Philly has 66 wards. Plus New York City.
Somewhere along the way, people started talking about New York City dwarfing Philadelphia. That's silly.
For outsiders, Philadelphia is a lot harder to make your own. For everyone, common discourse suggests its harder still to choose the Quaker City over its younger brother to the north. The 67th ward is a celebration of everyone who has done just that and it's time New York recognizes its place in history.
Where would we be without Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, fake Coach bags and the setting of every romantic comedy you didn't want to see? Big media certainly couldn't have become so insular and parroting without New York's echo chamber. How could the social banalities, celebrity obsession and cultural excess from the past half century crept into the American mainstream without New York? How could corporate greed reach a fever pitch so quickly if Philadelphia hadn't ceded its status as financial capital?
In the 1970s and 1980s, the 67th ward had a great thing going. It was gritty, grimy, Bohemian and re-envisioning what a city should be. It was so good that the world came to its doorstep and took away everything special, original and authentic. Anything distinctive that remained was promptly robbed by unheard of gentrification, rehashed TV and movies, much copy-catted stand up comedy and other soul-sucking attention.
New York's self-image is stuck obsessively in a time long since commercialized, reproduced and sold on magnets, in snow-globes and other Made in China nick knacks. So, Philadelphia is realer now. It's blossoming and flourishing in a way that New York once was.
So, we wanted to give New York a blueprint back to the best of what it once was, much of which is in Philadelphia now and lots more to boot. We wanted to remind everyone that Philadelphia has every reason to make folks forget about the 67th ward.