When my husband came home with a metal pushcart, the kind that you might see a person use to shuttle around their laundry, I thought he was crazy. While I did not have a job at the time, I wasn’t ready for bag lady status, I protested! He explained to me that clearly, the “Ferrari red” finish put this cart in a different category. The cart, he explained, was meant as a gift, to our new home in Philadelphia and my self-proclaimed commitment to a pedestrian lifestyle.
A proponent of public transportation and a low-impact lifestyle, I had been nonetheless living daily life around the automobile for too long; not since college had I been able to boast a car-free commute. When we moved to Chestnut Hill, a historic Philadelphia neighborhood, where the main street still provides a thriving business district and a train line to center city, I had my chance to quit the car!
Walking through a typical Saturday with me, my husband, and yes, the cart, is a chance to ponder the pleasure in the simplest activities when they’re experienced en foot instead of en route. Though I can’t claim that I’ve entirely ditched the automobile, I’ve discovered a lot about the virtues of a “walkable” neighborhood.
We call it a red cart day.
Starting out from our apartment, it’s a short couple of blocks to pick up the paper at the newsstand on Germantown Avenue, one of the oldest streets in the country, and still a center of activity. The newsstand is housed in a great little architectural piece, formerly a streetcar station. The tracks still run through the street though the cars stopped running long ago. We then cross the cobbled street to our favorite of five varieties of bakeries in our neighborhood, a cute little place called Cake, tucked into a low-slung building with a past life too, probably as a carriage house.
Right next door is the Hill Top Market, a farm stand style building in the center of town where you can pick up local produce, a Christmas tree, or a pot of mums depending on the season. Like all of our neighborhood stops, the faces are familiar and friendly.
Since we’re walking by anyway, next, we hit the bread bakery—if we’re lucky we’ll be in time for the half price deals! From there we make our way down the hill along Germantown to the Farmer’s Market. On our way, we pass a number of restaurants, shops, and a fantastic playground teaming (and screaming) with local kids and parents. Sometimes we’ll make a date to meet friends here with their kids.
The market is a typical Pennsylvania style indoor marketplace where local butchers have “permanent” stands from which they sell. Though a local icon, the market has changed with the times too, and there are also specialty vendors serving organic to Middle eastern, sushi, and cut flowers. I’m carried back to growing up in rural Pennsylvania where you could count on the butcher to know you by name. Not quite on a first name basis, we do get a familiar nod. I chat with an older gentleman who asks if organic eggs are really different. I doubt this would happen at the supermarket.
On our way back the three blocks to home, we take the opposite side of Germantown. My husband often likes to stop at Kilian’s hardware store, a family-run shop that dates to 1913, and has everything Home Depot has but crammed into a space the size of a few parking spaces!
Dragging the full cart back up the hill to home, we find it’s a great way to let the rest of a leisurely day unfold. It’s easy to find out what’s happening, simply by looking around. No need for the Web—banners and signs in store windows are enough to find out that there’s a concert in the park. You can ask too….at the new yoga clothing shop, I found out about a class being held right around the corner from my house.
For two busy professionals who would rather not jump in the car on a Saturday morning and spend two hours going to the mega-lot grocery store, this is an ideal way to shop and forget that we’re doing errands. And even if there’s no need to shop, the busy street life reconnects us after a week at the office, heads buried in computer and work.
Back home and it’s not even noon! If it’s been a few weeks without a trek out of town, we’ll walk by the car to make sure it’s still there on our way to the park!
