Philly? That town is outta here!

Imagine, Pennsylvania, if some got their wish and the city they love to hate just vanished.

All incurable romantics and boxing fans, now hear this: There are no more Rocky steps to scale at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Philly funnyman-extraordinaire Bill Cosby? He said he could go anywhere, and he did - someplace other than Philadelphia.

Remember the 1950 Whiz Kids, National League baseball champs? Well, they never even took the field - much less sent a gentle Nebraskan named Richie Ashburn on to shine in the broadcasting booth.

Walk up to a deli and ask for a "steak... with." Guess what? The guy's going to eye you like an al-Qaeda sleeper agent - because there's no such thing as a cheesesteak.

And here's the price of a newspaper: It's 50 pence, ol' sod. That's right, the Founding Fathers never gathered here to break away from the King (George 3d, not Elvis).

From City Avenue to the Ohio and New York state lines - and even into South Jersey - at times Philadelphia's detractors seem to exceed the total census count.

Outcries and new grudges perpetually are honed over Harrisburg tax dollars - or bridge tolls paid by Jersey commuters - helping the city.

There's griping even about the tax dollars the city raises itself: At week's end, Harrisburg lawmakers had voted on a measure to trim the city wage tax, which, if law, would force the city to make up $800 million in lost funds.

An ongoing subject of disaffection is the Philadelphia School District. Don't forget a near-broke City Hall in the early 1990s, then the costly Kvaerner shipyard launch. And others.

Like when suburban residents demand a new zip code, rather than use one reserved for the city's Chestnut Hill neighborhood.

Or the memorable rant of a Cheltenham resident who, when a reapportionment was poised to expand a district into Montgomery County, proclaimed she wanted "no part, no connection whatsoever with the city, however remote that connection might be."

Sometimes it even goes against pocketbook interests: Why, other than out of a fear of Philly, would South Jersey residents spite themselves by refusing to purchase clean, low-cost water from the city?

It's no accident, political analysts say, that no Philadelphian has been elected governor in nearly a century. Even though it proved a losing strategy in the May Democratic primary, look at how the Bob Casey Jr. campaign tried to play Philadelphia antipathies like a cello.

The rationales for Philly bashing are well-known and as shopworn as year-old sneaks. So it's time to stop wishing.

Let anyone who's ever thought the city and its problems should just go away consider the following fantastic scenario. Imagine how the region and the state would look and function if the city didn't exist.

To get started, trade shoes with It's a Wonderful Life's George Bailey. Picture him on the Bedford Falls bridge on Christmas Eve. He's suicidal, and mumbling the fateful wish that he'd never been born.

Enter guardian angel Clarence Oddbody. Except this time, he grants the wish of every Philadelphia detractor.

Poof! The city's gone - all 135 square miles of Billy Penn's Greene Countrie Towne, its 1,700 acres of Fairmount Park greenery, its every spire and skyscraper and brick rowhouse, every historic document, artifact and shrine central to a nation's founding.

All gone: a buffeted-but-still-chugging economic engine; the commercial, civic and cultural birthplace of a metro area of 5.1 million people; the place where W.C. Fields would rather be - still, despite all its woes; a city where, each weekend, an estimated 517,465 souls attend religious services to pray for a better world (including, but not limited to, the City of Brotherly Love).

Won't miss it a bit? Well, take one last journey down highways of the imagination - roads that, as of this moment, never were.

Start at the old cracked bell near where Independence Hall would have stood. Few places in America can boast more "firsts," among them:

Too bad none of it ever happened. Washington's army sure could have used the phenomenal purse of $50,000 Philadelphia financier Robert Morris raised going house to house one morning.

And what of modern visitors to these cobblestone streets? Cross off the five million annual visitors to the historic area. Forget their estimated annual overnight expenditures of $2.6 billion, and the 60,000 jobs they help create in the hospitality industry.

If the tourism center doesn't exist, you can pull down the blinds on many attractions in the suburbs and beyond. While there are few firm figures, it's the spillover of Philadelphia visitors that boosts tourism in neighboring communities - whether it's at Amish country eateries, or Bucks County bed-and-breakfasts.

On with the tour... down Market Street to City Hall. No Mummers strutting for two centuries. No adoring fans cheering championship athletic teams.

