2004-04-02 - 11:29 a.m.

On the internal soundtrack: Theme from "Growing Pains"

All right. Rant time. A post by Discopete reminded me that I've been wanting to post this. Pete said, "a lot of people in the suburbs are truly afraid of the 'big city'".

This is part of a larger pet peeve of mine, in how suburbanites view the city. I was raised in the suburbs, and we occasionally made forays into the city. In general, however, the city was always painted as a Big Bad Place, where muggers lurked on every corner, and it was certainly noplace that anybody would ever want to live. I was scared to death of cities, and never really spent much time in one until I joined Poindexter in downtown San Jose (a small city, not to be confused with the miles and miles of sprawling San Jose suburb). I thought for sure if I lived in the city, I'd be dead inside of a year.

I think that I, along with the 80 thousand or so people in Center City and over a million beyond, are living proof that this is not necessarily true. As long as you and your family don't join any gangs or sell drugs, and you avoid the areas that are heaviest with gang activity, you're probably in pretty good shape.

At the same time, people who live outside of a major city (hereafter, Philadelphia, for the sake of brevity) seem to think of the suburbs as being part of one big general area. While I understand and agree with the concept of a "metro area", I consider the word "city" to describe something very distinct: a place with mixed-use zoning with grid streets and a HUGE variety of people, shops, businesses, and cultural activities packed into a small land area (i.e., very high density). Once you start getting outside the city limits into differently-named towns, you're not in Philadelphia anymore. In fact, there are some neighborhoods inside Philadelphia that I don't know that I'd call "city". (The City of Philadelphia used to only comprise what is now called "Center City", but it annexed a bunch of suburbs in the mid-1800s)

Philadelphia is a city. Washington, DC is a city in some parts. Havertown, PA and Fairfax, VA, on the other hand, are suburban towns.

So I got into a silly "argument" with Phanatic a little while ago, accusing him of cheating in the food poll. The food poll said "Pick a city. What are the three best dining experiences you've had in that city?". He chose Philly, and then mentioned two reputedly fabulous restaurants that are actually in Philadelphia (they're on my list), and picked a third restaurant that is not in Philadelphia, but in a separate town approximately 15 miles away called Conshohocken.

(What a great name for a town. Conshohocken. I need to go there. While I am there, I will eat at the restaurant Brian mentioned.)

Notice that if the poll had said "Pick a metro area", I wouldn't've gotten my panties in a bind. I think I can explain best my objection to the use of Conshohocken when describing food experiences in Philadelphia with some comments I wrote in a post of Kevin's. Kevin himself wrote:

"I would say that if you live in a suburb and sign letters to the newspaper "The Woodlands" or "Pearland" or "Sugar Land" or "Clear Lake" that you do not live in Houston. You may work here, you may have an interest here, you may care about the place, but you live elsewhere.

But if you live within our hundreds of square miles, get mail at a Houston address, and vote in our elections, then I'd say you live in Houston."

I added:

"Add me to the list of people who are irked by suburbanites saying they live in [city]. When I lived in Virginia, I always said the name of the town I lived in, not "DC". Occasionally I will say I used to live in "the DC area".

City living is a completely different experience from suburban living and most suburbanites are horrified at the idea of living in the city. People who live in the Philly suburbs have nothing but bad things to say about Philadelphia (they call it a "shithole") and were aghast that I wanted to live here, so the last thing I want to hear is that they live "in Philadelphia". These are the same people who come here on weekends to partake of the culture and nightlife of the! "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there," is their attitude. That's fine, but *I* LIVE 'in Philadelphia'. They don't."

Other comments ensued, then I wrote:

"In Philadelphia, people who work here but live in the suburbs DO pay city taxes (a wage tax), so I feel they should have some say in how that money is spent. But some of these people really don't understand what makes a city work (see Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities if you're interested) and so sometimes want to "suburbanize" it, which is a Really Bad Thing. If you do that, you kill what makes it a city, the very reason why I want to live here.

