An Adobe Flash-based project for Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. As seen on the web and at Online News Association’s Interactive Narratives.

[THE ATHENS OF AMERICA]

Philadelphia used to be different.

It was proudly America’s anti-city city, one that provided the innovation and achievement that attracted thousands. An urban experiment that seemed to happily bathe in the waters of the “afflictions of worldliness.” A cosmopolitan city that boasted the nation’s best museums, hotels and institutions. A melting pot of language and social and cultural trends. A model metropolis teeming with a young nation’s best and brightest that played host to both the nation’s top political luminaries and the young literati of the day, who gathered at Asbury Dickins’s bookstore opposite Christ Church in the mornings. French botanist André Michaux described it as “the most extensive, the handsomest and most populous city in the United States,” and for awhile, people believed it – never mind the social stratification, marshes and latrines hidden behind the red-brick houses of the wealthy. For an era, there were no limits in Philadelphia: on space, wealth, tolerance – and above all, creativity.

“At the beginning of this century,” Albert H. Smyth, an editor of Ben Franklin’s writings, wrote retrospectively as the nineteenth century came to a close, “Philadelphia was the most attractive city in America to a young man of brains and ambition.”

But somewhere along the way, Philadelphia lost its focus. As fast as Philadelphia grew, other cities grew faster, and the once Utopian city ceded its superiority – in population, in economic superiority, in political sway, as a successful example of urban planning – to other cities, most notably New York. So began the decline of painter Gilbert Stuart’s “Athens of America” – the progressive urban experiment that was outpaced in its own pursuit of modernity and allure.

Generations have watched Philadelphia slowly lose its grip on itself and slide down the ladder of national prominence. The final slip came in 2006, when Philadelphia exploded in a crime wave that claimed the highest homicide rate of any big city in the country, with 406 killings — more per capita than even New York City, which has six times the population. Since then, Philadelphia has fixed itself atop the big city homicide ladder, and recently rang in the New Year with 392 murders in the books.

Since the outbreak of gun violence, Philadelphia’s attractive features have become considerably less appealing. Most of what made Philadelphia an alluring and charming city now seems to disappear in the shadows of more menacing realities. Its affordable real estate has been overvalued by 14 percent, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. The previous mayor, John F. Street, has been called passive, corrupt and one of the worst big-city mayors by TIME magazine. The magnetism of the city’s 80-some institutions of higher education has weakened because of a dearth of jobs for its newly-minted graduates. Above all, the “City of Brotherly Love” proved that there’s a not enough love between neighbors and a little too much tolerance when it comes to illegal guns on the streets. According to a 2005 article in USA Today, more than half of gun violence in the city starts with an argument.

But if the atrophying city’s health looks bleak on paper, it is an even worse view from the asphalt. Accelerated by the nationwide housing slump, “For Sale” signs are appearing in windows and on front lawns, but there’s no one to hand over the keys to. Philadelphia is hemorrhaging population – as it has been doing for half a century.

Increasingly, it seems Philadelphia is the brother no one wants anything to do with.

[OPERATION TOURNIQUET]

It’s Sunday, December 30, 2007, an overcast, drizzly day that’s warmer than usual for one week after Christmas. Well-dressed churchgoers are spilling out on to the streets, having just finished attending services. Vendors tend to their goods. Passerby stroll the sidewalk. On the horizon, a black hearse appears, rolling in silence down Diamond Ave. in the Lower North section of the city. Each revolution of its wheel is deliberate and slow over the weathered asphalt. The words “Living is a choice – choose life” are scrawled on the roof of the hearse, but the message is hard to see on street level. Still, the churchgoers stare in silence. Some shake their heads. Some avert their eyes. Some just walk away.

