Philadelphia’s truly invisible population: The crowd at Dr. Dog in Rittenhouse yesterday.
Who will hear their cries?

SPECIAL TO PHILEBRITY/TEXT AND PHOTOS BY BRADLEY MAULE: On the chance that you missed today’s Noontime Nuggetz, or last week’s Philadelphia Weekly cover story, or just didn’t happen to catch word last night, local boys done good Dr. Dog held a real big concert in Rittenhouse Square. Did anyone, besides the thousand-plus who attended the show, notice?

Here’s the thing: Concerts in the Park is sponsored by PW. As Joey Sweeney pointed out to me when I brought this up, most editorial boards don’t exactly encourage coverage of events sponsored by a competitor. By this notion, no one expects the City Paper to have a giant write-up about how awesome the party the Weekly threw went. And they didn’t.

But strictly in terms of what’s news: Isn’t a massive concert in the city’s most beloved space news? The Inquirer ran an entire series on the homeless in Rittenhouse Square a few weeks ago, and they were the first to report the decline in that same homeless problem, presumably because of an increased police presence there after the series.

Our struggle is your struggle.

No, it’s not an internationally touted event like Live 8, and no it’s not the annual corporately-sponsored Welcome America concert, but with a huge local band playing a huge local event, which was free no less, you’d think a matter of family-friendly civic pride could slip into the back side of a newscast. Pan the shot over to the al fresco tables at Rouge and Parc, packed as ever, or over to the construction of 10 Rittenhouse Square, the next top-of-the-line condos to hit the market, now two-thirds of the way built.

Fox29 was allegedly there, but it’s nowhere on their web site. A search for “Dr Dog” at myfoxphilly.com returns a top result of “Toledo Zoo Keeper Injured by Tiger.”

Even the Weekly’s own web site has nothing on it after the fact. Well, except for a Polaroid from the event at their music blog — they have a music blog! — anyway. If I was them, after successfully promoting it with a cover story and mad banner ads, I’d want to boast how well it went, with photos from the hired hands.

In fairness, that’s probably what they’ll do at their Concerts in the Park section . . . eventually.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 4:20 pm.