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I always try to be courteous, but I draw the line when questions and intent becomes intrusive.
Why do Americans think smiling is so important?
Why do so many Americans want to be loved every second?
Why are Americans afraid or dislike or judge people who want boundaries? Being overly friendly means you want to jump over those boundaries.
Why do Americans detest introverts? Not everyone should be required to be socially "friendly".
To me people who can't manage without constant reenforcement and acknowledgement are insecure.
Well, I travel frequently all over the world and I can distinctly remember the cities where people wore frowns and the cities where people seemed approachable and relatively upbeat. I mean, everyone to their own - I'm certainly not suggesting an individual be someone he/she is not, but I really don't think there is anything wrong with putting a cognizant effort into smiling and being generally kind. Also, if we want to be a "world class" city, we can't be a bunch of grumpy introverts.
Now I'm not suggesting you need to get into a 10 minute "small talk" conversation with a stranger, but in my opinion there is nothing wrong with putting a little effort into being a good ambassador for Philadelphia.
I've always thought that NY'ers, for the most part, were fine. I lived in NYC for 12 years before Philly and I find it about the same in terms of people's attitudes. People have places to go and sh*t to do. Maybe that's interpreted as being rude.
I think this is it in a nutshell. In dense populations people are in a rush to catch a train, a taxi, to beat madding rush hour to catch an elevator. A few seconds delay can mean missing a train. So many people and so little time for pleasantries means people get used to an "I'm on a mission" persona.
When I lived in the mid-west, always greeted with a smile -- less dense, fewer people in a rush.
Well, I travel frequently all over the world and I can distinctly remember the cities where people wore frowns and the cities where people seemed approachable and relatively upbeat. I mean, everyone to their own - I'm certainly not suggesting an individual be someone he/she is not, but I really don't think there is anything wrong with putting a cognizant effort into smiling and being generally kind. Also, if we want to be a "world class" city, we can't be a bunch of grumpy introverts.
Now I'm not suggesting you need to get into a 10 minute "small talk" conversation with a stranger, but in my opinion there is nothing wrong with putting a little effort into being a good ambassador for Philadelphia.
Exactly right. The courtesy I felt when I came to research Philly was a welcome surprise. Nothing wrong with that. After all, isn't this the city of brotherly love?
I originally posted this on r/philadelphia in a thread about the MFL.
Philly is most certainly not "blessed to have a subway" in the sense that it's lucky to have one. Philly was 2nd only to New York as a metropolitan area until 1900 and 3rd to only New York and Chicago until 1950. If Philly is 61% the population of Chicago, it should have 61% the number of subway lines, so 4.88 subway lines. Instead Philly has 2. The PATCO isn't counted as a Phila subway line.
And like you said, if Philly did get those subway lines, it might have been a lot closer to Chicago today in population than just 61%. Philly was really dealt a ****ty hand and didn't get to become the city it was supposed to be. The idiotic gentlemans agreement which kept the skyline puny, and the idiot who shot down more rapid transit lines, keeping the city inaccessible and hostile to growth.
Today New York and Chicago are renowned throughout the world for their skyscrapers and subways and are considered the only real huge urban cities in America. They both get lots of attention in Media. Philly, the former #3 city, is barely known throughout the world, let alone barely recognized as a huge urban skyscraper city by its own country. Philly is never reported in the media unless it has to be.
New York Chicago and Philly residents are all known for being rude and off-putting, but with New York and Chicago, no one cares because they love those cities and they have exiting big city reputations. Because of this, even though Philly residents aren't anymore rude, they are stereotyped as ruder and more unfriendly because Philly doesn't receive much of a reputation beyond this.
It's almost as if there were people who's concerted effort it was to keep Philadelphia from becoming the Alpha World city it was always meant to be and so close to becoming. As I see it, the leaders of New York and Chicago never wanted their city to be anything less than the biggest city in the world.
I originally posted this on r/philadelphia in a thread about the MFL.
