Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlotte485
I don’t like Philadelphia but for a long long time I always thought I’d love it (I love airplanes and I always liked US Airways and Philly was their big hub. + I liked big cities so it seemed like a good fit).
After visiting - multiple times - I dislike it. Soooo, I don’t think it has a perception problem hehe.
To be fair, I’m not even a big fan of New York. San Francisco has been my fav. American city by farrrrrr. San Francisco is like heaven on earth to me. If onlyyyy they had better rapid mass transit. Outside of DC, I reallly only like California. But Philly in particular I dislike.
That saiddd. I imagine outside of C-D and I think overall, people are impressed and love Philly. I think Im in the minority on this one  I think people put Philadelphia as an example of a great American urban city. |
Funny, I have Issues with the two cities you mention by name here as your favorites (or among them).
I enjoyed my one visit to San Francisco (2006) but thought the locals had an excess of self-regard and an exaggerated belief in their city's diversity (I know it has a sizable Asian and Hispanic population, but the headline in the
San Francisco Chronicle the Monday of my visit caught my attention: the city's black population had fallen by half - from 13 percent of the total to 6. And the ones leaving were the ones with the money, and they were all headed for the East Bay, Oakland specifically. Not to mention that its housing is insanely costly and it has an MHI up there with Fairfield County, Conn., one of the wealthiest counties in the Northeast).
I also enjoy visiting Washington, but again, it has a people problem, namely, the class of people I call Official Washingtonians. They too have an inflated sense of their own importance, probably a byproduct of working in the erstwhile Capital of the Free World. I don't think I'd enjoy living in a place where "So what do you do?" is often the first thing one is asked on a first date. The Washington reporter I courted for three years and eventually became BFFs with had a similar distaste for the city he worked in; he has since returned to his native Kentucky - Louisville, to be specific.
I think that had the national capital remained in a city not created specifically to house it, like Philadelphia, it might not have given rise to such people.
"Philadelphia isn't as bad as Philadelphians say it is" is a now-legendary campaign cooked up by a local PR group in the early 1970s. It had as its aim increasing civic pride, which had for many years been in deficit.
An anecdote in support of this comes from the foreword of "City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Philadelphia 1945-1972," historian Marc Stein's book about LGBT activism in Philadelphia pre-Stonewall (and prior to Stonewall, Philly was the focal point of LGBT activism with the annual "Reminder Day" demonstrations that took place every July 4 from 1965 to 1969).
Stein (who I assisted with research on his book by connecting him with an older gay man who was part of that activism) stated in his foreword that he initially had difficulty getting his project off the ground - and that one of the reasons for this was that he didn't much like Philadelphia. Then, he said, he read an article that cited a survey that found that 60 percent of city residents said they would rather live somewhere else. This led him to conclude that he had actually become a Philadelphian, and that made it possible for him to proceed.
And as he proceeded with his research, he developed a genuine affection for the place. (He did most of the work for his book while a graduate student at Penn, where I worked at the time.) But he did leave it: he is now on the faculty of York University in Toronto.
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