps out. "You workin'?" a woman calls out from the corner. There is pride, perhaps also wariness and jealousy in her voice. She's not really waiting for an answer.

"Yeah, I'm on a job," the man responds. His voice betrays confidence, status. His movements are careful and he is quick, into the old-school hardware store across the way and back out in minutes. Then he's gone.

These are but disappearing scenes in the nervous city. Contractors, who haven't been without work for a decade, are sitting at home. Some, behind the Tundra's wheel, roam the city. There are bargains at the supply house but there's no reason to buy. There are laborers on the early bus with nowhere to go. There are signs of devolution: a half-bricked wall, a façade of new window openings fitted with plywood, a temporary work light dangling, still illuminated, like a mourner's candle.

According to a January survey of Philadelphians conducted by the Pew Trusts' Philadelphia Research Initiative, city residents are feeling optimistic about the future. The city is getting better, say 68 percent of those polled in January. I wonder how much of that hopefulness is a result of the near constant presence of cranes in the air, of scaffolds and contractor vans, of construction fences and dumpsters, of the whir of the table saw and the snap of the nail gun.

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Perhaps very little. A survey made two years ago, at the height of the construction boom, revealed great pessimism about the future. So Pew analysts assign the hopefulness to recent political change. Despite early fumbles managing community participation in the budget crisis, the reform-minded Mayor Nutter is still popular with voters.

Yet I'm inclined to associate fixing up with feeling good, doubly important in a city that's really only a step or two from falling apart. Ten years of renovation — just how many rotted, wooden, single pane windows have been thrown in the dumpster since 1999? — have given certain neighborhoods a newfound sense of possibility, or maybe just a generalized feeling of stability.

Inaction, then, feels like disaster, not only because it stifles our creative energy — the immeasurable, pluralistic act of urban adaptation and reinvention — but because it means extensive disintegration of the housing stock, as well as retail streets and the final collapse of the mostly forgotten industrial landscape. Stop fixing roofs and replacing waste pipes and, well, even hearty optimism can be flushed away.

Philadelphia's homeowners are disproportionately old, and therefore less capable of keeping their homes in good working order. And many of those buildings are quite large and very old. It's like a terrible, inchoate riddle, only there's no cute pun that will solve it.

One likely hope is to make home renovation the city's leading green policy tactic (weatherization as vast civic project); tie that to a more generalized notion of historic preservation — the preservation of neighborhood form (and not necessarily style) — and several goals might be achieved at once, a necessity in a time of limited resources. The goal ought to be to keep the saws grinding. Silence is unbearable.

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Brian Howard's Editor's Letter will return next week.