Meet me at the eagle, I hope

I don’t remember the first time I saw the Christmas light show in the Center City Macy’s. I remember the fourth or fifth time, when I was old enough to sit quietly on the floor because the worst ear infection I ever had arose right in the middle of it. I squeezed my head with my hands on either side, focusing on the lights’ colorful glow, while my father ran out past the giant bronze eagle and over to the nearest CVS.

He probably did not call it CVS; he probably called it whatever it was when he was born, much like he always referred to Macy’s as the Wanamaker’s. My dad was resistant to those kinds of changes in a way I never fully understood.

Whenever we drove into the city, he would point out landmarks in his family’s shared memory. Many of them, surprisingly, are still there. Roxborough High School, for instance, where we think my great-grandmother was in the first graduating class in 1927. And Daisy Field, since renamed David Montgomery Field, where my ungovernable grandfather organized a rock concert for troubled teens that got so big that (allegedly) the cops couldn’t shut it down.

Some of the places, for all intents and purposes, are now gone. The PSFS building where my grandparents first met — in an elevator he operated — is now a hotel, though the iconic red letters still glow in the skyline.

I’ve come to recognize my dad’s sentiment about change in Philadelphia, but it took a long time — until now, really — for me to feel it. After all, the things I loved most about the city, I was sure, would last forever. Like Shiao Lan Kung, where the owner taught me as a toddler how to use chopsticks, and gave me little red envelopes with a dollar in them during Lunar New Year. Or the Melrose Diner, where my dad went for French toast in the 1980s when he worked nights at Methodist Hospital, and which I instantly loved when he later took me. Or — of course — the Macy’s, where Julie Andrews narrated a technicolor Christmas fairy tale, and the organ swelled, and the eagle peaked over the close-packed crowd.

Shiao Lan Kung closed early last year after more than three decades, and the Melrose, after 88 years, was razed to build apartments. And when I read last week that the Macy’s in Center City would shutter, I felt my chest cave in a little.

I know things have to change. Philadelphia is always changing. More than anything, I am grateful for the memories. I am grateful to have had such a warm and beautiful place to be with my family in the glow of about 100,000 little lights.

But a part of me always believed that if I ever got truly lost — the kind of lost where you don’t remember who you are — I would somehow get to the eagle, and someone I loved would know to find me there.

It was always a silly thing to believe. But it comforted me to think that a landmark that had served as a beacon, for my family and many others for over a hundred years, would be there for a hundred more.

I hope Market East — and all of the city — can thrive again, the way my dad reverently talks about it thriving when he was young. I hope the PSFS sign never comes down.

Whether the eagle stays in the building or is taken somewhere else, I hope it remains in a place where people can find it, where it can continue to serve as a kind of lighthouse. I hope I can always meet my father there, and that we can talk together fondly about all the ways Philly has changed.

Gina Vitale is a journalist and writer who grew up in Greater Philadelphia.