Philly is most certainly not "blessed to have a subway" in the sense that it's lucky to have one. Philly was 2nd only to New York as a metropolitan area until 1900 and 3rd to only New York and Chicago until 1950. If Philly is 61% the population of Chicago, it should have 61% the number of subway lines, so 4.88 subway lines. Instead Philly has 2. The PATCO isn't counted as a Phila subway line.
And like you said, if Philly did get those subway lines, it might have been a lot closer to Chicago today in population than just 61%. Philly was really dealt a ****ty hand and didn't get to become the city it was supposed to be. The idiotic gentlemans agreement which kept the skyline puny, and the idiot who shot down more rapid transit lines, keeping the city inaccessible and hostile to growth.
Today New York and Chicago are renowned throughout the world for their skyscrapers and subways and are considered the only real huge urban cities in America. They both get lots of attention in Media. Philly, the former #3 city, is barely known throughout the world, let alone barely recognized as a huge urban skyscraper city by its own country. Philly is never reported in the media unless it has to be.
New York Chicago and Philly residents are all known for being rude and off-putting, but with New York and Chicago, no one cares because they love those cities and they have exiting big city reputations. Because of this, even though Philly residents aren't anymore rude, they are stereotyped as ruder and more unfriendly because Philly doesn't receive much of a reputation beyond this.
It's almost as if there were people who's concerted effort it was to keep Philadelphia from becoming the Alpha World city it was always meant to be and so close to becoming. As I see it, the leaders of New York and Chicago never wanted their city to be anything less than the biggest city in the world.
Resident transitgeek weighing in on some of your comments:
There is no "idiot who shot down more rapid transit lines." Philadelphia's underdeveloped rapid transit system is the result of the city shooting itself in the foot, so to speak. Are you familiar with the 1913 plan for expansion of the rapid transit network via a series of city-built and -owned lines? (Philadelphia is unique among the four US cities that built subways prior to World War II [Chicago being the last of these, in 1939-43; its system was all-elevated up to that point] in that its first subway-elevated line was built entirely by a private company under a franchise, as opposed to a public-private partnership as in New York or a purely public undertaking as in Boston and Chicago.) That plan arose because the city was dissatisfied with the length of time it took the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company to complete the Market Street subway-elevated line (five years: 1902-07).
The plan called for six new rapid transit lines. Six. A Broad Street trunk line would have had branches going to Germantown and the Northeast, and the trunk would have run into West Oak Lane; a subway would have run up the Parkway before becoming an elevated over 29th Street and Ridge Avenue to serve Roxborough; a line would have branched off a new subway under Chestnut Street to head into Southwest Philadelphia (later, this was turned into another Broad Street Subway spur), and a new elevated line was to extend the existing Market Street line into Kensington, Frankford and Mayfair.
We only got the Broad Street trunk and the Frankford Elevated. The others never got built because the city never came up with the money to build them. And we've attempted to build the BSS Northeast Spur (aka "Boulevard subway") on at least two occasions and failed both times; the second time, there really was someone who shot it down: Mayor Frank Rizzo, who told outgoing Transportation Secretary William Coleman (a friend of Rizzo's - he was from here) to approve Federal funding for the Center City Commuter Tunnel instead in the 1970s.
Oh, and if you count PATH as part of the New York subway network, then PATCO counts here too. It took over a subway the PRT/PTC operated for the Delaware River Joint Commission that connected Philadelphia and downtown Camden that opened in 1936. Both PATH (nee the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, a PRR subsidiary) and PATCO serve to bring New Jersey residents into their respective core cities. And the "Bridge Line" subway here also had a connection to the Broad Street Subway's Ridge Avenue spur (you can see the junction riding a PATCO train eastbound as it climbs the ramp from 8th and Market to Franklin Square; look just before the train turns and you will see Chinatown station).
Now, as for your "they meant it to be the biggest city in the world" comment:
New York has always been a city on the make in a way this one hasn't been; I think the difference is coded into the municipal DNA (New York was founded by settlers from the Netherlands, the original mercantile nation, while Philly was a Quaker experiment, and the Quaker faith is inward-directed). But this city did build something meant to signal its preeminence as an industrial center (for many years it was known as "The Workshop of the World"):
Philadelphia City Hall.
