Fifty-Six: Cross Country (11-29-2023)
I live within 20 miles of where I was born. I've lived thousands of miles from where I was born, though now I live only 10 miles from where I grew up. In my life, I likely will never establish permanent residency greater than 100 miles from where I was born. This is the general lifepath of most every person. When I did live many timezones away, it became painfully apparent that it is impossible to escape where you are from, and that birthplace becomes self even if a part of the self is expressed in a desire to escape or subvert the birthplace and its imparted expectations. Yadda yadda and so on.
Tik tok is doing to New York City what Youtube did to Los Angeles. America's two largest cities, a continent apart, have sequentially fell victim to internet-driven migrations each individually tailored to their prior city-culture. Los Angeles's showbiz and vanity, as well as abundance of space, was ripe to inherit Youtubers who needed showiness, industry adjacency, and large sets and mansions. One-season weather and legal marijuana are other contributing factors.
New York is dense, wealthy, and old. Tik tok's short form, rapidly trending content is better suited to a city with a fast pace, small apartments, and fast money. Coldhealing does a lot of analysis of the products of tik tok, and is a member of the New York City internet migration. Obviously, immigration, internal and external, to New York and LA is not particularly swayed by internet trends and culture. The magnetic force of a large city acts independent of what people see on their phones. It's well known by now that for much of human behavior, little influence is driven from internet content. Very rarely does a targeted advertisement work (with potentially disasterous implications for the entire world economy, now plump and full on data), and creator-sponsored advertising is only mildly more effective. Vibe-based, aesthetic-curation does have some effect on personal expression and consumer habits, and does lead to even non-famous people uprooting themselves, but their is not wall-to-wall traffic or overstuffed subway cars full of internet watchers tailing internet creators.
Moving from one area of the United States to another is both a daunting and perilous task and a minor and frequent life event that amounts mostly to inconvenience. My brother lived in the far Midwest for two years to serve his time at a well-paying but remote company and pay off his student debt, then came back to our little 20-mile radius. I have friends in Philadelphia from across the country, who, in the 4or so years they've lived here, have mostly settled off any homesickness thanks to their comfort in frequent flying (or rail travel). This country is big, but it's well connected.
I am, in comparison, a local. My knowledge and depth of experience hardly outsizes transplants with any level of dedication or even a few years of casual homebodiness in Philadelphia, but by circumstances of birth I'm granted a minor authority. I cannot imagine moving myself any negotiable distance for another city. New York is, of course, a telltale heart, the taunting northerly big brother, whose cultural gigantism does not infrequently impose itself onto Philadelphia, with very enfeebling and self-justifying culture forming in response. By metro area (the true measurement), Philadelphia is the fourth largest city in the country, sixth on the continent. It does not feel this way, and the fact that I even have to debate and cherry-pick to place it there is evidence itself of Philadelphia's diminutive and ignored status. Boston is much better at preserving and presenting its colonial history, New York is far better at curbing crime and infinitely, inexaggerably better at creating culture. So why do people still move to Philadelphia? What are all these new apartment blocks for?
My destiny, as I saw it entering college in the city I grew up in (next to), was to suffer out 4 years of demeaning college at a failing institution, then live out a 30 year career emasculating myself in a broken and has-been city before retiring to a mildly affordable South Jersey bedroom community. This benign fantasy had some room for adjustment, and the failing institution is not so failing but certainly not prospering. My perspective has changed wildly. I am not a perpetual pessimist or optimist. I am skeptical of Philadelphia's long-term future, though in the present moment, it is a massive city I am realizing I have explored little of, and have opportunity in. Philadelphia is, for many, Safe New York, Small New York, Cheap New York; a shot for the moon that landed on an asteroid with Amtrak.
For me, Philadelphia is a semi-begrudging home. I don't think often of going anywhere else, I cannot dialecticize a different place as home. But Philadelphia has immunity to one very important thing: online romanticism. There's been like, 20 movies film in Philadelphia, and like 5 famous musicians since the 1990s. Every famous person from Philly leaves. Uzi, Meek, Smith, every retired sports professional, and most retired business people. The emigration of our famous is a good thing, because their mystique goes with them. Philly remains a gritty, "real" place, not to mention its comfortable scale and price. Imagine a young college graduate chasing their big creative dream. They can move anywhere in the country with their savings, and they will always pick New York. Their chances of world success are slim anywhere, but per capita, they're higher in Philadelphia, but there's no musical or cinematic obsession with Philadelphia, no swath of tik-tok lifestylers here, so they go to New York and blow it all. Or they go work for Deloitte in the Big Apple, and make 30% more than the Deloitte employees in Philadelphia, but pay 150% more in rent.
