Burning Down the House

I cannot seem to get my groove on to write anything interesting lately, so it is a bit ironic to be compared to Edgar Allan Poe. I am sure he never had writer's block, but then again, by the time Poe was my age, he was already dead*. So his problems were, in the main, greater than mine.

Since I cannot put two words together on my recent trip to Quebec, and since my delight over the egg dripping off Patrick Fitzgerald's face delivered recently by Conrad Black and the United States Supreme Court cannot (yet) be put into any sort of efficacious post of its own, I am going to have to try something else to shake off the rust and get the brain working again.

With that, please indulge me as I recount a story about - more or less - the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia. Back in August 1988, on part of my 8,250-kilometer journey** back to Halifax from California, I found myself in Philadelphia. Accompanying me on this part of the trip was my friend Frank T. from Toronto, who was also a fellow student at Dalhousie University. We spotted on a map - apparently, not a very detailed one - a small coloured dot denoting the location of the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site.

This was the first time either of us had been to Philadelphia. We had managed to find Broad Street and we were heading south toward places like City Hall, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. By the look of the map, all we had to do to find the E.A.P. National Historic Site was make a left turn and proceed east a couple of blocks. It seemed very simple.

Broad Street itself was interesting. Apparently parking was (and probably still is) a little difficult, so cars were parked parallel along both sides of the street, and in the bidirectional left turn lane in the centre of the street as well. This lane is more appropriately known as the Lane of Death, so perhaps the many parked cars using it made it safer. Don't know.

At any rate - I am going by memory here, and this was 22 years ago - we continued south until we figured we were more or less in the right place, and that once we turned left, we would either see the Poe place or we would see signs indicating how to proceed. So I turned left off Broad Street onto a street running east-west.

We had gone only about 100 feet on this side street when we knew something was terribly wrong.

The buildings on either side of the street were either boarded up, burned out and gutted, or torn down. There were vacant lots filled with trash and broken glass. There were automobiles on either side of the street that were not in working condition. By that I mean that some were stripped, some were up on blocks, some were burned, and at least one was on its roof. There were tough-looking guys wearing coloured bandanas, I assume the reason for which was to denote membership in one gang or another. On the next block, there were people walking in full Arab garb - the sort of long white thawbs one might see in Saudi Arabia, with head coverings. I really don't know what they were doing there, as I always thought ex-pat Saudis were well off and didn't have to hang out in neighbourhoods like this, but perhaps like us, they too wanted to visit the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site. One or two more blocks to the east, our street dead-ended on a north-south street and we turned right. As we did so, the doors on a church opposite the intersection were thrown open and a casket was brought out, followed by many mourners.

That did it. To hell with the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site. It was nowhere to be found, we had no exact address, there were no signs pointing the way. There was only urban blight and the feeling that at any minute, my out-of-country 1983 Pontiac Acadian (the equivalent of a Chevette) was going to attract the attention of the wrong person and he would start firing a gun at us. I believe after turning the corner, I said to Frank something along the lines of, "Let's get the !/$%^&* out of here!" He agreed, and I sped up to get to the next street onto which I could turn right, and from where we could make our way back to the relative safety of Broad Street. As I did so, I turned the radio on and blaring out the speakers was the song by the Talking Heads that had been a hit a few years earlier: Burning Down the House. After a block or so, I mentioned to Frank that "Burning Down the House may not be the best song to be playing in Philadelphia," referring to both the bad neighbourhood we were in and the MOVE house fire-bombing in 1985. Only a few minutes later, we were back on Broad Street, heading toward City Hall again, with the song still playing.

Since then, I cannot think of Edgar Allan Poe or listen to Burning Down the House without thinking of that day in Philadelphia, twenty-two years ago.



Good times, good times.

* This is illogical, but you know what I mean.

** I zigzagged a lot. If you proceed directly the distance is a lot less.