Update: Great West Philly Flag Wars Of 2009 Reveals Poster Author To Be A Snappy Copywriter
Click photo to enlarge.
A reader sent us in this snap of the “West Philly” side’s salvo to chant down the babylon that is the University City District‘s loathsome-to-some claiming of Baltimore Ave. as “University City,” which, to be fair, it is not. On the other hand, the copy on this poster is so “sassy” that we kinda wanna slap it and take UCD’s side in the matter because really. Who gives a shit. This is why you can’t have nice things, West Philly.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Fucking trustafarians…
July 8th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
baltimore ave is indeed part of u. city, the UCD stretches south to woodland ave. i’m no longtime resident, i’ve only lived in the area for about 12 years, but i see the changes that have come with the establishment of UCD, and there is so much positive change and so much growth that i don’t really understand what the problem is. hatin on trustafarians, well, sadly i do understand that part. but why actually take the time to print these dumbass flyers to try and work against commercial development for our neighborhood? how does destroying things make anything “ours?”
July 8th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Well said, ultraval. Truly.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
To be clear: my point was that these fliers are clearly the work of some god damned trustafarians (drexel students?) who moved to the neighborhood a year or two ago and now think they are the voice of the west philly “peoples.”
July 8th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
@ Res: What are the odds that these posters were designed with UPenn-licensed copy of InDesign on a MacBook Pro?
July 8th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
i jog past one of those flyers every day and i never stopped to read it clearly. now that i know what it says i’m tempted to rip it down. ethical dilemma! freedom of speech vs. being a total dumbass! hurm.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
I think these posters are funny, unlike, say, the vandalization of the Gold Standard Cafe some weeks ago. People need to research their targets more thoroughly.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
It could be argued that these posters are inciting vandalism to public property rather than free speech.
If I lived there, I’d tear the fuckers down, just like I do the SELL YOUR HOUSE NOW ANY CONDITION signs in my own neighborhood.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
It could be argued but it would just be stupid.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
@highstrung: i hear that about the gold standard. effing reprehensible.
@friendlynerd: dig.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Sad your posters aren’t getting a better review? And you spent so much time on them, didn’t you?
July 8th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
o highstrung, resorting to insults won’t help. now yr a troll?
friendlynerd’s argument is strong because that’s exactly what the posters are doing, they literally instruct people to deface public property.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
“This is why you can’t have nice things, West Philly.” So true, so true.
I’ll share yet another story from a former (OMG, black!) neighbor on my block in West Philly. She lived on the block for a good 25 years, and said the neighborhood was better than ever. She was pissed about the increase in her property tax (rightly so), but was pleased that her daughter could let her kids out on the street with no fear of being shot, and having some new restaurants to go to with her husband. She just wanted the “dirty punk white kids” to treat her like a normal neighbor and not someone they had to feel bad for.
There’s obviously big problems with gentrification with RE: property taxes. But the white trustafarians have to shed their guilt and coexist, rather than rambling on as if they’re speaking for their non-white neighbors. Cuz they’re not.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I’ve lived in W. Philly through the bars on your windows darkness of the 80′s, the cracked-out early 90′s, worked with community groups, the block clean-ups, the crime watch meetings, all of it. Dammit, I want my fresh Claudio’s cheese from the new shop opening up at 45th and Baltimore and some nice inexpensive Indian food from Desi. I’d like to see some of these high horse punk ass clowns giving back to the community instead of perfecting the fonts on their knee jerk misplaced irony-fueled ire. Jane Jacobs they are not.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
tvox, i think i love you. up with people!
July 8th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Tvox, you invoked Jane Jacobs. Let’s be friends?
July 8th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
I’m not trolling; I actually think that argument would be stupid. How is that an insult?
July 8th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Calling something stupid without explaining why – as in why the argument doesn’t work – is pretty much an insult.
I would welcome your explanation as to how this poster does not explicitly encourage people to deface public property.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Gross economic inequality and structural racism are problems, but the the battle against “gentrification” strikes me as a somewhat sadly misinformed struggle against a symptom of those problems. Sometimes the battle reveals more about the warriors than about the economic and political issues of our city.
