The Week That's Sucked

There've been better weeks to be a Philadelphian. But it's been a crap week all over.

by Brian Howard

The budget's in crisis, the Dow's cratering; a Pennsport cabinet factory burned to the ground, engulfing South Philly in fumes; we senselessly lost yet another of our finest.

There've been better weeks to be a Philadelphian. But it's been a crap week all over. With the economy falling — and with it, apparently, the sky — we're being forced to take a hard look at ourselves. Like staring down the prospect of playing the rest of the season without your star tailback, taking a long look in the mirror can be bracing.

Sunday night at Johnny Brenda's, I took part in a launch salon for Phillyskyline.com and CP contributor Nathaniel Popkin's second book, The Possible City: Exercises in Dreaming Philadelphia, which you may have read excerpted here a few weeks back. The book is something of a love letter to Philadelphia and the enormous potential it — as an old city with lots of what Bruce Schimmel calls "good bones" — possesses.

With its rowhouse scale and plentiful infrastructural reminders of a city that was an 18th- and 19th-century powerhouse, Philadelphia seems to cry out to dreamers.

I moderated a discussion between Popkin and R. Bradley Maule, the fellow who runs the show at Philly Skyline, a site devoted to the urban condition in Philly with an emphasis on architecture and planning.

There was a surprisingly large turnout for a Sunday evening event at a bar. There was also an elephant in the room: How much is now possible given the tenuous state of American banking and the American economy?

The 10-year boom in Philadelphia construction is over, figured Popkin, and nobody disagreed. Big projects, the crowd seemed comfortable conceding, could dry up. Maule and several audience members wondered what might be the focus of his site updates after (if?) the American Commerce Center goes up and that titular skyline becomes stagnant.

But the book's point is that the really meaningful changes in Philadelphia are possible because Philadelphia is, indeed, so manageable and malleable for people without enormous means. A bad economy doesn't need to mean the end of possibility.

William Reed, owner of Johnny Brenda's and Standard Tap, explained how the burst Internet bubble of the '90s and the subsequent cheap real estate helped make his little NoLibs bar empire possible. Where possibility is concerned, ideas are the coin of the realm.

Still, my 401k doesn't accept "ideas" and so, a bit freaked out by all the stock market turmoil, I called my financial adviser. Jane Berryman, a VP over at Raymond James, helps me manage the film canister full of state quarters that is the bulk of my "financial portfolio."

Yes, I was worried about my money. But what I really wanted to know was whether she thought Philadelphia — so close to New York but so much more affordable — was maybe poised to benefit from Wall Street's version of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

After spelling out that, for the purposes of an article, she is not an economist or an analyst (though she, with her master's from the London School of Economics, used to be), she explained that stuff like this happens every so often and that it's generally healthy for the market. She then recalled her time working in London. "Deutsche Bank was setting up back-office operations in Ireland," she says. "It was in the same time zone, had education as good or higher than in England and labor was 40 percent cheaper. If financial services firms in NY are suffering, they might want to farm out certain jobs to do them more cheaply. If Philadelphia had a broad pool of well-educated people. ... "

And therein lies the rub. Philly, despite its dogpile of universities, tends to lag behind other cities in workers with degrees and high school diplomas. On the bright side, if there are no more financial jobs in New York, maybe all those Wharton grads will have to stick around. Brain drain solved?

(bhoward@citypaper.net)