When work started on it in 1871, the aim was for it to be the tallest building in the world. Between then and its completion 30 years later, the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument had both surpassed it. But no office building had yet done so, and none would until the Woolworth Building was completed in New York in 1914.
City Hall Tower remains the second-tallest masonry tower in the world (after the Washington Monument), and the building itself is the largest masonry building in the United States as well as its largest municipal government building.
I originally posted this on r/philadelphia in a thread about the MFL.
Philly is most certainly not "blessed to have a subway" in the sense that it's lucky to have one. Philly was 2nd only to New York as a metropolitan area until 1900 and 3rd to only New York and Chicago until 1950. If Philly is 61% the population of Chicago, it should have 61% the number of subway lines, so 4.88 subway lines. Instead Philly has 2. The PATCO isn't counted as a Phila subway line.
And like you said, if Philly did get those subway lines, it might have been a lot closer to Chicago today in population than just 61%. Philly was really dealt a ****ty hand and didn't get to become the city it was supposed to be. The idiotic gentlemans agreement which kept the skyline puny, and the idiot who shot down more rapid transit lines, keeping the city inaccessible and hostile to growth.
Today New York and Chicago are renowned throughout the world for their skyscrapers and subways and are considered the only real huge urban cities in America. They both get lots of attention in Media. Philly, the former #3 city, is barely known throughout the world, let alone barely recognized as a huge urban skyscraper city by its own country. Philly is never reported in the media unless it has to be.
New York Chicago and Philly residents are all known for being rude and off-putting, but with New York and Chicago, no one cares because they love those cities and they have exiting big city reputations. Because of this, even though Philly residents aren't anymore rude, they are stereotyped as ruder and more unfriendly because Philly doesn't receive much of a reputation beyond this.
It's almost as if there were people who's concerted effort it was to keep Philadelphia from becoming the Alpha World city it was always meant to be and so close to becoming. As I see it, the leaders of New York and Chicago never wanted their city to be anything less than the biggest city in the world.
LA's first Subway opened in 1991 and it's bigger than Chicago by almost 50%. It's never had an impressive skyline.
Top 10 MSA's in 1900:
1 New York
2 Chicago
3 Philadelphia
4 St. Louis
5 Boston
6 Baltimore
7 Cleveland
8 Buffalo
9 San Francisco
10 Cleveland
Where are the other cities now? New York (1), Chicago (3) and Philadelphia (8). After that, only Boston (10), San Francisco (12) and St. Louis (20) still crack the top 20.
Philly has more than held it's own, despite the overwhelming trend away from the north and east towards the South and West for more than a century.
Resident transitgeek weighing in on some of your comments:
There is no "idiot who shot down more rapid transit lines." Philadelphia's underdeveloped rapid transit system is the result of the city shooting itself in the foot, so to speak. Are you familiar with the 1913 plan for expansion of the rapid transit network via a series of city-built and -owned lines? (Philadelphia is unique among the four US cities that built subways prior to World War II [Chicago being the last of these, in 1939-43; its system was all-elevated up to that point] in that its first subway-elevated line was built entirely by a private company under a franchise, as opposed to a public-private partnership as in New York or a purely public undertaking as in Boston and Chicago.) That plan arose because the city was dissatisfied with the length of time it took the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company to complete the Market Street subway-elevated line (five years: 1902-07).
The plan called for six new rapid transit lines. Six. A Broad Street trunk line would have had branches going to Germantown and the Northeast, and the trunk would have run into West Oak Lane; a subway would have run up the Parkway before becoming an elevated over 29th Street and Ridge Avenue to serve Roxborough; a line would have branched off a new subway under Chestnut Street to head into Southwest Philadelphia (later, this was turned into another Broad Street Subway spur), and a new elevated line was to extend the existing Market Street line into Kensington, Frankford and Mayfair.
