West Philly

Philadelphia has a bad reputation in America; the crime in some parts of town is seen as a symptom of the city's age, it's a city past its prime. That does seem to be true of the part of town where I'm staying, too far west to benefit from the gentrification happening around the universities.

Still, vestiges of earlier investment in the area remain. The main high school is in a very nice crenellated castle, there's a big domed insurance building on the other side of the tracks and down the road there's a nice old sandstone church.