Lawrence Hosken: Departures: Philly 1996: Part 2

the forgotten map, a lack of restaurants, hacking Fair Fares

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I shopped. Had dinner. Slept. Awoke. It was Monday.

My plan for the day was to walk to the tourist district of Philadelphia, see the Maritime Museum and the Liberty Bell, and see if anything else looked interesting. (It wouldn't.)

The first step would be the walk. On the map it looked to be four miles. It had discovered none of the maps I'd packed had a detailed view of the neighborhood I was in--none of my maps showed all the streets in this area. But once I got to the tourist area, the maps would be complete.

I set out, planning a walk that would take me through a park and to the University district (around Drexel). I walked down a road, turned down another road that seemed to be heading in the right direction, and was soon entering the park. I could tell I was entering the park because of the lack of houses and the lack of sidewalk. This park was not made for pedestrians. There were no trails that I saw. I walked on the shoulder of the road. The road swung back and forth. I came to a T intersection. I walked on. I emerged from the park, looking at my hotel. Obviously, I had got turned around somewhere along the road. I eventually figured out what had happened. Those swings in the road had turned me about. I'd made the wrong choice back at the T intersection. I'd doubled back to my starting point. Jeez.

Not many roads, but enough to get lost in

I decided to take another route through the park, one that was marked on my map. It would mean walking a bit further, but straying from mapped routes was leading to extra walking anyhow.

This road went past houses with lawns. The lawns looked overgrown. I realized that I was looking at lawns that grew in a healthy manner even if not mown. I wondered if this was a sign of a wet climate. The road entered the park. This road had a sidewalk. Judging from the condition of the sidewalk and the low overhanging branches, not many people used the sidewalk. I couldn't figure this park out. I saw one walker and one jogger my whole time there. As near as I can tell, the park was there to hold a music hall and an arboretum and lots of greenspace. But the only way people ever experienced the greenspace was by driving through it. No wonder they think Californians are stupid for wanting more greenspace. Greenspace is obviously just something that adds a little variety to your drive.

Maybe there weren't any non-drivers in the park because it was early on a Monday morning--about 9am. The early hour was actually part of my plan, a sort of contingency plan whose contingency arose. You see, when I emerged from the park I was in a Bad Neighborhood.

I'd heard that Philly had a lot of Bad Neighborhoods. It was supposed to be the epitome of a ring city--the rich folks had fled from the inner city to the suburbs and the inner city had fallen apart. Now I walked along cracked sidewalks looking at houses made of crumbling brick. There were abandoned houses, houses that looked partially demolished, gutted houses.

My plan for dealing with Bad Neighborhoods was to be there early, before any of the muggers had had a chance to wake up. I'd planned to pass through this area earlier--my wrong turn had cost me some time--but I'd obviously still managed to avoid the muggers. The only people out and about were some old folks sitting on porches and the garbagemen.

I turned onto Lancaster, a retail street. There were people here. For many, many blocks every single one of those people was African-American. It was sort of like Northern Idaho in inverse. Here again, the neighborhood looked very run down.

Campus was abrupt. All of the sudden, there were lots of big, modern buildings around, in good repair. There were lots of roach coaches around. That's when I noticed the lack of restaurants. It was weird. There were two universities in the area. There was a retail street with presumably cheap buildings behind me. Why hadn't there been lots of cheap restaurants there? Why were there so many roach coaches around? This was very alien. I wasn't in California, that's for sure.

Perhaps the coolest thing I saw on the streets of Philly was this mobile phone booth.

I walked through the U. district. I walked through the financial center. I walked through the tourist area. I arrived at the Independence Maritime Museum.

For the most part, this museum was brain candy. I spent my time letting facts about the port, the shipyard, local mercantile history, SCUBA, and immigrants flow in one neuron and out the other. There were two cool things, though.

There was a booth where you could listen to sound recordings of oral histories of people who'd worked in the port. One guy's story was especially eerie. He talked about how all these people were working on these metal ships in the shipyard; it would be winter; the workers would be on cold metal. They would kneel on this metal that was so very cold. To keep their legs from freezing, they would kneel on pads of asbestos, of which there was plenty around. When they were looking for a warmish place to sit down and eat their lunches, they would go to the asbestos holding bin and sit on top, luxuriating in the warmth, waving aside the fibrous clouds that rose up around them. It was so nice to be warm for a change. Other people talked about how surprised they were that the USN shipyard was shut down even though it had been rated the best in the nation. There was a lot of bitterness.

A pretty handmade boat

There was an area towards the back of the museum called the Workshop On the Water. Here people learned how to make wooden boats by hand. I looked at some displays about how one makes a wooden hull, learned a lot, and then forgot it. I'm tempted to say that the word "lapstrake" showed up a few times, but that sounds almost obscene, so perhaps I'm wrong. Most of this area was a large work area, fenced off so that the public could look in, but not enter. There was a hull under construction, and a sort of boat skeleton that I suppose was waiting to have a hull laid onto it. There was a big band saw, pails of various paints and chemicals, big clamps, lots of neat stuff. I asked about some long pieces of wood--they had triangular cross-sections. It turns out that the idea was that you'd put eight of these triangular pieces of wood together to make one piece of wood with an octagonal cross-section, then file/sand down this piece of wood to make a round mast. This was much easier than starting out with a single piece of wood with a square cross-section and filing that down to something round. Also, by cutting off the tips of the triangle, you could create a hollow mast very easily--much more easily than by boring out a single piece of wood. The result was a strong, light wooden mast. Someone named Cooper, who works alone up in some New England state (I forget which one), had come up with the idea.

A hatch on some big old boat at the Maritime Museum

Cannons, cans on some big old boat at the Maritime Museum

I left the museum. I got a sandwich at a deli. I took a look at the Liberty Bell through a window, but did not wait in line so that I could see it up close in the company of a hundred of my fellow tourists. I looked around for a shop selling cheesy souveneirs, but could not find one. I wandered around some of the historical buildings for a while, but my heart was no longer in tourism. I was ready to head back to the hotel.

I walked to a big train station. A light rain fell, then started to get serious as I walked. At the station, I caught a cab back to the hotel. The cabbie handed me one of those booklets I talked about--the ones meant to keep them honest. He pointed out in the book that my fare would be $13. Okay. He drove me to the hotel, and since I knew what the fare was, he felt no need to turn on the meter. So his boss need never know about the fare he'd collected, I suppose. I guess those books weren't enough to make the cabbies honest.

Back in the hotel, I flipped through a tourist pamphlet which was full of ads. One of the ads was for a mall called "Suburban Square." I kid you not.

The next day, I went home.

It's taken me a while to write this travelogue, much of the time spent trimming it down. There just wasn't that much interesting stuff that happened that I was awake for, and it's all I can do to restrain myself from trying to fill that void with fluff. I guess I could have shortened this whole report to the sentence, "For my trip to Philly, I forgot to pack a notepad, black socks, and an accurate map."

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