Falling for Philadelphia
Long before I actually had children, I had visions of what life with them would be like.
In those visions, the stereotypical trappings of motherhood were nowhere to be found. My fantasy kids and I walked hand-in-hand down city streets – no strollers, diaper bags, or in-case-of-emergency snacks in sight. We traveled lightly – stepping gaily onto trains with only vintage suitcases and stuffed animals in-hand – and for no reason at all. “I just want them to see as much of the world as possible,” I imagined myself relaying to a friend over lunch, trying to hide the smug satisfaction in my voice.
Of course (of course!), the fantasy remains just that. Since having children, I haven’t so much as gone to the park without an arsenal of puffs, wipes, water bottles, toys, and diapers in tow. When we take our twice-yearly trip to Canada, half our household belongings come with us. As for traveling on a whim? It just sounds, frankly, like too much work. Nothing short of a big holiday can tempt me to trek anywhere as a family unit.
So how did all four of us plus my mom find ourselves in Philadelphia earlier this month? Turns out, in addition to the carrot of a holiday, the stick of a ‘vacate your apartment so we can replace your windows’ order is effective too. We needed somewhere to go and Philly felt like as good a place as any – affordable, new-to-us, and close to New York City. It wasn’t any deeper than that.
But, after ten days, it felt deeper.
Though we were there in early November, Philly’s weather was warm, bordering on hot. Our AirBnb was in University City, where every second person we passed on the street was sweating in a Drexel fleece or walking to work in Penn scrubs.
The heat, so wet it shimmered in the air, gave the neighborhood a movie-set feel, as if the autumn part was fake. I passed students tanning in tank tops on quad lawns littered with crunchy, Thanksgiving-hued leaves and thought, “Those leaves must be props, they must have been brought in,” though of course they weren’t and hadn’t been.
I loved University City, with its creaky old Victorians in need of paint jobs, coffee shops with elaborate carved pumpkins slowly withering on their windowsills, young women in floral dresses and old men in Grateful Dead shirts. All the streets cross at incongruous angles, creating little triangle-shaped parkettes, homes that come to points, and six-way intersections that cars creep into slowly, full of ‘what the hell is happening here?’ trepidation.
For the ten days we spent there, the city’s overheated beauty made me want to move to Philly, or to any place that has neighborhoods like it – neighborhoods where all the campaign signs are leftist, where musty used book shops stand next to old-fashioned donut makers, and where the vibe is educated but not necessarily moneyed.
The kids loved it too, for all the reasons kids do – the playgrounds were plentiful, the aquarium was entrancing, the scavenger hunt at Magic Gardens happily gave them something to focus on that wasn’t prying mosaic tiles off an iconic art site. And it was utterly pretension-free. Even if I’d managed to pare my stroller and Amtrak game down to only the bare necessities – and, let’s be real, I didn’t manage to – nobody would have noticed.
Below is a list of some of the places and things we loved most:
Food + Drink:
Books:
Kids:
