Strolling Through Little Saigon
October 14, 2005 | 11 Ramadhan 1426
Went out for a walk tonight. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. You know, for a city I’ve been coming to (and now live in) for almost 20 years I don’t know Philadelphia that well. I took a long walk yesterday, around 3 hours or so, from South Philly down to South Street. From there I headed to Penn’s Landing, over to Northern Liberties, up to Center City and back down Broad Street to South Philly. It was a heck of a walk. I gotta break out the camera on one of these trips.
So today I took another walk down to South Street. It was drizzling and thought that I’d be okay but by the time I made it to 7th and Washington I was severely soaked. Grabbed a gyro at the Souvlaki place on South Street.
When you’re passing through 7th and Morris, say, the neighborhoods get weird down in that part of town. It’s like Little Saigon in between Oregon and Washington Ave around 7th Street. Lots of shops owned and patronized by Vietnamese and other “boat people”. I don’t know about that word. Well, what ever. White folks haven’t moved into these parts yet, gentrifying the whole place. But I imagine it’s just a matter of time. It’s going on in other parts of South Philly (and other major cities across the States as a whole). If you go down to 15th, 16th and 17th Streets between Washington and Lombard, those were ghetto just a few years back but now there’s scaffolding outside almost every house down there. Being renovated and resold, but not to the black families that live there. Urban renewal. The latest trend. More on my travels through and around South Philly to come.
