[For this
year’s installment in my annual anti-favorites series, I wanted to complicate
things a bit, considering places from across my life with which I have
love/hate relationships. I’d love to hear your own complex (or simple!)
anti-favorites, whether places or anything else, for the crowd-sourced weekend
airing of grievances!]
On
frustrating attitudes, fantastic academics, and a secret third thing.
I used to
think it was probably apocryphal, but apparently it’s entirely real: in the
1970s, a billboard
on the highway leading into Philly, sponsored by the civic group Action
Philadelphia which was seeking to drum up tourism for the city, featured
the slogan “Philadelphia Isn’t as Bad as Philadelphians Say It is.” Obviously
that was a joke and thus a hyperbolic portrayal of local attitudes and
narratives, but like many jokes, this one was definitely also a reflection of
reality. I’ve never lived anywhere where the locals had a more consistently and
comprehensively negative self-image than did Philadelphia and Philadelphians
during the few years I spent there (as a grad student at Temple University),
and for a congenital optimist like myself, encountering that attitude toward my
home and our shared city on the regular was a pretty painful thing to
experience.
On the
other hand, one of my very favorite people and certainly one of my favorite
fellow academics is a local Philadelphian born and bred. I’ve featured Jeff
Renye quite a bit in this space, from multiple
awesome Guest
Posts to my own impassioned
tribute to his awesomeness (since I made that plea, he has indeed gotten a
full-time teaching gig, in the UPenn Writing
Program). I don’t think I’ve said it specifically or overtly on any of
those prior occasions, but Jeff is profoundly interconnected with Philly, and I
don’t just mean because I met him in grad school there and he became a guide to
much of the city for me (although that’s certainly the case)—I mean because I
think the best of Philly and its ethos, of what the city stands for (compared
for example to more smug and self-confident places like Boston and New York),
is captured by Jeff and his work and identity alike.
Those two
paragraphs capture the duality of this place pretty well, I’d say. But I would
add this: one of my favorite places in Philly is a relatively unknown historic
site that’s drastically overshadowed by the more famous and to my mind less
interesting ones located nearby. I really love the Benjamin
Franklin Museum and would recommend it to any visitor to historic Philly—but
nearly all such visitors, it seems to me, stay in the area of neighboring sites
like Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, which are certainly historic but
much less interesting in their presentation and exhibits than the museum. And
that sums it up too, perhaps—Philly has tons of great stuff, but you’ve got to
work a bit harder to find it, and you’ve got to make it through the
self-deprecating narratives to do so.
Next
love/hate place tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Anti-favorites you’d share?
