My son, having the fabulous tomato bisque at Cafe Lutécia in Philadelphia.
This isn’t my usual lane, but my libertarian friend Steven Greenhut is focused these days on urbanist issues and asked me to write about what I miss about city living now that I’m back in Kansas and living in a surburan-ish college town.
Here’s a brief portion of my ode to Philadelphia:
It took my parents a long time to understand why I loved Philadelphia.
Their confusion was understandable. They’d grown up and then lived in small Kansas towns pretty much their entire adult lives. I’d been raised in those same towns, went to college there, and then spent the first decade or so of my career working at daily Kansas newspapers.
Kansas was familiar. Kansas was home. Kansas was … a place with not that many people.
But in 2008, with the Great Recession starting to rear its head, a couple of things happened in my personal life that suddenly made moving to Philly a pressing possibility. First: A startup news site that I’d helped found unceremoniously got its funding pulled and went out of business. Second: My wife got pregnant.
I needed a job. Fast. And as it happened, the best and fastest option was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia. The timing was also a bit fortuitous: I’d loved vacationing in big cities, had thought about one day taking my shot, and with a child on the way it felt as though there might not be another good chance. So we went.
It was kind of a disaster at first, frankly. The recession was wreaking havoc on the news business, and I was not a good fit with the alt weekly’s culture. I lost my job. And we decided to say. I became a stay-at-home dad while my wife worked. My parents wondered why we didn’t just come home.
Then I got sick.
I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say I spent a long, ugly week in the hospital. My dad flew into town to take care of our 2-year-old son. And one morning, grandad and grandson went to the neighborhood coffee shop, a little French cafe with the best soups in town.
Everybody greeted my toddler kid by name. He was like Norm from “Cheers.”
Suddenly my dad understood. We weren’t just living in a big city of more than a million people. We were living in a neighborhood, where people knew and looked after each other. It wasn’t so different from the small Kansas town where I’d grown up, after all.
Please read the whole thing!
I, for one, miss reading you in PhillyMag, and linking to your journalism :) Thanks for sharing that.