We only got the Broad Street trunk and the Frankford Elevated. The others never got built because the city never came up with the money to build them. And we've attempted to build the BSS Northeast Spur (aka "Boulevard subway") on at least two occasions and failed both times; the second time, there really was someone who shot it down: Mayor Frank Rizzo, who told outgoing Transportation Secretary William Coleman (a friend of Rizzo's - he was from here) to approve Federal funding for the Center City Commuter Tunnel instead in the 1970s.
Oh, and if you count PATH as part of the New York subway network, then PATCO counts here too. It took over a subway the PRT/PTC operated for the Delaware River Joint Commission that connected Philadelphia and downtown Camden that opened in 1936. Both PATH (nee the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, a PRR subsidiary) and PATCO serve to bring New Jersey residents into their respective core cities. And the "Bridge Line" subway here also had a connection to the Broad Street Subway's Ridge Avenue spur (you can see the junction riding a PATCO train eastbound as it climbs the ramp from 8th and Market to Franklin Square; look just before the train turns and you will see Chinatown station).
Now, as for your "they meant it to be the biggest city in the world" comment:
New York has always been a city on the make in a way this one hasn't been; I think the difference is coded into the municipal DNA (New York was founded by settlers from the Netherlands, the original mercantile nation, while Philly was a Quaker experiment, and the Quaker faith is inward-directed). But this city did build something meant to signal its preeminence as an industrial center (for many years it was known as "The Workshop of the World"):
Philadelphia City Hall.
When work started on it in 1871, the aim was for it to be the tallest building in the world. Between then and its completion 30 years later, the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument had both surpassed it. But no office building had yet done so, and none would until the Woolworth Building was completed in New York in 1914.
City Hall Tower remains the second-tallest masonry tower in the world (after the Washington Monument), and the building itself is the largest masonry building in the United States as well as its largest municipal government building.
The Singer Building (1908) and Metlife Building (1909) were also taller. Good points though about Philly's subway system that wouldve been as big as Chicagos today. Extremely interesting.
Well, I travel frequently all over the world and I can distinctly remember the cities where people wore frowns and the cities where people seemed approachable and relatively upbeat. I mean, everyone to their own - I'm certainly not suggesting an individual be someone he/she is not, but I really don't think there is anything wrong with putting a cognizant effort into smiling and being generally kind. Also, if we want to be a "world class" city, we can't be a bunch of grumpy introverts.
Now I'm not suggesting you need to get into a 10 minute "small talk" conversation with a stranger, but in my opinion there is nothing wrong with putting a little effort into being a good ambassador for Philadelphia.
I actually do what you mentioned wrt being a good ambassador. I'm a homer, remember?
Most introverts aren't grumpy. We just need more mental space/time to process information.
Resident transitgeek weighing in on some of your comments:
There is no "idiot who shot down more rapid transit lines." Philadelphia's underdeveloped rapid transit system is the result of the city shooting itself in the foot, so to speak. Are you familiar with the 1913 plan for expansion of the rapid transit network via a series of city-built and -owned lines? (Philadelphia is unique among the four US cities that built subways prior to World War II [Chicago being the last of these, in 1939-43; its system was all-elevated up to that point] in that its first subway-elevated line was built entirely by a private company under a franchise, as opposed to a public-private partnership as in New York or a purely public undertaking as in Boston and Chicago.) That plan arose because the city was dissatisfied with the length of time it took the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company to complete the Market Street subway-elevated line (five years: 1902-07).
The plan called for six new rapid transit lines. Six. A Broad Street trunk line would have had branches going to Germantown and the Northeast, and the trunk would have run into West Oak Lane; a subway would have run up the Parkway before becoming an elevated over 29th Street and Ridge Avenue to serve Roxborough; a line would have branched off a new subway under Chestnut Street to head into Southwest Philadelphia (later, this was turned into another Broad Street Subway spur), and a new elevated line was to extend the existing Market Street line into Kensington, Frankford and Mayfair.
I still maintain that the death of George Widener, and his son, on the Titanic in April, 1912, had a big impact on why the city ended up stumbling regarding its transit future. He was only 51 at the time.
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