Two photos, one Broad Street: Phillies Parade and Election Day by Albert Yee. Visit his kickass blog HERE.

by Nathaniel Popkin
November 5, 2008

Outside of the café at 45th and Locust, a gap-toothed man in a Russian ushanka hat laughed. He kicked, danced, and shouted. It was Saturday, late morning, and though the sky burned royal blue, the north-facing sidewalk was still in shade. Nearby, another man, in t-shirt and scruffy beard, was complaining -- not bitterly, merely incredulous to a neighbor's intolerance the night before. "It was only 11:30, Halloween night, as if it's wrong to be having a party! She claims she's never called the police before . . . "

Two tables toward the corner, an amorphous crowd of middle aged men, all of them born in Ethiopia, and with angular, east African faces, and several of them wearing Obama pins, drank espresso and ambivalently watched the scene unfolding across the street, at the restaurant called Abyssinia. The restaurant's owners -- two long-time partners -- were having a dispute. Apparently, they maintain a simple, and pretty elegant, agreement. They alternate management of the restaurant; one runs the place while the other travels home to Africa or attends to separate business. Saturday was switch day -- but for the first time in the 12-year partnership, the keys were not forthcoming.

As the two men argued, one from the café filmed the scene; others sauntered back and forth across the street. More chairs were brought out.

"I told them, this is America, you can't do it that way. You have to have it written down," one of the coffee-drinking men explained to me, and, indeed, lawyers and police officers now appeared before us to interpret the agreement.

Sharing, I suppose, isn't always so easy.

The day before, at just about the same time, I stood with my kids at Broad and Walnut. It was still an hour and a half before the start of the parade. The two of them hung on the bike barricades as the insatiable sidewalk filled. Every few minutes we gazed to the clock on City Hall Tower. "Only an hour and a half to go!"

It was about then that the stern blond-haired lady with the stub nose standing next to me told me to leave. It was her spot, she declared without irony, and she had been there since early in the morning. Oh, I responded, we'll just move over.

An argument ensued, of course, the kind that might pock any day in Philadelphia -- between the pedestrian trying to cross the street and the driver who doesn't obey stop signs, between the bicycler following rules of the road and the driver who tells her incorrectly to get on the sidewalk, between the partier and the woman who can't sleep at night. This is a crowded, public celebration, I said. This isn't your territory. It's everyone's. She told me to save it.

I confess that right then it was me, and not Chase Utley, who inappropriately dropped the f-bomb. And I did it in frustration, not joy. Then I turned my head skyward, and on this marvelous morning, I yelped, and finally turned away from her with a grimace.

Later that day I was back in West Philly, where Obama posters written in Amharic, the Semitic language of Ethiopia -- and which looks a bit like Hebrew -- hung on the wall of the Obama election day office on Baltimore Avenue. Now heading east on the 34 trolley, we came to a stop at 43rd Street, at the entrance to Clark Park. A police car, lights flashing, was blocking the way in order to allow a Halloween parade -- of parents and their kids in costumes, and babies in strollers, and pets, and members of a marching band -- to go by. It was a long procession, probably longer than a standard block. The trolley conductor, who already seemed befuddled, and tired, and ready to snap from the burdens of an inconceivable day, tried to tell his passengers to be patient.

"Yo, around here, in this neighborhood," said one passenger to a friend on the phone, "they all trick or treat together. Yeah, it's University City, you know."

Nearly everyone else sitting around me was also on the phone, and some spoke intemperately, and mean spiritedly, about the goofy uprising of precious children and their careful parents before us. No one on the phone thought them cute.

What struck me most wasn't the anger. The day was charged, after all, and anyone riding SEPTA might have been frustrated. Rather what emerged from the trolley was an overwhelming sense of separateness, as if to some, Clark Park was another, unimaginable world.

Eventually, the conductor threw his arms up in the air and stepped down. The parade stretched out. Down at the stadium, Utley told it straight and Jayson Werth sprang up instinctively, and somehow a million or so, the size of the simultaneous Congolese exodus, filtered out into the expectant night.

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No, sharing isn't easy; it can be ugly, too revealing, perhaps. And yet these past ten days, as never before in recent memory, we have been compelled to leave our own small worlds to head for the street, to face one another.

The city street -- that old notion -- calls us now, to celebrate, to share, confront, to announce. Standing in the center of Broad Street last Wednesday night, and hands numb from slapping, and young men scampering up lampposts like howler monkeys and a couple trying to make love, and toilet paper descending from above, and chants, too, of O-BAM-A, a friend said to me, "I love this. This couldn't happen in Dallas, where I'm from."

Her point was clear enough: the public spectacle, vast and also so intimate, is a response to the city; it begs us out -- to canvas door to door, as so many thousands have done these past few days, to place signs in our windows, where others can see them (the best being a swinging Utley as Obama's face and below it HOPE spelled with the Phillies P), to meet and talk and embrace and cajole and stand together waiting -- for a parade, for the smashing of a giant Trojan Horse, simply to vote -- and all together to yelp and honk long into the night.

Here, and right now, is the revenge of the city long-marginalized in the life of the privatized nation. Obama and Biden, both city dwellers, are ascendant because urban people stepped into the street -- like never before in St. Louis and Denver and Kansas City and Milwaukee -- to gather but also to announce a new America, one not so willing to retreat behind gates and inside of cars, but one with the instinct to work it out in public. Last night, Chicagoans so elegantly emphasized the point.

And isn't the point of Obama's election the hope that faced with difference, we can find common ground?

About midnight, in the still reticent public space around City Hall, hundreds, maybe thousands came to seed the reclamation. There are countless reports of hugs and the still echoing sounds of banging pots and pans announcing the new era upon us.

–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com

For Nathaniel Popkin archives, please see HERE, or visit his web site HERE.

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Chase Utley "HOPE" poster by DJ World Anthems. More info at fiftyonefiftyone.com.