Is Center City back? Mostly. On good days. As our town has gone from tumbleweeds to bustling, I’ve been making a slow move from one home to another, walking the length of downtown almost daily for the last 10 months while eyeing a rolling state of change.

If I had just landed, Rip Van Winkle-like and ignorant of the pandemic pause, Center City today might not seem all that different than it was in the before times. Pedestrian density downtown often is at a level that would be the envy of many an American downtown or Main Street. Not far from my old home off South Street, an old-school tailor’s shop has turned over into a place that sells skateboards. Near my new home, in the shadow of the emerging towers of UCity Square, bubble tea shops and a dumpling “automat” are popping up. The urban fabric always evolves.

It’s a relief. Several nights this past spring, I found myself standing at Third and Market Streets just after dark suddenly realizing I was the only person in sight, like an extra on a Hollywood set after the cast and crew were done filming for the day. As recently as a month ago, I feared the change was permanent. But in the last few weeks, the city has suddenly rebounded. Chestnut around Ninth and 10th, 29th and Market, Third and Arch have looked to me in recent days like old times.

If this is how packed the streets are in late August — when a lot of Philadelphians are usually in Maine or at the Shore ― it bodes well for the vitality of the city.

Some changes, though, are part of trends that began years ago but were deepened by the pandemic, and perhaps they are here to stay. Home delivery has altered the city’s rhythm. FedEx and Amazon trucks clogging car and bike lanes have lengthened the river-to-river ride for drivers to a half hour on many days. Early in the pandemic, I discovered that stopping for takeout in Chinatown after a day of packing and painting meant competing with double-parked ThisDash and ThatGrub drivers by the dozens working to feed a hungry city.

These are healthy signs of a city adapting. And yet, probably not since the early 1990s has the life of the city seemed so fragile. We emerged from our pandemic stupor with the knowledge that many of us had stocked up on guns, developed an anger addiction, and shaped our expectations of others to an online world where everyone agrees with us.

Often, my hour-long trek from one end of the city to the other seems like a study in extremes. One night I was harassed near the Museum of the American Revolution by a man who followed me while shouting inches from my face and demanding money. A few weeks later I noticed a woman walking down Walnut Street handing out water bottles and food supplies to people camped out on sidewalks.

It may be trivial to mention, but there’s been a marked change in how the city dresses up — or if it does at all anymore. Pre-pandemic, there was an unwritten dress code that compelled me to think carefully about my appearance before running out for errands. If I knew I’d be walking in Center City, I could expect to run into professional acquaintances and would avoid being caught in a T-shirt and shorts. These past months I haven’t worried about dressing casually so much.

I don’t pine for the days when Center City was dominated by a small army of little old men in bow ties, as it still was when I moved here in 1989. (OK, I may pine for the spectacle of it just a bit.)

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But a certain level of dress, whether it’s Brooks Brothers or Yeezy, is evidence that you thought about the wider world, and how you want to be seen by it, before leaving home. Thinking beyond ourselves is in short supply post-pandemic. On more than one comical walk through Washington Square West recently, Pine Street seemed overrun by dog-walking 20-somethings so thoroughly zombied by their iPhones that they were veering into other people’s paths.

Maybe some friction — and, yes, worse than friction — is inevitable as we all wake from our long social slumber and learn to get along again. Center City has usually risen to a certain level of harmony despite being not a single neighborhood, but many — neighborhoods of all kinds pushing out the boundaries of Greater Center City.

If there’s a threat to that harmony, it’s the cost of living. Rents, taxes, and real estate prices keep rising, undeterred by the pandemic. Philadelphia has long benefited from its affordability, especially compared to its farthest borough, New York. Will that continue to be the case?

My regular footpath across the city these past months has had me tracking the building project of a middle-age couple I know who have decided to look beyond the adjoining multimillion-dollar townhomes they renovated just a few years ago — by annexing and renovating two more. Often my walk has brought me past Broad and Spruce Streets, where no two other structures throw each other into such sharp relief as the newly built Arthaus tower, whose condos are being marketed for between $1.6 million and $15 million, and Broad Street Ministry, where people without an address can receive mail or get a free meal. There they sit, social commentary side-by-side.

Successful neighborhoods, Jane Jacobs writes in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “are not discrete units. They are physical, social and economic continuities — small scale to be sure, but small scale in the sense that the lengths of fibers making up a rope are small scale.”

Philadelphia needs all of its fibers: The social-justice activists with their wheat paste posters and the meringue-coiffed matrons of Rittenhouse Square, the rich condo dwellers and fourth-generation Philadelphians living in trinities with kitchens in their basements.

And the man I‘ve often passed on Market Street near 22nd singing and dancing who seems to carry around a soundtrack of joy in his head. We need him. Lots of him.