I think a lot of us who are from Philadelphia feel disheartened by the disinvestment and abandonment of it by capital. Judging from extended family and from posts on our regional news sites, that disheartening feeling can manifest in really ugly racism and misplaced nostalgia. More positively, Philadelphians have divers activist and NGO civic responses to that disinvestment from KWRU to TURN. Hell, even city council can be pushed to back an affordable housing trust fund from time to time. I admit it is confusing for me as a youthful leftist and a college educated worker to be excited to see some investment both from small business and business improvement district, but I am. After all it serves my interests (I can admit that, even if someone pulling a microbrewed pint won’t), but I suspect the benefits may be more widely shared…
Perhaps I am not treating the authors of this poster fairly, but I suspect we have similar educational and subcultural backgrounds: privileged (in an complex intersectional way, for sure), university educated, and at least a little bit punk. I think there are several common mistakan things that people like us don’t consider regarding “gentrification” in Philadelphia:
1) We are not London or New York and thus homeownership rates are high, and so it’s very difficult for rent changes to alter a neighborhood over night. We don’t even have rent control laws that landlords are clamouring to abolish. Home sales fueled by white flight (and middle class flight regardless of race) have been much more successful in transforming neighborhoods in recent history. Although I guess Society Hill in the 50s and the northern edge of the 30th Ward 50 years earlier provide counter examples of wealth displacing “slums”. Philadelphia has lost perhaps 700,000 people over the past half century. It’ll take substantial government and private investment to rehabilitate the residential neighborhoods we’ve lost to abandonment but there’s certainly room for us to be a city of 2 million again. Even if our workshop of the world factories are probably gone forever, there will be new ways for us to work which will change the character of who labors in Philadelphia.
2) West Philadelphia has simultaneously always been in flux and has always been the same. From Voltairine de Cleyre to the Movement for a New Society to the Punk-Nerd-Crust Nexus today, freaks have huddled along Baltimore avenue with academics, people who work for the academies, normies, the poor, the strung-out, Quakers, Catholics, African Americans, the imigrant, et cetera. With your Free Library Card you have access to the Inquirer to 1981 and the Daily News to 1979 from the comfort of your laptop. You can read stories from 1981, 1989, 1995, 2001, and today that say the same damn things, if you missed them the first time around.
3) The poor and vulnerable are always highly mobile against their own will. Mariposa 30 years ago, the Gold Standard folks 20 years ago, the Firehouse folks 10 years ago, Yoga studios today, and the Milk and Honey people in the future will probably displace very few people. But inadequate federal, state, and local housing and welfare policies will do the trick. The closing of Breyers’ factory by Clark Park or the once purposed abandonment of West Philadelphia for Chesterbrook by Penn probably were more effective. Drug prohibition and the the drug war melt-down in the 1990s figures large in everyone’s local memory. Perhaps positively, some people leaving are also moving up in the American class ladder, while surely some are moving down.
4) Cities change. It’s inevitable. But if we want to make sure they change in an equitable way it’s important that we work to make POLICY changes and we build networks with neighbors and even this damn-square political machine. The left-wing gut reaction to gentrification just seems to be so profoundly conservative. Our simplistic propaganda comes across and romanticing deprivation and the lives of people living through it. Poor and rich people with a variety of interests and reference points are going to have to live together in the same neighborhoods for our democracy to work for reasons of environmental justice.
Of course, it’s great for someone to raise the issues! I just hope having the issue raised generates energy toward democratic action rather than individual tsk tsking.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:15 am
I won’t defend the author of these posters, however, does anyone here mourn the death of South St? I would suppose that the author(s) of these posters is/are attempting to save the bohemian paradise they believe West Philly to be from a similar commercial death.
July 9th, 2009 at 10:48 am
“individual tsk tsking” from people sure stinks
July 9th, 2009 at 11:11 am
@A Feculent Rainbow
Uhh…yeah, plenty of people have mourned South Street. And now that the commercial model is failing, residents have swooped in and reinvigorated the neighborhood with low-rent gallery spaces. To compare Baltimore Avenue to South Street is a pretty extreme and ridiculous claim. The punx should go vandalize all the chains, then – not the people opening small local businesses.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
@trash
Uhh… rhetorical.
