My senior citizen art class (an outdoor sketching class) met yesterday on top of a building, the Cira Center. Five stories up on the West Bank of the Schuylkill River is a manicured park overlooking the river, and beyond it, Center City. Class attendance tends to be spotty for many good reasons, so we only had five or six people in class. We all spread out and sat on the ledges built into the landscape, looking out at Philadelphia’s compact skyline and sketching.

I am old enough (we are all old enough in that class) to remember when there was an informal agreement not to build skyscrapers any taller than “Billy Penn’s hat,” which is the broad-brimmed topper of a statue standing on top of the wedding cake of City Hall. I’m not sure when that agreement disappeared, but from the Cira Center I couldn’t even see City Hall. Instead, there are ranks of apartment buildings and corporate centers in between, hiding it completely. One of the buildings is my son-in-law’s workplace; I think he works on the 47th floor. Later that day, my son-in-law said he could see the stadium where the Phillies were having their first game of the official season, and where war planes did a flyover before the game started.

I sat down to try to capture one group of buildings, blue with distance against the blue sky. The instructor came over with her sketchbook and said, “Ooh, you are drawing the Finger,” and indeed the central part of that group has a long thin rectangular spire shooting upwards toward the sky, politely impolite and mostly useless, giving the sky the finger.

The teacher had chosen to draw a panorama of the River below us, through the glass fence, and it was a lovely sketch that made the area look much less desolate. I like her as an artist and as a person, and as my adult kid said later on the day, it helps to know that our instructors are paid only in program membership and are doing it basically as volunteers. She’s a solid teacher.

Many of those lovely buildings with all their glass, rising from the riverfront, are full of rental apartments. Indeed, some of the corporate centers are converting to apartments, too, because the COVID lockdown sent everyone home to work. My son-in-law was one of them, though he has now been brought back to his elegant building, which is owned by the large corporation he works for. I get the fuzzy feeling that the company needed to justify the building (which they are probably still paying off) and to justify the city taxes they pay for it, because it’s not as if the business itself slowed down during COVID.

The fading of street-level retail that afflicted the city in the last few years wasn’t just due to the lockdown and the empty office buildings, either. It was also because of the rise of online ordering, the escalating rents, and the dominance of chains. But businesses are all yanking back their employees nonetheless, so that they can work in those lovely glass buildings with blank street-level canyons between them and, theoretically, boost foot traffic in Center City.

There we were, on top of a building in a corporate park, between buildings, looking out at a sparkling river, and at the blank faces of all those buildings beyond, with the Finger extending up at a vivid blue sky dotted with thin specks of cloud, and it all looked remarkably anonymous to me.

After an hour, I took the elevator down from the cheerful office park on top to the grim canyon below, and went home to something I think of as more like the real Philadelphia.

I live in that Philadelphia, the one where you are jammed shoulder to shoulder against your neighbors in brick townhouses, and where you talk to people on the street. It was my neighbor Victoria’s birthday, she said. I saw my neighbor Charlie outside, too; he had on overalls with the Philly Phanatic printed all over them. He had invited people over to watch the season opener. He moved here from New York City, and is determined to embrace Philadelphia.

Anyway, the Phillies won their season opener. I am going to a day game next week, where I will sit shoulder-to-shoulder with people from all over the area, and cheer for my hometown team, which is mostly made up of people from somewhere else entirely who will be traded away to other hometown teams.