{"id":99015,"date":"2025-02-20T08:03:16","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T08:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/february-20-2025-places-i-love-and-hate-philly\/"},"modified":"2025-02-20T08:03:16","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T08:03:16","slug":"february-20-2025-places-i-love-and-hate-philly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=99015","title":{"rendered":"February 20, 2025: Places I Love and Hate: Philly"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

[For this
\nyear\u2019s installment in my annual anti-favorites series, I wanted to complicate
\nthings a bit, considering places from across my life with which I have
\nlove\/hate relationships. I\u2019d love to hear your own complex (or simple!)
\nanti-favorites, whether places or anything else, for the crowd-sourced weekend
\nairing of grievances!]<\/p>\n

On
\nfrustrating attitudes, fantastic academics, and a secret third thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

I used to
\nthink it was probably apocryphal, but apparently it\u2019s entirely real: in the
\n1970s, a billboard
\non the highway<\/a> leading into Philly, sponsored by the civic group Action
\nPhiladelphia which was seeking to drum up tourism for the city, featured
\nthe slogan<\/a> \u201cPhiladelphia Isn\u2019t as Bad as Philadelphians Say It is.\u201d Obviously
\nthat was a joke and thus a hyperbolic portrayal of local attitudes and
\nnarratives, but like many jokes, this one was definitely also a reflection of
\nreality. I\u2019ve never lived anywhere where the locals had a more consistently and
\ncomprehensively negative self-image than did Philadelphia and Philadelphians
\nduring the few years I spent there (as a grad student at Temple University),
\nand for a congenital optimist like myself, encountering that attitude toward my
\nhome and our shared city on the regular was a pretty painful thing to
\nexperience. <\/span><\/p>\n

On the
\nother hand, one of my very favorite people and certainly one of my favorite
\nfellow academics is a local Philadelphian born and bred. I\u2019ve featured Jeff
\nRenye quite a bit in this space, from multiple<\/a>
\nawesome Guest
\nPosts<\/a> to my own impassioned
\ntribute<\/a> to his awesomeness (since I made that plea, he has indeed gotten a
\nfull-time teaching gig, in the UPenn Writing
\nProgram<\/a>). I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve said it specifically or overtly on any of
\nthose prior occasions, but Jeff is profoundly interconnected with Philly, and I
\ndon\u2019t just mean because I met him in grad school there and he became a guide to
\nmuch of the city for me (although that\u2019s certainly the case)\u2014I mean because I
\nthink the best of Philly and its ethos, of what the city stands for (compared
\nfor example to more smug and self-confident places like Boston and New York),
\nis captured by Jeff and his work and identity alike.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those two
\nparagraphs capture the duality of this place pretty well, I\u2019d say. But I would
\nadd this: one of my favorite places in Philly is a relatively unknown historic
\nsite that\u2019s drastically overshadowed by the more famous and to my mind less
\ninteresting ones located nearby. I really love the Benjamin
\nFranklin Museum<\/a> and would recommend it to any visitor to historic Philly\u2014but
\nnearly all such visitors, it seems to me, stay in the area of neighboring sites
\nlike Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, which are certainly historic but
\nmuch less interesting in their presentation and exhibits than the museum. And
\nthat sums it up too, perhaps\u2014Philly has tons of great stuff, but you\u2019ve got to
\nwork a bit harder to find it, and you\u2019ve got to make it through the
\nself-deprecating narratives to do so. <\/span><\/p>\n

Next
\nlove\/hate place tomorrow,<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben<\/span><\/p>\n

PS. What
\ndo you think? Anti-favorites you\u2019d share?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[For this year\u2019s 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\u2019d 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[3843,25878,465,27533,7116],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-99015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history","tag-february","tag-hate","tag-love","tag-philly","tag-places"],"yoast_head":"\nFebruary 20, 2025: Places I Love and Hate: Philly - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=99015\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"February 20, 2025: Places I Love and Hate: Philly - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[For this year\u2019s 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. 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