Please explain why that comparison is a ridiculous “claim.” South St was once a spot… a mini-community for artsy weirdos – not an outdoor shitmall for NuJersians and Suburbanites. Hell, some of the burn-out South St bohemians of yester-yore still spend their days waxing philosophical with the crusties in Clark Park. However, in their current state, South St and Baltimore ave appear to have little in common. You got me there; still it was an insinuation, not a claim.
Don’t know if I’m following you on the failure of the commercial model topic. I would guess, like Wawa, that the “commercial model” is moving the fuck out of the criminally-absurd real estate market. They can conduct business, more profitably, somewhere else – maybe on Balimmore Avenue – but probably in the ‘burbs. Still, I would wager that more corporate/out-of-state-owned business have set up shop in the South st area within the last 6 months than mom’n'pop galleries. I would be happy if proven wrong.
Nobody should vandalize shit; corporate or local. There are legal means of opposing perceived ‘gentrification’ and or commercialization The flag defamation isn’t right – but it sure is funny.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Most of Philly used to be a shithole. Now, less of it is. This is how I see gentrification and I like it. It is good for the city and that means, in the long run, good for everybody that lives in it or near it.
@feculent: McDonald’s, that retarded chain pizza place, The Gap have all closed on South St. The only vibrant businesses I see left are mom & pop operations and locally run restaurants and bars. The galleries didn’t “open” but are donated spaces by landlords who can’t fill their storefronts because of the perfect storm of South St and The Economy sucking at the same time.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Best urban studies debate in ‘ever. Kudos to all. Its funny South Street is mentioned, because South Street was a product of gentrification (became hip after neighborhood above it became “Society Hill”) and product for gentrification (the presence of South Street spurred newcomers to what became “Queen Village” and “Bella Vista”). Btw, puttin names in quotes only to call out that they aren’t original.
I bring it up, cuz Baltimore Ave is kinda similar, just not occurring with the same gusto of South Street’s transformation. Many of the new places on Balt. Ave came there because a critical mass of newcomers moved to W. Philly, as it became “University City” (which like the name “Society Hill”, was a top-down rather than realtor name.) Now that things like coffee shops and microbrew bars have joined the electic mix of existing retail, more newcomers are enticed to areas around it.
People get attached to place easily and are naturally vexed by change, especially when it affects them personally. Hell my buddy and I moved to Philly in 98 and paid $750 for a two bedroom apt in the middle of Society Hill. I hardly bother with the whole of Center City now cuz its only for rich suburbanites at this point. But that fact hasn’t stopped me from living in a different neighborhood and patronizing the existing and new businesses around me. My scene has simply changed address.
While I feel for the flyer activists and recognize them as obviously creative people who are trying to make a better world, I think fighting change on Baltimore Ave is the wrong outlet for their steam. Unlike Manhattan or other places where there is no room for anyone besides rich mainstreamers, Philly has no shortage of affordable housing or cheap locations for homegrown businesses.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
‘university city’ really was a realty thing. like almost every other named district in major north american towns.
http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1197/philly3.html
also, manhattan is a big place. it has room for many different socioeconomic types. check out soho vs. washington heights, just as a for instance. i like a lot of what you have to say, arcticsplasher, but you make a couple of generalizations that sound misinformed.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
@ ultraval
Regarding Manhattan, you’re citing the exception to the rule. Arcticsplasher’s general point that Philly has far more affordable housing and commercial real estate than Manhattan is absolutely true.
July 10th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
note
Some seriously interesting discussion here, but it just sounds like there’s also some serious sidestepping of some of the core issues here.
Gentrification (look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification) is not just a neighborhood seeing newfound attention by businesses, city, benevolent corporations, fancy restaurants etc to make life better. At the core of this debate amongst critics of the UCD in West Philly has been the displacement of poor people and marginalized people being completely left out of the discussion. Pretty much directly accompanying UCD’s moves to help out the businesses along the Ave, we’ve witnessed a ton of people moving further southwest or out of the neighborhood entirely. And the new faces overwhelmingly white and considerably more well off than those who left.
