An urban story of a young couple renovating a dilapidated Philadelphia row house, and finding that the entire neighborhood made good use of it.
Manya and I had just arrived at that age when the urge to create our own space became overwhelming. That is to say, we had to act on something, anything. There weren’t too many choices; we had no money. We lived in Philadelphia’s Center City, in a nice top-floor apartment on Latimer Street, a rental. Manya could walk to work, and I would drive to Princeton, where I was ostensibly working on a PhD in Economics.
But it turns out that Center City is just a few blocks away from Philadelphia’s urban ghetto. This is a common feature of nearly all US cities, a vestige of our strange, not-so-distant past.
