Pope's Visit: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Philadelphia: price, versus)

[southbound_295]

Originally Posted by thedirtypirate

Not one person has to walk four miles. I mean you could if you want to just walk around but most people are just lining the streets waiting and independence hall mall is mostly full. it's like musical acts from around the world right now. The National Park Service showed there 100th anniversary video for 2016.

Only steeps would not understand the onion lol..

There's no reasonable way that there would be a 4 mile walk involved unless the churches were told or got the bright idea to park in Camden then walk across the Ben Franklin. That would be 2 miles each way.

[Janszoon]

I'm reading a lot of complaints from local restaurants that this event is really killing their business. I thought this was pretty telling:

Said Stephen Starr, who owns about a dozen Philadelphia restaurants: "This affected business worse than Hurricane Sandy. The city scared all of our customers away. We have virtually no reservations. This is unnecessary overkill. What should have been a feeling of family and community was turned into a police and military operation."

[chicagoliz]

I am curious to see how businesses that are open fare this weekend. They kept saying 422 was going to be gridlocked, although I could not understand why, given that 76 into the city was closed since last night. When they close that part of the expressway, they're giving plenty of notice, so people MUST exit -- it's not like an accident where people could get stuck between exits.

BUT, 422 today has been AWESOME. My husband got from the 422 corridor to PHL, parked in a satellite lot, took a shuttle to the airport, checked in, got through security and into the airport lounge in an HOUR. That is unprecedented.

I wish traffic was like this everyday.

(But I do feel badly for CC businesses that are being hurt.)

[rainrock]

Popenado. Pope Panic. Ya gotta love it. Shame citizens of the Philadlephia region couldnt enjoy this event.

I was in King of Prussia(76) around dusk. About 8 Black Escalades passed me by doing about 90 MPH heading towards the city. Im glad when I got home my worst fears werent realized. Ive never seen 95/476/76/422 so deserted. Unbelievable. The Parkway looks about 1/2 full. 4th of July or Made In America festival the Parkway is Full.

[thedirtypirate]

mmm I just got back from Little Nonna's, and I highly recommend all of Marcie Turney & Valerie Safran's resturants to any one.

Anywho, I had a wonderful time. Today made me proud to be a Philadelphian for hosting this event. We cleaned up, Nutter and Wolf both gave respectable speeches, and Pope Francis' presence alone made the whole thing worth it by itself. He is everything a good church leader should be. His whole speech was based around the golden rule of treat your neighbor how you would like to be treated. It doesn't matter what religion you are, Christian, muslim, jewish, we all need to understand that we must co-exist. Really great stuff. Honored to have him here. I met people from all over. Seattle, Denver, Boston, North Dakota, Dominica Republic, Argentina. People were literally from everywhere.

Also Stephen Starr is the most successful restaurant owner in the country (also one of the city's most prominent Jewish residents). Please don't ever say you feel bad for him ever again. Is it really that sad that all the hipster's left fishtown and aren't buying there $15 soft pretzel this weekend at Frankford Hall? Maybe everyone shouldn't have gone to the shore?

If you thought today was "scary" than you have never set foot in Philadelphia before lol. People seemed to be having a really nice time.

The big take away is that Philadelphian's themselves weren't there filling up the streets in center city like usual..

[thedirtypirate]

Originally Posted by rainrock

Popenado. Pope Panic. Ya gotta love it. Shame citizens of the Philadlephia region chose not to enjoy this event.

fixed it for you . I am so beat, but I wish I was watching Aretha in person right.

[rainrock]

Originally Posted by thedirtypirate

fixed it for you . I am so beat, but I wish I was watching Aretha in person right.

LOL. I was not lucky enough to win the lottery to get a papal tix.Otherwise I would be there helping fill in the half-empty Parkway. Of course I probably would have had to drive 10 miles in the opposite direction to catch a train into the city but I digress. An utter debacle.

