Not Your Father's Philadelphia

Five days ago, the New York Times declared Philadelphia the #3 place to go in 2015, just behind Cuba and Milan. It wasn't an isolated fluke. Conde Nast recently published a reader survey that elected Philadelphia the world's second shopping destination, only outranked by Barcelona. Late last year Forbes called Philadelphia one of three great cities for solo travel along with Boston and Milan.

The weight of this praise may be hard for some locals to comprehend. We live this city every day. Like a New Year's resolutionist staring at a scale, we don't always recognize the heaping improvements this city has made in relatively recent years. But the New York Times, Forbes, and Conde Nast have pointed out the apparent fact that, yes, Philadelphia's world class vitality has been resuscitated and we're charging headfirst at becoming the nation's premier city.

"The City of Brother Love is having a moment." - Forbes

Looking at Reading Terminal Market and Old City boutiques, even chains as unique as Uniqlo and Century 21 or as benign as Nordstrom Rack, Conde Nast explains why hardcore fashionistas are heading to Philadelphia's tax-free cash registers. And the Times and Forbes are telling them why they need to stick around.

Dated storefronts are being replaced with exciting window displays and an endless supply of local restaurants, pubs, and entertainment venues. Faster than you can say "beer garden," you could have your hand wrapped around a local lager on nearly any block in Center City.

But it doesn't end with a few listicles. If Philadelphia can earn high marks for shopping and travel, just imagine where we'll land when the most cynical amongst us are finally willing to admit we deserve it. Let's face it, we're a pessimistic bunch. Despite our fierce loyalty, we tend to take praise like a Greek yia yia at Easter. We hide our pride behind burden.

That doesn't matter. In fact, it's charming that our city has a collective personality. But the influx of travel, growing population, and new destinations are bringing more. Park improvements along both rivers are signaling neighborhoods to bring their A-game. Once a pipe dream, the proposed Reading Viaduct Park is no longer inching towards reality, it's actually happening.

And we're not just following in the successful footsteps of other cities. From BYOs to our universities and hospitals, Philadelphia is trailblazing emerging industries and ideas. 

CHoP will soon be rising above the South Street Bridge and University City's skyline is about to be home to the city's sixth tallest skyscraper. The Schuylkill Banks is on its way to Bartram's Garden on the west bank of the river. We're using smart urbanism to build tall and embrace pedestrians, connecting commuters and challenging what we consider "downtown." 

The Girard Trust Block is currently one of the largest redevelopment projects since Liberty Place gave our city a skyline, and it's begging the Gallery at Market East to get in line. And the Gallery has responded. 

We're pumped up like Danny Bonaduce, growing fast with a subtle hint of roid-rage.

Things are snowballing, not because national publications have decided to recognize us, but because we gave them something to look at. No longer the Oldsmobile of America, this is not your father's Philadelphia. So move over Chicago and San Francisco, there's another big player in town. And with thousands of acres of affordable, sustainable, urban real estate north, south, and west, we can house out-priced refugees from New York and D.C. for decades.

New York's Dirty Little Secret

Several residents interviewed for Lisa Foderaro's New York Times article, "Tensions Over Park Behavior as Homelessness Rises in New York City," have managed to define utter disregard for humanity.

As homelessness skyrockets, some are asking why, while others are demanding something be done to stop it. What few are actually concerned with are those unfortunately left on the streets. 

If New York's early 21st Century can be summed up by Sex and the City, it's 2014 is starting to get disturbingly Dickensian.

What's most unsettling about the article is its considerable lack of empathy for a very real epidemic. While hoards of transplants followed Carrie Bradshaw to the Big Apple, fueled by an affinity for runny eggs and bottomless mimosas, some of them apparently left their compassion back where they came from.

While one Brooklyn resident said that she felt compassion for the homeless, noting that the shelters may not be "a place that they want to go," that compassion seems lost on others, even Foderaro, who opted to discuss homelessness as a problem while ignoring the problems that lead there. 

Deputy Commissioner for the Department of Homeless Services, Jody Rudin stated that they've talked to the homeless, asking why the shelters are not an attractive option. Without delving into why each individual is homeless, the right questions aren't being asked.

Conducting the same survey a guest receives after three nights at a Hilton isn't going to get to the root of a very complex set of circumstances. And those circumstances differ from homeless person to homeless person, because they're people.

