This is one of those situations where the thing you imagine is much, much better than what a thing really is. Riding by a City Paper honor box, I read this week’s cover story headline not as is — “Who will pray for Camden? — but merely, seeing our neighboring city to the east’s name in big boldface type, it called out as a proposition: Camden? As in, “Tennis, anyone?” Which has been something that’s been on my mind for a while, actually. Having seen the Gentrification Wars rip through (in no particular order) Old City, Nothern Liberties, Fishtown, Bella Vista, Passyunk East, West Philly and so on, it pains me that there is not much soil around here for the Early Adopter/Urban (White) Settler to till; and as such, and as you know, all of the aforementioned neighborhoods are now literally teeming with assholes who would never have set foot in them a mere decade ago. So pardon me, Mike Newall, if i table your Pulitzer Lust-y tale of People Getting Lost In The System for a moment, because I’ve got Urban Renewal (and cheap-as-fuck real estate) on my mind. Look at it this way: Camden is actually kind of beautiful. And it’s so fucked. But it’s also free of so many of the problems that make getting anything done in Philly such a nightmare. And yet, it’s so close to Philly that it might as well be a part of it. So let’s take it back to the old school and make Camden a theoretical annex of Philly. Find a stretch of a few blocks, get some established Philly business people to throw down some dough and see what happens: Open a Cantina Dos Thirdos there, or a kind of Standard Tap-py place. Throw down some Pergo in some of the shitbox houses and rent ‘em out to UArts kids. Evict the Rocket Cat from Philly and send ‘em over on the ferry. You can see where I’m going with this — it would truly be a Grand Experiment. Anybody up for it? No? Oh. OK. Fair enough. After all, this is Camden we’re talking about. But mark my words, people. Mark. My. Words.
CP: This Is Not About That

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 10:50 am.