Past 50th

Last night I was out late for our weekly gathering of all the Philly Mission Year teams. As usual, I was taking the trolley home, this time from Center City. At one of the stops a group of about 7 young people, who I profiled as college students, boarded the trolley and moved to the back. They were pretty much the only ones talking and were loud enough for everyone to hear.

For most of the time I didn’t pay them much mind. Actually I don’t really remember anything else they talked about except which stop would land them at their college. The University of Sciences is the last in a string of several major schools in West Philadelphia, on the border between the large neighborhoods of University City and Southwest Philly. Their stop was 42^nd street.

Part of their conversation was concern that they would miss the stop and go too far down Woodland Avenue, the road the trolley saunters down. Some of them had wandered down to 50^th Street one time on accident, in search of a party, and they didn’t want to do that again. They loudly proclaimed, “Anything past 50^th is bad. Like really bad.”

Those words hurt.

I live past 50^th. Not only that, I live past 60^th—on 62^nd! As I heard them talk about how incredibly bad my neighborhood was, I wondered what the other trolley passengers thought as they heard these college students talk about where they live, work, have fun, and raise their kids. Those considerations hurt even more.

I get where the students were coming from. I’ve said those things before about other communities. Southwest Philly is a place where “bad” things are readily apparent, especially to eyes that come in looking for them. But after living here for a while, I know about plenty of really good things all around places well past 50^th Street.

I know kids that love to play dictionary games they’ve created so they can learn new words.

I know neighbors that shovel each others’ snow.

I know women who are respected for the ways they look out for everyone on the block.

I know old white couples that love their almost all-black neighborhood, even though all of the other white people left at least a decade ago.

But the college students don’t know those things. They only see bad things that they probably just don’t understand. They certainly didn’t understand how hurtful their words were to me and the other residents of Southwest who were headed home like me.

This doesn’t happen in only my neighborhood. Places (and their inhabitants) all over the world are labeled as “bad.” But those negative labels don’t help to end whatever negative attributes we seem to identify. They only reinforce them. I challenge you to consider your words and your thoughts about such places. And I challenge you to challenge others, too, and maybe as we all recognize the good in the places “past 50^th,” the good will be more readily apparent the next time you visit.