BTW, even before I lived in the city it irritated me when suburbanites said they were from a city, because I'd get all excited and ask them what neighborhood and what city life is like, and they'd say, "Oh, well, I'm from the suburbs, actually" and they know almost nothing about the city. :)"

The differences between living here in Philadelphia versus living in the suburbs are like night and day to me. Here in the city, almost everything I could possibly want is within two square miles, which means I never have to drive anymore. In the suburbs, it's not uncommon to be at least a mile from the nearest store of any kind. Center City is CHOCK FULL of old buildings -- it is like a living history of architecture. In the suburbs, there are tract houses mixed in with the occasional old farmhouse. The city is primarily designed with the pedestrian in mind. The suburbs are designed to be convenient for cars. YOU try taking a pleasant walk for a half-mile along a six-lane road with cars zooming by at 50mph just to pick up a quart of milk. Now take try taking it in the city, with narrow one-lane (maybe two) one-way streets and a buffer zone of parked cars that forces cars to slow down to 25mph. It's a completely different experience.

It sounds like I'm knocking the suburbs, because I don't care for them, but that's not really my point. If you prefer to drive instead of walk, if you love seeing lots of grass, you love the quiet, and you always want a parking place for your car wherever you go, the suburbs are a heavenly place. I love to visit my parents and sit in their half-acre backyard and hear nothing but the birds. I just don't want to live there. And they don't want to live here. They're two very different types of places, and I want people to stop lumping the two together.

Godammit. ;)

WTF am I doing awake at 8:30 on the one weekday I don't have to drive Poindexter to work? *cries* I didn't go to bed until midnight.

I'm too excited, is what it is. The ironworks guy is coming over today to talk about putting a gate in our doorway. The purpose of this is twofold: 1. So that we can have a front door (or storm door -- we're still pondering that one) with lots of glass in it to let the light in, and 2. So I can put all kinds of fancy flowers and plant stands on the stoop without worrying about them getting stolen.

So yesterday I was out looking running a couple of errands and looking at ironworks around Center City. Lemme tell you, there is iron EVERYWHERE. Somehow I didn't quite notice this. Everybody's got railings, security bars, gates, fences, whatever, and it's all iron. No Manassas-Park chain-link for these folks, thank goodness. Here's a coupla pics of the fancier iron that I am drawn to but do not work with our "moderne" house (and which Poindexter will never let me have anyway):

Both of these were taken at or near Pennsylvania Hospital, which I think (but have not confirmed) is the hospital they take Rocky to at the beginning of Rocky II. Poindexter was extremely amused by the beginning of the movie (he saw it on TV recently), wherein the ambulance drives through several neighborhoods in Philadelphia that are nowhere near each other in order to get to this hospital. Quite a trip.

Thing is, before we started thinking about a gate, I never gave much thought to iron works. Then I started looking for it and I was astonished at how much there was, and how much variety. I mean, besides your standard vertical bars, there's also this:

Neato, huh?

Update: Well, jeez. We talked to the iron guy, and he showed us a picture of a storm door with iron inside it, and we are now completely reconsidering everything. Now we're thinking: New front door, add a security storm door, and find a way to make my flower pot very difficult to steal (either bolt it down somehow or make a built-in raised bed kinda thing with bricks).

Also, while I was out, I was startled to see unfamiliar lettering on a gate. "Is that Russian? No, wait, I recognize that ... oh, it's Greek!" It was a Greek Orthodox cathedral of St. Somebody-Or-Other. They had a plaque saying this in English on one side of the doors and Greek on the other side:

Since the gates were open, I decided to go inside. I figured it would be a really fancy ornate church, and I wasn't disappointed. To either side of the foyer are the spiral stairs leading up to the loft:

The stairs themselves are beautiful, made of dark wood, but I didn't want to use the flash so you can't really see it.

As I suspected, the main room (I should know what it's called!) was beautiful, with more of the dark wood and lots of gold and fancy paintings. The atmosphere was decidedly un-hushed, however, since the room was also full of workmen straddling the rafters and hollering to each other! Check it out:

I couldn't figure out what they were doing, because I couldn't see what the ropes were attached to. There's also a bunch of netting up there. It was such an odd juxtaposition. All my life, churches have been quiet places, and here were a bunch of guys in grubby clothes hollering and throwing rope around. It was a little unnerving.

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