Of course, also gone would be generations of City Hall politicians who earned Philadelphia its notorious mention in journalist Lincoln Steffens' 1904 book, The Shame of the Cities. Steffens viewed the city as "corrupt and contented... the purest American community of all, and the most hopeless."

They may want for great - even honest - leaders at times, but there would have been 1.5 million people in the city. That's some 12 percent of the state's population, accounting for roughly three congressional seats and millions of dollars in tax revenues and buying power.

Harrisburg coffers are reeling, of course. Just the lost annual income taxes from employees of hospitals and universities drain more than $130 million.

Forgoing the state tax dollars paid by Philadelphians, by some estimates, leaves Harrisburg nearly $10 short for every $100 it needs to maintain state services.

A Pennsylvania governor without Philadelphia has trouble paying for state troopers or maintaining highways. Other scenarios: no one to protect wildlife and the environment; no senior programs; no helping families pay for college.

To be sure, Philadelphia gets state tax money back, nearly $1 billion for schools, $500 million for roads and transit and so on. But the point is, it's not the one-way flow that the city's critics pretend.

And an honest balancing of the fiscal scales must include the city's size and importance as a commercial, civic and cultural keystone to the entire state.

On most weekdays, the city-that-isn't-there-anymore flexes its economic muscle in hundreds of ways. It's no more evident than on the bustling train concourses near City Hall - the old hubs of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads.

Each day, SEPTA estimates, tens of thousands of commuters travel to downtown jobs from the counties, with another 15,000 from South Jersey on the PATCO High-Speed Line. Meanwhile, the interstate highways funnel 300,000 vehicles into Center City daily, many of their occupants headed to jobs downtown.

All gone, and gone with them, more than 600,000 jobs in the private and public sectors - many held by suburban and South Jersey residents. Don't look, either, for gleaming office towers housing the commercial, legal and financial services used by suburban businesses.

There's no easy way to quantify the impact of that on communities outside Philadelphia. It's far more than just jobs lost. What, for instance, would real estate values be like in Radnor if it enjoyed none of the amenities of being so close to a big city?

But, hey, at least with no jobs - and thousands fewer business clients - many folks living beyond City Avenue won't miss strolling down Broad Street to the Kimmel Center, or hopping the Phlash bus to the Art Museum and other cultural attractions that never were.

The magic of Muti, Sawallisch and Eschenbach, the cachet of Cezanne, the allure of exotic creatures at the Philadelphia Zoo - those and so many other attractions generated more than 3.5 million in attendance annually.

Not Rocky, of course. Not a Grace Kelly gem. Nor The Sixth Sense, Philadelphia, Trading Places, Blow Out or The Philadelphia Story - all of which have Philly connections. They might check out Man in Black (without son-of-the-city Will Smith - the Fresh Prince from, er,... nowhere).

Or go to a music club. (OK, OK, no Teddy Pendergrass, Stan Getz or Billie Holiday; no Patti LaBelle; no high C's from opera great Marian Anderson.)

They couldn't even listen to much oldies radio without Fabian, Bobby Rydell and Frankie Avalon. Dick Clark still might have birthed American Bandstand - in the suburbs. But there would have been no twistin' and shoutin' since Chubby Checker wouldn't have grown up in Philadelphia, gotten his nickname, or his big break here.

Curl up with a mystery, perhaps. Fine, as long as it's not one of Poe's. During his six years in the city, Edgar Allan Poe published The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

OK, so you're feeling faint at the devastation wrought by Philadelphia's disappearance. Too bad all the cutting-edge medical institutions the city boasted aren't around to treat you.

Had they existed, they would have produced generations of medical advances, including the Philadelphia chromosome that revolutionized cancer research by linking genetic abnormalities and cancer.

In the Civil War, without West Philadelphia's sprawling wards of 3,214 beds, countless lives would not have been saved there.

And without homegrown modern medical treatments, dozens of heart, kidney, lung, liver and pancreas recipients never could have become Team Philadelphia and competed at the 1994 Transplant Games in Atlanta.

At the city's universities, more than 80,000 students would have been bent over books. But for...

Now, the city's detractors might say the scales are balanced by all the problems that would disappear with the metropolis. For instance, who would miss Philadelphia's rogues and ruffians?

Let the Willie Suttons of the world burrow out of some other prison. Let crooked City Council members in some other town shake down a fake sheikh in a faint echo of the late-1970s Abscam caper. Let Pittsburgh be the state's crime capital.

