DGROFF.NET

One treat of living in my ward of the Bella Vista section is that our polling place is in the Fleisher Art Memorial, part of which was once a Romanesque church. November elections occur just after the Dia de los Muertos festivities, so the back of the chapel where polling takes place is decorated with figures and altar decor from that ritual celebration. 

Today the looming characters lent an especially surreal atmosphere to the otherwise mundane selections of a new district attorney and comptroller and making judicial retention choices. For me the comically ghoulish faces of the marionettes gigantes suggested a morbid commentary on at least two front. 

One, the current absurdity of the country’s national leadership and two, that we were voting to replace a district attorney who only recently began a prison sentence for bribery and fraud.  When he took office in 2010 he proclaimed a new era of cleanliness for the office. Astoundingly, the city got the extreme opposite.  

Two demonstrations — one protesting President Trump, the other protesting gay people — unfolded Saturday afternoon on Thomas Paine Plaza, just outside the Municipal Services Building and across from City Hall.  It was quite a cacophony. The small anti-gay group was at work before the Refuse Fascism rally against Trump got underway, and was getting more attention at first. 

When I arrived the anti-gay protesters were enclosed in a semicircle corral of Philadelphia police bicycles, apparently to prevent passers-by from getting too in their face. It was quite the free-speech moment. The Philadelphia Police Department always says it is there to protect the rights of demonstrators, but I’ve never seen that line of thought more literally applied. The protesters were the holier-than-thou kind, prompting one onlooker to quip: Those people can blow me. 

As the anti-Trump rally got ready to start, a speaker with a bullhorn asked that anyone not there for the political rally leave the area. It seems that a few representatives of the anti-gay group had wandered over and were harassing some of the anti-Trump people.  Sheesh. 

The anti-Trump event started and with two demonstrations underway Paine Plaza became a cacophony of amplified dissatisfaction. The cops were their usual sanguine selves, but you had to wonder what was going through their heads, especially those closest to the anti-gay demonstration. Almost certainly the cops had LGBT friends, relatives or acquaintances and were saying to themselves, What century are these “righteous” people living in?

Elsewhere on the plaza, the skateboarders went about their business as if nothing else existed. 

We sat out on our stoop awaiting trick or treaters and a few dozen came, more than in the other three Halloweens we’ve been on Bainbridge Street. Our block held little promise for kids in the past. When we arrived in 2014 a carpet company dominated one end of the street and a parking lot was at the other. Things have changed. The carpet company is gone and five three-story homes have taken its place. Another townhouse project is wrapping up where the parking lot was.

We and four neighbor families were poised on our side of the street with treats and we couldn’t help but notice that most of us were not originally from Philadelphia. South Philly has a reputation for celebrating holidays–decor in the windows and on the porches–but on our street it was the newbies who were keeping the Halloween fires burning, or lighting them anew. A small thing, but a hopeful sign after three years of construction and transition that our block is moving toward a fresh era of stability.