Wrong track, right city: How my pit stop in Philly turned into a second chance

I was heading South to start a life I wasn’t sure I wanted amid a past I hadn’t fully reckoned with.

It was January 2002. I was 24, and felt as tattered as the Philly streets I glimpsed from the windows of my Amtrak train.

At the time I was bartending back in Brooklyn at a neighborhood spot in the shadows of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Jimmy ran the bar. Jimmy was retired NYPD, wore a gray pompadour and a miniature gold badge that dangled in his open shirt collar. He kept a club tucked under the taps, and stranded me — and my scribbled bar napkin poetry — to slow shifts, until he heard I had brandished the weapon one night, in a desperate, fumbling attempt to fend off a belligerent customer. (I wasn’t actually going to use it. I was scared for my actual being.)

“Good job, Bud,” Jimmy beamed the next morning, slapping my shoulder.

Despite my brightening career prospects in the service industry, I had made up my mind to leave my hometown.

Grief can become an excuse, but 20 years ago it had knocked me enough off course that I was simply trying to outrun it. My oldest brother had recently died suddenly. He’d been trying to outrun his struggle for years. Strangers found him lying against a fence at a bus stop. Not long after, the Sept. 11 attacks led to a drumbeat of funerals for friends and neighbors and classmates, everyone in my world adjusting themselves in their own ways to loss. This might have made another person feel less alone in their grief. For some reason, I only felt more isolated. More lost.

So I rode the rails — or at least my comfortably cushioned bar car seat — to the City of Brotherly Love. It was meant to be a pit stop. A few hours. A few beers. I was meeting my college girlfriend, who had been kindly enduring a long-distance relationship with me as I struggled to find my footing. The plan was we’d drive to D.C, where I’d crash with her until we eventually found a place of our own.

I ascended the stairs at 30th Street Station, gazing up into its vast, gold ceiling, the clickety-clack, ticker-tape whirl of the old Amtrak flipboard signifying arrivals and departures. The truth was, I didn’t know if I was coming or going. Or where I was meant to be heading.

Instead, I beat it to the nearest bar, heading out the station’s gilded doors toward a footbridge, and across the river. The skyline was so different then — a lot less towering glass. The riverbank was overgrown and untouched. It wasn’t a pretty view, really. But it was honest. And it felt familiar.

There was a plaque on the bridge. In December 1999, around the same time I was burying my brother, the city had illuminated the river bridge in shining light to usher in the new millennium. A ceremony, it said, overseen by then-Mayor Ed Rendell.

The sign struck me, well, as a sign. While I had been knocked to my knees 90 miles north, in this bruised and alluring city, the fine citizens of Philadelphia and their mayor were lighting the heavens luminous. It was starting to feel like a place to run to. A place to be broken.

I sidled up to a stool at Roosevelt’s, a dive on the outskirts of Rittenhouse Square, where the bartender probably had occasion to reach for a club of his own. The place sat on a block by the river that seemed a little more beat up than ones around it. There was a Sunoco gas station and a weary, old neon WPEN radio sign. Compared to surrounding streets of sunlit brownstones, the streetscape seemed faded. Like it was the 1970s on one block. Like it was set apart. To me, it felt like an entranceway to a city. An outpost to tentatively step into a new life.

I went to the pay phone — yes, pay phone! — and dialed the number on a “For Rent” sign hanging from a bleak building I spotted from the bar window, with chipped paint and a cracked-glass door and a dull foyer light that called to mind the atmosphere of a police interrogation room.

Soon, Eddie, the landlord, strolled into the bar, and ordered a round.

“See it yourself,” Eddie said, plopping down the key.

The railings wobbled, the hallways were bleak, and the kitchen floors were so uneven the refrigerator door hung open. My neighbor would be the gas station. I could see the old radio sign from my window. The “P” in WPEN. It was half-lit.

Eddie unfolded a lease onto the puddled bar and ordered up more beers — and I settled into my crooked hovel on the outskirts. (My girlfriend rightfully said goodbye and went to build a beautiful life.)

The city was so different then. A lot less gleam. It was an old city becoming a new one. A fading map of so many now-vanished corner bars and bookshops, diners and record stores that I set out to explore — where I didn’t know a soul but that made me feel less alone. Less lost.

When I wasn’t taking in my new town, I traded in those bar napkins for an old Royal typewriter that I set up on a place mat on my table and banged away at it relentlessly — hey, neither the gas station or the mice complained — even if the prose was as uneven as my floor.

Soon, I landed newspaper jobs that let me write about the wonderfully weird and colorful characters I was meeting in Philadelphia, who reminded me in so many ways of the people I knew and loved back home, but left before I could figure out how to write about it.

Eventually, I got a job at this newspaper, where it probably wasn’t a coincidence that I often sought stories about Philadelphians grappling with their own devastating loss and grief. By telling their stories, I liked to think I was providing the people I wrote about some small bit of closure. But I know now I was seeking the same thing myself. And soon, I told my own.

And after 20 years, whenever my wife and I walk our 2-year-old son and aging pup through my first Philly neighborhood, we’ll talk about all the things that have changed there since I blew into town: the shiny condos and shimmering high-rises that line the fading streetscape I originally encountered, the glorious Schuylkill River Park that sprouted along the once-weedy waterfront, the new taco joint that replaced Roosevelt’s, where Fast Eddie the landlord long-ago boozed me into taking a hovel off his hands.

I’ve changed. The city has, too. For both of us, there have been promise and triumphs, sorrow and setbacks. That’s how it goes, right? You can’t outrun grief. You can’t take a train south to escape to a new life — the old life comes with you. The best you can hope is to find a place that gives you space to fight it out and to grow, and that grows along with you. If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a place that finds you when you didn’t know you were looking, and a bridge that lights your way ahead.

My Philadelphia Story is a column about what it means to live in and love the Philadelphia region. From distinct customs to neighborhood rivalries to iconic landmarks saturated with personal memories, it’s a column about the city we love, and the city that loves us back — in its own distinctly Philly way.