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My New Book!

Thursday, February 20, 2025

February 20, 2025: Places I Love and Hate: Philly

[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?

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