A friend of mine is a grade school teacher. She had last week off for the mid-Winter break, and she didn’t have much planned. She texted me early last week and suggested a trip to Philadelphia for like a day or two. I hadn’t left the New York area since November 2019 — when I was in Montreal to cover that year’s M for Montreal — and I had been itching to go somewhere.
A few things helped to make the trip possible:
- COVID infection numbers have been on a rapid decline over the past month. If I were asked about hitting the road in January, I would have declined.
- We were only planning to be out of town for about a day or two. (I had to be back in New York because my mom and I had tickets to see Hasan Minhaj at Radio City Music Hall.)
- I know Center City Philly fairly well. I had been to Philly a handful of times over the past decade — mainly for business trips tied into a day job. But I was also in Philly once for The Roots Picnic.
Our first full day in town was very busy: We got up and had the hotel’s free breakfast. The first thing I wanted to see was John Coltrane‘s house in North Philly.
FYI: Some of these photos, I’m posting out of order. But that’s neither here nor there. Before closing out the daytime activities with seeing Wesley Wofford’s beautiful The Journey to Freedom, we had wanted to check out Love Park.
Strangely, all the time I had spent in Philly, I hadn’t seen Love Park — until last week.