[steeps]

Originally Posted by thedirtypirate

Not one person has to walk four miles. I mean you could if you want to just walk around but most people are just lining the streets waiting and independence hall mall is mostly full. it's like musical acts from around the world right now. The National Park Service showed there 100th anniversary video for 2016.

Only steeps would not understand the onion lol..

Oh I've read the Onion before..... But I couldn't resist.......

i went by the VATICAN NEWS Released to Parishes last a week or two ago. It was also on Local Northeastern TV news. Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Stations. Some buses were cancelled.

Syracuse Diocese Released This..... It says 4 miles. 300 out of 400 back out of Bus to Philly for Pope's Mass.

Pope Francis: 300 CNY Catholics abandon bus trip to Philly due to security rules | syracuse.com

Philly.com shows maps where buses will park and or station drop offs. If its Camden Riverfront. It says a 4-mile walk or technical # given of 3.92 miles.

How far will I have to walk to see the pope?

[FamousBlueRaincoat]

Anyway a couple of obervations from my only day down there.

1) The BSL was nowhere near capacity at 8 AM or 7 PM when I was on it. I way overestimated how much extra time I'd need to get to work, even though I had to go through a checkpoint to get there. I essentially made it in as quick as usual. Didn't even take that much longer to get home than usual either, even though I had quite the walk from Washington Square to Walnut Locust.

2) Market Street was busy. Chinatown was dead. A ghost town. I felt bad for all those small businesses, some of which had nice displays outside selling food, and not gouging the prices at all. They must have made nothing. Even the chain restaurants around 12th and Filbert were empty. Reading Terminal wasn't especially busy - some vendors from inside the market were out on the sidewalk with pushcarts hocking food until they realized nobody out there was interested in buying either. Gave a bunch of food to some homeless folks so it wouldn't go to waste.

3) SEPTA's website that it forces you to view does suck because even though it answers all your questions about what's different, you can't get information about things that stayed the same. For example, I can take the H or L bus. They were running regular saturday schedules - totally inaccessible on the website and app - you needed to have a paper schedule on you like some kind of old folk, they only give you headways for buses that are running modified schedules.

Also real time inforation on buses seemed to be turned off - couldn't access it on the subway or the app. So it's just wait and hope. No idea where it is, no idea where it's supposed to be. Luckily the buses were empty and on time.

4) The SEPTA regional rail plan is so absurd and complicated the Transit Ambassadors at Market East station didn't understand it. They told people looking for the Media Line and Chestnut Hill West line to "go to 12th street" - when those lines only were stopping at University or 30th respectively. Had to take out my phone to convince the extremely confused natives and the transit ambassadors about where those lines stopped.

That's about all. A lot about this seems kind of disappointing so far - but these catholic folks were very nice and friendly folks to have around at the very least. Perhaps lots of people had unreasonable expectations about how much money they were going to spend at yuppie restaurants with little appeal to people coming primarily for religious reasons.

Heard a couple horror stories about it taking hours for checkpoints and moving through the crowds for workers along the parkway....glad that didn't affect me.

[thedirtypirate]

Originally Posted by rainrock

LOL. I was not lucky enough to win the lottery to get a papal tix.Otherwise I would be there helping fill in the half-empty Parkway. Of course I probably would have had to drive 10 miles in the opposite direction to catch a train into the city but I digress. An utter debacle.

Yes they didn't tell people that they could just drive straight into any part of the city, park and take the subway. I don't understand that. I don't actually know if the stadium parking lots were open to the public but a lot of people were coming in from that direction on the subway. I assume most of it was bus trips. People can drive to university city or temple and park right on the street or in a parking lot/garage. Go to 7-11 or use the token machine. Bing, bang, boom.


Also to tell you the complete 100% truth.. nobody ever even checked if I had a ticket. I emptied my pockets and went through a metal detector, but straight nobody ever asked me for a ticket or scanned mine.