Scene on the Road

As if I actually needed to be reminded, you really CAN'T plan for serendipity. Knowing this would be my first road trip, I decided it should begin from the front of the newspaper building. So (cheating just a little bit) I went scouting on North Broad Street the other day, and right across the street found Travis and Robert gutting the insides of an old railroad car that in an afterlife had become the Steak and Bagel Train. It was one of the only two eateries in the neighborhood back when I was hired at the Inquirer (Roy Rogers was the other). Both places closed years ago. They were hesitant to let me return to photograph them without permission of owner Ibrahim Aly, who reached by cell phone, told me he plans for his Ray's Philly Cheese Steak Train to open in the fall. He also told Travis and Robert it would be okay. So I arranged to come back today. Well, turns out Thursday is their day off.





I don't usually like to take photos of signs.



So I kept walking north on Route 611, Broad Street, ending up at the corner of Spring Garden, which is also home to two celebrated murals: Meg Saligman's "Common Threads" (1998) and the newer "All Join Hands: The Visions of Peace Project" by Donald Gensler (2006) from the city's equally celebrated Mural Arts Program.

The peace mural, which is on the side of Benjamin Franklin High School, faces a big parking lot and seeing it got me thinking - again - how I don't really like to take photos of signs (or murals) but in this case I was intrigued by all the cars squeezed into the small space, wondering how many might be commuters who drive into the city every day on the same road I'm about to travel. No matter how remote the road, no matter how exotic the locale, what a road tripper sees as a brand new experience is always old hat for somebody else who has to drive it every day. Meanwhile, I'm looking at the mural and the haphazardly parked cars thinking it could be a photo if somebody walked through them. But that can't happen because the owners are presumably all at work. Then Bruce Dorpalen suddenly appears in my viewfinder (under mural's left eye).

He lives in West Philadelphia and rides his bike to work at the North Broad Street branch of the national non-profit ACORN Housing Corporation. So what's he doing in the parking lot? Picking up his wife's car because she ended up at the emergency room at Hahnemann University Hospital (she's okay). This is a long way to circle back to serendipity, but Keelin Barry, Bruce's wife, drove in be a chaperone on their daughter Galen's 9th grade class trip to Baltimore this morning. While waiting to leave from the Julia R. Masterman School, she started (looking in direction of traffic first) to cross the street to grab a cup of coffee when she was struck by a bicyclist -- pedaling the wrong way -- as she stepped off the curb. She hit her head and another parent called 911. It turned out she did NOT have a concussion and was okay, so Galen got on the bus and left with the rest of her classmates. Mom and Dad went home. And I got back into my car and continued heading north....