A Million Stories

For weeks now, David Hilbert has roamed Philadelphia by bike, pillaging neighborhoods of one particularly sweet treasure: figs.

Well, "pillage" might be a little strong — the fig trees are all over the place, Hilbert says, particularly in neighborhoods where Italian-Americans live or once lived, often neglected.

"In some South Philly neighborhoods, they're like every tree or every other tree — just spilling onto the sidewalk!" Hilbert says.

On a recent trip to Overbrook, he says, he ran into some kids he knew from volunteering at Neighborhood Bike Works and recruited them. "We just rode around as a squad," he says, "picking figs."

The Penn senior has collected dozens of pounds of the fruit, the majority of which have gone into pies, which he sells — mostly over the Philadelphia Urban Farmers listserv — to fund a proposed community garden in Grays Ferry, where he's lived for the last 10 years. Earlier in the season, he was busy collecting mulberries and wineberries — both, apparently, wild and abundant along local creeks.

"The whole point of picking the stuff is, I want to say, 'Hey — this comes from your and my urban landscape.'" (Pies are $12: E-mail mhilbert@seas.upenn.edu.)

—Isaiah Thompson

The man just appeared one day. And he was there every day after, from morning until dusk, sitting on the stoop of Bill's Delly, a deserted storefront on the corner of Fourth and Cross streets. Everyone in the neighborhood knew his purpose: He never left his post to enter a car, never ducked into an alley. He dealt drugs right there on the street, flagrantly.

Nobody on the block liked it, of course. Recently refurbished and recently drug-active Dickinson Square Park is a half-block away, and plenty of kids play ball and ride bikes in the road. But what to do?

One morning a crudely painted sign appeared across from the dealer's corner. "NO DRUG DEALS!" it read in large, angry black letters on a red background. The sign was wooden and sturdy, its message bold.

"It looked like it was written by a kid," said Catherine Manning, who lives on the block. She doesn't know for sure who made the sign, but says that its message worked — "It definitely helped to have this made so apparent to everyone."

The sign went up a month ago. The man hasn't been back since.

There's much about Sunday's inaugural Philadelphia Naked Bike Ride (tr.im/phillynbr) that speaks well of the city. There's the fact that something like 1,000 riders, responding to meet-up information released via e-mail less than 24 hours prior, mobilized so smoothly and efficiently. That despite a route not being announced until the ride departed, everyone — save for one intentional break-away group — ended up on the same path and in the same place, Fifth and Fairmount's Festival Bar. That drivers who had their paths impeded by a steady stream of nude and semi-nude cyclists honked their horns mostly in support. And that almost all news coverage seemed to "get" the event. But maybe the most impressive thing, honestly, was how the police responded to this massive bicycular streak. Despite there being no pre-ride contact between facilitators and officials, Philly's finest somehow peppered the route and, on occasion, re-routed traffic for riders. One officer, who with his partner had blocked traffic crossing at I think Eighth and Market, stood with his cell phone camera out, waving as the riders passed.

—Brian Howard