Saturday I went for a walk. I live in inner city Philadelphia, but I’m a block away from Fairmount Park and an easy stroll to the Art Museum. I got rid of my car a couple years back, and I get around by bus and on foot just fine. I’m lucky that way.
As I was walking down to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, constructed in imitation of the Champs-Élysées, I saw a small troupe of people in identical t shirts that read “Love Walk.” There were maybe forty of them. They came to a stop at the bottom of the Art Museum steps, known as the “Rocky Steps” by out-of-towners.
A bunch of marquees were set up on Eakins Oval a little further on, because of a massive bike ride happening on the Parkway at the same time. A trainer was leading a warmup routine from a stage at one end of the Oval, and a bunch of people in bike shoes were dutifully doing high kicks.
When I first lived in this area in the 1970s, not much was happening on the weekends on the Parkway, not even on Saturdays. Pennsylvania basically shut down on Sundays, but Saturdays weren’t much better.
Then in 1973, the city hosted its first Parkway festival, Super Sunday. It was wild. There were carnival rides, performers, vendors, and snacks of every sort. It turned into a yearly thing for another twenty years or more. Other festivals followed. Now, on weekends, it’s rare the Parkway isn’t shut down for something.
That’s great. I love it, for the most part. My husband hated it, because the festivals, concerts, bike rides, marathons, and parades always shut down traffic. I didn’t mind that, because I didn’t drive as much as he did, but it often also shut down the SEPTA buses. Now that I don’t have a car, that can get pretty dire. The detours are unpredictable, to say the least.
Saturday, I was going to a festival that wasn’t on the Parkway, so because of the march and the bike race, I had to walk a long way, all the way to City Hall. My event shut down all the rest of the buses, because it took over the heart of the city.
At first I thought my event was going to be sparse, but in a while I saw the crowds and heard that low-frequency crowd sound that travels, like a lion’s roar. Love walks and bike rides aside, and despite the crowds of tourists going to the Art Museum and all the people going about their regular lives, quite a few people had turned out for the rally I was joining, the “No Kings” demonstration. There were something like a hundred thousand people there.
Someone I know from another protest was leading the chants. People were wearing T. Rex suits, or were dressed as Teletubbies. Old people were toting signs painstakingly lettered on cardboard or printed on color printers. Everyone was friendly. I met up with my adult kid, who doesn’t like crowds, and we sat on a ledge and watched the happy mob pass slowly by.
Eventually, after we had been part of some overhead pictures, we headed back, but it took a while because the bus detours didn’t make any sense with half of the center city’s roads shut down. An elderly man told us he had been trying to get home for an hour and a half. My kid and I helped a lady with a walker get to a bus that would take her to her (profoundly detoured) regular bus, which she needed in order to get several miles away.
A hundred thousand people is a lot, but it was a tiny percentage of the population. Most of the people in the city were just normal, just trying to catch a bus, because they had a long way to go and because they couldn’t walk very well.
My kid told me later, “The woman I was waiting for the subway with this morning told me ‘I’m raced and paraded out. Everyone sit down.’”
God, I was glad I could go, though.