Those who can’t keep up with new rents, taxes or a landlord’s preference to rent to a student (or one who looks like a student), end up no doubt moving to a place more dangerous, economically bleak, a place where one has less roots and no doubt conveniently the last thing on the minds of any UCD board member with plans for a neighborhood.
So before defensively slagging off imaginary white trustafarians who don’t know what to do with their degree, let’s think a minute about why people are pissed off about UCD’s role in flipping our neighborhood. If West Philly gentrification included concerns of folks who are struggling economically, who experience serious pressure from cops and the legal system, who survived redlining and now are losing ties with their communities because there are plans for their neighborhood, maybe it would look a lot less like gentrification (poor being displaced by the relatively rich). If a struggle to improve safety in the neighborhood meant making sure poor folks don’t live in dangerous precarious situations, or that for every grand invested in a storefront facade several would be spent on making sure a West Philly kid has the chance to not expect a future of incarceration, or if the fancy new restaurants mentioned in the poster above insured that everyone could eat their pricey food regardless of means, that’s another story.
A whole other tangent: how did UCD take over where our city left off with their own imitation cops, cameras and unaccountable shadow municipal functions? how the fuck did UCD manage to stamp their corporate brand on all of Bmore Ave anyhow?? maybe: http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/econ101/neoliberalDefined.html
July 13th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
@ expat: i’d be a fool to say that philly isn’t cheaper than nyc, but my issue with arctic’s post is “..Manhattan or other places where there is no room for anyone besides rich mainstreamers” because that’s a load of bunk. there’s plenty of room, and plenty of peeps that ain’t rich or mainstream. yes, i refer to the isle of manhattan.
i was naming one specific area of manhattan so as not to bore potential readers. i’m from nyc and anyone who thinks that manhattan is full of richies is behaving like a tourist. to smash the illusion i suggest going up to places like morningside, wash heights, harlem, nolita, anyplace west of times square (or, god help you, west of port authority midtown), the alphabets, and dude i’m already bored naming underprivileged areas. honestly i can’t believe someone questions it. have you been to manhattan? i mean, the spots that *aren’t* filled with rich white folks? don’t let the property tax fool you, some people can’t afford anything but their rent up there. it’s their prerogative since they want to be in nyc more than they want, say, money for incendiary posters, but to say that there’s no room for anyone but a rich person is just flagrantly wrong.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
could A Feculent Rainbow please post his home address? I have an idea for an “action” on his house that I think would be just hilarious.
luther_blisset, I wonder why you think commercial development is such a terrible thing. I dunno, the last I heard local businesses mean jobs and property taxes that go to making our schools better. In fact I kind of notice that UCD tends to work with local businesses, as opposed to big chains.
I read on some crazy website that of every dollar you spend in a locally owned business 45 cents goes back into your local economy and for every dollar you spend in a chain that number goes down to 14 cents.
For the question of how UCD got funding to put up flags that say Baltimore Ave. is they won a very competitive grant competition to get Federal and state money for promoting “Main Street” commercial corridors and the flags, as well as the new lights and free money for any busines on the corridor that want to apply for matching grants to fix up their signage. What a terrible thing it is that 2nd generation African American businesses like the White Star Cleaners are getting leg up keeping our our trolley corridor walkable with services available in our neighborhood without having to get in a car. Gentrification is bad, global warming and corporate chain stores are good I guess, luther-blisset.
July 15th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
@ Seand:
What, exactly, did I say that would justify an attack and/or act of vandalism on my house? I condemned the act but admitted that I found the whole scenario as funny – as it applies to the defamation of flags concocted for a retarded PR campaign. But you, possibly in jest – as the author of these posters may also may be joking, would applaud an attack and/or act of vandalism on someone’s home. What kind of sadistic dick are you?
That being said, it appears that you completely missed the point of luther’s post. “Gentrification is bad, global warming and corporate chain stores are good I guess, luther-blisset” Is just icing on the cake there, Strawman.