philly

Symphony House Condos

So since the last time I took a shot of the Symphony House condos on Broad St last month, they've grown by two floors. The view of the Drake is almost completely obscured now. Twenty-nine floors later, this thing is going to be ginormous.

Symphony House Condos

That sucker's gonna be thiry-one stories tall. The view of The Drake [my favorite looking apartment building], which you can still see right behind the crane, will most likely be completely obscured from the south-east, too bad. There's probably more construction/building photography to come with this new wide angle lens, but I'm not the expert Brad over at PhillySkyline.com has The Skinny on all things structural. I'm just here for the ride. No perspective correction on this photo [hence the trapezoidal shape].

This new condo building is at Broad & Spruce Sts.

A PW article about the condos from October 2004.

Fact-Finding Tour of the South

The crew from Philly IMC are in the middle of a fortnight of traveling through the South to see for themselves exactly what is going on in the Gulf Coast region post-Katrina. Philly IMC is traveling with the Poverty Initiative and seeing things that the rest of us haven't seen. Telling us what the MSM aren't telling. Trying to help where the Fed has forgotten or turned away.

An excerpt from Day 5:

At an update stop at a nearby café, we interviewed an activist-academic from Texas who is studying the needs, stories and conditions of Latino day laborers in the Gulf. The stories he told were frightening. He said that contractors are recruiting many day laborers from Texas cities like Austin and Houston. These workers are from Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, and other countries in Central and South America. Contractors lure them to the Gulf Coast with promises of high pay and housing, and for many men, who have families to support, lucrative employment is hard to find; the offer is irresistible. Yet when they arrive in the Gulf, many laborers find themselves in a highly precarious situation. Contractors reduce pay by deducting fees for housing, food, and transportation. Or, they may pay them late or not at all. Many men are provided nowhere to stay, so they sleep on the streets or anywhere they can. Workplace conditions for the workers are often very unsafe and they are not provided the protective gear they need for cleaning up toxic debris. Also, many contractors prohibit workers from seeing doctors if they become sick or injured, insisting that their workers only see doctors employed by the contractors themselves. These men have basically no bargaining power and are mostly at the mercy of their employers. Of course, you don't really hear anything about this in the mainstream media, which often portrays the cleanup effort with scenes of professional cleanup crews exiting homes wearing masks and those white protective suits.

The PhillyIMC is doing some great reporting.

Fourteen Plasma TVs

I just watched this NY Times multimedia slideshow [without volume, I'm at work sans speakers] about an architect and his wife who have outfitted their swanky NYC apartment with FOURTEEN plasma TVs. Fourteen. I didn't listen to the voiceover so I don't know for sure how much each cost. Let's assume that they got the absolute top of the line plasmas with all the goodies. I'd say they'd be in the neighborhood of $10,000 each. That's $140,000 for the TVs themselves. And then they have to set up the sound systems in the various rooms and get a custom remote control for it. Maybe another $60,000? So about $200,000 in all?

What the hell is the point of this? Good grief.

Apartment Search Part III

Lady and I have started Apartment Search Part III. We're moving in together [again] when our leases expire at the end of August. We looked at three two-bedrooms over on Pine/16^th Sts. yesterday which were all very nice. And no, we're not sleeping in separate rooms, we're going to use the extra room most likely as an office/studio space to share between the both of us. Lady for her schoolwork [she starts grad school at Temple in the Fall and me for working on my photos without distractions.

I'm gonna have to figure out a nice spot to place the wireless router once we pick a spot and get all settled in. Ideally, I'd like to upgrade to WiFi-G and maybe get a repeater and stick it in a hallway between the bedroom[s] and living room areas if we get a big enough place.

We're looking at another place today over on Lombard/9^th Sts and on Monday two more over at Pine/13^th and Spruce/10^th. I'm sure we'll be looking at plenty more in the very near future.

Anyone moving out of a really cheap place [big 1BR or 2BR] in Center City at the end of August?

NYC Highline Park

I read about NYC's High Line unused railroad bed in the Chelsea area a few years ago. Now, the elevated track bed is on it's way to become an elevated park according to this NY Times article.

Plans for the city's first elevated park - a singular ribbon of green space stretching a mile and a half along an abandoned railroad viaduct 30 feet above the streets of Chelsea - have taken a major step forward with a favorable ruling by a federal transportation board.

The ruling, on Monday, essentially cleared the way for the city to begin negotiating use and development of the High Line, a weed-overgrown railroad bed that has not been used since the late 1960's and that, seen from above, looks like a painter's thick stroke of brilliant green along the gritty Lower West Side of Manhattan, between 34th Street and Gansevoort Street, in the meatpacking district.

If the plans materialize, the project would become one of only two elevated parks in the world; the other, also carved out of an abandoned railroad viaduct, is the Promenade Plantée in Paris.

An elevated park, sounds pretty cool, eh?