Just another funeral in Philadelphia. Or is it? Behind the hearse, a cavalcade of vehicles follows it. But something’s different. Behind the lead coach, 28 more hearses follow, in matching black and silver trim. End to end, they stretch more than 500 feet. But there aren’t any corpses in these cars. The motorcade of morticians was arranged by the Quaker State Funeral Directors Association, a local chapter of the largest and oldest association of African-American funeral directors. The purpose of the mock procession is to remind neighbors that the last stop is in the back of a Lincoln with tinted windows. The 29 hearses represent only 7 percent of the city’s 392 homicide victims in 2007. Even those that deal in the business of death lament the city’s homicide rate.

“People tend to think we benefit from this – ‘oh, your business must be doing well, all these homicides’ – no, not really,” said Gregory Burrell, president and CEO of Terry Funeral Home on Haverford Ave. and 42nd St. in West Philadelphia. Burrell organized the mock procession through the National Funeral Directors and Morticians’ Association, where he is vice president, as a show of respect to the families of victims.

“It is not exciting for us,” Burrell said. “We’re not thrilled at the fact that we’re losing young people at this alarming rate.”

“Some of these kids are so young, and the first thing you think about is your own children.”

On the other side of the gurney, the view isn’t much better. David Quain, chief medical examiner for the city of Philadelphia, said his office stays busy year-round.

“We have at least a murder a day,” Quain said. “If we went a week without somebody murdered, that would be remarkable. And that’s sad. That’s truly sad. We can’t even go a week without somebody getting murdered. Somebody’s going to get murdered this weekend, there’s no question about it.”

Quain said the murders have gotten more brutal since he first joined the medical examiner’s office decades ago.

“In the late ‘80s, there really weren’t people carrying semi-automatic weapons,” Quain said. “Now they have 17 or 18 shots to pump into somebody. In the last four years, it’s been .40 caliber. You should see the size of a hole it makes in a car.”

Like Burrell, Quain faces the same criticisms of being in the business of death. Does he reap a bigger paycheck from the wave of murders? Does anyone profit from gun violence?

“This is a very, very strange profession,” Quain said. “If somebody gets murdered, that probably means overtime for somebody here… [but] most people are fed up with it. They’d rather not have the overtime.”

But the effects reach beyond his office and spill out onto the streets, Quain said. Quain, who was born in the Olney neighborhood of North Philadelphia, said the trance the gun violence has on the city is palpable.

“If you ride around this city, you can feel the tension and the hostility in the air in the cars next to you, besides you, behind you,” Quain said. “There are a lot of angry young people out there, and some of them have guns.”

[KILLADELPHIA.]

Kimberly Carter Ford is familiar with black hearses. The state employee watched one pull away with the body of her baby brother’s youngest child, Casha’e Rivers, 5, who was shot and killed in her mother’s car in front of an auto detailing shop in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of North Philadelphia. As an aunt, Ford spent considerable time taking care of her brother’s daughter after he was imprisoned on her first birthday. She said she felt cheated by her premature death.

“I took her to a wedding down South three months before she died and I remember her asking me, ‘Auntie, when I get married, are you going to buy me a dress like that?’ and I said yes. That’s why when she died…I was going to make sure I bought my baby the prettiest dress I could get. Because this was the only dress I would ever be able to buy her anymore.”

If there’s one question a family member of a Philadelphia homicide victim can answer, it’s what number homicide the victim was that year. Casha’e was No. 287. Ford said the process of confirming Casha’e’s killer nearly destroyed her. It took nearly a year before the right man was arrested, she said.

“For a long time we were angry, hurt and bitter because we were trying to tell the city that they had the wrong guy,” she said. “I told the commissioner myself. I told Deputy [Police Commissioner Richard] Ross [Jr.] myself. I called the FBI myself…everybody was trying to tell them they had the wrong person, but they didn’t believe me.”

Ford said the neighborhood where Casha’e was killed is plain evidence of municipal neglect.

“I think I felt like the neighborhood needed more help,” she said. “I can’t tell you where the nearest gym is, the nearest playground is, any type of community center. There is no police station for miles…that neighborhood is really ignored and is just left to deteriorate. Sometimes, a part of me feels like the city is waiting for it to fall apart so they can come in and build up. But you’re leaving people there like they’re on a desert island and they’re left to fend for themselves.”

[COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES]

A month ago, Ashley Simpson, a graduating senior at the University of Pennsylvania, had a dilemma. She loved the city she spent the last four years studying in, but the Ivy League graduate-to-be was tempted with comparable paralegal jobs in Philadelphia and New York. Simpson studied international relations, and it’s widely-known that if she wants a job in corporate law, the Big Apple is the place to be.

“I went with a staffing agency and they found me this opportunity,” Simpson said. “I have to admit, there was one job in Philadelphia that, had I seriously went after that, I think I would have taken it… [but] there was no opening. Other than that, I didn’t really look at any jobs in Philadelphia…I basically only looked at New York.”

According to a 2004 student by Greater Philadelphia’s Knowledge Industry Partnership – a coalition of local industry leaders that promotes the impact of the region’s “knowledge industry” of colleges and universities – 29 percent of non-natives stay in the Philadelphia region after graduation. In contrast, Boston hangs onto 42 percent of its grads. Of the non-natives who don’t return where they’re from, 30 percent head to the Big Apple. That’s almost twice as much as the next city on the list, Baltimore/D.C., at 17 percent. The phenomenon is called “brain drain,” and it has educators up in arms.

Pat Rose, director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania, said the partnership surveyed graduates of local institutions twice, and both times, Penn was on the low end of those who stayed.

“The problem we have here is not that people don’t like Philadelphia…the problem is there aren’t jobs here,” Rose said. “Penn students, as a group, are very interested in the same things that students at Columbia are interested in, the students at Harvard and Princeton and Stanford, and those things tend to be – the largest single thing – is financial services, specifically investment banking, with offshoots in private equity and hedge funds. And those jobs are not typically in Philadelphia. They’re in New York. There’s some in Chicago. There’s some in the Bay Area. But there isn’t much here.”

If a city’s health can be measured by any one factor, it’s the power it holds to retain its people – to keep them happy, entertained, even in anticipation of things to come. Yet it seems the only thing most Philadelphians anticipate is the arrival of a moving service. Once a social, economic and professional powerhouse, Philadelphia’s economic prowess has waned in recent years – and both the students it educates and the natives it nourishes are packing up to leave.

In both situations, the numbers are the proof. Philadelphia is popular among those in IT, engineering, health sciences, the arts – yet only one in four business majors, the area’s most popular course of study, stay.

“So if you want to work in investment banking as our students do in droves – literally in droves, as it’s approaching for our entire undergraduate group 30 percent,” Rose said, “very few of those jobs are in Philadelphia.”

The problem extends to retaining the city’s native population. Gary Jastrzab, acting executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, said Philadelphia has been hemorrhaging population since World War II – to its own suburbs.

“Population is an easy scorecard by which to measure success or failure,” Jastrzab said. “We’re a much smaller share of the regional population than we were immediate post-war…that concentrated population is dispersing.”

“I remember seeing a statistic showing that Lower North Philadelphia lost half, if not more, of its population between 1950 and the year 2000. North Philadelphia was a very densely-developed, row house, manufacturing-based kind of economy where people lived close to where they worked. That area went through a racial transition in the ‘50s and ‘60s – you know, the proverbial white flight.”

Much, much smaller in fact – the city of Philadelphia has lost more than half a million people since its heyday in the 1950s, but the metropolitan area has grown by more than two million. Last year, Philadelphia slipped one spot to sixth on the list of the nation’s cities, bowing to Phoenix.

“The city’s population is always churning, always moving,” Jastrzab said. “People are always moving in, moving out.”

But the slippery slope is easing. Jastrzab said net loss estimates have been declining since the turn of the millennium, and closer inspection of the numbers reveals that Philadelphia is finally bottoming out – with nowhere to look but up.

“There are some areas of the city that are probably gaining population, and we’re not going to know this until the next complete census in 2010,” he said. “The Center City area and some of the reinvestment neighborhoods around Center City are probably gaining population. Other parts of the city are still losing population.”