Maybe another Rev. Leon Sullivan would have lifted the spirits of black South Africans with an inspired strategy to apply international economic pressure for social change.

Someone might have gotten around to doing what the Pennsylvania Railroad did - inventing "the management techniques for running a large, modern corporation."

Or another retailer might have launched the department store ahead of John Wanamaker. Some suburb - West Chester? Cinnaminson? - could have led the country in manufacturing in the late 1800s. Sure thing.

Then again, it may be time for a reality check. As an influential civic leader once said of the Philadelphia suburbs, the reason so many people want to live there - as opposed to any number of pleasant but more remote places - is precisely because they're next to Philadelphia, with its cultural amenities, its sports teams, its services, its jobs.

Why is it necessary to offer a reminder of the city's worth, to play a fantastical game of "what if" when it comes to Philadelphia?

At one time in America, farms were the heart that made the nation pulsate. At one time, there were no great metropolitan areas.

Now there are. Fields of concrete hold their own bounty for the regions that cities anchor. This country could not be as strong as it is without its cities.

Yet, with cities - any great cities - come problems along with the perks. Those problems are as deep as the solutions are costly.

Giving Philadelphia more state dollars is seen by many outside the city as futile spending. Those piling on are Harrisburg lawmakers who gleefully, irresponsibly, stoke animosity toward Philadelphia when it suits their political needs.

To be sure, the Philly political-patronage game of "now it's our turn to get some of the pie" must end.

But as this flight of fantasy has shown, the state's health is tied to Philadelphia's health. All of Pennsylvania benefits from Philadelphia's presence. The state needs its fields of concrete, its fields of crops and its crop of suburbs to work with one another, not against one another.

Consider this, then: If an ailing Philadelphia just might be missed, imagine how much more it might contribute to the region, to Pennsylvania, if the city grappled successfully with its contemporary demons. And if it had the benefit of more goodwill and help.

The Rocky steps are still there. And triumph still awaits anyone willing to get up early, shrug off the naysayers, and work up a good sweat doing what needs to be done.

Dear Editor:

No one is arguing that Philadelphia used to be a great city.

However, 50 years of socialist/democratic rule have destroyed the city. It is ironic that you brag that that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were penned here but never mention that the "rulers" in today's city hall are far worse than the tyrants the Founding Fathers rebelled against (don't believe me? - the Boston Tea party was over a 3% tax on tea and Lexington/Concord was about the Colonists keeping their guns).

Philadelphia may still yet vanish. People have voted with their feet and the city has lost half of its population in the last 50 years. Most people who move to the area do not even consider living in the city (as Rocky Balboa might say, fuhgedaboudit, Paulie) Your grandchildren may yet ask what ever happened to the city of Brotherly Love. The correct response will be it went the way of the all high tax, repressive, corrupt and power hungry fiefdoms; like the Soviet Union it simply imploded.

Regards,

2banana

Question: If Philly is so good why did the Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. (The Inquirer/Daily News) move most of its operations to the suburbs?

I saw a report of few years back that few of the state's major industrial facilities could be found in the city limits. If memory serves, the now-gone PNI presses was the only one. A bit of irony.

This was before Kvaerner shipyard but since the Norweigens were basically bribed to come to the state, I don't know that I'd count that as an example of economic advancement.

If Philadelphia were to secede (or be expelled) from the state, Pennsylvania would be better off.

Redeeming qualities of the town.....Thatcher Longstreth, Tastykakes, Scrapple, 9th & Christian Markets, Fairmount Park, Irv Homer, Amaroso's rolls, Bookbinders, and Moshulu(which is now in California). I left the city long ago, as did all of my family members, and relatives. They had been anchored to the town for about 200 years. Nobody regrets leaving when the totality is considered. It is not the same town it once was, and the type of critter/vermin who call the shots there are no better than those who run Zimbabwe.

2d Banana writes: "No one is arguing that Philadelphia used to be a great city"

Blackdo writes:

Thatcher Longstreth, is a RINO. Tastykakes,is a big left, wing liberal supporter. Irv Homer, is a 2d rate radio left-wing talk show blabbermouth. Bookbinders, is (was) the most over-rated restaurant in the history of the world.

Take it from an old-time baggy-pants police reporter. Philadelphia was corrupt, is corrupt and will always be corrupt—at least in our life-time.

