City Scene

A few weeks ago on a Saturday morning, my sister Erin was driving to meet some friends (for a ballet photoshoot) and called me: "There is a church on 11th street that is being torn down, and the mural is just out there.  You have to come see it!"  So I did.
I met two people while there.  One was a man about my age, on a bicycle, who stopped to talk to me about the sadness of the building.  We seemed to have the same feeling, that it was beautiful and heartbreaking that this sort of thing happens, but we were both, I think, happy to have seen it.
The second man I met was named Harry, who approached me to talk about Philly Photo Day, and then showed me a few things about the building, including that you could see the pews stacked up in the vestibule, and that the capstone had been cut out, he thought for scrap.  He told me that the demolition had been in progress for weeks, and the site had only very recently been sealed up, so that people could not climb in to get more scrap.  Harry was about 65, and carrying his groceries with him.  He clearly had a passion for the building, and possibly a passion for getting involved in anything in his neighborhood.  (He told me about how he had called the construction company, another local church, and the police about all kinds of various things.)  Nevertheless, Harry was informative, and very friendly.