Finding Philly

An art gallery has opened in south philly and it’s about damn time.  We have blocks of prime real estate in the Italian Market/9th Street Market area and the fruit/veggie vendors can only do so much to keep this historic area of the city vibrant.  DiBruno’s and Claudio’s, Talluto’s and Esposito’s and a number of (really good) mexican joints work together in symbiosis to keep it going but there are *easily* a half-dozen prime storefronts that, in any other halfway decent city would be snapped up by people with business.

So where are they and what are they doing?  I’ll sit here and pontificate with my Chestnut Delight (thanks to the Chestnut St. Smoke Shop WHAT!?).  Please join me and comment as I’ve only lived in this fine city for three years now.

The first thing I think of when I think of Philly is South Street.  It’s not a touristy thing; it’s me coming here with my buddies to skate and hook out of school when we were sixteen.  You can say what you want about it but driving two hours to spend the day skating at Love Park and cruising South Street was a teenager’s view of heaven in 1993.  So we were too young to be turning down fiends asking for change but it was exciting.  The spot where Johnny Rockets is now used to house an old-school Star Trek pinball machine and I played that thing for longer than I thought possible when I was sixteen and my parents thought I was spending the night at my buddy’s house a few doors down.

That was the same time The Roots were out in the street looking for their big break and it’s before Zipperhead had to move around the corner.  It’s a time when a guy in the street would say “spare some change so I can get drunk and high?” and that seemed like the funniest thing in the world.  It’s a time when I first drank Brass Monkey and The Beasties were on 24/7.

Yeah, it’s a bit silly to romanticize.  But it’s my formative years.  It’s a good bit before I started getting really into food.  It’s disconcerting to walk down those same streets and see people following in the shadows of those memories.  South Street’s been ripped up.  All of the old trees were just replanted, the old stores are gone and riding a skateboard down the street used to be like riding an asphalt wave.  But those just got ripped out too.

So where does that leave us now?  Well South Street has lost all its romanticism and we’re going to have to wait another 10 years before those trees grow back.  The 9th Street Market has a hole every other shop.  But if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel it might be T & P Fine Art Gallery.

See, Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York have had wonderful modern art (pop) galleries like this for a long time. Philly has Olde City, a collaboration of the B&T crowd, bad restaurants that the Jersey crowd goes to on the weekend, and some really expensive galleries. Philly just isn’t big enough to support all of its artists in a tiny grouping of expensive blocks. Sure there are some well-to-do artists that get to show in places in Olde City but Philly, the birthing ground of Cornbread, has no place to show *street* artists. People that might not get a buy-in to expensive shows in Olde City.

So where better for the nascent underground/sticker/graffiti art scene than the remnants of an immigrant market built around the needs of locals? The Italian Market has the makings of an emergent underground art scene. It’s close to Center City, the rent is cheap and it already gets a ton of foot traffic. What’s to stop T & P from leading the charge?

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