The effort started back in 1999 by some neighborhood residents and now, finally, it looks like the park will become a reality. I think that this is some eggcellent news, more greenspace witin cities is always a good thing, Philly's got a ton of it in the Fairmount Park system and of course the original parks in Billy Penn's green city.

The Tokyo Geek Ghetto

Everyone is familiar with the stereotype of that old Japanese tourist with a camera. Nowadays, everyone has a camera... or a PDA or a cell phone or a camera phone or if you're like me a pda/camera phone [bitchin!]. The folks in Toyko gotta stay ahead of the tech curve and in doing so, many have come together in the Akihabara district of Tokyo. This WaPo article takes a tour of this nerd village.

A subculture of social misfits obsessed with electronic role-playing games, manga comics and Japanese animation, they began gathering in Akihabara in the late 1990s, lured by the district's proliferation of electronics retailers and stores selling everything you would need to build your own computer.

Maligned and shunned by mainstream society, here they stayed, their tastes and habits transforming the area also known as Electric Town into what sociologists are calling an urban first -- a ghetto of geeks.

It's an interesting phenomenon. Similar to how other ethnic or social groups have gathered in sections of certain cities like NYC's Chinatown and SF's Castro, the article points out. And just like those towns, the concentration of the inhabitants leads to good and bad things. On one hand, the self-described nerds are among their peers with less fear of persecution within the confines of the Akihabara district. On the other hand, they lose touch with the rest of the vibrant city around them. But then again, a lot of the rest of the city considers them outcasts of some sort.

Yet some sociologists critical of the nerd culture here have linked it to the high incidence of severe behavioral problems among men under 40. Immersed in role-playing games and comic fantasy worlds, many have found real-life personal conflict difficult to cope with-- one cause, some say, for a massive increase in the social problem of hikikomori , or shut-ins. Now numbering as many as 1 million nationwide, the shut-ins -- mostly men in their twenties or thirties -- typically live in their parents' homes, rarely leaving their rooms.

Otaku [nerd] behavior is also being blamed, along with social disillusionment following Japan's protracted recession, for the increasing numbers of Japanese youth who have no apparent career ambitions. Instead, many are choosing to work part time -- or not at all -- so they can spend most of their time pursuing their hobbies.

It's an interesting glimpse of the über nerds in a generally "bookish" culture as compared to Americans. I see myself somewhere in between though. I love the computer and my connection to others through the internet, in private. But then again, I love meeting them even more. Going to physically meet fellow Philly bloggers and photobloggers is an experience that is more rewarding, for me, than the online communicé we have. But for the otaku, they'd rather stay in a windowless room and never come out. Me, I gotta make my rent and pay my bills so I gotta. I also gotta get outside to take all these photos as well. I don't think I could ever cut it as a hardcore otaku and I wouldn't want to.

Sue's Produce

As I was checking out at Sue's Produce yesterday, I overhead one lady [Sue?] talking to one of her patrons about the Rindelaub's Row situation. With the new über expensive condos going up right on the next block from them, she was saying how rents may go up and that may push them out.

That made me incredibly sad. I had just [re]discovered it and it may be gone soon.

Lombardi's Closing

Lombardi's Coal Oven Pizza over at 18^th just north of Rittenhouse Square is closing on May 15^th for good. It's the Illy chain of the famed Lombardi's in NYC which was the first pizzaria in America, established in 1905. The pizza at the NY joint is great, as most coal oven pizza is. There are always long lines over there at the SoHo location.

I've never been to the Philly location, and I don't think I can fit it in before they close their doors for good either, but I've heard good things.

They're closing their doors to make way for the new condo development.

Target in Center City?

The Inquirer reports on a new project at 8th St and Market St. The new center proposal is anchored by a Target store. It could also have a Barnes & Noble and a Linens 'n Things and perhaps a movie theater.

I had almost exactly the same setup in my former hometown of White Plains, NY. A new "city center" opened up with a Target, Starbucks, Legal Seafood, Regal Cinema and other stores were in various stages of opening up before I left for Illy. It became an instant hit. White Plains had lacked a major movie theater [actually, any] and the current theater has about 15 screens, big enough to support the city of White Plains and the surrounding towns. I thought that it would snarl traffic, but with three entrances, cars were never a problem. You couldn't enter a lot from the main street; I think that helped a ton.

A huge center like this would be quite a change in look for that area of Market St. There's not much over there, I think. The SEPTA station is on 12th St and there's not much between that and Independence Mall over on 5th St.

Traffic isn't too bad over there, from what I've experienced. Market St has two lanes in both directions and if they play the parking situation right, it could bring quite a bit of business to that area.

I'm not over there much, so I can't say exactly what kinds of smaller stores are in the area which will be affected by the plan, but I do know that all of Center City will be hurt.

But I was just thinking, isn't that new slot-machine casino complex supposed to be right around there too? Ugh, what a stupid idea that thing is.

Pavilion East (artist's rendering) by developer Kenneth N. Goldenberg