The growing number of homeless in New York and around the country aren't members of a union with a spokesperson. For them, life is anarchy, a distopic nightmare full of untold rape and violence. 

Curfews and citations mean nothing in this lawless world. Before anyone can understand why someone would choose a park bench over a cot in a homeless shelter, the reasons each one of them is homeless needs to be understood. 

Then I would suggest that anyone who thinks homelessness is a "problem" akin to traffic or litter serve two tours in Iraq, watch friends get murdered and several villages burn, then return to a nation full of protestors who want to do the exact same to you. 

That might offer better insight into why some homeless people need much more than a bed and a bowl of soup.

Homelessness is incredibly harsh and too few people want to recognize that reality. Empathizing with something so horrid instills guilt, especially when walking a Welsh Corgi up to a park bench to shoo away a war veteran and enjoy a $5 latte. 

Two decades removed from the New York that now only exists in myths and legends, the city has managed to replace much of its diverse populous with ingrates completely out of touch with the struggles of socioeconomics. Likewise, its government has apparently been replaced with politicians and officials better apt to run Smallville than Metropolis. 

From public urination to drug abuse, the rambling Times article inadvertently exposes a city that sees homelessness as another form of blight. Blight is a problem, homelessness isn't that simple. It is a psychosocial condition that deserves sympathetic consideration. Watch The Fisher King. Read Tomas Young's "Last Letter." 

These are broken people who need help. While so many New Yorkers spend thousands on therapy to coach them through their upper middle class woes, many homeless people need sincerely reparative counseling. Those charged with "solving the problem" need to treat homeless people like the wildly diverse and dynamic anti-community that they are, not like a dysfunctional family with a one-size-fits-all solution.

That, perhaps, may be the entire campaign's most shortsighted flaw. These are not simply people from different backgrounds, races, and religions. They're people who have lost their families, their identity, and their faith. They are more diverse than anything one can fathom. To regard them as annoying would be akin to having a distaste for the universe. It's irrational, which is why so many residents are resigned to an annual donation and shutting their eyes. Understanding something so complex isn't just difficult, it takes you to a dark place.

Next time you turn a blind eye to the homeless person holding your door for change, visit the nightmarish reality they're dealing with all the time.

While New York's outer boroughs have awoken to new life full of community gardens and gastropubs, longtime residents have been priced out of their homes with nowhere to go. The strongest of them will survive New York's brutal winter while the elderly and sick will die on your streets, discarded in an unmarked grave. New residents who've taken their place are patting themselves on the back for improving neighborhoods someone else once called home. 

Others, shellshocked veterans who have been forced to self medicate with drugs and alcohol, are faced with a smugly idealistic public dialogue that knows nothing of the horrors of combat, a dialogue that has shamed many from returning to their families. 

Is it any wonder some homeless men and women trend towards being confrontational? They're stuck in a life you can't possibly imagine, and then you have the audacity to tell them they're not good enough to sleep on a park bench hours after you're in your king size bed.

Has America's once great melting pot become so superficially perfected that its heart has been buried under the pursuit of a utopian ideal that can only be met by discarding those most in need of the simplest sympathy and respect?

In a city that recently offered "ghetto" tours of its most blighted neighborhoods, exploiting its most unfortunate, can it ever recover from its own narcissism? People treat stray animals better. 

Next time you see a homeless person sitting on your park bench, if you don't feel threatened, join them. Share your Panera. Talk to them. They may not know where to find a shelter. They may be too proud to call their family. Offer them a shred of dignity. When the world treats someone like a sewer rat, that simple act of humanity may be exactly what they need. 

Banksy's Irrelevant Opinion

Often the line between editorials and rants is fine and technical. Editorials are opinionated, but backed by personal points of reference and alternatives. They are intended to foster debate, not blow off steam.

Rants typically consist of "grass is greener" jargon and argument bait. Of course rants are usually published in the comments below an article so by the time an argument ensues, the writer is long gone.

Banksy, London's popular yet illusive graffiti artist, has been making his way through New York City.

Some love him and some hate him. Some think he's a vandal, others a political statement. Few claim to know who he is.

But this isn't about Banksy the artist. It's about Banksy the self professed architecture critic.