Jastrzab said developers have been showing up in his office regularly looking to build along the long-neglected waterfront and Center City and surrounding neighborhoods such as Kensington and Fishtown. It’s an example of the momentum that will eventually transform Philadelphia into one-half of a future megalopolis with New York City, he said.

“Cities are probably the most sustainable kind of forms of human settlement that we can have,” he said. “I think we have a good future here in Philadelphia.”

[BLAME DUCK]

John F. Street is sweating. He’s standing at a microphone in the White Rock Baptist Church on Chestnut Ave. in the city’s 18th District in the midst of delivery an impassioned speech about how gun violence reaches beyond Philadelphia’s borders to the whole nation. Street’s wringing his hands, having just delivered the kicker, “It isn’t just Philadelphia” and hoping that the crowd buys it. In July 2006, almost exactly a year before his speech here at the church, Street begged young Philadelphians for a ceasefire in a televised address: “Lay down your weapons,” he pleaded then. “Do it now. Choose education over violence.” A year later, Street’s position on his city’s gun problem has changed from managing the crisis to simply dodging it.

At the pulpit, Street continues. “The commissioner and I say it all the time: we can’t have a good year in homicides.” He licks his lips. “We cannot have a good year.” He pauses, his elbows bent and his hands pointed inward towards his chest. “But…” He pauses again. His hands turn, facing each other as if trying to shape an intangible idea. One second passes. Two seconds. Three. The Seventh-Day Adventist’s eyes turn upward, toward the church’s ceiling, God, or both. “…you could report these things so that people think there’s something special going on that isn’t going on. The reporting is such that if you didn’t know any better, you would think the violence is unprecedented, and it’s not.”

Like any big city in the U.S., Philadelphia has seen its share of characters in City Hall – but few have had such a politically destructive career as the disconnected John F. Street. He banned skateboarding from Love Park after hosting the X-Games in 2001 and 2002. He presided over the privatization of the city’s public schools due to poor performance. It took the title of “Fattest City in the Nation” by Men’s Fitness for Street to create the Office of Public Health and Fitness. In 2005, he caved in to pressure to ban public smoking after failing to support the initiative earlier. The same year, the FBI bugged Street’s office during an investigation into corruption. In June 2007, Street made national headlines waiting in line for an Apple iPhone instead of handling the city’s crime crisis. And on his way out of office, he quietly took a retroactive pay raise he denied himself during his eight years as mayor.

“Let me tell you, the brothers and sisters are running the city,” he said at an NAACP convention in 2002. “Oh, yes. The brothers and sisters are running this city. Running it! Don’t you let nobody fool you, we are in charge of the City of Brotherly Love. We are in charge! We are in charge!”

The comment, taken out of context, was met with sharp criticism. But for the man who campaigned as the guy who would keep the ball rolling after the departure of “America’s mayor,” Ed Rendell, it didn’t look like John F. Street was a man in touch with all of the streets of Philadelphia.

“He could motivate and lead people when he felt like he was talking to people who already understood him,” said Wendy Warren, assistant managing editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. “He really had a problem talking to people who he felt didn’t understand him, or were prejudging him.”

It’s a problem that goes back a long way, said Dan Pohlig, a producer for WHYY and Warren’s colleague on The Next Mayor blog. “For the longest time, mayors in Philadelphia have been content to just move enough of the people that they need to hold on to their base of power,” Pohlig said.

If you ask anyone who grew up in Philadelphia who the last great mayor was, you’ll more often hear “Frank Rizzo,” Philadelphia’s top dog for most of the 1970s. There’s a reason there is a statue of Rizzo standing in front of the Municipal Services Building in Center City, and it’s not just because he died in 1991. The former Police Commissioner’s reputation as a bare-knuckled, iron-fisted, sometimes racist leader of 7,000 men is the polar opposite of Philadelphia’s latest crop of leaders – the kind of love-him or hate-him leader that had enough gall to say “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot” as a public statement. No politician since Rizzo has made such an impact – except maybe Rudy Giuliani in New York.

