One of my favorite memories of my time living in Philadelphia was made while driving out of the city. It was Thanksgiving morning and my girlfriend and I were headed to New York to spend the holiday with my family. We tuned into local radio and picked up to a live broadcast from the Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Not the Thanksgiving Day Parade you’re thinking of though. Not the one sponsored by Macy’s, with the giant floats and balloons that is broadcast around the country. This broadcast was from the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day Parade, which the hosts were at pains to reiterate was the first Thanksgiving Day Parade in America. It might as well have been the only. Not once did the hosts deign to mention what other Thanksgiving Day Parades might have come later that would’ve made it important to take note of precedence.
I’ve told this story countless times because in a single anecdote it gives a glimpse of one civic trait that makes Philadelphia so alternatively fascinating and maddening. It is a place that proudly nurtures a certain kind of myopia. The way things are done outside of Philadelphia don’t count. Things that don’t exist in Philly may as well not exist overall. And when anything comes to the city for the first time, it needs to be reinvented or otherwise altered to reflect some kind of local character.
Most places suffer from this to a degree, but only in Philadelphia does it feel so deliberate and so frequently venture into the realm of self parody. Once, I and a team of co-workers entered a competition to design a bespoke bike parking rack to demarcate space around fire hydrants, to be christened the “Philly Rack.” We had fun with the contest (finishing as a finalist!), but was a proprietary bike rack design really what Philadelphia needed? Wouldn’t it be smarter to just buy something off the shelf?
Maybe, and yet—I think it’s also important to see Philadelphia’s independent streak (which in a certain light be better described as a massive inferiority complex) within its context. New York City is two hours to the north. Washington DC is two hours and change to the south. Philadelphia is sandwiched in between America’s financial and political capitals, with the eyes of the nation’s news media split between them. Many a Philadelphian will note that this is very unfair. The nation was founded in Philadelphia, and today it is the country’s seventh largest metro area. Placed anywhere else and it would be a regional center and one of the most visible stars in the American constellation. But caught between two even brighter stars, and it has to fight harder than most to be seen.
The way that Philly responds to this circumstance can come across as parochial in the extreme. But it’s a mechanism of defense that makes Philadelphia so much of itself—a self that is nobody else’s. Ask anyone from there and they won’t have it any other way.
Northern Star
The Twin Cities has almost the exact opposite problem. A five hour drive from the nearest major league city, it is the nation’s sixteenth largest metro. It lies near to the edge of the divide between the rainy east and the arid west, on the fading edge of the Midwest’s carpet of rural density. It typically takes extremely bad news for the MSP metro to get national attention because it is so peripheral, not because it is caught between central poles.
But there is not a lack of news! Earlier this summer, I read about how the University of Minnesota’s medical center has become a global leader in using ECMO to rescue people in cardiac arrest who would almost certainly die elsewhere. The same week, I read an article about how Minneapolis’ Behavioral Crisis Response teams are pioneering new models of emergency response, a great review of Bucheron (a new restaurant in my neighborhood), and a review of a Minnesota Orchestra concert that I had just attended, which featured the acclaimed pianist Yuja Wang as a guest.
Then, late in the summer it suddenly seemed that Minnesota was everywhere. Our governor Tim Walz was selected as a Vice Presidential nominee despite being completely off the radar of the national political press. The achievements of the state legislature in his term became an object of national attention. Our newspaper of record, one of the few remaining local newsrooms in the country to remain roughly at pre-internet strength, underwent a major rebrand. Among it all, it seemed as if the State Fair had a moment as well. And to top it all off, St. Paul chef Karyn Tomlinson was hailed by Food and Wine as the country’s Best “New” Chef while Minneapolis’ Oro by Nixta snagged one of twenty spots on Bon Appétit’s annual Best New Restaurants. The vibes, as they say, were off the charts.
And by contrast, this is how the Twin Cities seeks to thwart inattention or else salve the shame of irrelevancy; by winning lists. Minneapolis is the best big city for bicycling in the United States. Minneapolis and St. Paul have the second and third best urban park systems in America. MSP Airport is the #1 mega airport in the country. As a nationally-syndicated radio show broadcast live from St. Paul used to put it, Minnesota was “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."
I think something about this is important, although it’s challenging to put a finger on precisely why and how. Still, I try. I wrote once about the ineffable worth of city pride. I’ve mulled over Minnesota’s furtive attempts at re-branding. And I truly believe that self-worth and self-belief can be held collectively and that it functions in two-ways; it operates inward as motivation and outward as confidence. How people collectively perceive themselves as citizens of their city is manifested in the real world. When citizens act like their city matters, it does.
‘Pro-Social’ Work
It is easy to stretch this argument too far, good civic vibes cannot make up for really existing failures or rifts in a city’s economy, environment, or society. At best, they can provide the impetus to work together to solve our problems, out of a shared belief that our shared home is worth doing so for.
It’s at the interpersonal level, really, where it matters to act like your city matters. Do people pick up trash or do they litter? Do people donate to enthusiastically to local causes or do they share only among friends and family? Do people read and share local news, or national?
The Vox journalist and essayist Rachel Cohen recently mulled over these issues in a thought-provoking piece that argued for balance between a systemic perspective and personal action. Her piece unearths again a variation of the wisdom of “think globally, act locally.” But she makes a case that’s less lofty than that; volunteering can do good, but it can also make you feel good.
I would venture to suggest this synthesis; “think and act civically.” It’s at the municipal level where we both have the power to envision and to make a tangible difference ourselves. And we can do this as an everyday practice. Volunteering to donate blood, purchasing food to donate, or helping out at a food shelf are actions that exist within a broad spectrum of what I might term “pro-social” activities. But this spectrum also includes supporting your city’s sports teams, patronizing cultural institutions, subscribing to local media, or making full use of your city’s parks. These actions are not altruistic and nobody is booking their ticket to heaven with their orchestra season tickets. (You should still very much donate blood, I highly encourage it!) Nevertheless, they contribute to the civic fabric of the city. They are actions that grow in meaning because they are done in common with others, making good use of public resources and contributing to their upkeep. That’s I think how you tell what is and isn’t pro-social.
This is what it means to me to act like your city is the one that counts. It’s making it a daily habit to inhabit the place where you live. It’s making the most of what’s around you and celebrating these resources. This is what it means to me to build up your civic self-belief and self-worth into something with real gravity; something that binds you and your fellow citizens closer together and draws in new neighbors from afar. I think that’s worth doing.