Friday, November 7, 2008- As some of you may know, I am responsible for instigating Th3, The Third Thursday, Syracuse’s monthly art hop. So it may come as some surprise that I’ve never been to the First Friday art hop in my home city of Philadelphia… until tonight that is.
I edited wedding videos for my old boss Albert during the day and then headed into the city via car. I was worried about the traffic getting into Philly. It’s notorious. There’s only one good way to get to Philly from Phoenixville and that’s I-76 (p.s. I love G. Love and his song about I-76). Plus there’s this part of the highway called the Conshohocken Curve… where the traffic naturally backs up because of the nature of the gently winding curves. Anyway, the traffic wasn’t too bad at 3 p.m. and I made it into Philly early since I’d given myself plenty of time.
The plan was to meet up with Kate Clark and her husband David, who recently relocated to Philadelphia from Syracuse. I have to admit, since I have Philly roots, Kate and I talked about Philly a lot when in Syracuse together, so it was really satisfying to finally get to spend some time with her in the city. We had talked about taking a trip together, but it never happened…
Since I got to the city early, I found a parking spot in a residential area. It was easy. That’s not always the case in Philly. It’s usually hard to find a spot and the ticket cops are ruthless. I’ve had one stand next to my car waiting for the meter to run out. I walked up to move it as it was running out and the cop said too late and gave me a ticket anyway… coldhearted ruthless ****… Sorry, forgive my parking rant. To get to the point I walked down to the Philadelphia Art Museum to wait for Kate and David to get home from work and meet me there.
It turns out every Friday night there are live jazz performances at the museum. It’s free for members, so that makes the $75 membership totally worth it if I was living in the area and could go every Friday. It was around $15 for nonmembers. It was packed and looked like fun, but when Kate and David showed up, we decided against it. Kate wasn’t feeling well and David had a few other galleries to go to. I ended up walking back to their apartment with them, catching up on the Syracuse news. Kate then retired for the evening and David and I went gallery hopping for First Friday.
Philadelphia Art Museum
This has Philadelphia written all over it with the statue and the trolley...
David and Kate with Philadelphia in the background
We hopped on a bus a headed to Old City. I never had a chance to really talk one on one with David before and I really enjoyed our conversation… talking about the intersections of science, art and entrepreneurship. After hopping off the bus, we went the Fabric Workshop and Museum, which I’d always wanted to see, but sadly, it was closed. So we pressed on and headed to a gallery in a printmakers coop studio and stopped in another random storefront. Finally, we made it to what seemed like the most hopping place of the night. Vox Populi is an artist collective that goes back many years. Right next door was another gallery started by people David knew from his home state. Enter the building and climb up several levels of shady steps to get to a balcony packed with people smoking, press beyond them and enter Vox Populi.
Then, who would have guessed, I ran into a cluster of old Syracusans. Among them were Dan Fuller, Jeremy Drummund and his partner. Jeremy was the main curator of Spark Video when I first came to SU. I became a curator shortly after he left. While we were catching up someone asked how we knew each other. It turns out he was one of the founders of Spark. It was Mark and his partner Becky. It really is a small world. I felt privileged to be in the middle. There I was speaking to people who had come and gone from Syracuse before I ever got there. Then I was able to introduce David to them as a newer generation of Syracusan now turned Philadelphian.
How ironic is it that all of these people now live in Philadelphia? Jeremy is on sabbatical, but the rest just relocated permanently to Philadelphia from Brooklyn. The consensus is that Philadelphia has many of the perks of a big city with a fun art scene, but at about a third of the price. (Which, by the way, is still significantly more than it cost to live in Philadelphia when I was there.)
Syracuse and Philadelphia remind me a lot of each other. Both are rust belt cities trying to reinvent themselves. Both have a salty perspective from the locals. Philadelphia, it seems, has succeeded. It has the advantage of becoming a second New York. Still, I wonder if I came back to Syracuse in eight years, will it have succeeded as well?
I like the girl's face in the photo...
vox populi building
