Philly

I just got back from a trip to Philly, coming out of Pittsburgh, where the urban environment honestly punches way above its weight. Pittsburgh’s got this rough charm, like a city that didn’t expect to be pretty but accidentally pulled it off. Tight streets, weird hills, neighborhoods stacked like sediment. It works. But Philly? Philly’s a whole different machine. The scale is bigger, the rhythm faster, the urban composition more intentional. It’s like someone took all the layers of American city-building, colonial grids, industrial sprawl, modernist entropy—and just let them fight it out in public view. And somehow, it works. Walking around, I clocked this constant negotiation between order and chaos, history and hustle. The city doesn’t just house life. Structures how you move, how you see, how you show up. And I felt that—viscerally, bodily. Philly’s not just urban. It’s architectural attitude.

Despite its size, Philly manages to stay remarkably human-scaled. The city doesn’t overwhelm you with oversized avenues or sterile plazas, it brings things in close. Narrow streets force intimacy. Sidewalk-fronting cafés, bars, bodegas, and barbershops pull life out of buildings and into public space. You’re always proximate to something, someone smoking on a stoop, someone yelling into a phone, someone selling you a bagel through a takeout window barely wider than your forearm. That proximity matters. It makes the city feel alive, lived-in, like it’s designed for people instead of cars or commerce. The residential fabric follows suit: dense blocks of townhomes, walk-up apartments, and converted lofts that create rhythm and continuity without feeling like copy-paste development. It’s not just livable—it’s comfortable in a way that invites you to linger.

The feeling is honestly more international than most American cities allow. There’s a density and friction to Philly that reminded me of parts of Berlin or Lisbon, cities where transit is baked into daily life and where public space actually gets used. SEPTA may not be glamorous, but it works. You can cross huge swaths of the city without touching a steering wheel. At the same time, Philly’s not pretending to be cute. It’s still Philly. I got yelled at multiple times—once for walking too slow, once for walking too fast, and once for standing still in the “wrong” part of the sidewalk. That edge, that slightly aggressive civic personality? It’s part of the charm. This isn’t a museum city. It’s not curated. It’s alive, opinionated, and occasionally ready to bark at you in a hoagie-fueled haze.

Copyright © 2025 Ryan Badertscher. All rights reserved.