Tales From The Boom: Digital City Philadelphia
AS TOLD BY PIERS MARCHANT: By 1999, shit had gotten figured out, at least to some degree, with respect to the Internet. The big players had emerged — Yahoo, Amazon, and, naturally, the service pipe-line for millions and millions of country bumpkins who were too afraid to dip more than their toes into the icy brine of the web, AOL. AOL’s stock price had soared, they were the kings of connection, with 25 million-odd subscribers as a base. The AOL welcome screen was one of the hottest properties in the Internet and the company was like a drunken adolescent with daddy’s AmEx Black shoved in their back pocket, just buying ludicrous shit and trying to stuff it into their already-crammed garage.
Digital City had started out in the mid-’90s as one of the first internet city guides, providing venue and event info, but also whatever the hell else the editors could think to throw in there: Columnists, features, regular bullshit movie reviews, whatever anyone wanted to cover. It had already established itself in many of the top markets by the time AOL came breezing along, offering to snap the company up for (undoubtedly) far more than what it was worth.
By the time I started, in October of ’99, AOL had spread eight DC hub offices in places like NY, Chicago, Denver, L.A. and Dallas, and offered absolutely no protocols on how each city was meant to run. On any given day on the Philly site, you could find a music review from A.D. “Baked Ham Pop” Amorosi, a racially-charged column from Clark DeLeon, a zillion upcoming art openings (which AOL users famously couldn’t have cared less about) and a gaggle of restaurant ‘reviews’ that said absolutely nothing about the quality of the food (weren’t allowed to, per AOL policy, at the risk of potentially alienating future ad-buyers).
After the jump, Piers continues. Brace yourself!
Oh, yes, we were flying high. Our first office was a lovely loft space on the sixth floor of the Daniel Building in Old City, the kind of glass-and-polished-wood-with-exposed-ductwork affair that just oozed new media. The sales team was on one side of the office, generally suit-clad, constantly on the phone, while the editorial team squatted on the other. The managing editor had been at City Paper for years, so there was a kind of quasi-journalistic sheen to what we were doing.
As per Internet Behemoth protocol at the time, the site was powered by a smattering of full timers amidst a veritable army of contractors, the latter of whom mid-20′s and tending toward the indie/emo spectrum, with a couple of notable exceptions: Miss New Jersey of 1998, a diminutive wisp of a girl who lasted with us about a month before moving on to other projects, and a dude who was so obsessed with LaVar Arrington, a linebacker from Penn State, that he recited obscure stats (“LeVar once ran a 4.37 forty,” “LeVar can jump over a Ford Explorer”) in place of any other kind of conversation. There was also an old Sweeney comrade, whom I’ll call Martin, who would show up everyday in an old army coat, reeking of smoke and bad choices, hung over like a motherfucker. Martin would collapse into his desk, surf porn for a couple of hours, and then crawl to the front of the office where there was a sympathetic developer’s office with a futon. There was also “Lance,” an incredibly sweet guy from outside Pittsburgh, who utterly destroyed our microwave by placing a potato wrapped in tin foil inside (he claimed he had never used one before), and, later, showed up for work one day in an odd-looking green suit and a set of fake, crooked teeth, remaining in character the rest of the day.
The center could not hold, of course. Our general manager, who was quite thoroughly loved, eventually stepped down, and a more corporate douchebag stepped in and promptly turned us into a bunch of miserable web-drones, doing his bidding to the letter. Then, we got bumped from our building by fucking gointernet.net (Ed.: worry not, there will be a post on these guys before the week is out, I assure you.) before they were busted by the feds.
Meanwhile, agonizingly, over the course of six or seven years, we saw Digital City (by now renamed, blandly, AOL CityGuide) twist in the wind, getting more and more marginalized as it got switched from division to division in AOL — a failing company whose fortunes had by now collapsed. No one quite knew what to do with DC/CG, it seemed, until, sometime last year, the plug was finally pulled and AOL acknowledged its utter failure by eliminating all the original content many hundreds of editors had spent the better part of eight years creating and replacing it with that of our former arch-competitor, CitySearch. A bit like the Greeks giving up the ghost and inviting the Turks to come and live in their house, eat their food, and enjoy copious amounts of sex with their daughters.
RIP, Digital City, at least we’ll always have Gianfranco’s.
Click here to take a peek at Digital City on The Wayback Machine.
Piers Marchant is currently an editor at two.one.five magazine.