As Philly’s problems multiply, many residents simply ask: What would Frank Rizzo do?

On Monday, January 7, 2008, Michael Nutter had the answer. Newly sworn in as mayor, the former city councilman with a history of sparring with Street appealed to just one part of the city – and dropped the hatchet. “We are going to change the mentality of those who think that it is OK to run our streets with illegal weapons and use them at random whenever they want,” he said. “Today. Today. Enough is enough. Enough is enough.”

Nutter looked up from his notes at the crowd. “To the law-abiding citizens of this city – I say we are the great majority. And to the law breakers – you are a small minority.” He raised his voice over the applause. “This is our city – and we’re taking it back. Every day, every block, every neighborhood, everywhere in Philadelphia.” His voice thundered. “Because I’ve had enough, and I’m not playing around about it.”

Nutter was not supposed to be this kind of politician. He’s a technocrat, a business-savvy city native who was supposed to appeal to those who have the city’s economy in mind, not its social issues. But as time passes, “‘the Seabiscuit of this year’s urban politics” has become Philly’s apparent remedy.

“He’s setting the right tone. Sending the right signals,” said newly-elected city councilman Bill Green. Green’s father was the city’s mayor through the early ‘80s. “People are excited, and now it’s up to the mayor and the city council to work together to deliver it. Hopefully, the time for small, petty and divisive politics is over and we can focus on the public good.”

Yet the hardest challenge Nutter may face is one that he can’t control, Pohlig said.

“The guy’s basically expected to cure cancer at this point,” Pohlig said. “The question is: what does he do when the times get tough? When a close associate has an ethical lapse?”

[ALWAYS SUNNY?]

Do we still need Philadelphia?

On Feb. 6, 2006, Comedy Central personality Stephen Colbert facetiously opened an interview with Dem. Congressman Chaka Fattah with the above question, and for a moment, it didn’t seem like he was kidding.

Fattah, a member of Philadelphia’s old political guard, didn’t hesitate and countered with a quick “yes.” But when Colbert pressed him for a reason, Fattah went right to referencing Philadelphia’s colonial and political history and the contributions of its native sons. “We have a rich history of the beginning of the country: the writing of the Constitution, the president’s house – the first house for George Washington…” There was nary a word of Philadelphia’s relevance in the 21st century.

Without a doubt, the fight to stay relevant is arguably Philadelphia’s greatest challenge.

“I’m asking you to join me in the greatest American city turnaround that anyone has seen in the last 50 years,” Nutter said on his inauguration night.

But if, as urban activist Jane Jacobs wrote, that “designing a dream city is easy” and that “rebuilding a living one takes imagination,” Philadelphia is in desperate need of a double dose of creativity. Buoyed by its fine colonial pedigree but weighed down by its modern identity as a Rust Belt casualty, Philadelphia is once again at a crossroads. With a little help from “rock star” Nutter, as ABC World News Tonight anchor Charles Gibson has called him – as well as the city’s greatest modern rival, New York – the “city in trouble” may be on a better track than is immediately apparent.

A recent interactive feature by the BBC detailing the effects of the vast increase in urban living during the last half century showed Philadelphia reclaiming the title of America’s fourth largest city. The projection, based on data from the United Nations, shows the Philadelphia metropolitan area reaching 5.8 million people by 2015 – the direct result of New York-Newark’s ballooning projected population of 19.8 million people.

In other words, Philadelphia’s greatest asset for its future might not be its colonial heritage, its hip factor, its housing stock or even Nutter – rather, it is the city’s physical proximity to America’s greatest success. The mayor’s greatest challenge is to bring the city’s mindset just as close. Or as Nutter said himself at a South Philadelphia Town Hall meeting in October, getting Philadelphians excited to hail from the City of Brotherly Love.

“I’m asking you to do your part to turn Philadelphia into the great city that we know it can be, that we know we deserve,” he said. “This is our time, this is our place…join with me in turning the city around to create the rebirth of a great American city.

“The renaissance period of Philadelphia: let’s get to work.”