In Montreal the Boulevard St. Laurent, or "The Main," is the immigrant passageway. A walk up The Main is a trip through the city's history. There is no "Main" in Philadelphia, but I'd like to posit Washington Avenue as the most comparable. In function, they're nothing alike. Whereas St. Laurent functions as a main street, something in scale and use like Walnut Street front to 63rd, Washington Avenue is an ugly behind the scenes engine. Here is where immigrants arrived until 1915 and settle today; here is where the coast guard watches our shore; here is the home of our immigrant carnival-players, the Mummers; here are warehouses of food from the pan-Asian frontier; here is the Italian Market, showrooms for building supplies, marble, granite, tile, wine, and piñatas. Here is the heart of Philadelphia's Vietnamese and Mexican communities. Here too is the circus from Québec, the sprawling Trigen plant, the abandoned Frankford Chocolate works, used car lots, body shops, and the city's premier dance school. Twenty-six blocks through the beast of the contemporary city, psychotic, decorated, painted, and broken by the stanchions of the Delaware Expressway. Only you can walk right through this city wall.

—Nathaniel Popkin

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