South Philly Safe for Post-College Kid

JHS
Mon, 02 May 2011 10:35:29 +0000

The neighborhood is relatively safe if you use common sense, and if your comparison point for “relatively” is a really bad neighborhood. If your comparison point is Scarsdale, it will relatively look like a heart attack. (Do you know the Bronx? It’s not unlike Arthur Avenue, but with hipsters.)

That neighborhood is one of the places in Philadelphia where hip, creative, striving 20-somethings with limited income live – people just like your daughter. It’s cheap because the housing isn’t particularly nice, houses/apartments tend to be small, and parking is a constant problem, and because it’s in a general area that can be very patchy in terms of ethnicity and socioeconomic status, which translates into a certain amount of petty crime. If my kids were living in Philadelphia, they would be living in that neighborhood or one of the other neighborhoods like it; when I was a 20-something moving to Philadelphia, with a wife who was in grad school, we lived in a neighborhood like it, too.

A couple of years ago, a kid who had just graduated from college and moved here to be a Teaching Fellow in a public high school was stabbed and killed in a mugging gone wrong not far from there. But . . . that was huge news. The 20-something college-grad population down there does NOT get killed or maimed on a regular basis. They get their bikes stolen; sometimes their wallets. The serious violence, when it happens, really doesn’t have anything to do with them if they aren’t dabbling in the drug business on the side. Fifteen-twenty years ago, one of the risks you might have faced down there would have been getting caught in the crossfire of a Mob war, but that hasn’t been happening much recently.

There are some great aspects to the neighborhood. It has great, cheap Italian restaurants, and increasingly Vietnamese and Mexican restaurants, too. It is walking distance from the Italian Market, the night life along South Street, and the cultural attractions on Broad. You can visit the famous corner where Pat’s and Geno’s face off over who has the best awful cheesesteaks, and you can be amazed at the wall of tribute to Danny Faulkner (the police officer killed by Mumia Abu Jamal.) There are people who just moved there and people who have never lived anywhere else.