Banksy's mock New York Times page, including the article he presented as an editorial.

Banksy recently presented an editorial to the New York Times, a rant attempting to eviscerate the design for the city's new One World Trade Center. His editorial is full of 9-11 bait claiming the "shyscraper" proves the terrorists won simply because he doesn't care for the building.

His commentary is too literal to delve into. The true problem with his article is it serves no purpose. Not liking the new WTC is fine. It's been both torn apart and praised by architecture critics around the world. Any opinion can be validated.

But Banksy fails to mention why. He offers no alternatives, perhaps because he isn't versed in architecture enough to know where to go. Instead of citing similar designs, better designs, or even comparing it to the original World Trade Center, he suggests "kids with roller poles" tag the façade.

Returning the commentary Banksy started back to his comfort zone is elementary. But he's not even doing that. His writing is trite. If he thinks the WTC would look better tagged with his Blek le Rat rip offs, tell us why.

But he can't. One of the biggest differences between an editorial and a rant, especially when published online, is the anonymity of the author. In order to have a legitimate opinion you have to be available to answer to it.

It's not surprising that the New York Times declined to publish his editorial. The mysterious nature that surrounds his identity excuses himself from any debate. It allows him to scream and the sun with no accountability. 

Banksy took the Times' snub to the streets, tagging an unrelated Brookly building with the words, "This site contains blocked messages," as if the Times was censoring his words. It does his artwork no service, particularly when One World Trade Center has been no stranger to criticism.

Banksy's reaction to the New York Times' snub suggesting that the Times censored his work. Confusing censorship with bad writing, Banksy fails to note that every news outlet in the nation published a copy of his editorial in one way or another.

The juvenile words in his unpublished (now published everywhere) New York Times editorial expose flaws in the man's creativity and talent.

Much - perhaps all - of Banksy's success stems from his mystique.

A lot of artists prefer anonymity. But it's one thing to want to exercise your craft and be left alone. It's another to get off on being noticed, on stirring up shit, and then vanish before anyone can ask for a follow up.

The cultural statement in Banksy's art has always been subversive, and graffiti has been the perfect medium for his message. But his editorial opens up the motivation as a political rabblerouser.

Did he not get the reception in New York that he expected? Was he annoyed that One World Trade Center overshadowed the grace of his presence. We'll never know. His position is almost voyeuristic.

Banksy's success in art circles hinged on his absence. The interesting thing about being an anonymous artist is that the second you succeed, you're no longer successful. If the one quality that sets you apart from other outsider artists is that no one knows who you are, then the mysterious allure that gives your work any credibility is gone the moment you submit an article to the New York Times.

Whether the identity of Banksy has been exposed or not, we now know enough about the man to examine his work at face value. Compared to the extravagant graffiti that adorns the lesser parts of New York City and much of Philadelphia, without mystery Banksy's stencils are boring and his installations look like marketing gimmicks, an anti-establishment Target advertisement.

London and New York City have separate cultural issues. Perhaps Banksy doesn't get that. Maybe he doesn't understand the difference between censorship and bad writing. If Banksy wanted to test the international waters, he should have remained humble, because right now he looks like an ass.

New York Takes On Barnes

Jumping on the Robert Venturi bandwagon, a hack of a different sort has come out against the relocated Barnes Museum. This time in the form of the condescendingly elitist New York Times' architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. Say what you will about Inga Saffron (Philadelphia Inquirer Architecture Critic and Pulitzer Prize Nominee), but she will tell you what she likes and why and spends the bulk of her articles discussing aesthetics rather than dwelling in the politics of "art". She engages all of her readers, allowing them to understand design instead of pretentiously trying to make those outside the art circle feel like slack jawed troglodytes for disagreeing. She's real.

Ouroussoff not only dislikes the design, he dislikes that the collection is being reloacated from Lower Merion. Apparently such a collection serves our culture better when limited to a knowledgeable art community rather than available to the urban public and tour busses. Aside from which he's clearly done no research into the reasons behind the move, and the problems between the current museum and the county. He's also done no research into the philosophy behind the design of the building in the grounds, meant to replicate the entire experience in the original location, a replication mandated as a requirement with the move.

This article reeks of jealousy more than anything.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/arts/design/07barnes.html?_r=2&hpw