Sunday, January 1, 2012

Philadelphia's City Hall

In case you have never been to Filthadelphia, it's an ugly place, with a unique city hall.  I don't want to call it beautiful, but i cannot recall seeing any other city halls with this particular architecture.  (Perhaps this is fortunate.)  As someone once described the front end of the AMC Matador, it's distinctive, but so are warts:



They did an interesting job of preserving facades of old buildings with the new skyscrapers:


But it still a fundamentally poor and miserable place, with tragedies like these:


6 comments:

  1. I've got a friend who lives near that church, I'll ask him what's going on with that.

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  2. 43rd and Chestnut is not a nice area. I wouldn't be caught there during the day without a firearm. You're pretty far off the tourist path there, though it's not far from my Alma Mater, and the University of Pennsylvania.

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  3. I was there because of the University of Pennsylvania, where I was doing some research. And yes, I was carrying my Colt Mustang when I was there.

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  4. My buddy says: "Oh, yeah. Christ Memorial Church. That church tower collapsed in 2004: years of no maintenance washed away the cement and the like weakened it so much that it collapsed during a rainstorm. No one hurt, but it's still a fenced-off ruin."

    Personally I lived for about three years a number of blocks south from there, 43rd and Baltimore, right across from Clark Park, while I was attending Drexel.

    Virtually everything I've ever had stolen from me was stolen while I was living there.

    (Just don't let the cops catch you carrying.)

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  5. To quote the line from The Mask: "I have a permit for that."

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  6. I had a girlfriend that lived a block or so from that corner, and one time I left and she heard gunfire a minute later.

    I heard it too, but it wasn't me. She called me worried, thinking I had just shot someone. There was a murder in broad daylight right down the street one day for which we heard the shots for.

    In the burbs, if you had heard the shots, the police would have definitely want a disposition. Not there. Apparently the cops knew who had done it, and I don't think were too concerned about getting justice for the demised, short of using it as an excuse to get another piece of human debris off the streets.

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