by Nathaniel Popkin
June 8, 2009
I've spent the last two months wandering, loitering, dancing. Above all, I've been listening -- to some four centuries of voices; to ideas and inventions, to observations and recriminations, to
stories of love and stories of horror. The journey began in pre-history, passed through a remarkable Lenape meditation called the Prophesy of the Four Crows, and forward to:
I'm from Phila with a Del but not the Rio
Well, I'm guessing here is like exactly where the Phi go
Now, we got the Phila-Del-Phi why not top it off with an A?
The Philadelphiadic rhythmatic way I'm straight from Philly
Silly but rugged then a hillbilly
Just like I said before I sport my skully when it's chilly
My cap is from The Lay Up, my bows from The Gilly
The Roots, is out to blow up like a clip from out the milli
or the oo-wop, I do drop, gizzantic, the crew wop
From out the darkest field I goes to pick the funk crop
You can't deny the props so stop before your fronts
get loosened, introducing, The Roots y'all.
In between, a cacophony. A Swede named Rambo, Quaker power broker brothers named Lloyd, Pastorius, Preaching-Dick and Benezet, James Dexter and Joseph Read, Paine and Peale, B. Ross and Dinah,
a slave, Polly Haine and Israel Israel, Girard and Hercules, James Forten and Fanny Kemble, William Still and Joseph Leidy, Anna Broomall and Voltarine, Tanner and Whitman, Leo Ornstein and
Bessie Smith, Crystal Bird Faucet and Jimmie Foxx, Salvatore Sabella and Tony Mammarella, Gillespie and Goodis, Maggie Kuhn and Isaiah Zagar.
Philadelphia's story is vast, complex, beguiling, and painful. It's being retold -- and all the cliché and reductivist narrative jettisoned -- through a project tentatively called
America's First Great City. It's the brainchild of Sam Katz. In the last year he's galvanized just about every institution and player in Philadelphia's sprawling history industry to
participate in the project, which has as its core a documentary film for national and local audiences. Under Katz's guidance, the Fairmount Park Department of Parks and
Recreation historian Rob Armstrong and I led a team of writers, historians, PhD candidates, clergy, scholars, and researchers to collect people and stories that help us to understand the city.
The task was made particularly rewarding because of the amount of new scholarship conducted in the last two and half decades. Synthesized, it's a tantalizing panorama.
History adds dimensions to our own flat plane of existence. Applied to a city, it makes every corner a hot link to somewhere. Now, more than ever, when I walk I hear voices, I peel layers.
The voices are humbling. So many have come before us; they've grappled, dreamed, imagined, reacted, fought, accused, demanded, and observed, just as we do. Oh, the dreamers -- Penn and
Benjamin Rush, Richard Allen, Joseph Willson, Caroline LeCount, Siegmund Lubin, Presper Eckert, and Lily Yeh -- forced to endless compromise. We can't help but see parallels among eras, ideas,
proposals; we can't help but recognize our own hopes, our own words, repeated, endlessly, back in time.
–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com
For Nathaniel Popkin archives, please see HERE, or visit his web site HERE.
For The Possible City, please see HERE.
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