Why is Philadelphia immune from internet musing? Certainly, smaller size has an influence, though I have seen Boston influencers (peddling the oft-discussed old-money, dark academia aesthetica), the majority of internet content comes from LA, NYC and Chicago. After those three, there's Philadelphia. So why not? Philadelphia is plagued by crime, yes, though it is as localized and avoidable as Chicago's or NYC's.
Philadelphia is affordable, Philadelphia is walkable, Philadelphia is historic, and Philadelphia is diverse.
The above list is every reason that is given as why people should want to live in Philadelphia. The above list is also every reason why people do not want to live in Philadelphia. As follows:
Philadelphia is affordable
Where you live, in the age of the internet, is a signal element of identity. And identity is aspirational, a chronologically forward expression of what you desire to be. There's plenty of writing on this online, but in simple: we express ourselves how we want to be seen, not how we are. A man buys a nice watch to show everyone he is what that watch represents, his desire to be someone who wheres that kind of watch. His performative identity exists in a moment in the future where he is the person he bought the watch to be. New York is where the rich, famous, influential, and poor, starving, and subversive live. So in both the aspirational identity and the pursuant identity, you have belonging. Philadelphia is where the poor, starving, subversive, and second class live. There's no aspirational cultural object for Philadelphia to pursue.
Philadelphia is walkable
This is a tenuous argument, but America loves cars. One element of LA's allure is the highway, the big Cadillac, Rodeo Drive. Part of New York's charm is being stuck in traffic, yellow taxis, and the Lincoln Tunnel. Philadelphia's roads are mismanaged, unmaintained, and dominated by literal hundreds-strong biker gangs. Sure, many neighborhoods are walkable, and car-free if on a block close enough to groceries (or wealthy enough for regular delivery), but Americans, even those too poor for a car but socially mobile enough to relocate to a major city, love their cars and their car-influence fantasies. America as a whole needs to, and hopefully will, move away from car dependency, and Philadelphia is a major bellwether for this shift, but in the present moment, car-hostility is a preventative influence on migration.
Philadelphia is historic
New York is historic, LA is historic, Chicago is less historic. Boston is very historic, and has preserved and museumed its history nicely, while growing in a very New England, stable wealth manner. Philadelphia bulldozed and paved over most of its middle history, and crowded out its colonial history. Midcentury crime was not kind to its pastoral north and industrial east, west, and south either. Elfreth's Alley, America's oldest residential street, its wedged between steel behemoths and contemporary abominations. Betsy Ross's house was knocked down and her neighbors' house turned into a mock of hers, then wedged between new construction and put on a busy three lane stroad. The house that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in is gobbled up by a concrete office building, then loomed over by bus stations and federal buildings. What a boring consumption of history. When Philadelphia does present its history in a respectful manner, it looms itself over the cliff, teetering on boring and performative, ingenuine veneration. The hidden gems are too exposed.
Philadelphia is diverse
This is not a comment on racial diversity, but diversity of neighborhood, experience, culture, and food. Philadelphia is, simply, not as diverse as New York. Our ethnic enclaves are smaller and less respected, our restaurants less prestigious and abundant, and the neighborhoods worth living in are not as large or livably plush with housing stock to become attractive to outsiders. And- diversity is not the strength of attractive internet obsession. The same subway platforms, scaffolding, and green parks that make every section of New York (2) a single digestible icon. Chinatown, Latin neighborhoods, Greektown, etc. are all afterthoughts. Philadelphia's core identity is not rich enough to attract.
If this provokes a thought of "what a sad and discriminating view of your own city", then you're just not a person for Philadelphia. I don't often see the same attitudes as above expressed explicitly, but the general attitude is that Philadelphia, for its problems and simplicities, is its own filter. If you are not cut out for Philadelphia, the city will make that apparent. There are people who can survive in the megametropolis of New York who would be crippled by the regular metropolis of Philadelphia.
Philadelphia's resistance to obsession, to casting its influence far into the world and dragging young girls and boys to it to chase a fabricated dream, as with its big sibling cities, is its greatest quality. Philadelphia has deep, narrow roots, and a beautifully inward focus. My girlfriend, a southern Marylander, early in our knowing each other, in a discussion of where we're both from and what it said about us, commented that we (Philadelphians) love sandwiches. From then on, I became shockingly aware of my defaulting to a sandwich for meals, and the cultural non-transmission of this behavior. I eat a sandwich daily, if not for two meals of the day. Apparently most places don't do this.
(1) The middle American history of industrial second revolution is most glazed over in public education, if kids knew about the full glory of the railroad and American steel, they'd vote for the wrong things
(2)Manhattan, mostly, Brooklyn and the afterbirth of hipsterdom is another conversation, or many