Mature Flâneur
Philadelphia’s Magic Garden: Bad Luck, Bottles and Junk
A New Year’s metaphor for us all.
I was walking along South Street, Philadelphia, and suddenly, bam, I got hit with a building. A spangly-shimmery mosaic-mirror glitterball of a building (above). It stopped me dead in my tracks. I just stood there as if paralyzed, gawking.
I have visited Philadelphia more than any other place in the USA for the single reason that Josh, my 33-year-old son, has made the city his home for over a decade. So I drop by at least a couple of times a year. There are parts of the city I like to think I know well, including South Street, which I have driven along dozens of times, but never once noticed this glammed-up, bedazzled façade.
In the past few years, however, I’ve been spending most of my time in Europe, as a Mature Flâneur — the French term for wandering about with no specific purpose other than to take in the sights and sounds of the city — to amble for the ambience, so to speak. For the first time in my life I have grown attuned to architecture. And so I had to wonder: how had I passed 826 South Street so many times before without this building ever registering? Without me actually seeing it for what it was? I shook my head in disbelief.
