Why this new website? Why in Philadelphia? Why

DAN ROTTENBERG

What do Americans today really want? Prosperity? Security? Meaningful work? Intellectual stimulation? Erections on demand? World peace? Eternal salvation? Convenient parking? All of the above?

Next question: Where are they most likely to find it?

This particular puzzle is helpfully solved every few years by that bible of America’s aspiring upper-middle classes, Money magazine. Money’s latest list of “America’s Best Places to Live,” which appeared in August, offered a compendium of 200 suburban and exurban towns, all located a safe distance from mean urban streets yet close enough to a big city that their residents’ brains don’t completely molder into applesauce. The very best place to live in the entire country, it turns out, is situated just 12 miles from downtown Philadelphia: Moorestown, N.J.

My own community— Center City Philadelphia— failed to make the Money list, even though my wife and I successfully raised two daughters here, within walking distance of my office as well as one of America's greatest orchestras, America's most elegant concert hall, a performing arts center that has excited the envy of Parisians, four cutting-edge theaters, America's most prestigious music school, and two dozen of the best restaurants on the East Coast, not to mention a mind-boggling concentration of boutiques, museums, antique shops, swim clubs, bookstores and coffee houses.

Thanks to our convenient location, we Rottenbergs expended no time, energy or gas on commuting or chauffeuring our children. Our daughters, in turn, developed self-sufficiency and coping skills by osmosis. They attended some of the most academically rigorous schools in the country. They also acquired a genuine sense of community among educated, articulate neighbors who (unlike suburbanites) must look after each other because all of us live so close together.

So Money’s board of experts would advise my wife and me to chuck our current lifestyle and move to Moorestown, N.J.? Are they out of their minds?

Despite Money’s presumably exhaustive research efforts and the worst fears of Philadelphia civic boosters, the Money list failed to incite any wholesale exodus of Philadelphians to Moorestown. On the contrary, suburbanites are lately abandoning their cul-de-sacs and Muzak malls and flocking to Center City, happily spending $1 million and more to live in condos within walking distance of arts and culture.

Center City’s population, which grew modestly from 73,000 in 1980 to 78,000 in 2000, is now estimated at 88,000 and projected to zoom to 110,000 in the next five years. The arts in Philadelphia now gross more than $1 billion a year, double the figure of ten years ago, according to the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. October's National Geographic Traveler celebrated Philadelphia as America’s “Next Great City,” explaining, “Philadelphia is like a stage, no matter whether the performance of the moment is a waltz, rock or salsa.)

Journalistic hyperbole aside, it is indeed true that there’s never been such an artistic flowering in Philadelphia— not even in the early-19th-Century heyday of Rembrandt and Charles Willson Peale, Nicholas Biddle and Gilbert Stuart, who dubbed Philadelphia “the Athens of America.” (Remember, Philadelphia’s population then was barely the size of Chester today.) Come to think of it, even the ancient Athenians had less on their cultural plates back in the Golden Age of Sophocles and Euripides than Philadelphians do today.

“When a man is tired of London,” Samuel Johnson observed in the 18th Century, “he is tired of life.” I’m beginning to feel that way about Philadelphia in the 21st. I no longer react defensively when suburban friends boast about their three-car garages, their Kings of Prussia and their Blue Routes. Instead I just smile serenely and reply: “I live three blocks from the Kimmel Center. How about you?”

Unfortunately, while suburbanites have been migrating downtown, Philadelphia’s major media have been heading in the opposite direction. The Inquirer, the region’s sole first-class news organization, committed more than $300 million in the early ’90s to a two-pronged strategy aimed at reaching two contradictory audiences: (a) soccer moms in Horsham whose rallying cry was: “What better way to spend my idle time than sitting in expressway traffic in my Lexus en route to Bennigan’s?” and (b) young professionals under 30 who lack the patience to read daily newspapers. In the process, the Inquirer slashed its arts coverage and offered early retirement to more than a hundred wise old editorial hands, effectively decimating the newspaper’s institutional memory as well as its sophisticated grasp of issues.

(One small recent example: Following the death in October of former Art Museum president Robert Montgomery Scott, an Inquirer editorial saluted “Bobby Scott, as he was known widely,” apparently unaware that Scott cringed at such a familiar nickname but was too polite to correct those who used it. An Inquirer photo caption identified one of Scott’s mourners as “Susan Goodfriend,” unaware that she is Susan Gutfreund, wife of John Gutfreund, the former chairman of Salomon Brothers and the supposed model for the fictitious Wall Street titan Gene Lopwitz in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 Wall Street novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. But who is left at the Inquirer to know or care about such details?)

Yet today the Inquirer’s cherished Horsham soccer mom has metamorphosed into an empty nester whose current rallying cry is: “Life is short. What better place to experience life’s awesome possibilities than one of the world’s great cities?” Thus at the very moment when suburbanites are beginning to sing, “Give me the sophisticated life,” the prevailing chorus within the Inquirer’s newsroom is: “Where are the grownups?”

The ostensibly trendier Philadelphia magazine, meanwhile, is currently edited by Larry Platt, who demonstrated his credentials as an urban visionary six years ago by publicly announcing that he was moving from Center City to Ardmore, where "I'm as close to cool stuff as I used to be at 16th and Pine" and where "there's actually more going on around my new digs than there was at my old ones.” To his credit, Platt recently cheerfully confessed that “My 1999 words strike me today as ridiculous….Center City today is so vibrant and full of promise, there’s no comparison in the region.” But the fact remains: Each evening, while Platt’s readers soak up tony bistros, eclectic concerts and cutting-edge theater downtown, this allegedly trend-setting editor scurries home to the Main Line. The same holds for Tim Whitaker, editor of Philadelphia Weekly since 1995, whose column affects the posture of a blue-collar Fairmount corner boy but who actually beds down each night in Gladwyne.

So my question is: Where can Philadelphia arts aficionados feed their hunger for stimulating conversation about everything this brave new cultural capital has to offer? Broad Street Review will attempt to fill some of that void— and, where we can’t, we’ll provide links to other similar conversations. Precisely what form this takes will depend largely upon our readers. In an age of short attention spans and pop culture, I’m looking for Philadelphians with long attention spans and a thirst for real culture. I know you’re out there— both of you— so will you please identify yourselves so we can commune with each other?