It was so bad in the'30s.40s, and early 50s, that trains stopping in "Filthydelphia" were not allowed to take-on drinking water. The "Schuylkill Punch" was deemed unfit to drink by the feds. At the the water has improved if you like the tase of clorox.

The corrupt Republican machine was overthrown by the Democratic liberals Joe Clark (mayor) and Richardson Dilworth. Both of these liberals were really squeaky clean. But Bill Green Sr., was the Democratic chief. He controlled the city. He offered every single Republican ward leader and every committeman the opportunity to keep their political jobs and benefits if they would simply change their registration. Every one ( somewhere around 1,200) did. And nothing else changed. Actually the city has gotten even worse..

When it comes to vote fraud, Philadelphia is tops. The dead always come back to vote.

1. Much of the exodus out of Philly consists of liberal professionals who settle in Montgomery and Bucks and the blue collar union goons who settle in South Jersey. As a result, the Philly suburbs have become more liberal in recent times.

2. Despite being a New Yorker more than anything else, I have relatives in metro Philly (Chester County, the only metro county that went for Bush!) and have been to the city many times since I was a kid. Philadelphia reminds me of a bigger version of my father's hometown of Newark, albeit with more historical cites. A largely poor black population (as in Newark, much of the black middle class has fled), a dwindling corporate tax base, a few token (and shrinking) "white ethnic" enclaves filled with old folks and a filthy, decaying infrastructure which, in many cases, rivals Dresden after the war.

The Dems kept promoting Rendell of "Philadelphia's Giuliani." He ain't even Abe Beame.

Actually I don't know of any big cities that are not corrupt. All municipalities should be kept to under 30,000 in population, have their own Mayors, or commissioners or councilmen or whatever along with independent zoning boards and school boards along with whatever else is deemed necessary.

But you are right. I guess I'd rather say I am from Philly than from Cleveland. It probably isn.t any better though.

Yep, and that's a clue about Philly. People don't dislike Philly -- they dislike many of the people currently in control of Philly. The productive working and middle classes have been moving out for a while, leaving Philly to the welfare class

Bingo ..

I was born and raised in Philly and I loved every moment of it .. was Proud to call myself a Phily Girl

But I left and didn't look back ..

WHY ???

The taxes are too high

The Insurance was to high

The crime rate is too high

The neighborhoods are literally falling apart

The Unions control if not all .. they do control most of Philly ..

The schools suck which is why many Non-Catholic in Philly send their kids to Catholic School

Even though the trashman work 28 hours a days (according to the payroll) I was lucky if I got my trash picked up and that is not counting when the go on strike .. then you can just fuhgedaboudit

Should it snow .. fuhgedaboudit also .. you are outta luck

I could go on ...

Philly use to be a wonderful place to live .. but now most of it is just a pit

I was born in Philly. Live in South Jersey now.

Philly...is a dump. No, wait...it's a Soviet-style, totally corrupt, racially nightmarish dump.

Ed "The Savior" Rendell STILL plays with himself (and WILL NOT be elected governor of Pennsylvania).

The Phillies suck...so do the Eagles, Sixers, and Flyers. The Vet is a toilet too (big surprise, huh?).

The only people who haven't fled by now are those who must stay because they have city jobs. I drink beer with a guy who's a Philadelphia fireman.

Get this -- he pays $4500 A YEAR to insure his car. That alone would induce me to blow my brains out.

I say we dig a moat around the entire city - then bulldoze the thing in.

No great loss to the planet Earth.

We moved back to the Philadelphia area just this year, after a job-related exile in the suburbs elsewhere. We looked around in the 'burbs and the city, and moved back into the city proper, where I'm just happy as a clam. We're on a lovely quiet tree-lined street, with great neighbors and lots of kids.

I first lived here about 10 years ago, and from what I've seen things have really picked up. The big real estate story isn't the people moving out to the suburbs, it's the folks selling their homes on Montgomery/Bucks county to move back into Center City. Parts of the city are plenty dumpy- but that's the story in every city or town in the Northeast I've seen (NYC? Scranton? Providence? Syracuse?). The city will never have as many people as it used to, 'cause it's covered in high-density rowhouse housing that people don't want so much these days, but the city isn't vanishing anytime soon- there's just too much to keep people here.

And no one's mentioned how good the hoagies are

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