Dude, who even knows.
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 12 notes
If you’re not from around Philadelphia, you’re maybe not appreciating how perfect “a ‘fucked up’-themed sports mascot” is as a civic personification
Like my whole life coming after the '70s collapse, besides the Rocky steps or LOVE statue “creepily intense about sports” was all the identity Philly had,* throwing the Phillies door-prize batteries or that one football game where we cheered louder the longer a rival player stayed down motionless after a hit.
We’d been in the longest championships drought of any city in America with that many teams (part of it was the dual football/baseball Veterans Stadium had terrible unpadded AstroTurf and come playoffs the Eagles were always riddled with injuries, in reaction we shifted fan enthusiasm to visiting teams getting injured)
Also the Phillie Phanatic in 1978, there’s a special place in our hearts for goofy fucked-up sports monsters.
* well and cheesesteaks, soft pretzels, and scrapple
Post with 12 notes
If you’re not from around Philadelphia, you’re maybe not appreciating how perfect “a ‘fucked up’-themed sports mascot” is as a civic personification
Question reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 15 notes
Anonymous asked:
What is the mechanism of action you propose made Philadelphia turn out differently than Camden. Like you said the water cannons and riot cops. But what did those do exactly? Do you mean that by reacting harshly to black rioting, it leads to a tamping down/demoralizing of local black integrationist activism and a reduction in the penetration of local institutions by black middle-class liberals? Or is it something else?
Like “if you the roll the tanks in to Harlem in 1968, in the long term you prevent someone like David Dinkins from getting elected mayor of New York”?
And then if the Dinkinses of the world become mayors, what do they do differently in power than their white predecessors? What policies lead to urban decay and surging crime?
Well when it came down to it Philly was a major finance/law/government agency office tower historic core city and Camden was the outer borough fringe; Manhattan got bad but did not burn like the Bronx.
Philly had a strong white ethnic unionized machine base (incl. the police under commissioner-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo) which maintained a hold on power across black popular majorities; though Philly had a black mayor 84-92 there was a sense that only with the 2000 election of John Street had black political power arrived (the time when the police, largely autonomously, firebombed a black radical group from the air was under that first black mayor. It was basically a guerilla revolutionary cult that had been loudly aiming towards a big apocalyptic showdown all along from a fortified block; given experiences ranging from the Karl-Marx-Hof in the Austrian Civil War to contemporary radical base shootouts in LA it was entirely reasonable to conclude it could not be stormed without significant casualties; this is basically what SWAT units would go on to get body armor and tanks for)
Like, imagine if the Bronx was not even part of the same city or state as Manhattan, so when the tax base fell apart they didn’t even have Fort Apache
Post with 3 notes
So despite the icon of Rocky Balboa and Jersey being right there, Philly’s “white ethnics” were never that Italian, there were a lot of Irish and Poles too.
Which I guess made them Catholic, but not as definitionally as in New York or Chicago, let alone Boston, Philadelphia was historically the American culture where sect meant least.
By the ‘80s if anything that seemed to have transmuted to an identity of Iggles-loving unionized public workers, beyond the cops/fire that get all the “first responder” cred – but possibly as a legacy of Pennsylvania being built in a pre-networked utility era and not really worth rebuilding after – sewer guys and especially linemen got a lot more respect too.
Question with 13 notes
Anonymous asked:
Why are Philly sports fan so antagonistic? Are the rest of yinz like that?
Kinda. “Like the black part of Baltimore plus the white part of Boston”, I always put it. It’s not merely incidental that Always Sunny is set there.
Also, “yinz” is a Pittsburgh thing, Philly uses “youse”.
Question with 22 notes
Anonymous asked:
Talk about Philadelphia some. Anything you want to say about the city at all.
There’s one mass transit organization, SEPTA, that covers the whole Pennsylvania commuteshed, which sounds like it’d be something that could plan things in an intelligent way but really it’s this miscellaneous bag created to hold all of the existing transit systems – and this being one of the oldest major cities in the hemisphere, never destroyed by fire or war, they were expanded piecewise along lines that made sense at various points since the 1700s
So you have things like there’s only 3 subway lines in the city but one of them is really an El, and one of them is run by New Jersey, but there are Boston-style underground tram tunnels and trolleys and buses AND trolleybuses and light rail and commuter rail
What else – the area was heavily settled by Dutch, Welsh, and regional German pioneers and a lot of stuff was given native names, then all of it got mangled pronunciation later, so there’s a ton of local shibboleths
The Schuylkill River is a major venue for collegiate rowing, and a lot of old-line schools maintain nice boathouses lining it.
Cheesesteaks are particularly associated with these two short-order grills, Pat’s and Geno’s, located across from each other at the same intersection
Soft pretzels, the city’s other iconic food, are baked early each day and sold to street vendors who show up everywhere
Post with 11 notes
Fun fact, “Action News” and “Eyewitness News” and other formats that merged into modern local TV news – focusing on live and video-transmitted on-location segments (as compared to earlier film, which needed to be taken in for development and editing, thus “more at 11”) introduced by chatty anchor crosstalk – were pioneered in Philadelphia, which was in range of the #1 media market NYC but not as institutionally tradition-bound as the network flagships there